Armor (45 page)

Not yet. But it would. It would work its way free. And soon.

He arched, bucked, warping his spine and dragging at the Siliconite sheen. He thought he felt something give. He mustered his energies for one major push.

The land, the cavern, the walls of the fissure all shuddered with the sudden tremor. The walls closed in on him. Just a bit. They stopped, shaking. Then they closed in a bit more. And then some more. Then it stopped. The last movement, the last shifting. The last hope. If he hadn’t been caught before, he was now.

I’m dead, he thought and rested his faceplate against the sand. He closed his eyes. Odd how he could hear nothing, even with the sunlight on him. Siliconite was a great tool, all right. Like those concussion cellars. He sighed. I’m so tired, he thought.

And then he thought: Kent, you worthless, timid, everybody’s hero bastard!

Oh, but why not? Why the hell not? If it had been the other way around, he’d have done the very same thing.

Except, of course, he wouldn’t have, he realized with a mournful groan. He would’ve helped; that’s what hurt. For Kent, Fleet’s Kent, Forest’s Kent, he’d have hopped down that hole swinging. In a scout suit, no less. Never mind the awesome might of Kent’s custom-built.

But why? Why? How had this happened? How had lie folded so badly and. . . so quickly!

He glanced down. A second ant had joined the first. Not long now. He glanced at the time, shook his head, looked again. He had been alone almost half an hour! He was sure of it, because he remembered looking before when he had to stop and transfer the. . .

What an insane idea!

Quickly as a striking snake, his hand reached down and snatched the blazebomb loose. He held it firmly pressed against his faceplate. Exhilarated, sweat broke out.

No way, of course, he thought, grinning delightedly. Still, it was nice to kill a few.

“Yup,” he said to the bomb, “killing them is better than getting peeled. In fact, killing them is better than not killing them. Killing them is fun.”

The narrow gap between the two beneath him would require a little delicacy. No good to have it get hung up on them. Plassteel was very nice. But two meters away from a blazebomb, it was about as protective as cotton. “Of course, it would unstick me.”

Maybe it didn’t matter. Thus confined, even from so far away as the cavern floor, the bomb would almost certainly kill him. Either with the blaze or the compression or by shaking loose the pinning walls, driving them suddenly together to squash. . . .

“What the hell,” he said, keying and dropping the bomb in a single motion. It fell cleanly between the two monsters. Well, that was something anyway.

The blaze killed the ants instantly. It also boiled their hides, fusing them into a single hurtling mass that rushed like an artillery shell up the fissure. Felix was aware of light, noise, and, finally, movement. Then all was dark.

Was he dead? It sure hurt.

He opened his eyes. The light streaming through from above was a searing on his retinas. His eyelids fluttered. He tried moving, found he could do that. So he looked and moved together and found out where he was the last part of the fissure just below the surface. He was hanging, sagging down into the crevice, too wide to slip through and fall. But . . . he had to have come that way.

The ants were everywhere, plastered to the sides of the fissure and, he noticed distastefully, to him. Mostly on his legs, but his back and hands and even his chest had ground ant packed on them. He was surrounded.

He propped a boot against the curve of each wall and raised himself erect. He examined the exit, glaring brightly and painfully. Not too far. He glanced again at that last narrow section between his boots. It wasn’t wide enough for his helmet. He shuddered, turned back to the light. Better not to think about it.

It took him several tries to get a grip on the sides of the opening. The pain steadily increased in almost every area. And his muscles had begun almost immediately to tremble and knot.

Hurt bad, he thought dimly. Really, really, bad.

He began pulling himself up and knew at once he wouldn’t make it. He was too weak. He was too tired. It hurt too much. He had no idea how much power was left in the suit he couldn’t read the dial. He tried marshaling a final effort. Nope. Falling. Colors flashed dizzily across his eyes, followed by rhythmic waves of feverish heat. Falling. Straight back, his grip going and lost down here. . .

Armored hands on his upper arms lifted him easily, miraculously, into the open air and sunlight. He squinted from side to side, vaguely recognizing the shapes of the warriors beside him. He nodded to them. He straightened up proudly. He crumpled, without warning, onto his heels. Alive. Even now. Even this. No pity.

“Felix!”

He recognized the voice. Forest? No. Shoen. Canada. Her shadow blotted out the bright light as she leaned over him.

“Felix, you made it! You made it! We thought you were lost! Nathan thought you were lost! Oh, Felix!” And she hugged him, awkwardly. Painfully. He groaned and tried to pull away. But she wouldn’t let go. She hugged him again. “Oh, Felix! They should give you a medal, too.”

The second shadow before him was Kent. He saw it hanging on the front of the great blue chest armor. Even though it wasn’t there, he saw it. It glinted in the sun.

Perfect.

Now was the time to pop his suit, he thought in a wave of scalding bitterness. And with that thought, the dark and the cold and the strength of both returned at last, slamming in from all sides at once, protecting and separating him once more.

With a vengeance, the Engine had returned.

He slept.

Shaking pain. Shaking and pain. He awoke only because he had to and there was the psychotech, red-faced and shaking his shoulders and screaming.

“I’m so sorry! So sorry’. Oh, God, I am! I am”.”

Two meditechs dragged him away. He struggled with them to get back. “You don’t understand!” he shouted at them.

A doctor type bearing white-haired authority appeared. He tried to soothe him.

“You don’t understand,” the psychotech pleaded. “It’s my fault.”

“Nonsense, son,” purred the Doctor. “The ants did this to him.”

Felix smiled.

“No, no, NO! It was me!”

A third meditech pressed something against his arm. Almost at once, the man began to calm. His shouting fell to unintelligible mutters. Soon he was slumped between the two meditechs. They hoisted him away.

“See to it that he’s looked after,” the Doctor called to them.

“Yes, Doctor,” one of them called back.

Felix realized he was still lying in his open suit. They must’ve just brought him up. White gloved hands appeared overhead and fiddled around him. He couldn’t see their owners. Maybe there weren’t any.

A second doctor type, older and female, appeared beside the first. The emblem over her left pocket was huge and colorful.

“Sorry, Chief,” the doctor told her.

“Don’t give it a thought,” she replied soothingly. “These things happen in war.”

Felix smiled again.

The doctor turned to another woman, hurrying past.

“Leclere,” he called. “What happened here?”

Leclere was pretty. Not blonde, though.

She shrugged her shoulders. “That psychotech evidently worked with this man. He felt responsible for sending him down again and having this …”

Felix regarded the banks of flickering lights all around him. One of the magic gloves reappeared. It placed a clear nozzle into the suit beside his chin. It sucked and gurgled.

Leclere was still talking. “... screaming and shouting about how he’d already been through too much …” “The psych?” asked the doctor.

“No,” replied Leclere. She pointed a clipboard at Felix. “This guy. The scout. Said he’d already had four major medicals and some ungodly number of. . . Hey, he’s awake!”

“Four major medicals?” echoed the older woman, the Chief. She looked at the older doctor unhappily. “How’s that possible?”

“It’s not,” the doctor assured her firmly. “It’s not.” Then he leaned forward over Felix and became fatherly. “Son, have you ever been in Intensive Medical before now? Do you recognize this room?”

Felix couldn’t speak. But the Engine could still smile. It did. It seemed to scare them.

Good. He slept.

It was perfect.

He recognized the voices because he had gone to sleep hearing them. He recognized their problem the same way. It seemed a great deal of trouble to open his eyes and since he could already enjoy their uneasiness without it, he didn’t.

He was a computer glitch and it wasn’t anybody’s fault. Still, something had to be done. His group, his A-team, had been reported wiped out so he, Felix, was too. Only he wasn’t his number was still in there somewhere in the other banks and that’s why they kept calling him because they called everybody from those outfits that weren’t there why take them out of the computer? But anyway, that’s how it happened. It’s a tragedy and unfair but what are we gonna do about it when they find out? It’ll be our necks either way, you know it will. Chief.

Chief agreed. Something had to be done. But what? the doctor wanted to know. Chief had an idea and the doctor didn’t like it but how did he think the Chief felt about it? It’s just that their only chance was in the records themselves.

No option.

They decided to leave him with twelve drops instead of twenty. Five majors instead of thirteen. One major medical instead of five.

It was the only way.

Felix heard it all. He pronounced it perfect.

He became aware of days. Different meditechs came at different times and then all again. One day he awoke to a solid ceiling instead of the clear curved dome of Intensive Medical.

A meditech came to give him an explanation of his condition. There was a long list of injuries in it. Felix was enjoying watching the man’s lips work so elastic when, suddenly, they stopped.

“You’re not even listening,” accused the irritated man.

“Don’t you even care?”

“Of course,” replied Felix in a clear, strong Engine voice. There was a commotion in the corridor outside of his room. He heard the name Kent and opened his eyes as the shaft of light crossed toward him. There he was, huge shoulders silhouetted. A meditech stood beside him.

Something odd. They had stopped talking. They were staring at something beside him. The meditech ran off in a hurry. Felix rolled over on his side and saw the crumpled psychotech, blood still pulsing from his wrists.

Felix rolled back onto his back and closed his eyes. He needed all his rest if he wanted to kill ants.

He had to work out in secret because the physitech didn’t understand and would make him stop. The physitech had never dropped and he didn’t know the shame of a body that just kept failing.

He visited his suit often. It was fine.

In his new squad bay they were always new all the kids could talk about was the Masao being aboard. It was supposedly Top Secret. But everyone seemed to have found out about it the instant he had arrived. It was hard to hide an Imperial yacht, of course.

The ones who knew almost nothing about the Masao, either the planet or the man, enjoyed great status while telling about it to those who knew even less. Felix soon learned that this pattern was unavoidable. Everywhere he went. ‘the squad bay, the mess, even the gym, the same thing was going on: wide-eyed kids asking other wide-eyed kids if it was true what they said about the Masao. Did he really own the planet? That whole wealthy planet and all fifteen million people? Was it true they practically worshipped him? He could change anything the regular government did just like that? What’s a samurai? Was that the same thing as being from Japan and how come everybody on Masao practically was Japanese?

Did everybody have to call him Great One? Even the captain?

When they asked Felix about it, the way they asked him about everything else, he just shrugged. Like always.

The screen at the foot of the bunk finally gave in. It was time.

“Good luck, Felix,” said one of the kids.

Felix smiled at him. Then he made himself get up and go over and pat him on his freckled shoulder and thank him for it. Only then would he let himself leave. He did, hurriedly, but feeling good about what he could do through the sheer power of his will.

It was worse than a minor drop. It was a token drop. The Masao, they claimed, wanted to see Banshee for himself.

Felix stood at the end of the line of thirty regulars listening to the briefing while awaiting the imperial presence. The mission was officially a probe placement. Felix had heard all he was told before. He knew the purpose of the probe: to measure the shifting magnetic patterns of Banshee. He knew why it was important: once man could learn how the ants were able to change the patterns artificially, they could program their missiles to adopt to it. He even knew the essential truth about the probes themselves: they didn’t work.

The sergeant doing the briefing ended it the same way as always. “Just stay the hell away from the damn things and let the techs do their work. Right? Right.”

All heads turned at the appearance of the man at the entrance of the Drop Bay. He was an Imperial Guard and an incredible sight. He wore bright red armor with the Masao’s crest emblazoned across the chest in white. He wore a white silk scarf around his helmet where his forehead should be. He wore two swords, one short, one long. He was beautiful. He spoke in highly dramatic, thickly accented, standard. “Be all aware: His Royal Highness, Alejandro Jorges Umemoto, Supreme Lord and Great One of …”

“Enough, Suki,” said a strong and gentle voice. “Just let me in.”

Suki sounded upset. He waved a hand abruptly at the entrance. “The Masao,” he said shortly.

There were a few giggles in the ranks at Suki’s expense. They stopped when he walked in. The Masao was wearing gold armor. Not that it wasn’t plassteel, too. Not that it wasn’t strong and utilitarian. It was. But it was also gold. The collective sigh was almost unanimous.

Behind the Masao, in two sharply stepping files, entered the remainder of the imperial guard. There were eighteen altogether. All wore the red, the scarves, the swords. One carried an extra two: the Great One’s.