Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (10 page)

I had control of the suit. The damaged element … had been
me!
I had stopped believing, and I had lost control of the suit. Now I had it back.

I stopped; and I
stopped
. I turned, and I
turned
. I jumped, and … Well, I had full control of the suit. I
didn’t need Goody and the rest now. I could do what I needed to do all by myself.

Except I no longer needed to do it. I no longer believed there was no hope for me. It was slim, maybe, but there was still hope. I might die here on this rock, but I wouldn’t give up here!

That was when Goody’s suit arrived. Other suits followed close behind, occupying a small clearing in the red brush. I checked the status displays: Kaine, Andersen, Nelson, Frankel … All my closest brothers and sisters just a day ago.
Now all corpse passengers in suits that had chilled internally to preserve their remains for burial.
I couldn’t stop
myself,
I checked the causes of death. Most were from lethal overheating. Those were the troops who had been closer to the blast, like Goody. A few suits had developed impact cracks, letting in the noxious atmosphere of EJC49-3. Those remains wouldn’t preserve very well. Some had impact injuries like my own, but more severe. Some of those would have to be … hosed … out of their suits. One privilege of being Senior Armor Officer is I could delegate that duty to a junior—except that all my juniors were now corpses standing silently, awaiting my instructions.

What would I do? If I wasn’t going to give up,
what would I do?
It would depend on my resources … which right now amounted to twenty-eight suits with their occupants and
maybe
the
Duke
back at the rendezvous point. So I might as well keep drilling to make sure I was ready for whatever came next.

I walked Goody’s suit up to me, averting my eyes from his visor. I couldn’t bear to look at what I briefly glimpsed there: the boiled, bloated thing that had once been my best friend’s face. Just a glance at the swollen flesh, eyes squeezed shut, had made my head swim.

But I had to look at his suit to run double-drills: switching back and forth between the suit I wore and Goody’s suit, slowly at first but getting faster. Soon I had the two suits playing patty cake. That sounds complicated; but with practice, it’s not too bad. You learn to give a suit an instruction that will take some time; and then in the time while it’s carrying out the instruction, you swap your brain to the other suit and give it an instruction as well. As long as you can swap quickly—which is the whole point of the drill—you can keep both suits on task. The instructors spoke in terms of
time slices
, the smallest fraction of time you could devote to a task. Or maybe the smallest chunk of time you could notice and react. It runs about a sixth of a second or so, faster with practice and good genes. Mine was around point-one-four seconds, point-one-three on a good day.

Point-one-four is plenty fast enough to play catch. I started tossing a rock to Goody’s suit and back. Then I did triple-drills, adding Kaine’s suit to the game. Then I added Andersen’s suit, thinking in shorter and shorter time slices as I added suits. When I added Frankel’s to the mix, I started to sweat. I had seen Sully drill with seven suits once, but that woman was a freak of nature. Five was all I could manage, and I started dropping the rock.

I switched to Drone Drills. I picked four suits and then
slaved
other suits to those: I would give instru
c
tions to those four, and the rest of the suits would imitate them. I started marching in ranks. Then I split the squads into separate files and drove the files through each other, using time slices as needed to keep the squads separated. A few suits were in worse shape than others, so I moved the damaged suits to the rear and gave them extra autonomy to override mimicry if they saw a possible collision. They shambled a bit, but we kept in line.

So I had a command, of a sort. Now I needed a mission objective. I lined the suits up in ranks, and we started marching toward the
Duke
.

***

Then a call from Sully added new urgency to our mission. “Fitz, buddy … Hope you’re double-timin’ … Saw … scout ship fly over. Command Unit reports two … squads incoming. CU’s locked onto them, but …”

A Command Unit is pretty good, but a couple well-trained squads can usually outwit one just because they have more brains to throw at it. Plus soldiers have better mobility and can attack from more directions. A Command Unit is supposed to support a human defense force, not stand on its own.

I answered, “Sit tight. SAO Fitzsimmons and His Wind-Up Band are on the way!” And we started marching in double-time.

As we ran, there was one crucial thing I had to test. Normally in CMM or PBM a suit’s weapons are locked down to conserve energy and to avoid accidental discharge and injury. Well, these troops didn’t have to worry about injuries. So I tried my newly-minted SAO codes, and …
Bingo!
Twenty-eight red blips indicated that all weapons systems were armed and ready.

So it was with guns blazing that we came over the rim of the valley in which the pilot had concealed the
Duke
. I had a tactical map from the Command Unit: below us were two squads of League troops, slowly advancing on the ship. Each squad took turns firing chaff rounds to cloud the ship’s sensors while the other squad advanced under cover and dug into its next defensive position. The ship’s point defense guns fired random cover bursts into the chaff, and had taken out four Leaguers; but that wouldn’t be enough to stop them before they reached the ship. The
Duke
’s hull would stand up against their small arms at a distance; but up close they could break in for sure.

When we came down upon the Leaguers, I spread out my troops so the chaff rounds would be useless. They might block one set of eyes, maybe two or three; but I was time-slicing through twenty-eight cameras plus the
Duke
’s, so I had the ultimate tactical view.

The Leaguers switched to slugs once they knew they had attackers to their rear. The crossfire was fer
o
cious, shots ringing off from every rock and outcropping. And I heard that through twenty-eight audio pickups, too. That was disorienting for a moment, but I quickly adjusted. As the bullets flew, I expected to lose some control. Stress was supposed to inhibit neural control, or so all the textbooks say. That’s why we drilled so hard. But instead I was amazed to find that controlling the suits was getting easier. Having twenty-eight different perspectives on the battle was strangely calming. I had a better understanding of the ebb and flow, and I knew where my attention was needed and where it could be spared. As I relaxed, I grew more ambitious, taking shorter and shorter time slices.
Point- one-two seconds.
Point-one-one.
Point-one!
Unheard of! Soon I found my mind expanding: six suits, seven … ten … a dozen. I lost count after that. I even lost track of which suit was the suit
I
wore. Being unable to feel my body had freed me from the confinement of one body, one suit. In my head, I wore
all
of them, all at once.

The shots were everywhere, and the Leaguers were no pushovers. I had numbers on them; but just as with the
Duke
, they had more brains to throw at the problem and could probably outthink me. On the other hand, I had mobility; and I still had the
Duke
’s defenses on my side, too. Plus my one brain was more coordinated than their dozen. They had to shout orders and plans, while I just had to think. The advantages just about balanced out.

But we had one more advantage they didn’t have: we weren’t afraid to die, most of us having done that
already. When Goody took a round to his power plant, a living soldier would’ve shut it down, shucked it off, and gotten the hell away from it before it could overload. Instead I ran Goody straight into their second squad just as the pack exploded, slicing the Leaguers open with high-velocity shards of shrapnel and cooking them alive with white-hot plasma.

In one spare time slice, I felt pretty bad about that. Gutierrez was one of my best buddies in the service, and I would’ve liked to bring his body back to his family. I wasn’t looking forward to explaining how his posthumous medals were
really
posthumous.

But his sacrifice was exactly what we needed. With one squad of Leaguers down, the rest of us set upon their first squad. We pinned them in the point defense zone of the
Duke
; and with fire from all directions, we made short work of them.

The
Duke
’s troop hatch opened up, and we boarded. I didn’t bother with formation. Formations are for coordinating a bunch of individuals, and we moved with one mind. We all just leapt aboard, the other suits carrying their precious cargo back to loved ones who didn’t yet know they were grieving.

I sent Kaine to check on Sully in her treatment cabinet. It looked like she would be all right if she got surgical care soon. Meanwhile I explored the
Duke
’s systems. It took three whole time slices—a whole third of a second!—to find my way through the
Duke
’s Command Unit and into the piloting system. But once I was in, another slice was all it took to find my way around and realize that I could “wear” this ship just like a suit.

So I called out, “Hang on, Sully!” Not that she could move in the cabinet, but I wanted her to know we were getting out.

Twenty-seven suits sat. Twenty-seven pairs of arms gripped the launch braces as I took a time slice to
push
with my mind. And the engines flared up and
heaved
the
Duke
free from EJC49-3. I saw incoming anti-aircraft missiles, so I loosed a couple chaser rockets and pushed us out of there as fast as we could go.

I would be all right. Even if this was the best I could look forward to, I had found …
power
that I had never imagined. I would learn to live with that.

I turned the
Duke
in a barrel roll, just because I could.

Original (First) publication

Copyright © 2014 by Martin L. Shoemaker

*************************

Mercedes Lackey, author of more than 100 novels and creator of the wildly popular Va
l
demar universe, has written a seemingly endless series of bestsellers, and has also co
l
laborated with Andre Norton, Anne McCaffrey, and Marion Zimmer Bradley.

.

.

It had been raining all day, a cold, dismal rain that penetrated through clothing and chilled the heart to numbness. Glenda trudged through it, sneakers soaked; beneath her cheap plastic raincoat her jeans were soggy to the knees. It was several hours past sunset
now,
and still raining, and the city streets were deserted by all but the most hardy, the most desperate, and the faded few with nothing to lose.

Glenda was numbered among those last. This morning she’d spent her last change getting a bus to the welfare office, only to be told that she hadn’t been a resident long enough to qualify for aid. That wasn’t true—but she couldn’t have known that. The supercilious clerk had taken in her age and inexperience at a glance, and assumed “student.” If he had begun processing her, he’d have been late for lunch. He guessed she wouldn’t know enough to contradict him, and he’d been right. And years of her aunt’s browbeating (“Isn’t one ‘no’ good enough for you?”) had drummed into her the lesson that there were no second chances. He’d gone off to his lunch date; she’d trudged back home in the rain. This afternoon she’d eaten the last packet of cheese and crackers and had made “soup” from the stolen packages of fast-food ketc
h
up—there was nothing left in her larder that even resembled food. Hunger had been with her for so long now that the ache in her stomach had become as much a part of her as her hands or feet. There were three days left in the month; three days of shelter, then she’d be kicked out of her shoddy efficiency and into the street.

When her Social Security orphan’s benefits had run out when she’d turned eighteen, her aunt had “suggested” she find a job and support herself—elsewhere. The suggestion had come in the form of finding her belongings in boxes on the front porch with a letter to that effect on top of them.

So she’d tried, moving across town to this place, near the university; a marginal neighborhood su
r
rounded by bad blocks on three sides.
But there were no jobs if you had no experience—but how did you get experience without a job? The only experience she’d ever had was at shoveling snow, raking leaves, mowing and gardening; the only ways she could earn money for college, since her aunt had never let her apply for a job that would have been beyond walking distance of her house. Besides that, there were at least forty university students competing with her for every job that opened up anywhere around here. Her meager savings (meant, at one time, to pay for college tuition) were soon gone.