John Steakley - Armor_玖贝云文库

Armor

John Steakley, 1997

Version 1.0, July 8, 2001

He drank alone.

Which was odd since he didn't have trouble with people.

He had always managed to make acquaintances without much

effort. And, despite what had happened, he still liked people.

Recently, he had even grown to miss them again. Yet here he

was, drinking alone.

Maybe I'm just shy, he thought to himself and then laughed

at such a feeble attempt at self-delusion. For he knew what it

was.

From his place at the end of the long bar he examined the

others in the crowded lounge. He recognized a handful from

training. Training was where it had begun. Where he had felt

that odd sensation descending upon him like mist, separating

him from all those thousands of others around him in the

mess hall. It was a dull kind of temporal shock at first, a

reaction reverberating from somewhere deep within him. He

had somehow felt . . . No, he had somehow known that they

all would die.

He shook his head, drained his glass. If be was in the

mood for honesty he would have to admit that his chances

were no better. No better at all....

He paid the credits for a full bottle and then paid the extra

credits to take it out of the lounge. It was strictly against

orders on a battle cruiser to have a bottle in one's personal

possession. But on the night before a drop a lot of things

were possible. And as the hour for the drop grew nearer, he

noticed that his fellows were beginning to take their drinking

more seriously.

Outside the lounge wasn't much better. Lots of bottles had

been smuggled out tonight. The ship wasn't exactly a giant

party, but there were enough get-togethers here and there,

and enough legitimate crew business here and there, to make

it almost impossible to find a quiet place to sit and think.

After awhile he had settled into an idle rhythm of walking,

sipping, smoking, and hunting.

After most of an hour of wandering about the corridors of

the immense ship he found himself standing beside the center

template strut of Drop Bay One. Drop Bay One was the

largest single room in the ship and, since the Terra was the

largest warship, the largest single room in space. It was over

a hundred meters long and sixty wide. Around him in a

checkerboard style were the little square spaces for drop

assignment. From here it all began. Thousands of men and

women would go into battle from this room. At the same

moment, if necessary. The overhead was ten stories above

him, criss-crossed with the immense cranes that lowered the

equipment of war into position. A hell of a big room, he

thought. Bigger even than the Hall of Gold back home where

he bad first stood at age ten beside the boys and girls of the

other nobles and watched the coronation. He and the other

children had had a tendency to giggle, he remembered, and

so had been placed at the far end of the Hall, away from the

throne.

Enough of this, he said to himself. That's over for me now.

It's far, far away. . .

He sighed, shook his head. He perched himself atop the

center strut and lay down on his back and stared up at the

distant overhead and didn't see it.

"Enough sentiment," he said aloud. "It's time for

brainwork. Time, in fact, for a cold logical assessment of the

situation." He took a sip from the bottle, lit a smoke, and

laughed again. "Pact is, we haven't got a prayer."

Fact was, most everybody in Fleet nowadays was a rookie.

Over sixty percent and rising. That meant six months of

advanced training. Nine months tops in the military altogether.

Not much hope there.

Still, the equipment was marvelous and many were surpris-

ingly good with it. He remembered his astonishment at discov-

ering clearly apparent aptitude for, of all things, the battle

armor. Most found the power suits almost impossibly alien in

practice and couldn't bring themselves to react in a suffi-

ciently normal fashion. But he, and a few others, had taken to

them easily, readily utilizing their potential as the long-sought

key to a machine as extension of man's own puny form.

How odd, he thought, that he should have such bizarre

talents. He, of all people, had fit with Fleet's hopes. . . .

And from there his drunken thoughts slipped into the past

like most drunken thoughts of terrified humans. He lay back

on the template and blew smoke at the distant cranes. He

sipped steadily from the bottle.

He feared.

The hours passed.

Lovers in niches surrounding the perimeter of the Bay took

advantage of the sexually integrated warrior class. They rocked

and moaned and grasped one another. It was a united, if

unorganized, effort by each and all to push the tension-tant

resent far ahead into the horrors of the future. After a while

they would rest from their labors, draining the last of the

bottles and lighting the last of the cigarettes. And before

thoughts turned inward each and all would notice the glow of

the cigarette coal coming from the lone figure who lay on the

center template strut in the middle of the vastness of Drop

Bay One. They would wonder what the tell it was he was

doing there.

Felix, alone and unaware of their curiosity, wondered the

very same thing.

Drop was just under four hours away when Felix rested the

crewline. The turnout was sparse this morning. Not surprising

considering the night before. He watched several people back -

out as the line advanced toward die food. As the smell grew

stronger, their faces grew greener until at last they couldn't

take it anymore. A broad-shouldered woman wearing a war-

rior patch and red eyes got so far as to actually have a plate of

the heaping whatever placed in front of her before she vom-

ited loudly onto the floor.

She looked around, wildly embarrassed, to apologize at all

others in the line, but found only Mix left. Puzzled, she

nodded to him and rushed out the door with her palm clamped

firmly over her lips. Felix looked around and laughed. He

was indeed alone in the chow line. The young woman had

actually emptied the place out.

He wasn't surprised, but neither was he affected. He stewed

over the crumbling clean-up crew and, to the cooks' amazement,

ordered them to heap whatever it was onto his tray.

"I'm hungry," was the only response he would make to

their pale faces.

Actually, he was just lucky. Two hours before the rest of

the ship had reveille, be had been rudely awakened by the

chief of Drop Bay One who had wanted to know just what the

hell be was doing sleeping on the center strut. That early start

had allowed him to miss the long lines at Medical for a little

something for his stomach.

After be found an empty table a fellow from his squad bay,

whose name might have been Dikk, appeared beside him.

"Felix, right?" the man asked.

Felix nodded without interrupting his eating. That foamy

something the meditechs had given him made him ravenous.

"Well, I'd be careful with all that food if I were you,"

said Dikk as be sat down. "It's supposed to be real bad for

you if you're wounded. Like in the stomach, you know?"

Felix nodded that he knew and continued eating. He didn't

want to say that he thought the idea of not eating before this

battle was incredibly naive. As far as stomach wounds were

concerned . . . Anything that could tear through battle armor

would leave not a wound but a tunnel.

It wasn't that he didn't appreciate doctors. He did. He was

impressed by their knowledge, dutifully in awe of their

equipment. But doctors didn't make drops. Doctors didn't

have to fight for days at a time without eating anything but

what they could carry. Come to think of it, neither did he. Or

at least he hadn't until today.

He looked over at Dikk's nervous face and at the hunched

shoulders of the handful of others who sat about him in the

mess.

None of us have had to fight yet, he thought. But maybe

that part was not so bad. What was bad was that they weren't

ready.

Something in his face must have made Dikk uneasy. He

mumbled something and left the table. Felix realized he had

never said a word to the guy. He had a sudden urge to get up

and catch him, to ask him if his name really was Dikk after

all....

But he didn't. He sat where he was and finished the plate

and lit a cigarette and watched the silken plumes rise and

twist.

A few minutes later his thoughts rose to him out of the

daze of smoke and fear. "We're not ready. We're not even

close." Then he started, looking around to see if anyone was

nearby. To see if anyone else had heard him. For he wasn't at

all sure that he hadn't said it out loud.

Felix stared at the black scout suit with the unsurprised

attitude of one whose emotional spectrum has retreated to just

two colors: frustration and disgust. Fear at this point could no

longer be thought of as an emotion. It had more the consis-

tency of gravity.

He sat down on the bench across from the now-gaping

maintenance chamber that served as long-term lockers. When

sealed, an elaborate testing system would commence. An

amazingly varied series of forces-from hydro-thermal to

magnetically directed laser probing-would come into play.

The testing would continue on a more or less constant basis

until the chamber was reopened. Most of it was to find a

leak. Which was silly for a scout suit, thought Felix. After

all, plassteel doesn't leak. You could vaporize it, warp it, tern-

it even (if sufficient forces were applied just right). But it

didn't leak. And scout suit outer armor was 100 percent

plassteel.

He snorted. Scout suits. A damn scout?

"Shit," he said out loud. No one could hear him inside his

cubicle, so no one could appreciate his display of disgust.

From under his arm he took a wad of crumpled writ he had

taped there before drop inspection. They still held inspection,

even though everybody already knew it was suicide to carry

personal belongings inside the perfect fit of battle armor.

They bad shown that one to the troops over and over, always

dwelling on the scenes of the surgical teams trying to remove

religious medals crammed halfway through some idiot's rib

cage. Of course one could wear jewelry on one's nose and

such where there was some freedom of movement. And many

did. But Felix's interest in a nose ring was the same as it was

for a religious medal-none at all.

He produced five cigarettes from the writ and lit one and

stared at the suit and thought about why he wasn't surprised

he had drawn scout duty.

Training again, he decided, the source of many first clues.

He recalled their excitement at his scores, at his times. They

bad made him run the tight course twice more before they

were convinced.

"Sure got the reflexes for this . . . uh, Felix, is it?"

He had nodded. He should have caught on then.

And later, when that same officer had called him into his

own quarters and talked to him about "natural leadership

abilities." Cigarettes were offered him. And something cool

to drink for the first time in many days. He had accepted both

and refused everything else.

He was furious with himself for not having been more

careful.

The officer kept trying, kept spouting garbage, but Felix

wouldn't budge. He knew it wasn't for him. Though capable

of giving orders and probably having them obeyed, he was,

of late, an uninspiring man. Not at all what a leader, a real

leader, should be.

He sighed and puffed (MI the cigarette. Looking around he

had seen several such men and women, he supposed. But

though admiring of their energy, he had little faith in then-

potential effectiveness. With such a bunch, that kind of leader

could likely get chewed in a battle long before decoration

time.

And Felix wanted to at least try to live. No blaze of glory.

No blaze at all.

So of course they had gone and made him a lousy scout

anyway!

He sighed, resting his face in his hands.

His world shrank toward him. He panicked, as he always had

before. Sweat poured down his face. His lips trembled. It was

completely, terribly, dark.

He keyed the master switch with a dry tongue. Air, heat,

light . . . life began again. For a moment he paused as he

always did and simply breathed and stared. It was a foolish

fear, he knew. But it was very real to him. Each time he felt

the suit close about him, felt the armor seal itself about him,

he also felt a deep inner terror that no amount of training

could prevent. For with the simple fright of claustrophobia

came something else: he feared the suit.

It was a machine. It did not care. It would work if told to.

It would not if not. It was no serpent. It would not crush him.

It did not crave his flesh.

But still he feared. And later simply breathed and stared

and felt relief. This time, as at other times, the suit had

chosen to obey him.

He examined the holos on both sides of the faceplate. They

seemed far away, deep and wide in their illusion of three

dimensions. Thousands of bits of information could be dis-

played on them. Maps of terrain. Known enemy locations.

Distances and probable routes to Retrieval points. Many,

many facts. They were blank now.

He worked the keys on the inside of his forearm and the

holos showed him where he was: Starship Terra, Deck AA12,

Warrior Section, Armor Vault One. He ran through the Func-

tion series. He matte exaggerated gestures with arms, legs,

head. Everything worked.

He made Connection and watched the gauge swell as he

and his suit drew from the very heart of the ship the thing that

seemed in awesome abundance everywhere: Power. Power

throughout the ship for thousands and thousands of different

uses. And more Power in the combined form of Fleet. And

even more from home. Power. Everywhere, sheer Power.

Force. Might.

He thought of the tiny sparks that moved and thought and

eased more sparks together to form and ease even more

sparks, the strength of which would ease together still more,

timer, sparks which, in proper conjunction, made Power. The

tiny sparks would then ease beside Power. And together, with

awesome brute force and intricate silken precision, wonders

could be created. Wonders like the Starship Terra, whose

marvelous stature and beauty could serve as man's ultimate

loving gesture to the darkness which surrounded him-We

are good. We are hopeful. We have built this. See her, the

Starship Terra, the jewel of our being

But jewels did not long shine when Power was still about.

Not when any fool could reach it. Felix, deep within the

jewel already, could rend and tear her. He could grind her

workings to nibble, blight her glowing entrails. He could

disembowel this jewel of Man.

For he had Power.

Inside these layers of plassteel armor even a fool such as

he, a dumb broken sonuvabitch with no future and a past he

refused, could stomp the idol to clay.

Such power had thrilled him at first. Later, he was appalled.

Now . . . now, he didn't care.

Felix read a dial. It was time. He left.

The Briefing Room mirror created what was termed "Positive

Psychological Feedback." It allowed a simple soldier to see

what a monster he was in battle armor. Some psyches had felt

it would have a negative effect on some warriors, particularly

the females. It was a stupid notion, immediately overruled.

All killers like to look the part.

They did. Two meters tall, they weighed six times their

norm. Their armored powered hands could crush steel, stone,

bone. Armored legs could propel the fastest around 100

kilometers per standard hour. The suit protected them as well,

automatically and instantly distributing most concussions in

an evenly expanding pattern from the point of impact to the

entire surface of the armor. Standard warrior armor carried

blaze-rifles on each sleeve. Hold the aim out, palm down,

drop the wrist: blazerfire. Even plassteel would boil before it.

The blaze-bombs clipped on racks on their backs provided not

only an explosion, but spherical delivery of blazerfire in a

single heartbeat.

And there were other gifts. They were, for example,

complete. They carried with them all air, food, etc. Deepest

ocean or vacuum. They needed no help from home for five

standard days. Three, with a major battle a day. Only one, if

always fighting.

The mirror helped. They were monsters, they could see

that.

Felix took the blaze-rifle, the blazer, from the slot in the

long row which had a number to match the one pulsing inside

his helmet. He checked it for charge, attached it to his back.

Scout suits, much smaller than standard issue, had no blazer

capacity built in. Scouts carried rifles used by open-air troops

for thirty years. Also, they had fewer blaze-bombs-only

nine as opposed to the two dozen the warriors carried. Scouts

must be fleet, must be able to realize their much greater

potential for speed and agility. And, where warrior suits bore

different colors for rank and group, all scouts were black.

Flat black. Dull, non-shiny, space black.

Death black, Felix thought as he watched the five other

scouts collect and attach their rifles. Then be followed them

out of the armory alcove into the Briefing Room proper. The

room held twenty-one warriors, group leaders representing

two thousand line warriors and one assault commander. Each

bore the broad colored stripings of rank and its attendant

responsibility. As scouts had no effective rank, they likewise

possessed no real niche in the line of command-Warrant

Officers technically, but with no command in standard

situations. Many enlisted personnel requested scout duty.

They sought the partial privileges of officer rank and the

chance for rapid advancement much-heralded by the grapevine.

In truth, no scout advanced more than a step or two. Instead,

they died. Even Felix's paranoid fatalism had not considered

this. Though he had heard, as bad all, that the scouts' sur-

vival rate was considerably less than line warriors'.

"A lousy scout," he mumbled disgustedly.

The Briefing Officer's helmeted head glanced up at the

muffled sound. He surveyed the ranks. There was no way to

tell who had spoken. All were on Proximity Band. He re-

turned to his briefing

Paying attention at last, Felix was surprised to hear that the

man had not yet begun to discuss details of the assault.

Instead, it was a pep talk. Felix realized this alarmed him.

ft wasn't the pep talk itself which made him uneasy. It

wasn't die Briefing Officer. It was something in that positive,

no-nonsense tone of his. Something. . . .

He doesn't believe, thought Felix suddenly. He doesn't

believe in the plan. He doesn't believe in us. But he'll be

damned if he'll let us carry that. So he's trying to make us

believe instead of him.

Felix admired the officer for his concern and for his effort.

He also bated him for failing

The pep talk mercifully ended.

All right," snarled die Briefing Officer in his best Drill-

master manner, "it's time to get down to it."

On the wall behind him a large screen warped into light

with a holo display of the target area. Felix noted the code on

the tower corner of the image and keyed it onto his own

holos. The map showed a peninsula some forty kilometers

long jutting due north into a vast expanse of ocean. The

peninsula terminated in a formation the shape of a large,

three-fingered, hand splayed flat over the surface of the water.

A choice spot, thought Felix, on Earth or Golden or any other

human planet. Loads of sunshine and beach. The ocean front-

age would supply fresh sea air to sweep leisurely across

sculptured terraces where happy vacationers would collapse

contentedly after along day of water sports and laughter. A

choice spot.

Except it wasn't Earth and it wasn't Golden. It wasn't a

human place at all.

it was A-9.

And the water wasn't water. It was poison. And the fresh

sea air would kill an unsuited human in a second-more

poison. And the sunlight did little human good in a place

where the average temperature was -20° at high noon. And

die breezes were a near-constant hurricane that drove the

noxious atmosphere deep into the sandy soil, carving vast

furrows into the land, forging riverbeds overnight, toppling

mountainous formations in handfuls of years, and giving this

nightmare place its name: Banshee.

Only the enemy thrived here. Still another reason, thought

Felix, not to go.

"B-team," began the Briefing Officer, "will drop here on

the western edge. They will drive northward in a clockwise

manner to rendezvous with C-team, who will drive due south

to meet them from the northernmost section, the tip.

"The B-team, C-team, rendezvous will take place here,

four kilometers due north of the Knuckle." A tiny arrow

appeared on the holo showing first the rendezvous point, then

the Knuckle itself, a steep crag one thousand meters high in

the exact center of the splayed hand.

"We expect only moderate resistance during this stage of

the assault. The bulk of the enemy is concentrated around the

Knuckle. Nevertheless, there is more here to cover on the

western edge than the eastern. And for that reason both B and

C teams will carry nine full groups and two scouts apiece."

A flood of hatred rose within Felix as the A-team insignia

appeared on his ID screen. Simple arithmetic left only two

groups for A-team. Only two hundred warriors for half the

area.

"Now before you members of A-team get too excited-"

too late in Felix's case--"we want you to know that there has

been absolutely no evidence of enemy activity on the eastern

side. None at all. Your job will be mostly sightseeing.

"So . . . you will be split up to cover the eastern half. One

group, with scout, will drop here, on the far eastern edge.

The other group, with scout, will drop here, ten kilometers

south. The two groups will converge here, due east of the

Knuckle, to await rendezvous with Assault Main, driving

northward up the peninsula.

"Don't worry about the lack of back-up. As I have already

stated, there is nothing there. You should spend a boring few

hours simply waiting."

It was then, for Felix, it began. The hatred for the Briefing

Officer had expanded to include his superiors, the Captain of

the ship, the commanders of Fleet itself, and finally the

thick-headed idiot humans who had undertaken something as

asinine as interplanetary war in the first place. The hatred

blazed brightly, then vanished. From somewhere inside came

then a shock of all-consuming rage, the nova-like intensity of

which startled even him. But then the rage was gone, too. It

seemed to shoot away like a comet or a torch dropped flicker-

ing and shrinking into a bottomless well. What replaced the

loathing and fury was something very different, something

cold and distant and . . . only impersonally attentive. It was

an odd being which rose from Felix and through him. It was,

in fact, a remarkable creature. It was a wartime creature and a

surviving creature. A killing creature.

From a distant place, the frightened Felix scanned himself.

He recognized little. Still, what he saw was a comfort of sorts

and he concentrated himself toward it, toward the coldness,

die callous machine-like . . . The engine, he thought. It's not

me. it's my Engine. It will work when I cannot. It will

examine and determine and choose and, at last, act. It will

do all this while I cower inside.

With furious concentration, that which kept him Felix gave

itself as fuel to that which could keep him alive.

There was more to the briefing. More figures of time and

distance, more numbers of men and probabilities of enemy.

The Engine heard and made note. Felix, watching himself,

- fueling himself, psyching himself, felt disgust at all that was

about to happen and all who had caused it. And once more

felt the distance between himself and those about him. Again,

as he briefly scanned their armored forms filling the chamber,

he thought: They're all going to die.

It stood three meters tall and weighed, on average, four times

more than a human being-damn near as much as a suited

warrior. It had six limbs, two for walking upright and erect,

four for work. The upper limbs, call them arms, were incredi-

bly massive, hanging down one and a half meters from two

titanic shoulder joints. The arms ended in huge, hulking,

two-pronged claws twice the size of an armored human fist.

The middle arms were smaller, approximately human size.

Curved, two-pronged pincers here for delicate work. The legs

were the size of tree trunks, ending with semicircular pads

splayed flat to the ground. There were two knarled knobs on

each. Each limb, upper, middle, and lower, had three joints.

The body had three sections: shoulder, abdomen, pelvis.

Each was covered with coarse, hairlike fibers spaced widely

apart

The head, half again larger than a warrior's helmet, bore a

dull globular eye on each side. The mandible-mouth opened

in three vertical sections of varying width and shape. Closed,

it resembled nothing so much as a smooth-sheened, toothless,

human skull. The skin was not skin at all, but bone.

Ectoskeleton. The muscles were inside. It was awesomely

powerful.

It was the Enemy.

It was an ant.

It was called something else, something long and technical

and dreamed up out of range. But scientific jargon had noth-

ing to do with what men had felt when they saw it move, saw

it coming. It didn't matter that it had no antennae and walked

upright and was too, too, damn big. From the beginning, men

had called it an ant.

Felix saw no reason to change that. He stood watching the

holo of the enemy in the wall of the passage leading from the

Briefing Room. The others had long since filed past. They

used their last minutes before drop as a time to be with

friends or check equipment or fight panic or yield to it and

vomit or to pray with undreamed of piety.

Felix, alone, watched the ant.

The screen on the back wall of Drop Bay Four was purely

representational. It served no actual purpose in the mechanics

of Transit. It merely informed the dropping parties of the

various stages. First it would glow white: Attention. Next

would come yellow: Transit beginning. Then the yellow would

be interspersed with flashing bands of red light: thirty seconds.

As the ten second mark arrived, the red bands flashed the

countdown. They would turn slowly inward across the sur-

face of the wall until a square had formed. The square would

shrink, coalesce, brightly pulsing all the while.. If all was

well, the red square would turn bright green at the two second

mark and the drop party would step quickly forward toward

it.

Actually, they were trained to all but throw themselves

toward the green square. "Try to bust that wall!" the Drillmasters

had demanded. And they would try, surging forward

en masse. But they never actually touched the screen, never

even left their drop squares. Instead, they would Transit. To

the next loom, to another Drop Bay, to another ship. To

another world.

The presence of Banshee loomed uncomfortably as Felix

John Steakley - Armor

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