by Jerry
I rightfully quit my fooling around and waited for further instructions from the master sergeant—just one of many technically-savvy non-commissioned offers who prowled on the sidelines. The closed hangar in which we all stood was part of the ODIS simulator—a place where new proxy Operators could get a feel for their machines, and the body suits could be “tuned” to their wearers. No human being’s electromagnetic or physiological signature being quite the same as any other’s.
“Lift your right legs please,” said the master sergeant. “Keep your knees about waist level and balance for thirty seconds.”
I did as instructed, and so did Chesty. I was amazed to see my proxy emulate me exactly, even down to the minor shimmying I was doing as I tried to keep from dropping my leg or toppling over. For an insane instant I wanted to call out PT cadence—One thousand, one! One thousand, two! One thousand, three!—and decided against it. The Air Force NCOs might not grasp the humor of the moment, and I certainly didn’t need to magnify the reputation I’d already earned as something of a goof.
If I’d been somewhat cocky about my ROV experience coming into ODIS, that cockiness had gradually crumbled as the magnitude of what I’d be doing became clear. ODIS wasn’t about sitting in a trailer and guiding a mini-helicopter, armed with cameras and third-generation Hellfires slung under its stubby wings—prowling for insurgents. ODIS was as close as I’d ever get to actually becoming what I drove. Or Operated, according to the correct term, which Valkyrie was insistent that we use.
She watched us now, sitting back a bit from the NCOs who worked and tapped at keys on their portable laptops, their own sets of wires and cables trailing this way and that across the floor. Mobile servers on wheels had been rolled in to handle the software aspect—human nerve impulse being wickedly difficult to accurately transform into data the proxy’s motors and servos could recognize. Fans in those servers hummed gently, and despite the superb air conditioning of the simulator, I felt myself begin to sweat.
“Okay,” said the master sergeant. “Left legs down, and right legs up.”
Chesty and I did as instructed, and our proxies mirrored us exactly.
“Won’t the distance cause enough signal lag to give us issues?” I asked the master sergeant, who’d so far proven to be fantastically knowledgeable about his subject of assignment. I’d have tried talking him into going Warrant if the Air Force had had the good sense to keep its Warrants, instead of retiring them out of the service so that every pilot could claim to be a college graduate.
“Some,” said the master sergeant. “But the proxy is only a few hundred miles up, at most. Not even the blink of an eye for round-trip transmissions. And we won’t be operating these on the Moon from this building. Sooner or later some of you are going to have to go up.”
Go up . . . I let myself thrill for the moment at the prospect of being assigned to honest-to-gosh-damned astronaut training. Would I even pass the harder parts of the physical? Would it matter? Now that the Navy and Air Force were calling the shots, a lot remained uncertain. But at least you didn’t need a doctorate in the sciences to get to orbit anymore, as had been the case when NASA’s astronaut feeder program had been clogged to the rafters with PhDs.
“Right leg down,” said the master sergeant.
Chesty and I did it. Our proxies did it too.
“Now jog in place,” said the master sergeant.
Chesty and I began to lightly pad up and down on the balls of our feet, not daring to get any more vigorous about it because our proxies were doing precisely as we did, and neither of us was sure how much terrestrial stress they’d been designed to take—despite what the factory specs said.
“Good,” said the master sergeant. “Leap forward a few times.”
Chesty and I looked at each other, but didn’t move.
“It’s cool,” said the master sergeant, smiling. “They’re expensive as hell, but then again they ought to be. They’ll withstand 7.62 automatic fire, and come back for seconds. You could drop one from three thousand feet, and all you’d do is scratch the paint job.”
Emboldened by the master sergeant’s words, Chesty and I began to leap forward. Rather comically, I am afraid to admit, stretching our bodies out and curling back, covering several feet in each bound.
The proxies mirrored us beautifully.
Too beautifully for my taste, as I landed awkwardly on the third jump and fell on my ass.
My proxy emulated me, thunking loudly onto the rubberized floor.
Chesty couldn’t help herself. She laughed loudly.
I looked over at her and ruefully pushed myself to my knees.
All enlisted eyes darted to my proxy as it began to flop and flail like a fish on dry land.
“Oh, crap,” I said. “Did I—?”
“No sir,” said the master sergeant. “It’s fine. Hang on a sec . . .”
He began hammering keys almost too quickly for the eye to see, and the spasming proxy relaxed and lay flat.
Valkyrie stood up and approached, with her habitually attached clipboard under one arm.
“It’ll be like that for awhile,” she said. “It’s going to be days before each of you have fed enough data into the system for the proxies to read your movements correctly in all circumstances. It’s a bit like voice recognition software, if you’ve ever used that. The basic setup is pre-packaged for a certain set of sounds matched to a certain set of words, but until the software learns you, it’s going to mess up as often as not. Same here, with the proxies.”
“Still,” Chesty said, “this is flat-out remarkable. I’ve never seen anything like it. Truly space-age.”
“Yes, it is,” said the colonel. “And unlike an astronaut who has to be supplied with food and air and water, a proxy can remain in orbit for months or years without needing to do much more than take naps while tied to the nearest solar collector or fuel cell. The batteries in those proxies are space-age too. In the end, it’s much cheaper and more effective to Operate in space, and I say that with no small regret, because once you’ve been up there—” I noticed Valkyrie’s eyes had started to sparkle a bit, “—you won’t ever be the same person again.”
I was blind and nearly deaf. The lightweight audiovisual hood was feeding me static. My heart told me there was nothing much to be done. If the Chinese had set off another EMP—lethal, I thought, at that range; for them as much as us—then both Chesty and I were cold turkey. And we’d just have to wait and wonder what the Chinese did with Grissom Platform.
Suddenly my visual picture blinked, went black, then blinked again.
“Hang on,” I said. I could vaguely hear the rapid speech of the Air Force and Navy people who’d clustered around Chesty and me as we Operated from our booths. They’d already assumed the worst, and rightly so. With the other Operators out of the picture, it seemed unlikely that Chesty or I could do much to change the present verdict.
Color swam back into my “eyes” and very quickly I realized I was staring up at a Chinese troop who’d bent over me. He was tugging at my torso with a tool of some sort. I could feel it, as if someone was trying to pry between my ribs with a pair of needle-nose pliers. I jerked and kicked—in the booth as well as via proxy—and the Chinese space soldier spun away from me, his tool lost to vacuum and only his tether keeping him from being similarly orphaned in orbit.
Chesty grunted and growled.
I re-orientated myself so that I could see what was happening down by the combat capsule. No less than six of the Chinese had piled on top of Chesty’s proxy, which struggled mightily to break free. One of the enemy had a hand-held device of some sort and was trying to keep it applied to Chesty’s upper torso.
“I’m losing it!” I heard her say in panic, as much through the Operating room as through the speakers in my ears. “Signal’s breaking up!”
The situation quickly became clear.
Not only were the Chinese trying to take Grissom Platform intact, they were trying to take the proxies too.
Which explained why they’d not so much as laid a pipe wrench on us during the melee. Probably they were under strict orders not to damage anything they came across, even if we fought back. They were trying to neutralize us instead.
Not thinking, I began my hand-over-foot-over-hand race back down the solar panel boom. Something latched hold of me from above, like a sack of cement stuck to me with duct tape. I ignored it and kept moving, intent on distracting the soldier who had the neutralizer in his hand and was trying to use it to knock Chesty out of the fight.
A final pull, then a hard push with motorized legs.
I curled.
My proxy hit them like a bowling ball.
The “pins” burst apart.
I had the neutralizer in my hand, and—lacking anything of sufficient toughness—slammed it across one knee. The sensors complained and I winced as the feedback hit me, but the neutralizer was in pieces, which I hurled away from me as I regrouped with my Marine battle buddy.
“Still too many,” Chesty said, breathing heavily. Though the proxies were doing all the work, the fight was as visceral as anything either of us had experienced on Earth. We’d been japing around in our booths—Operator-style—since the moment the attack began. And even being in good condition didn’t prevent a man—or a woman—from getting winded at that frenetic pace.
“I’d pay good money for a vacuum-tested .50-calibre machine gun right now,” I said, watching to either side as the Chinese troops pulled themselves back towards us on their tethers. What little of their faces I could see appeared rather displeased. And I was suddenly very grateful to not be facing them in person.
Their tethers waggled as they drew near.
Wait.
Tethers . . .?
“We’ll never beat them like this,” I said. “We have to give them a new problem to solve.”
Before Chesty could ask what I meant, I pulled myself over to one of the enemy tethers which was bound to the solar panel boom. Flexing my forearm, I deployed my proxy’s cutting tool and bent low, applying it to the tether’s base. Steel cable resisted, and then snapped as my cutting tool bit through the tightly-wound metal.
I grabbed the free end of the broken tether and yanked yard, then cast it away. The attached troop flailed and groped at nothing as he shot up and over me. I ducked. Were they smart enough to have configured their armored suits with miniature reaction control thrusters? I hadn’t seen a lot of extra hardware on them when they’d first emerged.
Chesty hooted her approval and set to work on another tether.
Suddenly, Grissom Platform lurched.
Cones of mist sprayed from the much-larger RCS system installed at mathematically determined points along Grissom Platform’s architecture. The two Chinese who’d managed to get inside had obviously done their work quickly. They had control of the Platform’s systems now, which was very bad news indeed.
“Someone has to get inside and stop them!” Chesty yelled.
Indeed.
“Do what you can,” said a third voice. It was Valkyrie.
Shed plugged into the Operator frequency with a normal headset.
“Can you give us a SITREP, boss?” I asked.
“All the other Operators are blacked out right now. The EMP did its work well. There is no help available at this point. It would be hours before we could attempt to bring other proxies—being Operated on other Platforms. And by then it will be too late.”
“Aren’t the Chinese worried about how this will affect the diplomatic situation?” I said.
“Obviously not,” Valkyrie replied. “I think it’s a test—to see how ready we are to resist them in an open contest for orbital space. And since the European Union is sitting it out as a neutral’ party, we’re left to defend our turf the old fashioned way.”
Chesty and I sat at the bar of the little wings’n’brew joint we’d found not far outside the west gate of Hill Air Force Base. Being none too familiar with the local denizens, we kept to ourselves—though it seemed obvious the staff were plenty used to military folk coming in for a drink and a meal. The man behind the bar was a friendly chap. Retired, I guessed, based mainly on his crisp high-and-tight haircut and the tattoo on his muscular arm—a half-naked woman that peaked out from under his rolled-up sleeve as he moved around and served customers.
“And here I thought you were going to be a joker,” Chesty said, twirling the ice in her glass with a thin straw.
“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” I said. “Eight weeks ago you didn’t know me. But now? Now, you don’t have that excuse.”
“True,” she said. “But I get the feeling I’m not the only one who’s had to correct himself on his assumptions.”
“Right,” I said, smiling slightly at her, before taking a slow sip of my root beer and putting the glass mug back on its foam coaster. ODIS rules were: no alcohol under any circumstances, any time. It somehow messed with the tuning of the proxy control suits. A nervous system thing?
A flatscreen TV behind and above the bar was playing the evening news. An earnestlooking reporter in a crisp suit was carrying on about something, though the sound had been turned down so we couldn’t hear about what. When an image of a Chinese orbital booster was layered in behind the news anchor’s head, with the words, “PRC RESOLVES TO MATCH AMERICA IN ORBIT,” blown up under the anchor’s chin, I pointed at the set and asked the man behind the bar to turn it up.
The anchor’s voice suddenly cut in, midsentence, “. . . for the last four years, and Beijing has promised that if the United States does not cease its military activities in low Earth orbit, the People’s Republic of China will be forced to declare the United States in violation of treaty.”
The news anchor vanished, to be replaced by a slim, fit looking Chinese man in a blue business suit—Mao suits being something you didn’t see much of in the new era of streamlined, bourgeois Chinese international relations.
“We consider the actions of the United States Department of Defense to be inexcusable,” said the Chinese man, “and we would remind the United States President that the territories of Earth orbit, as well as the Moon, belong to all people. Not just America’s capitalist exploiters.”
I snorted.
“You think they’re bluffing?” Chesty said.
I shook my head. “Hard to say. After the Party put down those big pro-democracy riots in the Chinese interior cities a couple of years ago, the Beijing government has been working double-time to plaster on a nice face at the United Nations. Given the fact that so many countries are up to their necks in debt to Chinese interests, nobody’s going to mess with China. But maybe it’s all part of a scheme to provoke the US? Make us look like the warmongering bad guys half the world seems ready and willing to believe we
are.”
I said the last with a bitter frown, and took a long draft of root beer.
“And you’re sure they aren’t right?” she said.
I nearly choked.
“What kind of talk is that for a Marine?”
“I’m just thinking that as much as we like to think we’re always the good guys, events of the last few decades have occasionally cast that into doubt. I’m not stupid. I know a bit about history and I know more than a bit about our overcommitments in the Middle Eastern and African theaters. If it were up to me I’d bring every last one of us home and let the world fend for itself for fifty years. But then I’m not the President, so I don’t get to make that call. She does.”
I pushed my drink aside and faced Chesty squarely.
“Well, surprise, surprise. I wouldn’t have figured you for a political thinker. Then again, we haven’t had a chance to talk much—about real stuff. Only about work.”
“No we haven’t,” she said, waiting for me to continue.
“So riddle me this, Marine, if the answer to America’s bad image abroad is to close the bases and bring the troops home, what are we doing constructing military space stations for the purpose of putting military personn
el in orbit? And if you really feel the way you say you feel, what are you doing tied up in a project like this? ODIS being the thing on everyone’s minds lately, as the Platforms approach completion and the Chinese eat up the international news cycles with threats and rhetoric.”
She looked down at her drink—the ice tinkling in her glass—and sighed.
“I always wanted to be an astronaut,” she said. “But life got in the way. Twenty years went by in a flash, along with two kids, a mean divorce, and too many deployments. I was in Kuwait when I read about ODIS in an e-mail from a friend, and I decided it was the closest I might ever get to fulfilling my dream—even if I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the political cloud that surrounded the program.”
“The first sortie is coming up,” I said. “Are you sad like me that we won’t be going up on a rocket ourselves?”
“Yes,” she said hesitantly, looking directly into my eyes. “Don’t get me wrong. I know I beat long odds to be here, just like you. And I am glad I did this. But it won’t be the same—not being able to float outside the spacecraft and see my own real-live hand against the backdrop of the earth as it passes beneath my feet. Like Ed White. Do you know who Ed White is?”
“No,” I said.
“Look him up on the internet tonight,” she said. “When I was a little girl, I used to love the color photos of Ed White.”
“They’ve sealed the air lock,” I said.
“Use your proxy’s key card,” Valkyrie ordered.
“I did. It’s no good. However they’ve hotwired it, I can’t get in.”
Grissom Platform was still thrusting with its RCS. The Earth was swinging away and to the right. I heard Chesty cursing as she struggled with the Chinese who’d resumed their attempts to subdue her. Unable to get in and stop the ones who’d gone inside and activated the Platform’s attitude controls, I debated between helping Chesty, and figuring out some other way to stop the Chinese.