by Dan Decker
“I thought that was the front,” I said, pointing to the side I had seen when I had mistaken it for a monster.
“These suits look the same from the front or the back, it helps disorient the lurkers and makes them underestimate us.” She growled. “I wouldn’t rely on that if I were you, they are still just as lethal as a lion and as intelligent as any genius you have ever known. Most of us are dumb animals compared to them, even though they look like insect-mammal hybrids.”
I removed my hat. “What do I do with this?”
“You can stuff it in between your side and the suit,” Roth said, “it won’t get in the way.”
I did as instructed and stepped into the suit, perspiration forming on my face.
Back on earth I had sometimes been a little claustrophobic, and I felt that anxiety creeping up in the back of my mind. It was not nearly as bad as it had been back on earth, so perhaps being in a new body made it more palatable.
There were places where my skin connected directly with the suit: my face, neck, and hands. I had expected the metal to be cold, but it was warm to the touch. When I had inserted my hands, it had felt like I had slipped into a coat backward. My fingers touched buttons that were similar to a video game controller. I could also feel each of my individual fingers against one another, so I had not slipped them into a glove apparatus of some sort. Once my head was fully inside, something wrapped around my back and strapped me in, causing another wave of claustrophobia to run through me.
I swallowed and closed my eyes. There wasn’t anything for me to see anyway, but it seemed to help.
“Tell your suit to wrap up, say it just like that,” Roth said, her voice far away.
“Wrap up,” I said, hating how uncertain I sounded.
I heard a quiet whirring as the suit closed around me, making me feel like I had just stepped into a coffin. I had a sudden intake of breath that I hoped Roth was unable to hear. When I opened my eyes it was dark, but then I could see again, like I was looking directly out of my eyes. I had expected a screen or goggles, but it was as if I was not in the suit.
I turned my head to see that Roth was getting into the suit right next to me, again this felt like a natural movement of my body and I did not even think about the fact I was wearing a suit.
When I spoke, I heard my voice plainly as if I still stood right beside Roth.
“What do I do next?” My voice did not sound as bad as it had a moment before, it helped that my eyes felt like they were viewing the world uninhibited by the suit.
“Take a step forward, be careful about it, it is going to take some getting used to, but it should be close to how you walk without it.”
I did as instructed and found that it felt exactly like walking without the suit. She had made me so cautious that I expected I might stumble, but nothing like that happened.
I took another step and twisted around, feeling like it was just my own body and that I was not strapped into some gargantuan behemoth.
“Jeffords did actually train you on the antigravity boots, correct?”
“Yes, he did.” I thought about bringing up the finer points of his training but decided against it.
I didn’t want to say things had turned around, but they were going far better than they had been before.
“This suit acts in much the same way. It will respond to voice commands. I don’t have time to teach all of them to you right now, but I will teach you a few things.”
“Come with me.” She took a step towards the door which I now realized was wider and taller than the other doors in the underground hangar. “By now, you understand that the suit moves naturally and feels like an exact extension of your body, but you must be very careful. Do not try to pick anything up. Try to avoid brushing up against or touching anything. I’m not going to try to teach you the intricacies of touch just yet, that is a skill that is hard to learn.”
I followed Roth into the hangar, where she turned around and looked at me. Surprisingly, I could see her face through the visor of her suit.
“How well does this protect my head?” I asked.
“It’s like you’re wrapped inside a tank, so it does a good job.”
“Your face is right there,” I said, shaking my head and feeling the faintest sensation that the suit was moving with me.
“It is an optical illusion. In fact, everything you see right now is an optical illusion of sorts. You are not looking through your eyes, what you are experiencing as vision is a transmission that goes direct to your brain, skipping your eyes completely. The face that you see is only visible to another person in a suit. Somebody looking at me without a suit would not see anything but the suit. This has been engineered to help easily identify people while in combat, there are some other things as well that are similar, but we will get there as we go.”
I was impressed with the suit. Other than the rehabilitator, I had thought that much of their technology was quite limited, but my assumption was wrong.
They kept it back because they wanted to make sure they could trust us.
My instincts told me that if we had not been attacked by the lurkers, I would not have been trained on the suit anytime soon, regardless of what Roth had said. It was only the present predicament that had prompted Roth to take the chance on me.
How is it transmitted directly into my brain? I wondered, while looking down at my hands and receiving a small shock when I only saw my suited arms. I had expected to see my hands because the experience felt so totally like I was in my body.
Even though my hands were free on the inside of the suit, I had appendages on the outside that represented the location of my hands.
I balled one hand into a fist and the suit did the same.
There was no lag, its response was instantaneous.
Weird but cool.
I could also see the suit around me. If I craned my head I could see down to my suited feet.
“Engaging the antigravity function of the suit is the same as using your boots,” Roth said, “however, don’t do it yet. Observe me first.”
I watched as she reached over and touched two buttons on the arm of her suit in the same position where her watch was underneath.
Once she pressed the buttons she hovered in the air about a foot, I would’ve expected a visible propulsion force keeping her there, but it was exactly like how the anti-grav boots had worked.
Floating and silent.
“You have noticed by now, of course, that there are buttons right by your hands inside the suit, try not to touch any of them. If we have time, I will go into what they are for later. The antigravity buttons are an essential feature of your suit and require ease of use when under fire, so we put external buttons on the outside in the exact same position as a wristwatch. These buttons are two of only a handful of buttons that are available on the outside.” She gracefully slid forward through the air like she was skating on ice and stopped when she was right in front of me. She reached out a hand and touched the same two buttons on my suit, but nothing happened. “The antigravity can only be activated by you. Somebody else cannot enable it; obviously, this is done for safety reasons.
I reached to activate my suit, but she put her hand out and stopped me.
“Wait!”
I was surprised by the biting response, it must have shown on my face because she went on. “Don’t do it right here.” She motioned towards a spot underneath the open door of the hangar. “Go over there before you engage.”
I did as instructed and once I was in place, I turned to face her. She nodded and I engaged the buttons, immediately feeling myself lift off the floor. Even though my suit hands were not connected to my real hands, I felt pressure on the tips of my fingers where the suit’s hand had touched the buttons.
“Unfortunately, despite all of the advances we have made in technology, one of the things that we have had a difficult time figuring out is how to make the suit respond in the exact same way as the anti-grav boots. I want you to gently
push your toes down to the floor. I cannot emphasize this enough: it must be as gentle as you can possibly make it because you’re going to—”
I didn’t hear the rest. When I moved my toes, I shot up into the air and straight out of the hangar. Before I knew it, I was two hundred feet above the ground.
I swallowed and was glad I had come to a halt instead of continuing to shoot straight up. I looked down and saw that Roth was coming up to join me, moving far slower than I had. The seconds ticked by, it occurred to me that she was showing great control over the suit.
I had thought nothing of it when she had floated towards me on the floor before, but I now realized that it took significant skill.
Roth was soon beside me.
“You now understand how difficult it is to hold onto the suit. If I had let you engage the suit where you had stood, you would have buried yourself into the ground and I would’ve left without you.”
That is not an idle threat, I thought, remembering how she had left me when the grenling had attacked the camp.
“I barely moved my toes.” I shook my head. “I barely moved them.”
“It takes practice to control your suit. I want you to gently spread your toes.”
I did this, doing my best to hardly move at all and shot backward. A moment later Roth was right by my side. “Look behind you, carefully, without moving your feet.”
Perspiration broke out on my forehead when I did as requested. If I would’ve gone another twenty feet, I would run into a cliff.
“The antigravity feature of the suit is extraordinarily sensitive. During my time here, they have tried different variations of the suit. None have been able to satisfactorily mimic the superior responsiveness of the anti-grav boots. In past versions of the suit’s software, they adjusted the functionality so it did not respond nearly as well as the boots, but there was an outcry from the soldiers, and they found it was better if they just made it as sensitive as they could.”
She floated until she was right in front of me. “When you get to battle you’re going to be glad the suit is so responsive. I was one of the soldiers on the battlefront who threw up a ruckus when it was dumbed down.”
“What’s the secret?” I asked, believing that there had to be something more that I did not understand.
She shrugged, at least I thought that was what she did, it was hard to tell because the suit mimicked her, but only to a small degree. “There isn’t one. You just have to practice. Now, I want you to spread your heels apart, do this as slow as possible and imagine that you’re doing it before you actually do it and see what happens.”
I slid forward thirty feet.
I could not recall moving my heels, but then I did the same thing again, focusing on thinking about it rather than doing it. I found that I had better control of the suit if I let my body subconsciously handle the movement.
I repeated the process, letting my instincts take over. It seemed to work far better, though not to the degree of control Roth had over her suit.
“I want you to land beside the hangar and watch me.”
I flew until I was over the hangar, but then it occurred to me that I didn’t really know how to go down. My use of the antigravity boots before had always been to go up. The only times I had landed, I had only been a foot off the ground, so it hadn’t been a problem to simply disengage the anti-grav boots.
In another situation I might have experimented, but I didn’t want to risk moving my feet and have something unexpected happen.
“General Roth, I don’t know how to go down.”
“What?”
“Jeffords never taught us.” I thought about elaborating but decided against it. The man was gone. I needed to get over it.
“Spread your feet apart. If you go too far, you’re just gonna fall like a rock.”
I didn’t move while I imagined myself falling to the ground like a meteor and getting stuck, or worse yet, flattened. I had never had a fear of heights, but I was starting to develop one. I spread my feet apart using the same technique I had before, thinking about it more than actually doing it. I began to fall like a rock dropping through the air.
I brought them together and shot back up, cursing as I went. I must have moved my toes when I made the adjustment. I flattened my feet and waited until I came to a halt before trying to spread my feet apart again. This time I still felt like I was falling but with less force than before. I didn’t bring my feet together until I was almost twenty feet from the ground. When I did, I shot up, but only by about ten feet this time. After I caught my breath, I spread my feet apart.
Before I could react, I was on the ground, having created miniature craters around my feet. It was a rough landing, I hated that there were indentations for Roth to see.
I reached over and pushed the buttons, turning off the suit’s antigravity feature. I took a step and was relieved to be back on solid ground again. I had not enjoyed learning to use the anti-grav boots and could say the same about the suit.
Death awaits at every turn.
I turned towards Roth, who had not moved while I had found my way down.
“Are you ready?” There was a note of impatience in her voice that was more pronounced than it had been before.
“Yes,” I said.
She rotated while in midair so she was parallel with the ground and then shot forward like she had been fired from a gun, flying like Superman.
As she sped away, I became confident that she was moving faster than a bullet. There was even a small sonic boom as she flew over a chain of red cliffs, disappearing into the distance.
My heart thumped in my chest as I wondered if maybe she had left me. If she had, it could have been far worse. At least I had a means of transportation now, though I hardly knew how to use it.
She flew back at an even faster speed, halting in midair. One moment she had been rushing along, the next she had come to a standstill.
She rotated again and then lowered herself gently to the surface, coming down lazily like a leaf floating on a breeze.
“When can you teach me to do that?”
“Not today. I’ve spared as much time as I could now to bring you up to speed. I did that mostly to make sure it was working. We have to get on with our mission.”
“Are we going to take the transport, or are we going to fly in our suits?”
Roth hesitated. “If you were a veteran, I would say fly, but I am not encouraged by how difficult it has been for you to use the antigravity of your suit. We’d also need fuel at some point. It’s best we take the transport, I’ll just have to fly close to the ground and be careful in our approach. We can take the suits with us in the transport. We will probably park once we’re closer to the camp and know more about what’s going on. Stay here.”
She hopped into the underground hangar. I waited for a good five minutes before I heard the ship’s engines engage.
This was my first good look at the transport as the other had been destroyed before I had a chance to study it, and I recognized it as similar to the ship that had picked me up that first day after I had suffered a terrible sunburn. It was much smaller.
It still bothered me that while the grenlings had been wreaking havoc on camp, the transports and suits had just been sitting here unutilized. The destroyed transport had killed a lurker, so the transports at least had a weapon. Roth said they didn’t have any useful weapons—the dead lurker notwithstanding—perhaps the ships could have been put to use in some other way.
Roth landed the ship as gently as she had used her suit. Before long the back opened and she appeared without the suit.
She motioned for me to join her. “Go inside, be very careful to not touch or brush up against anything. Don’t jump on the ramp or you might break it. Wait for me, I will help you get out.”
She disappeared into the underground hangar as I approached the ramp, putting one foot on before lifting the other. It felt like aluminum foil compared to the suit. I was afraid it would crumble un
derneath me.
The designers of the transport must not have anticipated somebody my size wearing one of the suits, because my head barely cleared the top of the hold. There were poles along each side. Roth’s suit was secured to the far pole on the right.
By the time I was fully inside the ship and looked back, the door to the hangar had closed and all I could see was the red ground, like it had never been there. It felt strange to finally get answers to some of the questions that had been dogging me, but I was not about to accept everything Roth had told me as true.
Roth jogged back into the ship and pointed at a metal pole that was opposite to the one where she had secured her suit. “Carefully walk towards that pole and position yourself in the same way I positioned the suit on the other side, just approach until you barely touch it. Go slow, this thing can crush a car as easily as you can a soda can.”
I took small steps as I approached the pole. Once I was right up against it, I waited for further instructions.
Roth leaned against the wall. “Wrap your hands around the pole, it is reinforced and hard to damage, but I urge you to be careful about how you do this anyway. It is meant to hold the suit in place, not withstand the incredible force you can bring to bear with your hands.”
I lifted one hand and wrapped it around the pole. Surprisingly, it felt like I had my actual hand around the pole. After I had done that, I did the same with the other. How did the suit make it feel like I was touching the pole?
“Now, repeat after me these words.” She gave me a moment to get ready. “Engage the hand locking mechanisms.”
I said this and felt something happen in the suit at the hands, but could not describe it as anything other than that, a feeling.
“Now say: ‘Open the suit.’”
I said this and it opened up behind me.
I was about to get out, but she held up a hand. “Stop. There is one more thing you need to say. ‘Disengage the brace.’”
After I said this last bit, the straps that had wrapped around my head and back, disconnected and slid up into holes like snakes.
“You are now free to get out.”