Armored-ARC

by John Joseph Adams

  What about payback? Your Streak will demand it. Radical Two will seek it.

  Leave it to me, the chief said.

  All of this clipped in Radical One’s memory. All of it stolen by Deacon and kept in his.

  I saw it all as if I were there. This is the power of a Fuse. It takes only a split second.

  Memory is more than just a series of biochemical firing pins, a cascade of molecular events that result in specific encoding. Memory shapes us, both human and Radical.

  And memory, we know, is the foundation of revenge.

  It was Deacon that made me stand again. The power of his mind and the Fuse, not even fixed yet, precarious in connection but determined to rise. He willed my battered limbs to move, my form to sit, then pushed to stand. Pieces of me flapped free and clanked. Before I had the cognitive function to flick down my arm blade or move my heavy foot, he did it for me, alive and alert. His thoughts were jagged as they melded with mine, felt foreign like stitches on a wound, like one of Tommy’s flesh injuries.

  He knew where I wanted to go. The chief and Radical One lay struggling in their own brokenness. Their shoulder armor shuddered open and back, like the twisted wing of a bird. Their chest spread with perforations and new scars.

  We moved, Deacon and I, to stand over my chief. I barely discerned the Tora mark through the bullet holes. We slammed my heel onto the chief’s wrist, breaking it through the armor, and held there to block any flick of weapon.

  He cursed at me. He reached for Deacon’s throat with his free hand, bolstered by Radical One’s remaining strength, but I grasped that too. We held there, a tableau of murder at an impasse, until Deacon brought up my right foot and slammed it into the joint where shoulder met neck. The chief’s arm went limp. It freed my own grip.

  My artillery packs sat empty. My gun was cracked and useless. It took no thought, only will. As Radical One’s red eye swept over my severed faceplate I plunged my arm blade into the chief’s throat and twisted it. So fast it took his head halfway off his neck.

  I inflicted the same on Radical One, with bare hands. Its injuries and momentary shock at the death of its human gave me and Deacon the advantage. I dismantled it right there on the road, a piece at a time. I bashed its circuits, gutted it of cables, twisted its desperate, reaching armor until the shapes made nothing, only hunched there like forgotten shards of frozen metal, the dregs of a factory assembly line.

  What I did to it was a mercy. It did not have to mourn, as I did, for my Fuse.

  The Gear Heart Streak, what was left of it, never interfered. Frightened of Tora retaliation, or too mindful of their own survival. Through Deacon’s mind I knew. My chief and Radical One had followed me from Tora’s wreckhouse, with every intention of dismantling me—and their chief and Radical had known. When they saw my destination at the Gear gate, furious signals flew between chiefs: dismantle me and kill Deacon, since we could not be controlled. I had disappointed my chief by not fusing again, going nomad. Deacon had disappointed the chief by coming to me first.

  Now they were disappointed and destroyed, and that was all there was to that.

  We lost the taste for blood, Deacon and I, and left the Gear Heart Streak to its decimation. I didn’t want to return to Tora and answer any questions, face any possible retaliation. I wasn’t Tora anymore; the destruction on my chest armor had wiped the Tora mark, one good result of that damage. Without a word of outloud consultation, Deacon and I set ourselves on the road out of Nuvo Nuriel. The direction was straight but my steps fumbled and creaked. We would need to find a resting place, between towns, to heal ourselves. And to fix.

  Where we were headed, it didn’t matter. We were nomad.

  I didn’t pick this Fuse. Later Deacon would say, I picked you. Sometimes, I suppose, it works that way. It is not all about the human. But it isn’t all about the Radical either.

  We sat in a field by an abandoned warehouse, letting the tendrils of the Fuse find one another until it was complete. We belonged to no Streak but he cared less than I did. I hadn’t forgotten what it was like to hold a human inside my armor, but it was different with him. While Tommy had dreamed of the stars and peace, Deacon was a restless runner. Sometimes I would have to pull him back, but other times he would drive me on.

  In this way we were Fused and in this way we would live.

  In this way, through all the spaces between populations, both Radical and human, we are alive.

  Karin Lowachee was born in South America, grew up in Canada, and worked in the Arctic. Her first novel Warchild won the 2001 Warner Aspect First Novel Contest. Both Warchild (2002) and her third novel Cagebird (2005) were finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. Cagebird won the Prix Aurora Award in 2006 for Best Long-Form Work in English and the Spectrum Award also in 2006. Her second novel Burndive debuted at #7 on the Locus Bestseller List. Her books have been translated into French, Hebrew, and Japanese. Her recent fantasy novel, The Gaslight Dogs, was published through Orbit Books USA.

  Human Error

  John Jackson Miller

  In the old days on Earth, victorious soldiers came home to parades. In space, Bridgie Yang knew, you might well return to find the enemy eating your house.

  The barracks for the Surgical Assault Teams were clearly visible as Bridgie’s space transport approached the asteroid…or what was left of it. The Signatory Council had thoughtfully constructed the warriors’ dome in a roomy, high-rimmed crater shaded from Altair’s bright rays. But now, half the crater wall was gone, and the barracks with it. Now, all that remained of the structure were shimmering chunks within a cluster of enormous living soap bubbles. Through the diaphanous alien menace’s body, Bridgie could easily make out the signal tower of the armory, quickly dissolving into digestible chunks.

  “Surge Team One to Altair Center,” Bridgie said, green eyes narrowing as she gripped the transport’s control yoke. “Tell me everyone made it out of the barracks.”

  “Affirmative,” came the response over her headset. “They all made it across to the station in time. Welcome home, Chief Yang. Er—I mean, welcome back.”

  Bridgie didn’t appreciate the slip. The Spore—it was eating their home base! What had they spent the last six months fighting, all across the Altair system? And what good was all that work now? What must have it been like for the troops having to leave everything behind?

  But there was a more important question, she knew.

  “Who brought it here?” The dark-haired woman’s throat tightened as she scanned the surface images on her console for the source of the infestation. She knew no one on her team would have accidentally brought it in—they were too smart for that. She hadn’t become the youngest human to lead a Surge Team for nothing. But because she was chief, she was technically responsible for everyone—even those she hadn’t recruited herself. It had better not be one of Welligan’s rookies, she thought. I’ll skin him alive.

  The transmission crackled for an annoying few seconds before she got her answer. No, the foreign biological had arrived the week before, affixed to one of the handheld laser cannons shipped in from another depot. Porrima B, where they’d never seen a safety regulation they couldn’t ignore.

  Bridgie exhaled. Losing the barracks was tough, but she knew there were plenty of weapons—and fresh low-grav battle suits—waiting for them in the main station. Just in from Regulus, where they knew what they were doing. They’d caught a break. She opened her headset channel to address the other troops on her carrier. “Looks like we’re not finished today, folks.”

  “Actually, you might be,” answered a baritone voice she instantly recognized: Falcone, administrator of the Altair Sunward Provisioning Center. “We all might be finished.”

  The Great Spore wasn’t actually a spore. But “Exotic Formation Seven-Alpha” lacked what the lobbyists back home were looking for: that special sound that panicked Earth’s governments into committing some portion of their burgeoning revenue from taxing space commerce to the defense budget. The s
pecter of an interplanetary fungus literally digesting resource worlds before prospectors could reach them had gotten everyone’s attention, bringing the humans into league with the other Signatory powers. As physically different as the intelligent alien species in the Orion Arm were, there was one thing they all agreed on: the Great Spore was unique, and uniquely destructive. It had to be eradicated.

  Of course, part of the problem was that there wasn’t just one Great Spore. Exotic Formation Seven-Alpha’s division—and effective multiplication—owed entirely to the clumsy first efforts of the early Signatory powers to combat it. Encountering the original Spore digesting the rocky remains of a planet orbiting Fomalhaut, an excitable Gebranese pilot launched a thermal explosive toward the quivering mass. The resulting blast was almost certainly a pleasant sight to the Gebran’s cluster of eyes—but the sequel surely was not. For the explosion hurled trace amounts of the organism across the kilometers to take root on the skin of the Gebranese rocket, already bound for the main Fomalhaut transit station. As soon as its dormant phase ended, Seven-Alpha went back to work. Those awaiting the Gebran’s triumphant return saw instead the new Great Spore, carried along by the acceleration of engines it had already mindlessly digested along the way.

  Before brute force methods were finally abandoned, similar episodes had spread Spore infestations to a dozen systems. All attempts to incinerate the being had only led to its further spread, clinging microscopically to everything from starships to comets. Radiation alone only seemed to make it grow faster.

  No, as Bridgie and all those who had trained alongside her knew, the only way to eradicate the Spore was up-close and personal. The boil had to be lanced—messy, detailed work that required individuals to approach the Spore in reinforced environment suits armed with precision lasers. A number of organic command structures, invisible from a distance, bobbed up and down in Seven-Alpha’s mass; pinpoint shots to these nuclei caused the surrounding mass to wither within seconds, unable to regenerate. A good team of Surgicals could destroy a cubic kilometer of Spore in an hour without any viable material spreading to their equipment. And Bridgie Yang’s team was one of the best, as the fragment of Spore on Altair’s orbiting gas giant had just found.

  Or would have, if it had a brain to go along with its boundless appetite.

  That another outgrowth had appeared on the same oblong asteroid with ASPEC—the not-quite right acronym for the Altair Sunward Provisioning Center—wasn’t of much concern to Bridgie as she entered the main station. Flanked by O’Herlihy, her hulking second-in-command, she breathed easy in the recirculated air of the dome. Their rocket-supported heavy-grav suits had made work in the clouds of the gas giant possible, but they weren’t built for comfort. The one-eighth Earth gravity of the asteroid felt like a day at the spa.

  “Yang! Glad you’re back,” said a man who didn’t look glad of anything.

  Even nearly weightless, Leonid Falcone sagged, Bridgie saw as she kept walking. Hair uncombed, tie too short—she didn’t know what hour it was supposed to be in ASPEC, but Falcone had either just gotten up or been up too long. She brought her hand to her tanned forehead in salute, even though it wasn’t necessary: Falcone was just a bureaucrat. “Saw the bugger on the way in, Leo. I’ll have Surge One suited up in five.”

  Falcone coughed. “That won’t be possible. Your equipment—”

  “Is in the building that just got eaten,” she said. Bridgie and O’Herlihy never broke stride, forcing the shorter administrator to keep up. “But you just got a knockbox in from Regulus with our new low-grav armor—and that’s still here in the base.”

  Seeing the rest of her troops filtering through the airlock into the station behind her, Bridgie turned toward the cargo receiving area. There, as she expected, sat four of the metal whales that had been light years away weeks before: the unmanned shipping containers colloquially known as knockboxes. Spying the markings of the Signatory Production Directorate, Bridgie looked back at Falcone, reassuringly. “You’ll see.”

  But what Bridgie saw after stepping through the cargo gate stopped her dead.

  “Where’s Q/A?” she said, looking around. “Temmons!”

  Seventeen and never home to a single facial hair, Quartermaster/Armorer Jake Temmons knelt beside a black metal polyhedron half his height. One of the pentagonal faces glowed, providing a technological interface with the knowledge of a species older than Earth itself.

  Bridgie knew what the device was, but not why the kid had it here and now. Here, in the tail-end of the knockbox shipped four days earlier from Regulus—and now, when the Spore threatened just a few kilometers away. “What’s the deal, Q/A?”

  “Oh, hi, Bridgie.” Pale-skinned and freckle-faced, Temmons looked like he belonged on a playground planet-side, not on the front lines. “What deal do you mean?”

  “Make that Chief Yang,” she said, seeing Administrator Falcone had followed her in. “None of this armor’s been unloaded! You knew we’d need to get out there and start fighting!”

  “Yes, I did,” Temmons said, not looking up.

  Wonder child or no, Bridgie thought, he’s taking the Q/A title a little too seriously. She walked to one of the large containers lining the sides of the knockbox and yanked at the handle.

  “See for yourself,” the boy said unhelpfully, as she swung the corrugated lid upward. And she did see…

  …something. But what?

  Bridgie heaved what she thought was a breastplate from the container only to discover she was holding a pentagonal shield more than a meter wide, concaved toward a circular hole at the center. A twin to the plate still sat inside the container, she saw. Pulling it out, she realized the two fit together, creating an oversized armored suitcase with five large holes around the edges. It was made from the same composite material as the low-grav armor she’d expected to find—but it looked more fit for a schizoid cello than for a human torso.

  The equipment slipped from her hands, gently clanking to the floor in the weak gravity. “Jake, what the hell is this?”

  “Not what we ordered,” Temmons said, rising and turning to an opened container behind him. Reaching in with both arms, Temmons fumbled for a moment before stepping back. Turning toward Bridgie, he displayed what looked like metallic kangaroo tails on each arm. The long sloping cones accordioned and bent as he crooked his elbows within the housing.

  “What does the manifest say?”

  “It says we received what we were due: thirty-two armored units optimized for combat in low-gravity environments.” Temmons smiled a little as he waggled the hollow armatures like wings. “They’re just not for humans.”

  “What?” Bridgie stepped forward and ripped one of the housings off Temmons’s arm. The Q/A looked miffed. She didn’t care. “Then who are they for?”

  Looking at the components together, she knew her answer before Temmons spoke. The Uutherum.

  Bridgie knelt and plugged the floppy arm into one of the side portals of the unit she’d unloaded. The connection made, the arm stiffened as servomotors came online. Temmons added another, and another. Just as with the human outfits from the Signatory manufacturing centers, the joints automatically cycled closed for an airtight fit. What remained at the end looked like a coffin for a starfish two meters across.

  Which was exactly what the Uutherum resembled.

  “There’s no helmet,” Falcone said.

  “There’s no head,” Temmons corrected. Stepping around a corner, he emerged with a sensor-covered disc half a meter across. “It fits right over the hole in the middle—plugs into their sensory organs somehow. The one for the hole on the other side has a thruster unit.”

  Bridgie felt along several of the arms to find tiny attitude control jets. “They get around,” she said, almost to herself. She looked up at Temmons. “They’re all like this?”

  “Haven’t been able to reach a larger container at the far end—but it’s got Uutherum markings too.”

  Standing, Bridgie stared blankly at the
rows of containers surrounding her. There would be no calling Regulus for replacements. The errant knockbox had reached Altair the same way they had, shot through a rip in space created by a pulse generator. But the trip took four days, and getting the correct material from Regulus would take eight. Messages traveled no faster between stars than humans—or misaddressed equipment—did.

  Bridgie angrily twirled one of her braids, as she always did at times like these. Long hair might be a liability in combat, but she’d always joked that if she didn’t have it, she’d be twisting bureaucrats’ necks instead. And this was a grand screw-up, indeed. “I’ve never heard of anything like this,” she said, infuriated. “All the money people have put into space travel. Every kilo of payload precious. And now—”

  “And now it’s common enough for people to screw it up.” Temmons chuckled. “I guess we’ve finally arrived.”

  Falcone stomped between them, veins visible in his neck. “Will the two of you shut the hell up? Seven-Alpha just ate your barracks as an appetizer. It’s going to eat the whole asteroid, and ASPEC with it!”

  Temmons looked up. “Skippy’s that close?”

  “Skippy?”

  Bridgie interceded between the two. If anyone was going to kill the youthful quartermaster, it would be her. “The Surge teams class the Spore specimens by behavior,” she explained. “This year’s mutation likes to leap around when it senses motion.” Actually, the being had neither senses nor muscles that she knew of, but there was no better description.

  “You just came back from the gas giant,” Falcone said. “You’ve got armor on your ship.”

  “Designed for a gravity well eighty times the one we’ve got here,” Bridgie said. “It’d be like fighting with a zoo bear on your back. We’d never be able to calibrate the control jets for an asteroid in time.”