Some other people have already started trying to get into theirs, but they’re having a lot of trouble. The D-87s come in all these different pieces, and the pieces don’t really fit together very well. I pick up one of the shells, and it feels like it’s made of lead. The whole suit must weigh like a hundred kilos. Sorril tells us we have to start with the center, the part that sits on your shoulders. I find the piece she’s talking about, and even though it’s just as heavy as everything else, once I get it over my head, it suddenly weighs nothing at all. When I fit on the next piece, the edges just sort of melt together. By the time I’ve put half the suit on, I actually feel lighter.
Spammers starts laughing to himself, and I figure he’s probably surprised at how light the suit feels, too, because he’s got most of his on, but when he sees me looking, he strikes this heroic-looking pose, and I get what’s so funny. He looks almost exactly like the people on the murals from the factory caf back at old S-225. Like, this whole time we’d been thinking how stupid it was to believe people in the Legion actually wore armor like that, and now it turns out to be pretty much true.
The real crazy part comes when I put on the helmet, though. Unlike the rest of the suit, which is kind of dull gray, the helmets are clear, so you can see right through them, but once I’ve got my head inside, everything goes black for a second, like blinking your eyes, and when I can see again, the whole world is different. It doesn’t feel like I’m looking out through some helmet. I can’t even tell the helmet’s there. But all of a sudden the air tastes a little cleaner, and the colors are sort of brighter than usual, and I can hear everything around me real clearly.
“I know why they left those helmets off the murals,” Spammers says. His voice sounds different, too, like I can somehow hear more of it. “You look scary, boyo.”
There’s no mirror or anything around, and no one else is wearing a helmet, so I pull mine off and look at it, but it’s gone clear again. “What’d it look like?” I ask Spammers.
“Didn’t you just look right at me?” Hexi says. She was getting dressed right next to me, and that’s the only reason I know it’s her talking, because her voice sounds totally different, low and a little echoey. And she doesn’t look like Hexi at all. She’s got all her armor on, including the helmet, which isn’t clear anymore but that same gray. Where her face should be there’s just a bunch of glowing yellow lines. They look sort of like cracks, the lines do, zigzagging out from a spot at the center like a window that’s been hit with a rock.
It takes me a second to catch my breath. “Hey, Hex!” I say. “How’d you get that on so fast?”
Hexi yanks off her helmet and looks at it. The front turns clear again pretty much instantly. “I had it on the whole time,” she says, sort of confused.
It turns out the D-87s are made so that when you’ve got them on you can see through other people’s helmets. It makes things easier to communicate or something. You can also talk to each other from real far away, like a radio but way better, and outside the suit, it doesn’t make any sound at all, in case you need to sneak around and don’t want anyone hearing you. And that’s only the beginning.
Once everyone is suited up, Sorril takes us through the same exercises we’ve been doing for weeks, and they’re so easy, it’s almost funny. You can do a whole obstacle course or run fifty kilometers and hardly even notice, or shoot your rifle one-handed and hit the target like it’s nothing. In the D-87s, every single recruit is fast and strong enough to take on a whole squad of militia. We can see and hear things we couldn’t before, and even sort of sense things nearby without looking. It makes me wonder why we spent all that time doing normal training, until the end of the day, when Sorril takes us to one last obstacle course.
It’s on the far side of camp, the course is, close to the forest. The new course looks about the same as the ones we’ve been doing all along, with climbing walls and ramps and swinging rings and so forth. The only thing that’s really different is that in some places the trees and ground and the course generally are all piled up with snow.
Right away, people start nudging each other and grinning. Yesterday, this would have been a pretty tough course, but it’s nothing now that we’ve got our D-87s. Even the snowy bits won’t be any trouble, since the D-87s are made to keep us warm in like outer space, so who cares about a little snow? But there’s something a bit off about this new course. Maybe it’s the weird smell in the air. It kind of reminds me of that place where we got off the train from old S-225.
I figure it out when the first recruit hits a snowy patch and just falls over. Where the snow is, there’s no thelemity, and our D-87s won’t work. Even though I’m ready for it, it’s still sort of a surprise when all of a sudden my helmet blinks out, and I’m staring through my clear visor, and at the same time, my whole suit gets unbelievably heavy. The thing really must weigh like a hundred kilos minimum. At least I don’t collapse the way some people do. By the time I make it to the end of the course, my D-87s sometimes working and sometimes not, I’m sweating like a lunatic and so tired I can barely stand.
That’s why they call this place “Limit Camp”: because it’s built right where the thelemity coming from the city in the middle of the valley runs out. When you’ve got thelemity, it basically forms this big bubble around its source. The space inside the bubble is called the “umbris,” and the space outside is the “aeter.” If you’re in the umbris, you’ve got like an everlasting supply of thelemity, but in the aeter, anything ingenized is just deadweight.
Optio Sorril tells us we have to be able to survive in both. Some battles move so fast that your source could go out of range at any time, leaving you in the dark. That’s another way of talking about the aeter. Dark. Our D-87s are made to keep us alive pretty much anywhere, but without thelemity, we’re next to useless in a fight, so we have to be ready to find our way back to the umbris, or at least hang on for rescue.
It’s a pretty scary thought, being out in some world where there’s no air, or it’s so cold you’d freeze solid in two seconds flat, or so hot it’d boil you right in your skin, and suddenly the only thing keeping you alive is this heavy metal suit and the little tank of air stored inside for emergencies. I try not to think about it too much, but that isn’t so easy when old Sorril is reminding us all the time how we have to be ready for anything, or else the Realms will kill us way before Romeo does. According to Optio Sorril, this is the part where we’ll find out what sort of legionary we have inside.
The legionary I have inside is unbelievably lousy, I guess. The branch of the Legion we’re all training to join, namely the infantry, is called the “milites.” I was a pretty good soldier back in Settlement 225, but I have to be about the worst miles ever. Honestly, the worst. The fact is, fighting Valentines is about way more than just finding something to hide behind while you fire your rifle at anything that moves, which, when you get down to it, is pretty much the whole strategy in the settlement militia.
In the Legion, you still need to be able to hide and shoot, of course, though most of the time they actually give you something to hide behind. The Legion has these things called “assault platforms,” which are basically little flat spaces big enough to hold about ten milites, all surrounded by shields and barriers and whatnot to protect you when the shooting starts. The problem with assault platforms is, most of the time while you’re on one just shooting away, the stupid thing is going to be flying way up in the air. When old Sorril showed us that battle in the moldy green Realm, the wall we saw floating in the sky, the one that looked like smoke, that was actually made up of hundreds and hundreds of assault platforms, all hovering over one another, and every one was stuffed with milites like me.
So we’ll be on these big old platforms, floating around in the sky while half-spider, half-dog things try to kill us. And even worse, once the fighting starts, there’s no guarantee we’ll even get to stay on our own stupid platform. The assaul
t platforms will be maneuvering around according to what’s happening in the battle, and a lot of times we’ll have to get to some other platform, like if the fighting happens to be concentrated there or whatever. But the platforms are all floating, remember, so you can’t just run from one to another the way you’d run from tree to tree if you were out fighting hellions for old S-225. Instead, you have to kind of fly. That’s the part that completely flattens me. The flying.
One of the things our D-87s can do, see, is change gravity. I’m serious. It only really affects the suit and whoever’s inside, though. What it does is, it lets you change which way gravity pulls you. So say you’re standing on the ground like any normal, sane person, but you want to get to something above you. You can flip your personal gravity, and you’ll fall up into the sky. That’s what it’s called: “personal gravity.” You can also just make yourself totally weightless, which is how they teach us to move from one assault platform to another. You push off the platform where you’re standing and float until you get to the next one, then adjust your gravity so you can stand there. The platforms are all double-sided, so there’s always someplace to land. If you need to get somewhere really fast, you’re supposed to just fall in that direction, then flip your PG at the last moment so you don’t land too hard and splatter yourself. And that’s what it’s like fighting the Valentines: everyone flying and falling and spinning all over the place. I get queasy just thinking about it.
The obstacle courses old Sorril gives us to practice personal gravity are pretty much impossible. Impossible for me, anyway. Spammers and Mersh and Hexi, they all get it pretty quick. But I’m terrible. Like, I’ll be running down a course, and I’ll get to some pit, and I’ll know I’m supposed to flip my PG so I can walk upside down on the ledge way above the pit, but instead I’ll end up falling in, or I’ll miss the ledge and go tumbling off into the sky until I get stuck in the safety nets they hang around the courses to catch idiots like me. For some reason, I just can’t get the hang of it. Most days, I end up puking in my helmet at least once. If there’s anything more disgusting than puking inside your own stupid helmet, I don’t know what it is.
“Try not to think of it as flying,” Spammers tells me. We’re in the armory, and I’m trying to wash the puke off after a particularly embarrassing run. There are bits of egg in my hair. “Think of each surface as its own planet. The world is round, so everywhere you step, down is a slightly different direction. If you walked to the other side of the planet, you’d be upside down from where you are now, but it wouldn’t feel strange because to us the world always feels flat. The platforms are that way, too. The ground is wherever you’re standing.”
“That’s like real profound, Spams,” I say, giving my helmet another rinse. The D-87s actually do a pretty good job of keeping puke away from your face, once you’ve gone and vomited it up and everything. I know Spammers wants to help, but I’m not in the mood for it.
Today was even more terrible than usual. I guess there was some big attack on the city a while back that has everyone on edge. It’s why they had that special ancillary draft, the one that got Hexi and Spams and me called up, and now the whole Legion is on high alert. Anyway, they were doing drills in the city, and old Sorril brought us in so we could all get a taste of what it’s like to be in the middle of a battle. Right as we got there, they started firing the City Guns. I’d only been to the city a few times since we got into training, and I’d thought these things were buildings, but they’re actually gigantic cannons, and when they get going, you’d swear you were about to die. It’s sort of like the way a real loud noise will mess up your ears for a few seconds, only the City Guns, they don’t just mess with your ears. They mess with your eyes and your tongue and your brain, too. And while all that was going on, old Sorril had us running exercises. No big surprise I didn’t make it.
“Or you could try keeping your breakfast down,” Mersh suggests. He’s only joking, but it annoys me. Mersh is pretty good with PG, and it’s sort of a shock to find out he’s actually better than me at something. Seeing all those guns really got Mersh going, too, and as a result he’s decided to be an even bigger turd than usual. A couple of recruits laugh like Mersh has made the world’s most hilarious joke.
“Real helpful, Mersh,” Hexi says. “Don’t worry, Torro,” she tells me. “Optio Sorril says some people take a little longer to acclimate to manipulated gravity. You’ll get it soon.”
Only I don’t get it soon. I actually get worse, if that’s possible. The training keeps getting harder, and after our like introduction to the City Guns, we hear them pretty much every day, even way out at Limit Camp. It doesn’t stop there, either. Other parts of the Legion start running exercises in the valley, and pretty soon you can hardly go anywhere without getting yourself nearly blown up. They have these things called “equi,” which are basically gigantic versions of our D-87s, only the people inside can use thelemity even without ingenized weapons like lazels and so forth. Those kiddos get up to some seriously crazy crap. They can set practically a whole forest on fire like it’s nothing, or even change gravity—sort of like we do with PG, only they can use it on other people, to like just squash them in their tracks. And that’s only if they don’t step on you first, or like explode your skull or whatever. Mersh can’t get enough of it.
In no time, I’m starting to feel queasy even before I get to spinning and falling and everything on the courses. So while the other recruits are all doing this crazy stuff, like jumping way up and swiveling midair so they land standing sideways five meters off the ground, or running along a balance beam that happens to be all tied up like some big thick bootlaces, I’m mostly falling flat on my butt or getting sick in my helmet. You can tell everyone’s getting tired of me, even Optio Sorril, who never gets sore at anyone.
One day, halfway through afternoon training, she just pulls me right off the course. “Why are you hanging back, Recruit?” she asks. She’s not wrong—about me hanging back, I mean. The course today is like this big twisting vine, with branches swinging around all over the place. I was looking up at it, trying to pick out a path where I wouldn’t just fall off. I already felt sort of dizzy, even though I wasn’t moving yet.
“I’m a little afraid I’m going to be sick, ma’am,” I tell her.
“And is this how you intend to behave when you meet the Valentines?”
“It isn’t about intending, ma’am,” I say. “It’s just what usually happens. So yeah, I guess I will. It stands to reason. Logically, I mean.”
It’s obvious old Sorril is pretty sore at me, just from the way she’s standing, sort of looming over me, even though she’s shorter than I am. “I’ve been watching you, Recruit,” she says. “There is absolutely nothing that should prevent you from being an exemplary legionary. The trouble is that you are not making the necessary effort. You would not be the first recruit to resent being brought here, or the first to allow your anger toward those you consider responsible—me, your settlement, the Principate—to interfere with your training. But this cannot continue.”
I hadn’t been thinking about how I left Granite Shore, actually, how old Cranely got me called up so someone else wouldn’t have to go to the Front, but I am now. I start getting pretty mad. And I start thinking, like, maybe I’d have an easier time if you Prips hadn’t been lying to me my entire shitty life. Maybe we could have been practicing this stuff at old S-225, so I’d have a chance to figure out some of this crap before you dragged me off to be eaten by homicidal aliens. It’d feel pretty good to yell all of that at Optio Sorril, probably, but I keep my mouth shut.
“At the beginning of your training, I promised to make a volunteer of each and every recruit,” old Sorril says. “For most, learning that we are in a fight for the very survival of our species is enough. But if preserving the lives of every human being in existence does not motivate you, I urge you to find something that does, because I will not send an incompetent legi
onary into battle. You will volunteer to fight, or you will volunteer for the dungeons. The choice is yours.”
TWENTY-NINE
TORRO
The next day, Sorril announces we’ll be having our first official combat exercise. We’ll be in a real battle scenario, with a mission to accomplish and everything. She looks right at me when she mentions the mission part, like having a mission is supposed to mean something extra for me. She probably wants me to know I’ve got more to do than just finish the exercise. I’ve got to find my motivation. That speech she gave me sure didn’t do it. I went back to the course all right, but I finished about a thousand times slower than all the other recruits. If I can’t get good enough to fight with everyone else, I guess old Sorril’ll end up throwing me in prison just to keep me out of the way.
Our mission today is actually pretty simple: kill as many Valentines as we can. They won’t be real Valentines, of course. Instead, there’ll be these things called “V-spheres,” which are basically targets that move around and shoot back at us. We’ll be divided into squads, and whichever squad destroys the most V-spheres gets a special dinner and no chores for a week. A lot of the other recruits look around at me when Sorril mentions the competition part. I know what they’re thinking. Everyone wants to win, and they know with me on their squad, they won’t stand a chance.
We’ll be traveling the way actual milites would for a real battle, using these things called “tetra fortresses.” A tetra fortress is basically a whole bunch of assault platforms all stuck together in a big ball, layers and layers of them, with a few people in the very middle to control the whole thing. Us milites all load up onto the platforms and sit there while the fortress flies into battle. When it gets where it needs to be, the assault platforms just launch off. “Like seeds from a dandelion” was how old Sorril put it. She showed us a couple of her moving pictures, and those fortresses really do kind of look like dandelions, with all the little bits peeling off and floating away. Once our platforms are detached, we’ve got to maneuver into position, making a wall or whatever kind of formation works for that particular battle. We’ve practiced flying around on the assault platforms a bit, but this time we’ll be using an actual tetra fortress, and we’ll have an actual source we’re supposed to protect.
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