When he was finished eating, Billings rose and deposited his dishes in the wall’s wash–slot. On his way back to his seat, he passed by my table. “You and Tom better rack out, Halfie. Sounds like we’re going to need those suits even earlier than we thought.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” I said, but Billings had already turned and gotten the attention of his squad. I scooped up my own mostly empty bowl and Tom’s still full one and went to where the other tech stood near the soldiers, their game forgotten in the discussion of tactics and plans for the next day. I grabbed his sleeve and pulled him along with me.
Back in the armory, Tom and I got into our bunks, which were actually hammocks strung high up in an armory supply closet, above and between the wooden crates of replacement parts. I lay there for a few minutes with my eyes closed, then said, “Tom?”
“Mmph.”
“Don’t you think Sergeant Billings is brave? I mean, to be in charge of protecting the whole township—that’s a lot of responsibility, right?”
“Mmph,” Tom said again, followed by the sound of him hacking and then spitting chicken–phlegm onto the floor below.
I gave up and let Tom sleep. It made sense that Tom didn’t notice—the tacticals’ pilots were nice enough, but none of them were like Billings. All I could think about was the sergeant leading his troops into the field, giving orders and outmaneuvering these new rebels. I couldn’t really imagine what that must be like. Yet despite all his duties, he always took the time to talk to me when they came in from a patrol.
And he had still called me Halfie. Even after the captain told him not to. Smiling, I rolled over and went to sleep.
§
All the suits were up and humming when the soldiers entered the armory the next morning, dressed in their standard short–sleeved pilot shirts and fatigue shorts. I waited next to Sergeant Billings’s heavy as he did his own visual inspection—a formality, as we both knew there was nothing he could see that a tech would miss.
“Good morning, Sergeant.”
“Morning, Halfie.” The sergeant finished his cursory checklist and mounted up, only climbing the ladder for the first few steps before leaning out and swinging himself into the open cockpit, settling in so that only his head and shoulders were visible.
The sergeant closed his eyes and sighed, and I knew that the subdermal controls—needles as long as my thumb—were sliding into the nerve ports in his arms and legs, replacing them with the suit’s own limbs. Fingers capable of crushing a groundcar like a paper juice carton flexed and clenched as Billings stretched.
Once, when I was feeling particularly bold, I had asked the sergeant what it felt like to pilot a suit. Instead of reprimanding me for speaking out of turn, he’d just smiled and said, “Like getting your dick wet for the first time.” I had smiled back, though privately I didn’t find bathing particularly enjoyable.
Billing walked the armor forward a few steps, twisted back and forth at the waist—and stopped.
“Halfie, I’m losing coolant pressure.”
That’s when I saw the spreading puddle beneath the suit’s feet.
Instantly I was clambering up the suit’s leg, peeling open access panels and hatches. It would only take the slightest shifting of one of those metal limbs to turn me into a red smear on the suit’s black frame, but the sergeant stayed perfectly still.
“Shit shit shit,” he offered.
I found the problem: one of the coolant hoses along the waistline near where the EFP had drilled through. It had looked fine during preflight, but the heat of the explosion must have cooked the hose and weakened the polymer. Now that it had cooled and warmed again, a long crack had formed in the synthetic rubber, leaking pale green fluid down into the suit’s innards and onto the floor. I dropped down and began to run for the storeroom, then stopped as a terrible realization struck me.
“Sergeant. We can’t replace it.”
“What?” Billings’s voice was sharp.
“The resupply. We’re low on replacement parts, especially hoses. We’ve been counting on the next dropship to bring more.”
The sergeant stared down at me. The suit’s limbs twitched.
“We can’t wait for the resupply, Halfie. We need to clear the area now. Can you rig something?”
The rest of the soldiers were looking at us, as was Tom. I saw a flicker of sympathy cross his face. Failing to repair a suit was every tech’s nightmare.
“I can try to patch it, but it’s a long break.”
“Do it,” Billings said. “Now.”
I ran. Less than ten minutes later I was back and clinging to the suit’s thigh, knees locked to either side of a weapons blister—the miniature ATACMS launcher, with its internal cache of tiny guided missiles. Using adhesive and pieces of another hose, I patched the break as best I could. When it seemed solid, I topped off the reservoir and moved back. Billings looked to me, got the nod, then tentatively began working the suit once more, twisting and bending.
“Will it hold?” he asked.
I wanted desperately to say yes. “It’s likely.”
“And if it fails?”
I dug my hands into my pockets, searching for an answer that wasn’t there. “You’ll have to power down the legs and wait for an evac.”
The sergeant’s expression hardened. “Unacceptable, Halfie. We can’t risk leaving a suit out there, and I’m not sending my squad out short a heavy.” He paused for a long minute, thinking. “Shit.”
An idea struck me, and I blurted it out without thinking. “I could come with you.”
“What?” Billings looked down at me, startled. “Techs aren’t supposed to leave the base. You know that.”
“I know. But if I go with you, I can fix the suit if it breaks.”
Billings looked skeptical. “What about the mold?”
“I can use one of the breathers.” The air filtration masks were only used on those occasions when soldiers left the building without a vehicle. The air wouldn’t be as good as inside a suit’s hermetically sealed canopy, but it would be fine for a few hours. “I’ll be okay. You need me.”
There was another long pause as Billings considered. Finally, he said, “Fuck it—all right. Go get a breather and a com bead. Quickly!”
I ran for the storage lockers again, yet this time my mind was elsewhere.
The field! In the three years I’d been on Medupe, I’d only been outside our building a four times—once when the dropship delivered us to the base, and three times when we needed to watch soldiers test a malfunctioning suit on the parade ground. On those latter occasions, we hadn’t even left the envelope of the base’s anti–spore shield. I’d never really given much thought to the world outside the base beyond how it pertained to the suits, but now that I was going along on a patrol, the idea sent an electric current of excitement up my spine.
I caught a glimpse of Tom’s contorted face as I ran past, but not enough to tell whether the expression was concern or jealousy. Probably both.
Then I was back again, breathing the stale, dry–tasting air of the filtration mask and rigging a makeshift net harness along the suit’s waist, close to the access panel for the offending hose but still far enough out of the way that I hopefully wouldn’t be at risk from the suit’s arms or the hot, stubby fins of the heat sink on the suit’s back. Beneath me I strapped everything I might need: more patching and adhesive, plus the few spare cans of coolant we still had left. The overall effect was of a gigantic purse, or perhaps a sling for a child. I clambered up and threaded myself through the webbing until I could barely move.
“Ready?” Billings asked.
“Ready.”
Then we were moving out of the big roll–up door and into the sunlight of the compound grounds.
It was bright, even brighter than I remembered, and I was glad I’d thought to grab a pair of the variable–tint welding goggles. Beneath the blazing ball of the sun, the base was a rambling line of gray concrete surrounded by yellow–brown grass.
A high chain–link fence marked the perimeter, broken only by a guardhouse where the base’s main road passed through it and into the wilds. We moved in that direction.
Despite having seen the suits in operation a thousand times on cameras or in the repair bays, I’d never ridden on one for more than a few laps around the armory. The whole suit bobbed up and down as each massive foot rose and fell, and before we were more than a klick from the base, the rhythm had almost rocked me to sleep.
The base was positioned in a long, flat expanse of prairie, the better to see any approaching hostiles. It also meant that the spore and pollen count was fairly low—those being strongest in the flowering forests—and the air was clear enough to see for a least two klicks in any direction. Soon the fields began to shift from grass to grain, and I caught my first glimpse of locals working their plantations. They stood as we passed, but none bothered to wave back when I raised a hand. Perhaps they couldn’t see me against the body of the suit. I had just decided to quit trying when the fields gave out and we came into the township proper.
I had been made to understand that the township was heavily populated, but I had no idea until that moment just what the words meant. In my life on the base, there was only the squad of soldiers and a few maintenance workers who came in periodically to take care of the robotics not directly related to the suits. Before that, I’d known only the few dozen caretakers, doctors, and siblings of the tech nursery.
The township had more people than both of those places combined—many more, a hundred times more. Where the buildings of the base were concrete and clear plastic, these people built with what looked like dried mud, painted or stained the same yellow as the ever–present mold. Their roofs were tiles or wooden slats, and their windows had no glass, just shutters.
The township’s residents were as tall as the soldiers but scrawnier, their arms and legs thin and sticklike. Despite the spore–thick wind, none of them bothered to wear filtration masks, and their clothes were dyed bright colors, with many wearing patterned bandannas tied over the tops of their heads. Their skin was dark—though not as dark as that of Jacobs, the brown–skinned soldier who for some reason called himself black—and mottled in places with lighter reddish patches.
As the squad stomped its way down the packed–dirt street, we quickly gained an entourage of children trailing in our wake or darting fearlessly between the great suits’ legs. The adults, too, stopped what they were doing and stood staring at us. I understood the feeling—a suit in action is a magnificent thing. Though they must certainly have seen the soldiers on patrol many times, eyes still widened as we passed. Yet where the children cheered and dared each other to touch the metal behemoths, the adults’ awe seemed tempered with something else—a sort of wary reserve. A few even looked frightened, which was absurd. The soldiers were here to protect them.
As quickly as we entered the town we were out of it again, leaving the close–packed buildings where they leaned and sagged against each other and pressing on to the west. Immediately the fields began to give way to dry forests, and we turned off the road. The towering and segmented bambyan trees stretched forth in a series of successive walls, leaning out over us and raining down their tiny, rustling leaves. I’d heard someone say that all the bambyans in a given wall were part of the same plant, connected by runners under the soil, which was why they tended to grow in rows. They really did look like giant fences, with their twisted branches serving as slats. In between their orderly processions were the flowering fern trees responsible for producing the pollen which attracted and fostered the mold. Everything in the forest was covered with a coating of yellow dust, and when the breeze shook the trees it created a tornado of pollen so thick that it was hard to see the next suit in line.
Still, the trees were widely spaced and the ground was dry and firm, so the suits had no trouble maneuvering through the forest. After a time the ground began to rise and fall in a series of hills and ridges, and the com chatter between the soldiers increased as Billings consulted the map on his canopy’s overlaid tactical display. At the top of a ridge, he paused at a rocky break in the tree line to get his bearings, and I decided to take the opportunity to run a few tests, jacking into a line–out port from where I hung in the sling.
The ground exploded. One minute I was adjusting my diagnostic tablet and the next I was being showered with dirt and old loam as a wave of pressure rolled over me. Billings staggered sideways, and I realized that the suit had sheltered me from the true force of the blast. From somewhere to our left came the familiar rattle of a machine gun.
“Contact at ten o’clock!” someone shouted. And then everything happened very quickly.
The squad was arranged in a rough circle around the stone outcropping. As one, the soldiers turned the suits to face outward and began pouring fire into the trees, keeping mostly to the arm–mounted antipersonnel guns that chewed wood chips from the trees in great gouts of bark and dust. The noise was deafening and disorienting, seeming to come from every direction at once.
Through the fog of pollen and spores shaken from the trees by our assault, I could occasionally see shapes moving. They were smaller than the suits, no larger than man–sized. As I watched, hanging helpless in the webbing, one of them stood and aimed a long, thin rifle in our direction. I ducked, and a sound like a tiny bell rang out incongruously above the rattle of the cannons as the bullet spanged ineffectually off the metal above my head.
There came another explosion down our line, making it clear that at least one person on the other side had weapons worth worrying about.
“Flanking maneuver.” Billings’s voice was tense but steady, and I felt a surge of admiration at his courage. “Switch to tags and short–range bursts, firing only on solid lock. Suits three and six, a hundred meters left and turn. Two and four, a hundred right. Five, we’re going around back on the right, on my mark. Let’s tag these fuckers and follow them home. Mark!”
We moved—not the rolling gait of a cruising suit, but a jarring, bone–rattling run as Billings barreled over roots and logs, slapping saplings out of the way like I might brush cobwebs. Inside my sling, I clung to the suit’s side, trying to keep myself from swinging into the fins that were rippling the air with dispersed heat. Around us, gunfire screamed and chattered.
Billings hit his mark and turned, sprinting back toward the ambush. All at once, the ground dropped away beneath us, and we found ourselves looking out over a ten–meter–wide crack in the earth—probably a streambed run dry in the summer heat. Across it, I could make out the muzzle flash of the rebels’ machine gun still spitting bullets back toward the original skirmish point, and the long tube of some sort of rocket launcher.
The steep–walled gully twisted partway around the nest, and then ran due west down the ridge. We could easily fire on their position from here, or we could go back around and come in on the left flank.
We did neither. Billings took three steps, the lip over the gully crumbling beneath us as he ran, and launched us into the air.
For a terrible moment, we were weightless, the boulders at the bottom of the narrow cut passing beneath my feet. Then we slammed down on the other side, every tooth in my mouth clicking together with the shock.
The men in the nest—their weapons looking old enough to be museum pieces, all the way down to the archaic national army logo—turned at the impact, but there was nothing they could do.
Billings didn’t bother with guns. In a few steps, he covered the remaining space and swung one metal arm. Two of the men went flying, bones crunching like eggshells. The third took off running, and Billings paused long enough to call “Tags?” on the com band.
“Three, Sergeant. Rabbits running.”
“Good,” said Billings, and shot the running man in the back. The force of the heavy round sent the rebel flying forward in a spray of blood and bone shards.
As the report’s echoes died, I realized that the woods had gone silent. With the echoes of cannon fire still
ringing in my ears, the metallic whines of servos and the snapping of broken twigs seemed like nothing. The other suits ghosted out from between the trees as silent as fog. In my ear, the com bead buzzed and nattered with reports and system checks, but I barely heard the soldiers’ call and response.
I stared at the dead men, the ones Billings had swept aside. Both had been standing, and had caught the blow with their upper bodies. Now they lay crumpled like rag dolls, chests staved in and heads misshapen masses of bone and tissue. One of them had a gold tooth, and it stuck out at right angles from the ruined mess of his gums.
“Halfie!”
“Uh?” I jerked my eyes from the corpses and saw Billings looking down at me. “Sergeant?”
“I said we’re losing coolant pressure.”
That woke me up in a hurry. Tearing myself free of the webbing, I scrambled over to the access panel and levered it open, not bothering with my diagnostic pad.
The hose patch had burst, probably in the shock of our ungraceful landing on this side of the gorge. Coolant streamed down the rubber and into the left leg housing, hissing where it made contact with hot metal. With no time to do things properly, I slathered the whole mess with quick–bonding adhesive and slapped a new patch over the old one. My hands burned as I held it firmly in place, but it stopped the leak. As soon as I dared, I pulled my blistering hands away and studied my work. It was ugly, but it should hold.
Of course, the last one should have held as well. I drained the cans of replacement coolant into the reservoir. As I watched, the levels rose, steadied—and then slowly began to fall.
Shit.
The other break was smaller and higher, behind the backplate and closer to the primary power cell. I patched it quickly. “Now?”
War Stories Page 21