6
July 29th.
Mike Ram:
Fourth time you’ve put on this show this week. They still haven’t told you just what your numbers look like from the last three.
Fort Bragg.
09:00 and the sun is already turning the black synthetic shell of your armor hot to the touch. The DI’s don’t complain about that, though—they’re too pride-hurt and pissed, eager to kick your “Robocop ass” for what you so easily do to them. They bleed their rage at you so blatantly that it takes everything you can manage not to drink it in, feed off it, and then use it to actually hurt them.
Just keep reminding yourself: They’re on your side.
“Motherfuck…!!” one of the beefier ones spits out somewhere between you tangling up his arms and when he lands on his ass on the hard earth of the exercise field. You spin into the next one as he tries to blindside you and the mass of your armor hits him like a truck.
And the boots are cheering at the expense of the sergeants that have been giving them structured hell for the last six weeks.
“As you can see,” you’re saying without breathing hard at all yet, “mobility in the suit is not much of an issue. In fact, it can provide a number of advantages up-close-and-personal. Not that there aren’t potential vulnerabilities…”
You stand still and spread out your arms, egging two of them to rush in and try to get a hold of you. You give them a full second to manage their best handholds before you flow into a series of follow-and-coil dissolves that make it look (and probably feel) like your body just turned into some kind of armored serpent. You run them together and get loose enough to throw a number of good, hard shots that stop just a fraction short of target and then back up when they realize just how broken they would have been and let go. Then you walk over to the heavy tackling dummy they’ve got for training.
“You really don’t want me to actually hit you wearing this,” you tell them all, and then proceed to vent some of the rage you’ve absorbed. The padded steel unit rattles and jumps visibly, more impressive because it looks like you’re not even trying.
“And if all else fails…” You turn on them and pop the blades out of your wrists. Then you flash a grin at the DIs (who are gathering their pride and dusting it off) and prompt them to chill out and salute you.
“Gentlemen, my thanks to you for enduring that abuse for what’s hopefully a cause worth a few bruises.”
“Pleasure, sir…” one of them manages to pant, getting his wind back. “Not every day we get a freeshot at kicking an officer’s ass, sir.”
“No damage done, Sergeant Sanchez,” you give him back, remembering what professionalism he maintained despite the cool glee you took in humiliating him. “Consider a transfer. I’ll give you a rematch in suit of your own. And by the way: it’s air-conditioned.”
The boots—who’ve been sitting in the sun for half-an-hour now—mutter and laugh and shake their heads, at least until their DI’s glare and get them quiet and focused again.
“Yes, sir,” Sanchez tells you. “I’d like that, sir.”
That’s one.
You get lots of eyes on you as you get the official tour of the base. The local brass tolerates you with reasonable diplomacy, but there’s definite skepticism (beyond the fundamental bizarreness of the armor). Word about this new mystery DARPA/SOF project has been circulating since the last half-dozen live counterstrikes—they were, after all, at least partially calculated to grab attention (hence the insistence that you show up as the upgraded Grayman in four of them that they knew would leave assorted witnesses: you’ve become somewhat of an icon in their New World Order).
But it’s far from positive: there’s definite bitterness in the off-the-record chatter. The line soldiers are bent that the technology exists and isn’t available for the grunt that actually puts his ass on the line daily. We look to them like some sort of publicity performance team that comes in and runs down the bad guys for show. So you keep telling them that the gear—or some evolution of it—will be disseminated as soon as its field value is proven, but they’ve heard bullshit like that before. (Some of them remember the days when you had to buy your own body armor on the Net because that was the only way you’d get any.)
That leaves you to offer the next-best: if you want the gear now, join up—we still have the better part of a thousand suits to fill.
But the word is out on that, too: once this show-pony force gets put together, it’s not going to be US Military—it’s getting handed to the UN (assuming they want it).
“I really can’t comment on that, gentlemen…”
Things get uncomfortable after lunch.
You parade out in front of another company, give them your rundown of the project (the suit, the gear, the AI…), show off the ICW against a handful of dummy mortars and RPGs, then back to the exercise grounds for a fresh smackdown with some fresh DIs.
Blame it on the heat: despite the AC in the suit, you spend a lot of time with the helmet off and the sun baking down on your head. And somewhere in there, you catch her looking at you.
It’s a coed company, with one all-female platoon, but you can’t help but keep picking her out of the crowd, locking on her: hard-slim, tan, dark hair, deep eyes that always seem to be looking into yours when you look her way. She doesn’t take her eyes off of you all afternoon. Not like the other boots—she’s different. More there. More herself—not fading into the programmed mob of Soldier-Americana. She doesn’t fit.
You shake it off and do your thing with the DIs.
But stupid: you forgot about the gun.
You’d been showing off at the range: ran their kill-house with the ICW, then showed them you could do it almost as well—but more stylishly—with your laser-sighted automag. But you left it loaded-and-locked in your thigh-rig when you went wrestling.
Blame it on the heat or the coed audience: one of the DIs loses it just a little worse than normal and it gets to you. He gets to you: big bully beefcake who looks like he gets off on this job because he likes to intimidate. It gets just a little too good for you slamming him down. You have to dial it back. You try to be polite, play nice, but it only makes him worse. On one pass he breaks the rules and grabs for the gun and he gets it and he’s so sadistically gleeful about it as he shoves the barrel into your chest and hisses “You’re dead, Major…” and you just need to show him.
You lock his eyes and you barely keep the animal-snarl in and you take his hands and lock them to the gun and you pull the trigger for him before he can believe it.
Ow. Oh…
It’s your own fault—you tell yourself that as the shell blows between the two of you and you feel like someone just hit you in the sternum hard with a large hammer. The shock alone feels like your teeth are coming loose and you don’t even realize you’re flying back until the back of your head bounces off the hard earth, but by then it’s all done and you don’t even care that you’ve got the wind knocked out of you as your rage kicks and scissors your heavy armored legs to generate the momentum to get you back up on your feet and dumbass bullyboy is just looking at you with his stupid mouth open and the gun your gun still in his hands.
Dial back. Dial back.
You catch hold of yourself just as you snap the gun out of his hands so hard you hope it gave him whiplash. Then you make yourself step away, step away, breathe. Decock the gun. Smile.
Nothing happened. It’s all just part of the show.
But you can’t say that. You can’t say anything. You’re too busy swallowing down the rage program.
Like it was nothing, you spin the gun casually, cool, and drop it back in your rig.
Dumbass is trying to find the words to apologize but he’s still in shock—you take some satisfaction in scaring the shit out of him, showing him how far you’re willing to go—and you snap off a salute and turn on your heel before he can even move to return it and you tell them “That will be enough for today…” and you get the hell out of there.
B
ut she catches your eyes again, catches what’s in them.
It scares her. You see that. But you also see it—or something very much like it—held back and waiting deep in her own eyes.
You wonder what her name is.
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 53