Armor (33 page)

Felix cleared his throat. “Li and Gao are dead, sir,” he said gently.

The captain continued to stare in silence.

“Captain?” persisted Felix. “It’s time to. . . .”

“Of course, uh. . . Felix. Of course,” spoke up Goermann suddenly. “Of course. I was just. . . trying to think of an alternative. . . plan.” His armored right hand raised up and settled comradely on Felix’s equally insulated shoulder. “Always good to have an alternative route, you know, in case something goes wrong.”

Felix nodded. “Yes, sir,” he said, willing to accept the other’s pitiful stab at leadership, or anything else, to finish this.

“Haven’t been able to think of a thing, though, uh. .

Felix. You seem to have grasped the situation precisely.”

Felix nodded, rose to his feet. It was true enough. He had grasped that they weren’t going to get through. The Captain rose as well, and called the other two over to run it through one last time.

“Now don’t waste time and energy,” the Captain reminded the other two, “trying to use your blazers in a pinch. We’re out of blazer capacity, you both know that. But get it strong in your mind now. I don’t want somebody trying to fire an empty gun at a crucial moment.”

The other two nodded.

“Felix will pick the spot. Don’t try to outguess him.”

The other two nodded.

“And for God’s sake, don’t hold back on him. The only

chance we have is to slam in behind him all together.” The captain regarded them. “Is that clear?”

The other two nodded. They said it was clear.

Felix wanted to laugh. He knew they all knew that the other three, including the Captain, were going to hesitate at the last second and leave him alone with the ants. It wasn’t simply the fear and revulsion they felt at ramming into a wall of two dozen monsters. It was. . . maybe Felix could do it all before they got there and they wouldn’t have to. . . be engulfed.

“Shit.”

“Felix? Did you say something?”

Felix looked up, saw that he had walked away from the others. Saw them looking at him. He hadn’t realized he had said it out loud.

“Did you?” the captain repeated.

“Nothing,” Felix replied. Maybe goodbye, he thought. He headed for his spot on the far left edge of the ridge. He looked back. The others were spreading out twenty meters apart. He was perhaps twice that distance away from the nearest of them, Patriche, to give him time to reach the greater speed of a scout. He sat down.

Maybe it wouldn’t happen this time. Maybe the Engine wouldn’t come.

He wasn’t at all sure how he felt about that thought. He wasn’t at all sure what frightened him more, being alone with no protection at all from the fear and from the ants, or that horrible sense of dropping away, that terrible vertigo that seemed to make him feel as if he but hung at the edges of himself, watching himself, his Engine self, perform. Watching it kill.

But when he thought of what he was about to do. When he pictured himself streaking down the dune toward the wall of ants waiting at the Cone, guarding his only route to safety . . . When his mind’s eye pictured the massing and gathering and lumbering together of those huge stalking zombies, their grotesque mandibles groping for him, globular eyes rotating obscenely in dry sockets as big as his head. . .

And when he saw himself dart suddenly toward them, as he must do, and accelerate right at them, as he must do, and plow into them, as he must do. . . . And when he knew it wasn’t going to work. When he knew they weren’t going to get through. . . .

The sudden nauseating spasm doubled him forward onto his knees, his chin plate struck his chest with a grunt. He thought his stomach would pull him in half. My God! My God! You’d think it would get easier! But every time it’s even more wrenching than before.

His head swam, the vertigo shifting him randomly in eddies of its own. He closed his eyes, gripped his sides with his elbows. He gasped.

“Felix?” sounded the captain’s frightened tones. “Felix!

Is there something wrong?”

He stood up, his muscles still taut but released. “Fine,” replied the Engine.

“Very well,” said the captain. Felix saw him raise an arm, saw the others acknowledge the preparatory gesture. A second later he saw the arm drop and he was up and over the ridge and flying down its side, his piston driving boots tearing angrily precise gashes in the sand.

Bolov, thought Felix suddenly, in a last plaintive desperate attempt at irrelevance. It was Bolov who had said he was a one. Bolov!

The man I threw away.

And then he had receded with his fear and guilt, had slipped back into his cowering. The Engine was on the move.

Below, the ants reacted en masse, jerking to ghoulish attention. There were maybe thirty of them lined up side by side and they shifted and bulged toward the direction of his approach, massing for the collision. The bulge flattened abruptly, however, as the other three were sighted as well. The ants scrambled uncertainly for a moment before flattening out their line once more into a semicircle. Every approach was guarded, covered. Thus thinned out, the barrier they formed looked deceptively vulnerable, as if it were only a line of men and not exoskeleton horrors.

He brought himself to the right with a slight lean and an added burst of acceleration. He must go faster! Faster! And his legs flashed beneath him.

To his right the other three had already, prematurely, begun to veer in his direction. The captain was watching Felix so carefully he stumbled and almost fell. Patriche, he noticed, had already begun to slow up. Damn!

Only Michalk at the far end of their sweep, followed the plan. Head forward like a bull, he sprinted determinedly down the hill straight toward the ants.

Distantly, Felix wondered if it might work after all. The Engine, uncaring and unexpectant, chose that moment to dart viciously to the right in front of the others. He picked a spot to strike the mass, saw the ants swell in anticipation, accelerated harder, gritted his teeth, considered a fake back to the left, discarded the thought along with its image of tripping and sprawling into the nightmare at one hundred kilometers an hour, out of control and flailing as they leapt to absorb him, pouncing….

The last fifty meter stretch of slope gave away abruptly to the flatlands, jolting his stomach but adding immensely to his speed. He strained even harder. Faster, faster, he must slam into them! Slam into them, tear them back and. . . .

And, at 120 kph, the Engine did just that. At the last second he leapt forward, wrapping his limbs into a lethal torpedo, and hurtled into the first ant. It seemed to simply disappear before his faceplate, crushed flat. Behind the first were two others leaning toward him. Not bracing or preparing, but just ants, dumb stupid mortal things that simply reached for him, the thing they were here to want and Wham! he was through their splintering bodies, exoskeleton disintegrating in the alien air and he was tumbling to his left and his legs were rolling up over his head out of control and the next ants rushed before him and he struck them faceplate first, the concussion so staggering that for just an instant he saw nothing but lights and patterns on his retinas and Wham!Wham
he crashed into the last, decelerating massively in a single second until silence and stillness for a precious half a moment.

But as he jerked himself to his feet they were alreadyreaching for him, crowding around him, groping, their mandibles clacking and clattering against the plassteel, huge globular eyes blocking out the ugly gray sunlight with ugly black menace. He bashed the flat of his armored hand through the thorax of one, slashed sideways with his elbow against a midsection, felt the splintering, twisted away underneath a massive looming mandible, gripped and jerked and tore loose a pincer wedged clinging into the waist seam, spun again out of still more grips, felt them close up behind him, all around him now.

Where the hell were they!! He was still five meters from the edge of the Cone! If they didn’t back him up now. ..! They must come now! Now!

The most jolting collision yet was Michalk slamming into him from behind. Thank God. Thank God! “Michalk …” he mumbled to him or to himself, twisting again to his feet and vaulting forward through the two in front of him, straining forward, only a few meters away, they could make it, they could make it! He butted to his left, driving the side of his helmet into an eye, grasped the midsection before him, ignoring the pincers and claws slamming viselike against his sides, and lifted and pushed and shoved and strained a step, then two, then three.

Behind him he could hear Michalk grunting, and slamming forward, gasping and stomping and straining, straining to follow. There were no signs or sounds from the others.

He slogged forward, ignoring the brutal blows that rained against his sides, his head, ignoring the clutching clasping pincers, ignoring the looming globular spheres rolling monstrously before his eyes. Another step. Another. He strained and heaved and struck out and butted again and stomped sideways against a trunk like hoof like leg thrust upward at him, drawing him off balance. Another step.

“Felix!!! Feeeeliiixxxx!” screamed. . . who? Patriche? The captain? “Feelixx!!!” sounded again, very close, and then cut off muffled by ants and fear and, lastly, horribly, by that most horrible Whumph! of air escaping a bursting, peeling, armored suit.

He twisted again, stomped again, strained some more and some more and whipped about breaking grips another step, clouting at last the pincer scraping his faceplate, growling and thrashing forward. The air filled suddenly with dust, a gusting blast of poisonous bile whipping the sand about him and….

The Cone was there. A step away at most. It shimmered briefly through the tangled, clutching, exoskeleton jungle. It was there. There! He could spin some more or, wait! he could spin all the way around and drive backward with the leverage there were only these three holding him, the other ants reaching awkwardly and without purchase in their haste.

He spun completely about, ripping loose at least two grips.

He dug his heels into the sand.

He screamed.

Michalk. . . pieces of Michalk were strewn, stretched, entangled in the ants that had torn his suit open, ripped it open to their mandibles and pincers. They had blown him open into them. His eyes bad exploded outward through his faceplate. His skin had fast frozen like burned tar.

Screaming again, Felix vaulted backward into the Transit Cone, dragging two ants with him.

Blinding Transit light. Then darkness, then the patterned heaving, but a shaking, shimmering, too, a shuddering as though his suit wanted to explode and. . . .

The colt bright lights of the drop bay appeared overhead.

He started to reach out for. . . .

And slammed again to the metal floor. The ants! The ants were still on him! They had stayed on him and they were they were crazy! The beam, the ship, the Transit, something had driven them wild. They shook in mad, impossibly rapid convulsions, palpitating, vibrating into a blur. They were dead. They had to be. But they still held him! They were still clamped to him with pincers and claws and as they churned and convulsed, they slammed him against them and between them and up and down against the floor.

The pain seared through him as his body rocked between them. He felt muscles tear, felt his shoulder socket quake and throb and burst loose, felt his leg being twisted. . . thrown, snapping, against his shoulder blades.

His suit relented at last, popping outward into Traction Mode. But still the ants held and still they shook him in their spastic frenzy and still the pain grew and he was frozen into the mode, unable to fight back or crawl away.

Whitefaced techs appeared over him. “Get them, god dammit!” he screamed. “Get them!” And one of them held out a tentative gloved hand toward one of the ants to pull it away but the massive corpse vibrated so it was impossible to grasp. The pain was swelling, breaking over his eyes, rushing to the top of his head, slamming into his forebrain. “Get them off.” he screamed again.

And then, as one, the ants stopped. Turned off. Run dry.

Still. Dead. He was no longer churning.

He opened his eyes, not remembering when he had closed them. The tech was leaning over him, hands braced on knees and saying something about the medicos and the ants being dead and not to worry, just lie there.

He closed his eyes again, the pain thrusting him down into cool darkness. He fainted, his teeth still gritted tight, his last thought: Never again.

Never, ever, again.

He awoke and remembered. It hadn’t worked. Michalk. . . .

Michalk.

No one else had gotten through. No one else had gotten close.

But I got through. I got through. I always get through.

Damn me.

Never again.

He slept.

Felix remained an extra day in Intensive Medical because his nervous system had developed immunity to the standard formula propaderm. An alternative was found and administered, allowing time for the rebuilt musculature of his left thigh to set. When he suggested to a confused meditech that his several past exposures to the vitro may have caused the immunity, she merely laughed.