Armor (4 page)

Felix was out of the shadows in seconds. He inspected the corpses. Armor that had retained its integrity, he had been informed, also retained its energy supply. He found a charred warrior and lay down beside it to make hip-to-hip Connection. There was an instant’s brief hesitation as the young man, recalling the constant fighting and fleeing of the past hours, screamed silently. Why?

Why continue? He was alone and lost and without hope.

Why string it out?

The Engine ignored this, grasping the armored shoulders before him and muscling the corpse into the bizarrely sensual embrace of Connection. The Engine smiled as the power surged to 42 percent. The Engine refused to die.

A black warrior still carried twelve blazebombs. Felix removed nine, made Connection, and raised power to 60 percent.

A sergeant with a broken neck brought it to 71 percent.

The CO’s command suit brought it to 87 percent. Disgusted at gaining only 4 percent, he shoved the next corpse angrily away, refusing to recognize Dikk from the mess hall..

The last possible source was an Asian girl looking far too young to be there. Her legs were twisted under her back, forcing him to lie with his faceplate against hers. He gazed blankly at her delicate features, then made Connection. She screamed.

Felix vomited against his screens. Then he jerked as though electrocuted, throwing himself back and away. But Connection was made and her face stayed close to his, wide and screaming. He gagged and panted and, for just a moment, could not move.

Until at last he, too, screamed, a hoarse sound. “Shut up!”

She shut up. He paused, took a deep breath, and hit the stasis key. In seconds the helmet was, except for a fading odor, clean. He looked at the girl again, who was just then seeming to realize what he was.

“You . . . you’re a man?” she asked timidly, like a small child.

“Yes,” he replied, nodding.

“I thought you were. ...”

“I know.”

“You’re a man,” she repeated. “You’re human.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not the ants again.”

“No.”

“I thought you were …” she whispered and her eyes flared with growing hysteria.

“I’m Felix,” he said quickly, trying to disrupt the momentum of her panic. “Scout, A-team Two.”

Her calm firmed somewhat as she focused on this information.

“I’m Taira. Warrior. A-team. . . . You said A-team Two?

You’re A-team Two?”

“I am,” he replied impassively.

“Oh, thank God, thank God! We drought. . . . I thought I was . . . alone! A-team One is… is….”

“Hit your tranq key,” he said quickly.

“. . . they’re all dead! All! The ants were . . . Oh, God!!”

He growled. “Hit your tranq!”

“Hub? What?”

“Key your tranq! Now!”

She blinked uncertainly, obeyed from instinct. From just above. her elbow a tiny stream of compressed air shot against her skin, opening a pore and injecting the drug. Felix watched her pupils swell and contract as the tranq took effect. Taira blinked again, shook her head, blinked once more. Slowly, she pulled herself together.

“How many made it?” she wanted to know.

Felix ignored her. “Are you able to move?”

“No,” she replied brusquely, businesslike at last. “My legs are broken.”

Judging from her contorted posture, he could well believe it. “I suppose I could carry you,” he mused aloud. “How many are. . . . What’s your name?”

“Felix. What’s your power level?”

“Uh . . . 84 percent. Pretty low.”

He laughed dryly, felt the disgust welling.

“Okay,” he said. “Key your painers. It’ll be a rough ride and….”

“Felix,” she said slowly, her voice now as cold as his.

“You’re alone, aren’t you?”

He met her gaze. He nodded. She stared a moment, then closed her eyes. She sighed loudly.

“Two hundred and four people,” she whispered to herself.

She opened her eyes. “Two left.”

He said nothing. His eyes were blank.

“And you’ll carry me?” she asked with more than a trace of bitterness.

“I’ll carry you,” he replied in an even colder tone that told her she was right to think what she thought.

She grimaced, taken aback. Then she relaxed. “All right, Felix,” she said wearily. “I’ll be all right here. Just g. ...” “Freeze!” he barked suddenly.

“Oh, come now. Scout. I know what you think you .. .” “Freeze!” he snapped again, looking past her down the canyon. “Ants!”

Just around the corner of her helmet, he could see the four ants coming back into the canyon. He was in a lousy position to see anything, but he was afraid to attract their attention by drifting. He settled for severing Connection, a slight movement. “Don’t move,” he said. “They’ll come right by us.”

“I can’t move,” she replied softly. “Where are they now?” “Shut up!” he ordered bluntly, watching them shuffle across the hard packed sand. The one with the blaster was trailing behind, he noted.

“Are they close? Do they see us?”

“Shut up!” he snarled.

“Tell me!”

Her tone of fear and pleading got through. He looked at her. His eyes relaxed a bit. He looked back to the ants. “They’re coming right past us. You’ll probably see ‘em when they go by. My view is bad. About twenty meters now….”

‘How many are . . . ?”

“Four. Quiet. About fifteen meters, ten. The last one’s back a ways. It’s got a blaster. They’re not looking at us.

Five meters . . . There they go. See ‘em?”

“No. No, your helmet is . . . Yes! Yes, I see one! Don’t move! Don’t . . . Okay. Okay, it’s moved off. I only saw one . . . and it’s gone past.”

“All right,” said Felix in a dead voice. He took a deep breath. “Sit tight.”

For several seconds their two pairs of eyes flickered about straining to see. They kept their bodies rockstill. Occasionally, they looked at one another. Once, Taira smiled. Felix lodged away.

“All right,” he said at last. “There they go. On my side.” He felt her relax. “They’re going away. It’s okay.” He found he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a rush. “Okay . . . okay, there they go. The one with the blaster is first. Now . . . the second. Good. There’s the third right behind him.” He glanced quickly at her, his lips forming a pale smile.

Her eyes shot wide with terror.

He was already moving when the claws clamped down on his shoulders, moving back from her and up. He struck out with a boot, hitting something. He kicked again, felt the claws quiver against the plassteel. He kicked a third time, striking solidly. He spun about, sprung free, and slammed a forearm into the hairy abdomen.

The ant loomed over him. He took a step back, retreating, but the ant closed, grasping his waist with its smaller middle pincers. One of the claws slammed thunderously against the side of his helmet. He ducked the following blow from the other claw and lunged forward. He planted a boot, quite randomly, atop one of the ant’s footpads, pinning it in place briefly. Then he drove upward, slamming his open armored palm against the flat chin like space below the mandible. The ant’s head popped off.

Felix froze, staring unbelieving, as the gushing torrent of black blood erupted from the gaping spinal shaft. And then the ant fell backward. To his horror, he found himself being pulled along. The pincers still held him tightly to the ant.

They landed brutally against the hard canyon floor. Felix twisted wildly, trying to break away. He stole a glance over his shoulder, saw the next one almost upon him.

He groaned. He wrenched back, got a knee against the abdomen, and lurched to his feet. One pincer tore loose from its grip. Another, still clamped to his waist, tore loose from its socket. Felix spun around, to meet the charge with at least. . . .

The second ant crashed into him like a tank, knocking both of them rolling across the headless stump of the first. Felix spun himself on top and clamped an armored hand viselike around the thorax. He shouldered aside a grasping claw and drove a powered fist through the center of the right eye all the way to the brain case. The creature shuddered violently, then became still.

Felix planted his boots on the midsection and leapt forward to meet the rush of the third ant. But he was all wrong, too straight in the air. He collided full faced with the hurtling ant. Even through his suit, the concussion shook him. The ant seemed to feel nothing. The pincers clamped onto his sides firmly, holding him fast while the upper claws pinwheeled in unison, bashing his helmet from side to side with tremendous force.

Felix felt himself rising helplessly as the ant lifted him off the ground. He had no leverage, no place to run or dodge and the claws kept slamming into him and he reached out, groping for those hideous eyes. But they were too far away, he couldn’t reach, and the blows kept coming and his vision blurred . . . and he was losing it, losing all sense of what to do or how, losing, about to die.

And then the two of them, man and ant, were suddenly enveloped in the crimson beam of blasterfire. It was incredible. The last ant was boiling them both to kill him. He felt the intensity increase as it rushed forward to finish it.

Felix, encased in plassteel, could take it a lot longer. The arcing claws became erratic as they, and the rest of the ant holding him, began to literally fry. One claw fell to its side, useless. The other swung, missed, missed again. The ant slumped, stumbled to one side. He felt one boot, then the other, touch the ground. He braced them firmly, grasped the simmering oozing form before him by thorax and pelvic joint, and lifted it high into the air. The pincers at his waist stretched, disintegrated. Still holding the ant high, he threw his weight backwards, twisting around, and buried the broiling monster directly into the source of the blasterfire.

The heat ray ceased abruptly as the last ant staggered backward, clawing at the bubbling ectoplasm spattered about its skull and shoulders. Felix leapt forward and tore the blaster from a claw. He swung it mightily, in a long arc, and slammed it against a leg joint. Exoskeleton splintered loudly and the joint gave. But the ant flung itself forward anyway, against Felix, and the two of them banged to the ground atop one of the armored corpses.

The ant grabbed the blaster, triggering it into the sand below them. Holding the barrel away from him, Felix pounded his free forearm into the side of the thorax. The ant shuddered, stunned, but did nothing to evade another blow. Instead it tired to grasp control of the blaster, discharging it harmlessly all the while. On a sudden impulse, Felix moved the barrel within range of the other claw. The ant grasped it hungrily, both claws on it now, and still firing at nothing.

Felix reared back and slammed out with his forearm again to the completely exposed thorax. The ant shuddered again but kept both claws on the blaster. So Felix hit it again.

And again. And again. The creature slumped, sagged, as Felix pounded his target over and over with every bit of power at his command. After a while, the claws relaxed their grip, the gray eyes convulsed. The ant collapsed.

Felix clambered to his knees, dragged the blaster free from the lifeless claws . . . and froze.

For a long moment he didn’t move. Then he gently lay the blaster on the ground beside him like in some somber ritual. He paused, then gripped the dead ant and dragged it to the side.

He sat back on his heels and stared.

It had not been a corpse he had fallen upon. Not then. And the blasterfire had not been, after all, harmless. Gently, carefully, he picked up Taira’s armored arm and lay it across the gaping, smoldering, hole in the center of her faceplate. “Damn,” he said softly.

It took him six more hours to travel eight kilometers west ward for the terrain rose treacherously and there were many ants. He had only 49 percent power remaining. There were no blazebombs left. Idly, he wondered why he didn’t care.

He sat down in a sand drift and machinelike. Engine like, went through a communication check. For diversion, he decided to try the ship’s beacon first. Nothing. Next came the Emergency Frequency. Nothing. Last came the Command Channel. Unexpectant, unhopeful, and, frankly, bored by it all, he keyed it on.

As if in response, the ground suddenly rocked beneath him from a tremendous explosion less than five hundred meters away. Before the rumbling echo could die, he heard, clear as a bell, a man’s bitter voice saying:

“I don’t care about it, goddammit! You hear me? I don’t care! And I ain’t fighting ants any goddamned more! Fuck Earth, anyway!”

Felix stood up. He looked in the direction of the explosion, at the distant and majestic spire. He smiled. He was no longer alone.

He began to run toward the west. Toward the Knuckle.

The bands were jammed with a hopeless overload of garbled voices. There were frantic exchanges between warriors, impatient officers’ directives, sergeants’ flat commands. Underlying each was a growing tone of panic. It had been a sporadic chord when Felix first detected it. Now he heard it everywhere a faint coating.

War sounds were also constant, rumbling, thundering waves of noise occasionally punctuated by another of those heart stopping blasts that had first told him where he was. After each of these, the chattering would cease for several seconds. And despite himself, Felix would each time envision all having been killed by it. Then, seconds later, the chattering would begin again, a little more desperately.

He was homed in on the center of the transmissions, a point just south of the Knuckle. He had to stop often to check his bearings, for the terrain had made anything resembling a straight approach impossible. A seemingly endless series of eroded gulleys and draws produced what amounted to a maze of narrow alleys between random groupings of walls five meters high. There was no pattern to either level or direction.

And there were many dead ends

He had just completed another bearing check when he noticed he was no longer alone.

Two warriors stood shoulder to shoulder in a clearing a few meters in front of him. Felix stared at them, too delimited with their very existence to speak. By the time he had gathered his wits enough to call out, one of them was already speaking