Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (9 page)

Fine, that would be good enough. “Who’s the new Senior Armor Officer? Sullivan?” Sully would u
n
derstand. She would let me …
well,
do what I had to do.

But the bad news just kept coming. “This unit has no data on who is the new Armor Officer. Contact with the recovery vessel
Duke Phillips
, SV-12703J, has been broken. A channel is available, but no one is r
e
sponding.”

Oh … Fuck … If the League had hit the
Duke
as well … Well, that would take care of my problem eventually. Stuck on a League-controlled rock with no pickup was as good as dead, just a question of when. But the suit could make that take a
long
time. In Corpsman Mode, it could feed me (recycling my own wastes and scavenging from local vegetation), medicate me, and provide artificial respiration for weeks. Four other platoons had dropped here, but I didn’t know where their recovery ships were, nor if they were even still planetside. Unless the League found me and finished their work, I could be stuck in this tin cage until the batteries ran out.

No. There had to be a way. “Suit, open the channel to the recovery ship.”

The suit paused, running through its decision cloud. I was on the disabled list, but opening a channel had no risks, right? But if the suit saw it as a security risk, it might override me.

After the pause, the suit said, “Channel open.” And then I heard crackling sounds on the audio.

I called to the ship. “SV-12703J, this is SPC-73732. Respond if you’re able.” I used only Code Tags, just in case the League
was
listening. Operational Security had been drilled into me for too many years, and I wasn’t going to break it now.

I heard moaning, nothing coherent. Then I heard Sullivan’s slurred voice.
“73732 … Fitz … That you?”

Sullivan sounded awful, in pain. I checked my comp for her tag. “Confirmed SAO-73129, this is 73732. What’s your status?” I had planned to work my way around to my … situation. But now it sounded like Sully might be worse off than me. It wasn’t like her to break OpSec.

She took a long time answering. “
I been
hit, Fitz. League cruiser happened by … blew off our cover.
Pilot got ’em, but … We drew fire, three squads in suits plus some EMP beamer. Cap flamed the suits, and took the survivors with a scattergun. But they beat up the hull, took some hits.
Lost most of the team here.
Cap put me in a med cabinet. Then EMP beamer … did something to neural control circuits. Fried pilot’s brain, Cap’s too. I took the inducer off in time, but … I’m hurt, and I can’t get outa this cabinet … Can’t get to the controls.”

So the
Duke
had been hit, and Sullivan might be the only survivor. Her neural inducer might have let her control the
Duke
. It was the same technology you use to control a suit, letting you map your natural neural impulses to the signals of the hardware. Without the inducer, Sully was as much a prisoner of the hardware as I was. She was desperately waiting for help, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I couldn’t even help myself. That I was just waiting for a chance to off myself. I would’ve laughed, if I’d been in the mood for funny. Here I was, a brain trapped in a suit walking on its own mission; and there she was, trapped in a treatment cabinet with only her head free. Weren’t we a pair?

I didn’t laugh, but I could’ve cried when Sully got on the line again. “Fitz? You’re comin’ for me, right? You can get me outa here …” She sounded weaker and more desperate.

I stalled. “I’m no pilot, 73129.”

“Easy … Like wearin’ … suit, only think bigger. You can do it …”

“We’ll see.” I closed the line. I didn’t want to lie to Sully. It looked like her number was up right along with mine. With Cap and the pilot gone, no one seemed to be in charge. Shit,
I
might be the most senior officer still functional. Except the suit I wore didn’t think I counted as functional.

Wait! The
suit
didn’t think so, but maybe the
Duke
hadn’t gotten the message. I changed to the command circuit. “Command Unit SV-C-12703J, this is SPC-73732.” I had to phrase this carefully. If I reached too far, the Command Unit would reject it as a cyber-attack. It might even counter attack, possibly disabling the suit I wore. That would finish me, but only when I died of thirst. I had to be vague and let the ship fill in
its own
details. “I am reporting for duty, and I claim all command powers and duties appropriate to my current status in the command structure.”

The Command Unit was much smarter and faster than a suit computer, of course. Even though my phrasing had been tricky, the Command Unit didn’t pause at all.
“Understood.
All routine command dec
i
sions have been delegated to Command Unit until relieved by proper authorities. Contingent decisions to be handled by best judgment in consultation with human officers as available.”
Great.
This entire mission was now on auto-pilot, and the auto-pilot would decide when to consult me.

Then the Command Unit added: “SPC-73732 is duly promoted to Senior Armor Officer and is given full authority to direct CMM and PBM operations.”

Great! That was all I really needed. Now the suit would have to listen to me. “Suit, this is Senior Armor Officer Fitzsimmons, Alexander. I order you to stop.”

But the suit’s decision cloud reached a different conclusion than the Command Unit had. “Negative. Senior Armor Officer Fitzsimmons, Alexander is classified disabled and unable to serve as Senior Armor Officer.”

We were at an impasse: the suit had registered my field promotion, but it still refused to recognize my authority. As the suit marched along the path to the
Duke
, it at least gave me something to distract me from my black thoughts: I was
pissed!

***

I tried every override code I knew. I tried logic and reason. I tried screaming, but that only earned me a quick jolt of tranquilizer. Eventually I decided the suit was defective, its decision cloud damaged, and it had locked into core protocols. It had made up its “mind,” and nothing I could do would change it.

But while my head swam from the tranquilizer, a wild idea struck me:
this
suit saw me as disabled, but maybe the
other
suits would see me as Senior Armor Officer. I’d received the field promotion, the suit knew it,
so
the news was out on TacNet. Maybe I could make the other suits do what I couldn’t.

When my head cleared, I revisited the idea. What did I have to lose? Then I laughed.
Everything.
That was what I wanted, to lose everything. But I couldn’t see any obvious flaws in the plan, so I got on TacNet and called up the suit command channel. “All suits, this is Senior Armor Officer Fitzsimmons, Alexander. Pause program.” I checked the heads-up display; and I was glad that our comm systems were mostly on neural control, so I could change the display with a thought. I switched it to tactical map mode, and I watched as the green dots all slowed to a stop. The tally showed twenty-eight suits: twenty-seven PBM, one CMM. The other fourteen suits tallied as not responding.

My whole platoon gone! Over half could be recovered so their families would have something to bury, but only if the
Duke
somehow survived.

What to do now? I could single out one suit and bring it to me; but one might not do the job. A suit is pretty tough against another suit. I might need four or five to finish me off right. Controlling that many individual suits could take a lot of effort and time, so I took the easy way out. “All suits, accept new re
n
dezvous coordinates as follows.” I took my own coordinates from the suit’s comp, projected forward from my rate of travel, and sent the result. “All suits, resume program.” And the green dots started converging on my course. When they reached me, I could isolate the few I needed, and then reset the rendezvous coo
r
dinates back to the
Duke
. It would delay pickup; but my belief in pickup was dropping to the same level as my belief in my own chances: damn near zero.

Damn the suit!
It was supposed to serve me. Now I was its prisoner. It was marching to the
Duke
, and I would have to stop it. I would use other suits to arrest it, and then finish me. So to warm up, I practiced neural control. We had drilled this plenty of times, but not under circumstances like this: a damaged body in a damaged suit on a hostile planet.
So a little practice was called for.

I thought back on my training:
neural control is all about tricking your brain
… Complex selection and virtual control loops were too much for eighty percent of the troops: they could manage the suit they were in, but not hop to other suits. But I was ranked higher than that eighty percent. What had qualified me for Armor Officer were my high aptitude scores in virtual control. So it wasn’t hard for me to “reach” out and “feel” another suit. I “pushed,” and my brain was in the suit.

Identifying information flashed before my eyes:
EIA-5372967, PFC Gutierrez,
Estefan
. A queasy feeling came over me: Goody was one of my best friends in the platoon. I checked his post mortem:
Internal i
n
juries, critical overheating.
Goody had been fifty meters closer to the explosion than me. His brain had … boiled …

I shoved that thought away. I had
work
to do. I “blinked my eyes”—not physically, but mentally, the neural signal for changing my point of view. When I “opened” them, I was “looking” through Goody’s suit cam. The neural control circuits fed the camera image straight to my visual cortex, and my brain interpreted
it as if the camera were my eyes.

I lifted my arm—and
nothing
. The suit arm didn’t move. I felt a twinge of pain from my neck through my arm, but that was impossible. My spine was severed, I couldn’t actually
feel
anything. That was phantom pain, I knew that. But it didn’t explain why neural control wouldn’t work. And it made me pull back in shock if I even tried. Phantom or not, that pain was a bitch!

As the suits marched, I reviewed our neural control drills. I remembered Neurologist Hill’s standard spiel: “You don’t coopt six million years of evolution by pretending, unless you’re
really
good at it.
Then
pretending is the way to go. You have to make yourself believe: you
are
in that suit, or you
are
that spacecraft or that microprobe or whatever you’re controlling. When
you
believe that, your brain will know how to control it.”

And there was my problem: I had stopped believing. Oh, part of me believed I was in EIA-5372967 with Goody; but a much bigger part of me believed my arm couldn’t move, it was never going to move again, and so I had no business trying to move it. The phantom pain was my brain, screaming at me:
Stay away! Don’t look! This is too ugly to bear! I’d rather be dead!

Yes, for entirely rational reasons, I’d rather be dead; but that made it impossible for me to believe that I could move Goody’s arm no matter how many times I had drilled situations like this.

How do you do the impossible? How do you
believe
you can do the impossible? That one was easy, the most important lesson from boot camp: you try, you fail, you get hurt, you keep trying through the pain … and one day you see that you’ve made impossible progress. After that it gets easier, because your belief shifts.

So I tried lifting Goody’s arm again. This time when the pain struck, instead of shying away, I pushed into it. And I studied it: it was like a persistent jolt of lightning, radiating from the right rear base of my skull, down my neck, and through my arm, making the whole arm spasm.

But no, my arm was still.
Goody’s
arm was still. The spasm was all in my mind.

There was no spasm. I believed:
there was no spasm.

And the pain slowly withdrew, creeping back up my arm and into my shoulder. Soon there really was no spasm, phantom or otherwise.
Because
there was no pain.

The pain withdrew from my shoulder, up my neck, and back to its origin: a throbbing little dynamo of pain right where my neck had snapped.

There is no pain. The suit has medicated that. There is only the memory of pain. Don’t believe the pain.

Just like that, the pain was gone. It had never been. The original accident was real, I couldn’t deny that; but the pain since then had all been a belief system and a coping mechanism, a way to avoid facing my condition.

And there before my “eyes” was a right hand, raised, fingers flexing, wrist twisting as I thought it should.

No, wait … In that double vision you sometimes get during neural control, I saw
two
arms moving: one through Goody’s suit cam, and one through my own eyes. When I realized that, it momentarily shook me out of neural control and back into the suit. Sure enough, there was my own arm before me, flexing and moving any way I wanted.