She shook her head.
I forced a smile and kept chewing.
-10-
I fell asleep late that night inside Shed Six. My com-link beeped and woke me up. I had no idea what time it was, as the interior of the shed had no windows. Even if it had possessed a window, the view would have consisted of the interior metal walls of the laser turret.
Sitting up, I noticed that Sandra was gone, and that the prototype of my new battle suit was lying in the output tray. The last thing I noticed was my com-link light, which was blinking red. I reached for it, and it beeped again.
“Riggs here.”
“Colonel, we have new contacts,” Major Barrera said. He sounded as solid as always. I wondered what time it was. I wondered what day it was.
“Contacts?” I asked. “At the Venus ring? Give me the count and configuration.”
“They are at the Venus ring. The new contacts are invasion ships. Cylindrical shape and size match our recognition patterns perfectly. There are six of them, sir.”
“Did they all make it through the minefield?”
“The minefield had been completely eradicated, sir. The Macros spent all night shooting down every mine we had out there.”
I lifted my helmet and checked the chronometer inside. It was four-thirty a. m. Barrera was still on station at my desk computer where I’d left him yesterday. Apparently, he’d never slept. Despite all that, he sounded calm and competent.
I found some cold coffee in a plastic container Sandra had brought yesterday with the sandwiches. I sipped it and grimaced. It was awful.
“Are they moving yet?” I said.
“No, sir. Not yet.”
“Good. Keep me updated.”
“Will do.”
I disconnected and stretched. The enemy fleet had been waiting for reinforcements after all. Logically, since they hadn’t moved on, there were more ships still to come. I hoped they wouldn’t show up for months and when they did, that the additional forces were insignificant. It was a faint hope.
Sandra showed up around six with breakfast. By that time, I had most of my new suit on and had her help me with the helmet. The problem was with the design, I could see right away. I needed to alter the helmet so it was self-sealing with trained nanites. With the gloves so thick and unwieldy, I couldn’t fasten the catches on the helmet by myself. That was unacceptable design. I didn’t want to put my troops in vacc suits that couldn’t be put on solo. If they were caught in an emergency situation alone, that could mean a dead marine.
“You look like some kind of freak,” Sandra told me when I was all suited-up.
“Thanks,” I said. My voice echoed and was somewhat muffled inside the suit. I sounded like I had a garbage can pulled over my head.
I didn’t have a mirror handy, but I knew I must look rather daunting. This new battle suit wasn’t like the old ones, which were basically nano-fiber with a series of solid form-fitting plates over vital areas. Instead, it was all solid plates of dull, black metal. The plates interlocked and slid over one another to allow reasonably freeform movement. The nano-fiber interior was still there, underneath this heavier exterior of inch-thick plating.
“Why the heavy armor?” Sandra asked. “Other than to stop incoming fire?”
“The new equipment was too heavy otherwise,” I said. “It would work okay in zero-gee, but under acceleration or a high gravity planet it would be hard to move. So, this suit is different. It’s an exoskeleton.”
“It makes you stronger?”
“Much stronger.”
Sandra stood back, cocking her head and smiling. “Arm-wrestle me,” she said.
I snorted. “We don’t have time for—”
“Come on, you said you wanted to test the suit.”
“Okay, here,” I said, squatting down on a stool beside a steel table. We’d finally upgraded our furniture to withstand our gross body-weights. The stool sagged under me all the same. I wondered if we would have to upgrade everything again.
“If you pull my arm off, you have to take me to the infirmary to put it back on again,” Sandra said, looking worriedly at the claw I put up in front of her.
“I’ll be careful,” I said. “No squeezing your hand. I’ll just use lateral force.”
“Okay.”
We must have been a strange sight, this hulking robotic monster sitting across from a girl that couldn’t have been more than a tenth my weight—if that much. She reached up and took my humming arm.
“Your suit vibrates in my hand,” she complained. “It feels funny.”
“That’s the exoskeleton. Ready?”
“Why not?”
I locked my arm, but didn’t move it. She pushed. I felt the feedback, but it was nothing like the force she was applying. I let her cheat, standing up half-way for leverage and using her legs.
“Ready?” I said, pretending I couldn’t feel her shoving and grunting.
“You bastard. I can’t move that arm. I don’t think I weigh enough.”
Sandra had fantastic strength for her weight, but she wasn’t really stronger than the average nanotized marine. What made her deadly was her speed and accuracy. The microbes had rebuilt her with high-performance in mind.
I suddenly made a sweeping, lateral motion with my arm, twisting at the waist. Sandra made a whooping sound and flew across the room. She caught herself, tumbled and came back up.
“It’s not fair,” she said. “You’re a machine now. I might as well wrestle a tank.”
I stood up, bumping the steel table. A heavy crease appeared at one corner. “Damn,” I said. “I’m going to have to be careful in this outfit.”
“What else can it do?”
“Come outside.”
She followed me into the sunlight. Passing marines stared at me, and half the laser turrets swiveled to study me. I sweated for a moment. I was a new classification of contact to them—and possibly hostile. More turrets swung to cover me. I froze in place.
“Unit Six,” I radioed back to the shed behind me. “Transfer the configuration and recognition patterns for the new prototype battle suit to all laser turrets. Mark as friendly. Do it now.”
“Done.”
After a few more seconds, the lasers relaxed and went back to scanning the skies and tracking birds in the trees.
“That was close, Kyle,” Sandra said at my side.
“Yeah. I forgot.”
Inside the suit, I stood motionless for a moment. I was trying to figure out how to control the new system for my next test. I’d built this prototype unit with the same Heads Up Display we used in our regular battle armor, but for some reason it wasn’t responding.
“What are all these lights and lines for?” Sandra asked, walking around me in a circle. She traced various LEDs on the exoskeleton with her fingers.
“You need light in space,” I explained. “Both for identification and just to see. I can change the colors too, like this….”
The lights running over the suit changed from a soft blue to a soft green.
“Oh no,” she said, “change it back. I like blue better.”
I tapped through the color palette back to blue.
“How will you tell one another apart in these things?” she asked. “I think the colors should mean something. How about rank?”
“Good idea.”
“Blue for officers,” she said. “I only want to see you in blue.”
I laughed. “And the other ranks?”
“Red for most marines. Green for non-coms.”
“All right,” I said, liking her ideas. It would make the identification of my people easier in combat. I hoped the Macros wouldn’t figure out they should shoot the guys who were lit up in blue—but I didn’t worry too much. They didn’t seem like they were overly interested in colors and insignia. I didn’t think they really understood or cared about our command structure, which was very different from their own. Macro Command was a parallel-processing wireless network that consisted of every Macro in the region. They probably had no idea some of us were giving the orders while others followed them. In their social systems, everyone participated and instantly came to the same conclusion as to their next tactical move. In a sense, they were the ultimate egalitarians.