The suit reacted almost instantly: Enemy in range.
Relax, got to just relax, let it flow, he told himself. Let the suit do the work.
He wondered if she just happened to be training here and was delighted to take the bait or whether she’d waited for him. She was good, very good, at her job, and she knew it. But she’d always had a bug up her ass about him. She was not only a top soldier, she was damned good-looking, too, and she wasn’t used to being turned down by guys who looked pretty fair themselves, weren’t married, and were known to like girls. In her mind, everything was competition, everything was power, and she didn’t like to lose at any point.
It wasn’t rank or position—she was a Marine captain, he was a Navy warrant officer, and they were well within the fraternization zone of allowance. It was strictly a personal decision with him, one he’d never once wavered from in all his years of service. It was a decision learned the hard way, very young. Always fuck within the services, because the physiological effects of frequent genhole travel made you far less desirable, and groundlings far less understanding of what that meant. Never mind the lesions and tumorlike growths and discolorations, it was the total lack of any body hair that always got them, the result both of genhole travel and the wearing of these suits.
The other rule was never to fuck anyone in your own ship’s company. That one was a lot harder to follow when you were out on the line so often, but it was necessary as well. Somebody from another ship was okay; the distortion of time every trip would make it unlikely that, even if you met again in a year or two at some other port, you would still be physiologically in the same generation. At the speeds and distortions such travel imposed, a trip might take a year while decades passed back where you left. You just got used to it and accepted it and drank a toast to Einstein and Fitzgerald every once in a while.
But somebody in your own ship’s company, as Barbara Fenitucci was, never. You might have to send her, even ferry her down to some godforsaken real hellhole that would make this sim look like a walk in the park and then listen as she was killed or eaten or slowly carved up into little screaming pieces. He’d had to listen to it once too often, and he’d had to direct the recovery of what was left of the bodies of people he’d grown very close to. He didn’t particularly like Barbara Fenitucci, always called Bambi behind her back to her complete rage, but he didn’t particularly want to like her, either.
He switched into full battle sensor mode, but there was so much living and moving crap around that it was next to impossible to pick her out of it. Well, that would go both ways, and she’d have to dodge the same loving embraces of the vines and gaping suck-holes of the bushes that he had. That meant she’d be floating, too, as long as conditions allowed.
The one thing they’d never figured out how to do was to allow you to look back at yourself in a combat situation. It would be nice to be able to really see how well camouflaged he was at the moment, and how such a suit might look in this dark, green hell, but without a partner to link to that was impossible. Again, it was even, but this was her full-time business. He had the training, but was sadly out of practice.
Well, the timer was still counting down. He had to move, and she would know it. This was going to be very, very tricky. He had to move low and slow enough that it would be damned hard to pick him out of the local flora, but he had to keep just high enough that he wouldn’t become some of the local flora. How big and powerful was the next flesh-eating bush? How long was the next vine? How could even a machine tell?
Slow and steady, keep to the contours, move north-northeast. Targeting lasers to the ready, disruptors fully charged and ready to follow the targeting as soon as there was something to shoot at. He didn’t worry about vaporizing her, the suits knew they were in training mode, and they also knew what was real and what was sim. Neither could really hurt, let alone kill, the other, but because it was in training mode it would sure as hell feel like it, and that was something he’d rather not experience right now.
Now, what would he do if he were the enemy? The magic door was to the north-northeast, and she’d have the same clocking as he did. If she somehow got in front of him, she could simply glide pretty much as he was and wait. The best that could happen from her point of view was that she’d spot him coming and have free shots before he realized it, or, since she thought all this was a damned game, she might let him go past and then blow him in two from the rear. At worst, she would reach the exit first and then remain there, knowing he’d have to come by and be moving while she could be still and probably effectively invisible.
Had she been here first? Unlikely, because the “enemy in sight” call had come after he’d tangled with that over-friendly bush. She could have passed him then, but if she’d come close enough to pick up, the suit would have warned him even if it and he were in the process of being digested. So she was still behind him, lying just enough back to keep from triggering the sensor and targeting systems. And if so, and he was well over halfway through his time and maybe seventy percent across the sim area, she’d wait for him to have to come into the open, as in that large clear lake now about a hundred meters in front of him, and then she’d simply spray the hell over the whole area and targeting be damned.
It was too dense here to pull the stop and pass trick himself. The vines would surely nab anybody trying it. The best spot would be right on the other side of the lake, where the forest resumed. There was hanging fog and mist, and contrast was lousy. The life signs would be still masking him from what was over there. If he shut down all but minimal scanning power and just waited…
But first he had to get there. That meant, if he was right about her position, that he’d have to give her a free couple of shots. Not great, but it couldn’t be helped. Bat out of hell across, maybe with some fancy dodges in three dimensions, then a sudden stop and powerdown at just so. Might work. Let’s see. It would sure be a good test of the suit, and there would be no time to think actions through once the shooting started. He either became the suit, and the suit him, or she was going to be insufferable.
Clear the mind… Exercises from the bad old days came back, but the tension no longer had the kind of excited thrill it used to have. That’ll happen after you’re scraped off a planetary floor and reassembled in a tank, and maybe they got all the brain back in and maybe not. That’s what had turned him from a Commando into a cop.
Now it was Commando time again.
He realized suddenly that the memories and the pain were the problem. Oh, sure, the shrinks had said so before this, but now it hit him. This was why somebody’d sent in Bambi the Destroyer. He hadn’t wanted to feel that horror again. His subconscious had been fighting it, fighting full integration. Well, okay. In about ten seconds there would be every chance to feel a mighty convincing simulation of that unless it all worked. Bambi wouldn’t accept a surrender here, and probably wouldn’t even recognize an order to accept it. It was put up or shut up. Okay, mina do it or scream!
He switched vision on all frequencies to the rear. Nothing he could see, but he had the feeling he’d know pretty damned fast. Okay, they said that you couldn’t execute complex commands while simultaneously defending if you had the suit in three-sixty mode. Well, that’s one thing they told all the Marines and grunts, but then they told the Commandos that it just might be possible. He knew it was. That was why Chief Harker had emerged a commissioned warrant officer. He’d taken out a complete nest of smugglers and covered the retreat of four pinned-down squad members, three of them wounded. Of course, that was what had also gotten him just about killed, but he’d done it. He wondered if Bambi knew it.