The First Sergeant moved like a heavy machine with lots of ball bearings. When the door hissed shut, he swiveled ponderously to face us and said, “At ease, siddown, ” in a surprisingly gentle voice. He sat on a table in the front of the room. It creaked, but held.
“Now the captain talks scary and I look scary, but we both mean well. You’ll be working pretty closely with me, so you better get used to this thing I’ve got hanging in front of my brain. You probably won’t see the captain much, except on maneuvers.”
He touched the flat part of his head. “And speaking of brains, I still have just about all of mine, in spite of Chinese efforts to the contrary. All of us old vets who mustered into UNEF had to pass the same criteria that got you drafted by the Elite Conscription Act. So I suspect all of you are smart and tough — but just keep in mind that the captain and I are smart and tough and experienced.”
He flipped through the roster without really looking at it. “Now, as the captain said, there’ll be only one kind of disciplinary action on maneuvers. Capital punishment. But normally we won’t have to kill you for disobeying; Charon’ll save us the trouble.
“Back in the billeting area, it’ll be another story. We don’t much care what you do inside. Grab ass all day and fuck all night, makes no difference … But once you suit up and go outside, you’ve gotta have discipline that would shame a Centurian. There will be situations where one stupid act could kill us all.
“Anyhow, the first thing we’ve gotta do is get you fitted to your fighting suits. The armorer’s waiting at your billet; he’ll take you one at a time. Let’s go.”
4
“Now I know you got lectured back on Earth on what a fighting suit can do.” The armorer was a small man, partially bald, with no insignia of rank on his coveralls. Sergeant Cortez had told us to call him “sir,” since he was a lieutenant.
“But I’d like to reinforce a couple of points, maybe add some things your instructors Earthside weren’t clear about or couldn’t know. Your First Sergeant was kind enough to consent to being my visual aid. Sergeant?”
Cortez slipped out of his coveralls and came up to the little raised platform where a fighting suit was standing, popped open like a man-shaped clam. He backed into it and slipped his arms into the rigid sleeves. There was a click and the thing swung shut with a sigh. It was bright green with CORTEZ stenciled in white letters on the helmet.
“Camouflage, Sergeant.” The green faded to white, then dirty gray. “This is good camouflage for Charon and most of your portal planets,” said Cortez, as if from a deep well. “But there are several other combinations available.” The gray dappled and brightened to a combination of greens and browns: “Jungle.” Then smoothed out to a hard light ochre: “Desert.” Dark brown, darker, to a deep flat black: “Night or space.”
“Very good, Sergeant. To my knowledge, this is the only feature of the suit that was perfected after your training. The control is around your left wrist and is admittedly awkward. But once you find the right combination, it’s easy to lock in.
“Now, you didn’t get much in-suit training Earthside. We didn’t want you to get used to using the thing in a friendly environment. The fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built, and with no weapon is it easier for the user to kill himself through carelessness. Turn around, Sergeant.
“Case in point.” He tapped a large square protuberance between the shoulders. “Exhaust fins. As you know, the suit tries to keep you at a comfortable temperature no matter what the weather’s like outside. The material of the suit is as near to a perfect insulator as we could get, consistent with mechanical demands. Therefore, these fins get hot — especially hot, compared to darkside temperatures — as they bleed off the body’s heat.
“All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of frozen gas; there’s lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding ‘ice’, and fracture it … and in about one-hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck. You’ll never feel a thing.
“Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months. And they were just building a bunch of huts.
“I assume you know how easily the waldo capabilities can kill you or your companions. Anybody want to shake hands with the sergeant?” He paused, then stepped over and clasped his glove. “He’s had lots of practice. Until you have, be extremely careful. You might scratch an itch and wind up breaking your back. Remember, semi-logarithmic response: two pounds’ pressure exerts five pounds’ force; three pounds’ gives ten; four pounds’, twenty-nine; five pounds’, forty-seven. Most of you can muster up a grip of well over a hundred pounds. Theoretically, you could rip a steel girder in two with that amplified. Actually, you’d destroy the material of your gloves and, at least on Charon, die very quickly. It’d be a race between decompression and flash-freezing. You’d die no matter which won.
“The leg waldos are also dangerous, even though the amplification is less extreme. Until you’re really skilled, don’t try to run, or jump. You’re likely to trip, and that means you’re likely to die.”
“Charon’s gravity is three-fourths of Earth normal so it’s not too bad. But on a really small world, like Luna, you could take a running jump and not come down for twenty minutes, just keep sailing over the horizon. Maybe bash into a mountain at eighty meters per second. On a small asteroid, it’d be no trick at all to run up to escape velocity and be off on an informal tour of intergalactic space. It’s a slow way to travel.
“Tomorrow morning, we’ll start teaching you how to stay alive inside this infernal machine. The rest of the afternoon and evening, I’ll call you one at a time to be fitted. That’s all, Sergeant.”
Cortez went to the door and turned the stopcock that let air into the airlock. A bank of infrared lamps went on to keep air from freezing inside it. When the pressures were equalized, he shut the stopcock, unclamped the door and stepped in, clamping it shut behind him. A pump hummed for about a minute, evacuating the airlock; then he stepped out and sealed the outside door.
It was pretty much like the ones on Luna.
“First I want Private Omar Almizar. The rest of you can go find your bunks. I’ll call you over the squawker.”
“Alphabetical order, sir?”
“Yep. About ten minutes apiece. If your name begins with Z, you might as well get sacked.”
That was Rogers. She probably was thinking about getting sacked.
5
The sun was a hard white point directly overhead. It was a lot brighter than I had expected it to be; since we were eighty AUs out, it was only one 6400th as bright as it is on Earth. Still, it was putting out about as much light as a powerful streetlamp.
“This is considerably more light than you’ll have on a portal planet.” Captain Stott’s voice crackled in our collective ear. “Be glad that you’ll be able to watch your step.”
We were lined up, single-file, on the permaplast sidewalk that connected the billet and the supply hut. We’d practiced walking inside, all morning, and this wasn’t any different except for the exotic scenery. Though the light was rather dim, you could see all the way to the horizon quite clearly, with no atmosphere in the way. A black cliff that looked too regular to be natural stretched from one horizon to the other, passing within a kilometer of us. The ground was obsidian-black, mottled with patches of white or bluish ice. Next to the supply hut was a small mountain of snow in a bin marked OXYGEN.