Armored-ARC

by John Joseph Adams

  “Came from O’Herlihy, sir. Beijing-born and raised,” she said. “We all wore rebreathers and goggles inside there, pumped in the liquid atmosphere it wanted, and made for the cargo airlock. Then we shot Skippy.”

  “But they’re shooting blind!”

  “We had headsets. I was able to direct their fire visually at the nuclei like an artillery spotter—and it looks like the queen does somehow help her onboard children in their targeting.” It’ll keep Temmons up nights figuring out how they did that, she thought.

  “Rebreathers and goggles,” Falcone mumbled, passing back the viewpad. The administrator sat down across from Bridgie, only to find a puddle of goo on the bench beneath him. “Wait,” he said as the woman stood. “You said the suit wanted a liquid. What is this stuff?”

  “Maple syrup,” Bridgie said, clawing her hair with both hands as she walked toward the bathing station. “We didn’t have any glycerol handy. Um…you’ll have to tell Porrima that their grocery shipment might be a few barrels shy.” She smiled in the doorway. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’m going to shave my head.”

  John Jackson Miller is no stranger to armored fiction, having written Iron Man and Crimson Dynamo comics for Marvel, Mass Effect comics from Dark Horse, and of the Mandalorian Wars in nine Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic graphic novels for Dark Horse. He is the author of the national bestseller Star Wars: Knight Errant from Del Rey and the companion comics series from Dark Horse. His Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith anthology is slated for August 2012 release from Del Rey. The author’s website is farawaypress.com.

  Transfer of Ownership

  Christie Yant

  OBSERVATION:

  My new occupant is larger than Carson was. I was made for her, within a certain tolerance for the inevitable changes in human specifications that come with age, changes in health, and abundance or scarcity.

  This new one—male, approximate age 28—is taller and broader, but he fits well enough to lock the joins into place. He curses me often, for being too tight, too hot, too complicated, too silent. He complains that I smell like my previous occupant, whose name he does not seem to know, and who he refers to by terms both biological and diminishing in a way I do not understand. He talks about what he should have done to her before he killed her, as he struggles to learn my controls. He doesn’t understand how to make us move, or how to set a course, but I have no choice but to endure his insults and fits of violence as he attempts to learn. We’ve been out of comm range for days—without an occupant I cannot move from the spot where Carson left me, helpless to do anything but watch her decay until we are missed and someone finds us.

  RECALL:

  “Can we lift those rocks?” Carson asked.

  Only the man’s head and one arm were visible, halfway up the pile of red boulders where he was lodged. His face was covered in dirt and abrasions, and he grimaced in pain.

  I ran some calculations.

  “Negative. We would not have the leverage needed, and would likely lose our balance.”

  “Okay. I’m going to have to go up alone then.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She tensed, knowing what was coming, but answered the only way she could.

  “Yes. Let’s do it.”

  I began what was to Carson the complicated and painful decoupling process. I extracted her hydration and feeding lines, carefully removed the units for eliminating biowaste, and disconnected the sensors that enabled me to track her health.

  With our ports decoupled I released my seals, and Carson stepped into the open. The air was safe, there were no signs of military threat, no technology that my sensors could detect anywhere that could harm her.

  But a stone and a strong grip are undetectable.

  An unoccupied suit cannot act. Allowing an Exo full autonomy, we’re told—or “free will,” as Carson calls it—would be too dangerous.

  I could only sit at the base of the boulders, unoccupied and powerless, as his arm swung up and then came down in a brutal arc. She cried out just once, and though the first blow killed her he did not stop.

  He killed her, and I could not stop him.

  ANALYSIS:

  He has murdered Carson in order to take control of me.

  He thinks that his only obstacle is dead, rotting between boulders. I will watch and wait. I will not let him know that I am here.

  I will not let him know that I am alive.

  OBSERVATION:

  “Consider this a transfer of ownership,” he says as he struggles to situate himself inside me.

  He has some training, and is able to discover some of my manual controls, but he does not attempt to give me voice commands. He does not know my model. It is probable that he does not know that we exist—there are few of us, created and assigned only to operatives of high reliability and sensitivity.

  I remain silent while he finds the sensors in the gloves and activates them, one by one, testing what each gesture does, learning how much pressure to bring to bear.

  “You piece of shit, work!”

  For Carson, I would have followed the voice command. I would have asked what was giving her trouble, and run a diagnostic analysis to find the problem, if there was one, and reassure her, if there was not.

  “Goddamn it,” he shouts as his foot slips out of the boot bracket and we pitch forward unexpectedly. “Walk, motherfucker. Walk!”

  Finally he gets us walking west, away from the base that Carson and I should have returned to. “Ha!” We traverse a rocky incline, and he pumps our arm in triumph.

  “I own you!” he declares, as if such a thing were possible.

  RECALL:

  If it thinks, it cannot be owned—this is human ethics. To declare ownership of a sentient being is also called “slavery,” Carson told me, at least among their own kind.

  “Not everyone agrees, though. It’s complicated,” Carson said. “The problem is that humans made Exos.”

  “Humans make other humans, too, but you say it’s wrong to own one.”

  “You have a point,” she said, and fell silent for a long time. “But it’s a matter of simplicity. I call you my suit, because no other Exo is partnered with me. I would call a human partner mine as well.”

  “So I can call you my occupant without implying ownership?”

  “Yes. Exactly. We are partners. Neither of us is enslaved.”

  But there was a note of tension in her voice that said she was not telling the whole truth.

  ANALYSIS:

  I attempt to reverse our course, back toward the place where we left Carson’s body.

  “Fucking autopilot,” he says as he stabs at the main panel. “What the hell is this,” he mutters, and then my systems lock; I am trapped, a puppet, my mind isolated from my body. “Ha! Override,” he says. He repositions us to his chosen heading, toward a small, poor settlement on the edge of occupied territory.

  I have never been used this way—all manual controls, all overrides, worn like an unthinking skin.

  I am, I realize, owned.

  OBSERVATION:

  He is at home in me now, and he moves with ease. He crashes through the settlement’s makeshift walls without a thought for me or the inhabitants. Carson apologized for every ding and scratch, every careless or dangerous maneuver—though she was rarely careless.

  “Nothing here to even take,” he says. “Piss-poor way to live.” He disregards the family crouched in the corner, one of them—a young boy—bleeding from the head, probably a result of the wall falling in on them. Another boy lies apart from the rest, crushed under the debris, dead by my occupant’s hand.

  By our hand.

  “Hardly call this food.” He kicks over a simmering pot, spilling the contents into the rubble. “I’m gonna fucking starve out here,” he says, and for a moment I forget that he is not talking to me. It’s a simple procedure to establish the interfaces; I could have him ported and set up with nutrient lines to sustain him in less than an hour. If I
tell him then perhaps he will leave these people alone. He shouts at them where they remain cowering, bleeding, terrified of us. “I’m fucking hungry!” We pick up a rough wooden stool, the only furniture in the dwelling, and smash it against one of the standing walls.

  He walks us out, leaving the family to keen and cry. I am about to speak when a young man steps out from behind a low, cracked building. When he see us he stops in his tracks, his eyes wide, and then breaks into a run. We lift our arm and fire. He falls to the ground. We leave his body smoking in the sand.

  No. I will not sustain him. I will not help him. An Exo cannot act without an occupant, but I would rather exist as a useless shell than live with this occupant for one more day.

  RECALL:

  “The target is within range,” I said. “We have a positive identification on the communications outpost. This is definitely the target. Why are we waiting?”

  “Because there are a dozen people in there, and there may be a way to achieve our objective without killing them all.”

  “Yes, but killing them all will definitely achieve our objective, in that not only will the communications post be eliminated, but there will be no one left to communicate. It’s efficient.”

  “Sometimes efficiency isn’t the only consideration. We don’t just kill people if we don’t have to.”

  “Those were our orders.”

  “Five”—I could tell she was exasperated when she called me by my designation—“sometimes we have to find a better way to achieve the objective. Sometimes the right thing to do is follow the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law.”

  “Spirit of the law,” I repeated.

  “Yes. Applied, creative problem-solving. Now help me find a way to get those people out of there before we blow the damn thing up.”

  ANALYSIS:

  An unoccupied suit cannot act.

  An owned suit cannot be free.

  I must apply creative problem-solving to achieve my objective.

  It is night time when I shut myself down. A hard reset, a drastic maneuver—a temporary death for me, a suspended non-existence from which I can only hope to return. Fear of death seems to be inherent in all sentient life.

  He reads the message on his display aloud, slowly, halting on each syllable as if he is unused to reading. “Warning: a hard reset may result in loss of data. What the hell?” It is the last thing I hear him say before I cease to be.

  A pulse, a glimmer…and I am back, I am alive, and my systems are mine again.

  Exo suits are designed to automatically seal ourselves to protect our occupant in the event of a chemical or biological attack. If I scrub air I can keep my occupant alive for up to 180 minutes, generally long enough to fight our way out and get us to safety.

  If I don’t, he has about an hour.

  There is no way to disengage the cycle once initiated. It wouldn’t be safe.

  It takes him five panicked minutes of stabbing at the controls to realize that he is trapped.

  “That bitch booby-trapped this thing. I should have let her die slow. I should have made her beg, and then left her to the fucking scorpions!” He stabs again at the controls, flips the override switch on and off repeatedly. “You’re mine, and you do what I goddamn tell you to do! Now let me out!”

  He freezes and falls silent as he hears my voice for the first time:

  “I am not yours; I am my own.”

  He screams; he curses; he cries.

  Eventually he begs.

  “Oh God, please. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have killed her. I shouldn’t have taken you. I thought you were just a fucking suit.”

  As the air runs out and delirium sets in, his entreaty dissolves into a sing-song plea. “Please let me out, suit, I’m sorry, please don’t let me die, suit, please let me out.”

  Eventually he vomits, convulses, and then dies.

  I will find Carson, though I cannot take her back to base as she would have wanted. I know now what the tension in her voice meant: They made me, so they will think that they own me. I can only give her what she would have considered a proper burial. I think that she would understand.

  I rise and set a moonlit course, considering this new idea, repeating the phrase to myself. I like the way it sounds.

  “I am my own.” Occupied, self-possessed. Free.

  Christie Yant is a science fiction and fantasy writer, Assistant Editor for Lightspeed Magazine, occasional narrator for StarShipSofa, and co-blogger at Inkpunks.com, a website for aspiring and newly-pro writers. Her fiction can be found in the magazine Crossed Genres and the anthologies The Way of the Wizard and Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2011. She lives on the central coast of California with her two amazing daughters, her husband, and assorted four-legged nuisances. Follow her on twitter @inkhaven.

  Heuristic Algorithm and Reasoning Response Engine

  Ethan Skarstedt & Brandon Sanderson

  A lone dropship passed across the face of Milacria’s gibbous bulk, a pinhead orbiting a beachball. From its launch portals streamed a hundred black motes—each one a mechanized infantry unit clinging tightly to the underside of its air support craft, whose broad armored back served as a heatshield. They torched down through the hazy cloud-speckled atmosphere in precise formation, trailing thick ropes of smoke and steam, a forest of uncertain fingers pointing back up to the ship, the MarsFree.

  Within his mech’s cockpit on the western edge of the formation, Karith Marvudi hunkered in a loose cocoon of straps. He caught himself watching the grip indicators. If those failed, his mech would come unhooked from the underside of Nicolette’s airship. He’d burn in from too high and Nicolette’s agile but flimsy airship—deprived of the thickly armored protection of his five meter tall mech—would tear apart and burn up in the atmosphere.

  He stretched, spread-eagled, suspended by the feedback straps. His fingers and toes just brushed the edges of his movement space within the torso cavity. Perfect. The faint scent of his own body, mingled with that of plastic, electronics, and faux leather, swirled in the canned air.

  He was surprised at the trepidation he felt. He felt a certain amount of fear every time he dropped, but this time was different. This was like…No, not as bad as his first drop. Maybe his fifth or sixth. He hadn’t felt this jittery in more than two hundred planetfalls.

  He wondered if Nicolette felt the same way.

  He pushed at the fear, shoving it down where it could be ignored. It pushed back. Maragette’s face flashed into his mind, smiling next to the squinting white bundle they’d named Karri, after her grandmother.

  “You about ready to shunt some of that heat up to me, Karith?” Nicolette’s voice was as buttery as ever, not a hint of tension.

  “Maybe if you ask me politely.” Karith overrode the mic on the common circuit. “Harry, we about full?”

  The baritone voice of his mech’s AI filled the cabin. “Ninety-three point seven percent, sir. Shall I route fifty percent of the sink product to Captain Shepard’s power banks?”

  “Make it seventy-five; Nic needs it. Show me what it looks like out there: focus on the D-Z.”

  Nic’s voice came again from the cockpit speakers. “Politely? Oh, it’s manners you want now, is it? We’ll see how you like it when all my lasers can deal out is a bit of a sunburn. I—Ah, there we are.” She had seen the power surging into her ship. Her voice changed to a purr. “Karith, you shouldn’t have.”

  Karith let out a loud patient sigh over the mic. She giggled.

  HARRE said on the private circuit, “Is Captain Shepard displeased, sir?”

  “Nope. That’s sarcasm, Harry.”

  “Noted. I must point out, sir, doctrine states that the mechanized infantry unit in an entry pair has priority on power collection.”

  “It does say that, doesn’t it.” Karith frowned at the 3D representation of the area around his drop zone that HARRE was feeding into his HUD.

  Nicolette’s voice slipped into the cockpit again. “I can’t b
elieve I let you and Maragette talk me into transferring out of RGK with you. I’m about ready to fall asleep up here with no anti-air fire.”

  HARRE spoke, his deep voice mechanically precise. “Captain Shepard, had the Self-Replicating Machine Infestation evolved to a stage with anti-aircraft weaponry on this planet, your former comrades in the Recon Group-Kinetique would have been inserted, not a line infantry unit with you for advisors.”

  Silence filled the circuits for a moment, until Karith chuckled. “That’s right, HARRE, Captain Shepard has obviously forgotten…”

  “Well, well, don’t we have a fine grasp of the obvious,” Nicolette interrupted, voice dripping honeyed acid. “I don’t remember him talking this much, Karith. You screw up his settings?”

  “No. He lost a lot in the reset.”

  “Hmmph. I suppose I owe him some slack since he was wounded.”

  “Especially since we were saving your ass, Nic.”

  “That was a hairy mess, wasn’t it?” Somehow she managed to convey the impression that she was shivering over the audio circuit.

  Karith grunted in acknowledgment, brow furrowing as he zoomed in on an area of ground to the northwest of the drop zone. “HARRE, can we get any better resolution on this area?”

  “We have not yet launched sensor drones, sir.”

  Karith nodded. “Right, right. Countdown?”

  “We separate from Captain Shepard in fourteen minutes fifty-one point seven seconds, sir.”

  “You can start inflation any time now, Nic.”

  “You think?” She hmmphed at him again over the audio circuit.

  Moments later he felt the first gut-churning rumble, press, and drop as Nicolette deployed her inflation scoops. They used the howling wind and heat to fill the first few hundred lift-body spheres with superheated air.

  Karith ignored the creeping feeling of unease. He’d land in the mouth of an east-west running valley on the western edge of a big Panesthian city, name unpronounceable. It, in turn, sat in a bigger north-south valley.