Armored-ARC

by John Joseph Adams

  “Why?” Karen whispered.

  He laughed, a short bitter bark. “You’re too young to even begin to understand.”

  She squared her shoulders. “But you’re a ranger.” She wanted to say more, wanted the words to have more weight. She wanted to recite the name of every report he’d ever made, the verdict of every case he’d ever closed. She wanted to show him a picture of herself, hunched over her desk on a Friday night, watching him giving testimony on the news, studying him while the rest of her classmates gathered in Luna’s cheapest bars. She wanted to show him a picture of Earth, a lone blue-green orb in the blackness of space, a treasure trove they’d both sworn to protect.

  But all she could do was repeat herself: “You’re a ranger.”

  He shook his head. “The government doesn’t give a shit about the work we do here on Earth. No one cares about a few goddamned elk or the health of one stupid lake in the middle of fucking nowhere. I’ve been living that truth for a quarter of a century.”

  The enormity of his crime sank in. It wasn’t just one deal with one Cirkan. There’d been other transactions, other schemes. She’d wondered why her unit, led by the service’s most decorated agent, hadn’t caught a perp since she’d arrived. Now it made sense. “You’ve been selling information to poachers.”

  He waved a hand. “Like I said, no one cares, Karen.”

  “I care.” Her throat closed tight around the words. She swallowed hard. “I’m going to have to arrest you.” She bit her tongue to keep the word sir from slipping out. Its taste, sour and coppery, filled her mouth.

  Behind the darting lights in his faceplate, Hardiman’s eyes narrowed.

  She reached for her rifle even as the Cirkan snatched Hardiman’s weapon from his back holster and opened fire.

  Her eyes registered the flash of light from the end of the rifle before the pain erupted. The ballistic armor could withstand small-arms fire, and even some anti-materiel weaponry from a distance. But at less than twenty feet, the tungsten armor-piercing round passed through the main torso plate and out her back before the round even had a chance to shed its sabot casing. She flew backward, her glove snapping off shots even as hydrostatic shock shut off her brain.

  Water closed over her faceplate and, for a long moment, Karen was dead.

  Reflex took over: gasping, choking, clawing for air, even as the suit force-fed her oxygen. She flailed for the surface. Weeds slid around her wrists and held them, fighting the drag of two hundred fifty pounds of weaponry and Kevlar. Bubbles rose up through the water, tiny bursts of light and color like the readouts scrolling across her visor’s displays.

  The mission drifted from her grasp like the oxygen escaping her lungs. There was no pain; the suit took care of that. Down in the green depths of the pond, air, the job, Gordo—it all seeped away. Everything was unimportant. Maybe Hardiman was right. Maybe nobody cared about one little lake in one little forest on one primitive little planet. After all, the rest of the voting, breathing populace kept themselves to the colonies.

  Breathing. Karen couldn’t be sure she still could; the shot in her gut must have taken out her diaphragm. She couldn’t bring herself to care.

  The suit burst hot lightning in her armpits. Electrical shock. Her eyes fluttered and rolled up in her head. It shocked her again.

  Her body jerked like a man on an electric chair.

  The weeds pulled free. She sank again, loose. Like flying.

  The suit’s thrusters powered on.

  The thrusters boiled the water at the bottom of the pond, steam pushing her body toward the surface. Karen’s eyes rolled up in her head as her innards went cold, then bubbled and gurgled as triage gel filled her abdomen and activated. Regulation, military-issued armor response: pseudocells mapped the damaged tissue; amino-acid markers and multi-band stabilizers glued shut the ends of damaged nerves. No longer just protecting her body—sealing it up, regenerating the missing parts.

  Needles in the groin injected more adrenaline, pain killers, glucose. Her heart stuttered. Caught a beat.

  Her head broke the surface of the pond.

  The revolver came up, still locked on Hardiman. She hadn’t realized she’d gotten in a shot, but he lay still and crumpled on the muddy ground. Karen struggled to understand the red puddle beneath his helmet. The suit shot her with more glucose as she dashed toward the Cirkan ship’s cargo bay.

  Inside, the alien worked computer panels, its eyes focused on its displays. Karen felt a surge of excitement: the motherfucker was so sure she was dead, it had left Hardiman’s rifle on the ground beside his corpse. She snapped it up without slowing.

  Karen leapt forward, her snarl loud in her helmet. The last of the air in her lungs bled out in the sound, and without a solar plexus, refused to refill. Her vision grayed. For a quarter of a second, she thought she would die again, and then the suit activated rib cage pressurization, squeezing, squishing, sucking the air into her lungs. She felt a rib crack, but her drug cocktail stifled any pain.

  The Cirkan looked up just in time to miss her fist. Her knuckles crashed through the display panel beside it and all the lights on the ship went out. The alien ducked under her arm and made a break for the cargo door. She back-flipped past it, suit and mind in perfect synchronicity. The suit ratcheted up her adrenaline level as she landed outside the craft.

  Her boots skidded in the mud, but her fingers closed on the Cirkan’s arm and swept them both to the ground.

  The alien struggled in her grasp. Clicks and whistles erupted from its mouth and nose.

  “Let me go!” In the suit’s translator, the Cirkan’s voice sounded like Stephen Hawking’s. “You don’t need this tiny lake. Your people have the entire star system at their disposal.”

  “It’s our home.” Karen’s voice didn’t sound much better. It was hard to talk with her diaphragm regenerating.

  Its face rippled, darkened. “Your home, machine-girl? Have you ever even felt its air on your bare skin?” It spat on her face plate, silver goo that left a grease stain when she wiped it on her arm.

  “I’m going to arrest you now,” she growled.

  It wriggled again, freeing one hand. “To you this place is a…how do you call it? A theme park. A playground to prove how tough you can be.”

  She thought of that mandatory sixth-grade camping trip. Being tough was part of it, but the ducks were more important. Not every kid understood why they visited Earth, but every one of them remembered it for life. She shook her head.

  “You’re tough, all right,” the alien said. “But you humans all have your price.” It reached for its belt pouch.

  Instinct made Karen grab for the arm, but it didn’t stop digging in the pouch. She twisted its elbow in her grasp.

  The arm ripped loose in her glove, organic matter no match for her armor’s amplified strength. A black fluid burst from the shoulder socket, its surface dark and rainbowed like used oil.

  The alien’s eyes went wide. It made sounds, but the suit could not translate them. Karen eased its body to the ground.

  She still held the arm in her grip. She stared at it, the dark goo running down her fingers and collecting in the joints of her gloves. The gloves looked less like human hands than the gray-speckled hand of the Cirkan, its fingers still holding a stack of currency.

  Something between a laugh and a sob slipped out of her mouth.

  She fell back on the ground beside the alien body, cold overtaking her limbs. Despite the suit’s best efforts, she was going into shock. She activated another glucose shot and toggled up the suit’s interior heat. She turned her head and studied the Cirkan.

  Its skin had gone pale, the blood seeping out until it was ivory and dappled with faint gray spots, like the bird she’d seen this morning in the tree. The Northern Flicker. Its name no longer blinked at the bottom of her visor display, but she didn’t think she would ever forget it.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She wasn’t sure if she was apologizing to the alien or the bird s
he was supposed to protect from such things.

  She lay there another second in silence, checking that her emergency beacon was activated and that her radio was switched off. Protocol had to be followed, even in times like this, when the world pushed beyond protocol and became disaster. Two teammates dead. An illegal alien, dead. A lake filled with alien lifeforms. A rookie proving just how tough she really was.

  She wished she could wipe her the tears off her cheeks, but she didn’t dare crack open her suit. Parts of herself might seep out. She settled for laying still, floating on a cloud of drugs and exhaustion. Her lungs hurt from the suit’s pumping mechanism. A gauge in her faceplate showed the suit adding more oxygen to her mask, and she wanted to thank it.

  Even inside the shell of fiberglass and Kevlar, wired into the world by computers and sensors, her body cut off from any real air or real sounds, she felt the welcome quiet of the forest settle around her. A needle pricked her thigh again and her eyelids began to sneak shut.

  Someplace in the distance, birds chirped, small cheerful ones, like sparrows. Or probably chickadees, she thought sleepily, and hoped their songs would work themselves into her dreams.

  Wendy N. Wagner’s short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and the anthologies The Way of the Wizard and Rigor Amortis. She is also an assistant editor at Fantasy Magazine. She lives with her very understanding family in Portland, Oregon, and blogs about food and words at operabuffo.blogspot.com.

  Maybe it was the smell of hot iron, or the squeal of metal on metal, or just the slick and slimy feel of hydraulic fluid, but Jak Wagner has always had an interest in mecha. After five years as an aviation structural mechanic, he left the world of the military to write about the world of SF. Jak is currently majoring in computer science at Portland State University and is hoping to contribute more to the mecha literature genre. This is his first publication.

  The Green

  Lauren Beukes

  The Pinocchios are starting to rot. Really, this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone. They’re just doing what corpses do best. Even artificially-preserved and florally-animated ones. Even the ones you know.

  They shuffle around the corridors of our homelab in their hermetically-sealed hazmat suits, using whatever’s left of their fine motor functioning. Mainly they get in the way. We’ve learned to walk around them when they get stuck. You can get used to anything. But I avoid looking at their faces behind the glass. I don’t want to recognize Rousseau.

  They’re supposed to be confined to one of the specimen storage units. But a month ago, a Pinocchio pulled down a cabinet of freeze-dried specimens. So now Inatec management lets them wander around. They seem happier being free-range. If you can say that about a corpse jerked around by alien slime-mould like a zombie puppet.

  They’ve become part of the scenery. Less than ghosts. They’re as banal a part of life on this dog-forsaken planet as the nutritionally-fortified lab-grown oats they serve up in the cafeteria three times a day.

  We’re supposed to keep out of their way. “No harvester should touch, obstruct, or otherwise interfere with the OPPs,” the notice from Inatec management read, finished off with a smiley face and posted on the bulletin board in the cafeteria. On paper, because we’re not allowed personal communications technology in homelab. Too much of a security risk.

  Organically Preserved Personnel. It’s an experimental technique to use the indigenous flora to maintain soldiers’ bodies in wartime to get them back to their loved ones intact. The irony is that we’re so busy doing experiments on the corpses of our deceased crew that we don’t send them back at all. And if we did, it would have to be in a flask. Because after they rot—average “life-span” is 29 days—they liquefy. And the slime-mould has to be reintegrated into the colony they’ve been growing in Lab Three.

  It’s not really slime-mould, of course. Nothing on this damn planet is anything you’d recognize, which is exactly why Inatec have us working the jungle in armored suits along with four thousand other corporates planet-side, all scrambling to find new alien flora with commercial applications so they can patent the shit out of all of it.

  “Slime-mould” is the closest equivalent the labtechs have come up with. Self-organizing cellular amoebites that ooze around on their own until one of them finds a very recently dead thing to grow on. Then it lays down signals, chemical or hormonal or some other system we don’t understand yet, and all the other amoebites congeal together to form a colony that sets down deep roots like a wart into whatever’s left of the nervous system of the animal…and then take it over.

  We’ve had several military contractors express major interest in seeing the results. Inatec has promised us all big bonuses if we manage to land a military deal—and not just the labtechs either. After all, it’s us lowly harvesters who go out there in our GMP suits to find the stuff.

  Inatec’s got mining rights to six territories in four quadrants on this world. Two sub-tropical, one arid/mountainous, and three tropical, which is where the big bucks are. Officially, we’re working RCZ-8 Tropical 14: 27° 32’ S / 49° 38’ W. We call it The Green.

  We were green ourselves when we arrived on-planet. The worst kind of naïve, know-nothing city hicks. It was all anyone could talk about as we crammed around the windows—how fucking amazing it all looked as the dropship descended over our quadrant. We weren’t used to nature. We didn’t know how hungry it was.

  The sky was rippled in oranges and golds from the pollen in the air, turning the spike slate pinnacles of the mountains a powder pink. The jungle was a million shades of green. Greens like you couldn’t imagine. Greens to make you mad. Or kill you dead.

  Homelab squats in the middle of all that green like a fat concrete spider with too many legs radiating outwards. Uglier even than the Caxton Projects apartment blocks back home. Most of us are from what you’d call underprivileged backgrounds. The Caxton stats when I left were 89% adult unemployment, 73% adult illiteracy, 65% chance of dying before the age of 40 due to communicable disease or an act of violence. Who wouldn’t want a ticket out of there? Even if it was one-way.

  Besides, our work is a privilege. We’re getting to work at the forefront of xenoflora biotech. At least that’s what it says on the “Welcome To Inatec” pack all employees are handed when they’ve dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on the contract. Or maybe just made an X where you’re supposed to sign. You don’t need to be literate to pick flowers. Even in a GMP.

  Of course, by forefront, they mean frontlines. And by harvesting they mean strip-mining. Except everything we strip away grows back, faster than we can keep up. Whole new species we’ve never seen before spring up overnight. Whole new ways to die.

  You got to suffer for progress, baby, Rousseau would have said (if he was still alive). And boy do we suffer out there.

  The first thing they do when you land is sterilise you—strip you, shave you, put you through the ultraviolet steriliser and then surgically remove your fingernails. It’s a biologically sensitive operation. You can’t be bringing in contaminants from other worlds. And there was that microscopic snail parasite incident that killed off two full crews before the labtechs figured it out. That’s why we don’t have those ultra-sensitive contact pads on our gloves anymore, even though it makes harvesting harder. Because the snail would burrow right through them and get under the cuticle, working its way through your body to lay its eggs in your lungs. When the larvae hatch, they eat their way out, which doesn’t kill you, it just gives you a nasty case of terminal snail-induced emphysema. It took the infected weeks to die, hacking up bloody chunks of their lungs writhing with larvae.

  Diamond miners used to stick gems up their arses to get them past security. With flora, you can get enough genetic material to sell to a rival with a fingernail scraping. “Do we have any proof there was ever a snail infestation?” Ro would ask over breakfast. “Apart from the company newsletter?” he’d add before practical, feisty, educated Lurie could get a word in and contra
dict him. He was big into his conspiracy theories and our medtech, Shapshak, only encouraged him. They’d huddle deep into the night, getting all serious over gin made from nutri-oats that Hoffmann used to distil in secret in his room. It seemed to make Shapshak more gloomy than ever, but Ro bounced back from it invigorated and extra-jokey.

  Ro was the only one who could get away with calling me Coco and only because we were sleeping together. Dumbfuck name, I know. Coco Yengko. Mom wanted me to be a model. Or a ballerina. Or a movie star. All those careers that get you out of the ghettosprawl. Shouldn’t have had an ugly kid, then, ma. Shouldn’t have been poor. Shouldn’t have let the Inatec recruiter into our apartment. And hey, while we’re at it, Ro shouldn’t have died.

  Fucking Green.

  Green is the wrong word for it. You’d only make that mistake from the outside. When you’re in the thick of it, it’s black. The tangle of the canopy blocks out the sunlight. It’s the murky gloom after twilight, before real dark sets in. Visibility is five meters, fifteen with headlights, although the light attracts moths, which get into the vents. Pollen spores swirl around you, big as your head. Sulfur candy floss. And everything is moist and sticky and fertile. Like the whole jungle is rutting around us.

  The humidity smacks you, even through the suit, thick as +8 gravity, so that you’re slick as greased ratpig with sweat the moment you step out. It pools in your jock strap, chafes when you walk, until it forms blisters big as testicles. (A new experience for the girls on the crew.) Although walking’s not what we do. More like wading against a sucking tide of heat and flora.

  The rotting mulch suffocates our big clanking mechanical footsteps. Some of the harvesters play music on their private channels. Ro used to play opera, loud, letting it spill into The Green, until it started attracting insects the size of my head. I put a stop to it after that. I prefer to listen to the servo motors grinding in protest. I have this fantasy that I’ll be able to hear it when my suit gets compromised. The shhht of air that lets through a flood of spores like fibrous threads that burrow into metal and flesh. The faint suck of algae congealing on the plastic surfaces, seeping into the seams of the electronics, corroding the boards so the nanoconnections can’t fire. The hum of plankton slipping between the joints of my GMP between the spine and pelvic plates, to bite and sting.