Thwip felt less queasy. “So to move the chems safely…”
“Chems are the one portion of your suit that you don’t have much manual control over. You can pulse some of the basics for pain management and so on, and the staff will work with you if there’s anything you need that’s unique to the mission, but otherwise, for your own protection they are automated.”
Leo pulsed through the measurements of Thwip’s chems, going farther back in recent time.
“What’s this from?” Leo emphasized another, smaller spike from earlier. “That’s the tiny swell that started your chems rocking back and forth like a boat in a storm, leading up to your brownout and Skregs walking you back to the lab.” Leo moved forward in the timeline, and the spikes grew larger and larger until they pinnacled in the largest of the day.
Thwip read the time hash. “I made an agreement with another recruit. We intended to form a unit together. A day later, I processed out from P2 without notifying her. I was thinking about that when I blacked—browned—out.”
“I see.”
“Why would I need full manual control of my other suit systems, but not my chems?”
“They operate quickly and subtly while you’re focused on survival. Important tasks.”
“Just about every other automated task on my suit is important, but I can shift those to manual.” Before Leo could reply, Thwip went on, “I can accelerate my trepid advancement if—well, I have my own approach.”
“You wouldn’t be a Nova if you didn’t. Order what you need, and my crew—your crew—will respond. I think you’ll find the talent I’ve recruited to augment our experienced staff”—his beard twitched with suppressed pride—“impressive.”
“I just need the freight that has my mission sweetener and private, secure PT lab space. And someone to banana me out of my suit in the lab, since I’m likely to rip my head off if I try to get into my collar and pull my auttie yank myself at this point.”
Leo looked curious but didn’t ask questions. He used the tether to help Thwip return to the hybrid PT lab-medica module.
After DMTS Sanders helped Thwip out of his suit, Leo departed for the command deck and Thwip took up his trepid hardhood and walked suitless alongside Sanders in his arrow to the lower hangar, where the smaller Vesper-0 ship waited on its own private dock. He rubbed his fingertips back and forth over the grooves in his hardhood’s design, in time with their footsteps. Impressively, P2’s Head Tech had managed to make Thwip’s honey prompt look threatening. Bee stripes filled with a honeycomb pattern dominated the outside of his hood. The lines were bold and angry, the angles sharp: his Nova symbol seemed to vibrate with fury. Sections on the top right and back left where the pattern interrupted and was roughed up gave the illusion that his hood had been smashed and scraped in combat, making him look more experienced than he was.
Most importantly, while his symbol was different from the rest of the unit’s, just as theirs all differed from one another, it was created by the same hand: it matched.
Sanders guided Thwip to a corridor near the center of the V-0, which ended at a single module entryway. He gestured deferentially that Thwip should go first. Inside was an intimate PT lab. There were five workstations, and at each the arc surfaces were still sealed with the temporary protective installation coverings. Sanders dashed past him, peeled the coverings off, pulsed the disposal hatch, and trashed them. Then, seeing the freight set against the lab’s wall, he paused with eyebrows raised.
Thwip’s sweetener was already there, inside two three-meter-tall trepid containers marked with his personal hashes and orgo-panels that would only unseal in response to his biomarkers.
“Looks like they’ll be adding limits to the sweetening agreement in the future,” Sanders said, taking in the quality and shape of the containers and asking without asking for confirmation of what was inside.
Thwip joined Sanders in front of the containers. After struggling in trepid all day, moving without a suit felt strange. He missed the resistance, and the feeling of skin on skin when he crossed his arms made him start, as if his suit had been breached.
“I thought I was clever with my sweetener request. Damn.” Sanders’ eyes were wide. He still wore his unique tech mask and pulse gloves. “It’s the first one I’ve had. Never deployed this far away from Denizen for this long before. Should have dreamed bigger.”
“What did you request?”
“Amber whiskey from Nidari, a little settlement somewhere in the labyrinth of Mariner Valleys that’s only worth knowing about if you want the best malt in the universe. Also requested proper storage for it to stabilize temperature and so on. Very fussy.”
“You’ll be popular at a celebration.” Thwip tried his full name out. “Steve Sanders… Did I pronounce that right?”
“Yes.”
“I always liked the old-world earthiness of ancient names. It is ancient?”
“Yeah, it’s ancient. My father’s ancestors immigrated to Marscape from Earth, and there’s a Steve Sanders in every generation. We aren’t Scapians, though. Damn technophobes. People assume that just because you’re from the planet you might be one of them, but there are plenty of people from Marscape who are Marslian and live normally like the rest of the UNP. Anyway, as we say on Marscape, victory tastes best with whiskey.” Sanders blinked as though coming out of a dream. “Of course I’m focused on the mission and my tasks, and not the aftermath. Will you do your work in an arrow, then, sir?”
Sanders was older, highly skilled; he was a deputy officer and Janusi Blyku’s right hand, one of the prime experts and creators in the PT industry, yet he reminded Thwip of himself a couple of days ago when he was a rankless recruit shadowing the techs and his other superiors on P2, hoping to be included.
“Negative. Don’t want to confuse what I’ve learned on trepid so far with the familiarity of arrow mechs.”
Thwip had Sanders review the organization of the trepid data on the 0-lab’s flat arc for him, then sent him back to the Vesper’s PT-med module with a list of tools he required and prepped his work space for pulsing the first container open. Sanders returned with two techs, who delivered the contents he’d requested on a light loader, along with a few tools Sanders and Blyku had included “in anticipation of his needs.” Thwip looked for those first and lifted out devices unavailable elsewhere. There was a surgical medpen that looked too advanced for him to use without significant study, and a half mask that contained data on nasty hash combinations that made for lower-suit-grade vulnerabilities and thus had to be quarantined from their systems.
The techs returned to the Vesper, and Sanders looked around the 0-lab. “Crew’s not allowed on the V-Oh without permission. They were excited to make the delivery and take a peek inside.” He stood at attention. “Sir, if you need anything further, I hope you’ll consider asking me personally. No matter how insignificant the task might seem.”
Thwip dismissed him and sealed the entry to the 0-lab so that he could work in private. He sat his hood down on an arc and turned it facing away just in case it was capturing, then he let his excitement out in a silent scream behind it, and improvised a victory dance. I have my own top-tier lab space!
It took him ten attempts to tunnel-tether his trepid hood into the flat arc so that he could see the rest of his unit by displaying his IF there, while also keeping the fidelity of the loop secure from the ship’s other systems. Wheck, Skregs, and the Commander appeared. Charis remained a mystery. He didn’t have pulse gloves on, so instead he had to work skin-to-arc, leaving smudges. He pulsed his hood’s aurals, put the unit’s chatter through, and opened a log to track his progress.
The Commander and Skregs discussed space conditions. Wheck commanded a group of pilots. Leo dipped in and out when required. Thwip listened, soaking up the unit’s workflow as he examined the containers that held his sweetener. He chose the one on the left to begin, and decided to save the one on the right to use once he’d gained experience from the first.
He pulsed his security swipes to the left container via his hood tethered to his flat arc, then reached out and put a bare hand to its front. It read him, and his call name appeared. He pushed on it, and the seams of doors became evident on the front. He carefully folded them open and outward, found they extended farther, and folded them open and outward again. On the back of the doors were various trepid-issue tools and items for the interior suit kit, but his attention was straight ahead, where a trepid suit and hardhood hung in a custom-mold that cradled it. He removed the hardhood—it wasn’t blank. Instead, it bore a Nova honor mark: on each side a repeating pattern of fractal Sierpinski chaos triangles formed a pyramid of pyramids.
I thought they’d print me a generic suit…. Is this another Nova’s old suit? I requested the most recent generation of trepid.
He placed the fractal trepid’s hood on the flat arc next to his own and then set to work, tethering its IF pulse control to the arc, confirming that it was the same IST3 model as his suit.
He drummed on the arc, exploring the fractal hood’s back-end hashing, not worrying about consequences or damage. It took him a while, but he found how data connected to the intel symbol and logged the path.
Then he switched to his own hood, retraced the same path, and accessed the hashing for his intel mechs. He pulsed past the intel on unit history until he found the mission specs Skregs had teased him with earlier.
Next Thwip stretched the fractal trepid suit out over the flat arc and browsed the specs Sanders had organized for him, looking for ways to separate the suit’s exoframe from the endoframe. He felt inside the suit for the thin, stiff, and skeletal endoframe that sat around the shoulders and ribcage. Once a suit’s a-yank was pulled, releasing the suit sculpt, the suit went inactive and slacked; only the endo retained shape and structure. He removed the inner kits of tools that lined the sides of the suit, and then, more roughly than he liked, held the suit down and used a standard medpen to sever and remove the inactive endo’s liner, exposing its structural layer. Since he couldn’t work from his own suit, the process went far slower than it might have. Although it slowed him further, the mission specs were too tempting to wait on, so he brought them up on the arc and read them to the side as he worked.
Three hours later Thwip still hadn’t found the connections he’d need to sever to separate the frames. He leaned back from the flat arc, tipped his head back, and shut his eyes.
If I ask Blyku instead of solving it myself, then I won’t learn as much. And it’s probably not safe enough for anyone not wearing trepid to experiment with the suit, in case it reacts unexpectedly.
He considered what he knew of PT theory and what signals might reveal the suit’s pattern, then returned to the flat arc and began researching the back-end hashing for the noxious stimuli sys that the suit used to identify harmful threats to itself. If I can locate where the interior and exterior stimuli differ, then I can parse the frames’ data and physical structures and see where they separate. But I’ll have to wait to separate them until I can use my trepid to do it safely.
Frustrated, Thwip shifted over to the side of the flat arc he’d devoted to his hardhood readings, saw the Commander’s position relative to his own. Shit. When he looked up, the Commander was just outside the lab, filling the now-open entryway.
“You left the loop without explanation, and you’re out of suit.”
Thwip couldn’t see the Commander’s face, and he didn’t dare look at the flat arc to see it via the loop, but he could hear dissatisfaction. “Yes, sir. I don’t have the small motor skills yet to work on this suit while inside my trepid. But I can master trepid more quickly if I can take one apart and understand how it was built. A three-sixty-degree approach. And a bit of a paradox.”
“Next time notify and clarify before you de-suit. We only take them off when necessary. Protocol is to let your unit know directly—not through Leo.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Novas don’t address one another using honorifics or rank. Call name is fine.” He entered the lab. “You don’t have the trepid motor skills yet.”
“Yes, si—uh—yes.”
“Crave.”
“Crave.” Thwip tried it, but not saying “sir” felt disrespectful.
“Tell me what the task is, and then I can do the task in my gear.”
“I don’t want to waste your shift time, I can just wai—”
“First task.”
“Separating the exoframe from the endoframe is the goal, but I’m not sure how to get there. Connect the hood to the suit and seal it. I’m going to bring it online, as if it’s occupied.”
“I didn’t know that was possible.” Crave connected and sealed the hood.
“In beta tether, yeah. It’s how the techs test the gear safely during build before letting anyone get inside them.”
“The same system that allows for emergency tether from unit or Leo?”
“Based on what I know about the roselaurel suits, that would make sense. We can find out by mapping the commands through the suit. Or we could research the manual, but this is quicker.” And more fun. Thwip pulsed the flat arc to animate the fractal trepid’s suit sculpt. It took shape as though its Nova was inside. “All right, punch it or kick it.”
Crave looked at him in surprise.
Unprotected in his basic greys, Thwip went to the farthest arc wall, and prepared to use the suits tether to keep it stable in case it reacted unexpectedly.
“Specific measurement of force?” Crave asked.
“Not important.”
Crave issued a soft jab to the suit’s chest, knocking it backward, but not so much that it lost its feet or disturbed the lab. From Crave’s controlled hit, Thwip received data from three points. First, the suit itself, in complex numbers, mapped the forces acting against it. Second, Thwip’s tethered hardhood scanned in the force in a puff of numbers on the flat arc. Third, as Thwip returned to the flat arc, Crave anticipated his next request and granted Thwip access to his IF’s reading of his own movement, which included measurements of the resistance his suit had registered against the fractal.
“This shows how the signals travel.” Thwip drummed his fingers across the flat arc, hashing the data through an image scan that converted and simplified it into visuals, then emphasized the series of reactions he’d captured when Crave struck the suit. They branched like nerves through the trepid frames, a relay signal of mock pain that flashed through the noxious stimuli sys whenever an agent threatened the suit with force. “This is the clue.”
“The blue pattern.”
“The path of the signal widens as the sense of pressure imitates how pain hits the human body, but then it narrows at these points, here, as if it’s traveling across different bridges, then widens again. On the IF body map, the sensation is translated visually and appears to fan smoothly, but on the back end, it’s pinched at those points. Those bridges are the connections between endo- and exoframes. Will you unseal the hood, pull the a-yank, and lay the inactive suit out neat on the flat arc?”
Crave released the suit sculpt. Thwip put the suit down again for unoccupied diagnostic tether.
“Use the trepid-issue medpen and cut the interior of the left sheath and oblique—that’s this thing right here, can you scan that? It has to be precise.”
“Confirmed.”
“I think it’s one of the signal bridges. Cut that a quarter of a millimeter deep and then keep it apart. It should snap without damage, and then heal itself when pressed together.”
Crave made the incision on the suit—a tiny snap—and his hands darted in, separating the layers so that they didn’t self-heal. Thwip recorded progress in the log.
Twenty-five more cuts like that at the bridge points, and we should be able to separate the suit’s layers without damaging them.
“What result are you expecting when the endo and exo are separated?”
Thwip magnified the incision on the flat arc and shifted through the image for the next p
lace the signal converged over a bridge. “I took apart the arm of an SI suit at academy. The knowledge gained allowed me to learn arrow faster, which saved my ass during boot. I only had to vent a sweat once a day the first week. I learn fast this way. But I don’t know what exactly will happen when I separate them. I hypothesize that I’ll be able to access some mechs that are not open to the user to manipulate.”
Crave made his mask transparent at the eyes and leaned over. Thwip saw his gaze trace over the other data present on the arc.
“I was going through the specs of the mission while I worked,” Thwip explained.
“You dug the specs out of your hood external to your suit without your pulse gloves? That’s…”
“Cheating!” Skregs blasted over the aurals.
“Thwip did say he would do it today,” Wheck auraled in as well. “He didn’t say how. You might have realized that with his PT specialty, he could and would go directly to the motivator.”
“I know I’m not ready to join prep yet, Skregs.” Thwip grinned wide. “I’ll need another day for that.” He looked through the SOCs on the flat arc to see from the others’ POVs.
Wheck and Skregs were together on the command deck. Wheck rapped his knuckles twice lightly against Skregs’ shoulder in what seemed to Thwip to be acknowledgment or agreement, and remuted Thwip.
Crave worked something on his hardhood, his eye movement taking in whatever occupied his IF. The entire exchange went on in the loop around him, never moving him from his task.
“What do you think of the mission specs?” Skregs asked Thwip.
“I’ve only read about a tenth, but so far I think I better hurry the fuck up.”
A new face appeared on Thwip’s IF on the flat arc, converting from private mode into muted greyscale and hashed CHARIS. She had the same shoulder-length haircut as Crave and Wheck. Her eyebrows pinched in and up at the center, went down, then up, in an almost circular dance as she spoke in shades of black and white. It’s just me she has muted. Thwip heard the rest of the unit’s brief replies to her after her mouth moved soundlessly on his own IF. Her location marker showed as nearby—in the V-0, inside their sleeping module. A few minutes later he looked at his IF on the flat arc; she was on the flight deck near Wheck. Skregs remained on the command deck.
Astral Fall Page 11
