12
December 16th.
Grayman:
First fitting.
“Captain, I’d like you to meet Doctor Richard Mann, Director of Research and Development for Small Arms and Armor at SENTAR Corporation…”
Henderson, all smiles, is quick to point this man out as soon as he comes into the test chamber: Tall, lanky, tan, thick dark hair and lean features. Big eyes, almost childlike, though set into deep, dark-circled sockets. You would expect a labcoat or a cleansuit, but he wears a slightly rumpled dress shirt and casual slacks, cloth slippers instead of shoes, no socks. He gives you barely a nod of acknowledgement. Henderson keeps trying:
“Doctor Mann heads the team that designed the suit and the ICW, all the gadgets…” You consider that Henderson’s condescending tone is calculated. It gets Mann’s attention, if only by annoying him. He breathes out sharply and comes closer, seemingly only intent on checking the fit as his techs finish adjusting the heavy plated high-collared jacket and help you into the thick gauntlets.
“Where’d you get this one?” he mutters at Henderson, still not making eye-contact with you.
“Classified,” Henderson throws back casually. Then he grins at you. “How’s it feel?”
The techs give you room to move around. The suit fits snugly, despite how bulky it looks, giving some support to your joints as you bear its weight. It reminds you somewhat of Japanese armor, the combinations of flexible and rigid, only more form-fitting. There are plates in the chest, abdomen, back, shoulders, forearms, hands, thighs, shins and insteps. The “tails” of the jacket form a skirt of plate to protect your groin and hips, slit to allow movement. A four-inch-high collar protects your neck and throat. The plates are a laminate of synthetics and nanotech alloys, so they’re both lighter and tougher than they look. The plating is only “extra” protection; the primary defense is in the multiple layers of nanotech “fabric” (woven of tube-like fibers of structured carbon atoms) that covers you like an oversized snowsuit.
You run through range-of-motion with your arms and torso. There’s some resistance, but you find you can move relatively freely, at least standing. Then you try to walk. That’s where you feel the weight, like someone increased the gravity in the room. Your boots thud on the floor with each step. Still, if no one’s expecting you to move fast…
You surprise Henderson a bit by whipping your arms through some basic drill combinations. You immediately see where some “breaking in” could be useful, but you can also imagine how much harder you could hit with the benefit of all this plate and padding. Henderson grins.
“Good?”
You give him a distracted nod, then glance up at Dr. Mann, who continues to eye you warily through his feigned disinterest. You give him a little nod like a bow of respect. He barely gives you one back, seems to catch himself, looks almost confused, like he’s trying to re-assess what he thinks of you. And you remember how the first potential “test subjects” they approached—the real Special Forces—apparently responded to the suits.
“Try the helmet,” Mann orders coolly, though you can hear the slightest rise of childlike enthusiasm for his craft. One of his techs raises the helmet over your head, slips it on and makes the necessary adjustments to the pads and straps. He checks the fit by shaking it—shaking you—and then slaps the visor down and locks it. It covers your whole face, but gives you enough space to breathe and not fog it. Then a chin-piece is placed that seals you completely in like a diver. Plastic and rubber smells flood your nostrils as tiny fans begin to feed you filtered air.
“Still good?” Henderson wants to know. You nod again, add a thumbs-up to it.
“If you start getting too warm in there, just ask Dee to up the A/C,” one of the techs reminds you. “The internal thermostat is self-adjusting, but it doesn’t know how you like it. Not yet, anyway.”
You move around some more, walking, shifting, pivoting. The hardest parts are trying to lunge or crouch—moving the mass of the suit quickly against gravity or inertia.
“How does it feel?” Henderson wants to know again.
“So…” you change the subject. “What can hurt me in this?”
That gets Mann’s attention—he seems to appreciate the seriousness of the question.
“Kinetic energy,” he tells you, like he’s trying to see if you can understand such concepts. You nod in the helmet, so he gets more specific. “Blasts at close range. Heavy ones. Most antipersonnel weapons are more shrapnel than shock. But a good-sized bomb or other ordnance—the kind they throw at convoys and buildings—will hit you like a bullet-train within a certain range. You’d be crushed to jelly but the suit could still be intact. High-powered rounds will hurt you, too: they’ll shove through the ‘soft’ parts of the suit. Even the heavy plate only takes so much.”
“What can actually penetrate this?” you ask him. He tries to suppress a little shrug.
“High-caliber armor-piercers. Rounds designed to take out armored vehicles or aircraft. And the visor’s only rated Class Three.”
“What about small arms loaded with special alloys?”
He considers that for a moment. Looks at Henderson like he’s not sure what to tell you, then goes ahead: “Certain high-velocity penetrator cores. Depleted uranium. Tungsten.”
“What about Fletcher darts?”
He raises an eyebrow. Looks at Henderson.
“He knows about the Fletchers?”
Henderson tries to suppress a smug grin. Nods.
“It’s very unlikely that a flechette would make it through the suit, Captain.” But he sounds like he’s reading off an approved script.
“Anything else I should be worried about?” you press him after a moment. He breathes and thinks about it. The way he broods over it, you get the definite sense that he worries about ways his product may fail.
“Heat,” he offers. “The suit is fireproof—it’s mostly carbon, after all—insulated and air-conditioned, and it even has a limited oxygen supply. It will hold you through short-term exposures of up to a thousand degrees. Just don’t get stuck in any burning buildings.”
“What about underwater?”
He lets out a laugh under his breath. “Back to the self-contained air supply. We actually have versions for marine applications in the works, complete with propulsion screws and auto-ballast…” He seems a more than a bit proud of himself now, pulled away from the topic of his fears and back toward his dreams. Then he turns away from you to his monitors.
“Boot him up,” Mann commands. And you flinch as the inside of your visor comes alive with glowing graphics, making the room swim in colors as it accents heat, sound, motion, and finally the ghostly X-ray of Terahertz reading through the walls, showing you shimmering people-shapes passing by in the corridor outside. A series of targeting hi-lights flare around each person in the room, and the Datascan runs a facial recognition scan on each one, flashes you their ID files as you look them over. Then it gives you a 3D floorplan of the complex, and then a satellite image of Langley itself.
You notice that several of the techs—as well as Henderson and Mann—are watching the monitors more intently than you. Looking over their shoulders, you get the disorienting flash of seeing what you see repeated in each of the half-dozen screens in the room.
“He’s on,” a tech confirms.
“You getting all this, Captain?” Henderson prompts you.
“Perfect,” you tell him. “It’s perfect.” And you grin inside the helmet, knowing that no one can see your face.
Grayman Book One: Acts of War Page 29
