Chapter 4
In a few days, the pain was completely gone. Everyone in the unit had chosen (or been assigned) a weapon. Bri had already spent over twenty hours with both the Jen and the Api. She rated excellent with the pistol and the both versions of the medium range rifles. But it was like she couldn’t miss with the Jenny and Anderson had mentioned that all of the weapons would be enhanced once they had their exo’s.
With breakfast finished, everyone was suiting up for another day on the ranges, but Andrews’ voice came across the comm instead. “Unit 37 to shuttle Romeo 2 Delta 2. Full excursion gear.” His voice sounded in each of their ears. A shiver of fear ran through the room. Every time something changed in their routine, things got hard, harder than they had been. Naturally, everyone looked over at Pauly to see if he had found anything.
Pauly looked at Cooper and then at Arles and over the rest of the unit. “I’m working on it.” He chuckled.
Bri looked around at the rest of the team. “Remember the first time he put us on a shuttle?”
“Go get ‘em!” Kat gave the unit her best Anderson impression while she dug gear out of her footlocker, “Seems like a million years ago.”
“Got it,” Pauly’s eyes moved back and forth across the overlay. “That shuttle filed an excursion plan an hour ago.” You could see he was reading the information as fast it displayed across his overlay. “Two other shuttles filed the same flight log. We’re leaving after them.”
“Looks like a field trip, kids!” Biloxi locked his pack in place and holstered his pistol. Over the past weeks, he had surprised everyone. He may have been from some backwater planet in the god only knows system, but he had been the last man standing more than once over the past weeks. He had scored well on the Broadrail class of weapons, capable of carrying the massive thing and the tripod required to fire it. Everyone had thought it was going to be Cooper (he was an inch taller than Biloxi and Arles) but they gave him a sweeper and more two drones, which Pauly loved to play with.
But Bri didn’t care. While the unit gathered all of the things that kept them alive for days in the wild, she ignored the banter. All Bri wanted was her exo. It seemed like it had been a months since the connection ports had been installed. And it was torture watching and working with soldiers that already had theirs.
But you were bound to secrecy, forbidden to discuss the installation of the exo. It wasn’t some military or state secret, it was tradition. So all of the questions Bri had peppered across the base for the past weeks had gone unanswered. No one would discuss it. Of course, this did nothing but fan the flame of her fixation.
She had talked about it, dreamed about it, even asked if she could touch one, but there was no doing. Everyone just grinned, a wry, meaningful grin. Some raised their eyebrows.
A captain, not Andrews but one Bri had seen around the base before, showed up in the doorway. “Unit 37?”
“You found us,” Biloxi slipped a red headband on before grabbing his helmet and tucking it under his arm.
“Your exo’s are on board the shuttle,” he glanced to his left. “I’m here to link you to them.” A young, female soldier appeared along with a small, hovering med bot.
Everyone looked around. It was finally happening and a shiver of excitement ran through the room. Bri glanced at Kat who gave her a wink and a big, toothy grin. (Everyone knew Kat was almost as excited as Bri.). Pauly glanced around the room. “Finally! I thought I saw a shipping manifest arrive on the mainframe last night.” He waggled his eyebrows and laughed like an old-time comic from the black and white feeds, the really old stuff.
“Boy, you better stop!” Biloxi laughed out loud. “One of these days, these people are gonna find you snooping around,” Biloxi rolled his eyes like he was already as frustrated as a cat recently arrived to a bathtub under less than perfect pretenses. “I’m telling you, they gonna have questions for you.”
The captain gave Pauly a cursory glance as the unit made their way toward the door, but nothing more. And Bri wondered if their mystique was beginning to make its way around the base. There was nothing 37 couldn’t do, they were like gears. The tech, the overlays and synced comms, the addition of the wristcall and constant visual and auditory feedback, it made them better. And they didn’t even have their exo’s yet.
“Me first,” Bri was already in her gear and at the front of the room.
The captain looked at the name on Bri’s chest, a chalk-looking scrawl that read Bri with a little red heart over the i. It was strange when she thought about it, it was the only part of their uniforms, their gear that anyone personalized, and it said a little bit about them.
Bri stared at the heart, the playful little twist of color against the strange almost fabric like chest armor. And then she looked at Kat’s with yellow whiskers and little yellow eyes peeking out from around her. “I need your wristcall, Lladron.”
Bri stuck out her left arm and the captain pointed the device at the screen. “Lladron, exo 24f72h.”
As soon as the unit walked into the main hanger, they were greeted by a med pod and a tall man in a doctor’s coat with the assemblage badge on his lapel. He was middle-aged, with short hair, a thick mustache and a biomech eye that glowed light green. He glanced up from his wristcall every few seconds as the unit came in but didn’t say anything.
Bri took a seat near the front along with Kat and Alers and tried imagine what was behind the doors to the med pod. Nervous excitement had her shaking her leg and looking around the hanger while she tried to imagine what the augmentation would feel like.
The doctor waited until the last of the unit entered before he spoke up. “Unit 37, as you have probably heard, you are to be outfitted with your exoskeletal augmentation today.”
A younger orderly stepped out of the pod and handed the doctor a data tablet.
The doctor glanced over it, touched the screen a number of times and then handed the device back to his assistant who disappeared back inside without a word.
Kat leaned forward slightly and winked at Bri which, she guessed, probably meant that Kat thought the orderly was cute.
“You will step inside the pod when your name is called, the operation will take approximately six to ten minutes, and then you will board the shuttle behind me.”
Everyone glanced around. They were isolating the people with exo’s from those without, but there was little they could do but guess the reason why.
“What do you think it feels like?” Thelia, the only woman in the unit to have passed the heavy weapons training on her first try like Biloxi had, looked like a kid waiting for her first needle. She was pale and her voice kind of cracked when she asked the question. It was so obvious that Kat laughed out loud.
“Come on, girl. They gonna fill all those little holes all over your body. What’choo think it’s gonna feel like?”
Bri rolled her eyes. Leave it to Kat to make an uncomfortable situation even more so.
“Most describe the feeling as pleasurable.” Pauly was reading the information off his lens, oddly staring at the front of the room because of his focus. “A few have reported side effects such as muscle pain and fatigue, but over eighty percent report no lasting side effects.”
“Ms. Alers?” The young orderly appeared in the doorway to the little med bay.
Thelia took a huge breath like she was about to jump into the training pool. “Wish me luck,” she sighed. “I’m so tired of going first.”
“Go get it, Alers.” Biloxi waved his arm like he was rooting her onto victory in some game.
Bri glanced over at Kat who was blatantly ogling the young orderly with a wistful smile.
The orderly held the door open for Alers but before she went in herself, she glanced over her shoulder at Kat. “Don’t worry, your turns coming.”
Everyone laughed at Kat and, though her skin was as dark as the dirt on Terra 6, she blushed and stared down at her boots.
When Bri’s turn came, three others had alr
eady been fitted. None of them had been allowed to return to the front of the hanger, but each had looked back at the rest of the unit as they were escorted from the med pod to the shuttle.
Arles had been the best. Even with the orderly on one side and a security officer on the other, she had managed to look over her shoulder, back at toward the unit, and yell: “Hurts like hell!”
Bri stepped through the door without a word to the rest of the unit. She couldn’t figure out why she was so nervous. When they had implanted the lens and the processor chip in her head, a simple procedure that took twenty minutes but involved a medical android and a robot arm that looked like something out of a tech nightmare, she didn’t even blink, but this was different. She was a mix of fear and excitement.
On the other side of the door, the medical pod was barely the size of bunkhouse. Against one wall, there was a tall metal case marked with the seal of the assemblage and a slew of visual identification tags and on the opposite wall, there was a platform and a strange metal frame that looked like a table on its end without a table top.
The rest was what you would expect in a medical pod, a console, some wall cabinetry that held the tools of the medical trade, and a single medical android that stood in the corner, it’s blue, visual sensor glowing on and off.
“You’ll need to take your uniform off,” the doctor’s assistant touched a tablet and turned toward away from Bri toward the exo crates, obviously trying to make the soldier feel more comfortable. “24f72h,” she muttered the words while she stared down at the tablet.
The doctor entered through an interior door, and walked toward a wall console while Bri worked the straps around her wrist and neckline. She removed the top half of her excursion uniform, a poly-dense nano fabric capable of short term camouflage, some force resistance, and hydra-cycling.
Bri wasn’t uncomfortable with her body. She had always been comfortable with the curves and tone of her body. She thought of it as an instrument, a thing to be used.
As a child, both her and her brother ran track in addition to the daily, prescribed routines. There wasn’t a time in her life when she wasn’t fit; she simply liked to move too much.
While the doctor was busy looking over something she couldn’t read, Bri did her best to see inside the heavy crate the droid was sorting through. To her, they all looked the same so; she turned toward the strange frame that stood on the other side of the room.
It was constructed of thin, black metal but built like it was made to withstand some pressure, and the curves were beautiful. It was like you had laid a person on the ground and then traced around not only their shape, but their magnetic field as well. The table didn’t look built; it looked like it had grown into the shape she ran her eyes across. What is it? How does it work? She tried to imagine what was about to happen. At least, I didn’t hear screams when everyone else was in here.
The doctor turned around and gave her a once over. “Could you please turn around?” His voice emphasized how disinterested he was in the naked, female form in front of him. “We need to make sure everything is in order.”
The orderly stepped up and held the tablet out in front of her. “Please mark here for the receipt of your government issued property.”
Bri shot her a quick glance to acknowledge the satire of the orderly’s tone and then touched her finger to the tablet.
“Thank you,” the young woman walked over to the console and Bri thought of Kat outside. She has two reasons to be excited.
“Everything looks good. We have the correct number of contacts and connections and they have all healed rather well.” The doctor’s voice was appraising and she felt the warmth of a finger in the middle of her back. “This one looks…” his finger prodded and poked the integration, “I think it’ll be fine.”
Bri took a deep breath. It’s happening. My very own exo.
It was the one advantage the Assemblage had been counting on. The Earther soldiers, especially the marines, had arrived in New Terran space wearing armor like nothing the newts had ever seen. Each soldier loaded into a full body suit that was three, maybe four times as big as their physical body. They were huge, rounded soldiers with helmets like a dome, a wide, long dome that looked like it stretched from shoulder to shoulder.
They were strong. The exoskeleton-style armor, which was really little more than a heavy-duty robot piloted by a jar-headed marine, made them strong, but it also made them slow.
That’s where the newts had the advantage. Their exo’s had only enough armor to protect them for moments, but moments were all they needed. With the internal interphase and augmentation of a newt exo, they were fast, agile, and deadly.
The orderly showed Bri onto the platform and they came to that awkward moment where neither one of them was saying anything but they were both trying desperately to communicate. The orderly doing her best to indicate where and how the naked soldier who now stood a good foot and a half higher than her because of the platform. And the soldier because she just couldn’t stop staring at the table for half a second.
But once Bri had sort of wandered into the frame and tried to figure out how to stand, the orderly touched her arm. “No, miss, um…turn around, please.”
Embarrassment tinted Bri’s cheeks. “Yeah, I mean, um. Of course. Sorry.” Nice one. Could that have gone worse? Two brace like belts slipped out from behind the frame and tightened snug across her.
Bri glanced at the orderly who was staring at her tablet with eyes as big as saucers, but before Bri could utter a word to ask her what was wrong, the entire frame spun around and there was the whoosh of pneumatics somewhere in the room. Then Bri was facing the floor, her body suspended against the two braces with the intricate frame behind her.
The motion caught her off guard and she almost screamed, but then she still wanted to know what the orderly had seen, what had made her face go all wide-eyed and pale.
“Sorry,” the orderly leaned down, “I am really sorry; I accidentally touched the control on my tablet.”
Bri let out a sigh. “I thought the world was about to end.” She tried to chuckle but then remembered that she was still upside, facing the floor, and about to be outfitted with the latest in Assemblage technology sold to the lowest bidder. “Really, it’s no problem.”
“Are we ready Madeli?” The doctor sounded slightly perturbed by the chit chat.
“Yes,” the orderly disappeared from Bri’s view.
“Statics?” The doctor asked.
“Patient is suspended.”
“Are you ready Ms. Lladron?” The doctor’s voice was no more interested than it had been when she walked in, but Bri decided to answer.
“Ready.”
The third-gen android with the glowing eye removed the exo from the case and the sound was like a wind chime, a cheap wind chime made out of bits of metal – all tink and clink and clank. But Bri didn’t care. Everything nerve in her whole body tingled and she realized she was holding her breath.
How many times had she imagined what it must feel like? What had she said when the first soldier she had ever seen with an exo stopped and asked her if she was alright? She closed her eyes and tried to imagine what was only moments away.
“Alright, Madeli if you could take this side,” there was he sound of footsteps, shifting bodies, breathing. “And we can move it like…”
Ice. Freezing ice. All over her body, at every connection. It felt like someone was pouring ice water into the holes. Every muscle went stiff and there was a sharp pain that moved from her neck across her head and down to the tip of her nose, but only for a moment. She winced while her body tried to resist the invasion, the millions of microscopic threads that moved into her muscles and then around her bones.
“Take a breath, Miss Lladron.” She felt the warmth of the doctor’s hand on her back.
She wished she could see what was happening but then the feeling of ice faded and every muscle contracted at once. Her body was suddenly cramped, twi
sted beyond and outside of her control.
She wanted to panic but she couldn’t breathe. Everything ached. Everywhere at once. But that too only lasted for a moment. She thought of taking a breath. Maybe if I try to relax for one second, just let go.
Something moved across her skin, it felt like a feather or a spider skittering across the blonde hairs on her arm. A scream rose in her throat but before she let it go, it was over. Everything stopped and she felt normal.
She opened her eyes and concentrated on breathing. It was over. She didn’t feel anything except a bit of pressure at the connection points. The pain and strange sensations were gone. All she could feel was the exo itself snug against her, the harnesses threads of cable taut against her body.
The frame spun again and she was back to standing. The doctor and orderly stood in front of her. “How does it feel?” The doctor glanced at his wristcall as uninterested as before.
Bri took half a step and liked the way exo felt, the new sensation, the ease of motion it already lent. She opened and closed her hands and looked down at the exo, the way it wrapped around to her forearm and met the port on the back of her wrist.
“That’s the port that helps with the fingers,” the orderly smiled and handed her a small rubber ball.
As soon as Bri’s fingers touched the blue material, a holograph appeared in the space between the orderly and Bri. To Bri, it was backwards, but there was the diagram of a hand and she imagined it was hers.
“Please squeeze the ball as hard as you can.” The orderly was staring at the data on the projection from her tablet but Bri still couldn’t look away.
The ball felt different. The sphere itself, she could feel it differently, like the nerves in her fingertips were sharper and even without looking she could see the kind of material it was, imagine how it was woven.
“You can put your clothes on now, Ms. Lladron.” The doctor turned back toward the door he had come through.
“Please enjoy the rest of your day. I understand Andrews has a surprise for your unit today.”
For some reason, Bri thought about the number of shuttles she had noticed departing the base. Was it three?
“Please do not tell anyone who had not had the procedure; your instructions are to report to the shuttle.” He walked through the door and Bri looked at the orderly a little confused.
“It only scares them,” she handed Bri her uniform.
The orderly escorted Bri to the shuttle along with a security officer who had been assigned the station for the day. Andrews and the other three from her unit were already aboard.
Andrews was talking with one of the crew. She glanced at Biloxi for some idea of what he knew, but he only shrugged. Something told her he was about to repeat the pistol training, about to take them out into the middle of nowhere and put their new hardware through its paces.
“You’re right,” Biloxi looked at her and grinned, like he knew what she was thinking. “Its boonie time.”
“You guys hear anything?” Bri took a seat next to Arles.
“No, Andrews just got here, but he didn’t say anything to us,” Biloxi looked over the unit. “We gonna be here a minute, though.”
“Remember what I said about pistols?” Bri glanced around again looking for a clue but there was nothing. There was no extra gear or any other indication that they might be headed somewhere specific. She opened a menu set on her lens and looked for something about the day’s activities, but she couldn’t find anything. Where’s Pauly when you need him.
“Look out!” Andrews did not shout the words as he leaned to his left like a tree bending in the wind and Pauly flew into the far side of the shuttle, crashing into two seats and meeting the wall with a sickening thud.
“Did you just put a dent in the shuttle?” Biloxi blurted out.
Andrews through the soldier a look, and then walked toward Pauly who was still trying to untangle his body from the two seats and get vertical. His face was a mask of horrified embarrassment.
Andrews held out a hand and helped haul the tall man to standing. “Tools not toys.” He grinned.
And the mood instantly shifted. Where everyone had been on the edge of nervous breakdown, so excited and terrified at the same time that they felt like they might suddenly burst into a brilliant array of starlight at any moment, the room seemed to take a collective sigh.
“Sorry, um, I couldn’t…”
“Stop, yes, I saw that. It’s a handy thing sometimes though, don’t forget it.” Andrews turned back to the shuttle’s captain.
“Look up how not to embarrass the entire unit,” Biloxi slapped Pauly’s shoulder when he sat down.
Once everyone was onboard, Andrews swung a small case around to the front of the room. “Alright, listen up!” Each of you will be given 3 energy cells.” He held up a small black cylinder with a blue dot in the center. “That’s one to power you on and two more to get you home.”
“Home?” Biloxi blurted out the question and Kat slapped him across the back of the head.
“Yes,” Andrews grinned at Kat, “Thank you. You’re going on a field trip, this time it’s the desert.”
Everyone glanced around for a moment, like they were hoping their someone else might speak up and explain what they were all thinking. But we don’t even know how to use these things yet.
“But, sir…” a kid named Boomer finally gave in and started to speak, but stopped when Andrews took the energy cell in his hand and slid it into the little chamber on his side. As soon as it touched the receiver, a handful of filaments stretched from the belt and locked the energy cell in place.
“Easy right?” Andrews threw a cell to Boomer.
As soon as Bri’s exo powered on, her lens came to life. The overlay became a view of the exo itself and was color-coded as the check moved across the hardware’s systems. When it finished, the overlay disappeared.
She opened and closed her hand. It didn’t look different, but it did feel different, like she was stronger and faster. In fact, her whole body felt that way.
“Unbelievable,” Pauly whispered behind her.
“What is it?” Bri asked.
“These things are amazing. The specifications listed in…”
“We’re here,” Andrews opened the shuttle’s hatch and the desert air rushed in.
Bri couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed the flight and, from the look on everyone else’s face, no one else had noticed they were in transit either.
“You have until eighteen hundred hours to get back to base.” Andrews stood beside the hatch and waved his arms at the sunbaked landscape. “Your new gear is capable of a great many things. Learn it. Use it. Your objective is the mess hall by eighteen hundred hours. Now bounce!”
Within a minute or two, the entire team was standing alone in the middle of the desert watching the shuttle disappear over the horizon. Bri pulled her pistol from its holster on her thigh. The moment her hand touched the pistol’s grip, the overlay of her left lens activated.
A string of data blinked across the view and disappeared, replaced by a menu set she had never seen before. “Um…guys?”
“Oh shit!” Biloxi was holding his pistol as well. “Look at that!”
“The exo’s are tuned to our weapons.” Pauly, as always, shared everything he discovered as he searched through the exo’s specification files.
“Alright, we should get moving. I’m gonna go ahead and guess we aren’t anywhere near the base.” Arles who was usually tasked with unit leadership by Andrews stared down at his wristcall.
“Run!” Biloxi holstered his pistol and started running south. It took a moment, a few steps, but his exo kicked-in and his speed instantly increased.
Bri and everyone else stared at the man in awe. Biloxi’s legs were a blur. A thin dust cloud began to billow out behind him.
So excited by what she was witnessing, Bri started after him. Her left foot hit the ground like normal, but she lifted the right to take the nex
t step, the suit responded. She felt lighter as the enhancement amplified her movement. Her steps became longer and faster. She could feel the tension in her muscles, it wasn’t painful but it was definitely going to take some getting used too. Once she was moving faster than she could normally run, the suit started adjusted balance and control. It was like piloting or being piloted, she couldn’t really tell which.
As she ran parallel to Biloxi, his dust trail spinning off to her left, she heard Pauly’s voice come across her com. “Um…guys. The base is this way.”
Bri started to slow her pace and cut a wide arc to turn back toward where they had started. She glanced down at her feet and watched her boots hit the ground, dust exploding off the soles of her feet as she ran. It was effortless, almost like she was being carried along by the exo. Once she turned she almost couldn’t believe how far they had gone. Pauly and a few others were so far ahead they looked like part of the horizon, trees or boulders blending into the landscape. She had already gone over a mile in the space of a couple minutes.
Biloxi, on the other hand, decided to stop and change direction when he heard Pauly’s news instead of doing what Bri did which was make a long turn to face the opposite direction. Of course, no one had taught them anything about the suits and when he tried to suddenly stop, he instead threw off his own balance.
Bri turned and watched Biloxi battle his suit. Every step looked wobbly and unnatural as he tried to do one thing and the suit tried to do another, smarter and safer thing.
“Shit. No, no, no. Up.” Biloxi lost control and tumbled before his suit straightened him out again. “This way. No, no, no. Come on.” His struggle came over the com and then came loud grunts and curses as his body flipped, slammed into the ground, tumbled again, rolled, and finally slid to a stop. He hopped up and immediately started dusting himself off, unhurt, but embarrassed.
“Forty miles per hour,” Bri laughed as she glanced at the overlay.
Anderson scheduled three days with the exo-technicians; the people tasked with teaching soldiers how to use the latest in Assemblage tech. Some of 37 had it easy. Bri, Kat, Cooper and a few others took to the enhancements the way a duck takes to water, but there were more than a few that couldn’t seem to get their heads around it.
The exo’s abilities were more than anyone had imagined. Even 52, the last unit to be suited wasn’t given the same iteration. The suits integrated with the visual and auditory enhancements as well as the weapons they were issued. Meaning, 37’s stellar target range scores and standings, were almost untouchable. Of the 1200 scored rounds put down range by 37, only 7 were outside of the target’s scoring field.
After the initial break in period, new scrimmages were setup. Units that had already been outfitted with exo’s but had not been deployed were bracketed into 6 hour matches. The prize was a full day’s leave. It took a week of daily matches, but 37 took the competition easily.