Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(45)
“The point is not to teach you to fight all at once,” Reeves had said during what felt like the billionth repetition of the same basic stances and body control exercises. “It’s to ingrain the fundamentals in you. With your bodies, it’s about how you stand, how you move and coordinate. So when you need to use them, even if you’re not perfect, you’ll be better.”
Yet Beck thought the more important application of this concept was in their minds. Early on she had refrained from asking why they didn’t begin training in their armor right away. The question burned inside her for the first week until her perspective shifted enough to allow her to answer it herself. By then she was secretly relieved to have kept her mouth shut; it seemed obvious.
The armor was a tool just like any of the weapons they fought with. Just as the cohort learned weaponless fighting first to hone their coordination and control before being trusted with spears and the like, they as whole people needed those six weeks for Reeves to mold them properly to handle something as complex and powerful as their armor.
And here they were. The day had finally come.
Reeves finally appeared, walking into view from the footpath. He smiled as he took in the unit. “Well, don’t you all just look like a bunch of lounging jungle cats. Ready to suit up?”
The round of agreement from the group was louder and more forceful than their usual quietly respectful answers to his queries. Reeves checked the time on his tablet. “Okay, the armorer should be opening up in a minute or so. He has the whole cohort left to do today, so don’t dawdle or ask him too many questions.”
Reeves made a shooing gesture at them. “Go on. Door’s opening. Meet in the courtyard once you’re all dressed up.”
“Hell, yes,” Jeremy said, slapping Beck on the shoulder. “I’m so ready for this.”
“Try not to ruin your pants,” she said, but she was at least as excited. She just hid it better.
The armory was one of a handful of buildings they had never been in before. Acuet wasn’t large, only about quarter mile across, but still had its off-limits areas and hidden corners. The building itself didn’t occupy a very large footprint, perhaps fifty feet on a side, but it towered high above the much more squat facilities surrounding it and plunged much further below ground. Beck knew it would have its own dedicated Loop port, strictly for freighting in armor and components.
The armorer was not alone. Two apprentices moved around the large central space, which was far more advanced than Beck expected. After a lifetime of living in printed stone buildings with technology added after the fact in a sloppy sort of kludge, seeing a purpose-built piece of slick construction like this was slightly unnerving.
Lifts dotted the space in a perfect grid, simple platforms rising up out of the floor. Their nature was obvious due to the gap surrounding them, a mesh-covered space that looked hungry for any careless limbs that wandered too close. Each lift contained a shining suit of armor, each slightly different in size but all similar in style. The walls were lined with monitors, carts bearing diagnostic equipment, and tools of such variety that Beck’s mouth almost watered with the desire to run over and study them.
“I’m Smith,” the armorer said, placing his thick-fingered hands on the small work table centered near the front of the room. “Yes, I’ve heard every joke there is about my name being Smith and the fact that I provide armor, so you can keep any comedic brilliance you might have to yourself.” He gestured to a small rectangular object resting on a cloth. It was about eight inches long, four wide, and two thick. “This is a Brick. It—”
“We know what a Brick is,” Jeremy interrupted. “We’ve been studying this since the first day we got here.”
Beck kicked the back of his boot to signal him to shut up, but it was too late. Smith’s face clouded with annoyance bordering on anger. “If you interrupt me again, you’ll be ordered to leave. Without a suit of armor, you can’t continue your training. Am I clear?”
Jeremy flinched back in horror. “Yes.”
Smith let his glare rest on Jeremy for a few seconds longer to drive the point home before getting back to his demonstration. “Yes, I know you have been over all of this. But no one leaves my armory without me personally reminding them of the dangers. Now,” he said, waving a hand over the Brick, “who can tell me what this is, aside from its common name?”
“It’s a battery,” Beck said. “A quantum storage device, though I have no idea what that actually means or how it works.” She pushed down a flare of embarrassment at the admission, but that wasn’t her realm of physics. Not that there were many options for such esoteric education out in a Rez like Brighton.
“No one really does,” Smith said. “Only a handful of people in Science division grasp it, and even their understanding is limited. Bricks store about a hundred times the energy of old world batteries of the same size, but we haven’t worked out a way to make them smaller than this. Anything larger than about ten times this size and they overheat and explode. The reason I remind every cohort of these facts is simple: you have to understand how dangerous your power source is.”
This caught their attention. Any time a member of the Watch mentioned a potential threat, the trainees listened. Smith tapped the Brick with a finger. “This is drained, or I wouldn’t leave it sitting out. Your armor has a shielded bay because these things put out weird distortions in the electromagnetic field. We don’t know the long-term effects, but the old world manuals on them stress the importance of the shielding. It’s doubly important because if a Brick is damaged, it can respond...unpredictably. It might explode, or discharge all its energy at once in the form of heat or electricity. Take a bad enough hit, and you could find yourself electrocuted or boiled inside your own skin.”