Deathwatch (The Faded Earth Book 1)(46)
“Fuck,” Jen said, staring at the innocuous rectangle.
“A lot of you say that,” Smith said with a grim smile. “So. Anyone want to quit now? Knowing you’ll go into battle with a bomb strapped to your back?”
No one raised a hand or moved much at all. Beck assumed their unnatural stillness sprang from a worry that even a twitch would be taken as surrender.
Smith nodded. “Hmm. Usually it’s one out of six or seven who take the offer. Very well, then. I will call your name and when I do, one of my apprentices will lead you to your new armor. Try not to scuff the finish.”
Beck was called first and almost tripped in her rush to finally step inside her armor. The apprentice, who introduced himself as Tom, ushered her to the back of the room to a fairly petite suit of armor. Beck blinked in surprise. There were always variations in height, but this was much more noticeable.
“Why is it so small?” she asked. “I know I’m not a giant or anything, but I’ve seen men my height wearing nearly full size suits.”
Tom frowned thoughtfully as he checked the screen of his tablet. “You know, I didn’t even think about that when I assembled it. We see so many of them—ah. That explains it. This set is modular. Special order.”
“What does that mean?” Beck asked. “Well, I know what modular means, but I don’t understand why mine would need to have swappable parts.”
“Oh, that means it’s scout armor,” Tom explained. “You must have someone rooting for you to let you have something like this ahead of time. Scouts use the same basic frame as everyone else, but the attachment points are different. This thing will be able to accommodate larger armor plates on the base frame, height extensions with additional pieces of exoskeleton, even a second Brick. That takes a lot of careful engineering. Those things do not play well together.”
Bowers. It had to be. Well, she couldn’t really be upset about it. Not only did her armor have the same functionality as any other set, but it could be adapted as needed. The more streamlined version in front of her looked faster, which suited her nature more than the heavily armed and armored standard design.
“Ready to hop in?” Tom asked.
Beck grinned. “Absolutely.”
“Okay, let me calibrate everything,” Tom said. He tapped away at his tablet, then produced a small blinking device from a pocket. He held it up. “When I link the chip in your head with the suit, it’ll run through this at first. Right now your BIM has six weeks of recorded data on your gait and other movements, and the corresponding neural impulses that go with them. The suit doesn’t. It’s a blank slate. This will serve as a sort of bridge, smoothing out the suit as its systems adapt to the settings your BIM feeds it. It’s basically a control unit to keep you from falling on your face until the computer in your armor gets itself lined up with you.”
Beck raised an eyebrow. “How long will I have to rely on using that?”
Tom seemed confused, then laughed. “No, this will only take a minute. The computer just has to rectify the BIM data with the actual way you move inside the suit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it take longer than ninety seconds.”
He tapped a button on the tablet and Beck’s armor opened at the back. Its small stature was relative to other suits; it still stood a solid foot taller than her. She stepped in, ducking her head down and raising it up into the attached helmet. Sliding her hands down its arms, she wiggled her fingers into the gloves and felt the odd sensation of hundreds of integrated sensors gently pushing themselves against her uniform.
“Go ahead and close it up,” Tom suggested. “You remember how?”
In response, Beck twitched the default sequence on the fingers of her right hand and felt the suit close. Instantly its internal systems glowed with life. Status lights lit her HUD as the boot sequence finished, and she got a green light on the handshake between the computer and the BIM in her skull.
“Take her for a spin,” Tom said. “Slow and steady. We need to let the machines do their thing.”
Beck did as she was told and took her first step. The surprising part wasn’t the ease with which she moved despite the weight of the armor around her. It wasn’t the casual strength now wrapped around every part of her body.
It was how perfectly natural the armor felt.
How right.
22
They were barely halfway to the courtyard to meet with Reeves when an alert flashed across Beck’s HUD redirecting her group to the Loop station.
“What the hell?” Jen asked on the team channel. The others began to chatter back. Beck sent a blare of noise across them to shut everyone up.
“Enough of that,” she said. “No speculation, no working yourselves up. Reeves will explain when we get there.
The trek was fast—especially now that they had their armor—and Beck knew something was wrong as soon as she saw what waited in the station. Reeves stood with every other full member of the Watch not currently working in the armory, including Caleb in his white armor.
“In ten minutes or so,” Reeves said, his voice amplified by his suit, “every remaining member of the cohort will be here. Smith is rushing them through the setup procedure. This is not a test. This is not a trick. We’re being activated as of right now. Every able body is needed. Even some that are less than able.” He nodded to Caleb, whose ribs were certainly still healing from Beck’s assault.