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Armories
Posted By: Angel at the Tomb<hamiltondaniel@mac.com>
Date: 25 September 2007, 1:11 am
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The soft tension of the gloves on his hands, the pressure the gauntlets exert on the back of his wrists, always marks his transition. Now, again, to war.
In the deep armories and the belly of ships, it is often the same. The faces of the techs change; the names and the accents change, and sometimes they are old, weathered, almost spirit-broken but still holding on. Sometimes they are young, though, and it is always the young ones he remembers; the gap-toothed kid up from Minister and so nervous he dropped the shoulder plates trying to get them on; the Gunny on the Resolute who laughed at the cross-shaped scar on his breastplate; the girl on the Roche-Derrien who saluted too smartly, who shied when he asked her name ("Special Petty Officer Leisl, sir," she said, and he caught her smiling when he turned his back).
The mood changes, too; before drops it is somber and cold, all his gray, sunless skin is standing taught and tense, and his toes ball up, eager for the reassurance of the bootplate. They make him jump in the armor, though, just in case, and so before the Shaw-Fujikawa transition he is bored, lazy for the rest ahead, but still alert to the proper placement of every coupler and actuator, and he watches the EGT and FCR/S and MDR diagrams flicker and pulse to life in the viewscreen of the helmet. He makes sure they spike at the right time, diligently, and when all the little flashing and spinning guages blink green and vanish, and he knows that everything is primed for a hard-start, he falls into the cryo chamber and is asleep before they've even strapped him in.
Here, though, is a cold-start; the man, reticent, sits in the armory, and awaits the garments of his coronation.
They bring him the greaves first, and he can't remember the last time they came out fresh and newly buffed; these days, they've still got the last engagement's blood on them, all the old scratches and the dent from where the roof came down on him (he knelt, the ruined building going to dust around him, and ignored the pain of the fracture). Unpowered, the greaves nevertheless give a bit of a welcome and much-missed pressure on his muscles, the polymers and cooling fluids in the skinsuit below compressed by the heavy plating of the armor. The locks click closed at the back of his calves.
The techs speak to each other but rarely to him, and then it is almost always a tiring sort of awestruck speech. He smiles softly and nods, to keep their spirits up, but sometimes he would rather they kept to themselves, as he keeps to himself. Age has made him cautious around people. They stare too much.
He feels like some hybrid of aviator and infantryman, the keeper of some machine of extraordinary power and complexity but still he is at the mercy of topography. A long, falling draw away from his well-entrenched position, and he will have an easy day. Blind ridgelines, cities, starships, and he will have to earn his rest. Would he were winged, and could alight upon the rocks and prominences and lay defilade down upon his enemies, at will.
They assemble his vessel around him in the armories, piece by battle-marked piece. It goes on cold, inert, so that it is like being buried under miles of alloy and composite, it is like being encased in some massive, resolute statue. He sits, silently, as they attach the heavy breastplate.
And so the neutron flash when they fire the reactor is like birth, a cascade of heavy particles making flickering traceries across the back of his eyes for only a second, never long enough to do any real damage, and then it stabilizes. Between his shoulderblades, the tiny intertial confinement core hangs between the hot, twin lasers, a little star, the engine for all of his fury and towering rage and for all the war he's made. Motors flex and uncurl. The suit, the dead mass of it, lifts away from him and is suddenly light, and even the pressure of it against the skinsuit seems to diminish, as the metal warms and the final system checks beep a confirmation of readiness. He moves his arm, and the machine around him moves, silently, powerfully, all the metal and carbon of it, and down beneath that his blood-fed muscles and the marrow, still human, at the center of his reinforced humerus. The techs assemble some last few pieces, the big, angular ailletes, and they hand him the helmet.
He used to always take a deep breath here, but the habit has gone over the years. His big, black-clad hands take the helmet, and slip it easily and smoothly onto his head, a known motion, a practiced motion.
He does, however, close his eyes.
And when they open he is alive, some final indicator pulses and clicks in the glass, and the suit is warm and alive around him, gentle when he is gentle, stern when he is stern, and when he is valorous, the suit, with him, is valorous.
He used to wonder where he stopped and the machine began.
Now, he knows that it doesn't matter.
Beyond the deep and the dark of the armories, black clouds scuttle and spill from cities and from the crashed husks of starships, and the war rumbles and is furious in the distance, flashing.
Beyond the deep belly of the ship, a little, blue pearl gleams in the dark.
Beyond the deep and the dark of armories, the world braces.
He stands.
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