Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

It still wasn’t right. He wondered if he should have stepped inside so readily when he felt this way. It wasn’t that the suit wasn’t up and running properly, or that he didn’t need the training—in fact, he enjoyed it to a degree—but it was the damned interface. It still felt as if he was operating a device, a machine, rather than becoming one with the suit. That was the single problem he still hadn’t completely licked, and if he didn’t then there was no way this was going to work.

It was a jungle in there, and he checked the gauges. Temperature was forty-three Celsius, humidity one hundred percent, which was easily seen by the clouds hanging halfway up the trees, the mist in the air, and the fact that any movement caused him to get wetter. People commonly made the mistaken assumption that it rained at a hundred percent. That would mean that a full glass overflowed. It started raining when you filled it over a hundred percent, but just at the maximum the water hung in the air. The suit, of course, simply registered it and then promptly forgot it once it analyzed the rain as common water, nothing more. There were a ton of trace elements, of course, as there always were, but they were safely ignored as none flagged anything in the suit’s extensive database.

Still, there was something wrong here. Pressure was okay, water was okay, that meant—

A huge leafy plant suddenly came alive and lunged at him, revealing a near endless mouth bounded by countless tendrils. The speed of the thing was incredible; it was practically swallowing him as he reacted, first by feeding a stiff electric jolt to the outer skin of the suit, and, when the plant shuddered but kept on swallowing, a slice and hack with hands that were turning to sharp machetes and going as much by sensors as anything else while the suit ingested a few cells of the plant’s mouth and did a rapid analysis. Unable to come up with a likely herbicide before it would be pointless, the suit suddenly sprouted long swordlike spikes from head to feet, extending them and digging into the plant, particularly inside the mouth. He applied power and began a rotation that, for a moment, caused the thing to shudder. Then it stopped him cold in a standoff. Damn! This thing was strong!

The suit did have power limits, since it also had to maintain a lot of other functions, but it was stronger than the flesh of the plant and, after a test of strength that went on for what seemed like several minutes, he finally felt the spikes start to give. His rotation resumed, in fits and starts, now tearing out chunks of the inside of the plant’s mouth. Quickly he shifted the spikes to sword edges, which began to move more rapidly, literally coring out the outer section of mouth. He fell back, then had to use his superhuman strength to lift the core off him and toss it.

Analysis showed the thing could be vaporized. His right arm became a small disruptor and he shot the thing, bathing it in a white-hot energy glow, watching it flare, then simply cease to exist except as a slightly smoldering mass of goo.

This was not a good start. He’d been slow to react; he’d had to command something to happen rather than simply thinking it so, so that precious seconds were lost that might have favored the plant, and he’d shown up his own weaknesses. And this was just the welcoming committee!

Now he looked around through full spectrum scan and saw signs that much of the jungle was a bit more alive than anybody would expect. The vines moved; the bushes quivered in anticipation, and although the trees looked like trees they probably were the brains of the operation.

Okay, let’s see. Fifty thousand volts for five seconds had merely irritated the thing, and it had the muscular strength of the suit, just not its supertough and self-repairing shell. Energy levels were still depressed slightly. Hell, you’d need a fucking singularity in your power supply to walk through this.

So it was best not to walk through it.

The magnetic field was actually fairly strong; data said it was certainly strong enough and uniform enough. He switched on the maglev and rose about three meters in the air. He might still be caught by those vines or other hidden things that might be in the trees—or the trees themselves—but at least he was just above where those wandering carnivorous bushes could jump. First problem solved, but not as easily as it should have been, and not without some power drain, which wasn’t serious because the a-suit would easily reset itself, but which was simply too much too soon. If he had to call on really power-draining equipment, he might not make it to the end. That, of course, was part of the exercise. The data monitor indicated that he had put in for a one-hour problem, and he still had fifty-three minutes to go.

The basic problem in this sort of scenario, if none was stated, was to find your way out without being killed, eaten, or captured by someone or something. There were also guarding, transporting, holding, and taking problems, but this seemed pretty straightforward just, well, as unpleasant a sim as they were supposed to be. The door he’d come through was closed and locked behind him and had already been effectively removed from his reality. There was another exit somewhere that could be reached and used within the time set by the problem, but that was all he got.

The machete was good enough to take care of the vines, which got so omnipresent that at least he achieved one goal: he began dealing with them snaking out of the trees and trying to lasso him without even thinking more about them.

He was beginning to feel very comfortable, and that was a bad sign. They were going to start throwing stuff at him any moment now.

“Hey, Eugene, wanna come out and play?” The call, sounding highly derisive and insulting, came to him telepathically. He wasn’t a telepath, nor was the sender, but one person in a suit could send to another pretty much as if they were.

“That you, Bambi?”

“That’s Barbara, asshole! 1 heard you were puttin’ in for hero. That ain’t no job for a Navy man! That’s a job for the Marines! ”

“Not this time, babe. This requires some fancy flying. I don’t think there’s much grunt work where I’m heading. ”

“Yeah, well, let’s see. Women make the better pilots, you know that. Faster reaction time for longer periods. So all you got is a dick I don’t need and muscles, and my suit’s bigger’n your suit, so there! See, I’m the wild card, Eugie. Ready or not, here I come!”

The suit reacted almost instantly: Enemy in range.

Relax, got to just relax, let it flow, he told himself. Let the suit do the work.

He wondered if she just happened to be training here and was delighted to take the bait or whether she’d waited for him. She was good, very good, at her job, and she knew it. But she’d always had a bug up her ass about him. She was not only a top soldier, she was damned good-looking, too, and she wasn’t used to being turned down by guys who looked pretty fair themselves, weren’t married, and were known to like girls. In her mind, everything was competition, everything was power, and she didn’t like to lose at any point.

It wasn’t rank or position—she was a Marine captain, he was a Navy warrant officer, and they were well within the fraternization zone of allowance. It was strictly a personal decision with him, one he’d never once wavered from in all his years of service. It was a decision learned the hard way, very young. Always fuck within the services, because the physiological effects of frequent genhole travel made you far less desirable, and groundlings far less understanding of what that meant. Never mind the lesions and tumorlike growths and discolorations, it was the total lack of any body hair that always got them, the result both of genhole travel and the wearing of these suits.