John Steakley - Armor

“I don’t care about it, goddamnit! You hear me? I don’t care! And I ain’t fighting ants any goddamned more! Fuck Earth, anyway!”

Felix stood up. He looked in the direction of the explosion, at the distant and majestic spire. He smiled. He was no longer alone.

He began to run toward the west. Toward the Knuckle.

The bands were jammed with a hopeless overload of garbled voices. There were frantic exchanges between warriors, impatient officers’ directives, sergeants’ flat commands. Underlying each was a growing tone of panic. It had been a sporadic chord when Felix first detected it. Now he heard it everywhere—a faint coating.

War sounds were also constant, rumbling, thundering waves of noise occasionally punctuated by another of those heart-stopping blasts that had first told him where he was. After each of these, the chattering would cease for several seconds. And despite himself, Felix would each time envision all having been killed by it. Then, seconds later, the chattering would begin again, a little more desperately.

He was homed in on the center of the transmissions, a point just south of the Knuckle. He had to stop often to check his bearings, for the terrain had made anything resembling a straight approach impossible. A seemingly endless series of eroded gulleys and draws produced what amounted to a maze of narrow alleys between random groupings of walls five meters high. There was no pattern to either level or direction. And there were many dead ends.

He had just completed another bearing check when he noticed he was no longer alone.

Two warriors stood shoulder to shoulder in a clearing a few meters in front of him. Felix stared at them, too delighted with their very existence to speak. By the time he had gathered his wits enough to call out, one of them was already speaking.

“Don’t try to stop us,” said a man’s nervous voice.

It was the last thing he would have expected to hear. He took an instinctive step toward them, then stopped. There was something wrong with these two. They seemed to edge away from him, like children, like schoolboys caught…. And then he had it: deserters.

“Don’t try to stop us,” said the nervous voice again.

“All right,” replied Felix dully.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” said a second voice, equally as strident as the first.

“Then don’t,” answered Felix blandly.

The two exchanged glances, then stared at him some more. They were privates, he saw from their markings. They began to ease by him slowly, not trusting him.

“Don’t try anything,” warned the first.

“All right.”

“We don’t want to fight you,” said the second.

“Fine.”

“We’re going now,” said the first.

“Where?”

For just an instant, they hesitated and Felix thought he had gotten through to them. But then they were gone around a bend and out of sight.

“Where?” he asked again. “Where will you go? This is Banshee!”

There was no reply.

He keyed a dose of stimule into his system. He had had another less than an hour before, but suddenly he felt very weary.

* * * * *

The war sounds increased as he grew nearer. The great blasts had continued as well. The floors of the gulleys were being filled by the cascades of sand pouring down from atop the shaken walls. He must be getting very close. He leapt easily over a particularly large deposit and hurried down the widening passage beyond. And then he was surrounded by perhaps a dozen warriors stomping past him from the opposite direction. He held out a hand to stop them. A heavy warrior’s glove slapped it away.

“Get out of the way, damn you,” shouted someone. “Can’t you see the beacon?” The group disappeared the way he had come without slowing.

Dismally, Felix considered the possibility that the entire assault force was now composed of deserters running away from this battle only to encounter, inevitably, more fighting. Each would, in turn, flee from the new battle, only to run into another and another. For where, on a hostile planet, can a warrior desert to?

He noticed the Transit Beacon for the first time. Beacon? Why, he wondered, would they run away from that? Transit was the only way home. He raced off toward the source, the way he had been headed all along.

He dashed around a corner of the maze and collided head-on with something coming the other way. It was another black suit.

“Come on! Get up!” cried the other scout, a woman. She grabbed his shoulders and tugged.

Felix leapt to his feet unaided. “Go on, if you want,” he said disgustedly. “I won’t tell anyone.”

“Huh?” asked the other scout, genuinely puzzled. “Tell who? What?”

“Never mind,” Felix answered, starting off again toward the beacon.

The scout stopped him with a gloved hand on his arm.

“Are you crazy?” she asked.

He shook his arm free. “Are you?” he retorted angrily.

A split-second before the shock hit them, he saw it coming.

And then he was flying sideways in the air against the side of one of the embankments which was already crumbling as he hit it. Great chunks of sand fell down upon him, covering him. He struck out wildly, shoving at the sand, trying desperately to keep from being buried, from disappearing beneath it forever, trapped and held by Banshee herself, for her children the ants and more sand fell on him and around him and the ground trembled with a terrible sense of fragility and then it was over.

He sat on the floor of the gulley, buried in sand to his waist. Directly in front of him, the other scout’s helmet bobbed abruptly into view with a hissing rush of sand. Felix got to his feet and helped dig the rest of her out.

“What was that?” he asked.

“Another goddamn tank. What else?” she replied bitterly.

“A tank…? he repeated dully.

She looked at him closely. “Don’t you know?” she asked. “Where’ve you… Uh-oh! Another beacon.”

Felix saw it on his own holo. The beacon was quite near this time.

“Damn!” she exclaimed. “It’s right on top of us! Come on!” She made a step in the direction she had been traveling before—away from the source.

Felix hesitated, bewildered.

“Move!” she commanded desperately and he found that he was already moving with her, blindly following.

They raced down several passages, careening wildly around corners, bouncing off walls, until they slammed together against the solid bank of a narrow cul-de-sac.

“Shit!” she spat bitterly. “Another dead-en….”

This blast was closer. It was much worse. They thudded back and forth against the walls of the cul-de-sac like insects shaken in a bottle. The walls swayed, warped, bowed outward at them… but held. They were not buried.

It took him a moment to clear his head. He found her on hands and knees at the base of the wall across from him.

“What the hell is that?” he demanded.

She raised her helmet slowly to eye level and regarded him for a beat. Then: “You really don’t know?” she asked in a quiet, thoughtful, tone. “Where have you …? Who are you?”

“Felix. A-team.”

She sat up. “A-team? We thought they were all dead.”

“They are.”

“Huh? But you just… Oh. You’re it, huh?”

“Yeah.” He paused, seeing it all, briefly, once more. “Tell me about the tanks.”

She straightened, rose slowly to her feet. “The ants get the Transit Beacon somehow. They home in on it. I don’t know what this is they’re using. Not like their mortars, obviously. Some kind, of rocket, maybe. They don’t have any exhaust, though. I’ve seen ’em. More like a streamer….

“Anyway, we all run like hell when we see the beacon indicators ’cause we know what’s about to happen. Now you do, too. The Hammer is about to fall.”