John Steakley - Armor

“Oh, shit. I hope not.”

“Afraid of becoming noble?” he asked, his eyes twinkling.

“That, too. But basically, that’s the worst reason I can think of for killing. That it’s the right thing to do. You kill out of outrage or fury or to keep from dying or something like it, that’s fine. Hell, kill them rather than bother with them—or be bothered by them. But if you’re killing them because it’s the ‘right thing to do,’ it’s only because you’ve done so many wrong things up until then to make that spot. It’s not the right thing to do. It’s the best of the last of your choices.”

“That’s the longest I’ve ever heard you talk at one time.”

“That’s because you never ask me about my hair.”

Later, I asked Holly about the eaves. He said fine. We set the last of the charges as the first bunch appeared from the right. I leaned out the hatch and shot one of them. The others flattened against the wall, out of range. Holly was all for blowing it right then. But I wanted to wait for the left-handers to show up, too.

When the first blaze-bomb rattled at us from the right, I acceded. Holly keyed the charge from the control room so we could see it better. It got everyone of them. But it kept falling and rolling, great chunks cascading over and over. When it had finished, we had a ridge of debris from the Dome to the river. It was five meters high at it’s highest point.

“We’ve cut them off!” announced Holly with a cheer.

“No. They’ll blow it open. But it got their attention.”

We blew the second on the grounds that no one could be that stupid. It made another ridge. All the way to the river. Hot damn.

So ended the second attack.

Things started happening pretty fast after that.

The trouble was, the whole thing had been damn near a blur all along. From the beginning when the squirrel woke me up to Wice to… no more Wice and then no more Crusaders and then no me for a couple of hours. To crazy Borglyn to crazy Holly.

Now crazy me.

They came in the third wave moments later. They came to the ridges we had made by blowing the eaves down the hill. They didn’t blast them, though. They just stood behind them, out of sight and out of range, and threw things at us. They didn’t bother with catapults or launchers. They hauled out the people wearing that open-air armor. Their artificial muscles were plenty. They threw concussion grenades and blaze-bombs, which I had expected. And smoke, which I had not. Idiot.

They had us anyway. We had no place to go. Only one place from which to fight back. The smoke wouldn’t hide us from them. But they could use it. And they did.

“Get ready to blow this first one!” I yelled to Holly as the first half-dozen blasts rocketed masonry along the front wall.

“Can’t we wait?” Holly yelled back gamely, running to another cannon console.

“No!” I screamed back. “No! We can’t stay in this for-wardroom! We’ve gotta go back to…”

“Look! They’re coming up at us!” he said, ignoring my cussing and firing away with the cannon.

But the smoke bombs hit then, cutting off most of our effectiveness. And then the first of the grenades hit, rocking us back and rocking the wall itself. Through the dust and smoke coming in I saw it waffling back and forth on either side of the gash. It was crumbling and warping and shaking….

And then coming at us as something hit it just right and a five-meter-wide section just folded back, just lifted up and folded back from the gash toward us. We were already down, blasted down and bouncing, me screaming for Holly to get back, goddammit, before…

Too late. That section of wall, folding and crumpling and collapsing, disintegrated from the force of another blast and then those pieces blew apart from the force of another and then one of those smaller pieces—a tiny one no larger than me—shot forward across the floor and over him.

“Holly!!”

And I leaped forward to help him, to get him back and get him away from the commandos I knew damn well would be coming up the hill from those ridges through the smoke. More grenades and blaze-bombs and then blazers and then hand-to-hand with that… Damn! With the ones wearing armor!

“Holly!” I screamed again and tried to get through the smoke and the blasts that wouldn’t stop coming, wouldn’t stop shaking me and throwing me about. The chunks of wall were rolling through now, from the gash and the inside of the wall and from the ceiling, falling and smacking horribly close by—

“Holly!” Then there he was beside me, the blood streaming and he lifted his head and gave me sort of a half-smile that he was all right but he damn well wasn’t and I cussed at him or maybe at me and then they hit us face-to-face.

I shot one. Two-four-five. The cases of grenades were there and I grabbed and threw with such urgency and terror that I didn’t bother to key them to blast, just threw them and heard them scream and saw them drop back out of sight. Then I had a second and I used it to key the next batch of three or four. I tossed the rifle to the side and grabbed for Holly. He moaned as I lifted him off the floor but there wasn’t anything I could do about that right then. The people outside hadn’t thought we were still in there that close and they were sure to drop back and throw much, much more.

And then the blasts were there, right there, at the area almost directly in front of the gash. Soon they would be coming all the way through. I tightened my grip on Holly’s shoulder, ignoring his cries, and hauled him back, stumbling, toward the next inner door. We were almost there, almost through it all the way, when two or three or a thousand seemed to hit all at once and the blast threw us forward, punching us limply through the air and the doorway. I heard Holly scream again, knew what must be happening to him, felt the hurtling chunks rake across my back and shoulders. A small something tore across the back of my neck as I lifted up to key the door shut and sealed and safe. The blood, the screams and the pain, the pains….

The door slammed shut, locked, and sealed itself automatically. For the moment, it was over.

Holly screamed as I dragged him the length of the second room to the Control room. The screams were strident and searing and they echoed off the floors and the ceiling and those beams. I ignored them and got him into the Control room and up onto the hospital table and slapped a medigrip on the worst of the spots, his broken-shattered leg where the bone was white and stark. Then I did something to put him out. He went. Then I collapsed.

I was thinking of the funeral.

The funeral. The one with presidents and ministers and secretaries of this or that, representing these or those, all decked out and solemn in black and respect. It was the biggest funeral ever, somebody had said. Everyone who was anyone, everywhere that was anywhere, had somebody, a Somebody, in attendance. Nobody wanted to miss the funeral.

It was Kent’s funeral.

Like most people I had watched it. It had been carried on the Fleet beam, no less, and perhaps had the largest audience for any event in history. Such a man! Such a hero! Everybody’s Hero! I had felt pretty much the same way. I hadn’t known any better.

What a man….

Funny the things you think about when you’re tired and scared and only have a second or two to rest.

Which was all I had. Half stimules and half painers, I had managed to get Holly and me pretty much fixed up. Medigrips and medipacks everywhere over the cuts and contusions and abrasions. There was a disquieting, and possibly crucial, amount of blood over us. But I figured we would live until they killed us.