John Steakley - Armor

“Now spring the door,” I urged him. I didn’t want to wait an instant for them to recover.

Holly nodded. He keyed the switch for “open.” That’s all it took. I snarled at him as I raced forward. He laughed and stumbled along behind.

The Plan was for me to rash out ahead to find cover. Then I would support Holly’s exit against any resistance that might be left from the first blast. Holly could thereafter support my charge down the hill over the ridge.

We never had a prayer.

The blast had done its job well enough. There was no sign of the front chamber except for the huge chunks of masonry scattered about. As I leaped forward to the first boulder-sized one, however, I knew it was over.

They were waiting at the ridge, safe and secure and already firing, already filling the air with the arcing grenades. I spun around to yell at Holly to stop! “Stay where you are! Holly! I’m coming back in….”

But then it was too late. The first blasts hit and we both went down. I saw him slammed against a jagged cornice and lay stunned. I tried crawling toward him but then the air was full of blue beams and dust from the blasts. I felt a surge of heat along my thigh and jerked it out of the open. I couldn’t get across the open space to him. I was cut off. But he was exposed! He was open to their fire and the blasts, without any protection at all but a difficult angle up from the ridge.

The ridges. The other side opened up about then. And then from two sides the air was filled with beams and grenades and dust and slamming rocking noise. I tried crawling back to him, curled up around myself to ward off the dust and rock that rattled against the surrounding rubble. But it was no good. No way to get back without being struck by the flying shards. No way to stay. No way to do anything. So I crawled and stumbled forward and things crashed into me, cutting and tearing and crushing and I yelled to Holly that I was sorry, sorry, so sorry that I wasn’t going to make it to help him, I was dying and sorry and Holly? Can you hear me?

Suddenly moving quickly, sliding roughly across the broken stones. Holly? But Holly was there beside me, sliding along parallel and… What the hell? I strained to lift my head, to see who had us by our collars. But then he no longer did. We were inside the second room once more and he had dropped us flopping on the floor and turned to re-seal the door.

It was Lewis. It was the drunk. He was sober. I remembered the hatch.

He didn’t bother to take us all the way back to the Control-room table. He left us lying where we were and used the medical supplies stacked against the wall.

“Lewis?” asked Holly suddenly.

I turned, surprised and delighted to see he was still alive. “Holly! You made it!”

He grinned, winced from the pain. “Why not? You did,” he asked.

Then we both laughed.

Lewis did not. He didn’t speak at all, in fact. He tended to us in grim silence, darting back and forth from body to body with grips and packs and an air of urgency. We weren’t much help. Too tired and too hurt and, come to think of it, too amazed at being alive.

When it was over and we were going to live for another short while, he sat us up against the wall and gave us some water. Then he hauled over a chair and sat down and lit a cigarette and looked at us with that same grim expression, of a parent furious with naughty children, and asked: “Why?”

Holly tried to tell him. About Borglyn using mortars on the Cityfolk again and again and about how horrible that was and what it meant. About how Borglyn would be so hated now that he would have to be even more brutal later on and how, no, we didn’t think we could beat him exactly, but slowing him down would surely mean something….

He interrupted once. In a cold tone he nodded at me. “All this for you, too?”

I nodded, feeling strangely embarrassed.

Holly seemed embarrassed, too. He went on, really wanting Lewis to understand.

“It has to be done, Lewis.”

Lewis sighed. “It always does, Holly. That’s no reason to do it.”

“But all those people!”

“What about them?”

Holly frowned, stuck. He turned to me. But I couldn’t think either. He turned back to Lewis.

“Lewis, there just isn’t anyone else? Can’t you see that?”

He stood up, walked a couple of steps. He puffed a puff. He looked down at us. “Shouldn’t that tell you something?”

Holly faced him. “I just didn’t see any way out, Lewis. I still don’t.”

Lewis frowned. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t,” replied Holly in an odd tone.

I looked at him. Tears were starting from his eyes. I shook my head. What the hell was going on?

And then Lewis was there, right in front of us and crouched down and peering at us with eyes I didn’t know he possessed and he said: “You can’t? Neither of you? You don’t see any way out?”

We shook our heads. And then Holly said, in a calm clear voice: “There isn’t one.”

Lewis dropped his face into his hands. He rubbed it hard.

But then, when he lifted it back up, the grimness had gone. It was replaced with… what? Reckless abandon?

He smiled. “I was afraid you’d say that.”

Then he stood up and stripped off his jumpsuit. He was naked underneath. I heard a groan behind me. I looked and saw that Holly was openly crying now. He must have known then.

But I didn’t until Lewis walked naked to the far corner of the room and did something that only one human creature in all the universe could do. He touched his open palm to that of the black suit—and it opened.

Felix.

It couldn’t be.

“I want to know how come you’re not dead!” I demanded idiotically.

Lewis/Felix laughed. It was that same carefree abandon as before. Then he winked at me. “You got a couple of minutes?” he asked, indicating the door to the outside.

That wasn’t what I meant. I said so. Holly helped. He asked about Kent.

“Kent’s dead,” was the uncarefree reply.

“I know that. He died on Banshee. But what I…”

“He didn’t die on Banshee. He died on the Terra .”

We looked at each other. I went this time. “Lew… Felix? Is it Felix?”

He nodded. “Of course.”

“We thought Kent killed you.”

He frowned. “He saved me. They killed him.”

“Who?”

“Fleet,” he said in a dead voice and knelt down to fiddle with the suit. It had sprung, spread-eagled open, off the wheelchair onto the floor.

In a hurried voice, Holly told him what we meant, why we had thought what we thought. When he got to the part about immersing, Felix cringed.

“You really did that? You went through the whole thing with me?”

Holly said we had. “Except between drops. But everything in the suit.”

Felix shuddered. “Still…” He shuddered again, made an effort to regain his former humor. “I hope you guys had more fun than I did,” he said and laughed.

We didn’t know what to say. We didn’t want to say anything. But we had to know. Holly told him about being there when Kent had struck him and then everything going blank, the Alpha readings dropping out of sight.

Felix smiled. “I can see your problem. But all that happened was that Kent popped my suit when he hit me. I guess he was afraid I would struggle or something. As if it would have made any difference. Damn! but that man was strong.”

We nodded, watching in silence as he continued to both talk and work the suit.

“Then he put me in a ship. It was… He’d stolen it from someone I…”

“From Allie?” Holly prompted.

Felix looked at him, surprised. Then he nodded slowly. “That’s right. You know everything. The whole story.”