In the Valley by Jason Lambright Read Free Book Online Page A

tiredly. I’ll bet he goes home to a nice, warm little place every night.
    “After being subjected to power rundown, a suit needs either to be exposed for twelve hours to uninterrupted sunlight or spend two hours attached to the M-118 recharger on trickle charge. It is not recommended to recharge the suit faster than that because of possible thermal runaway issues with the batteries.”
    Thermal runaway issues? That didn’t sound good to Paul. In fact, seeing the hulking suit sitting there with its operator’s hatches sprung open, this whole military thing was striking him as a fantastically bad idea in general. Oh why, oh why, he thought, did I have to get into a snit about Rhoda going into the forces. Even his father’s nagging took on a better light.
    Looking around the windswept tumbleweed range, Paul was starting to feel positively jealous of a life as a drone mechanic, for example. He was cold, and the insides of the suit looked like Death to him. Thermal runaway? Hell!
    He must have missed something because the instructor was giving him the fish eye while he continued his soliloquy about “All Things Armored Suit.”
    “Operator interface with the suit is completely intuitive. I could prop a ten-year-old of the suitable physical parameters in this device here, and he could button up and go for a stroll, just like that. In fact, modified versions of this suit have been used for centuries in the construction field or to allow a severely handicapped man to walk—assuming, of course, that he was resistant to other types of therapy. In fact, I’ll bet one of you soldiers have used a suit before.”
    He cast his eyes around the crowd. He looked right at Sherkarchi. “Sherkarchi, I see from your records that you have used an MkVb materials mover before. Why don’t you tell the class why an untrained operator is better off not using a suit?”
    Poor Bob Sherkarchi looked like he was about to fall through the floor. He mumbled, “Instructor, if you don’t know exactly what you are doing in a specialty suit, you shouldn’t use one.”
    The instructor looked at Sherkarchi like a bird eyeing a particularly tasty worm. “Can you be more specific, perhaps?”
    Bob turned beet red. He flashed all of our halos an image of an overbalanced materials-mover suit falling on its side, its load of sewage pipes crashing to the ground and rolling into his employer’s ground-car. A younger Bob popped out of the suit and ran as his employer chased after him, yelling.
    The students chuckled and gave Bob some catcalls and general good-natured ribbing. The instructor cleared his throat to silence us and raised his eyebrow.
    “Very good, Sherkarchi. We now know how you ended up in the force infantry. More importantly, his example shows us why the laws of physics still apply to an augmented human in a suit. Force equals mass times acceleration, right? The mass of Sherkarchi’s suit could not withstand the acceleration of gravity upon his poorly balanced load of pipes, which applied a rotational forcethat toppled his suit—resulting in the termination of his employment at the Mexico City Department of Public Works.”
    The instructor stopped. He looked around. He spoke again.
    “Only, here, soldiers, you will not be dropping a load of pipes. You will be carrying mission-essential equipment for your squad. If you make a bad decision, your suit will fail, and the mission may fail because of your lack of training and judgment.” Another pause. “The Forces will provide you with training, rest assured. And in your twenty weeks here, perhaps you will learn judgment as well.”
    Paul looked around at his peers. He too hoped the guys around him would learn judgment, but he had serious doubts.
    The wind picked up; gray clouds scudded across the October sky. Paul’s behind, pinned against the cold concrete, was going completely numb—but not without hurting a lot first, an uncomfortable pins-and-needles feeling creeping up his