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

thighs.
    The instructor continued his military poetry reading, backed up with halo visuals. “The trooper suit is equipped to wield a standard M-74 rifle stowed in its right-arm weapons compartment. When placing your M-74 rifle in the weapons stowage compartment, be sure to place the switch in your rifle’s magazine well to ‘belt feed.’ That is the switch that they told you over and over again in basic never to use. You do use the switch in a suit.”
    The instructor paused while he played with the balaclava around his neck. Paul guessed the cold wind was getting to him, too. He spoke again, his tempo increasing.
    “The suit’s arm can hold eleven hundred rounds of 6.8 mm caseless, linked, standard, blank, armor-piercing, incendiary, tracer, or high-explosive, dual-purpose ammunition. Your suit’s halo or mission commander will select semiautomatic, five-round-burst, or full-automatic fire. Your weapon’s maximum rangein this configuration is 6,446 meters; maximum effective range is 2,100 meters, Earth-standard gravity.
    “In addition, there is an integral grenade launcher located underneath the weapons stowage port and beneath your arm. You can carry up to ten rounds of 40 mm HE-DP, smoke, infrared, or standard illumination, incapacitation gas, nerve-gas, or fléchette munitions.”
    Paul thought that was a lot of mayhem in just one arm. And they hadn’t even covered the other weapons attachment points yet.
    “Your left arm, if you chuckleheads were wondering, can be converted to hold an M-74 so that the operator can dual gun. However, doctrine calls for the left weapons storage compartment to hold a standard 9.5 mm M-3a1 handgun mounted with an integral 125-round drum magazine.
    “Doctrine also calls for the M-241 machine gun to be carried on the left shoulder mount, the M-35 recoilless rifle to be mounted on the right shoulder mount, and for the Mk29 automatic grenade launcher to be mounted on the back mount and used as a high-angle-of-fire weapon.
    “At this school, you will be familiarized with all five mounts and associated weapons systems, but your eventual assigned weapon will be issued by your gaining units. So don’t get attached to any of them but your M-74.”
    The instructor raised that eyebrow again and panned for laughs. In the wind and wet, none were forthcoming from the miserable troopers.
    Despite the tooth-chattering cold, Paul was impressed—by the Suit, that is, not the instructor and his lame jokes. Paul thought the instructor was a douche bag with a nice warm house to go back to.
    “The M-15 Armored Combat Suit has hands whose motion mimics your hands. They are the most delicate feature of your suit. The hands can, with sufficient practice, pet your favorite cat—or smash its head to a pulp. We willspend one day doing nothing but practicing handling fragile objects with the suit’s hands.”
    The instructor didn’t bother with any lame jokes this time.
    “Your suit’s feet and legs are powerful enough to kick through a brick wall. However, there is a pain feedback system wired into the suit that enables you to use the features of the suit intuitively. If you do something that begins to stress the suit’s materials or systems, you, as the operator, will feel the suit’s pain.
    “Like I said,” the instructor added, “suit control is intuitive. Some things, though, can only be learned through experience.”
    Two weeks later, Paul was moving in overwatch by squad bounds. To an aerial observer, it looked like two groups of ten suits abreast leapfrogging each other, careful not to “mask” each other’s fires. Paul had learned that the military called any type of projectile or projected weapons “fires,” which was a lot better understanding than he had had a mere sixteen weeks earlier.
    Paul had gotten used to the tingling feeling he got when putting on his suit over his cams—kind of like putting on a civvy halo, but it took place over his whole body, as the suit synched