End of the Line by Hill Travis

Author:Hill, Travis [Hill, Travis]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Travis Hill
Published: 2015-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

***

Two days later, as we were discussing plans to suit up and continue on, Lowell’s suit shut down in the middle of a maintenance check.

“Shit fuck goddamn motherfucker bitch cocksucker!” he screamed, losing his cool in front of us.

He stepped back from his suit, then charged it with a flying kick, knocking the CR-31 over into the dirt. When he turned toward us, I sensed that he’d lost it for good. If not at this very moment, it was coming soon.

“Come on,” I said, tugging at Goldman’s sleeve, stepping between Sergeant Lowell and his suit before he flipped completely out and decided to pump it full of plasma from his rifle.

The specialist and I righted Lowell’s suit and spent a few seconds checking it to see if it would reactivate. I wasn’t an expert mechanic or diagnostic tech when it came to a CR-31 combat suit, but I’d been lodged inside one for weeks at a time over the last few years. I felt disoriented trying to work with the HUD controls from outside of the suit. A blue initialization light began to glow, even though I hadn’t actually done anything to the suit other than get a headache from looking at it.

“Sarge, she’s got some life in her,” Goldman said.

Lowell walked up to the suit, giving the two of us wary looks as if we’d planned to trick him somehow. He peeked into the helmet, saw the light, now joined by three more, and stepped back.

“Okay,” he said, his voice calm. “I apologize for that outburst. I’m sorry. It’s bad for morale to see your CO wig out.”

“No sweat, Sarge,” Jordan said. “I’d have dropped a grenade in the motherfucker if it shut down on me like that.”

Lowell only nodded, as if Jordan’s reply seemed perfectly reasonable. The sergeant’s face watched the suit go through its startup sequence. When the CR-31’s sensors detected that a human wasn’t present within the suit, it beeped three times and went into standby mode.

“What the fuck?” Lowell asked. Most of us shrugged when he looked around. “Lofgren, help me get into this bastard bitch son of a whore.”

I laughed at his sudden grin and stepped forward to keep the suit steady while he secured himself.

“I’m not stuffing these fucking tubes inside me,” he declared, as if we’d all been giving him accusatory stares that he was forgetting something important. “I don’t care if this fucker never turns back on again. I want at least another day or two of not having to experience that kind of torture.”

I’m not sure why the six of us stood around watching Sergeant Lowell go through the initial startup sequence in his suit. It felt like we were all waiting for the suit to explode, or maybe just catch fire. Maybe we were scared that the suit would malfunction again, once and for all, and if we stood near it, our collective willpower would somehow keep that from happening. My thoughts centered more on how Sergeant Lowell would be truly screwed if his suit decided to conk out for good.

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