“You have just ejected yourself into space. Is there something I can help you with?” the suit’s female voice asked me with a hint of reproach.
“Plot a course to Kacke avoiding detection,” I told the suit. There was a pause.
“Whilst this suit is capable in both terrestrial and extraterrestrial environments, atmospheric entry into terran-type worlds, especially ones with extreme weather patterns is not recommended… Scanning for alternative routes to the planet… Calculating… Your current location is in an embargoed zone. No routes found.… Calculating… The following flight path is the least dangerous option and has a 65% chance of success with a 10% chance of catastrophic failure.”
I examined the route the suit brought up, it was rather less direct than the one I’d planned to take which had been to go straight down and head south until I hit some sign of civilisation… Or civilisation came up and hit me.
“Very well, engage.”
“Engaging. Flight time will be… approximately… Four hours.” I felt the push of hard acceleration as the suit’s arms and legs locked and the suit powered towards its destination.
Slowly the planet got larger, and as the distance from the planet’s surface approached 100km, the suit decelerated sharply, slipping smoothly into the atmosphere with barely a shudder.
I sped high across the planet’s surface at a leisurely Mach 2, gradually losing height, heading directly towards an ominous dark whirlpool of cloud on the equator, hundreds of kilometres wide and lit by lightning flashes. This was a big storm, even by Jeckon standards.
“Suit, shouldn’t you be avoiding that hurricane?” I asked.
“Weather not found, would you like to install weather?” the suit asked.
“Umm, what? Yes, yes, install.” I said as we hurtled towards the storm.
“Installing… Unable to install… Using an Imperial Arms FYT suit in a breathable atmosphere is banned under twenty-seven galactic treaties. Please have your purchasing agent contact Imperial Arms for the complete list of restrictions on using the FYT suit.” the suit said in a different voice sounding way too smug for my liking.
“Fuck. Enable manual control.” I shouted wondering why there were so many treaties and how many of them had been signed due to my past actions.
“Manual control enabled.” The suit said and lurched sickeningly as I tried to find out which controls did what and found them both inverted and reversed from the galactic standard.
“Would you like to take a quick tutorial on controlling this suit in an atmosphere?” The soothing female voice asked.
“I can do that in this situation?”
“Installing tutorial…. Unable to install. Using an Imperial Arms FYT suit in a breathable atmosphere is banned under twenty-seven galactic treaties. Please have your purchasing agent…”
“Suit, shut the fuck up and let me concentrate,” I yelled as I wrestled with the suit controls as the storm filled my field of view. “Actually, set controls to Galactic Standard.”
“Setting Controls… Unable to comply…. Using an Imperial Arms FYT suit in a breathable atmosphere is banned under twenty-seven galactic treaties. Please have your purchasing agent contact Imperial Arms for the complete list of restrictions on using the FYT suit.”
It was now too late to turn and avoid the whirling storm clouds of doom without subjecting myself to horrific g-forces. Suddenly I was flying blind, relying on the suit’s basic instruments to keep me straight and level while the storm treated me like a leaf in a blender. Throttling back made things worse, then the wind spun me out of control and it took me nearly a minute to restore some semblance of control during which time I was hit by lightning enough times to make it feel like the storm had a personal grudge against me.
I was unharmed but the suit wasn’t happy. Red lights that I didn’t have time to look at were flashing, a persistent alarm was sounding in my ear and the display was flickering enough to give me a headache.
Then the clouds cleared and directly ahead of me were a series of sharp black and white peaks.
“Altitude warning, impact Imminent. Please take immediate evasive action,” the suit’s female voice said calmly over the alarm which I realised wasn’t a malfunction but the suit trying to tell me it was about to hit the ground.
“Enable autopilot,” I yelled.
“Unable to comply…. Using an Imperial Arms FYT suit in a breathable atmosphere is banned under twenty-seven galactic treaties. Please have your purchasing agent contact Imperial Arms for the complete list of restrictions on using the FYT suit.”
“Well fuck you too, suit,” I yelled mentally preparing a route through the jagged peaks.
“Unable to comply…. Using an Imperial Arms FYT suit in a breathable atmosphere is banned under twenty-seven galactic treaties. Please have your purchasing agent contact Imperial Arms for the complete list of restrictions on using the FYT suit.”
“Alarm off,” I shouted. To my surprise, the suit complied and I threaded my way through the peaks like the professional drop pilot I had been a lifetime ago. I whooped in triumph before taking stock of my surroundings.
I was flying down one side of a massive U-shaped valley, a glacier beneath me, the sides of the valley towering above me and I suddenly felt very small. I angled my trajectory away from the valley side and the full force of the storm hit me, flinging me across the valley. I might have recovered but at that moment I was struck by lightning. I desperately fought with the suit’s suddenly unresponsive controls and as they came back online I overcorrected the wrong way.
I just had time to see the valley side approaching at a frightening speed before the suit forced me into a foetal position. A fraction of a second before I impacted there was a muted explosion. As crash landing impacts went, this was a relatively soft one and I guessed the suit had deployed some sort of airbag, the aftermath, however, went on for a hell of a long time, long enough for me to get really fed up being thrown about, the glimpses of the black and white landscape only serving to disorient me further. Finally, though, with a final bone-rattling thud, I came to a stop. Slowly and painfully, the suit released me from its foetal position until I was lying on my back. Above me, storm clouds whirled as gusts of wind buffeted the suit.
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“Emergency protocols enabled… Suit systems compromised… Self Repairing Systems enabled… Your designated recovery service has been contacted and will be with you shortly… Scanning you for injuries,” there was a faint buzzing in my nether regions, “No serious or life-threatening injuries detected… You are in a potentially hazardous location and attempting to move may cause damage to this suit or yourself… You have been sedated until help arrives… Please relax.”
“No. Cancel sedation!” I yelled, suddenly feeling very tired. I shut my eyes, just for a moment.
***
I opened my eyes. Above me, I could see a cloudless blue sky above the black walls of the valley.
“Fuck,” I swore.
“An agent of your designated recovery service has arrived. Suit functionality is limited to ground use only. Please do not attempt to fly or jump more than ten metres. Please allow a few minutes for the sedative to wear off.”
An orange cigar shape floated across my view, taking the view of the sky away from me. Beneath the giant orange cigar hung what looked for all the world like a couple of large shipping containers attached to a complete battleship bridge module. It took a few seconds to process what I was looking at and a couple of seconds more to remember I was on Jeckon. Only on Jeckon would anyone fill a bag with helium, strap it to one of the most advanced pieces of technology humanity had ever possessed, bolt a couple of shipping containers to it for storage and call it transport… And, probably, home.
“Secure channel communication connecting… connected.”
“Commander, are you there?” a young-sounding, Jekon-accented female voice whispered.
“Either that or I’m experiencing a really shit afterlife. Is that your big orange bag of air above me?” There was the sound of a nervous giggle being suppressed.
“Well… not mine, I’ve persuaded the current owners there’s some valuable salvage here and they are here to collect.”
“I suppose they want the suit for rescuing me?” I said, unhappy about this development.
“They want the suit but they have no intention of rescuing anyone. These are not nice people. Is the suit working?” the voice hissed. I checked the display.
“Yes, tell them they can have it when they pry it from my cold dead body.”
“I was so hoping you’d say that. There are three of them coming down with me, all in orange EVA suits. Two are armed with laser blasters, and one has a projectile rifle. I’m the one in white. There is one still on the airship but none of them are expecting trouble… Not from you.”
“What about you?” I asked.
“Once I give them access to the suit I think they are going to kill me… We’re nearly here, wait for me to signal. Gotta go.” the voice said, a slight quaver betraying the fact she didn’t normally do this kind of thing.
“Lt Surex has connected you to a public channel,” the suit announced
“Fucking snow, this better be fucking worth it,” a male voice complained over coms.
“Well there it is, Doesn’t look like much. Are you sure it’s an FYT suit?” another male voice asked.
“If it’s in one piece, it's an FYT suit, or something very similar,” my ally replied, sounding confident.
“I have a bad feeling about this. FYT suits don’t just fall from the sky,” a female voice said.
“They do if I tell them to,” my ally said.
“Let’s just get this done, get the loot and get out of here. I don’t want to be here longer than necessary, we’re at a far higher altitude than I’m happy taking this airbag,” an older-sounding male voice said, the clearness of his transmission revealing that he was the one on the airship.
“Okay, you two grab the shoulders and drag it to the lift. It’ll be easier to open there,” my ally ordered.
“You don't tell us what to do. Open it here,” the complainer growled as someone knocked on my helmet.
“Open up you dumb suit,” someone said as an orange helmeted head appeared over me then recoiled back, “fuck me, there’s a body in there.” Two orange helmeted heads appeared and peered into my visor. I smiled at them and sat up as slowly as I could in approved zombie fashion realising I really needed to pee. I had no intention of ruining my posh new suit so I was going to have to deal with this quickly.
“Boo,” I said and flung my arms out, hitting the two figures with every bit of power the suit’s exoskeleton could muster. They both went flying across the snow in opposite directions. Three metres in front of me, the third member of the airship’s crew was staggering backwards, knee-deep in the snow, and unslinging their projectile rifle. In one bound I was upon them, I rippled the rifle from their grasp and brought my fist down on the suit’s helmet which burst like an overripe watermelon.
From behind me, there was the sound of blaster fire. I spun around, rifle at the ready only to see my ally neatly shooting one of our opponents in the chest with a compact blaster. They went down and we both turned to where the last of our opponents lay in a pool of blood, shockingly red against the snow. No one could lose that much blood and still be alive.
“What’s going on down there? Is everything taken care of?” the last remaining crew member asked.
“The bitch is playing hard to get,” I answered in a rough approximation of one of his crew mates.
“Fucking hell Geoff, don’t bother playing with her. Grab the suit and let’s get out of here. It ain’t as if she’s gonna do anything but die up here.”
I looked at my ally, her formerly immaculate white suit splattered with blood. She just stood there, blaster held loosely at her side. I jumped over to her and pointed up to the airship. She stared at me, still frozen in shock. I sighed, picked her up and put her under my arm then jumped over the snow to where a battered, yellow lift, connected to the airship by four wires, stood waiting. I pressed the up button, dropping my ally on the rust-stained floor of the lift.
The lift rose painfully slowly and my need to pee increased with every passing second. I got tired of waiting, and, estimating I was ten metres from the crudely cut opening of the starboard shipping container, jumped up into the hole to find myself in a dimly lit space half-filled with crates of various sizes covered in frost. To my left, another crude hole had been hacked in the container to line up with the airlock door of the bridge module.
Without ceremony, I used the emergency manual controls to open the airlock and stepped inside. The final remaining crew member was sat in the Captain’s chair. His feet resting on the control panel, the main screen in front of him dark. He turned and gasped in horror at the two-and-a-half-metre-tall apparition in front of him. I dropped the rifle, grabbed him by the throat, dragged him through to the shipping container and threw him screaming out the left hole. Halfway down he bounced off the lift, provoking a scream from my ally before he landed in the snow and was still.
I stumbled back into the bridge module, jumped out of the suit and slapped the open button to the bathroom. Nothing happened. I looked around me, suddenly realising the module wasn’t even powered up.
I swore and returned to the suit, pinged the release to the groin-mounted power connector and dragged the cable over to the engineering console where I located the main power socket and plugged it in. There are many processes involved in powering up a bridge module and I ignored every one of them, merely flipping the big green ON switch. Lots of lights came on, quite a few of them flashing red, and several alarms started beeping insistently. I ignored them all for the green light of the bathroom door.