May 14, 2013

First, she collected the identag from the bank box, holding it in her hand as she walked, the alien plastic warming as she moved through the city. Next, she changed in a women's commode on the edge ove the Trade Quarter, changing out her yayliq for an abaya and a jhundi covering her face.

A boutique catering to prostitutes was her next stop, a woman covered in cloth entered a dressing room, a woman in the cargo pants, shirt and vest, her hair in straggly braids left the coffee shop next door. Both proprieters knew her, knew the money she gave, and that she bothered them seldom, let her store the clothes that covered her modesty. She scrubbed at her head, feeling oddly naked with her head uncovered. The identag hung on a line inside her shirt, her rank markings turned on and itching. It always itched for a day or two if she turned it on, or off.

She walked differently, in the cargo pants, easier, knowing the rent money was in the left knee pocket. If anyone was following her, one change, or the other, or the drunkard's walk she took to the storage vaults was probably enough to loose them. She paid the year's rent for the space, thumbprinting the contract in silence. “Been incountry?” the rental agent was chatty this year, a different one than last year.

She gave him a look that used to make recruits suck their thumbs at night, flat, impersonal, slid the signed tablet back, waiting while he stuttered into silence, and gave her a printout of the contract. She glanced at it, folded it up, put it away, and walked past him to the storage areas.

A decade ago, she had rented a cargo pod sized space, with power feed, paying extra for an input only datafeed. What she kept there waited, passive, patient, taking in data and power.

She opened the door and slipped inside. There was only a red telltale within the vault, it swept over her, pausing at her rank marking. She turned and pulled a telescoping retinal reader to the eye over the marking. Between them, her identity was established to the satisfaction of what waited for her.

The lights came up, still dim, but the spectrum that matched sunlight outside, and the Ploughshare hexa-4E20-mark90 Combat Suit (dec.) raised itself to its metal knees, the uncustomized cranial unit swiveling its auditory pickups at her, its cameras focusing on her. Faded red mottling decorated the armor plating, and the points for the weapons mounts were slightly brighter metal. She stripped down in the unheated room and pulled on the sensornet suit, matching the pickup points to the sub-dermal implants, grunting a little as she pulled it shut. The sensornet had been last fitted to her anatomy two children ago, and even with almost daily exercise, her body hadn't remained same as it was then.

The Ploughshare's telltales began flickering green and red as the sensornet suit began feeding data to the onboard systems. The suit reported her general health (good), and she stretched, shaking the kinks out. The suit opened its torso, and walked into the thoracic cavity, fitting herself into the harness and feeds, pulling the head unit down and locking it into place. A moment of claustrophobia passed, and she began getting the feeds back from the Ploughshare as it gave her the distilled information from the past year. She discarded some data the system considered significant, agreed with some, chased other data to the limits of the system. The Ploughshare had only a low priority vampire tap to the info system. There wasn't much that she and the combat suit's AI disagreed on, it'd spend over half her life fitting itself to the way she thought, and over half her life training her to observe and sift data.

The suit's systems sent a request to send a passive drone outsystem, to report her alive-and-well to Tasker's Battalion, or failing that, to the Unit itself. It would re-set the retrieval countdown, auto marked as two system years back to the full term. She agreed, and a flyspeck dispensed itself, settling on where she'd left her clothes. The suit's systems tracked the device, reminded her to come to within a kilometer upwind of a spaceship, or half a kilometer downwind. The drone would infiltrate a ship open to the atmosphere, attach itself to an unobtrusive clean surface, wait until it reached a system with a suitable level of EM activity, then insert its message into the mailstream. Standard protocol for undercover reporting.

The thoracic shielding slid closed, and she was enclosed in the suit. She ran through the power up checklist, agreed that the left knee needed maintenance, but it was still working within safety parameters.

Next she stood the system up, the ceiling frighteningly close to the cameras for the cranial unit. Next, she began the recalibration procedure, moving through a slow water kata that allowed the suit to re-adjust to the neural impulses her body fed it.

Next, she ran a second set of maintenance checks on the suit, the left knee hydraulics she already knew about. The light filters, the assorted joints and systems. All in all, it was midmorning before she was done, the sensornet suit wet with sweat, her bladder damn near full to bursting, but the combat suit was tuned and maintained and back to spec.

Reluctantly she shut it down, stripped out of the sensornet and set it to autoclean, re-dressed, and left the vault. She missed the intimacy of the Ploughshare mark90, the feeds and the easy power that the gave her, but she didn't miss what it'd done, what she'd done. “See you next year, Big Beast.”

“See you next year, Little Death.” The Ploughshare's voice was her own, filtered and anonymized, made neutral of gender and emotion. Then all but the telltale turned off.