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The Rose by Chris Cook, Part 5 @->--
It was almost two years later, when I was nearing my sixteenth
birthday, that we first saw the suits. I mean to say in person - there
had always been some Sisters in armour around the Convent, going about
whatever business they had, but this was the first time we were allowed
to train with them. The suit - to give it its proper name, the mark
seven slash beta 'Angel' tactical powered armour - is a wonderful piece
of equipment. If I had the Emperor's blessing to give out now, it would
be to the Magos Technicus who designed the first Angel suit. We knew
something of how Space Marine power armour worked - that it was actually
plugged into their brain via some sort of special implant. Fortunately
- I was a little nervous, to be honest - Angel armour needs no such
connection. The inner surface of the suit is lined with rows of tiny
bumps that are actually pressure sensors. Once a suit is calibrated to
its wearer - ie me, in a process that involved me standing still for
eight hours while Adepts fine-tuned the suit - it will be able to detect
any movement via these sensors, and the suit will move in such a way as
to take the pressure off those particular sensors. It sounds fiddly,
but it isn't. Suppose I were to move my arm up: that would press on the
sensors on the upper surface of the suit's arm. The suit would register
this pressure, and move its arm a fraction to take the pressure off. So
long as I keep moving my arm, the suit keeps moving its arm. A
properly-calibrated suit does all this so fast it's like a second skin -
it moves as I move. Unlike a vehicle it requires no skill to use - at
this stage I'd been walking, crouching, ducking, rolling and running for
almost sixteen years, and was quite good at it all.
What we wore was not proper battle armour, of course. It was
stripped down, with most of the armour gone, and special sections made
to automatically adjust to us as we grew. Each of us had a suit of our
own, and our lessons now broadened to include its proper maintenance in
all those areas outside the realm of the Tech-priest who, with his staff
of Adepts, performed all the complicated litanies and repairs that we'd
never have managed on our own. We learned how to store the suits in the
racks that housed them when not in use, how to prepare them for the
battlefield, how to run through the routine checks that told us whether
a suit was healthy or not, and how to manage when something went wrong.
Some of this involved minor repairs, which we were taught by the
Tech-priest himself, under the supervision of our trainers, but mostly
it something went wrong in the field it was beyond our abilities to fix
it, and training told us how to cope with the disadvantages a
malfunctioning suit brought, and meet our mission goals regardless.
This training armour had special units built into it that allowed it to
simulate common faults, like partial loss of power, or damage to the
control nodes, the kinds of things that could easily happen in battle if
a shot gets through the armour and hits machine instead of flesh on the
inside.
The suits, although not entirely armoured, afforded us enough
protection to allow us to use more realistic weapons in our drills. Up
until this time we'd been using very low-powered laser weapons, which
gave us a nasty sting when they hit but did no real damage - we wore
goggles to shield our eyes, which were the only part of us really
vulnerable to such weapons. Even so they weren't something to be taken
lightly. The first time I was hit, in the arm while I was negotiating a
barricade, I thought something had gone wrong and I'd been hit by a
full-strength shot. My arm felt sore for days. That was enough to give
us a real interest in treating these weapons as the real thing. But
once we were in armour we used weapons more like real lasguns, although
still not as powerful - they were enough to knock us down if they hit,
and if one were to have hit an unarmoured target I don't doubt it would
have caused a nasty flesh wound at least.
These were difficult exercises for me, not because of the hits
but because of what was happening in my head. Whenever I saw someone go
down alongside me, in my mind I had the horrible fear that one day this
would be played out for real, and that girl would then be wounded, or
dead. And it was worse because I knew, in a way, that I was right - one
day it would be for real, and no matter how hard I tried the toughest
simulations always took their toll on our simulated squads. It was
worse when I was squad leader - I felt I had failed, even when I was
noted for having kept my squad more intact than was usually the case.
One casualty was too many. Strangely it wasn't so bad when I was the
one knocked down, lying in a powered-down suit waiting for the end of
the simulation. Unless I had gotten myself hit through some careless
error, I didn't feel that I had failed my squad. But more often than
not I was the squad leader, and the squad doctrine we had learned was
based on keeping priority personnel alive - mission specialists, and
leaders. So it was more often than not one of the others who took the
fall, and I had to keep going. One time it was Serena who was hit,
right by my side as we were racing across a fire zone. I very nearly
stopped and went back for her - if another of us hadn't done the same
thing the day before, and gotten a full lecture about achieving the
mission, I might have done it. It wasn't easy starting the next
simulation after that one.
As my sixteenth year came to an end, unnoted by any but myself
and Serena, who had extracted the date of my birth from me not long
after we were brought to Delva Four, the routine of our lives began to
change. We were less and less students, and more soldiers in training.
Those lessons that remained in the lecture rooms were no longer about
history and abstract philosophy, or the dictates and principles of the
Emperor's words. Now, in the lectures, we were taught the faith that
would keep us alive, and fighting, when nothing else would.
"There may well come a time when your lives are given in the
service of the Emperor," said Sister Kristine, who was still lecturing
us in our revised faith and philosophy classes, and now in target
shooting as well. "On that day, which may not be far off for some of
you, you may wonder whether the service you perform - which may be, in
the larger context of the Imperium, not so important that it would go
unnoticed if it should be left undone - is really worth the cost of your
own life. You must believe that it is. Every task undertaken in the
name of the Emperor is worth the most we can give to see it achieved.
If the price of success if life, that price must be paid without
hesitation." She paused for a moment, looking out over us - it was only
when she began tutoring us in marksmanship, when she wore a viewvisor,
that we had realised she could barely see with her own eyes. Whenever
she looked at us it was with a stare so penetrating that she seemed to
be looking right through our eyes and memorising the back of our
skulls.
"The service of the Emperor is not a matter of factories and
wars. Great men and women have fought across the galaxy in the
Emperor's name, and whole worlds have become production houses to supply
the Imperium with its essential needs. But the Emperor's work is not
done with our hands. It is done in our hearts. Whether our task be the
conquest of a world or the writing of a prayer, in our hearts we do His
work, and we need know no more than that. The Emperor's work must
always be done, in whatever form it presents itself to us. Whatever the
cost, whatever the hardship we may endure, His work must be done. The
greatest gift we may receive is the Emperor's salvation, and compared to
that the cost of our life is a small price indeed."
No effort was spared, however, to ensure that the ultimate price
was paid only when necessary, and at as great a cost to His enemies as
to ourselves. We trained with every weapon I had ever heard of -
autorifles like the Guard at home used, proper lasguns, tasers, webbers,
crossbows, railguns, slings, missiles, practically any weapon capable of
throwing a projectile further than arm's reach was put in our hands, and
we were taught how to put that projectile - whether it be a rock or a
warhead - onto an Imperial credit piece at maximum range in poor light,
four times out of five. When we could do that, Sister Kristine nodded
and introduced us to the next weapon. She could use all of them, five
times out of five.
And of course we trained with bolters. The 428/Mars-alpha
pattern explosive bolt rifle slowly became our standard weapon for all
but live combat drills, and I certainly came to respect it - although,
to be honest, I later preferred the Mars-gamma that's been issued to the
Astartes nowadays, and is slowly being issued to the Sororitas as well.
The first thing that struck us was the noise of the thing when fired,
as Sister Kristine demonstrated the standard bolt shell. We all knew,
from stories, about how they roared and rattled and so on, and I was
expecting something a little more than the dull 'whump' as she squeezed
the trigger and the shell almost lazily flew out of the barrel. Then,
barely half a second later and just as we'd stopped being tense, there
was an almighty crack, followed by a boom as the target mannequin was
reduced to burning debris. That's the strange thing about bolters,
they're not really rifles at all - more like a hand-held rocket
launcher, where the rocket fires just after it leaves the barrel
propelled by a tiny ignition charge. We'd thought the autorifles were
loud, but I don't doubt that we'd all have been deafened within a week
if we hadn't had protection from sound dampers, or armour.
And the kick of the thing - it's entirely unlike a rifle there
as well, because there's a double recoil, first from the ignition charge
- I called it 'tiny', which it is, compared to the main burn, but it's
enough to knock the gun out of your hands if you're not ready for it -
and then the shockwave as a micro-missile lights up barely a metre in
front of you and hits you with all its backwash, half of it spilling
back down the barrel. We learned how to angle slightly up just as the
bolt ignited in front of us, so it flew straight but didn't put its wash
back into the weapon. The training guns we'd used had mechanisms inside
them designed to simulate the kick of a bolter, but it's not the same.
We trained with more advanced weapons as well, meltaguns,
grenade launchers, flamers - they're a lot more complex than people
think, by the way, they're more like a liquid cannon than a simple
flamethrower. Ursala was still with us occasionally, when whatever
schedule she was following meshed with ours, and she seemed to be a
natural, earning the singular honour of being told she was 'not bad' by
Sister Kristine - as close as our tutor ever came to praise without an
attached criticism. She trained with all sorts of weapons, everything
we had learned and then some, from bows right up to strange
Mars-manufactured creations that had one of the Tech-priest's Adepts
standing alongside at all times - even a few weapons that I didn't
recognise, and later realised were of alien design. Some of them I
still don't know.
And more often we were left alone, too. I don't mean we had
time to do with as we pleased - that almost never happened - but we were
given texts to study, copy or translate, and left to do so while the
Sisters spent their time teaching the younger girls who were arriving,
just as we had a lifetime earlier. Or it would be endurance exercises,
where we were simply told what to do and left to it, leaving the Convent
at sunrise and not seeing a Sister again until sunset when we returned,
exhausted. It may seem strange, but it became very important to us to
have these times to ourselves, even though we weren't doing anything
different than we had been earlier. We felt like people, not children,
and to speak for myself, I was suddenly proud of what I was doing.
Before it had been simply a case of doing what I was told, but now I
felt that I was making my own choices, in a strange way that had nothing
to do with actually having a choice to make. The lists of 'thou shalt
not' that had been drilled into us were suddenly, inside us, replaced
with 'I will not'. It made no difference, but it made all the
difference in the world, too.
@->--
To be continued...
--
TRANSLATOR: Chris Cook
TRANSMITTED: Alliance Heavy Cruiser Artemis
CROSSFILE: http://www.netspace.net.au/~alia/
AUTHOR: Sister Antonia
THOUGHT: To every life a light that shines.
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