Date Point: 7y 9m AV
Huntsville Alabama, USA, Earth
Adam Arés
“Y’all good?”
“Man, FUCK the plumbing in this thing.” BASEBALL was fidgeting and frowning, trying to adjust his EV-MASS undersuit for comfort, an exercise that Adam was beginning to suspect might be doomed, at least until the water was pumped in.
“Hey, Sergeant Kovač went through a really stressful day getting those measurements.” He pointed out, grinning.
“Riiight, real stressful.” BASEBALL rolled his eyes. “And she was dumb enough to hit on the only guy on the team who’s got a steady girl.”
“I can’t help it if I’m pretty.” Adam grinned.
“Man, you ain’t the pretty one. The Major’s the pretty one.”
Adam’s eyes widened a little, his expression became serious and he glanced over BASEBALL’s shoulder.
BASEBALL shut his eyes. “…He’s behind me, isn’t he?.”
There was a tense moment, then Adam cracked up laughing, and the rest of the crew joined in. “Gotcha!”
“Aww, fuck you all!”
“Hey, y’ain’t wrong.” Sikes agreed. “The old man’s looking good on the C-juice.”
Price drawled an exaggerated imitation of Sikes’ Georgia accent “He shore is purdy, y’all.”
Sikes’ retaliation, as it always was, was a strangled received pronunciation mockery that bore no resemblance at all to Price’s Essex accent. “Oh yes, delightful, wot?”
“Good to see you lot’re in a good fookin’ mood.” Powell commented, joining them already wearing his undersuit. As ever, his delivery was level and could have been taken as gruff if they hadn’t been able to see the relaxed humour in his eyes.
“Good morning, sir.” Legsy greeted Powell as the room turned toward him and straightened up.
“Morning, Legs. How’re you all finding the suits?”
“The plumbing’s a bitch, sir.” Burgess told him.
“You just be glad the plumbing at the back didn’t need any measuring.” Powell told him, opening his own locker and throwing his bag into it. “Technical Sergeant Kovač might have enjoyed that job a little too much.”
There was a round of laughter, but Stevenson was suddenly looking worried. “So…she wasn’t kidding about that thing needing to go in our butts, was she?”
“Alas, she was not.” Powell told him, shutting the locker again.
“And on the day we have to use it, I will take comfort from knowing I won’t be alone.” Vandenberg added.
Even Stevenson chuckled at that.
“Arright.” Powell told them. “Tech team’s ready for us, get on through there.”
They hustled at the order, stowing the last of their stuff in their lockers and bustling through into the suit lab, where the midsuit and outersuit of the EV-MASS systems were stored and maintained by a team – two for each Operator—of technicians.
The techs may not have been a physical match for their operators—after all, the SOR was training them to the point where, once they hit operational readiness, they would be brushing the limits of what the unaugmented human body could achieve—but they still took part in training and team-building exercises. The result was that everyone already knew their techs, and had grown to respect them. The technical crews tried to hang with the Operators in training, and made a damn good attempt at it. That was worth a lot.
Adam’s technicians were Senior Airman Raymond Doyle and Petty Officer Dean Hargreaves, USAF and Royal Navy respectively. That was a pattern repeated across the whole SOR—one tech from the operator’s parent service, and the other from somewhere else. It seemed to work well.
Doyle was the more meticulous of the two when it came to interpersonal interactions, and greeted him with a neutral “Good morning, staff sergeant.”
The sentiment was echoed by Hargreaves, whose rank was roughly equal to Adam’s own, in a rather more relaxed manner: “Hey, Horse.”
They’d both earned it, as far as Adam was concerned, even if Doyle preferred not to exercise that privilege. Where Doyle was undeniably the orderly, logical and meticulous mind of the pair, Hargreaves’ intelligence was more hands-on. Doyle would have drawn up a blueprint down to a half millimetre fare-thee-well, but Hargreaves was the one to build it. They were a good team, and had between them planned out and enacted several minor modifications to the suit so that it should, in theory, fit Adam perfectly.
All under the watchful note-taking eye of Drew Cavendish, of course.
“We ready?” Adam asked them.
“We are indeed.” Hargreaves nodded, handing him the throat brace that Adam dutifully buckled on: without it, the suit would constrict his throat and choke him. “I just finished modifying the sleeves last night.”
Adam nodded his thanks and stepped forward onto the two once-yellow feet on the floor in the middle of Doyle and Hargreaves’ working space. Naturally, he and BASEBALL had soon corrected the colour of those feet during the dead of night, earning them both an immediate “motivation” session from Legsy (who had quite astutely pointed out that there were no other pararescuemen anywhere on the facility, which didn’t make for a long list of suspects when twelve pairs of yellow feet were mysteriously painted green) but the new colour had stuck.
One man alone couldn’t possibly have put on an EV-MASS. Even if there hadn’t been equipment that needed mounting on the back where even the world’s most flexible contortionist couldn’t reach, he would have needed at least a couple of hours to manage it, by the end of which he’d have been too exhausted to actually do anything with it.
The midsuit’s torso was all one object which needed lifting up and lowering over his head and raised arms. Once that was in place he could then—awkwardly bent forward—lift his feet up and insert them into the legs and boots, wriggle them down, grit his teeth as he forced them past an uncomfortable stricture, and finally push them fully in until he was entirely contained and had his ass hanging out of an otherwise complete suit of armour. Then, the torso and sleeves could be pulled down, with Doyle’s hands carefully inserted to protect his ears as the collar constricted his skull, until he suddenly popped out of it like a turtle, with the rigid attachement points for the helmet and breathing mask sitting at the back of his skull and along his jawline.
The top and bottom halves of the midsuit met at a shaped docking ring that ran around his hips and above his buttocks. Before it could be closed, Doyle had to reach awkwardly up from below past Adam’s butt, and connect the undersuit’s waste and water ports to the midsuit by touch.
That done, the docking collar could be snapped together and sealed, leaving the full weight of the heaviest part of the suit bearing down on him.
Weirdly, though, the worst part was almost over. Hargreaves attached a water hose to the inlet port, turned on the pressure, and five seconds later, the inner suit’s water system had filled. Its reactive polymers activated in response to getting wet and SQUEEZED, shrinking the inner suit down until it was tighter than his own skin and the load-bearing structures were taking the worst off the weight.
The midsuit did something similar in response to his body temperature – its innermost padded gel lining expanded, and that was like getting a full-body bearhug from BASEBALL. It served a purpose, though—the suit’s incredible tightness both counteracted vacuum precluding the need for a pressurized internal environment except around the face and mouth, and made it an extension of his limbs rather than just something he was wearing. It wasn’t comfortable at first, but that was what the five minute acclimation break was for. Technically, he was already exercising – under that compression, merely breathing became an exertion and all of his muscles were forced to flex a little. He should have been sweating profusely—instead, the undersuit’s stillsuit system went to work, whipping the water away from his skin and adding it to its own circulating and cooling reserves.
After that came all the technical bits—the life support system that went on his hips, the capacitor bank up his spine, the forcefield emitters that ran down his arms, the heat exchanger at his shoulders, all of which again needed Doyle’s delicate touch to hook up.
Then there was the outersuit, which was basically just a digital camouflage cover, plus the framework of carrying systems for his backpack, ammo, grenades, medical equipment, and any auxiliary armour plating or mission-specific tools he felt like carrying.
The final step—his helmet and breathing mask—were almost anticlimactically simple. He could—and was required to—put them on himself. They snapped on simply and easily, having a pressure-sealed locking system of Cavendish’s own design that was allegedly foolproof.
And that was it. He was wearing EV-MASS, Extra Vehicular Search and Rescue System variant.
The first few times had been way worse. Hell, the first time they had done nothing more than put the suit on without the “plumbing” and just walked around wearing it for half an hour, and even that minimal activity had beaten the crap out of them.
Then there had been a few minor modifications, then wearing it again, this time for forty minutes. Then again for an hour. Then again for a light PT session.
This was Adam’s seventh time in the suit all told, but he was now starting to feel acclimatized. The extra inch in the sleeves that Hargreaves had added, and a few tweaks to the water circulation rate courtesy of Doyle had made all the difference. When he stood up and bounced lightly on his toes, he didn’t feel like he was wearing a heavy, constraining lump of technology any more. He felt like Adam, except…more massive.
It almost felt comfortable.
To judge from their expressions, the rest of the team were feeling similarly more at home in their suits. Even Powell was moving with assurance and calm, rather than the red-faced scowl that he’d worn the first few times.
“Right.” the major declared, as soon as it became clear that everyone was suited up. “Training time.”
“What are we doing today, sir?” Firth asked.
“Today, lads…we’re playing Gravball in the suits.” Powell grinned.
Date Point: thirty minutes later.
“So. Observations about today’s session?”
“Well, the suits are up to spec.”
“Aye, that they are. Anything else?”
“WARHORSE needs more weight on him in training.”
“Oh come on-!”
“Agreed. Anything else?”
“We’re going to need a new goal.”
“I did rather get the impression that an oil drum half full of concrete isn’t quite heavy enough nowadays, you’re right.”
”…Bet that’s a sentence you never thought you’d utter, sir.”
“Mm. Any more observations? No? Arright, let’s go get these fookin’ suits off. And…Arés?”
“Yes sir?”
“Find us a suitable replacement for the goal, will you?”
“Yes sir.”
Date point: November 5th 7y 10m AV
Southwark Park, London, England, Earth.
Sean Harvey
Sean had always preferred cold weather to hot. You could always pile on layers, make a hot drink, turn up the heating, light a fire or snuggle up to somebody in cold weather.
Ava was the other way round, he knew, which was why she was insulated under a thick coat, a woollen hat, gloves, a scarf, and why her cheeks and the tip of her nose were red, highlighted by the flashing lights of the Bonfire Night fairground they’d decided to come visit, seeing as it was a clear and dry November 5th for the first time in years.
She was enjoying it immensely he could tell, and it only made her look prettier. A curl of hair had escaped from the hat and was bouncing at her cheek as she watched Ben throwing away his money on some stupid rigged game, lured by the lie that he’d get a little plushy animal as a consolation prize for Charlotte even if he lost.
Sean had figured out instantly that it was actually impossible to lose and earn that consolation prize, which meant that instead you won and got a pointless little plastic keyring, five of which could be traded for the big plushy animals after you’d paid far more than they were worth, but he knew that wouldn’t have stopped Ben, so…
So he watched Ava instead. Ava, her breath steaming in the November darkness. Ava, smiling in the carnival light. Ava who it hurt to even think about, let alone look at.
It just wasn’t fair.
Sean didn’t think of himself as a bitter or jealous kind of guy. If it had been a happy relationship that Ava had with her boyfriend, then he’d have just shrugged it off, been her friend, no problem. The occasional idle speculation, nothing more.
But it was a shitty relationship, an absent relationship where they only saw one another a few times a year, when Adam took some of his leave time to visit and they just…vanished. Ava would spend the week prior to the visit fretting about it and talking about nothing else, then Adam would arrive and nobody would see Ava for the duration, until one day she was back, radiating equal parts afterglow and frustration.
It was abuse. She was’t being harmed in any physical way, but she was being neglected, taken for granted. Treated as something for Adam to do when he needed a break from being a soldier.
And the very worst part of it, the part that made Sean hate the bastard’s guts more than anything else, was that it was clear he wasn’t doing it deliberately. He was just a fucking moron, and that was enough for Ava to keep forgiving him.
She caught him watching and gave him a little smile, brushing that stray hair back behind her own ear. She’d been doing that a lot, lately. She probably wasn’t even aware she was doing it, but Sean was: he noticed every time.
“You okay, breadstick?” she asked.
“Getting cold.” Sean lied. Well, okay, he WAS, but that hadn’t been the source of his frown.
“Me too!” she nodded. “Isn’t there anywhere warm round here?”
“We could grab a cup of tea?” Sean suggested. “Ben’s going to need another five goes to win anything, at least.”
Ava nodded. “Hot chocolate!”
“Even better.”
They picked a fast food van and grabbed their drinks, before sitting on a bench to watch Ben and Charlotte, who seemed to be enjoying themselves at least.
He became aware that she was sitting right up close to him, and sat back on the bench, casually draping his arm along the back of it.
He was surprised and delighted when she sat back too and wriggled up a little closer. “God damn it’s cold.” she grumbled.
Sean nodded “It’s November, and they’re saying this year’s going to be the coldest ever.” he said.
“Uuurgh.” Ava shivered even more inside her coat, and took a huge scent of the steam coming off her drink.
Sean gripped her upper shoulder and pulled her a little closer still. She was tense—no, check that, she was shivering. “Fuck, are you okay?”
She turned a little more towards him. “Yeah, I’m…you’re warm.”
This much was true, and explained everything. Still, when Sean tried to remove his hand from her upper arm, she made a protest noise and wriggled closer again, so he put it back.
Some sips of her drink and several minutes later, she’d stopped shivering and seemed a lot more comfortable, but she stayed where she was. She even let out a big contented sigh.
Sean tried to gauge if she was conscious of how intimate she was being right now, and decided that she probably wasn’t. Ava was fiercely intelligent, but her one long-distance relationship didn’t translate to being all that boy-savvy. In a strange way, he suspected that her and Adam’s mutual inexperience was part of what kept them together.
”…Better?” he asked, after enjoying the contact just long enough but not, hopefully, long enough to scandalize her if and when she noticed.
She jumped a little and sat up, wearing an awkward expression which quickly became a blush, but she nodded even as she looked away. “Sorry, yeah. I just…I was miles away. Yeah.”
She tidied up her hair again and looked over at the game. “They’re STILL playing?”
“I think he’s going for the top prize.” Sean replied.
“Shouldn’t we maybe stop him?”
“It’s his money.” Sean shrugged. “He should be nearly done. Want to go check?”
”…Yeah…”
Sean had enough tact to get up frst and let her sort her head out behind him. He rejoined their friends just as Ben managed to land a dart smack in the middle of the Seven of Hearts and uttered a “fucking finally!”
“Worth it?” Ava teased, arriving level with Sean’s elbow.
Charlotte waved her prize happily. “I got a kitty!”
Ben just nodded to Ava with a little smile. “Worth it.”
Only Sean noticed how the exchange put Ava in a thoughtful mood, from which she only emerged an hour later when the firework display started.
He would have spent a lot more than Ben had on his rigged-game kitty to know what she was thinking about.
Date point: Christmas day, 7y 11m AV
Llanelli, Wales, Earth.
James “Legsy” Jones
”‘Ello Mam.”
“Fuckin’ ‘ell you got big!”
“Good to see you too, Mam. Merry Christmas.”
“Beer’s in the fridge if you want some, your sister’s coming down at half four.”
This was, by the standards of Lydia Jones, a warm and affectionate welcome. She was the opposite of her son in every possible way—small, serious, and corpulent to the point of being basically spherical, fumigated by the cigarettes she rolled herself and sporting a half-grown-out dyed purple undercut hairstyle that might have almost suited her if she shed half her weight and figured out how to smile.
“Cheers Mam.” Legsy retrieved the offered drink and downed about a third of it in one go. “Dai in front of the telly?”
“Where the fuck else would ‘e be? Take ‘im another beer through, will you?”
Legsy did just that, laughing quietly to himself and enjoying the familiar strident almost-shout of home. Sending him through with a beer through for her husband meant, for those who really knew her, that his Mam was in a rare good mood.
“Fuck me, you got big!” his dad exclaimed, as soon as he entered.
”‘Ello Dai. Merry Christmas.”
“Aye, Merry Christmas.”
With that, David Jones—”Dai” to everyone, his children included – exhausted his conversational reserves and went silent again. Genetically, he was the source of Legsy’s prodigious height, but life hadn’t been kind to him on the health front. First had come a backbreaking physical career. Second, upon being laid off when the company he worked for had gone bust, had come rampant obesity brought on by the fact that he hadn’t adjusted his diet to match his new, more sedentary lifestyle. Then had come the dole, type two diabetes, depression and the end result was that “Dai”, a man in his early fifties, looked a decade older than that and only levered himself out of his chair these days to go to the bathroom, go to bed, or to waddle down the road to the pharmacy.
They watched TV for a couple of hours, watching people buy houses at auction for jaw-dropping sums of money and then spending a few thousand more on renovating and redecorating them, under the periodic scrutiny of a camera crew.
Christmas for Legsy had always started, not at the moment he got to Lydia and Dai’s house but when his sister and her family arrived, and they never failed to arrive at 4:30 on the nose.
He got up to get the door for them at twenty-nine minutes past, and grinned as Amy’s car—always a new one, sleek and showroom-clean, paid for but never purchased—slid up outside the tiny terrace house their parents lived in.
Amy Jones was his twin, the older by about half an hour, and the person he loved second-most in all the world. Just like him, physically and in personality she was everything their parents weren’t, albeit she’d taken after their mother in the height department.
She was exclaiming her astonishment even before she’d got out of the car. “Oh my days! Oh my—look at—you’re huge!”
They exchanged a massive hug. “You should see some of the lads. I’m one of the small ones.” he told her, then gave an equally welcoming hug to Amy’s husband, Robert.
Amy and Robert had met through work, having both taken the same six month contract for a debt management firm in Bristol before going into business together. They’d once tried to explain to Legsy exactly what it was they did, but it had mostly seemed to involve phone calls, spreadsheets and knowing everybody who lived within twenty miles of the M4 and who earned more than three hundred thousand pounds a year. It paid well, whatever it was.
“You leave Abby with your folks then?” he asked Robert, referring to the person who held the number one slot for his most-loved person in the whole world.
Robert nodded, a little sheepishly.
“School complained about some of the language she picked up last time.” he explained.
“Yeah, I thought that might happen…” little Abigail had been much too enthusiastic about it when she’d learned the word ‘fuck’ off her maternal grandmother. “You mind if I pop up and see her after?”
“It wouldn’t be Christmas if you didn’t get to, would it?” Amy said, understanding. “Come on, let’s get this out the way…”
For all her failings, Lydia Jones was at least acutely aware that her culinary talents extended to oven chips, microwave dinners and ordering takeaway, so every year she saved up to have a hot Christmas dinner delivered instead. James and Amy had both been offering to cover that expense for years, but—as with the house that Amy and Robert had offered to buy for them—Lydia and Dai had been too stubborn and proud to accept.
Still, it was a good Christmas dinner, even if the table conversation was basically nonexistent.
It was barely eight o’ clock by the time the gifts had been exchanged and opened, and they had departed, with Legsy finding himself surprisingly comfortable in the back seat of Amy’s car and sporting a new T-shirt that Dai had had custom-printed, which showed an astronaut with a gun and a red dragon on his spacesuit, and the legend “Mab Cymru, Milwr y Gofod”.
It was, in Legsy’s own words, a “fuckin’ cool shirt” and he had promptly exclaimed “tidy!” and changed into it on the spot, leaving the family to exchange wide-eyed glances at his new musculature.
“So…why are you so big now?” Amy asked, once they had taken the right turn at Felinfoel to take them towards the motorway.
“I need to be.”
“I thought astronauts would all be small.” Amy replied.
“Astronauts, yeah. Maybe? I’m not an astronaut, I’m still a soldier.” Legsy pointed out.
“But you’ll be wearing a spacesuit.” Robert said.
“Yeah, but astronauts don’t have to run and fight in their spacesuit, do they?”
“So you’re not even the biggest?” Amy asked.
“Nope. That’d be Adam, and THAT boy’s a fuckin’ legend.”
“Legend how?” Robert turned in his seat slightly to look back. Amy was always the driver—Robert had never learned how.
“E’s from San Diego, ‘im and ‘is missus.” Legsy explained. “I swear, they lost everything, right? But he’s in the SOR with me, and she’s off becoming a journalist and…to be fair, she’s a fuckin’ legend too. I don’t know HOW she puts up with ‘im sometimes.”
“Why’s that?”
“I’d trust Adam with my life, wouldn’t even have to think about it.” Legsy said. “He’s about the smartest bloke in the unit, too. But he’s a fuckin’ IDIOT when it comes to his girl.”
“Like you’re an expert on relationships.” Amy teased.
“Oi, that’s by choice.” Legsy retorted. “But serious now, if he wasn’t so good about writing her every chance he gets, she’d never hear from ‘im.”
“Well have you talked to him about it?”
“Tried to. He always just nods and tries harder for a week or two – takes some leave to go visit her or something like that—an’ then he falls right back into it, right?” Legsy shook his head. “It’s like…that’s part of the reason I admire ‘im so much, he’s a fuckin’ machine in training, he’s dedicated to gettin’ stronger an’ faster an’ smarter, an’ he could carry TWO of me by now I reckon. But I dunno if that’ll keep up if she finally gets sick of ‘im . I dunno WHAT’d happen to ‘im if he lost her.”
He sat back and rubbed his chin, and looked out as rolling south Welsh hills swelled into view out the right window as the car climbed a hill. “I guess we just have to hope she doesn’t.”