Only Gray

The tables were metal gray. The walls were metal gray. The guns were fucking metal gray.

That was how the world looked to me. That was how it was. It was me sat at a table, surrounded by a world, holding a weapon, and all of it was the same.

“Plankton, you eating that fruit cup?” Pony asked me.

“Do I look like I want scurvy? You think I’m gonna be vitamin C deficient in space? God knows what they’ll do if my teeth start falling out.”

“How do you know when you get scurvy?” Metz asked. “What are the symptoms?”

“According to this,” Pony said from his tablet. “Low socioeconomic status.”

“Fuck off,” I said.

We all laughed, and it sounded hollow.

“Finish up and suit up, dropguns!”

We all looked up at the speakers in the corners. We all followed orders. I ate the fruit cup. I ate the Shredded Beef in Barbecue Sauce with Instant Mashed Potatoes. None of it tasted like food. It all tasted gray.

Pony slapped my back. Metz was already standing.

“Hey,” I called to her, but I had nothing else to say. I just liked seeing her face. It reminded me of a face you’d see in a locket two-hundred years ago. It was something to come home to. So when she looked back at me, I shrugged instead. You can’t say that kind of shit in this place and not expect to get your ass kicked, so I said nothing.

So we went, and we suited up. It took fifteen minutes to fit into the suits, twenty five more to be given the green. They did two tens and a five: a ten minute full check, a second ten minute full check, a five minute quick check. The quick one was for things like our seals, to make sure we wouldn’t pop in space, to triple check the instant kill errors. Oxygen was full and accounted for. Nothing was leaking. We only got two checks for things like our piss bags.

“You low economic status, Plankton?” Metz asked. She was behind me, so I could only hear her voice and see the gray wall in front. An engie was on my arm, doing the second ten minute check.

“I just like my teeth,” I said, and I chattered them together into the comm.

“Not enough breast milk too,” Pony said. “He had too much cow milk as a kid. Poor no tittied mother gave him scurvy.”

“How much of that fucking article did you read?” I asked.

“All of it.”

“Your memory for the mundane is astounding,” Metz said.

“Symptoms include fatigue, connective tissue defects, depression—you fucking depressed, Plankton?”

“Hell no!” Five of us shouted in unison. The whole squad was starting to get in on it. They were laughing.

“Quite moving,” an engie called down the line. “You want your shit bag working, or you want to keep chuckling?”

“Wait until they open a hole in my abdomen then we’ll see how my shit bag is working,” Sodom called.

“I’ll open your abdomen you don’t let them finish their checks,” Tee called down the line. “Clear fucking comms.”

We were more than happy to. We were dying laughing. Tee was squad lead, which meant he’d either be the one in the very front or the very back. Usually they were in the back so the first bolt didn’t take their head off and send us all scattering like leaves. The front was for the photo op.

The engie in front of me was hooked into the suit doing the five. I had once thought about sabotaging Metz’s suit. Thought if it failed check at the last moment, they might not make her drop, but I always lost the nerve. I wouldn’t have known where to begin, but I fantasized about it still. All the time.

War is a world of fantasies.

It wasn’t even like Metz and I were close. Not like I had any real idea who she was, where she was from, or even her family. The closest thing I knew to her likes and dislikes was that she didn’t like the Peach Cobbler—no one fucking did—and she did like the Chili Con Carne—which, also, no one fucking did. We had no shared past and likely no shared future, unless you counted bleeding out face down in space dust as a kind of romantic future together.

But still, something in her face gave me comfort, and so my brain went to a place better than this. Better than the fucking gray wall in front of me, shaking as we entered the atmosphere. Better than the hoses and tubs still attached to me and shaking violently. The gun rack clattering against the far wall. The engies, chained to the floor and sometimes bracing themselves against our legs not to fall over. Most of them didn’t even bother a sympathy look up. Maybe they did on their first time ever doing suit checks, but these ones were all old hands. Some of them had seen us jump before. Some of them had seen others jump and never come back. They were business. Get in, get out, hope a bolt didn’t blow you up.

The engie in front of me had his face light on, so I could see in his helmet. He was sweating like the sun was bearing down on him, like he was the one about to go out into a hostile world to get blown in half. I wanted to ask him what was so goddamn scary, but I didn’t. I turned on my comm.

“How about some Chili Con Carne when we get back?” I asked.

There were groans and moans, and one cheer.

“Atta girl,” I said, and I was grinning.

Give me something to come back to, I prayed. Not to God, or karma, or whatever was out there, just to beauty, because wouldn’t that be a great thing? Wasn’t that the whole point of life? To find the beauty, to find it in the slag heaping shit of the universe that we were thrown into? If there was any sense of beauty, of this thing we were all living in, I’d have something to look forward to, and it would help me get back to it. Praise be to beauty, to the reason we got out of bed, to the hope it wasn’t all the inky black of nothing and the gray of war.

“All clear,” came the call from the lead engie. The rest were standing up and shifting their uneasy weight down the line. They wanted the hell out when the drop doors opened.

“Hey, this shit bag is already full!” Sodom hollered at the engies, and we hollered with laughter right back. Even Tee was laughing.

I cleared my throat and stared ahead. Nothing but the guns, the gray, and the big lights on the wall. Both were dim. Green meant we were a-go-go. Red meant oh-no-no-no. I could tell everyone else was staring just the same. All of us were waiting. I don’t know why. Those red lights never fucking went on. Not once had I ever even heard of them going on. What could possibly make you risk turning around? We were already risking catastrophic failure from being blown up just to let the squad drop. Was there any reason they wouldn’t just drop us all?

I couldn’t imagine a single one.

Right on cue, the ship gave a spasm that threw me back against my rig. I could hear the others thrown forward behind me. We bounced up and down, the arms on my rig holding the suit steady. There were sounds outside, boxy, tinny, and definitely explosive.

Did these things explode? When did a convoy explode? If a bolt went through the floor and split Pony in two, would the rest of us be okay? Would the whole thing go to hell and split in half, turning into a ball of fire, or was that only if some kind of engine or battery were hit?

That’s what I was thinking about, Pony split in two, his arms and legs still with the suit on, hanging in the rig, his face misted into a thousand droplets, when the big light turned a-go-go.

The floor fell away then—well, it opened out, but that wasn’t the way it looked to us. To us it just suddenly wasn’t. There was just bleak sky and bolts streaking by. Big and blue and blowing up dropships around us.

“Suits oooout!” Tee called, and as he did, the rigs pushed us forward, pushed us down, and hung us there.

A long time ago, I had been on a coaster sim, the kind of coaster they had on earth but not on the colonies. It was a VR thing. They had these rides called drops. They’d take you up slow, and you’d see the world popping up bit by bit. The sim had it just like on earth, like I was at a theme park. First you’d see the tops of the heads of the folks in line, then you’d see the next area of the park, with all the stands for foods and drinks, bits of garbage blowing by feet, then you’d see the other rides, the ones that looked so big from down below but now stretching and shrinking below. Then you’d see the edge of the fence—the border of this whole little place, this whole world—and then you’d go higher still, and you’d see beyond.

That’s what this was like now—seeing beyond. This wasn’t the gray walls and the gray guns. This was the edge. The outer bounds.

The gun rack came forward, and as it did, my gun magged into my hand. There’d be no clapping backs and shaking hands until the last one of them or us was dead, then they’d decouple the mags and let our hands breathe again. It was always the worst. I couldn’t uncurl my hand for hours. Fucking magnets.

“Five,” Tee called.

The scariest thing about that sim was that you didn’t know when you were going to drop. You just kept climbing, up and up and up, and at some point, you’d think you reached the top, and it would keep on going.

“Three,”

And at some point it would stop, and you’d think, is there more still? And sometimes you’d be right. And sometimes, you’d be—

“GO!”

There was the fall. There was the world. There were the bolts.

No more gray, not here, just the screaming wind, the exploding ships, the howling bolts. The stabilizers kicked in and my fall controlled. My arm rose partially on command and partially on assist from the suit, and I started zeroing in.

The ground below was a fuzzy, muted blue, and streaking through the sky all around were the bright blue bolts tearing everything to shreds. Threatening to give us all a new worry about our internal shit bags. Threatening to turn all our little fantasies into dust.

But that was a distant thought. My thoughts were on the domes. That was the goal. That was the objective of our squad. The domes had to go. Everything else was someone else’s problem.

So I raised my rifle, I sighted on the large, whitish dome, and the suit whirred and locked so the wind resistance didn’t rip my arm straight back up again.

Proximity Alarm.

Blue beam on my nine, but nothing much to do. We had the big guns. We had the payloads. Our job was the domes. Aim your big gray gun, deliver your big payload.

Sighted.

My helmet flashed three times to let me know I was signal locked. It pinged me four more to let me know Proximity Alarm-Proximity Alarm-Proximity Alarm-Proximity Alarm.

I fired, and even with the stabilizers and the thrusters going, it kicked me back.

The bolt that had been coming up, that maybe would have missed me, that maybe would have split me in half like Pony, didn’t do either. Instead, it seared off my left arm, and it scored up my left leg. My thrusters failed, my suit screeched, and I plummeted in free fall.

“Hit, I’m hit, I’m hit, I’m hit,” I said in to the comms, not like it would matter, hoping it wouldn’t. I realized even as I was saying it, I wanted my comms to be offline, that I was begging they were for that last message. The last thing any of the squad needed while they were dodging death was my idiot voice coming into their head reminding them about mortality.

I didn’t tumble through the air, which I was thankful for. It was a controlled fall, me facing forward, the suit adjusting what it could, the vacuum seal attempting to tighten around where my arm had been sheared off.

The dome below took a hit from my rocket, and a plume of smoke was rising up. It was still intact, just hit, and I realized something.

Son of a bitch.

So was I.

I raised my gun, and the suit whirred along to assist me, and I willed it to make up for the missing arm, to make me whole again.

Sighting…

I couldn’t tell it to do its job any better. I couldn’t divert power. I couldn’t divest any energy more than already was. The suits were designed by the smartest minds imaginable, conveyances of destruction so we could deliver payloads with maximum security and efficiency. They already knew about adjustments. These were guys that calculated trajectories of rockets based on equations of gravity and wind predictions on white boards. Yeah, I wish I could tell it to help me out more, but that’s because I had one arm and panic like ice in my bones. If I was smart enough to know how to make the suit work better, I wouldn’t be the one in the goddamn thing.

Sighted.

My helmet flashed three times.

I pulled the trigger again, and the force tumbled me again, only I drifted to the left and tumbled a bit because of the missing arm and weight. I closed my eyes, feeling my stomach going, not feeling the missing arm at all, just feeling it wasn’t there. No pain from what the suits shot us up with. Nothing but adrenaline. No pain.

The suit corrected my course and I was face down again. I raised my arm.

“Come on you asshole,” I said, seeing the display flash three.

Sighted.

A good dropgun could get off eight shots before they hit the ground, supposing nothing blasted them out of the sky before then.

I got off twelve.

I also landed with a thump, collapsing straight backwards when I did. Dust flew up in huge plumes.

I’d blown two of those goddamn domes before I hit the ground, and now I just kept trying to raise my arm to wipe the dust off my lenses without realizing I had no arm to do so.

I lurched forward and the suit surged me up.

They gave us fifteen rockets, and once they were through, we switched off the rocket mod, detached the ballistics mode and switched to auto-fire. Only I had one fucking hand, so I couldn’t do that.

One of the first things they tell you is that if you can’t auto-fire, you don’t fire at all. A rocket on the ground is more likely to kill you and everyone around you than it is to do any damage to the enemy at all, but when they tell you that, you don’t see forty hulking green suits of reinforced steel and machinery and killing intent bearing down on you.

So I didn’t switch to auto-fire, and I didn’t sit on my hand and do nothing, which would have incidentally shoved my ballistic rocket rifle right up my ass. Instead, I fired a rocket into a mass of Greens eighty yards from my position, and the ensuing explosion sent me rocketing off my feet and sent pieces of enemies thirty feet high.

“Get out of my way!” I shouted, and I stood up again, and I fired again. And after that wave, and after that one floored me, and after I got up again, I fired another time.

What I remember from that landing is mostly that. I remember those moments. Not seeing the domes burning to pieces, not Sodom getting blown out of the sky not ten feet from me, though everyone says he did. Not pieces of your friends, of your squad, wherever they landed, wherever they fell.

I remember those moments here, and I remember seeing gray, and gray, and gray.

And when I woke in the infirmary, it was to a gray ceiling, and the blowing of an air condition vent that somehow felt gray and dead on my skin.

I was trying to think of anything other than where I was.

“There’s someone here to see you,” came the doc’s voice, and I closed my eyes.

“They better have Chili Con Carne,” I said, and I kept them closed, because we lived in fantasies here, and I wasn’t about to let this one go.

Not yet.