Table Of ContentArmored-ARC
edited by
John Joseph Adams
Advance Reader Copy
Unproofed
Baen
Other Anthologies Edited by John Joseph Adams
Brave New Worlds
By Blood We Live
Federations
The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Lightspeed: Year One
The Living Dead
The Living Dead 2
The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination (forthcoming)
Seeds of Change
Under the Moons of Mars: New Adventures on Barsoom
Wastelands
The Way of the Wizard
Armored
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are
fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by John Joseph Adams
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof
in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-4516-3817-2
Cover art by Kurt Miller
First paperback printing, April 2012
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America
For
John Steakley
&
Robert A. Heinlein
Foreword
A few years ago, Marvel Comics approached me about writing for them. They
suggested I might want to work on Iron Man.
Now, I was no fan of superhero comics—my taste, as a kid, had been more
along the lines of Classics Illustrated and Scrooge McDuck, with a bit of
Superboy thrown in because he was actually a kid with a real life.
But Iron Man? He didn’t even have any extraordinary powers—he just wore a
really talented suit. Admittedly, he designed the suit himself, and funded it. But
why not make a thousand of them and get other guys to wear them? Why did he
have to wear the suit himself?
Now, I’d been studying military history ever since I became fascinated with
the U.S. Civil War when I was eight years old. I was quite aware of the constant
see-sawing of advantages between assault weapons and fortifications.
Enemies come and attack your village, overwhelming you by their greater
numbers and better weapons. When you gather the survivors to rebuild the city,
you put it on a hill and you build a wall around it.
The next time the enemy comes, they ride around and around your walled city
on their chariots while you throw rocks or shoot arrows at them. They
outnumber you ten to one—but they can’t get inside to harm you. Eventually,
they go away and raid some village that doesn’t have walls.
Next time they come with catapults. Or they dig a tunnel under your walls. Or
they run up with hundreds of ladders.
Next time you build your walls higher and thicker, and surround them with a
deep moat to foil tunnels.
Then cannons knock down the walls and a whole new kind of fortification in
depth has to be invented, using miles of trenches. Bombers fly over the trenches;
antiaircraft artillery and fighters and ground-to-air missiles bring down the
bombers. And on and on.
Right along with the see-saw of armies and fortified cities, there’s another
game going on. A personal one.
Combat isn’t just between armies. Even older than war is the contest between
two alpha males for supremacy. It can be relatively peaceful: cocks displaying
their plumage; other birds building attractive nests.
Two stags butt their heads together. Two gorillas tear up saplings and beat the
ground with them to intimidate their opponent with their strength.
A man with two cutlasses displays his ferocious and skillful swordwork.
Indiana Jones pulls out a pistol and shoots him.
Ah, yes—the blade! The projectile weapon! A way to overcome the other
man’s advantage. You’re stronger than I am—but are your fists able to damage
me as much as this cudgel of mine will damage you?
You have a cudgel? I’ll throw a stone from this sling of mine. You have a
spear? I’ll shoot you with this arrow.
The goal is to damage the other fellow far more than he can damage you. To
accomplish this, we develop deadlier weapons that magnify our strength, or
weapons that we can use from farther away.
So the smaller, weaker man can, with craft and practiced skill, overmatch the
stronger, larger one.
But the stronger man does not have to stand there helpless. Next time he
carries a heavy shield on one arm and a sword even heavier than yours with the
other. Now, little fellow, beat on my shield all you want—it won’t hurt me, and
meanwhile my sword will hack yours out of the way.
As for stones and arrows, the stronger man covers himself with thick cloth and
leather; then he plates it with armor, or wears flexible metal mail. Your projectile
weapons bounce harmlessly off as he comes close enough to break you in pieces.
Turn and run, little man! You can’t hurt him now.
Armor is personal and portable. Wearing it, an individual can get close enough
to let his greater strength and skill overpower the enemy. Armor is a moving
castle.
There are other ways of achieving the same end: stealth, speed, trickery,
treachery. As many walled cities fell to bribery and betrayal as to sappers or
climbers or catapults or cannon. The duel becomes moot if your enemy manages
to poison you the day before, or slit your throat while you sleep.
Armor, by contrast, is hard to conceal. When the internal combustion engine
achieved enough power to carry an armor-plated cannon-house on wheels and
treads, trench warfare and machine guns lost their advantage, just as armor-
plated ships were already able to rip wooden ships to shreds without sustaining
any damage themselves. But it’s hard to sneak a tank behind enemy lines.
It all comes down to the men inside the tin cans, whether they float or are
borne by horses or automobiles or carried on the backs or arms of the men they
protect. It’s still personal.
Or is it? The remote-controlled drone now fires a missile while the operator is
ten thousand miles away, controlling it by a combination of satellite and
computer.
But such projectile weapons only work as long as your communication
satellites remain in orbit and your radio signals can be transmitted and received.
Jammers and satellite-killers become another kind of armor, potentially making
drones as useless as stones thrown against metal plating.
Ultimately, though, these are all contests of will. What propels these tin cans
forward are the men inside; shields, mail, suits of armor, tanks, and other
personal enhancements are merely decorative until the will of a human being
causes them to move close enough to an enemy for the contest to begin.
This book is a collection of stories about people who armor themselves in
order to reduce the risk of coming near enough for someone else to cause them
harm.
There is enough military history for every reader to recognize that however
fanciful the weapons and armor might seem, it is only realistic to say that there
will always be someone devising armor to defeat a weapon, and a weapon to
defeat the armor.
Most of us, though, will never don any kind of shield or wear any kind of
armor, because most of us avoid combat for our entire lives.
Or do we? The power of a story about armor comes, not just from its roots in
the real world of physical combat, but also from the fact that all humans are
constantly searching for ways to armor themselves against another kind of
weapon.
We build up an image, a reputation, in order to armor ourselves against lies
and slanders—or against inconvenient revelation of our secrets.
When we have been damaged by personal treachery, we often armor ourselves
emotionally by creating a thick emotionless shell which, though invisible, can be
impenetrable.
We surround ourselves with a wall of friends to protect ourselves from the
deep javelin of loneliness.
We try to control our children, building walls and fences, rules and an
umbrella of constant vigilance to keep them from the consequences of their own
foolish choices as well as from outside forces than endanger them.
And always, always we find that there is no such thing as armor that is
impervious to all risk; or if there is, it is so heavy that we cannot move.
I think of the powerful scene near the end of The Lion in Winter, when Queen
Eleanor’s personal guard overpowers the armored knight who stands watch in
front of the prison where her sons are being held.
His armor protected him until he stumbled and fell; then the same armor
prevented him from escaping as the queen’s man came close enough to insert a
thin dagger into the helpless knight’s brain through the gaps in his faceplate.
I can think of few metaphors for our ultimate defenselessness as good as that
one. Whatever armor we put on to protect ourselves from risk can be turned
against us.
As I began to write my series of Ultimate Iron Man comics for Marvel, the
question I had to answer was what vulnerability in the man Stark made it
imperative for him, not to invent armor, but to put it on his own body and wear it
into combat himself. Why does he hate vulnerability so much that he must shield
himself and then constantly test the shield against the deadliest of foes?
The armor is Iron Man’s kryptonite, as well as the source of all his power.
The soldiers inside a tank cannot escape the hand grenade or Molotov cocktail
dropped through the hatch. The sailors in the submarine are trapped by their
thick hull when a depth charge or undersea obstacle pierces it and lets the water
in.
And the person who has armored himself against emotional risk is utterly
unprepared when that barrier is unexpectedly pierced. And if it is not pierced,
the person wearing it finds that his armor has kept him from living his life. In the
end, complete safety means complete immobility; armor is eventually overcome,
or leaves us helpless.
Behind their high walls, the people of the city can only watch as the enemy
ravages all the lands that supply them. There is always the possibility of terrible
loss, despite or because of the thickest of defenses.
And yet we would be fools to expose ourselves to the risks of life without
some kind of defense. Or else we must be prepared to sustain and bear and try,
somehow, to survive the wounds that will inevitably pierce and break the thinly-
covered skin, the unbraced bone, the trusting heart.
—Orson Scott Card, October 2011
Hel’s Half-Acre
