“We might not get another opportunity like this. They’re only sending two ships out, that’s three of us against two of them.”
“They’ll be in firing range in two minutes,” Warshaw said. “Looks to me like they are spoiling for a fight.”
“Here is a chance to see the new class in action. Do you really want to run?” Franks argued. He was right. It was our one chance to gather intelligence by watching those ships in action, but I thought it might be fatal intelligence.
“Take us out of here,” Warshaw growled.
Franks sighed as he gave the order to his virtual bridge. “Contact the other ships. Tell them to broadcast to Mogat space.”
The viewport darkened, the lightning danced, and we traded one space panorama for another.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
We broadcasted in a hundred thousand miles above the Mogat home world, roughly half the distance between the Earth and its moon. Before hearing Franks’s little lecture about differences in space, I never paid attention to the textures of the stars. Out there in the Galactic Eye, space looked like black velvet walls studded with millions of Christmas lights. The only direction in which I saw undisturbed darkness was toward the planet below us.
What the Avatari had hoped to do to New Copenhagen and Terraneau, they had already accomplished on this planet. They had captured the planet, saturated it with toxic gas, then baked it by expanding the nearby sun. The extinct sun loomed like a shadow orbited by a cinder of a planet.
…And when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven, I thought, another little gem from Nietzsche.
“Scan the area,” Franks ordered his virtual bridge.
My eyes adjusted before my mind could accept what they saw. We drifted slowly toward the graveyard, a floating reef of dead ships and debris left in the wake of the U.A. Navy attack on the Mogat Fleet. As my eyes took in the starry surroundings, I began seeing shadows of inert shapes. I saw hulls and wings, whole ships and partial ships outlined in light, floating in place, as sharp and as dead as fish in a jar of formaldehyde.
A voice came from Franks’s console. “The area is clear, sir. It doesn’t look like anyone has been out here in years, sir.”
“Well, General Harris, we have twelve crews and four hundred ships to explore,” Warshaw said as he rose to his feet. “Did you plan to join us?”
“I do,” I said, more aware than ever that I had come on this operation as an observer. This was a job for engineers and technicians. Having a leatherneck along would add nothing to the equation.
“Have you ever been on a wreck before?” I asked Warshaw as we left the observation deck and cut our way across the bridge.
“No. I hear it can get ugly,” he answered.
“It’s pretty grim,” I said, remembering a mission in which I had explored a wreck. There were bodies floating weightless, frozen in the null heat. Once the hull of a ship gets pierced, the air, heat, and pressure flush out of the hole, and the inside of the ship becomes as sterile as the space around it.
“Maybe you know the answer to this. I always wondered, what happens first when your ship gets smashed? Do you freeze, suffocate, or explode?”
“It’s that bad?” Warshaw asked.
He must have thought I was joking or trying to make a point. I wasn’t. That question had remained on my mind since the first time I boarded a Mogat wreck.
“Admiral,” I said, “this tour will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
In my experience, sailors and officers waged wars like gods. They sat on high, out of the line of fire, sending more expendable souls to bleed and die on the battlefields.
But both the officers and the sailors came along for the ride this time. I wondered if Warshaw or Franks had ever seen the aftermath of a space battle. The flash-frozen bodies on these ships would look exactly as they had the moment after the battle. Without oxygen or heat, they did not decay.
We piled into transports, cramming the kettles beyond capacity with 120 men each, plus equipment. Unlike Marines, human crustaceans in their hardened combat armor, engineers wore soft-shells—rubberized suits that were flame-, chemical-, and radiation-retardant, but little else. Far from bulletproof, engineering armor wouldn’t even protect them from an assailant with a mechanical pencil. As little more than an observer on this mission, I was issued soft-shell armor. By the time the transport doors closed, I already knew I hated engineering armor.
Crushed against the back wall of the kettle, I felt a bolt digging into my side. When another man stepped on my foot, I felt it. It didn’t hurt, but I didn’t expect to feel anything.
The visors on the soft-shelled armor showed the names and ranks of the men around me. Instead of night-for-day lenses, these suits had cheery little torches along their visors. They had a good reason for this backward step in technology. Night-for-day vision wreaked havoc with depth perception and showed the world in monochrome. Working with color-coded wires, circuits, and diodes, these engineers needed to know red from green. Hell, even their armor was color-coded. Weapons techs wore red armor, electronic and computer systems specialists wore yellow, and engineers wore blue.
I’d brought contraband on this mission. As the only Marine in a flock of sailors, I felt duty-bound to bring a weapon—a particle-beam pistol. If Warshaw ever came on a mission with me, I’d allow him to bring a wrench …in the spirit of fairness.
The sailors around me had to have been chatting on the interLink, but I was deaf to them. Reminding me that this was a naval mission, Warshaw refused to give me a commandLink, the bastard. He alone could listen in on every conversation and speak on private frequencies with whomever he liked.
That left me in isolation. I stood in the tightly packed kettle alone with my thoughts.
The audio equipment in my armor was not as sensitive to ambient sound as the equipment in combat armor. I knew when we lifted off because I felt it, but I could not hear the boosters. Instead of telescopic lenses, my engineering visor had a magnification lens. Engineers don’t snipe, they inspect circuits.
“They’re away,” Warshaw said. On the off chance that the U.A. sent a patrol through Mogat space, we sent our ships back to Terraneau.
“The battleships?” I asked. I knew the answer before I asked, but I wanted to talk. I was lonely. Goddamn.
“Yes, the battleships. Harris, you said you entered one of these ships once. Is that really true or were you just slinging shit?”
“The Mogats scuttled a ship in the Perseus Arm, I went out to explore it.”
“How did you get in?” Warshaw asked.
We sure as hell didn’t ride in on a gigantic specking transport, I thought. “There was a gash on bottom of the ship. We flew a ten-man sled in through one of the holes.”
“Did you try opening the docking-bay doors?”
“Nope.”
“Did you have engineers with you?”
“Nope, SEALs.”
Warshaw sort of snorted, and said, “SEALs.”
“They knew their stuff,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m sure they did,” Warshaw said. “Look, Harris, you mind going out with A Team? It sounds like you have more experience finding your way around a wreck.”
“No problem,” I said.
A moment later, Warshaw’s voice came over an open channel as he addressed every man on the transport. “We’re opening the rear hatch. A Team prepare to launch.”
The pilot maintained the gravity field within the kettle, keeping us rooted to the ground, even as he purged the air from the kettle so that we would not be flushed out when he opened the doors. Once the atmosphere turned into a vacuum, the doors slid apart, revealing an open field of space and stars.