The rear of the kettle closed as our pilot prepared to take off. Hearing the hiss of the lifts, I placed my helmet on the bench beside me and rested my elbow on it. Shannon, who sat across the floor from me, continued to wear his.
As we rumbled out of the landing bay of the Kamehameha, the SEALs began talking quietly among themselves. They had clearly worked together before and spoke nostalgically about planets they had raided. I could not see into Shannon’s helmet, but I got the feeling he enjoyed listening to them. There had only been one real war in the last hundred years, and Tabor Shannon was the only man on our mission who was old enough to have fought in it.
One of the SEALs pulled a cigar from his vest pocket. As he lit it, I noticed a round insignia brantooed on his forearm. In the quick glimpse that I got, I saw the whirlpool pattern of the Milky Way with each of its arms stained a different color.
The brantoo process involved melting a pattern into the skin, then staining the burn with alcohol-based dyes. I knew plenty of Marines with tattoos. Some of the more rugged veterans around the Kamehameha had brantoos, but they were small, maybe the size of a coin, and single-colored. To make these brantoos, these SEALs would have suffered through the tinting process six or seven times. I wanted to ask the SEAL if he was awake when he got the brantoo, but I already knew the answer.
The SEAL looked at me. “See something interesting?” he said, in a way that was neither aggressive nor friendly.
“I noticed your brantoo,” I said.
With a slight laugh, he rolled back his sleeve and showed me his arm. “We all have one.”
I looked more closely. The insignia showed the Milky Way with red, yellow, blue, green, orange, and black arms. A banner over the galaxy said “NAVY SEALS.” A banner under the galaxy said “THE FINAL SOLUTION.”
Shannon removed his helmet, and said, “Let’s test out your interLink.”
I put my helmet on.
“They’re not so tough,” Shannon said over the interLink. “Don’t let that brantoo shit fool you.”
“It has six tints,” I said.
“Keep focused, Harris.”
“Six,” I said.
“Harris, do you know why Admiral Huang got so angry when he saw us?” Shannon interrupted.
“Years of constipation?” I asked.
“He wanted Marines he could push around…grunts he could intimidate. He thought Klyber would give him a couple of normal jarheads. Instead, he got us.”
“You think so?” I asked.
“Take my word for it, Harris. We’re the scariest friggin’ weapon in the Unified Authority arsenal.”
I glanced at the SEAL who had shown me his brantoo. Nothing bound him to me, not even humanity. He was natural, I was synthetic. It might have been psychosomatic; but ever since my conversation with Klyber, I felt more and more disconnected from everyone around me. Was this untethering the reason the Linear Committee resorted to Plato’s lie?
The SEALs passed small pots of green and black face paint among themselves. Dipping their fingers in the pots, they drew stripes and patterns over their faces until they covered all of their skin.
The walls of the transport shook as we entered the atmosphere. A few minutes later, a light flashed signaling that we had neared the drop zone. As we gathered our gear, Admiral Huang appeared on the overhead monitor. He spoke to the SEALs for a moment, then turned his attention to Shannon and me.
“You have been brought on this mission as a formality. You will do nothing unless so ordered by my men. If you get in the way, I will hold you personally responsible for the failure of this mission.”
“Yes, sir,” Shannon and I intoned, in perfect sync.
Huang turned back to his SEALs. “We need information, not corpses. I want them alive.” With that, Huang saluted, and the signal ended.
Technicians aboard the Kamehameha had launched a surveillance satellite to view Ronan Minor long before our AT launched. They made a significant discovery—one part of the planet was infested with rats. The vermin offered an important confirmation. At that point in the seeded planet cycle, Ronan Minor should only have had plant life. Somebody had landed, and rats had escaped into a world with no predators and plenty of food.
As we left the ship, I noticed how well the SEALs blended into the jungle. The paint on their hands and faces, which looked so ridiculous in the all-metal environment of the armored transport, matched the leaves and shades of the jungle. We had learned about camouflage back at the orphanage, of course, but I had never seen it firsthand. The SEALs filed out in a column, with Shannon and me trailing a few yards behind.
My armor shielded me from the heat. I could see the way the humidity affected the SEALs. Underarm stains began to show through their uniforms within minutes of leaving the kettle. Drops of perspiration rolled down the oil-based paint on their faces.
“Those poor boys look uncomfortable.” Shannon’s voice oozed with mock empathy.
Though the SEALs used a proprietary channel to communicate with their headsets, I located a faint echo of their chatter on the interLink. They did not speak much, and the few crackling words I understood were all business. “I get the feeling that they’re not thinking about the heat,” I said.
When McKay first told us we would have a thirty-mile hike through the jungle, I envisioned one long, hot afternoon. The foliage grew thicker than I had imagined, and the SEALs cut ahead slowly, careful not to make unnecessary noise. Instead of trotting twelve-minute miles, we barely traveled two miles per hour. Since Ronan Minor, a small planet with a fast rotation, had sixteen-hour days, we were going camping, like it or not. We pushed to within four miles of the target zone, then stopped for the night.
When one of the SEALs told us that Shannon and I had drawn guard duty, I wasn’t surprised. With heat vision and night-for-day lenses in our visors, we were the best choice to stand guard, but I could not help feeling snubbed. They were illustrious SEALs, and we were clones. While the rest of the team rested, Shannon and I sat on opposite ends of the camp.
About an hour after I settled into a nook beside a fern-covered tree, Shannon hailed me over the interLink. “See anything, Harris?” he asked, from the opposite end of the camp.
“Rats,” I said. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” Using heat vision, I could see the rats’ heat signature through the foliage. They looked like bright red cartoons with even brighter yellow coronas as they scampered back and forth along the ground.
“Do you see anything else?” Shannon asked.
“Negative,” I said. “Am I missing something?”
“Look due west, all the way to the horizon. Keep using your heat vision.”
We were at the top of a low hill, just a swell in the terrain really. The jungle spread in front of me, and I could see above most of the growth. Off in the distance I saw the dark red silhouette of the oxygen generator. Only the tops of its stacks were giving off heat.
“The generator,” I said. “I missed it before.”
“It’s been shut down,” Shannon said. “Stage three seeding—the plant life takes over the oxygen production at this point.”
Thanks to my heat vision, I saw the aura of a rat running in my direction. I could not shoot it, of course. The noise would give us away. If the bastard came any closer, however, I was not above stomping it with my boot.
“Now look north of the generator. See anything?”
I looked but saw nothing. “This isn’t some kind of trick question is it?”
Shannon laughed. “Use your heat vision. Look at the forest about one mile north of the generator.”
“I still…” But I understood what he wanted me to see. Most of the forest looked velvety black through my visor, but there was a perfectly circular patch with a faint purple tinge. You had to look hard to see it, but it was there. “The Mogats?”