"Franks, get us out of here," Warshaw commanded.

"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 cla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce."

The viewport darkened, the lightning danced, and we traded one s.p.a.ce panorama for another.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN.

Earthdate: December 12, A.D. 2516

Location: Mogat Home Planet

Galactic Position: Norma Arm

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 s.p.a.ce, I never paid attention to the textures of the stars. Out there in the Galactic Eye, s.p.a.ce 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 h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.ds. 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 s.p.a.ce 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-sh.e.l.ls-rubberized suits that were flame-, chemical-, and radiation-r.e.t.a.r.dant, but little else. Far from bulletproof, engineering armor wouldn't even protect them from an a.s.sailant with a mechanical pencil. As little more than an observer on this mission, I was issued soft-sh.e.l.l 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-sh.e.l.led 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. h.e.l.l, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d. 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 s.p.a.ce, 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. G.o.dd.a.m.n.

"Yes, the battleships. Harris, you said you entered one of these ships once. Is that really true or were you just slinging s.h.i.t?"

"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 h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce and stars.

One of the men at the top of the ramp panicked. He screamed for help over an open frequency and tried to fight his way to the back of the kettle. Warshaw addressed the kid over an open frequency. "Westerfield, get out there."

"I, I can't. I can't."

"That is an order," Warshaw said, but the softness in his voice made it more of a request than an order.

"I can't do it."

Warshaw ordered the other sailors to let the kid through, and then asked, "Is anyone else too specking scared?"

I reminded myself that these were sailors, not Marines. They had grown accustomed to having an atmosphere and walls around them.

"No other takers?" Warshaw asked. "Okay, A Team, move out."

That was my call. There were about twenty of us on the team. We walked down the ramp, the gravity becoming weaker the farther we got. Halfway down, I could have kicked off hard and flown into s.p.a.ce. When the first man reached the bottom of the ramp, he held his motivator over his head and lifted off.

Engineers used handheld motivators instead of attaching jetpacks to their armor. The device looked like a pair of bin-oculars with handlebars instead of a strap. Their thrust technology used noncombustible gas emissions instead of flames. When I switched on its power, my motivator lifted me from the ramp and into open s.p.a.ce.

Following the sailor before me, I banked around the stern of the transport. As we flew along the transport, the pilot switched on the runner lights along the hull, lighting the rust-colored skids and smooth steel underbelly of the st.u.r.dy bird. Each motivator had a row of knuckle-sized safety lights blinking a ruby red signal along their top.

Our team leader hit some b.u.t.ton, and a headlight appeared at the front of his motivator. He only flew about fifty feet ahead of me; but I could not see him, just the cone of his headlight. The men ahead of me lit lights on their motivators as well.

We circled the wreck of a ma.s.sive battleship like a swarm of flies approaching a beached whale. The holes along the belly of the ship were large enough for us to fly through, but the bottom deck of the ship had imploded.

"General Harris, sir?" My visor identified the man on the line as our team leader contacting me on an open line.

"What is it, Ensign?"

"Sir, do you know what kinds of weapons they used on this ship? I've never seen such extensive damage."

Having spent the last six years of their lives trapped in the Scutum-Crux Arm, none of these boys had ever seen combat up close. "This is what happens when you get hit with your shields down," I said. What I did not add was that this ship had gotten off lightly.

"Their shields were down?" the team leader asked. "Why would they lower their shields in battle?"

"We lowered the shields for them," I said. "The Mogats used a centralized shielding technology that they broadcast to their fleet. Once our SEALs shut down the central shield generator, the ships were unprotected."

"You were in on the Mogat invasion, sir?" The team leader did not ask that question; it came from another member of our little team. I heard a tone of awe in the boy's voice.

"Yeah, I was there," I said, trying to keep the darkness of my thoughts out of my voice. "A lot of good men died. We lost a lot more men than we should have."

We flew across the battered underbelly of the battleship and up the port side. My interLink connection remained fairly quiet as men fanned out and inspected holes and burns along the face of the ship. Three decks up, one of the men found our doorway.

"The outer lock of the docking bay is open," the man reported.

Knowing that the end had come, some Mogats had piled into a transport to abandon ship. They almost made it to safety. The broken nose of the transport poked out of the docking-bay hatch like a missile launching from a silo. The outer hatch of the docking bay had come down on the transport like a giant cleaver, slicing halfway through the kettle and crushing the rest into a bow-shaped heap.

The transport had made it through all three atmospheric locks when the first torpedo or laser pierced the hull of the battleship. Once the hull integrity failed, all of the outer hatches would have automatically sealed to protect the ship against the vacuum of s.p.a.ce. In theory, sealing hatches creates pockets of oxygen in which sailors can survive for days. I'd been on enough wrecks to know that air pockets preserve fires, not lives. Rescuers never arrive in time. Scavengers may come looking for treasure, but the hope of rescue is the last resort of fools.

We flew in around the crushed transport. The eight-inch-thick hatch had slid down like a blade on a guillotine with enough force to flatten the nearly impregnable walls of a kettle.

Small diodes embedded in my visor sent out a fifteen-foot shaft of light. Beyond that beam of light, blackness shrouded everything not illuminated by the beams from another man's helmet.

As I worked my way in along the side of the transport, three men floated in place, staring into a spot where the hatch had sliced through the kettle wall. Seeing the wreckage of the transport gave these boys a good introduction to what they would find inside the ship.

"Move along," the team leader said. "We have a job to do. Perryman, Miller, Ferris, see if you can open the locks. Gold-berg, Lewis, figure out a way to sweep this place out. I need the runway clear." By "sweep" he meant for them to purge the transport.

"Aye, aye, sir."

Until we found a way to open the inner doors of the atmospheric locks, we would not be able to enter the ship. A trio of beams played along the wall until they all centered on the same panel. Using small torches, three engineers cut away the panel and discarded it. Behind the panel, they found a small lever, which one of them pumped up and down as if using a socket wrench. After four or five twists, the door pinning down the transport lifted toward the ceiling, rocking the injured transport as the hatch rose from the kettle.

"How can it still have power?" I asked the team leader.

"Emergency hydraulics."

Three engineers placed charges along the rear of the transport. There was a flash, a small explosion, and the wreck rolled into s.p.a.ce.

"That was easy," the team leader said over an open channel.

Getting rid of that transport was the only thing that came easily. The other emergency controls were all on the inner sides of each hatch, meaning our engineers needed to cut through each of the locks, then open the way for the rest of us.

It took Warshaw's engineers most of an hour to untangle the first lock, but they learned as they went. The next lock only took ten minutes. After they opened it, we entered the enormous, blackened cavern of the landing bay. Up to that point, the sailors only knew there would be bodies aboard the ship. Now they saw some.