Before a battle, Marines do not have time for ghosts. After a battle and a few drinks, Marines have time for just about anything.
Traveling around the deck of this demolished ship, I became consumed by the feeling of walking among ghosts. Perhaps it was the shadowy blue-white world that my night-for-day lens showed me. Maybe the way we abused the bodies of these dead Mogat sailors got to me. A few of my Marines tried to hide their nerves behind gallows humor, but we all felt it. The Mogats had died a fast but gruesome death. They were the enemy, but Corps honor seldom made room for abusing the dead, friend or foe.
I felt closed in. I felt trapped. The combat hormone had not yet kicked in to my system, but the anxiety of battle was there. I had entered the Liberator version of no-man’s-land.
I dropped down to the scaffold below the ship. I had been in and out of the gash in the hull four times now, and each time the trip left me with a different impression. The first time I came up, I thought that the breach looked like a gaping wound in a human body. The next time I thought it looked like a tear through a building. The third time my mind stayed more focused on the job, and I thought about the air flushing out of the ship, washing thousands of bodies out with it. This time, I felt like I was falling through an open grave.
Once I landed on the scaffolding, I switched from night-for-day to my standard tactical view lens. We had lamps set up along the scaffold. I would have seen everything more clearly with night-for-day vision; but feeling morose as I did, I wanted a moment to myself in which I could see color and depth. There are areas of color in space, but you do not see them often or clearly. Seeing the charcoal-colored hull and the silver pipes of scaffolding did not improve my spirits.
I came down to examine the nine puppets we had placed along the scaffold. I tried to think of them as puppets, not bodies, and especially not corpses. Their faces were buried behind faceplates. I did not need to look into the colorless tissue flowers that filled their eye sockets. For all intents and purposes, the soft-shells on the scaffold could have been empty. Except they were not empty, and I knew it.
Sergeant Evans and two other men posed the puppets so that they would look like engineers cowering during an attack. They placed five of the puppets in a kneeling position behind the welding rig. One of the puppets had thawed enough for Evans to bend his body. He seemed to peer over the top of the rig. One puppet sat near the far side of the scaffold. Three more hung from wires—puppet strings. Once our audience arrived, we would effect their escape by pulling them back into the ship.
Maybe I felt jinxed by the ship, but I did not think we could make our puppet show believable. It was one thing for a squad of SEALs to put on a magic act in which they fooled the Mogats into shooting their own pilot. The SEALs specialized in reconnaissance, not combat. Our show would be more ambitious and the men less skilled. I trusted my men. I worked them hard and knew they would not fold in battle, but the clones were made for storming buildings and routing enemies. Finesse was not in their DNA.
“How does the stage look, Sergeant?” Evans called to me on the interLink. He and Corporal Kasdan stood three decks above me, holding the puppet wires.
“I think they’ll buy it,” I said.
“You know this is crazy?” Evans said. Once the Mogats arrived, he and Kasdan would reel in their puppets and disappear into the ship.
“Is everyone in place?” I called over an open frequency.
When all of my men answered, I launched myself from the scaffold and back into the ship. On my way up, I switched off my stealth kit. The sensors spotted me that instant and the show began. Philips, the man from my platoon in whom I had the least confidence, met me as I reached the third deck. With one arm around a railing, he hooked me and tugged me toward an open corridor.
“Think they know we’re here?” Philips asked.
“I’d bet on it,” I said. “It might take them a minute to scramble their battleship in our direction, but they know about us.”
Thomer joined us as we entered a corridor. I don’t think the sensors knew or cared that there were three of us. They recorded our movement. Wherever they were, the Mogats knew someone was mucking around the ship.
With the sensors reading our movements, Philips, Thomer, and I traveled a route we thought engineers might take. We meandered through corridors as if studying the wiring. We took detours past system junctions. The one thing we made sure we did not do was move in the direction of the engine room. If the Mogats knew that we knew about the secondary broadcast engine, they might abandon it.
Other Marines joined us as we floated through the halls. Soon nine of us met. Only Evans and Kasdan stayed in place. We wanted to give the impression that a body of men had entered the ship through the bridge, then separated to examine its arteries. The men used their stealth kits as they joined us, then switched them off. Some of my men headed for the bridge. Others went to examine the shield generator, which was in the front of the ship but three decks below the bridge. Now, with three simultaneous alarms, I hoped the Mogats would become nervous.
Once I was alone, I switched on my stealth kit. Once again invisible to the sensors, I headed for the launch bay. For the rest of the mission, I would hide in the launch bay and wait. Everything hinged on one point—they could not know I was there.
The landing area was huge, dark and empty. It was so vast that I could not see all the way across it with my night-for-day lens. With the doors of its atmospheric locks wide open, one side of the bay opened out to space. As I looked for a good place to hide, I stumbled across an emergency elevator. The opening to the elevator was fifteen feet tall and twice as far across. Fire engines and bomb disposal carts rode in that lift. Peering into the gap in the door, I saw that the shaft ran the entire height of the ship.
I pried the doors apart and left them wide open. I doubted if anyone would notice the open doorway. The lift was dead. The ship was dead. Who would care about an elevator shaft? Besides, according to the Mogats’ sensors, no one had entered the launch bay.
Before stepping into the shaft, I looked down to make sure it did not open into space. Below me, the shaft yawned like a giant gullet. I did not see a bottom, but I did not see stars below me, either. The car itself was about ten feet above me, the bulky metal reinforcements beneath its floor forming a roof over my head. I sprung up to the roof, then pushed off it to drop down the length of the shaft.
The emergency shaft ended in a storage room on the bottom deck. In this room I found a few dead men and a trove of battered equipment. Parts of the floor had been shorn away in the fighting. Judging by the amount of destruction around me, I decided that I could not have been far from the gash in the hull. The holes must have occurred at the end of the fight after the hull had been pierced and the atmosphere had equalized; otherwise, the men and equipment would have been flushed out with the air.
Bright flashes of lightning sent a momentary glare through the holes in the deck. I saw the blinding light shine and looked away. That light could only have been the anomaly of a Mogat ship broadcasting into the area. If I looked into it, I would be blinded. Even looking in the opposite direction with tint shields blocking my visor, I still registered the flashes. When the lightning stopped, I peered out a hole and saw the black silhouettes of two Mogat ships against the fading brightness of their anomalies. A moment later I saw a transport leave one of the ships and head in our direction.
Unified Authority armored transport ships have heavy shields and no guns. The Mogats might have claimed this transport fifty years earlier, but it was still of a bulky, slow, and unarmed Unified Authority design. As the transport approached us, it slowed to a crawl. The doors at the rear of the kettle slid open and out flew five Mogats in unwieldy deep-space armor that the Unified Authority Navy had abandoned decades earlier.
“Evans, reel them in!” I shouted over the interLink. From my vantage point, I could not see the puppets rise as Evans and Kasdan reeled them up into the battleship. I did see the Mogats fire their lasers into scaffolding. I could see a small section of scaffold. I had enough of a view to see it blow apart in a flash. In the midst of the debris, the seven puppets we left on the scaffold must have flown off in every direction. Very satisfying.
One of the puppets coasted into my field of vision. As I watched, a Mogat commando fired at it. The laser cut through the soft armor, causing a small explosion in the oxygen-pressurized suit. The puppet exploded, spraying out body parts and blood.
“They bought it,” I called over an open frequency. “Now let’s give these specks a good show.”
The deep-space commandos rocketed toward the break in the hull. They would fly into the ship on their own while their transport parked in the launch bay above me.
