A small ten-foot-by-ten-foot dais sat on one side of the cafeteria. In the time that I had been in Fort Houston, no one had ever used it. Now I saw a podium on that stand. Three empty chairs formed a short row behind the podium.
When the officers in charge came into the cafeteria, everyone snapped to attention. The officers, all Marines in Charlie Service uniforms, marched up to the stand without so much as a sideward glance. One of those men was a colonel—probably our new camp commandant. One was a major. He’d been around all along. The third, also a major, was a briefing officer who had most likely flown in from Washington.
The briefing officer stood straight and tall. He was a Marine who had seen combat; I could see it in his demeanor. We all could see it. Something about the way he carried himself commanded instant respect. Even the way he scowled at us commanded respect.
“At ease,” the colonel said. Then he followed up with, “Gentlemen, make yourselves comfortable. We have a lot to discuss.”
With this he stepped back and gave the mike to the briefing officer.
“Gentlemen, we have an enemy; and as you know, the Unified Authority Marines do not take kindly to enemies. Our enemy is Morgan Atkins. Now, gentlemen, we could try to reason with Mr. Atkins. We could try to negotiate with Mr. Atkins. We could even offer to play nice with Mr. Atkins, but that would not be the Marine way.
“Do I make myself clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” we yelled.
“What was that?” the major asked. “I don’t believe I heard you clearly.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” we all shouted at the tops of our lungs.
“That’s better,” the major said.
He was a short man with a shaved head and glasses. He had a scar on his forehead. That scar might have come from an old skiing injury, but I had the feeling he’d earned it in battle. Sitting as close as I was, I could also see that he was missing some teeth.
“You,” the major called to one of us, “shut down the lights.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the man called back as he raced to the switch.
A screen lowered from the ceiling, and a familiar image appeared. It was a planet called Hubble, certainly the ugliest piece of real estate I had ever seen. The planet had a smoggy, brownish black surface that had not seen sunlight in thousands of years.
“Gentlemen, this here is Hubble. Hubble does not have oxygen in its atmosphere. The gases that surround Hubble are humid with oil. If you breathe that shit, you will die, Marines. I suggest you take good care of your armor so it can take good care of you.”
The picture changed to a surface view of the planet. Several of the men in the cafeteria groaned. The landscape looked like a desert at night except that the soil sparkled like fresh coffee grounds. The cliffs looked like they were made of volcanic glass.
“This is the surface of Hubble. This is what happens when a sun expands and bakes a planet, gentlemen. It turns to shit.
“Hubble is made of one kind of shit and one kind of shit only. That shit is in the air. It is in the ground. It is in the rocks. It is nasty shit, gentlemen.
“Should you visit Hubble, do not shoot the rocks or dig a hole, gentlemen. In the rocks and ground you will find the nastiest shit of all. The boys in the science lab have labeled this an ‘extreme-hydrogenation elemental compound distillation.’ At the Pentagon we call it ‘distilled shit gas.’
“You may not know this, Marines, but we lost a lot of good men and equipment on Hubble because distilled shit gas eats through armor and machinery.”
The scene changed to show a corpse. It was a Marine in combat armor. The outside of his armor was intact. The camera came up to his visor, which normally had tint shields but was now entirely transparent. The face behind the visor was stripped down to skull and muscle, with the muscle disintegrating right before our eyes.
I’d fought on Hubble. That was before the Confederate Arms declared independence. We massacred a Mogat settlement on that planet. I always wondered why the Mogats had chosen to hide on such a hideous planet. I was about to find out.
“Gentlemen, you learn something new every day. Today we have learned that the corrosive elements in distilled shit gas can be used to produce energy. If you strip those corrosive elements out of the shit gas compound, you are left with highly malleable chemicals that carry an electrical charge and are easily transformed.”
“Nanotechnology,” somebody whispered in the audience.
“You are almost correct, Marine,” said the briefing officer. “Not nanotechnology.” He stretched the first syllables—
“It turns out that distilled shit gas is useful stuff. Morgan Atkins has based his entire civilization on the use of distilled shit gas. He fuses the noncorrosive compounds with an electrical charge and converts them into plastic to build his cities. He condenses it and strips the acids out to fuel automobiles. The man has an endless supply of distilled shit gas at his fingertips, and he is specking Albert Einstein when it comes to the many uses of that gas.
“When you invade his planet, gentlemen, you will be underground. Be aware, Marines, that everything around you will be made of distilled shit gas.
“Do you hear me, Marines?”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
Manipulative or not, I had to admire the way this briefing officer personalized the war. He never referred to the Mogats. Everything focused on Morgan Atkins himself, as if he personally had attacked Earth, killed Marines, and declared war.
The screen reverted to an orbital shot of Hubble. “The good news is that we no longer need to invade Hubble. There are no Mogats on this planet, we already killed them,” the briefing officer continued.
Across the cafeteria I heard sighs and nervous laughter.
“The bad news is that you will be invading a planet that is exactly like Hubble, right down to having distilled shit gas in the dirt.
“The distilled shit gas will be the least of your worries. You Marines will invade a planet that is home to an estimated 200 million Morgan Atkins Believers. Those men and women will not welcome you into their home, Marines.
“Leading their forces is one General Amos Crowley. You may have heard of this man. You may be ignorant of him. Amos Crowley was once a general in the Unified Authority Army. His having deserted the Unified Authority makes this dickweed our enemy, Marines. His having swapped sides to join the Mogats makes him a treacherous dickweed.
“Do not underestimate this dickweed. When he was our dickweed, he led the Unified Authority Army through many great battles. He may be a dickweed, but he is a dickweed who knows how to fight.”
On the screen, the white-bearded face of General Amos Crowley smiled down at us. Crowley had a smooth, kind face with a generous smile. He had shown that same smile to me as I lay on a table waiting to be tortured. He was the reason I’d invited Freeman to join the invasion. Whether we won or lost, Freeman would make sure that General Crowley did not survive the battle.
“I have more good news for you, gentlemen. Morgan Atkins has developed shields that protect his ships and his buildings from any weapon we possess. We have not seen his tanks in action, but we have reason to believe that his tanks and battle vehicles may have those shields as well.
“Their shields are the real specking deal, Marines. Do not bother shooting Morgan Atkins tanks with laser weapons. Do not bother shooting his buildings with particle beams. You will not hurt them with grenades or mortars.
“If this invasion goes as planned, we hope to shut those shields down before you have to deal with them. If it does not go as planned, gentlemen, you may find yourselves in a battle against an invulnerable enemy. If that
