Down along the wreckage, five men in soft-shelled armor ventured into the gap that the cranes had opened.
“If you don’t mind my asking, sir, do we really need to do this?” Mars asked, his new born-again values leaving him uncomfortable about excavating graves.
“I want a better look at their armor,” I said.
“We’re pulling them out to look at their armor?”
“You worry about the engineering, I’ll worry about the ethics,” I said.
“The general wants to examine their armor for weaknesses,” Hollingsworth volunteered.
“Why does he care about that?” asked Mars
“He wants to know how to get through their armor before his return engagement,” Hollingsworth answered. He and Mars carried on their conversation around me as if I weren’t there.
“Are they coming back?” Mars asked.
“Nope; Harris wants to invade Earth,” Hollingsworth said.
For a moment, Mars looked stunned, then he laughed. “You’re joking, right?”
I started to say something, but Lieutenant Mars’s expression suddenly shifted. Something he’d heard over his headset caught his attention. He took a step toward the wreckage, then turned to me, and said, “They’ve got one, sir.”
“Are they certain it’s one of theirs?” I asked. We had lost nearly as many men as the Unified Authority in that battle. Most of ours were killed on the top level of the underground garage. Most of theirs were killed on the lower levels. They found this stiff so quickly, I thought it might be one of ours.
“It’s a U.A. Marine,” Mars confirmed.
“Are his shields still up?” I asked. Six weeks had passed since we brought the garage down on the bastards; the power in their suits should have gone out long ago.
“No, sir. The suit’s gone dark.”
“Is the armor in one piece?” I asked.
Mars relayed the question, then told me, “Good as new.”
A few minutes later, two engineers came out of the ground, carrying the dead Marine. They brought the body over so I could examine it. Without the glowing skin of its shields, the dead man’s armor looked very much like the combat armor my men wore. It was made of the same dark green alloy. Quarter-inch ridges traced seams along the shoulders, sleeves, legs, and sides of the helmet. The shielding must have been transmitted from those ridges.
Looking down at the body, I felt no regret for killing this man. The war was of their making, not mine. I was only twenty-eight years old, but I’d spent the last ten years of my life running from one battlefield to the next. Any compassion I had ever felt for the dead had long since burned out of me.
“The visor’s cracked,” I told Mars.
A hairline break ran vertically across the glass face of the visor. The crack was thin and shallow, so minor you might not even be able to trace it with a sharpened pencil.
“Where?” Mars asked as he bent down for a closer look. “That? That’s not a crack, it’s a scratch.”
“I told you, perfect condition,” I said.
“As long as the visor works—”
“You have your orders,” I said.
“We’re getting four more sets,” he argued.
“Five more suits,” I corrected him. If I’d left it at four, he might have taken it as tacit permission to keep this suit. “And those five suits had better be perfect, or I’ll send them back.”
“Five suits in perfect condition, aye,” Lieutenant Mars said, making no effort to hide his frustration. He relayed my orders down to his men, whispering something extra into his microphone so I would not hear.
Finding armor in working condition might take time. Once the shielding turned off, the armor would be crushed under the weight of rocks and concrete; but the garage was big and cavernous. With three thousand Unified Authority Marines buried in its depths, there had to be five undestroyed suits down there.
Nearly an hour passed before the engineers returned with their next specimen. I examined the armor. There was no dust on the seals around the shoulder plates. One of Mars’s engineers had taken a helmet from one cadaver and added it to the body armor of another. Clever. I pretended not to notice the switch.
“Send it to the labs,” I told Mars.
“Aye, aye, sir,” he said, trying to hide a smile. He must have known about the switch and thought he had pulled one over on me.
As his commanding officer, I could not allow him to think he was smarter than me, so I added, “And, Lieutenant, tell your men to stop with the mix-and-match armor. Next time, I’ll send it back.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
Mars called down my orders as his men loaded the body onto a jeep and left for Fort Sebastian. As I watched the jeep bounce away, Colonel Hollingsworth said, “Looks like we’ve got us an audience.”
“Damn.” I sighed.
A small crowd of locals had gathered around the chain-link fence that we’d built around the area as a perimeter. Leaning on the fence and watching us, they reminded me of inmates staring out of a prison yard.
“Maybe you should have a word with them,” Hollingsworth suggested.
“Don’t tell them that you are planning to invade Earth,” Mars added. “You wouldn’t want to upset them.”
“Just get me the specking armor,” I muttered to Mars as I headed for the gate, hating what would come next. The locals had caught me with my hand in the cookie jar. By mutual agreement, the underground garage had become a designated no-man’s-land forbidden to both us and the civilian government. Along with Unified Authority Marines, we had buried an armory filled with guns, grenades, mines, vehicles, and bombs when we blew up the garage. The locals didn’t want us visiting the armory, and we didn’t want them raiding it, either.
Throughout the morning, low clouds had floated in from the east, blocking out the sun and threatening to rain. Now the first drops of rain fell, splattering on shards of concrete, turning their gray surface to taupe.
I walked to the fence where the locals waited. Rain fell on them, but they did not seem to care.
“This is a flagrant violation of our agreement,” the Right Reverend Colonel Ellery Doctorow said as I approached. He stood a few inches from the chain link, his arms folded across his chest, an angry scowl on his face.
“I’m not here for weapons,” I explained.
“I don’t care why you are here,” Doctorow said. “Pull your men out and leave immediately.”
Doctorow was at least halfway through his sixties. The highest-ranking chaplain in the Unified Authority Army in his former life, he had come to Terraneau five years ago as the Army prepared to fight off an alien invasion. After the aliens massacred the fighting men, Doctorow shrugged off both his uniform and his cassock and became a civilian leader. He hated the military, and he viewed God as some kind of cosmic voyeur instead of a supreme being.
“We’re exhuming bodies, not weapons,” I explained. “You can hang around and observe if you like. You won’t see any weapons come out of that hole, just bodies and armor.”
Lieutenant Mars trotted over to tell me that his men had located a suitable stiff.
“How’s his armor?” I asked.
Mars repeated my question into his microphone, pressed his finger against his earpiece, then said, “The legs were crushed. The helmet is perfect.”
Under different circumstances I would have given the order to throw it back, but I did not know how long I could hold Doctorow and his civilian posse at bay.
“Take the legs from the first guy you found, the one with the cracked visor,” I said.
“Praise Jesus, God is good,” Mars told the men in the hole. “He says we can keep it.”
“Why are you digging up dead Marines?” Doctorow asked.
I started to answer, but Lieutenant Mars spoke first. “He’s preparing for the invasion.”
“Is the Earth Fleet coming back?” asked Doctorow.
“It’s the other way around. He’s planning on invading them,” Mars said, the glimmer in his eyes revealing the
