Sten blinked as the world came back into focus. He and the five other recruits stared at each other blankly. Halstead flipped up the flash visor on his shock helmet.
"How long were you out?" he asked.
Sten shrugged. "A second or two, corporal?"
Halstead held out his watch finger. Two hours had passed. He unclipped another of the tiny bester grenades from his pocket.
"Instant time loss. You don't know what's happened to you, and you don't think anything's gone wrong. These are some of the most effective infiltration weapons you'll use.
"The company's out on the dexterity courser. Report to Corporal Carruthers."
Sten saluted and the recruits ran off.
Sten couldn't get the man out of his mind. There had been nothing unusual about the incident, but for some reason the officer's image kept poking up from his brain at odd moments.
It had been his day as company runner and he had been dozing at the desk. He didn't hear the door open or close.
"You the only one here, guardsman?"
Sten snapped awake and was on his feet
The man standing in front of him was tall and slender. Sten blinked and found himself staring at the uniform. Almost imperceptibly, it was changing shade to match the paneled wall background. The man wore a soft hat of the same kind of strange material that Sten later learned was a beret. It was tilted rakishly over one eye.
A winged dagger was pinned to the beret The only other insignia on the uniform were captain's stars on one shoulder and on the other the black outline of some kind of insect.
For some reason, Sten found himself stammering.
"Uh, yessir—they're—they're all out in the field."
The officer handed Sten a sealed envelope.
"This is for Sergeant Lanzotta. It's personal, so see it's delivered directly to him."
"Yessir."
Then he was gone.
A week later, Sten got a chance to ask Carruthers who the man was. The corporal whistled when Sten described the uniform.
"That's Mantis Section!"
Sten looked at her blankly.
"You mean you ain't heard?"
Sten shook his head, feeling like a pioneer-world idiot.
"They're the nastiest bunch of soldiers in the Imperial Army," Carruthers said. "Real elite. They work alone—humanoids, ETs. The Empire takes the best the Guard has and then disappears them into the Mercury Corps—Intelligence."
Sten remembered Mahoney and nodded.
"Anyway. Mantis wears those fancy trop-camouflage uniforms when you see them. Mostly, you don't see 'em at all and you'd better hope it stays that way."
"Why is that?"
"If you see one of those boys in the field you know you're about to be in deep trouble. Any one of 'em's probably got about two thousand and three of the enemy on his butt."
Carruthers smiled a rare smile. There was nothing she liked better than war stories. "I remember one time on Altair V. We were down with a regiment on a peacekeeping mission and somehow we'd got outselves surrounded.
"We were screaming for help on every wavelength we could reach and tryin' to hang on. We figured the next thing that'd happen is we'd have to die a lot."
Carruthers laughed. Sten figured that she had just made some kind of a joke and laughed back.
"So, one night this woman shows up at the command post. A Mantis Section troopie. She'd come through the enemy lines, through our pickets, through the support lines and first thing we know she's sitting down with our CO eating dinner. When she finished, she borrowed some AM2 tubes and bester grenades and disappeared again.
"I dunno what she did, or how she did it, but about twelve G hours later six Imperial destroyers showed up and bailed our tails out."
Carruthers glared at Sten, which made him feel a whole lot better. A smiling Carruthers was something he didn't think he wanted to get used to.
"But that's not the way it usually works," she told him. "You ever see one of those guys again, troop, you crawl under something. 'Cause as sure as your tail is where your head ought to be, there's something big and nasty about to come screaming in—you just remember that, hear?"
Sten heard her real well.
"You will all learn about the fighting suit," Lanzotta said. "Chances are, some of you will even die in one. And you will discover, as I did, that the suit will kill you faster than the enemy, more often than not."
At that point, Sten and the others turned their minds to "doze." They all thought they had Lanzotta figured now. All of his little lectures were structured the same. First, an introduction. Then—Lanzotta's favorite part—a history lesson. Followed by the informatipn they really needed to know. At which point they snapped awake again.
"I am particularly fond of this subject," Lanzotta continued. "In fact, I have made a personal study of the suit. Because it was with this piece of equipment that the technicians reached the absolute height of absurdity."
Click. Snap. Every recruit mind instantly slipped into a deeper state of unconsciousness. Lanzotta motioned to Halstead, who walked to a terminal and rapped on a few keys. There was a loud clanking and grinding and all the recruits came awake as a long rack of fighting suits ratcheted out into the lecture area.
Sten looked over the suits, and for once, he didn't have to fake interest. Many of them he recognized from the war feelies. They were huge, armored things shaped vaguely like humanoids. Some had what could pass for arms, but were track-based.
The first thing he noticed was they all seemed to be graded by size. At the beginning of the rack, they were small and flimsy-looking. From there they got larger and larger and more complex-appearing, until about two-thirds of the way down the line. Then they got smaller again, but with a more durable look about them.
Lanzotta paced along the line of suits, stopping at the largest one. "Now here, as I can personally attest, is where the Techs really outdid themselves. It was all so logical, you see. To anyone but a guardsman. They made bullets, therefore they made bulletproof vests."
Lanzotta looked his captive group over, as if anticipating a question. No one was that dumb.
"Now, I'm not going to explain what a bullet was," Lanzotta said, "except to say it was a projectile that was capable of creating a hole in you as big as the willygun. In some ways, it was worse."
The way Lanzotta grinned at that, Sten knew he meant worse.
"The larger the antipersonnel weapon," Lanzotta continued, "the more the Techs loaded on the armor. Until, finally, with this suit we could take anything. Lasers, nukes, bugs, null bombs, you name it, we were just about invulnerable."
Sten was starting to get the drift of what was wrong with the suit.
"About fifty years ago, I had the great pleasure of testing this suit in action. Myself and about two thousand comrades in arms."
Lanzotta laughed. And it was instant tension time for the recruits. Should they laugh? He obviously thought he had made a funny. But Carruthers and Halstead were stony-faced. They didn't think it was funny. Lanzotta ended their agony by not noticing anything and going on.
"Our orders were to put down a rebellion on a godforsaken planet called Moros. Besides the troops, we were supplied with everything known to modern military science—including the latest fighting suit."
Sten studied it more closely. It was the largest, non-tracked piece of equipment on the rack. There were tubes and wires, minividscreens, and knobs and bulges everywhere. It looked like it weighed about five hundred kilos and would take a whole battery of Techs to operate.
"I love this suit," Lanzotta said. "It can do anything. "It's AM2 -powered and pseudomuscled. Anyone inside it would be equal to thirty beings in strength. A small company dressed in these could advance through any kind of fire the enemy threw at them. It's impervious to almost anything and you can live in it for months without outside support."