Our props for this delicate performance included empty suits of soft-shelled armor. The combat armor used by Marines was not bulletproof, but it was rigid. Engineers, firemen, and other noncombat personnel wore flexible armor. It was not as pliable as cloth, but it was a lot softer than the metal-resin alloy used in our armor.
“You boys ready for the cadaver roundup?” I asked. We split up in groups and searched the ship.
The next task on the agenda was morbid but necessary. We went scouting for bodies.
When the U.A. sank this boat, the bodies in the open areas were flushed into space. We would need to scour closed rooms and compartments now. I started my search in a latrine on the third deck, just behind the birthing area.
The entire ship would have been pitch-black had I not used the night-for-day lens, but the latrine seemed particularly dark. Maybe it was the small size of the room and the way the stalls reached out like fingers. The darkness just seemed to close in around me. There was something eerie about the empty latrine. It reminded me of walking across the barracks late at night. Stainless-steel urinals hung from the walls, the sinks were pristine, and the floor was clean, but no one moved. I went to look in the toilet stalls.
I found the first of my corpses wedged into a stall. The man hovered an inch or two above the seat. When the lasers struck the ship, he had probably just finished his business. His pants were up and sealed. His neck was broken. Depending on his luck, that might have killed him. Otherwise, he might have suffocated, or died as his own blood pressure caused his body to explode, or froze to death. Death in space came in many flavors, all of them fast.
The man’s blood hung frozen just above the floor like an icy web of beads. Walking in on the scene, you might have thought he’d vomited up glass.
I unpacked the top half of a soft-shell suit and used it like a net to scoop up the blood. The brittle strands snapped and shattered into beads inside the armor.
Then I pulled the dead sailor out of the stall and dressed him, and his blood, in the armor. The man’s body was frozen as stiff as stone in the absolute chill of space. Had I hit him against the wall with enough force, he might have shattered into tiny pieces like a pane of glass. As I tried to force him into the suit, flaps of his skin kept snapping like crackers between my fingers, and I eventually had to break his arms off and shove them into the sleeves of the armor separated from his torso. Once I finished dressing the sailor, I sealed his armor. It pressurized, read his body temperature, and heated itself automatically. It would take this boy a long time to thaw.
“How is it going out there?” I called out over the interLink.
“I feel like a ghoul,” one of my men responded.
“Are you eating them or dressing them, Marine?” I asked.
“Dressing them.”
“Ghouls don’t dress bodies, they eat them,” I said.
“Then I feel like a specking grave robber,” the Marine returned.
“You’re not fleecing them, are you?” I asked.
That Marine did not answer.
“They’re so frigging stiff,” another Marine commented. “I keep snapping off this guy’s fingers.”
“I had to break my guy’s arms off,” another Marine said.
“This seems kind of disrespectful,” another Marine added.
“They’re not going to fool anybody. No one is going to believe that these stiffs are alive.” It was the one who said he felt like a ghoul. “Maybe we could paint them white and sell them as marble statues.”
“The Mogats won’t be watching for flexibility,” I said.
I checked my first puppet. Some of the skin from his face had thawed, but his face was no longer attached to his skull. I had broken his legs and arms at the joints so that they would fold in the right places. I shook his helmet and saw liquid blood.
I found two more bodies in the halls beyond the birthing area and dressed them. It was unpleasant work.
“Okay, report. How many puppets do we have?” I called over the interLink.
“I have four ready,” one team called in.
“We have five and a half stiffies,” Private Philips, always the joker, reported. He had partnered up with Sergeant Thomer. I would not have trusted him on this mission without Thomer looking after him.
“Thomer, what does he mean by a half?” I asked.
“Don’t ask,” said Thomer.
“I’m asking,” I said.
“Philips thought it would be funny to kick one of the sti…puppets while I was loading him in his armor. He went flying backward and snapped in half.”
“He was an officer,” Philips explained in his own defense.
“Just shove the legs into some pants and seal him up,” I said.
“That might be a problem,” Thomer said. “His ass hit a bulkhead and shattered.” I heard the other men laughing over the interLink.
“We have nine,” the last team radioed in.
“Ass kiss,” one of the men muttered. I was pretty sure it was Philips.
“We need this puppet show to happen just the way we discussed. Any questions?” I asked.
“How many Mogats do we get to off?” Private Philips asked.
“Our puppets are supposed to be Navy engineers,” I said. “We have to keep this simple.”
“Ten of them?” Philips asked.
“None if we can help it,” I said.
“Philips is right. We have to kill some of them,” another Marine complained.
“Not a one,” I said.
“Ahhh, c’mon, Master Sergeant, how about just one?” Philips pled.
“Well, yeah, maybe one,” I said. “But open your speck receptacle one more time, Philips, and I’ll load you in a puppet suit,” I growled. “Any more smart questions, assholes?”
No one said anything. I liked their attitude.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
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.