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was frozen stiff.

  A guy in a lab coat whose nametag read Doctor Bolder fiddled with some switches and buttons and then said to Mrs. Salazar, “We’ve got a solid connection. There’s nothing to worry about. Who’s next?”

  Just then I had the utmost respect for Mr. Humboldt. He had gone first without knowing whether the connection was good or bad. That takes balls of steel.

  Guess who got picked to go next? Me.

  I stripped nude and everyone laughed at me. My dick shrunk up from the humiliation which made them laugh even harder.

  But then something magical happened: Mrs. Salazar stripped down right in front of the entire class, and her body was gorgeous. Everyone forgot about me in an instant which was good because my dick started to make a comeback.

  She took me by the hand and led me to a different pod.

  Then as I lay down, she turned to face the class and said, “Nothing you will do takes more courage than this. You have to subject yourself to the ridicule of others and then you have to trust your very life to an untrustworthy piece of tech. Jack was picked to go first because he has more guts than all the rest of you pukes put together. And you punks had the audacity to laugh at him?

  As the disc came towards my face, all my worries evaporated. For the first time, I wondered what it would take to get Mrs. Salazar to bed.

  Then my mind screamed out in confusion and my thoughts went out like a light.

  Mech.

  I woke with a start. A robotic mammoth was staring at me. Its face was more or less human-like but nonetheless, hideous to wake up to.

  It said in a masculine voice, “I’m Mr. Humboldt. Which one are you?”

  “I’m Jack Peterson, sir.”

  “Well, you’re a lucky boy because I think you got just about the coolest Marine skin available. Come with me and take a look.”

  I followed him to a mirror, specially placed there to help us come to grips with our new visage. He was right. My visor was the same as the others but my exoskeleton was blue and pitch-black with little green highlights, as opposed to the usual grey of the other skins.

  I lifted my visor with my robotic hand. The fake face underneath was even a little cooler than his was.

  To make the transition easier, the skins are all man sized, just so we don’t trip over our own feet because of a size difference.

  I did a little twirl and then I stopped in my tracks. “Holy fucking shit,” I said, oblivious to the fact that my instructor was at my side.

  He just smiled a weird, rubber smile, and said, “Yep. I told you it was the coolest one. I’m a little jealous.”

  On the right shoulder of my skin was an etching. It simply said, Rick Pimpage. Semper Fi mother fucker.

  The signature belonged to Richard Pringle, the most badass son of a bitch to ever don a space Marine skin. I was literally wearing the same skin my hero had worn before.

  Just then, there was a thud and Mr. Humboldt went clopping off. I watched him introduce another student to the weird and wonderful world of being a bonafide space Marine.

  He asked who was in the skin and then he slapped a magnetic nametag to the chest plate. He led the formidable looking robot over to me and allowed it to gaze into the mirror for awhile. I saw the name tag read Becky Morrison.

  I don’t know Becky very well. She’s a bit of a dunce and she doesn’t talk much, but when she saw the etching on my shoulder, she coughed and said, “No way? You’re so lucky Jack.”

  I smiled and for the first time, noticed that one of my incisors was chipped, damaged no doubt by Richard Pringle during some daring assault on terrorists or something equally exotic. Maybe he was quelling an uprising on a penal planet? Maybe he took a piece of shrapnel to the face during a skirmish with militarized Skeptics. I knew it was also equally plausible that he just tripped and fell or hit his mouth on a beam but I pushed those imagined scenarios to the back of my mind.

  I should mention what Skeptics are. Skeptics believe that the whole notion of aliens coming back to earth to extinguish humanity is nothing but a hoax perpetrated by the government to keep the people down. It’s an odd stance but it has some merit to it. None of us were alive when the so-called aliens arrived. No one alive saw it with their own two eyes, so it’s easy to dismiss as a ruse.

  But lately Skeptics have taken up arms. They’ve assassinated high up military personnel as well as politicians. They blow up earth bound military facilities. There is some evidence they were the ones responsible for the power failure at that cryo-freeze facility I mentioned before.

  No one really understands why they do what they do. We think it’s to topple the system that they believe is lying to us to keep us toeing the line, but so far they haven’t published any kind of concrete manifesto and no single leader has come forth yet. I think they’re just lunatics.

  They’re a bloody menace and I know for a fact that Richard Pringle infiltrated a few of their various cells in the past; it was all over the news feeds.

  I looked to the left just in time to see a space Marine suit drop to its feet from the three inch suspension of cables and wires that held it. It hit the floor with a thud. The detached cables dangled over the robotic head like attacking vipers.

  Mr. Humboldt helped the new arrival acclimate as he had with us.

  When Mrs. Salazar announced her arrival, we knew everyone had made it safe and sound. The room was full of hideous but formidable looking space Marines now.

  Mr. Humboldt said, “While we’re here, you will call me by my first name. My name is Billy. Mrs. Salazar’s name is Samantha. Call her that until we go back to camp.”

  We all nodded. I guess I did already know that her name was Samantha, but now that I was going to get to call her that, and now that I knew what she looked like naked, I felt closer to her. Plus she said I had more guts than everyone else in the class. She had gone from my worst teacher to my favorite teacher in mere minutes.

  That alone, made me suspect that this field trip was going to be unusual.

  Captain

  Captain Jonathan Hitchcock walked into the skin room. He was handsome for an old guy, with a neatly trimmed beard and his stripes showing prominently. He had a golden, metallic orb in his left hand.

  He took in the entire class and said, “You are some lucky kids. You get to don soldier skins instead of having your thoughts stuck in one of these things,” he tossed the orb a few inches in the air and it floated there for a few seconds before falling back to his hand. “Non military personnel never get to wear skins so you can thank Billy Humboldt for the privilege. He’s an old friend.” When no one thanked him the captain bellowed, “Thank him now or I’ll throw you off my fucking ship.”

  That scared the hell out of all of us. We thought things got better after camp but the captain had proven otherwise. We raced each other to thank Mr. Humboldt.

  The captain smiled like an imp and said, “Just kidding guys. Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  As I walked past him, the captain put a hand on my shoulder. I actually felt the pressure of it through the steel. He winked at me and said, “Do you know who wore that skin before you?”

  I nodded and smiled as I pointed to the etching on the shoulder.

  He said, “If any other soldier had defaced my skins like that, I’d have reprimanded him. But Richard Pringle is no ordinary soldier. If you’re lucky, some of his essence got trapped in those circuits with you.”

  I knew that wasn’t really possible but I smiled like I thought it was.

  He added, “I heard Rick is older than I am but because he spends so much time in stasis while he’s in the field, he hasn’t aged the same way. I think he tells girls he’s only twenty five or something. He’s a sly dog.”

  I hadn’t considered that. All pictures and likenesses of him were classified. I made a decision to look up his earliest exploits as soon as we got back to camp.

  Tour

  The captain showed us around the entire ship, and I mean every
nook and cranny. We had to see the inside of a maintenance closet but we also got to end our tour in the command room which was awesome.

  He said, “This is where the magic happens.” He pointed at the thirty foot monitor that showed the black of space outside and said, “We’re currently situated around a planet we’ve nicknamed Scum Earth. Ensign, show them the view of the planet.”

  A young woman moved her finger around on a large touchpad until the scene on the monitor changed.

  The planet was aptly named. It had an orangish brown atmosphere, just opaque enough to show dirty black landmasses beneath. It really did look like a scummy earth.

  Someone said, “Which quadrant are we in right now?”

  The captain shook his head. “That’s classified information. I’m sorry but I can’t divulge our location to anyone but those with the proper clearance. I’m sure you understand.”

  Someone else said, “But there’s no threat. The Skeptics don’t have the resources to reach deep space.”

  The captain laughed. “We’re not keeping our location a secret because of those weasels. We’re keeping it a secret because of the aliens.”

  “But we don’t know when they’re going to return or even if they’ll return. What if they don’t show up in our lifetime?”

  The captain said severely, “And what if they do?”

  I saw Mr. Humboldt look at the nametag on the chest of the person asking all the questions. They’d be getting a flogging when we got back to camp.

  The captain seemed to