He held up a prune-size twisted metal bit, so hot his insulated glove smoked. “This iridescent blue’s characteristic of a Projectile hull. Like titanium, but with trace elements rare in the solar system.”

“It’s worth getting killed for?”

He frowned inside his mask. “Nah. This shrapnel is all we ever find.” He waved a hand at the ruins. “We have no idea where to look for anything larger. We’ve tried every sorting and detection device and methodology.”

We walked as he talked.

I pointed at rubble. It looked… different “What about there?”

Howard turned. “Why?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. Something.”

Howard shrugged, and we dug.

Two minutes later, I touched it. Inside my suit, hair stood on my neck.

“Howard…” I wrapped my gloved fingers around something curved, then yanked.

It popped loose, and I stumbled back.

The thing I held was iridescent, blue metal, dinner-plate size, and so hot it warmed my skin through my gloves.

Howard pounced from where he had been digging and snatched it away, muttering, “Holy Moly, Holy Moly.”

He rotated the fragment. The convex side was scorched black. “This was the exterior surface. It was coated with ceramic that friction burned away as the Projectile entered our atmosphere.”

“It’s important?”

“Biggest frag we’ve ever found. Most of the Projectile vaporizes.” He drew his finger along one side of the fragment. It was a round edge, like somebody had taken a bite, and silver. “But this part here is the prize.”

“What?”

“My educated hunch—the army puts up with me because I have good educated hunches—is this is a rocket-nozzle edge.”

“So?”

He punched a button on a handheld global-positioning unit, and it beeped. I supposed he was marking the location where we found this little treasure. He motioned for me to turn around, unzipped my backpack, slipped the frag into an insulated bag, and dropped it in. My light pack got heavier. Now I understood why Howard requested an infantryman. He needed a pack mule.

“The radius of this nozzle is too small to be a main propulsion system for a vehicle that was as big as a building. It’s a maneuvering nozzle. We’ve been of two schools on how these vehicles are so accurate. One school of thought is they’re ballistic. Fire-and-forget, like a bullet. But from a range of three hundred million miles that seemed unlikely to some of us. This confirms that they make midcourse corrections.”

“Like remote control?”

He shook his head. “That’s what the others will say, now. But neither radio astronomy nor any other monitoring has picked up any signals to these Projectiles. And we’ve certainly been listening.”

“What do you think, Howard?”

He snugged my pack, spun me, and we again picked our way through debris. “You tell me, Jason.”

Professors. The Socratic method. I was coming to appreciate the army. They just told you how it was.

I pushed my helmet back and scratched my head through the protective suit “I dunno. I have a hard time hitting a rifle target with a bullet past three hundred meters, much less three hundred million miles. I think the Projectiles must be guided. But I wouldn’t do it by remote control. I had a radio-controlled model car once, with one of those antenna boxes? Every time our neighbor hit his automatic garage-door opener my car turned left.”

Howard stepped over a fallen lamppost. “Great minds think alike. Why would these aliens risk signals that we could jam?”

Well, then, how did Howard think they steered these things? I shuddered. “Pilots?”

He nodded. “Kamikazes.”

I shuddered. “We’re looking for alien bodies?”

“The chances of finding one after impact are infinitesimal. But an alien corpse could teach us enough to turn this war.”

“Like why they hate us enough to exterminate us.”

He stirred bricks with his walking stick. “Hate us? We didn’t hate the AIDS virus. We eradicated it because it was killing us. Maybe I Love Lucy reruns we broadcast into space last century cause birth defects in their young.”

For the next six hours I jumped every time Howard poked rubble with his stick, expecting to see ET’s charred carcass. We had no more narrow escapes. We made no more Holy Moly-provoking discoveries. But we collected enough scrap to restore an antique Buick. My pack clanked with every step.

Dusk fell as we returned to spook camp. Howard actually whistled behind his mask, pleased with the day’s loot. Of course, he wasn’t carrying the Buick.

In a trailer, Howard helped me out of the pack. “Jason, why did you dig there? Where we found the big hull fragment?”

I shrugged. “Seemed right.”

“Very right.”

We shed our protective suits, now soot-blackened. He caught one foot in a leg. As he pogoed for balance, he asked. “You’re in Basic, now?”

I nodded.

He stared at my pack on the trailer floor. “You have a permanent assignment when you finish?”

“If I finish. I’m kind of a fuck-up.”

Evening chow was over by the time the spooks released me back to Third Platoon. Civilians trickled away with the last of the distributed C-rations. Walter asked, “Whadja do, Jason?”

“Same ole‘, same ole’.” I shrugged. The last thing that happened before Howard released me was a Judge Advo-cate General’s Corps major made me sign in triplicate a paper that said I’d never tell that Howard’s outfit existed. Hell, after I read it I wasn’t sure I could admit that Pittsburgh existed or I existed.

Walter had scrounged me a bacon-and-scrambled-eggs C-ration meal and even a plasti of Coke. My mouth watered, even at the prospect of C-rations.

My back ached from humping Hibble’s war souvenirs, my face blistered from blast-furnace heat where the mask hadn’t reached. I ate seated with my back against a deuce-and-a-hatf tire. The day with Howard Hibble taught me that, quietly, humanity hadn’t quit. If I hung in, maybe the army and I could make a difference.

After we convoyed back from Pittsburgh , the battalion commander gave us a day off. Most people slept. I went to the day room and discovered books. Not Chip-books. Paper books.

Every company area has a day room. It’s a lounge for soldiers to spend their free time. Of which there normally is none in Basic. I think the army named it because an hour there feels like a day.

Ours had a manual Foosball table with one of the little men broken off, a tray of yesterday’s mess-hall cookies, coffee, and ancient orange furniture covered in the skin of animals so extinct I’d never heard of them. Really. I read the labels. “Naugahyde.”

Shelved books lined the walls, the way libraries used to be. Not exactly the New York Times most-downloaded list, of course. There were yellowed field manuals on everything from first aid to the ever-popular FM-22-5 Drill and Ceremony. Better were The Art of War by Sun

Tzu and General Eisenhower’s Crusade in Europe . Whole shelves held histories of the campaigns of Napoleon, Robert E. Lee, and Alexander the Great, complete with color maps that folded out just like a wide-screen you could actually touch.

Books aren’t like chips. You feel them and smell their age.

Some have a life of their own. Inside one’s cover was handwritten, “DaNang, Vietnam, May 2, 1966— To a short-timer who won’t have to study war no more.” Another read, “Tor Captain A. R. Johns, KIA Normandy, France, July 9, 1944.” It didn’t say if he had a family. He could have been orphaned, like me. But he had an outfit forever. The First Infantry Division.

I devoured the books shelf by shelf and just made it back to barracks by lights-out. I persuaded myself my obsession was just because I was starved for intellectual stimulation after Basic’s moribund mud. The alternative was that Ord and Judge March foresaw that the army and I were a predestined match, a notion too bent and knobby to contemplate. I snuck Benton’s The Sino-Indian Conflict: Winter Campaign 2022 back with me and skimmed it while my free hand scrubbed commodes with Ord’s brush.