"All of which wouldn't have meant all that much, except that HARDCASE had a much different approach, especially to recruiting. Their process was much closer to what I had imagined would be used on PEREGRINE, focusing on reflexes and even more esoteric things, synaptic variations, certain types of chemical and immune system receptivities, and so on. And even psychologically they were looking for a different kind of subject. We were pilots, had been chosen primarily as such—some of the PEREGRINE subjects had never flown a combat mission, but they were all fliers, much like the original astronaut corps. HARDCASE needed soldiers. You might even say that, ultimately, they needed killers. They tried to be more discriminating than that, but that infinitesimal slant shadowed it from the beginning, I think.

"Even so, if Barrett Keener's problems had been physical—a tumor, say, or a serotonin imbalance, it would have been caught immediately. Both PEREGRINE and HARDCASE subjects were routinely tested for such things, and we spent most of our time hooked up to analytical devices as a matter of course. But in those days pure schizophrenia was still largely a mystery, and Keener was the sort of paranoid who made hiding his growing illness part of the focus of his madness. Although very few people who worked with the man could honestly say they liked him, not a single one of the psychologists or doctors at Sand Creek or any of his HARDCASE co-subjects guessed that he was slowly going insane. Not until it was too late.

"I see the look on your face, Mr. Ramsey. No, you haven't ever heard of Keener. You'll find out why in a moment.

"I can be brief about this, and I would prefer to be. I lost many friends on the day of Keener's rampage. There were plenty of safeguards built into the system, but although the military and its contractors had considered the possibility of sabotage, and had even considered the frightening possibility that one of the HARDCASE subjects might have a breakdown, no one had considered that both might happen. Keener, caught in the grip of a strengthening psychotic delusion, had been preparing for weeks. The HARDCASE complex at Sand Creek was an arsenal—the cybernetic battle-suits themselves each carried the firepower of a Powell tank, and there was a stockpile of other ordnance for combat-testing purposes. But as deadly as the battle-suits were, for someone like Barrett Keener with a background in munitions there was even more damage that could be done. He spent weeks preparing in secret, determined to avenge some incomprehensible insult, or strike some unimaginable blow for delusional freedom, descending deeper and deeper into a black spiral of hatred.

"I have pieced together much of what happened from secret reports. It was night when it began, and most of the personnel on the base were asleep. I happened to be up—I've never needed a lot of sleep—working with the night-shift technicians in the construction bay. We heard the explosions first. We barely had time to wonder what was going on when Keener himself, his battle-suit already in full thermodispersal flare, blew through the walls of the construction hangar. He wasn't singling us out—we were simply on his destructive path from one end of the base to the other. Despite the surprise and the firestorm from the bombs he had already triggered, there had been at least a little resistance before he got to us. Keener had already survived a direct hit from a grenade launcher with only scorch marks and a slow freon leak at one of the suit joints to show for it. With the glow of his heat dispersal units and the cloud of leaking vapor, he looked like an angry god. We didn't have a chance. As he stepped through the wall he opened up with a mini-railgun and the place literally fell apart around us.

"It was horrible. I cannot bear to think about it much. In the early days I tried to imagine things I could have done differently, ways I could have saved my comrades—tortured myself with a thousand different scenarios. Now I know that it was only blind luck that I even survived. I was close enough to one of the ships under construction that I was able to scramble inside the shell when the first of Keener's incendiary ordnance went off. I had time only to see Keener marching out across the rubble of the construction bay, armor blazing like the sun as it struggled to process the additional heat, then the rest of the thermal grenades he was spraying began exploding and everything went away."

Sellars brought a knuckle slowly up to the corner of his dry eye. Ramsey wondered if it were only an old gesture helplessly repeated, or if the man felt tears he could not shed. He wondered which would be worse.

"Two technicians inside the ship and I were the only ones in the bay that survived the attack, and neither of them lasted out the month—they were too badly burned. We all were burned, roasted like meat in an oven, but I had shielded organs and modified skin—the engineers didn't. I was lucky enough, or unlucky enough, to survive. Just barely.

"After leaving a path of destruction all the way across the base, Keener actually escaped Sand Creek. Through a lucky accident his built-in flight jets were incapacitated by machine gun fire from one of the sentry posts, so he set out on foot. He was headed toward the closest town, a place called Buffalo, I think, and God knows what he would have done when he got there, but they scrambled jets from the nearest air base and caught him within a mile or so of Sand Creek, in open prairie. They lost a plane, but Barrett Keener was finally killed by air-to-ground misiles. To be more precise, even though there were no direct hits on him, the explosions finally pushed his suit past its dispersal limit and it went up like a small-bore thermonuclear device. It took years, I hear, before anything grew on the spot. The soil was virtually turned to glass.

"So . . . a madman committed a very, very expensive suicide, and the rest of us were left behind to deal with it. I was the only surviving test subject of PEREGRINE. Keener had been even more thorough with his HARDCASE comrades, placing shaped charges in the barracks, and every one of them died in their beds when the building went up. The entire Sand Creek base was in ruins—one hundred and eighty-six killed, three times that many wounded. The ships were ruined, billions of dollars worth of work and research gone, so the military-corporate fellows cut their losses and ended the program. HARDCASE was buried too—or at least that was the official story. Of course, Keener had managed to do a very impressive amount of damage with only a single suit, and the less ambitious combat suits that soldiers wear today look very similar to the HARDCASE regalia, so perhaps they simply changed the name of the program and started again somewhere else."

"How . . . how horrible," breathed Kaylene Sorensen.

"I've never seen anything about this," Ramsey said, trying to keep from sounding too doubtful, if nothing else out of respect for the obvious pain on Sellars' ruined face. "Not a whisper."

"It was buried very, very deep. People knew about the base at Sand Creek of course, but not what was being done there or what ultimately went wrong. The official story was that it was closed because of a bad fire, with some residual radiation contamination forcing them to seal the site. Some of the dead, like the PEREGRINE volunteers, whose postings had been secret in the first place, were siphoned off to other operations and their deaths reported there. It was a failure of colossal proportions, not to mention that it would have brought down countless billions in lawsuits if the truth came out. They buried it. They couldn't just make it disappear completely, of course, which is why there are rumors about what happened there to this very day."

"And they buried you, too?"

"As best they could. I had no relatives. In fact, they thought I was dead the first twelve hours or so, because . . . because the scene in the construction bay was so bad. When I survived, it became easier just to lose me."