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what I said? You’ve survived a day or two and now you’ve got your promotion.”
    Gorski chuckled. “Do you remember what I said? These assault ships and even these capsules could work very effectively against the two Macro ships we’re now sitting in the middle of.”
    “You’re right,” I said, “but so was what I said before. If it was just us, I would go for it today. But this isn’t about just us. I’ve made mistakes before. Remember China? I didn’t even attack the Macros that time. I just nosed around and pissed them off. I’m not keen to get millions more innocents killed.”
    Gorski nodded. “I understand, sir. We are expendable. We will do or die.”
    “We will do both,” I said, correcting him.
    Quietly, we smoothed and shaped our tiny, flying dishes. I hesitated, and then I ordered our factories to churn out sixteen hundred of them.
    I’d been working hard for hours, at that point. One annoying thing about a helmet was the fact that it kept you from touching your face. Abominable itching was something all my men had to endure for hours from time to time. As soon as I got through the airlock, I removed my helmet. The interior of every brick was pressurized. I breathed deeply of slightly fresher air and gave my head a good scratching.
    I got to thinking about a suit redesign. We had vacc suits, and they had done fairly well on Helios. But they were far from ideal. They weren’t really made for combat in pure vacuum, nor for weightless maneuvering. I envisioned many problems and deaths with our current designs. We’d come up with suit improvements before the Helios campaign, but I’d put our efforts into preparation for that world’s heavy gravity, such as the lighter combat kits I’d issued. I’d never really gotten around to improving each marine’s basic survival suit.
    The problem with combat in space was that any hit tended to be fatal to the victim. Even if you had a suit-puncture over a limb, it was hard to isolate that portion of the marine’s body without the injured man freezing and suffocating. The nanites helped a lot, as they were able to act like a smart metal, automatically sealing up the breach. But the first thing that happened was depressurization. So, even before the nanites could act, the marine had no air in his suit and none in his lungs. The freezing void would suck it all out. We’d taught our people to release all the air from their lungs in such a case—you could last a little longer that way. If you held your breath, you were asking for a rupture.
    I found these conditions unacceptable. A small puncture could take out one of my men effectively. Even if it didn’t kill him, it would at least incapacitate him. I soon found myself working on a new suit, a battle suit. There were a lot less of my people left now, and I knew the environment we would be facing. I figured the least I could do was give them the best equipment possible for the job.
    Hours went by. I came up with an armored design. A battle suit that was heavy, and required some exoskeletal help from the nanites to move under normal gravity. Naturally, as my marines were anything but average men, they could perform even without this power-assist, but I gave them everything I could. The helmet was hard polymers, as was the chest and limb covering pieces. These harder, thicker surfaces made the suit heavy, but that didn’t matter much in space with nanotized troops. Light hits from shrapnel and the like couldn’t penetrate the new battle suit.
    I decided to have each man be responsible for transferring the existing HUD unit inside his current headpiece into the new suits. That way, I didn’t have to duplicate all that delicate electronics. The power packs and weapons systems remained similarly untouched. I was focused on the skin of the suit and how it reacted to damage.
    I built the suit in regions, with separate compartments for your limbs, torso and head. There were seals that felt like pinching elastic