Sanctum Secorum Reading Room #15 - Armor

What this episode covers

Join two of our Keepers of Mysteries as they examine Armor, by John Steakley. The planet is called Banshee. The air is unbreathable, the water is poisonous. It is home to the most implacable enemies that humanity, in all its interstellar expansion, has ever encountered. Body armor has been devised for the commando forces that are to be dropped on Banshee—the culmination of ten thousand years of the armorers’ craft. A trooper in this armor is a one-man, atomic powered battle fortress. But he will have to fight a nearly endless horde of berserk, hard-shelled monsters—the fighting arm of a species which uses biological technology to design perfect, mindless war minions. Felix is a scout in A-team Two. Highly competent, he is the sole survivor of mission after mission. Yet he is a man consumed by fear and hatred. And he is protected, not only by his custom-fitted body armor, but by an odd being which seems to live within him, a cold killing machine he calls “The Engine.” Armor is the story of humanity’s war against an alien race whose foot soldiers are three-meter-tall insects, referred to as “ants”. It is also the story of a research colony on the fringes of human territory which is threatened by pirates. The two plots intertwine and finally join at the end, with each providing answers and insight into events of the other.

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