Armor by John Steakley

...everything you were hiding from was in there with you. That’s the trouble with armor. It won’t protect you from what you are.

Felix is a loner, a broken man with a mysterious past. When he’s dropped with thousands of fellow soldiers on a toxic planet nicknamed “Banshee,” he’s the only survivor of the battle with the 8-foot tall “Ants” that live there. That’s partly because of the special armor he wears — his black nuclear-powered scout suit — and partly because of the emotional armor he wears — what he calls “The Engine” — his lack of fear and compassion in dangerous situations. Because he doesn’t really care if he dies, he is able to make quick detached decisions, and it’s this armor, ironically, that keeps him alive.

After the battle, the computer assumes Felix is dead, and this glitch means that he’s never assigned to R&R. Instead... Read More