The kid blinks. “You’re kidding, right?”
Oshiro turns to another pounder. The scarred one. “Hey, Duke, you remember Stohl?”
“****yeah.” The big man shudders theatrically. “I still have nightmares.”
“Why?” The kid glances between them. “What happened?”
The man called Duke grimaces. “Temp regulator in her ATLAS blew on midnight patrol. She was half-frozen by the time she got back to the OC. They took off her suit, and most of her skin came with it.”
The kid swallows. Wordlessly, he sets about copycatting Oshiro’s routine to seal his suit as Duke winks at a few of his comrades. To his credit, Lindstrom seems a quick study; he only fumbles once getting himself sorted.
“Good.” Oshiro nods.
Lindstrom flashes the sergeant a lady-killer smile. “Thanks.”
“Save it, prettyboy,” she sighs. “You can thank me legit by not getting your stupid ***X-ed out before Christie takes me off babysitting duty.”
Lindstrom’s lady-killer smile dies—he’s not used to it failing, by the look.
“What’s the big deal? We’re just standing guard over a bunch of colonists, right?”
Guffaws echo around the troop bay. The PA warns the pounders they’re two minutes from surface. Engines roar hard as the Locust slows its descent. The whole ship is bucking like it’s in an earthquake. Oshiro is smiling at the kid, hard and sharp.
“You silver spooners on the Magellan don’t get much word about what goes down on the surface, do you?”
“We’ve been a little busy up there,” the kid snaps. “You know, fixing a breach in the vortex containment system. Trying to stop a cascading warp storm from swallowing the entire planet. Get some comms out. Maybe get the wormhole generator running one of these years, so we can jump the **** out of here. It was a little complicated.”
“That so?” Oshiro tilts her head. “Well, down here, it’s real simple, Cherry. You do what I say, when I say it. You step where I step. You move when I move. Clear?”
“I think I’ll manage.” The kid stares defiantly. “It’s not like we’re going into battle here.”
“Oh, maybe not a knock-’em-down-shoot-’em-up.” Oshiro nods. “But you bet your *** there’s folks down there gunning for you. And these pitdiggers aren’t gonna do anything as stupid as shoot at you when we’ve got their families locked up. But theywill**** with you. Maybe it’s just the water being cold every time you hit the showers, or a fistful of sugar in your Cheetah’s gas tank. Then maybe one night you head out on patrol and the temperature regulator in your ATLAS ****s out. Or your brake lines fail. Or maybe you just go to sleep with the heater running and never wake up.”
Oshiro steps closer, eyes narrowed. “We invaded these people’s homes, Cherry. Bombed them to ****. Killed their families. You think this isn’t a battle? This is a ****ing war.”
Lindstrom remains mute. Oshiro searches his eyes. Her voice is razor-edged.
“You do what I say, when I say it,” she repeats. “You step where I step. You move when I move. Clear?”
Lieutenant Christie reappears at the hatchway, helmet on, eight telescopic lenses arranged like a cluster of glowing spider eyes in its forehead.
“All right, pounders. Sixty seconds. Lock and drop!”
Oshiro is still staring at Lindstrom, waiting for an answer. The kid finally nods.
“Ma’am, yes ma’am.”
“Get your helmet on.”
Sullen, the kid slaps his helmet down, the arachnid optics flickering into a steady red glow. Magnetic couplings lock each soldier in place as the engine roar grows close to deafening. Metal shuddering, rivets groaning, the heavy hiss of hydraulics underscoring it all. There’s one final tremor, then a brief silence followed by a series of heavy thuds, as the Locust touches down.
The bay doors crack wide, admitting a howl of freezing wind, a bright flare of blinding snow-white light. Temperature in the bay plummets, frost and snow filling the air. The cameras take a moment to adjust to the glare.
By the time vision returns, the pounders have bailed out of the transport and gathered in the shadow of one broad, prehensile wing. Lindstrom is sticking close to Oshiro as ordered, staring at the scene around him. The landing zone is as makeshift as everything else in the Kerenza IV colony. BeiTech had repurposed the old high school geeball field to serve as their airfield—it was the only space large enough with a solid surface after the spaceport was destroyed in their initial invasion. If the poor saps had known they were going to be stuck living in it for half a year or more, maybe they wouldn’t have bombed the **** out of the colony quite so thoroughly.
Someone get me a tissue.
Sitting by the landing pad in neat piles are thirty-seven aluminum boxes. Each one is about two meters in length. Rectangular. Embossed with the BeiTech Industries logo. You can see the shift in Lindstrom’s stance as he realizes what they are.
Coffins.
Coffins filled with dead BeiTech officers.
A tanker trundles in on fat rubber treads to refuel the Locust,spanner monkeys in thermal suits swarming around the ship as its flanks steam in the freezing air. Private Duke Woźniak, standing beside Lindstrom, nudges the kid with one elbow.