“Don’t let Oshiro get you down, rook. She’s pro. Stick to her, she’ll do you right.”
“Sure,” the kid says, still staring at those aluminum caskets.
“You get the chance, swing by the barracks tonight, twenty-one hundred. The Duke’s got a card game running. Jacks and Knives. You got money, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Right.” The big man nods. “Twenty-one hundred. Don’t tell Christie.”
Lieutenant Christie is barking orders, telling most of his troops to report to the Operations Center. He turns to the kid, yelling over the engines and howling gale, voice distorted by his suit.
“Lindstrom! Enviro regulator at the med center is broke ****. You and Oshiro haul*** up the hill and get it copacetic, then report back to the OC for de—”
The explosion cuts Christie’s sentence off at the knees.
It’s bright. Deafening. The ATLAS a-vis rigs are built to withstand combat-level stress, though, so I get to watch most of it. It begins in the fuel tanker hitched to the Locust, blossoms outward, impossibly quick, incinerating the spanner crew and ripping through the gathered soldiers, throwing them around like kids’ toys. Lindstrom is hurled a good twenty feet, landing in a crumpled heap with Oshiro on top of him, smoking debris raining all around them as the boom echoes across the stadium.
The sergeant rolls to her feet in an instant, an MX flechette cannon slung off her back, the red beam of her laser targeting system cutting through the swirling black smoke. Shouts of alarm ring across the airfield. Sirens wail. Engines roar as the fire crews scramble. Blackened bodies are strewn across the snow. Lindstrom struggles to his feet, rifle in hand, shouting to Oshiro.
“What the **** is going on?”
“Stay down!”
“Are we under attack?”
“Stay down!”
The woman peers through the smoke, lenses shifting. The BeiTech Locust is a hollow shell, twisted and burning. Pounders are pulling themselves to their feet, but at least a dozen charred and smoking bodies are scattered about the blast site.
“Medic!” comes the cry. “Medic!”
Lindstrom staggers forward through the snow, Oshiro out in front.
“****,” she breathes.
Lieutenant Christie is on his knees, four other soldiers huddled around him. A fifth man is on his back, the breastplate of his ATLAS torn open by a smoking chunk of Locust hull. The chest behind it is shredded, white bone showing through the carnage, blood steaming in the snow. Christie drags off the pounder’s helmet to reveal the features of Private Jarrod Day, twisted in pain, lump of chewing tobacco still lodged in his cheek.
“****ing********,” he groans.
“Stow it, Private. Medic is on his way.”
“It’s…b-bad, Top.”
“Shut your noise, Day,” Christie growls. “You’re too stupid to know when to die.”
Day begins coughing, the chaw bubbling up out of his lips, blood and tobacco juice slicked on his chin. Looking over his shoulder toward the cluster of buildings at the airfield’s edge, the lieutenant roars.
“WHERE’S THAT ****ING MEDIC?”
Day is coughing harder, his face growing pale. Lindstrom and Oshiro are standing with the others now, the Locust still blazing behind them. A BeiTech trooper with a green cross on his back comes sprinting through the sleet, skidding to his knees beside the groaning soldier. Christie has hold of Day’s hand, pulling off his own helmet and looking into his man’s eyes as the medic goes to work.
“Look at me, Day,” the lieutenant commands.
Day is groaning, eyes closed.
“Soldier, I said look at me!”
The man opens his eyes a crack. Christie grasps either side of his head, leans in close. “A pounder does not die unless he is given permission to die, you hear me, Private?”
Blood and chaw spatter Day’s lips. The medic is cursing, sticky to the elbows. Red is soaking into the snow.
“Private Day, are you reading me?” Christie roars again. “I do not give you permission to die, is that understood?”
Day winces. Whispers something inaudible.
“I can’t hear you!”
The wounded man hiccups, eyes growing wide. And as he exhales, the light goes out of his eyes. Like someone flicked off the switch. Two hundred and twenty pounds of muscle and bone encased in a shell of plasteel and ballistics-grade nanofiber weave. Armed to the teeth. Trained to perfection.
And just like that, he’s gone.
Silence reigns across the windblown field. Christie looks at the soldiers around him. The ground crew and medics and spanner monkeys. All of them silent. The lieutenant pushes himself to his feet with a soft whine of servos. The winter camo on his armor is splashed with red. He glances at the dead bodies around him, at least a dozen left lying in the explosion’s wake. He spits into glittering scarlet snow.
“Tag ’em and bag ’em.”
Lindstrom glances at Oshiro, breathing hard.
The woman’s face is hidden behind her helmet.
Her voice is like iron.