TEXT: BATTLECORPS
  BREAK-AWAY
  (Proliferation, Part I)
  By Ilsa J. Bick
  
  BATTLECORPS
  “Naw, naw, we got that beat. Battle of Tybalt, Amanda and me 
  did this break-away thing. Snuggled up real close. Meter, may-
  be. But, see, when you get painted, you look like one guy on GCI, 
  right? So we’re going speed of heat, and then just outside visual, 
  Amanda slid out and did this roll, pulled real hard into a split-S, 
  ninety degrees, and she’s booming, peeling angels, and I’m play-
  ing the music so the Capellans lose the bubble. Then when I yell 
  ‘Go’ she does this righteous bat turn. Thing of beauty: One-eighty 
  roll, wings-level pull-out, hooking into their bellies, and then I’m 
  loading angels, and the Capellans are loading angels, and they’re 
  so busy looking up at me, they never see her coming from below 
  until she rips them a new asshole. Wingman vaporized and the 
  lead bails, but no nylon letdown we could see, poor bastard.  
  “Anyway, yeah, break-away. Crazy damn stunt. Never work twice.
  “But you know? You live for that kind of shit.” 
  —Colonel Charles Kincaid, as overheard in the Double Ugly, Terra
  October 19, 2435
  
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  Signal Mountain, Terra 
  December 22, 2438: 2030 hours
  Hackett took sixty seconds to die, ten more than the colonel 
  expected, and he bled like stink: twin ropes of dark blood spat-
  tering on icy rock, like water gurgling on concrete. Hackett’s eyes 
  went glassy and as his knees buckled, the colonel stayed with 
  him, playing a wash of yellow light from his flash over Hackett’s 
  face: the star in the spotlight of a terminal drama. Wisps of 
  blood steam curled in delicate fingers, misting the chill night 
  air. Hackett’s mouth was open, gawping like a fish as he tried to 
  breathe, but the cut was deep and had sliced his trachea in two. 
  A saving grace: he would suffocate long before he drowned or 
  his body drained of blood. He would lose consciousness even 
  before that. Then, Hackett toppled face-first and very hard. A 
  dark red pool bloomed, spreading like dark machine oil chugging 
  from an overturned bottle. Then the flow of blood dwindled as 
  Hackett’s heart failed. Stopped.
  The colonel released a slow breath that coalesced in a miasma, 
  a kind of giving up of the ghost. His knife hand – the right – was 
  tacky, and he caught the scent of wet rust, like the bed of an old 
  wagon left in the rain. The knife was a standard-issue HAF KA-
  BAR, black on black, with a straight edge seventeen centimeters 
  long, and oily with blood. He cleaned his hands and then spent 
  five minutes on the knife, cleaning and then applying a thin film of 
  boot oil to the blade. When he was done, he slipped the knife into 
  a sheath riding his right hip and secured the thumb break over the 
  black leather grip. His fingers lingered over incised initials on the 
  KA-BAR’s bolt butt: C. K.
  Squatting, he searched Hackett. The man didn’t have much, but 
  this was standard for a Level-C SERE exercise: Survival, Evasion, 
  Resistance and Escape. He took the major’s rations, a jackknife. 
  Didn’t need the axe or the major’s KA-BAR. Instead, he peeled 
  back the collar of Hackett’s parka and then his BDU tunic, thermal 
  and olive tee. His flash picked up a glint of chain. The chain was 
  blood-slicked, but Hackett’s identifier tags were a metallic blue, 
  like the color of aluminum exposed to a flame. Unzipping the par-
  ka, the colonel jerked the tags from Hackett’s neck then dropped 
  them into a radio-opaque pouch that nestled against his own ther-
  mal tee to keep the tags warm. The metal chinked.
  Thumbing off his flashlight, he fitted a pair of night vision gog-
  gles over his eyes. He’d made excellent time these last few days 
  
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  but had kilometers to go before he slept. He raised his left wrist, 
  depressed the stem of something that looked like a wristwatch but 
  wasn’t. In an instant, there was the glow of red digits. He tapped in 
  a command and received more numbers, a bearing. 
  So he set out, slipping in and out of shadow, here and then as 
  quickly gone: the avatar of a gathering storm. 
  
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  Yakima Proving Grounds, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 0800 hours
  The hot, humid air of the inner habitat was musty with a linger-
  ing, ripe stink of feces mingling with mashed jack fruit. The smell 
  always reminded Dr. Carolyn Fletcher of a cross between a New 
  York City sewer and a cow barn. A slow rivulet of sweat trickled 
  into the hollow between her breasts. She’d been at the target 
  range first thing that morning; popped off two, three rounds 
  from her Prestar-Glock 90 just for something to do. Pretty darned 
  cold and she’d worn her black cashmere sweater, jeans and black 
  cowboy boots: exactly the wrong clothes for the inner habitat. 
  She felt wilted.  
  Her boss, Dr. Htov Gbarleman, had given the entire neuroscience 
  staff a week off. Christmas, and all that. The military guys skedad-
  dled like they had rockets attached to their butts. Unfortunately, 
  her only standing invite was San Antonio and a ninety-year-old 
  aunt with purple hair from a bottle. So, after tossing the PG-90 in 
  its case into the well behind the driver’s seat, she opted for the lab. 
  Data to collate, neural inputs to study. Yada, yada. Busy work. 
  The neurohelmet worked. No question. But the system made 
  her nervous. Tricking the brain into churning out more neuropep-
  tides than required… She hadn’t liked it before, when the assistant 
  director – a military type, natch, but hell of a good-looker – strong-
  armed Gbarleman into the augmentation loop seven months ago. 
  The colonel liked it just fine. Kincaid racked up a slew of kills; 
  got a real hard-on in the sims – hooting, hollering and carrying on 
  like a bronco-bustin’ cowboy racing after the steer that got away. 
  A shoe-in for the Mackie. Best man. Hegemony Special Forces 
  Sniper Champ and all that crap. (Someone said there was a whole 
  bunch of very pissed-off Blackhearts; just totally ticked that one 
  of their own hadn’t won. Seemed kind of dumb to Carolyn; if the 
  Blackhearts didn’t want anyone winning but HSF, they shouldn’t 
  open up the competition to every branch. Dumb. But that was an-
  other one of those military-intelligence oxymoron things.)
  Call her sexist, but Carolyn was rooting for Major Cunningham. Not 
  that she knew the pilots more than just to say hello. (Carolyn was 
  hired help: a simian neurophysiology specialist and pretty much 
  invisible.) Amanda Cunningham’s numbers were darned good, and 
  she was more under control emotionally. Racked up kills but with-
  out the hoo-hah swagger, joy of killing crap. Kincaid might be the 
  
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  best man, but Amanda was a better woman. Except there were all 
  kinds of politico mumbo-jumbo going on, Jacob Cameron’s fingers 
  in the pie, the Kincaid family in all kinds of industries, most of which 
  had spent a pretty sizable chunk of change on the project, blah, blah. 
  The final decision would be like, you know, really fair. 
  So, Carolyn had been in the central lab, scrolling through 
  numbers, blah, blah. Not really paying attention but eyeing her 
  reflection: chestnut hair tacked to her scalp in a sensible bun with 
  a forest of bobby pins; the illusion of a heart-shaped face accentu-
  ated by a widow’s peak. Thinking maybe her eyes – large, deep 
  brown-black – were her best feature, and about how if that’s all 
  you got going it’s, like, hopeless. 
  Then sounds seeped into the periphery of her awareness the 
  way water bleeds into paper. She pulled out of her slouch, listened 
  hard. The sounds were screams, but not from people; not a per-
  son screaming; the screams were…
  Oh, my God.  She tore out of the lab and clattered down an ac-
  cess corridor, boots banging linoleum like gunshots, but by the 
  time she keyed in her combination code, did the retinal scan and 
  cracked the seal for the inner habitat, the screams had stopped. 
  Now, she glanced over at the females huddled on a wooden plat-
  form three meters above ground. Lucy, Betty, Shana. They were 
  still wild with fear; their brown eyes were wide, whites all around, 
  rolling in their sockets. Tongo, Shana’s infant and Jack’s son, 
  looked like he was trying to melt into his mother’s chest. Linus, an 
  easy-going adolescent male and Shana’s first-born, was high in 
  one of two sycamores that topped out near the removable ceiling 
  grates. That was wrong. 
  Jack was wrong, too. The alpha male, Jack wasn’t a huge chimp. 
  Sixty kilos, a little wiry. Very sociable. Always came over for a hug. 
  Not that aggressive but smart. The way he’d gotten to alpha male, 
  for example. Instead of an out-and-out fight, Jack had scrounged 
  three plastic jugs and charged the dominant male and his bud-
  dies while screaming and juggling the plastic jugs, making a hell 
  of a racket. The other males scattered. Pretty smart chimp. Today, 
  though, Jack was jammed in a corner like he’d been sent to time-
  out. Hadn’t looked around, hadn’t made a sound. Wrong.
  Normally she never approached the chimps. Better they come 
  to her. So she was cautious. Moved slow; made sure she had a 
  straight line to the door. “Jack,” she said, from about a meter away. 
  “Jack, what is it, boy?”
  
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  This time, for whatever reason, Jack answered. No, strike that. 
  He cried: an owl-like hooting, a call Carolyn recognized but didn’t 
  believe because it made no sense. 
  Chimpanzees cry, but they do not weep. Their sorrow is vocal: 
  Hoo, hoo, hoo-hoo-hoo. Jack’s was a slow crescendo that built in 
  volume and frequency, crested. Fell. Eerie.
  She reached for him, blindly, the way a mother consoles a child. 
  When her fingers brushed his coarse, dry fur, he shuddered like 
  she’d sent an electric charge sizzling into his bones. His fingers 
  moved in a palsied tremor that was oddly, uncannily familiar. And 
  then Jack pulled his head around, and she saw his face. That’s 
  when everything went to hell. When all her assumptions went out 
  the window.
  Because Jack was weeping.
  
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  Snake River, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 0845 hours
  Job one after the kill? Get rid of the frigging body.
  Major Sarah James did everything by the book. Take sniper 
  shots. You had to clamp down on every little twitch no matter how 
  bone-cold you were, or that your nose was icier than a brass but-
  ton. (Thank heavens, the weather was freakish and snow hadn’t 
  arrived in the Tetons yet.) So she kept still, let her heartbeat slow. 
  Tried not to think about the way her stomach was one big, sharp, 
  ripping cramp, like a cat’s claw snagged on skin. Plus, she reeked. 
  Hadn’t seen a hot shower for three days and was pretty sure her 
  BDUs’d stand up on their own.  
  None of that mattered, though, because there was the colonel 
  on the west shore of Snake River and looking one-eighty in the 
  wrong direction. Charles Kincaid: HAF Certified Rock Star with a 
  head of blonde curls and blue eyes to die for – and the one to beat. 
  She was dying like hell to whip Kincaid’s tight little ass. 
  She peeked through her scope to double-check. Watched as her 
  targeting crosshairs glowed crimson and her IFF read the identi-
  fier tags:
  Kincaid, Charles
  Serial # 11031902
  FOE
  All right. Figure, maybe, seven-three-oh meters.  James emptied 
  her lungs, the warm moist air jetting from her nostrils. Waited for 
  the pause between heartbeats. 
  Beat. And… Amanda Cunningham, eat your heart out… Beat. 
  She fired.  
  A mosquito whine and then the ruby red of laser fire cut a seam in 
  the air. The laser needled the colonel’s back, and Kincaid flinched, 
  jerking like a fish flipped out of the water. And he went down.
  And the crowd goes wild; they are celebrating in Times Square 
  tonight. James waited a few seconds then trotted over. Kincaid 
  was face-down, left arm flung to one side, his right folded un-
  der his stomach. His laser rifle lay just beyond the outstretched 
  fingers of his left hand. As a precaution – and because she knew 
  
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  every little thing counted – she kept her weapon at the ready and 
  gave the body a wide berth, kicked the rifle to one side, out of 
  reach. The colonel was playing it to the hilt. Rules said to fall down 
  and play dead, not hard to do when you’d been pretty much semi-
  tasered. Not as bad as the real thing but still laid you out a couple 
  seconds. She shouldered her rifle then nudged Kincaid’s right leg 
  with the toe of her boot. “All right, Colonel, show’s over.” And 
  then she grinned because she was that much closer to piloting the 
  Mackie: “And if you don’t mind my saying it, sir… you is one dead 
  mother.”
  In response, the colonel stirred. “Naw, not me,” the colonel said. 
  He rolled left, and then he was on his feet, hood flipping back, his 
  right hand moving up in a single, smooth arc – and James’s mind 
  did this little stutter-step of surprise because now she was staring 
  into the huge black O of the business end of a silencer. “But you 
  are,” he said, and fired.
  The slug rocketed at a speed of a half klick per second along 
  eleven centimeters of barrel plus silencer and zipped the scant ten 
  centimeters between James and the muzzle before the pfft ever 
  reached her ears. 
  But, by then, well… her skull had exploded.
  
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  Inspiration Point, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 0850 hours
  Major Amanda Cunningham perched atop a hummock of gran-
  ite called Inspiration Point that overlooked Jenny Lake, directly 
  behind and to the east, and the craggy, snow-covered peaks of 
  Grand Teton and Mount St. John due west. She wasn’t admiring 
  the view. Instead, she was whittling a fishhook out of a supple 
  whip of stripped aspen. She didn’t need a new hook; it was just 
  something to do. She’d snagged a fair-sized brook trout out of 
  Jenny Lake just as the sun was coming up. Best time to ice-fish, 
  first thing in the morning. She bled, scaled, scooped out all the 
  fish guts. Buried the guts as far into the frozen earth as she could 
  (not much) because of animals, and if a squad came by, to make it 
  look like no one had been around. Couldn’t make a fire. Smoke was 
  a big no-no, kind of empirically obvious if you were trying really 
  hard not to get caught. So she ate the fish raw. It was okay. Hey, 
  people paid a lot of money for that stuff and called it sashimi. 
  Raw fish, whittling hooks, watching her ass: what SERE was all 
  about. Big field manual on the thing. Playing by the rules, Amanda 
  ought to be on the move, heading for Death Canyon, twenty-odd 
  klicks southwest. (There was probably some irony there.) Up at 
  Death Canyon, there was a radio she could use to vector in a res-
  cue chopper. Deadline was midnight December 25, and a Merry 
  Christmas to you, too. 
  That same manual also said that come daylight, you get a move 
  on. She bet that’s what Hackett and James and Kincaid were do-
  ing because whoever got to Death Canyon first won. The trick was 
  not getting captured, and staying alive. 
  But this was the fubar part.  Not only were there enemy squads 
  gunning for your butt, you could take out the competition. Show 
  you had grit, and all that crap. Taking out your own people was 
  stupid, even if you were competing with them. Amanda hadn’t 
  survived this long playing by rules that made no sense. It wasn’t 
  like she wasted a lot of time and energy feeling bad about do-
  ing her job. She was a soldier and a realist. Some soldiers gazed 
  at their navel, wondering if killing the enemy was like, you know, 
  moral. Screw morality. You think the enemy’s getting all existen-
  tial? Don’t want to kill people, be a writer. 
  On the other hand, some rules existed because only some peo-
  ple could break them and not end up vaporized. Like Tybalt three 
  
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  years ago, that break-away, a stunt you bragged about in a bar. 
  Won them a couple of medals, and then she and Kincaid celebrat-
  ed in bed for a solid day, giddy with relief and tickled to be alive. 
  At the thought of Kincaid, a whiny little voice seeped up from 
  some dark Neanderthal crevice of her brain: That’s what’s really 
  eating you, isn’t it, sweetheart? Hard enough Kincaid’s got his eye 
  on the Mackie, but having to train with him, watching him ace 
  those simulations. Not enough that he knows more about slug-
  throwers than any guy living and has the medals to prove it. But 
  seeing him do it with that kind of weird energy he gets so you 
  know that he’s happier shooting almost than flying… got you go-
  ing, hunh, baby doll?
  “Shut up, you moron.” Suddenly furious, she jabbed a knothole 
  with the tip of her jackknife and twisted, popping it out like an eye. 
  “You think the two of you would live happily ever after? Not when 
  there’s a Cameron in the picture, right?”
  She remembered the day everything went to hell. This year, a 
  Thursday afternoon in early July: The heady, too-sweet aroma of 
  day lilies swirling through an open window and over their naked 
  bodies on the warm fingers of a gentle wind as smooth and soft 
  as velvet. She’d been his wingman for four years, and his lover for 
  most of that. They just fit together. In bed, out of it, and when they 
  made love, she could pretend that Colonel Charles Kincaid wasn’t 
  destined for great things – and that one of them wasn’t Isabelle 
  Cameron, the Director-General’s third cousin. 
  They’d lain in a tangle of sheets, Kincaid on his stomach along 
  her left side, thigh to thigh. He was a leftie, and that was his side 
  of the bed because he hated reaching across and fumbling around 
  the nightstand for something. She was propped on her elbow, trail-
  ing the fingers of her right hand over the knobs of his spine; but, 
  as much as she wanted him, she had to know. Call it perversity. Or 
  maybe self-defeating. But she said, “So you’re marrying her.”
  She expected him to be angry. Maybe that’s what she wanted. 
  Nice big fight, maybe break a couple things. Then losing him 
  wouldn’t hurt so much. Instead, he rolled up on his right elbow. 
  Kincaid’s eyes were very blue but dark, like the sky at twilight. 
  “You know I don’t have a choice,” he said.
  “You have a choice. Just say no.”
  Kincaid sighed. “Amanda, we’ve been over this and over this. 
  My family has connections…”
  
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  “Who cares which uncle served under whom? I know that your 
  family’s been in service to the Hegemony for a long time.”
  “That counts for something. I’m not narcissistic enough to be-
  lieve that Jacob Cameron would fall if I don’t marry Isabelle…”
  “Jacob Cameron’s an idiot.”
  “Being an idiot and Director-General aren’t mutually exclusive. 
  Even if we leave out my family’s military connections, there are 
  quite a few Kincaids with a vested interest in seeing this very ex-
  pensive project through. I don’t think my relatives or their friends 
  would be very keen on seeing, oh, billions go up in proverbial 
  smoke. There’s a lot riding on the Mackie, including the future of 
  how you and I will fight our wars.”
  “And the Kincaids are keen on that, too, I suppose? More war?”
  “I could say that war is a business.”
  “It is.”
  “Yes,” he said, “it is. A very expensive business that we can’t 
  afford to let go bust. So if this doesn’t work, or the Camerons 
  are perceived as weak, then the Capellans, the Federated Suns, or 
  even some our oh-so-loyal disgruntled nobles won’t hesitate to 
  stake their claims and carve us up. Then little things like Tybalt, all 
  that suffering… our people will have died for nothing, Amanda.”  
  “Don’t pull that guilt shit.” Her voice went watery, and she didn’t 
  want him to see her cry. “Damn you. I hate you, you know that? 
  And I really hate her.” 
  “It’s political, Amanda. It’s economic. The marriage is only one 
  factor in a very complicated calculus that’s about as cold and hard 
  and mathematical as the equations governing life and death. This 
  is an alliance my family wants and the Camerons need. You know 
  I don’t love Isabelle.”
  “I know that,” she said, more sharply than she liked. Reaching 
  over, she laced her fingers behind his neck and rolled onto her 
  back, pulling him down then crushing his mouth with hers. They 
  made fierce, desperate love and…
  “Stop.” Amanda fisted her hands. The whittled point of her rough 
  fishhook bit into her left palm, but that was okay. Mooning over 
  some guy who was going to get married come February just as 
  soon as he piloted the Mackie for its test run…
  
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  Now, that was an interesting bit of defeatist thinking. She un-
  furled her fingers and stared at a bead of bright red blood welling 
  up in her palm. Was she trying to lose to spare herself the humili-
  ation of Kincaid’s being chosen because he was Kincaid? Even if 
  she really was better?  
  Nothing was certain. There were, for example, three possible 
  outcomes between now and midnight December 25. One: She 
  could win. Make it to the radio, vector in the chopper and exit right 
  into the Mackie’s pilot couch.
  Two: She might get captured. She’d managed to avoid two sepa-
  rate squads over the past three days only to nearly walk into one 
  yesterday near dusk. Sidestepping her way down a slope, she saw 
  movement out of the corner of her left eye and ducked back in the 
  nick of time. Three of them, tiny as ants, making their way around 
  Hanging Canyon; maybe a good thousand meters away and too 
  far to tag with her target laser. She watched them long enough 
  to figure that they were going to be between her and the pick-up 
  coordinates the rest of the way. So they might snag her unless she 
  figured a way to take them out of the equation. 
  Or, three: She could get herself killed. There were three people 
  running around with the go-ahead to kill her if they could. One 
  was Brian Hackett. Another was Sarah James. And the third was 
  Colonel Charles Kincaid.
  With deliberate care, Amanda broke down her jackknife, slipped 
  it into her pocket. Then she wormed her fingers into her tee and 
  pulled out her tags, the ones that signaled friend or foe. She dan-
  gled the metallic blue tags, watching how they spun then unwound 
  in a blur. They chinked like tinny chimes. 
  Everything came down to this: Would she pull the trigger on a 
  man she loved and hated in equal measure? Even if it was pre-
  tend? She didn’t know. But she was sure of one thing. If Kincaid 
  found her first? 
  “Pow,” she said.
  
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  Snake River, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 0846 hours
  The back of Sarah James’s head erupted in a fine pink mist of 
  blood, brain and bone, releasing that heady, brackish, keenly sat-
  isfying odor of fresh blood, burnt hair and singed skin. The impact 
  knocked her back a half meter where she crashed to the shore, her 
  body leaving a bloody smear like the track of a large snail.    
  He waited a moment, watching, listening. A pity about the si-
  lencer, but in a wilderness this quiet, an anomalous sound carried 
  for kilometers. Oh, he had a perfectly serviceable rifle. He’d even 
  used it twice this week already. But he still had work to do. No 
  point alerting the remaining contestants. 
  Still, he really enjoyed a truly well-made handgun. His SIG Pro-
  SP 2022 was a thing of beauty, an antique passed down through 
  his family for generations. The pistol was very blocky, with a stip-
  pled grip plate that fit his large hand. The frame was finished in a 
  grey-black matte, though the barrel was left bright and the metal 
  anodized. Virtually no recoil, fifteen rounds to the magazine. It 
  would’ve been so nice to hear the boom. 
  He looked down at James. She’d died in a nanosecond. Her 
  hands were rigid with cadaveric spasm, the fingers curled and 
  arms flexed until her balled fists nearly touched her shoulders, 
  as if daring him to put up his mitts. Her unfocused eyes bugged 
  from their sockets and her mouth was still open, her features 
  frozen in that last moment of surprise. A baseball-sized chunk of 
  skull a little below the crown of her head had blown away, leav-
  ing a red-black crater. Her brains drooled, puddling in a lumpy, 
  pink-gray jelly. 
  Unscrewing and pocketing the silencer, he snugged the Sig-Pro 
  into a concealed-carry holster riding under his waistband over his 
  crotch. The barrel was still warm which was, all things considered, 
  very pleasant. Then, he bent and pocketed his brass because you 
  never could tell. 
  He levered James onto her back, rolling her like a log. He 
  struggled with the zipper of her parka. The dispersion mesh – a 
  conductive layer sandwiched between taslan nylon outside and 
  an inner waterproof layer laminated with nylon tricot – made the 
  material stiff. The zipper gave, grudgingly, with a chattering me-
  tallic sound. He slid his fingers down her thermal shirt, lingering 
  a moment when his fingers grazed the domes of her breasts. (He 
  
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  was tempted, but soldiers failed if they lost sight of the mission.) 
  Reeling up a pair of tags, he deposited them into his specially-
  lined pocket. 
  Then he had to break her arms. The cadaveric spasm had not 
  only drawn her forearms under her chin but clamped her elbows 
  to her sides. So he grabbed each forearm with his right, braced 
  against the corresponding shoulder with his left, and pulled. He 
  was perspiring by the time the bones cracked in two. Arming 
  sweat from his face, he hooked his hands beneath her armpits 
  and dragged James’s body – minus the lion’s share of her brains 
  that had slopped out of her cranium (he marveled how few people 
  really understood how liquid a brain was) – away from the river’s 
  edge to the gear she’d stashed behind a tumble of boulders. He 
  debated about covering the body with stones. This had been gla-
  cier country back in the last ice age, and the landscape was littered 
  with tumble-down heaps of boulders alternating with streamlined 
  drumlins. On the other hand, this was also mountain lion country; 
  there were grizzlies; there were small animals eager to drag off a 
  foot, a finger, a hand. Without her tags, they wouldn’t find James, 
  or what was left of her, for a long, long time and likely not all in 
  one spot. 
  He took a moment to search her pockets. Virtually the same gear 
  as Hackett. James’s only weapon was her target laser: a non-le-
  thal variant of the Mauser 480, the HAF standard, with a built-in 
  IFF that pinged the identifier tags. But he discovered a pleasant 
  surprise: a stash of cello-wrapped ration bars. Perching on a boul-
  der, he ripped open one promising to taste like peanut butter and 
  chocolate but didn’t.
  While he ate, he tweezed out a photograph from his left breast 
  pocket. The photo had been taken at MacBeth shortly after the 
  Battle of Tybalt; he recognized the onion bulb of the spaceport’s 
  control tower. And, of course, there was Amanda. She was wil-
  lowy and very tall for a pilot, easily two meters. She stood, bulky 
  helmet tucked under her left hand, her right hand on the cockpit 
  ladder of her fighter, her right boot perched on the first rung. She 
  wore an olive flight suit that highlighted the fiery cascade of her 
  hair around her shoulders and accentuated her eyes, which were 
  a deep green, like the depths of a forest. Cool, welcoming yet full 
  of mystery and absolutely maddening. No matter how long he 
  studied the contours of her face and the curves of her body, she 
  remained elusive, like a half-remembered dream. 
  
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  He chewed the last of the ration bar, swallowed. He took a long 
  pull from James’s canteen. The water tasted like tin from the pu-
  rification tablets but was so cold it hurt his teeth, an ache that 
  rivaled the physical tug he felt every time he looked at Amanda. 
  Desire viced his chest.
  Abruptly, he slipped the photograph back into his pocket. He 
  squeezed his hands together, waiting for his pulse to slow. Then 
  the colonel stood, turned his back on James’s body and faced due 
  west toward Death Canyon. Aptly named, because that was where 
  he knew Amanda must and would head. 
  There was a method to his madness, and it was this: He’d saved 
  Amanda for the last act – the last act here at any rate, and oh, what 
  a drama awaited the Director-General; how the Hegemony would 
  feel his wrath – because he wanted her. He wanted her, and he 
  would have her: Amanda’s body under his hands, Amanda’s blood 
  in his mouth. Amanda’s life, and his face the horror she would 
  take to her death. He hungered for all of that and he wanted it, up 
  close. 
  But, first, they would play a little game. Cat and mouse. A cat 
  was a study in patience, knowing when to pounce and how to 
  maim without killing so the fun could go on and on. And then, 
  when a cat tired? 
  Smiling, he straightened his right index finger, cocked his thumb: 
  a classic gesture children throughout the universe knew. 
  “Boom,” he said.
  
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  Yakima Proving Grounds, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 1030 hours
  “Parkinson’s disease?” asked Colonel Nathan Powers. He stood 
  behind Carolyn’s left shoulder and when he leaned down to get 
  a better look at her screen, Carolyn caught the scent of a subtle 
  musk aftershave and sweat. “It can’t be.”
  “I’m just saying it’s a possibility.” She was anxious, his being so 
  close. The flight surgeon was one of the most attractive men she’d 
  ever seen: black wavy hair cropped close, dark brown eyes, and 
  the faintest suggestion of a swell to his lower lip. He was dressed 
  casually in a biking outfit: navy blue one-piece, insulated jacket, 
  gloves, hat, biker glasses on a strap. The outfit was very form-fit-
  ting around the bulge of his calves and thighs, and she was having 
  a hard time remembering not to stare and wondering how he 
  looked with the bike suit off… .
  She quickly turned her attention back to her screen. “I’m not 
  sure. But this clip,” she pressed a key, and the deflated, slouched 
  figure of an old man firmed up on the screen, “that guy fits what 
  I saw.”
  The clip had obviously been taken in a hospital of some sort. A 
  splash of fluorescent overheads turned the man’s papery skin a 
  sickly off-yellow. An anonymous cotton hospital gown, also off-
  yellow, drooped open at the man’s scrawny neck. A glistening 
  track of saliva dribbled from his lower lip. Carolyn pointed. “There, 
  his hands, see how they’re shaking even when he’s not reaching 
  for anything?”
  “I know what a pill-rolling tremor looks like,” Powers rapped. “I’m 
  a doctor, remember?”
  “I know that.” A wave of heat crawled up her neck, and that made 
  her angry. Damn these military people; they’re all so self-righ-
  teous, like they’re the only guys with brains. “And I know I’m just 
  a stupid-ass simian expert, but let me tell you something, Doctor. 
  Chimps don’t get Parkinson’s. They don’t get malaria or AIDS or 
  Huntington’s chorea. They may be our closest relatives genetical-
  ly, but there are a lot of things they don’t get unless we help them 
  along.”
  Powers scowled. “Yeah, but then you’re talking surgical ablation, 
  drugs. We didn’t give them anything.”
  
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  “Oh, come off it,” she said. Powers was drop-dead gorgeous, but 
  she wasn’t about to go brain-dead because of a pretty face. “You 
  know perfectly well what I’m talking about.”
  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” His tone was clipped and his brown eyes 
  had turned flinty. “You’re trying to blame some abnormal chimp 
  shit on the augmentation loop that you just so happen not to 
  like.”
  “I’m not blaming you or your precious loop. But the reality is that 
  the loop does feed into regions of the brain most associated with 
  attention, focus and concentration. These just so happen to corre-
  late with dopamine-rich neurons, like the basal ganglia and frontal 
  lobe, and dopamine depletion…”
  “Then how do you explain that when we checked the chimps’ 
  neurotransmitter levels three months after we discontinued test-
  ing, their dopamine levels were normal?”
  “Maybe we didn’t follow them long enough.”
  “Yeah, you think?” He sagged back in a chair. “I’m sorry, that 
  was uncalled for. You did right calling me. Hell. Kind of fits, too, 
  like that crying jag. People with Parkinson’s can be pretty volatile. 
  Loss of emotional control, stuff like that.” Then he scrubbed his 
  close-cropped hair and blew out. “We’re debating in a vacuum. 
  We need a vet. I’m a people doc.”
  “He’s TDY. In Sydney, for God’s sake. I called the communica-
  tions people and they said they couldn’t authorize contact unless I 
  had command approval. You’re command approval.”
  “I’m assistant director. Gbarleman’s the boss.”
  Uh-hunh, and that’s why Gbarleman caved when you wanted the 
  loop. “He’s civilian. Anyway, he’s in Tel Aviv somewhere. Hell and 
  gone.”
  “Figures.” Powers eyed her. “By the way, why aren’t you gone? 
  I checked Gbarleman’s paperwork a couple days ago. You’re sup-
  posed to be in San Antonio.”
  It crossed her mind to wonder why he cared, but she really didn’t 
  feel like getting into it. “I… change of plans. I had work. Like collat-
  ing all the neural input data from the sims we ran on Kincaid and 
  the rest.” 
  “That couldn’t wait?”
  
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  “Well, I don’t mind being alone. I like when it’s quiet,” she lied. 
  Then she told a truth: “Went shooting. I like that, too.”
  “Yeah?” Powers looked at her with new interest. “What kind of 
  laser you got? Sunspot?”
  “No, semi-auto pistol.” She told him about the PG-90, and he 
  asked a couple questions about that, like where she got ammo, 
  and while she was kind of enjoying this and he really seemed in-
  terested, she said, “Look, we can bond over slug-throwers later. 
  Right now, we have to get moving. Get the vet, run tests. Maybe 
  then, I dunno, bring the pilots in.”
  “Over Christmas? Make a big brouhaha because a chimp’s got 
  the weepies? No way. Anyway, Kincaid and the others, they’re out 
  on some exercise.”
  This was news, but it tallied. Being a civilian and relatively low 
  on the totem pole, no one told her anything. “Where?”
  “I don’t know. They don’t keep me in the loop about stuff like 
  that.”
  “So what do we do?”
  “You want my opinion? I say we close up shop, turn off the lights, 
  go shoot and then I’ll take you to lunch.”
  She did a double-take. “What?”
  “Shoot. You, me. Then eat. Couple of beers. C’mon, it’s Christmas. 
  Forget the chimps. Let it go for a couple days.” Then at her in-
  credulous look, he said, “You wanted a command decision. Well, 
  that’s it. We go at this one step at a time. You know how hard it is 
  to change around orders?”
  “No.”
  “Hard. Plus you got to double-check, lick the base commander’s 
  hairy ass. In this case, that would be General Coleman and I’m not 
  hauling him away from a Christmas party or shagging his old lady 
  because some chimp’s having a bad hair day. I could be at this for 
  hours, maybe days. Then, ten to one, turns out to be a big zero, 
  and I’ve got me a salmon day.” At her mystified expression, he 
  sighed. “I’ll spend all day, maybe two, swimming upstream only 
  to get screwed and die. It’s not happening.” 
  It was not the answer she expected. “Well, gee, I’m sorry. Silly me, 
  I thought the assistant director might be, you know, interested…”
  
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  “Whoa, whoa.” He held his hands up. “Just a sec, lady, how about 
  you beam back to reality…”
  “Don’t blow me off! I don’t have the authority to get anything done 
  that needs doing. So, if you would…” She broke off suddenly. “Oh, 
  Jesus, not again,” she said, pushing up from her workstation.
  “What?”
  But she was already moving for the door. “The chimps, the 
  chimps, can’t you hear them?” Then she punched the door open, 
  and a cacophony of screeches and yowls pillowed in a solid ball of 
  sound. She took off at a dead run. “Come on, come on!” 
  It was like running down an echo chamber filled with sounds 
  that banged around and around, and sent gooseflesh rippling up 
  and down her arms and legs. Jesus. She bent down to key in her 
  combination code, cursed when her fingers slipped. Got to get in, 
  got to… 
  But then Powers was there. “Here,” he said, pushing her aside at 
  the same time. “Command override.” He punched in a code, and 
  as the door hissed, he grabbed the edge with both hands, forcing 
  the hydraulics into a whine of protest. “Go, I’m right behind you. 
  Just go!” 
  She squeezed through the door and then skidded to a halt so 
  abruptly Powers ran right into her. The impact forced the air out 
  of her lungs and she nearly fell. But he snagged her by the arms, 
  hauled her up and against his chest.
  And then they just stood there, speechless. 
  
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  En route to Death Canyon, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 1230 hours
  Amanda spotted the vultures first, a big black funnel cloud cart-
  wheeling to the southwest. She didn’t think too much of it. Things 
  died in the woods all the time. But when she started her ascent to 
  the ridge running around Phelps Lake and onto the pass for Death 
  Canyon, she realized that the vultures were close, nearly overhead. 
  Again, it could be a trick of the eye. Distance was hard to judge 
  here. But then she smelled the blood and knew something was 
  very, very wrong.
  She’d been too keyed up to sleep. The feeling reminded her of a 
  palomino she had when she was about ten, eleven. Rex, very origi-
  nal name: Every time that horse caught sight of the stable, he’d 
  flat-out gallop no matter how hard she hauled on those reins. So, 
  she was like Rex, dashing for the barn. Bad survival tactics, maybe; 
  the manual said you kept a steady pace, you rested. She couldn’t.  
  The first stretch along Cottonwood Creek was due south and 
  easy, just wide open. Frozen prairie and meadow and, thank 
  Christ, no snow. But no people either. Not even a close call and 
  that was weird. She’d thumbed on her target laser, carried it like 
  a real weapon: strap around her neck, stock clamped to her right 
  side, trigger finger along the guard. She couldn’t kill anything with 
  it, but the targeting IFF had a range of about seven-thirty meters, 
  eleven hundred on a really good day. But, no Hackett, no James. 
  (Forget Kincaid; fine, let him win. She just had to be so close be-
  hind he’d think she was tattooed to his butt.) Weird. 
  She didn’t catch sight of the squad either, and that almost worried 
  her more. She’d already figured that she couldn’t just shadow them 
  but had to get around them somehow. Problem was how and where. 
  She’d soaked in those briefings and studied maps so long she knew 
  them better than her own name. When she cut west and headed for 
  the mountains, there was a lot of up and down over heavily forested 
  moraines before Phelps Lake, where she’d hook west around the 
  lake’s northern edge. From then on, she didn’t have much choice 
  but climb to Death Canyon, dogleg south and then circle to the Shelf 
  and the radio. The way up to Death Canyon was steep, the elevation 
  changing in a hurry the first third of the way. The trees thinned half-
  way. The rim, while very high and overlooking steep jagged cliffs, 
  was all sagebrush, sparse Douglas fir and rock. Dropping into the 
  canyon wasn’t an option. With very few exceptions, there was no 
  way to get up and down without climbing gear. 
  
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  She chewed over that problem when she stopped to rest. Tried 
  to come at it from a different angle. Not how to evade the squad, 
  but how to thwart those guys. If she could confiscate their weap-
  ons, that made it ten times harder because then they had to get 
  right up close. Couldn’t just point and shoot and set off an electric 
  tingle – not the almost taser-like shock associated with a kill but a 
  little zap that let you know you’d been made courtesy of the mesh 
  incorporated in her parka and BDUs. (No choice but to wear the 
  clothes, the cold kind of negating the option to run around butt-na-
  ked. ‘Course, she could cheat. Take off the identifier tags. Although 
  there was a fail-safe: the tags relied on body heat. Take the tags 
  off for more than two hours, they changed color and wouldn’t re-
  vert back. Sort of a dead giveaway. Anyone found with black tags 
  was immediately disqualified.) So, thinking out of the box, she fig-
  ured it boiled down to doing the unexpected: go right down their 
  throats. Slip in. Grab the rifles. Get the hell out of Dodge. The only 
  thing was to find them.
  The moraine cradling Phelps Lake was one massive carpet of 
  dark-green lodgepole and white-barked pine, and the thinner, de-
  nuded limbs and peeling white trunks of slender aspen. Sunlight 
  bathed the frozen lake behind her and set up a glare, making the 
  vultures’ black wings glisten like slick oil and giving her sun-dazzle 
  that left her blinking away spots. She had a sense that things were 
  going to open up soon and her cover give out. The gaps in the 
  canopy were wider, the trees smaller, a little stunted, and further 
  apart, and the air definitely colder.  
  But then two things happened at once. She glimpsed the straight 
  edge of a frame tent – and she caught the unmistakable odor of 
  spent cordite and blood.
  She stopped cold, then ducked behind a pine. Crouched, waited. 
  When she heard nothing, she glanced around the tree. Nothing 
  moving and now she picked out two tents: one dead ahead facing 
  west, and the other slightly off-center opposite, looking east. The 
  flaps of the east tent were cracked a smidge. But that was all. The 
  blood smell was still there: heavy, a little… gassy like blood got 
  after coagulating. 
  She eased back behind the tree. Chewed her lip and tasted dead 
  skin. Darted a glance at the vultures. Thought long and hard about 
  what she was going to do. Because no question: something dead 
  up ahead. She’d been a soldier too long to forget that the unex-
  pected happened, constantly. 
  
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  And that’s when she thought of an alternative explanation: this, 
  too, was a test. Would she act on self-preservation and detour 
  without checking a site that obviously screamed for a recon? Or 
  would she investigate, but carefully, without getting captured or 
  “killed” herself? Certainly, a new wrinkle. She tried to remember if 
  command had said anything about scenarios that would involve 
  simulated casualties, and could recall none. But shit happened. 
  Assuming, as she did, that Kincaid was ahead, she wondered what 
  he’d done, and then got mad she was even thinking like that.
  She looked right, left, behind. The tents were maybe three hun-
  dred yards. Studied the layout of the trees, how they petered out 
  to the left and thickened to the right. Going right was the only 
  obvious choice and, despite being obvious, the best. She moved 
  with care and varied her rhythm, pausing now and again, darting 
  quick looks around and behind. The silent vultures skimmed air. 
  She edged up to the closest tent, the one opening west and away. 
  The canvas was stiff and smelled cold. She levered right, keeping 
  the tent on her left. She waited, listened. Smelled blood. 
  Go on. She shifted her weight to the balls of her feet. You’ve 
  come this far, just do it. 
  Holding her breath, she edged around the corner.
  The colonel tracked her with his scope and from a vantage point 
  nearly five hundred meters due north and straight up, in a tree. 
  He would have preferred a hardwood not a pine. He didn’t like the 
  stink of resin, and the needles were sharp. But they did possess 
  the distinct advantage of excellent cover. 
  Before Amanda arrived, he used the time to check his rifle, yet 
  another antique, a bolt-action Barrett M468. The barrel was forty 
  centimeters long with a muzzle brake to both blast expanding 
  air up, as well as down and back at a forty-five degree angle to 
  reduce recoil. He’d given the weapon a thorough going-over be-
  fore, but he was a stickler for detail. While he waited, he snapped 
  out his magazine and pressed his right thumb on the first shiny 
  bullet and then eased up, checking the return for hesitation. Ten 
  bullets to a magazine: full metal jackets, each six-point-eight mil-
  limeters, tapering to a sharp, blood-red point. He had three such 
  magazines, more than enough. He eased the magazine back until 
  the catch clicked. 
  
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  Scanning the area around the tents, he saw movement, braced 
  his right foot on a limb and then his rifle on the hump of his knee 
  and raised his scope to his eye. The scope had not come with the 
  weapon; he’d had it custom-made so he could see who he was 
  shooting, right up close. And there she was: a blur framed in the 
  small circle, like a religious medal. He thumbed the focus and her 
  face firmed. She’d thrown her hood back; her head was cocked a 
  little to the left, and he read her tension and, he thought, a little 
  bit of fear. Her skin was very pale and this made her remarkable 
  green eyes even deeper. He inhaled a quick breath. She was the 
  incarnation of the beauty he remembered, and the one he recalled 
  in dreams.
  When she paused at the edge of the tent, when he knew she 
  would have to look, he was ready. He watched her tense, then piv-
  ot. Then she flinched, straightened in shock, and he dropped the 
  scope’s crosshairs on her back, left of center and over her heart, 
  just as she let out a short, sharp cry of horror. 
  
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  Yakima Proving Grounds, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 1232 hours
  “Oh, my God,” Carolyn said. Her knees went water-weak, and 
  she suddenly understood what being numb with disbelief really 
  meant. 
  There was blood, everywhere. Or maybe that’s just the way it 
  seemed. The females – Lucy and Betty – still screamed from the 
  safety of their platform. But Shana wasn’t screaming. Instead, the 
  chimp sprawled in a loose-limbed heap of congealing blood. What 
  was left of her throat was raw, ugly, ripped wide open. Only half 
  her face was intact. The rest was a bloody crater. One clouded 
  brown eye stared fixedly at a point behind Carolyn’s left shoulder. 
  She’d been bitten in the belly repeatedly; chunks of gore – dark 
  red liver and glistening bluish-pink loops of intestine – spilled over 
  her side, and Carolyn had an insane, horrible image of a child’s 
  piñata split wide open.  
  Where’s Linus? Where’s Jack? And the baby, what about the 
  baby? She dragged her horrified gaze from Shana, probed the 
  habitat, finally spotted Linus hunched in a nesting den. Maybe the 
  baby… 
  Powers touched her shoulder. “There.” His mouth was close to 
  her ear, and she felt his breath tickle her cheek. He pointed to a 
  spot above her head. “In the tree.”
  Jack perched upon the tallest sycamore. His mouth was wide 
  open, his lips peeling back from teeth stained burnt orange with 
  blood. Every time the females screamed, he answered with a roar. 
  But as strange and awful as all that was, this was worse: dan-
  gling from Jack’s left hand was the limp, bloodied body of his son, 
  Tongo.
  “No,” Carolyn said. Her vision went blurry with hot tears and she 
  turned her face into Powers’s chest. “No, no, no.”
  “Come on.” Slipping an arm around her shoulders, Powers 
  nudged her toward the door. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
  She balked. “No. We can’t leave. We have to do something!”
  “Like what? The baby’s dead, right? That other chimp? You can’t 
  do anything for either of them.”
  “But, Jack…”
  
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  “Yeah, what? You’re going to climb up there?”
  “I could try to get him down…”
  “No.”
  “But I have to do something!”
  “Staying alive is good. What makes you think he won’t rip you 
  apart? You wanted a command decision. Well, here it is. Let’s get 
  back to the lab where we can hear ourselves think.” 
  She rocked back on her heels when he tugged. “What about the 
  other chimps?”
  “He hasn’t bothered them, has he? He only took out that one, and 
  the baby. You think they’d still be alive if he didn’t have some kind 
  of internal control?”
  He had a point. So she let him lead her away. But the screams 
  chased her, all the way back to the lab.
  
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  En route to Death Canyon, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 1245 hours
  She let out a small cry before she was aware that she had. Then 
  training took over. She ducked low and now she transferred the 
  useless target laser to her left hand and then flicked the thumb 
  break over her KA-BAR and withdrew her knife in one smooth 
  movement. Her heart galloped and her lungs worked like bellows. 
  Her vision swirled as she hyperventilated. Slow it down, slow 
  down, one step at a time.
  She didn’t look at the men, not closely. Time for that in a minute. 
  First, she had to make sure there wasn’t anyone waiting for her. 
  She slid along the tent she’d rounded, nudged the flap with the 
  point of her target laser and quickly swept the flap back, her knife 
  at the ready. Empty. Just duffels ripped open, two bedrolls. Same 
  thing in the second tent but just one bedroll and duffel, so prob-
  ably the squad’s chief master sergeant’s gear. She re-sheathed 
  her knife and stepped back to look at the men. Part of her wanted 
  to run screaming in the other direction; the other knew that she 
  had to be thorough here if she wanted to stay alive.
  The men were seated in a line: backs against the tent, the sec-
  ond and third man listing so their heads touched – a comical 
  effect, if it hadn’t been so awful. Single shots to the chest from 
  a slug-thrower, large caliber. Very accurate. Whoever had killed 
  them wanted to advertise because the men’s parkas were un-
  zipped and sagged around their shoulders. Their shirts were slit 
  down the middle and folded back like the covers of a book so she 
  could see each single, neat hole drilled six to seven centimeters 
  beneath the left nipple and a little off-center. Right through the 
  heart. Just a dribble of blood coagulated like a frozen tear. Not 
  enough to cause the blood smell. 
  The reason for the smell: Their necks were slit. Ear to ear. The 
  heart, even one that’s been shot, beats an agonal rhythm for a 
  minute or so. A quick swipe of a knife left to right, and more than 
  enough blood drizzle. The blood had congealed in thick rivulets, 
  like syrup, and was starting to freeze.
  But cutting throats was overkill. Like lining them up as if they 
  were spectators to a play. Unless… she took a few steps back then 
  scoured the ground with her eyes. There, to her far right: a KA-BAR 
  stabbed the ground. Two sets of tags coiled around a black leather 
  handle slicked with dried gore. When she bent down and yanked 
  
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  the knife, she saw the initials on the bolt butt: C. K. She cradled the 
  tags in her gloved hand. James. Hackett. The tags were black.
  The small muscles of her jaw clenched. She didn’t believe for 
  a second that Kincaid had killed these people. Okay, he was a 
  champion marksman and yeah, he was competitive. But she knew 
  Kincaid as a soldier and a man. If the killer had Kincaid’s knife, 
  Kincaid was dead. She was surprised that she didn’t feel grief. 
  Maybe that was because, at core, she was a soldier, and a soldier 
  grieved when there was time. Right now, she had to stay alive.
  Everything here screamed that she was the only one left. Meaning 
  this little spectacle had been arranged for her to find by someone 
  who knew she had to come this way. And if he set this up… 
  “He did it so he could watch my reaction,” she said, suddenly. 
  “Oh, shit.” 
  And as if to also prove that the killer was telepathic, her left leg 
  exploded in a single burst of white-hot pain.
  
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  Yakima Proving Grounds, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 1330 hours
  “Hold up a minute,” said Powers. He still had her hands and now 
  he leaned forward so their faces were less than a half meter apart. 
  “Let’s think about this. Maybe this is a good thing.”
  “What?” Carolyn jerked her hands away so Powers clutched air. 
  “How can you say that?”
  “Didn’t you just say that this could be normal?”
  “No, I said it’s not unheard of for a male to kill an infant, even his 
  own. But this is something that Jack has never done.”
  “Which doesn’t mean he couldn’t. How do you know that this 
  kind of aggressive behavior isn’t just nature asserting itself?”
  She blinked. Her eyes felt scratchy, and her nose was stuffed 
  from crying. Jack, a killer? A cannibal? Chimps could change on a 
  whim: docile one moment, murderous the next. They also hunted, 
  usually in packs, for fresh meat to supplement their diets. But the 
  chimps in the habitat were fed a carefully-balanced diet; they were 
  given chunks of raw meat at monthly intervals in an attempt to 
  prevent just this kind of behavior.
  On the other hand, she knew that chimps, like humans, murdered, 
  and for many reasons: to establish dominance; to exact revenge and 
  sometimes because they liked it. She said all this then added, “Let’s 
  say for the sake of argument that Jack’s behavior is normal; that he 
  killed Tongo out of jealousy or something. What about Shana? I’m 
  not aware of any report of any male killing both mother and infant at 
  the same time. Females usually do that. Jack was being… sadistic.” 
  “You’re anthropomorphizing. You have no idea what’s moti-
  vating Jack, right?” When she didn’t answer, Powers continued, 
  “Maybe it’s plain old aggression. From where I’m sitting, that 
  might be really good.”
  She gave a bitter laugh. “Explain that to Shana and Tongo.”
  “I’m a soldier, you’re not. When you send troops out, you don’t 
  want them being swayed by subjective factors. What they should 
  or shouldn’t do. Soldiers are trained to kill. You want them to do 
  their job without hesitation.  So if this augmentation loop not only 
  focuses and sustains attention and concentration with no fatigue 
  and heightens aggression… then that’s perfect.”
  
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  She gaped. “Are you… you’re… you’re serious, aren’t you? How 
  can this be good?”
  Powers gave a horsey snort. “Come on, think about it. We’re not 
  chimps. You remember Kincaid. Remember what a kick he got? 
  How much better he got? Now that’s a soldier. Knows how to keep 
  a lid on it, that’s all.”
  “No.” Carolyn stood, drilling him with a look. “I don’t agree. But 
  since I’m not the project director and Gbarleman is, I’m going to let 
  him make that decision. I’ll get through to him somehow, even if I 
  have to bully my way to some general’s office to do it. The worst they 
  can do is fire me. So, either you’re coming with me, or you’re not.” 
  He stared up at her for a long moment. She couldn’t read what 
  he thought. He had his neutral expression firmly slapped in place. 
  Finally, he pushed to his feet. “All right, I’ll come. Gbarleman needs 
  to hear both sides. That way nobody panics.”
  It was on the tip of her tongue to say something about covering 
  his ass but she bit that back. Instead, she said, “We won’t know 
  anything until we can run more tests.”
  “And that’s a damn good thing.” He looked down at her. “I don’t 
  apologize for thinking the way I do. If you were in my position you 
  might have exactly the same response. From my perspective, this 
  is a potential windfall.”
  “Mmm.” She stared right back. “Well, then, thank heaven I’m not.”
  “And vive le différence,” he said, without irony. “We’ll go to com-
  mand communications. You drive.”
  They pushed out of the lab. Neither spoke as they circled around 
  back. The sun was behind clouds. The air had a metallic smell and 
  was so cold her nose hurt. 
  At her car, Powers pulled up. “Aw, hell. I forgot my jacket. Look, 
  you go on ahead; just let me run back. I won’t be a sec.”
  Carolyn didn’t need encouragement. Shoulders hunched against 
  the cold, she trotted to her car, aimed the remote, popped the doors. 
  When she hauled back on the driver’s side, the metal was stiff, and 
  the hinges squalled. She dropped in, slammed the door. The vinyl 
  upholstery was frigid. Turning around, she reached behind to the 
  passenger seat. A wedge of her sheepskin jacket was beneath her 
  gun case still in the well; she snagged a corner, reeled the jacket in 
  and then shrugged into it. The leather creaked with cold. 
  
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  “Heat,” she said, cranking the engine and pushing buttons. “Heat, 
  heat, heat.” Cold air blasted her face, and she jammed a control 
  that sent the chill lapping her ankles. She cranked her defrosters 
  to max, waited a few minutes, watched as her breath bunched 
  and balled. She was just beginning to get impatient when Powers 
  crunched up, his bike in hand. Knocked on her rear windshield, 
  mimed putting the bike in her trunk. She depressed the latch for 
  the trunk, waited as he took off the front wheel, folded the bike to 
  fit and slammed down the trunk lid.
  “Sorry,” he said, popping the passenger’s side door. A blast of 
  cold air pillowed in. He dropped into the passenger’s side, slammed 
  the door. “Got hung up shutting down one of the computers.”
  “Yeah?” She popped the brake, dropped the car into reverse, 
  pulled out then shifted into drive. Her gloves were in back; she 
  wished now that she’d thought to put them on. The steering wheel 
  was like a block of ice. “I was positive I shut them all down.”
  “Guess not,” said Powers, reaching around for his shoulder har-
  ness. “Jesus, if it’s cold here, Kincaid and those guys have got to 
  be freezing their asses off in Wyoming.”
  “Wyoming?” Frowning, Carolyn shot Powers a quick glance then 
  faced forward as she pulled to the stop at the end of the exit. She 
  hit her right turn signal then swiveled her head left to check for 
  traffic. “I thought you said you didn’t know where they were.” 
  “Yeah?” 
  She looked back at him. “Yeah.”
  Powers’s face was unreadable. “Mmm.” Then, lifting his chin to 
  indicate something to her left, “Jeep coming.”
  She turned back, spotted the jeep. “I can make that.” 
  “But you want to go left.”
  She twisted back to look at him. “No, the communications,” she 
  began. Then stopped.  
  Carolyn Fletcher had seen a lot of slug-throwers and more than 
  a few lasers in her life. She liked to shoot. So she registered that 
  the weapon was a laser pistol, standard military issue and easy 
  to flick from single to continuous burst depending upon whether 
  Powers wanted to drill a hole or burn a track along her chest.
  “No,” said Powers. “You really want to go left.”
  
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  En route to Death Canyon, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 1330
  Watching Amanda’s reactions through his scope – her horror 
  shading to disbelief and settling upon intense calculation – filled 
  him with a certain pride. Yes, that was the Amanda he knew, the 
  confident wingman, the consummate soldier. She turned north 
  because he’d buried the knife up to the hilt, and far enough away 
  from the bodies so she had to face forward. The sun spilled over 
  her shank of fiery red hair and made it glow like copper. A glint of 
  metal in her hand: the tags. And then he saw her study the black 
  butt bolt, read the initials – and then her head jerked up and she 
  seemed to look right at him.
  He exhaled, brought his targeting crosshairs over her heart. 
  Waited for his to beat. And then he squeezed the trigger.
  Amanda felt the bullet before she heard the shot. There was the 
  flash of pain as the bullet sliced through her BDUs, then the skin, 
  then muscle and veins of her left thigh before exiting. And then 
  the pain detonated as the bullet blasted out a chunk of meat and 
  skin and a spray of blood combined with fibers from her clothes. 
  She shrieked. Her knees folded, and she tumbled down hard on 
  her right. By the time she was falling, the sound of the shot – a 
  startling BANG – clapped against her body and bounced off, echo-
  ing along the hills, a sound that would carry for kilometers. 
  As much as she hurt, instinct and training kicked in. She hit and 
  rolled right behind a nearby pine. Stayed sprawled on her stomach, 
  head down. No point in pulling into a crouch for a shot; she didn’t 
  have a weapon worth shit anyway. She listened for the report of a 
  second shot. Heard nothing but her heart banging away. She held 
  her breath a second. Still nothing. Her left thigh screamed with 
  pain. She was already sweating from the shock and her stomach 
  knotted. 
  Take it easy, can’t afford to lose it, just hold on.
  After a minute when nothing came, she crawled to a sit, back to 
  the tree. She still had the tags and Kincaid’s KA-BAR. She tucked 
  the tags into her parka, laid the KA-BAR alongside her right thigh. 
  
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  Pulled off her gloves and gave her left thigh a quick once-over. 
  Her skin jumped beneath her fingers, and a fresh wave of nausea 
  had her sweating and tasting sour bile. The shot was through and 
  through, lateral aspect of her left thigh. How much damage the 
  bullet had done would depend on whether or not it had a lead 
  core, how much it yawed or fragmented. No way to tell any of 
  that, but the entrance wound was small and dimpled, the material 
  from her trousers dragged in with the bullet. Couldn’t see the exit 
  wound. Her fingers came away slicked with blood, but she hadn’t 
  felt the gush of a pumper. So that was good. Fumbling her buckle, 
  she stripped her belt from around her waist, threaded it under her 
  thigh and cinched it down hard above the wound. She’d still bleed, 
  but that would buy her some time.
  High velocity, lots of kinetic energy, sniper shot, something with 
  a really long barrel. Mac 2176, maybe a Ruger-Barrett RLR 7000, 
  and very far away. Didn’t hear the shot until way after I got hit.  
  That meant something else. Two things, actually. That far away, 
  her sniper had a scope. If he had a scope, he knew what he was 
  hitting and where he was aiming. The only way to hit her at dis-
  tance was to aim high: heart-high. Or he could be a lousy shot. 
  Somehow she didn’t think that was it. So he’d meant to wound, 
  not kill. 
  That was like toying with her, personally. No toying with those 
  guys lined up at the tent, and she bet James and Hackett died quick. 
  So that meant the sniper was someone she knew, really well.
  There were a lot of good snipers in the universe. But as far as 
  she knew there was only one that mattered. Couldn’t believe it but 
  didn’t see a clear alternative.  And then she remembered her target 
  laser; flipped the IFF and cautiously swept the weapon north. The 
  IFF beeped and she looked – and that’s when her world crashed 
  down around her ears. 
  Kincaid.
  He could see the tail of her parka and a fold of hood. He thought 
  about firing again but gave her several minutes to absorb the situ-
  ation and realize the implications. His shot had been perfect. He 
  needed the mouse alive. He was also confident that she would 
  move soon. She could not afford to stay in one place. 
  
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  She did not disappoint. After perhaps ninety seconds, he saw her 
  use the tree for support and pull to a stand. She wobbled, righted; 
  through his scope, he could see how white her knuckles were, the 
  way they tented skin as she clung to the tree. Then she pushed off, 
  staying as low as she could, her walk a shambling lurch.
  Excellent. Slinging his weapon, he swarmed down from the 
  tree and took off in a jog to flank her right. He would, he decided, 
  squeeze off a shot from time to time to herd her where he wanted 
  her to go.
  Run, little mouse. He moved in an easy lope, and he felt fine, bet-
  ter than he had in three years. Run. 
  
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  Yakima Proving Grounds, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 1400
  They drove northeast in silence, Powers with the laser below 
  the dash and aimed at her gut. The Manastash Ridge was north 
  and west, the humps of the Saddle Mountains almost dead 
  ahead. Carolyn knew the proving grounds were big, almost thir-
  teen hundred square kilometers of rolling, dun-brown, tinder dry 
  shrub-steppe and chaparral bounded by the sheer basalt cliffs of 
  the Yakima River to the west and the Columbia dead ahead. If he 
  wanted, Powers could kill her in the middle of a lot of nothing and 
  dump her anywhere.
  And he won’t even need the car because Iron Man’s got the damn 
  bike… 
  Then she remembered her PG-90, wondered if she could worm 
  her left hand round, slip the catch, take out the weapon. Tight fit 
  against the door, but she thought maybe she could. She waited a 
  sec, then let her hand fall to her lap; waited a second or two more 
  then eased her hand to her seat…
  “No, no,” said Powers. “Here; I’ll get it.” Keeping the pistol 
  trained, he stretched his long arm behind her headrest, reached 
  down and came up with her case. “Looking for this? We’ll use it 
  soon enough. Both hands on the wheel.”
  “What do you mean we?” When he didn’t answer, she glanced 
  right. “You want to explain? This can’t be about that damned 
  loop.”
  “Not the way you think,” he said. His tone was neither hostile nor 
  amused. Just there. “Eyes on the road, please. We wouldn’t want 
  an accident.”
  She did what he said. “You went back and wiped my data, didn’t 
  you?” A hunch, but it made sense given his protestations then 
  trying to talk her into waiting and finally, when she wouldn’t, the 
  need to erase her data – and her. “What I can’t figure is why.”
  “Don’t worry about it. Instead, let’s talk about you. Did you know 
  you’ve got a depression problem?”
  “Huh?”
  “Pretty woman on a base alone over Christmas. No boyfriend. 
  No family. Sounds depressing. You think that somebody’s going 
  
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  to think it’s abnormal when I talk about how intense you were and 
  kind of down in the dumps? Lonely? Distraught about Jack? We 
  talked shooting and you said you were going out with your PG-90 
  to do some shooting and I offered to go with you, but you refused, 
  and now I feel so guilty… well, you see how shrinks will go for it.”
  “Holiday blues? What, I’m going to shoot myself over Christmas?”
  “No, I’m going to shoot you. The story is embellishment.”
  “Why are you doing this?”
  A pause. Then: “I’m sorry, but I really can’t tell you. Just drive.” 
  She fell silent. She drove. She watched the road unfurling like a 
  broad black ribbon and wondered what in hell to do. It scared her 
  when her mind just kept turning over the same information again and 
  again: He’s got the pistol; he’s got my PG-90; all I can do is drive… 
  They were on a stretch of road now that bent in a gentle curve 
  south toward North Fork Lummuma Creek. The creek was on her 
  right, and ahead she saw that the road dead-ended in another road 
  running roughly north and south. 
  All I can do is drive.
  Carefully, she slid her eyes right. The creek had iced over; the 
  banks were sloped like a culvert and the entire width of the creek 
  was about ten meters and not very deep. She had a half klick, she 
  figured, before the road veered away.
  All I can do is… drive. 
  Powers said, “Up ahead, where it dead-ends, take a right.”
  “Uh-huh,” she said. Then, before she could talk herself out of it, 
  she jinked the wheel right, hard, and hammered the accelerator. 
  A lot happened at once and in a split second. There was a squeal 
  of rubber, the sizzle of asphalt and then a grate of gravel as the car 
  went off the road. She felt a giddy swirl of motion; flashes of blue 
  sky and brown grass whizzing past her windscreen; the feel of 
  her harness biting her stomach. The sudden swerve jolted Powers 
  left; he had enough time to give a startled shout, and Carolyn had 
  an impression of arms flailing, the laser jerking right. The PG-90’s 
  case went bumping off Powers’s knees, jamming into the pas-
  senger’s side well, and the case popped open. Carolyn’s fingers 
  itched to grab the gun, but she hadn’t let up on the accelerator 
  and now here was the creek and a black gap and then the car’s 
  
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  front wheels grabbing air and a sensation of catapulting forward, 
  falling; a smashing, splintering sound as the car rammed into ice 
  and rock and hard earth. She felt herself hurtling forward as the 
  car bammed to a halt; there was a bang as her driver’s side air-
  bag deployed. Her harness locked as momentum threw her body 
  against the straps so hard she’d be black and blue for a month. Her 
  face smashed into the airbag then rebounded like a hockey puck 
  careering from a slap shot. She was dazed, seeing stars; her neck 
  shrieking, but she was fighting now, angry at her body, ready for 
  blood. Powers was jammed by his airbag, too, and he’d lost hold 
  of his laser pistol, which had catapulted into the back seat.
  The airbags began to deflate, and she was ready. Unsnapping 
  her harness, she lunged forward, pushed the limp passenger’s 
  side bag aside and scrambled for the PG-90.  But he was right 
  there, his knees pushing her down and forward. Her arms scis-
  sored; she was jammed up against the glove box; the transmission 
  lever stabbed her abdomen. He couldn’t both pin her and grab his 
  pistol, but she couldn’t get her gun either. So she twisted around, 
  saw nylon-sheathed pant leg and bit down, hard.
  She tasted wet nylon and salty blood as her teeth tore at his 
  skin. Roaring with pain, Powers jerked away, and then her fingers 
  brushed metal and she had the PG-90 in her left hand and she was 
  pushing back, knowing she had to get out of this cramped space 
  or he’d wrest the gun away… 
  She transferred the gun from left to right simultaneously fum-
  bling for the door release. But her fingers skittered and then it 
  was too late because Powers’s face twisted with black fury and 
  he lunged.
  So she shot him.
  
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  Death Canyon, Terra 
  December 24, 2438: 1630
  The sun was slanting down directly ahead, yellow light painting 
  the rock brassy and much too bright. She was nearly out of energy 
  and time. She was close to the canyon. And then? Her head spun 
  and her skin was clammy, cold. The butt of her target laser banged 
  against her right hip. Her left leg was one steady, aching throb and, 
  with all the walking, still bleeding. Her left pants leg was black 
  and smelled like a wet penny; she could feel blood oozing into her 
  sock. Her boot squelched. 
  He was driving her. She knew that; figured it out when she tried 
  circling back to find a place to hide near Phelps Lake. She had 
  some half-formed notion of stealing back to the squad’s tents, go-
  ing through their rations, taking a bedroll, maybe finding a radio. 
  But every time she made a move, there was a crack of a rifle and 
  the high ping of bark chunked off a tree by a bullet. The fact that 
  the two events were closer meant he’d gained ground, too, not 
  hard when Kincaid had two good legs.
  But how could he smuggle in a rifle? He’s good, but he’s not…
  She thought about defying him: forcing Kincaid to show himself. 
  He wasn’t ready to kill her just yet. The more she thought about 
  it, the more it seemed clear that he was keeping her alive. But 
  why? Her brain kept snagging on that because it didn’t feel right. 
  Kincaid, why would Kincaid…
  Then a light bulb flash in her mind: the men lined up against that 
  tent flap, their throats ringed with bloody necklaces… Something 
  wrong there, but what? Not the bullet holes. Not the clothes. Their 
  necks, yes; something wrong… Then she glanced down at her 
  own knife and the answer burst on her brain. 
  Of course, of course, it’s the only explanation. 
  Twisting round, she looked down the pass and spotted him: a 
  dark speck, growing larger. She tried using her scope, but she was 
  shaking so badly from fatigue and blood loss the image jittered 
  and she gave up. Instead, she waited, not sure what she would do 
  when he reached her. But she was through running.
  Because she knew something else now.
  
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  When she stopped moving, the colonel was momentarily non-
  plussed. A new wrinkle; he disliked wrinkles. It was very important 
  that she get up to the rim of the canyon. It was important that she 
  not miss the show because he did not think they had much time. 
  But when she stopped, he peered through the Barrett’s scope; 
  saw her hair plastered to her sweaty skin and the purple shadows 
  bruising the hollows of those eyes. 
  Saw her mouth form the words: Come get me, asshole. 
  Well, well. When he came to within three meters, he was disap-
  pointed not to see shock or even horror. Horror he would have 
  understood. In fact, horror was what he preferred. But she only 
  nodded as if confirming some wager she’d made with herself. 
  She said, “You need to study up… is it, Colonel? Or Sang-shao?”
  Excellent psychological tactics: Get in the first word; ask the 
  questions; assert dominance. Well-trained; a spitfire. Defiant even 
  in a hopeless situation. “Colonel will suffice, although your accent 
  is excellent.”
  “I was present during several debriefings after Tybalt.” Her eyes 
  raked him from head to toe, and he felt her gaze, laser-bright, lin-
  ger on the taut, shiny scar that swept like a scimitar from his left 
  brow to right jaw before diving south beneath the neck of his par-
  ka. Only he knew that the scar continued to the level of his heart, 
  spreading like the filaments of a web. He had refused plastic sur-
  gery. Let his body bear witness.
  So he knew what she saw: The scar was as pink as the skin of 
  a newborn rat and pulled down at the left corner of his mouth so 
  that his lips were always slightly parted on that side, a slick of 
  drool always there. The burns had singed away his left eyebrow 
  to the pores and his nose had been foreshortened until his nostrils 
  resembled the black pits of a sand viper. His left eye had boiled 
  like an egg, and the orbit burst. He saw no need for an eye patch. 
  So the socket was a wizened, pink crater. 
  She said, “You’ve obviously compensated for your left eye. 
  Shooting, I mean.”
  “Indeed. Depth perception was problematic, but I have mastered 
  myself. One only requires a single good eye to shoot.” He cocked 
  his head, studied her expression. “So, you knew. How?”
  “I didn’t at first. Then I remembered that squad.” She nodded at 
  the Barrett, its sling drooping over his right shoulder. “Kincaid’s 
  
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  a leftie. A leftie wouldn’t begin his cut under the left ear, but you 
  cut those guys after you’d propped them up, and you did it stand-
  ing behind each man. The cut’s deeper under the left ear and tails 
  off to the right. No way a leftie can do that. You had me going for 
  a little while, though. So,” she said, “where’s Kincaid? You killed 
  him, didn’t you?” 
  He answered with a jerk of his rifle, remaining well out of her 
  reach. She might be wounded; he knew she was physically weak. 
  But this was a formidable adversary who had more than proven 
  her mettle in battle. “Up there. Above Death Canyon.”
  “I asked you a question.”
  “And I’m not prepared to answer, nor are you in a position to 
  argue.”
  In response, she eyed him for a second then lowered herself to 
  the ground – awkwardly because of her leg. “I’m not going any-
  where. And I don’t think you’ll gun me down here. You want me 
  alive and up there. Why? What’s this about, revenge?”
  He grinned, awkward because of the scar. From experience, he 
  knew the effect was ghoulish. “You are the sauce. A… how shall 
  we say it? My reward? I am looking forward to it. For you, I have 
  very special plans. But you are not the goose.”
  “Then what’s the goose?” she asked, straight-faced though he de-
  tected a narrowing of the eyes and knew that, of course, she did 
  know but couldn’t say because this prototype battle machine was 
  supposed to be secret. Why else assassinate the machine’s pilots?
  He was about to reply when he heard something not… right. 
  Explosions. No. Thunder? He saw that she heard it, too, and then 
  he looked left, due north. The sound came again, more distinct, 
  and now he recognized it: the low, rhythmic wop-wop-wop of a 
  helicopter, a big one from the sound, perhaps a Desert Cobra or 
  HAF Redhawk Gunship. 
  They are early. How? Who alerted…? 
  Still too far away, however, to be a threat. He tensed fractionally, 
  waiting to see if the chopper vectored for them or turned for the 
  decoys he’d planted along the way. Circling, circling… he let his 
  breath go as the sound faded. But it would be back.
   He looked down to see her deep-green eyes sparkle with tri-
  umph. “You don’t have much time.”
  
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  “No,” said the colonel. He whipped around, his booted foot whir-
  ring in a roundhouse kick that caught her on the right temple. Crude 
  but effective. Her head snapped left, and she crumpled without a 
  sound. He waited a moment, knelt, pressed a finger to her neck 
  and checked for a pulse: thready but there. This close, touching 
  her… he was tempted. But, instead, he shouldered his weapon, 
  bent, grabbed her limp forearms then hoisted her over his left 
  shoulder. Her target laser slewed to one side, the strap pinned 
  between his back and her chest. She was much lighter than he 
  expected. This was a good thing because he still had a kilometer 
  or two to go.
  The chopper was not good. It was early and this meant something 
  had been… compromised. He shot a glance left to the expanse of 
  the shelf that opened up in a few hundred meters and quickened 
  his pace. He did not wish for the helicopter to find them until he 
  was done – with both of them. 
  With Amanda – and Kincaid. 
  Kincaid knew bad. A fighter in a flat spin, him and a Capellan 
  in a knife fight in a phone booth – these were all bad. Battle of 
  Tybalt was worse. But the situation now was beyond bad. The sit-
  uation – Capellans in the Hegemony, Capellans infiltrating Terra 
  and one of the most secure bases on Terra – was damn near 
  catastrophic.
  Kincaid had four days of Capellan hospitality to assess and re-
  assess the situation. Three days ago – when they’d shot him and 
  then he’d come to as hands fumbled open his parka and ripped his 
  tags from his neck – he’d gotten a firsthand look at just how really, 
  really bad his situation was. They could’ve killed him; should have. 
  But he knew when he saw the colonel – that pink web of shiny scar 
  instead of a left eye – he knew they were keeping him alive for a 
  very special reason. 
  “I’ve let you live for now,” the colonel hissed, so close Kincaid 
  felt spittle against his face. Face purple with fury, lips quivering, 
  the colonel fisted Kincaid’s shirt in one hand and twisted until 
  Kincaid’s air choked off. “You’ll live,” he said, as Kincaid writhed, 
  felt the blood thudding in his temples, his chest burning, “until 
  I find her, and then I will enjoy watching you watch me with her. 
  Then I will let you see her die, but I will do it slowly until you beg 
  
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  me to end her agony, and then you will know suffering the way I 
  suffered as I watched my wife!” 
  The colonel let Kincaid go, and then as Kincaid doubled up, suck-
  ing in air, the colonel aimed a vicious kick to Kincaid’s wounded 
  left side. He laughed when Kincaid gargled a scream. Then the 
  colonel went away.
  One thing for sure: that guy was nuts. Kincaid suspected the 
  colonel’s men knew that, too. But they valued living. Or maybe 
  living long enough for a transfer.
  There were two guards, one a pretty nice guy as Capellans, and 
  probably Maskirovka, went. The other was a fairly grim schmuck, 
  also Maskirovka, who was much more par for the course. They kept 
  him alive. One, the nice guy, dressed his wound, peeling Kincaid’s 
  blood-soaked BDU tunic, thermal and undershirt like soggy wrap-
  ping paper. The bullet had punched a hole just above Kincaid’s left 
  hip. The nice guy sponged the wound, fished out a red-black plug of 
  blood clot. That started more blood flowing, but it didn’t pulse. The 
  exit wound on his back was about half the size of his fist. Kincaid 
  tried to remember if there was anything vital there, but his thoughts 
  were woolly and it felt like someone was jamming a red-hot poker 
  through his side. Then the nice guy made him swallow pills, per-
  suading him with the business end of a laser pistol. One was a 
  painkiller; he drifted in and out of a fog for most of the day.
  That must have been when they moved him, because when he 
  came around again in the middle of the night, he felt cold stone 
  leeching through a bedroll, smelled damp, reached up a hand, 
  grazed wet stone and knew: a cave. Looked around, still too grog-
  gy to do much, but saw the orange glow of a cigarette suspended 
  in midair that seemed a thousand meters away but was probably 
  more like fifty. 
  Come morning, he was with it enough to take stock. Light filtered 
  in from the entrance to his right and splashed the rock a muted 
  silver-gray. The cave wasn’t large. Maybe thirty meters long by 
  fifteen wide, with a shape like the track of a bullet with a lot of 
  yaw: a narrow opening high enough for a man to hunker down 
  and crabwalk his way in. Then a stretch where the cave gradually 
  opened up before the roof soared away in the center and a man 
  could stand and move comfortably. Then a dip again as the cave 
  tailed off, ending in the cul-de-sac where he lay. 
  That day he hurt a lot so he didn’t move much. He spent his time 
  observing and figured after five minutes that he could take both 
  
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  these guys without too much trouble. Question was when and 
  how, plus he had to get healthier. One thing he knew from experi-
  ence: wait long enough, everyone relaxes. He spotted his target 
  laser propped against the far left wall in the widest part of the 
  cavern. He tried hard not to think about Amanda because every 
  time he imagined that colonel touching her, his skin crawled and 
  the reality of what they were up against made things seem… not 
  hopeless. Just daunting.  So he shoved that down, boxed it. He 
  couldn’t help either one of them if he panicked. 
  And who was the goddamned mole? That really nagged at him. 
  Couldn’t figure who the asshole was who sold them out. Obviously, 
  someone on the inside and pretty high up because the SERE was 
  classified, the project itself beyond secret. Sure, there were a lot 
  of people on the project, and it was hard to account for all of them. 
  But for the Capellans to both know who the Mackie’s prospective 
  pilots were and, more importantly, where they were… that nar-
  rowed the field.  
  Someone in command, or maybe one of the project directors, some-
  one who deals with us on a regular basis; someone who doesn’t mind 
  if the Hegemony falls and a whole bunch of us get killed…  
  The second day two things happened. One: they cuffed his hands 
  behind his back. Nice shiny metal cuffs, and both the nice guy and 
  Grim had a key. Two: the nice guy pestered him to get up and 
  walk. It wasn’t just to prevent a blood clot from going to his lungs. 
  Because of the cold, the air flow into the cave wasn’t great, and 
  Kincaid’s peeing into a jug made it smell like it was raining piss. 
  Kincaid made a big show of reluctance and moved extra slow, just 
  enough to make Grim impatient, complain about the stink and 
  gripe about wanting a cigarette. 
  The cave mouth opened onto a ledge about two meters wide. A 
  rocky dirt track that Kincaid judged was about nine hundred me-
  ters doglegged north and then east back up to the canyon rim. The 
  track wasn’t steep, but Kincaid took his time, not just because he 
  was in pain but to scope the terrain. They were in Death Canyon, 
  he knew; the craggy teeth of the Tetons haloed by clouds were 
  visible north and a little east, and looking west he could see clear 
  across the canyon. Damn close to the radio, but he figured if they 
  knew about him and everything else, they knew about the radio. 
  Halfway up the trail, they passed tangled clumps of dry sagebrush 
  clinging to the canyon walls and the dark roots of Douglas fir like 
  wiry black fingers. When Kincaid looked up, he saw that grass 
  lipped the canyon rim to a knot of fir. 
  
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  Because they’d cuffed him, he had to concentrate on keeping 
  his footing on the track. The rock was slippery. Kincaid saw that 
  the nice guy still had the laser pistol. Grim prodded Kincaid along 
  with his pulse laser. Once they got far enough from the cave, Grim 
  stepped back and looked at him expectantly.
  Still cuffed, Kincaid peeked over the edge and then stared back. 
  Paused for effect. “Just remember to give it a good tap when I’m 
  done.”
  The nice guy laughed, and Grim’s skin flushed copper. Kincaid 
  kept his neutral face on. Grim uncuffed him; Kincaid unzipped, did 
  his business, tapped and zipped; they cuffed him and retraced 
  their steps.
  By the middle of the third day, he got their routine. First off, they 
  had contact with the colonel three times a day. Radios: no words 
  but tapped codes that were scratchy with static. Bad. That meant 
  he had to take both soldiers, pretty much at the same time and 
  between radio contacts. Plus, the way those guys grinned at each 
  other after the evening message, Kincaid figured things weren’t 
  going well for his side. 
  That also meant the colonel was damned efficient. Knew where 
  to go and who was there. So, yeah, someone on the inside, some-
  one on the project. The fact that the colonel had his tags and parka 
  meant he could play the SERE, pretty much trick anyone into 
  thinking that he was Kincaid. Probably let himself get tracked by 
  those squads. The jolt when someone hit you with the target laser 
  wasn’t totally incapacitating but it was damned unpleasant. So 
  the colonel must be wearing some nonconductive material under 
  the parka and Kincaid knew he was a damn good shot. So things 
  weren’t just bad for his side. They were a disaster.
  Second, the nice guy only had a laser pistol; Grim had both a 
  hand and pulse laser rifle, and neither liked the other much. This 
  was good. In fact, Kincaid didn’t think the nice guy bought into 
  the mission at all: weird for a Maskirovka but maybe he had that 
  nutso colonel pegged, and that was better. For one thing, he was 
  way too… well, nice wasn’t the right word. Humane, though, like 
  Kincaid was a homeless mutt. Kincaid asked for painkillers; the 
  nice guy handed them over. But he was sloppy because he was a 
  Maskirovka, not a real medic. Didn’t check Kincaid’s mouth, didn’t 
  stick around so the painkillers, if Kincaid was mouthing them, 
  would dissolve. Sloppy. By the middle of the third day, Kincaid 
  had a stash that could probably put down an elephant. But then 
  he had an excuse to always look groggy, pretend to sleep. He 
  
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  stumbled around a lot when they let him up to pee, or when the 
  nice guy said he had to walk. (Actually, some of it wasn’t acting. 
  He hurt like hell.) He didn’t even consider doping their coffee or 
  something stupid like that. Dope in coffee tasted like battery acid. 
  Dope in anything other than coffee tasted like poison and stank 
  like crushed beer cans. But he played up the groggy stuff.
  Grim wasn’t nice. Grim was a Maskirovka who liked action. Either 
  that or he had PMS. Grouchy. Glowered a lot while the nice guy 
  changed his bandages. Kept that laser pointed in the right direc-
  tion. Griped about having to take Kincaid to the toilet. And he liked 
  to smoke.
  By the fourth day, the nice guy and Grim were bored and sick 
  of each other. A lot of glares back and forth. Grim smoked like a 
  fiend. Took a smoke break about every five minutes; planted him-
  self right at the entrance to the cave, rifle on his knee. The colonel 
  called in that morning but not in the afternoon, and the air was 
  electric with tension. Kincaid was moving better, but he was still 
  stiff. The day was bright, the cave mouth glowing like a milky eye. 
  By midday, the sun had warmed the air in the canyon enough to 
  set up a breeze.
  Around midday, Kincaid heard a rifle shot. Didn’t flinch but wor-
  ried. Then, every once in a while, another shot. Random. Getting 
  closer. The nice guy and Grim flicked looks.
  Then they all heard the chopper. Kincaid caught only the dull 
  boom of it, but he saw Grim roll back and duckwalk into the cave. 
  After a few seconds, the thumping faded. Grim and the nice guy 
  looked at one another, and something wordless passed between 
  them because then they turned to look at him. When Kincaid 
  stared back, the nice guy looked away first. 
  Bad. It was then that Kincaid knew he’d better get gone. 
  Lunch or early dinner or whatever, maybe a last meal kind of 
  thing, was some chunky stew-muck: unrecognizable hunks of 
  meat slicked with gray-green grease and something that passed 
  for carrots and potatoes. The nice guy brought the food in a ra-
  tions tin along with a fork, a spoon and a mug of sour coffee. By 
  then, they’d let Kincaid sit up, hands in cuffs behind his back when 
  he wasn’t eating or pissing. Despite the fact that they hated each 
  other’s guts, the nice guy and Grim did the handcuff thing right: 
  Grim with the rifle while the nice guy unlocked the cuffs. Then 
  Grim went to smoke.
  
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  Kincaid forced down most of the food, chased it with sour cof-
  fee. Asked for another cup which the nice guy, being essentially a 
  nice guy, brought and this was something Kincaid was banking on. 
  He’d seen enough combat to know that the meds guys got when 
  they had a gut wound stoppered them up so bad that when they 
  finally crapped they did it all at once – especially after drinking 
  something hot, like coffee. 
  All of a sudden, Kincaid stopped chewing in mid-mouthful. “Oh, 
  Jesus.”
  “What?” The nice guy squatted two meters away, laser dangling 
  from his right hand.
  “I don’t know.” Then Kincaid groaned, doubled over. “Aw, Jesus, 
  aw, I got to take a dump. Man, I got to go like right now!”
  At the mouth of the cave, Grim ducked his head and looked 
  around. Cigarette screwed into the corner of his mouth. Scowled. 
  “You’ll have to wait.” Cigarette dancing.
  “We should take him,” said the nice guy.
  “I’m finishing my smoke.”
  “Jesus.” Kincaid exhaled, closed his eyes. Grimaced against a 
  cramp. “You want me to shit in my pants? Come on, for Christ’s 
  sake, I can’t help it if I…” Doubling over, grimacing. “Aw, God, that 
  hurts.”
  “I’m taking him,” said the nice guy. 
  Grim grunted. “Do it by yourself then. You can wipe his ass when 
  he’s done.”
  “Christ.” Kincaid showed his teeth in a grimace and his face got 
  frantic. “Aw, no, we got to go, we got to go, we got…”
  Two seconds later, the nice guy’s features shaded into shock. He 
  started waving his hands. “Stop, stop!” 
  Grim was on his feet, cigarette dangling, smoke spiraling in a 
  vertical curlicue. “Hell he doing? Man, don’t let him do that!”
  “I can’t! Jesus!” Kincaid squeezed out a couple tears, looked 
  away. “I told you! Please, please!”
  “Wait, wait!” The nice guy getting up fast, probably thinking he’d 
  be the one stuck with clean-up. “Come on, I will take you!” 
  
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  “Damn it.” Kincaid averted his eyes. A guy ashamed to have 
  crapped his pants. “Just a sec…” Doubling over from a cramp. 
  “Give me a sec.” Palming the fork. “Christ…”
  “Will you get him the fuck out?” Grim. “Just get him out!”
  “Come on!” The nice guy, at his right elbow. Hand on his shoul-
  der. “Come, I will take you, I will…”
  Kincaid shot up, grabbed the nice guy’s right wrist with his 
  right hand and jammed the fork into the nice guy’s eye with his 
  left. The nice guy screamed, dropped the laser, clawed at his face. 
  Blood and eye jelly spurting, the fork jittering. Kincaid swept up 
  the fallen hand laser with his right hand, danced right, crouched, 
  saw Grim hunkering down for a shot – and blasted Grim just 
  as he got his rifle set. Screaming, Grim flinched back, slammed 
  rock; his laser discharged, burning a seam that skimmed a few 
  centimeters above Kincaid’s head. Then Grim rebounded right 
  and disappeared. 
  The nice guy was still shrieking. Kincaid spun him around then 
  smashed his left forearm into the nice guy’s throat. Felt the brit-
  tle cartilage of the larynx explode and then the nice guy stopped 
  screaming, fell to his knees, clawing at his throat, trying to get 
  air through a fractured larynx but only making bubbly choking 
  sounds. Kincaid pressed the muzzle of the laser to the nice guy’s 
  temple and pulled the trigger. A flash, a sizzle. Stink of roast meat. 
  The nice guy stopped trying to breathe.
  Winded, Kincaid staggered to the mouth of the cave. He looked 
  down. Wheezed. Grim had burst like a blood-filled balloon an easy 
  fifty, sixty meters below. His rifle was nowhere to be seen. 
  Damn. Kincaid sagged against the cave wall. His wound had 
  opened up; his side roared with pain and blood was seeping down 
  his side. The air reeked of feces and charred pig. He went back, 
  took the nice guy’s hand laser and grabbed his target laser. He 
  would have stripped off the nice guy’s pants, but the guy was 
  small. He stripped out of his underpants though, tossed them, fig-
  ured that if he got out of this alive the whole thing would make a 
  damn fine bar story. Tugged his BDUs back on. Slung the target 
  laser over his right shoulder. Thanked Christ he still had his parka 
  and, in the parka, his gloves. He ducked down, duckwalked to the 
  entrance and turned north onto the track. 
  If I can make it to the rise. He stepped as quickly as he could, 
  but he was wobbly from days of immobility and unsteady on the 
  
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  rocky trail. If I can just make it to the rise, I can find someplace to 
  wait for the colonel; he’s got to come this way…
  There was a faint thumping sound now, echoing in the canyon, 
  and he realized that it was the chopper still north but closer. He 
  was still too far below the rim to see the chopper, but if he could 
  get up there, signal it… Because something’s happened; now 
  they’ve sent people out to find us.
  And then he had an idea. Scuttled to the halfway point, when 
  the lip of tinder-dry scrub and sagebrush was nearly even with 
  his right shoulder and he was still a good seven hundred meters 
  shy of the rim. Laser thumbed to full burn, he played the stream 
  of light over the sagebrush and gnarled roots. Instantly, the grass 
  flashed, sparked; there was a crackle and a sputter; and in a few 
  seconds, there was gray smoke and orange fire racing for the rim. 
  The updraft from the canyon floor brought oxygen and the flames 
  flared up hot and bright. He saw the fire eat its way up the hill. 
  Smoke pillowed and swirled, and as the crackling fire spread to 
  that trio of squat Douglas firs, there was a bright flash as the trees 
  ignited.
  Like sending up a flare. He started forward again, the whoosh 
  and roar of the fire in his ears. They got to see it…
  Then he looked up and his stomach bottomed out.
  Smoke, and now the colonel knew something was very wrong. 
  Even with Amanda slung over his shoulder, he’d made adequate 
  time, and she had not regained consciousness. The trail had come 
  out above the treeline and was much wider now as it headed west, 
  worming in an S.  So as the trail looped out, he saw the smoke 
  first; and then he broke into a rough jog.  Another hundred and 
  fifty meters, and he saw the Maskirovka’s body draped over crim-
  son rock — and then he spotted Kincaid. 
  No, you won’t steal this from me, not now! Cursing, the colo-
  nel stooped, tumbled Amanda from his shoulder and pivoted 
  with his rifle in his right hand, dropping into a crouch. In the next 
  moment, as he scanned the path through shrouds of smoke, he 
  almost laughed out loud. Kincaid was perhaps six hundred me-
  ters, an easy shot, and had only a laser pistol and that pitiful 
  target laser. He judged Kincaid was too far along the track to run 
  
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  back to the safety of the cave, where he would be trapped in any 
  case. Kincaid’s hand laser didn’t have the range. So the only thing 
  Kincaid could do was vault the edge – which he couldn’t because 
  the track was sheer. 
  Not exactly what he’d had in mind. He would have to enjoy 
  Amanda alone. Still? The colonel unhooked his rifle from his shoul-
  der. It would be a pleasure among many to come.
  Kincaid saw them both, the colonel and Amanda; saw the left leg 
  of Amanda’s BDUs saturated with blood; saw through the thicken-
  ing smoke how the colonel slid Amanda from his shoulder to the 
  ground where she lay, unmoving. He knew without looking that 
  he could not go back or over the edge. So he did the only thing he 
  could. 
  Jamming the hand laser into a pocket of his parka, Kincaid trans-
  ferred the rifle from his right to his left hand and scuttled up the 
  track. 
  One chance, I get one chance and then it won’t matter because 
  I’ll be dead and the chopper might make it before he does anything 
  to Amanda; God, how bad is she hurt, did he… ? 
  Kincaid’s mind balked and he concentrated now on scrambling 
  along the ridge, wincing as his side bunched and caught. A thick-
  ening gray veil of smoke hung between him and his opponent. But 
  that meant his opponent couldn’t see him either.… 
  His head snapped up as he caught the rhythmic whop-whop-
  whop of the chopper. Yes, yes! He was on the move, crouching, 
  duckwalking. The chopper was closer because the pilot had seen 
  the fire and smoke and they would be in time to save Amanda; 
  that was all that mattered, just get Amanda safe.…
  Suddenly, Kincaid’s left boot crunched gravel then skittered 
  to one side, and he slipped. The maw of the canyon opened on 
  his left.
  
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  Amanda crawled to consciousness. The inside of her head felt 
  like someone had thrown in a cherry bomb and clanged down the 
  lid. A headache blistered her brain back of her eyes, and the pain 
  along her skull and neck was bad enough to momentarily over-
  shadow the persistent throb in her left thigh. She was aware that 
  she was on the ground; dry sagebrush pricked her cheeks, and the 
  taste of bloody grit was in her mouth. She heard something that 
  sounded like cold cellophane being crinkled, but then she smelled 
  wood char and began to choke against smoke. She propped her-
  self up on her elbows. 
  They were on the rim of Death Canyon, and she saw the colonel, 
  ahead and to her left: facing away, his rifle in his hands, thick gray 
  and black smoke swirling over his body, the ground on fire so the 
  colonel looked like a devil rising from a pit. She pushed up to a 
  sit, silently groaning as she did so – and felt the strap of her target 
  laser drag over her right arm.
  No! Kincaid swayed over the edge. His boot skittered on rock 
  then shot to the side. Crying out, he threw himself right, flailing for 
  a handhold; he banged down, his chest punching rock, his belly 
  slithering over hard pack – can’t lose the rifle, can’t lose it! – and 
  then, at the last possible second, his right hand snagged rock. A 
  shower of pebbles sluiced by but he held on, digging in with his 
  elbows and the toes of his boots, and pulling in air that tasted of 
  smoke and hot ash. 
  It had taken all of five seconds and when he dared to look again, 
  he found that he’d slipped two, perhaps three meters from the ridge. 
  Take too long to climb back up. He shot a quick glance at the smoke. 
  The wind could shift direction at any moment and he had to be ready. 
  And then it struck him that having fallen this far was a blessing. 
  Because he won’t have to compensate for gravity as much; if 
  anything, he’ll have to aim a little higher.
  But he had to get closer; moving away wasn’t any option. His eyes 
  darted left, searching for any toehold. There was one, not more than 
  a meter away, and not really a ledge but a spur of rock that formed 
  a natural saddle and it was perfect. It took Kincaid fifteen seconds 
  to make it to the saddle and another two to drop into position. Then 
  he blew out, trying to get his heartbeat to slow, searching for that 
  calm place he needed to make his last shot count.
  
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  The colonel was so enraged that his anger choked him nearly as 
  much as the accursed smoke! Eyes stinging with tears, he hun-
  kered down as the wind whipped a dark funnel cloud. He heard the 
  crackle of dry sagebrush igniting; saw flames licking the trunks of 
  the firs. Smoke boiled over the ridge, and then just as suddenly 
  the wind shifted again and the smoke thinned, and now he could 
  make out the canyon’s far rim, the flat butte of a distant pass and 
  then, much closer, there was Kincaid.
  For an instant, the colonel was so surprised, he nearly whooped 
  for joy. Fallen from the track trying to save his lady love? Well, 
  Kincaid had failed in that as well. The fool had slithered down the 
  slope. A pity he hadn’t broken his neck but now look at him: curled 
  on rock, a target laser no more deadly than a child’s toy in hand. 
  And thank you for making my job that much easier. With Kincaid 
  closer, the colonel wouldn’t have to worry about gravity as much, 
  though the wind would be a problem. Five hundred meters, 
  perhaps. A trivial distance. 
  Another pillow of smoke, but the colonel was not bothered. The 
  colonel released a breath, dropped his crosshairs even as he heard 
  the heavy bass rumble of the chopper, knowing that nothing mat-
  tered more than this instant toward which he’d been rushing these 
  three long years.
  Because I will kill him and then I will kill both her and myself and 
  it will be done and what has been set in place may yet succeed in 
  toppling Cameron and this accursed Hegemony.
  Waiting for the smoke to clear, judging the wind gusting east, 
  and seeing now that his aim was perfect, his crosshairs centered 
  on a spot just above Kincaid’s left ear. 
  His heart beat – and paused. And in that dead space, the colonel 
  held his breath as his finger tightened on the trigger.
  It was the moment Kincaid had been waiting for. He was barely 
  conscious of the chopper’s thumping; the roar of fire; his own pain. 
  Every distraction dropped away like a tree shedding the last of its 
  leaves. The smoke thinned, parted, cleared, and Kincaid saw the 
  
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  white blur of his opponent’s face appear then firm in his scope be-
  cause Kincaid had judged the distance just right. His focus was tight 
  enough that he saw the colonel’s shoulders give a little flinch of sur-
  prise, but his opponent had taken aim, had his scope to his eye…
  And then Kincaid squeezed the trigger and took the shot of 
  his life.
  A searing red flash spiking the center of his crosshairs and then 
  his right eye erupted in a starburst of pain. Roaring in agony, the 
  colonel flinched back, stumbled, lost his grip on his rifle, which 
  went skittering over the edge. It discharged and because it was 
  so close, he heard the blast at the same time something hummed 
  past his left ear. He heard the squeal and pop of gravel beneath 
  his boots. His eye screwed shut; tears squeezed from beneath his 
  right lid. The pain was so bad it was as if Kincaid had driven a 
  white-hot poker directly through his eye and into his brain. He 
  was afraid to open it; imagined that the eye had burst and he was 
  afraid, he was afraid… 
  Blind! His thoughts came as jagged as shards of glass: Laser… 
  magnified… scope… blinded… my eye… 
  Crying out in fear and pain, he twisted, bent at the waist, swung 
  right. Have to get up, more level ground, have to get away! But he 
  was too afraid to open his eye; and he couldn’t see, he was blind… !
  There was a rush of something whirring just behind. He heard it 
  cleaving the air just before it barreled into his back with the force 
  of a sledge hammer. 
  There was smoke and fire, and the ground vibrated from the 
  basso rumble of the chopper, but she was on her feet, the target 
  laser’s barrel tight in her hands. She’d lost the feeling in her left 
  leg, and the limb was numb; it was like trying to walk with a badly 
  fitted peg. She limped forward, dancing on her right leg, trying 
  to cover distance before the colonel could fire because she knew 
  without having to see it that Kincaid was down there and she had 
  to get to the colonel, she had to stop him! But before she made 
  
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  it, the colonel’s back went ramrod straight. He screamed and then 
  his hands flew up, the rifle twirling away like a baton. She heard 
  the crash of a gun shot and then he staggered back from the rim, 
  his hands clapped to his right eye. He stumbled back on his heels 
  – and was just close enough.
  Amanda uncoiled, swinging the target laser like an axe with all 
  her might. There was a high whistle as the butt sliced air and then 
  bammed against the colonel’s back so hard the barrel tried to jitter 
  out of her hands. The blow sent the colonel reeling forward a step, 
  then two, and then – he was gone. 
  All except his scream.
  Kincaid saw Amanda lurch for the colonel, her laser cocked like 
  a bat, and he roared with joy, cheered her on. She was a beauty. 
  She was fire, with her red hair and taut, savage grimace.  She was 
  Death – and he never loved her more than he did at that moment.
  He saw her swing and connect; he watched as the colonel 
  rocketed from the blow, plummeting from the rim, falling away, 
  screaming. He saw Amanda sway, take a step; saw the laser slip 
  from her fingers and then he watched, helpless, as she folded in 
  on herself and collapsed as a Redhawk hove into view, parting the 
  curtain of fire and smoke and bellowing like a beast loosed from 
  the throat of hell.
  
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  Evans Military Hospital, Terra 
  January 10, 2439: 1825 hours
  She regained consciousness by degrees. The first time, there had 
  been a gabble of voices, the pinch of a needle and the more delib-
  erate pain of a catheter being inserted into a vein of her left arm. 
  Someone shouting: “Major, we gonna med-evac you, do you un-
  derstand? Major, you hear me, squeeze my fingers!” She struggled 
  to focus and must have managed to do what he asked because then 
  someone was slapping an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. 
  A sensation of being swaddled, lifted; a roar of rotors and then the 
  ground falling away. Or maybe that was her mind.
  The next time, there were bright lights and a great deal more 
  pain but all over. Her throat was very dry and there was something 
  hard in her mouth snaking to the back of her throat. She panicked, 
  couldn’t get her breath. Then there was the voice of a woman telling 
  her not to fight the tube; a blurred image through gummy eyelids, 
  and then the rush of something very cold along her forearm.… 
  More blackness. More sleep.
  She awoke for the third time in a bed with aluminum rails 
  squared in a room that was dark except for a dim lamp on a night 
  table to her right. Her mouth was terribly dry and when she tried 
  to swallow, it hurt. When she slicked her lips with her tongue, she 
  discovered that they were fissured and very chapped, and that 
  reminded her of that moment on the mountain right before she 
  rounded the corner of the tent…
  She must have made a sound because there was a rustle of fab-
  ric on fabric and then Kincaid was there. She was so overwhelmed 
  her lips trembled and her eyes burned with tears.
  “Amanda.” He cupped a hand to her left cheek, and she felt his 
  thumb wiping away the wet. “‘Bout time you woke up, girlfriend.”
  She got weepy and that embarrassed her because she didn’t 
  want him to think she was crying because of him, even though she 
  was. Her voice came out in little hitches: “I’m… I’m so… stupid… 
  to… to… cry.”
  Kincaid’s lips curled in a grin. “Don’t worry about it. The doctors 
  said the painkillers might do that, and even if they didn’t, you’ve 
  been banged up pretty bad. Go ahead, cry. I know you’re glad to 
  see me.”
  
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  “You wish.” She gave a weak, half-hearted laugh then winced as 
  her throat balled. “Thirsty.”
  Kincaid fed her ice chips, and she never thought she’d tasted 
  anything as wonderful. She felt a wave of relief that was as much 
  a physical unclenching of her muscles as emotional. When she’d 
  slowed down, he said, “Are you ready to hear what’s going on?” 
  She nodded. “How did they find us? Why did they even come 
  looking?”
   “One of the docs back at the project called in the alarm. Name 
  of Fletcher, works with the chimps.”
  “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
  “You know her. She’s one of the team but, you know, who pays 
  attention?” He recited the story about Powers then added, “She 
  capped Powers and then took his bike. The problem is no one 
  knows if Powers and the Capellans planned this as a joint op-
  eration – you know, having two prongs of attack in case one 
  failed – or if Powers was working for somebody else.”
  “Break-away,” she said. “So busy looking at one guy, you never 
  see the second.”
  He nodded. “All they found for Powers was the number of an 
  unlisted account way the hell off-world. No idea who paid him. So 
  it could be just the Capellans or the Capellans and Federated Suns 
  working together, though that doesn’t compute. For that matter, it 
  could be any one of a number of nobles, someone figuring he has 
  more right to rule the Hegemony than Cameron. The way I’d do it? 
  Steal the Mackie, take out the pilots, turn Cameron into a grease 
  smear and throw the Hegemony into chaos as the coup de grâce, 
  then waltz in and put on the save. Be some pretty damned grateful 
  businesses out there not really keen on losing out billions on an 
  investment.”
  “I thought you said your relatives own some of those businesses. 
  They wouldn’t turn.”
  Kincaid eyed her askance. “Don’t be so sure. Business is busi-
  ness. Any of my family gets in the way, they get eliminated and 
  someone more… easily persuaded takes over.” 
  “Then thank God it didn’t happen.”
  “Yet.” Kincaid paused. “Whoever he is, he has plenty of balls, 
  patience, and organization. He’ll be back.”
  
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  She couldn’t resist. “Might be a she.”
  “Christ, no.” Kincaid grunted. “Probably just like you, and then I 
  know we’re in deep shit.”
  They grinned at one another. Then Amanda said, “So they fixed 
  the helmet?”
  “Well, what they said is that they’d gotten rid of the loop. Whether 
  the same thing might happen to us months down the line… who 
  knows? They did tests on me. You, too, except you were out. 
  So far everything’s okay. Fletcher’s assistant director now and 
  Gbarleman said there shouldn’t be a problem. Far as HAF is con-
  cerned, this never happened.”
  “I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”
  “Why tell anyone? You know how many people get killed when 
  they’re testing new systems? Happens all the time. You just don’t 
  tell John Q. But how are you going to win if you never fail?”
  “Don’t tell me this is one of those risk-is-our-business things.”
  Kincaid shrugged. “Well, it is. Sure, we could pull out. We could 
  try to raise a stink. But someone’s got to take the risk. That’s why 
  there are tests and pilots willing to fly prototypes knowing they 
  might crack up. You accept it as part of the job, or you move on.”
  She had to give him that. He told her about James and Hackett, 
  then about the squads. Then she asked what she’d been putting 
  off because she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. But she said, 
  “So what’s wrong with me?”
  “You had a pretty solid concussion, a non-depressed skull frac-
  ture, not to mention losing a couple liters. You’ve been out for a 
  long time.”
  “How long?”
  “Try almost three weeks.”
  She gawped. “Three weeks?”
  “Yeah. It’s almost the middle of January. You were in ICU for New 
  Year’s. The nurses threw a little party, put one of those pointy hats 
  on your head.”
  “I don’t believe you,” she said, laughing, wanting to take a swat 
  at him. The image was pretty silly. But next year; it was next year. 
  “When can I get out?”
  
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  “Now that you’re awake, probably end of the week. But you’ll 
  have to take it easy. Where you got shot was pretty nasty. They 
  couldn’t close it, it had been too long. So they just washed it out 
  good and loaded you with antibiotics. Let the thing heal in by it-
  self. They said you’ll have a hell of a scar.”
  She blew out. “That’s the least of my worries. What about you?”
  His lips quirked into a grin. “They kept me a couple days, then 
  got tired of listening to me complain. The Maskirovka did okay by 
  me so mine wasn’t as bad.” He paused, and she sensed the shift 
  in his mood. “There’s no easy way to say this,” he said.
  She read it in his eyes, and didn’t need to say it but she did 
  anyway. “You’re piloting the Mackie.” When he nodded, she said, 
  “Okay, makes sense. It’s the only logical choice now. So, yeah, 
  right,” she forced a smile to her lips, “congratulations. I guess the 
  best man won.”
  “Thanks.” Kincaid cocked his head to one side and regarded her 
  for a moment. “Actually, I pretty much refused.”
  “What?”
  “You heard me.”
  “Yeah, but I don’t believe it. The hell you do that?”
  He lifted one shoulder, let it fall. “Because I was just the guy left 
  standing.” 
  “What happened to all that rah-rah Hegemony crap? Don’t tell 
  me the Director-General isn’t, you know, pissed.”
  “No, he’s pretty insistent. So are all my relatives who’ve tied up 
  capital in this thing. They want the test run on the specified date, 
  no delays. So, you know, family on my back, nag, nag. I finally 
  agreed to think about it.”
  She was amazed when the words came out of her mouth: “What 
  were we just talking about? Someone’s got to pilot the damn thing. 
  Might as well be you.” 
  “And not you?” He frowned. “What? Why?”
  “Because then everything will have been for nothing,” she said. 
  “Hackett, James… this. I don’t know about you, but I came pretty 
  close to dying. Even so, I accept that because I’m a soldier. Like you 
  said, it’s the job. So do your goddamned job. Show the Capellans, 
  
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  the Federated Suns…hell, show ‘em all that we’re pros. They can’t 
  keep us down. If you don’t pilot that thing, then Cameron looks 
  like a fool and we look like jackasses. Remember what you said 
  about Isabelle?”
  “I remember.”
  “Well, it applies. I don’t like it. But I accept it because there are 
  some things you have to do, and that’s one of them. So if you can 
  marry a woman you don’t love because that’s your duty, then you 
  sure as hell are going to do this for me. Besides, how am I going 
  to watch your ass in a Mackie if you don’t park yours in that com-
  mand couch and prove that hunk-a-junk works?”
  He was silent, his dark-blue eyes steady on hers. Then his lips 
  parted in a slow smile. “You watching my ass has its attractions.”
  “Count on it, Kincaid. I’m your wingman,” she said simply. 
  “Always have been and always will be. Because put you and me 
  in a couple of bad-ass Mackies?” She found his hand and held it 
  tight and knew she’d never let go. “The universe is in for some 
  serious shit.” 
  Next Month:  
   
  House Steiner 
   
  Prometheus Unbound  
   
  by Herbert A. Beas II
  The End
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/BattleTech [multi]/EXTRA/Novels/Battlecorps Novels/Proliferation (1) - Ilsa J. Bick.pdf