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  “You da’ fucking man, Q,” Jabara said quietly.

  “Don’t you forget it,” Quantrill agreed. He whipped out his pressure bandage and dropped to his knees beside Jabara. “You have a little scratch here. Let’s see what we can do.”

  Quantrill tore aside what was left of Jabara’s pant leg. His calf was crushed – the lower leg was reduced to hamburger with jagged shards of bone jutting out. It looked like a major artery was punctured. Blood spurted out in time to the big man’s heartbeat. Quantrill applied his bandage and ripped off the activator strip. Coagulant foam filled the wound – hopefully stopping the bleeding long enough for Jabara to get medical attention.

  When Quantrill looked up he saw Corporal Tsien come running down the ravine. He was followed close behind by Lieutenant Hardaway. “What’s the situation?” Tsien asked as she skidded to a stop at Jabara’s side. Tsien was the platoon’s combat corpsman.

  “Bug bite,” Quantrill replied. “Pretty bad.”

  “No shit,” Tsien said mildly. He pulled a clear plastic bag of Plaz from his kit. The amber fluid was a synthetic blood replacement – it wasn’t as good as the real thing, but it was a hell of lot better than nothing. The corpsman quickly found a vein in Jabara’s right arm and inserted a needle connected to the bag of Plaz by a thin, plastic tube. “Here, hold this,” he handed the bag to Quantrill. “Keep it elevated.”

  “Is he good to move?” the Lieutenant inquired.

  “Yes, sir,” the corpsman replied. “He’s stable for now.”

  “Good,” Hardaway said. “We need to get the fuck out of here.”

  “I’ll second that,” Quantrill agreed under his breath. If the second wave of the attack hit while they were pinned down in the narrow ravine, they would be Bug chow.

  Tsien produced a monofilament stretcher from his pack. It was about the size and shape of a throw pillow, but when the corpsman activated the filaments it snapped into a rectangular frame about two meters long. They loaded Jabara onto the stretcher and Quantrill and Tsien each took one end. The Lieutenant grabbed Jabara’s SAW and led the way.

  Chapter 2

  Juice

  They reached the other side of the valley and the Lieutenant arranged the platoon into a defensive perimeter. Quantrill and Tsien carried Jabara to the rear of their position.

  “Hey, Q,” the Lieutenant called out.

  “Sir?” Quantrill stopped to reply.

  “Not bad.”

  “Yes, sir,” Quantrill said with a quick nod. Even with the heavy stretcher he stood up a little straighter. Coming from the taciturn Lieutenant Hardaway, “not bad” was practically a Medal of Honor.

  When they found a secure spot, they set Jabara down and Tsien went about examining the injured Marine. He waved his med-scanner up and down the big man’s leg and injected him with various concoctions from his hypospray. Finally the corpsman peeled back the foam bandage. “Arggh!” Jabara cried out. The pressure bandage had practically been the only thing holding his leg together.

  “LT!” Tsien called out. “I need an authorization!”

  A few minutes later, Lieutenant Hardaway came up to Tsien. “What’s his status?”

  “Severe muscle damage on the lower leg. Tibia has been crushed. His hip joint is fractured,” Tsien rattled off. “Fucking Bug nearly ripped his leg off.”

  “Okay,” the Lieutenant agreed. “Juice him.”

  Tsien had the hypospray ready to go. He pushed the pistol-shaped injector against Jabara’s bare leg and dosed him with Accelerated Metabolic Recovery Agent – more commonly known as Juice. Juice kicked Jabara’s metabolic processes into overdrive – digestion, respiration, cell reproduction were all happening at four or five hundred times the normal rate. With Juice, an injury like Jabara’s that might have put a man out of action for weeks would heal in minutes.

  Sweat was pouring down Jabara’s copper brown skin. He breathed faster and faster, until he was practically panting like a dog. Quantrill looked down at the injured leg. If a person watched long enough it was possible to literally see the muscle and bone knitting itself back together. That was how fast Juice worked.

  “Feel … so … hot,” Jabara panted.

  “Easy, Jabby,” Tsien consoled the hyperventilating Marine. “Don’t try to talk. You’ll be good as new in no time.” Jabara nodded weekly. His eyes fluttered, then stayed closed.

  No doubt Juice was a miracle drug, but it did have its downsides. For one, Jabara would be comatose for the next hour or two. That’s why Juice could never be used in a combat situation without the Lieutenant’s say-so. An injured Marine could still pull a trigger, but a Juiced Marine was nothing but dead weight.

  “We’ve done all we can for him,” the Lieutenant insisted. “I need you men on the line.”

  “Yes, sir,” Quantrill and Tsien said in unison. They grabbed their rifles and marched quickly up to the line of boulders where the rest of the platoon had taken up defensive positions. Quantrill took a spot near Corporal Vanlanding and directed his rifle down the hill. There was nothing to shoot at yet, but Quantrill didn’t expect to wait long. The initial skirmish at the LZ had scattered the Formids, but they would regroup quickly.

  The Bugs seemed to be able to talk to each other, even over long distances. They didn’t have a spoken language – at least, not that anyone had ever heard. They didn’t use radio or microwave or any other kind of electromagnetic signals that could be detected. No one had any idea how it worked, but the Formids did communicate. The Lieutenant often said if one Bug saw you, the rest knew where you were, too.

  Sure enough, the Bugs came swarming up the hill minutes later. The men waited as the enormous creatures rushed toward their position. The only sound was the ominous clicking of the Formid exoskeletons. Then the silence was shattered by the throaty roar of automatic weapon fire from the left flank.

  Quantrill added his own fire to the mêlée. He was out of armor piercing ammo, so he inflicted little damage on the approaching beasts. He tried to focus on the creatures’ legs. The legs were more lightly armored than the main body, so standard ammo could sometimes do damage there. The Lieutenant advised against the strategy – most Marines aiming for the fast-moving and narrow legs would hit nothing but air – but Quantrill was a keen rifle shot and managed a few lucky shots and injured several Formids. At least, he slowed them down enough to be taken out by other Marines firing AP ammo.

  More than a dozen Bugs went down but at least twice as many more were still rushing up the hill. They fought their way to within a few meters of Quantrill’s position, climbing over the dead bodies of their comrades like any other rough terrain. The close range made them easier to hit, but Quantrill also got an uncomfortably good look at the vicious, serrated jaws of the attackers.

  At that moment, weapon fire rained down from a rocky ridge above and to the right of their position. Quantrill looked in that direction and saw Harper, Kowalski, and Shrike standing high up on the ridge and firing down on the Formids. “Oorah!” Quantrill yelled and turned his attention back to the attack.

  The Bugs were trapped out in the open. They were being ripped apart by fire from the front and from above. Any human soldier would have retreated to a more defensible position, but Bugs don’t think that way. Formids just keep going and going until you kill them, or they kill you. They are like mindless windup toys that some cosmic asshole unleashed on humanity.

  Their numbers dwindled until there was only one Bug, slowly dragging itself along on its one good leg. It was the last survivor, its legs were mostly shot off – Quantrill was personally responsible for at least three of those legs, he estimated – but the damn thing was still trying to kill.

  “Cease fire!” Lieutenant Hardaway yelled. Hardaway walked out from his position and right up to the wounded Bug. It snapped its frightful jaws at the man and scraped along the dusty ground. The Lieutenant calmly shouldered his rifle and fired a 5-round-burst into the creature’s eye. Only then did it stop coming.

 
Officially, Marines were under a standing order to capture Bugs alive if the opportunity presented itself. It wasn’t for humanitarian reasons – Fleet Command just wanted to haul the thing off to a lab somewhere and experiment on it. Hardaway, however, insisted a Marine’s job was to kill. When a Marine doesn’t do his job, the Lieutenant told them, people get dead. Hardaway was insistent on this point. He once told a full-bird colonel that if he wanted a pet Bug he could come get one himself. The colonel never took him up on that.

  Quantrill had no problem with Hardaway’s line of thinking. Clearly a Bug wasn’t going to come along quietly. The Marines were issued nets to immobilize the Formids, but you had to get close enough to wrap a Bug up in one. Quantrill, for one, wasn’t eager to have his arm bitten off while trying to lasso one of the monstrous things. The only good Bug was a dead Bug.

  “Corporal Vanlanding,” the Lieutenant called out. “Take your squad and secure the radio building.”

  “Yes, sir!” Vanlanding replied immediately. The corporal turned and marched up the hill toward the building without a word to the rest of the squad. They had heard the Lieutenant’s order and didn’t need to hear it again. Quantrill and Jordan followed close behind. Potter joined soon after. The squad’s heavy machine gunner, Jabara, was still down from the Juice.

  Vanlanding was the first to reach the heavy metal door. Ordinarily the door would be closed to protect the sensitive equipment inside. Now it was hanging open – not a good sign. Vanlanding took position on the left of the door with his back to the smooth, gray wall. Quantrill crept to the other side and tried to peer around the corner into the building. All he could see was darkness.

  He looked at Vanlanding and shrugged. The Corporal produced a signal flare, pointed to Quantrill and then at Jordan right behind him. Then he pointed into the dark doorway. Quantrill nodded. He pulled out his flashlight and attached it to the multimount on his AR316.

  Vanlanding smashed the flare against the wall to activate it. Then he threw the red, sparking flare into the dark bunker. Quantrill followed after. The interior of the bunker was lit up with harsh red light that cast sharp, jagged shadows that danced over the bare walls. Quantrill turned right at the doorway, leading with his AR316 rifle and moving quickly but carefully.

  “Clear!” he yelled out when he reached the opposite wall.

  “Clear!” Jordan called from the opposite corner.

  Quantrill moved along the far wall and met up with Jordan in the final corner. They had covered the entire perimeter of the small, square room and found nothing. That wasn’t a surprise – Bugs didn’t really go for hiding. It paid to be careful, though.

  “Shit,” Vanlanding swore from the center of the room. Quantrill shouldered his weapon and hurried in the direction of the corporal’s voice. He ducked under some conduit and electrical wiring hanging down from the ceiling and saw Vanlanding kneeling over a shape on the floor. When he got closer, Quantrill saw that it was a body. The face had been mostly chewed off along with an arm and half of a leg. The only identifying characteristic was the orange jumpsuit of a repair technician.

  “Scratch one repair tech,” Vanlanding said with disgust.

  “Only one?” Quantrill asked. Repair technicians generally operated in teams of six. If this guy was dead there should be five more.

  “We’ll probably find the others around,” Vanlanding said. “Pieces of them anyway.”

  Quantrill just nodded. Unfortunately it was a common story. Repair technicians were sent out far and wide to maintain the hyperspace network. It was dangerous work, especially since most of the broken equipment got that way because it was sabotaged by Formids. Often time repair techs ran into the same shit as the Marines – the Marines at least brought guns and carbon fiber body armor.

  It wasn’t like these guys volunteered for the job, either. They were drafted, the same as most of Quantrill’s platoon. The difference was the repair technicians hadn’t made it through boot camp. If a draftee washed out of basic training, rather than digging ditches or working in a factory – which they might have enjoyed – they got sent down to the Technical Services Division. It wasn’t a death sentence, but it was pretty close. Fleet command liked their cadets motivated.

  “Bag this bug bait,” Vanlanding instructed. “I’ll report to the LT.” Quantrill pulled his HRP – Human Remains Pouch – from his pack and unrolled it on the concrete floor.

  The bug bait remark was also typical. Combat troops generally looked at repair techs with undisguised contempt. The thinking was techs were too slow, too weak, or too lazy to be real fighters and deserved what they got. Quantrill, for one, felt differently. He knew how close he had come to washing out of basic himself. At barely 165 centimeters, Quantrill was frankly too small for the Marines. If he hadn’t been the best rifle marksman in his wave he might have ended up in an orange jumpsuit too. And then in an HRP.

  “Fuck I think I’m gonna puke,” Jordan moaned.

  “Puke outside,” Quantrill barked. Vanlanding’s callous indifference was hard to swallow, but it was better than Jordan’s nervous stomach. “It stinks in here enough already.”

  “No shit, bro,” Potter agreed. Private Potter grabbed the repair tech’s good leg and helped Quantrill lift the man into the body bag laid out on the floor. The tech was heavy and thick around the middle – that was probably why he hadn’t made it through boot camp. His bulk was unwieldy, especially since Quantrill’s wrist was still sore from trying to fire Jabara’s SAW from a half-assed, awkward position.

  As they hefted the stocky man into the body bag, his head lolled to one side and a gelatinous glob of brain tissue fell out of the hole that used to be his face and landed on the concrete floor with a splat. Jordan put a hand over his mouth and ran for the doorway.

  “Oh, what the fuck?” Quantrill grumbled. As though this wasn’t disgusting enough already. He tapped at the hunk of brain with the toe of his boot and managed to get it into the bag along with the rest of the tech’s body. The guys at Mortuary Affairs could sort it out.

  Quantrill zipped up the HRP and then he and Potter carried it out of the radio bunker. Outside they saw two more body bags lined up on the ground – apparently more of the repair team. They set the third bag down beside the first two and found Corporal Vanlanding.

  “What’s the word, Van?” Potter asked.

  “We’re establishing a perimeter around this hilltop. From there,” the corporal pointed to a rocky outcropping down the far side of the hill, “to there, to there.”

  “Got it,” Quantrill acknowledged. Each Marine carried a perimeter scanner as part of his basic kit. If all the individual scanners from the platoon were networked together and arranged in a rough circle they could create a perimeter around their encampment. The scanners would raise hell if anything bigger than a gnat passed through the grid. They had most likely killed off the last of the Formids on this rock, but you could never be too careful.

  Quantrill got out his scanner – a small canister of electronics about the size of a cup of coffee inside a rugged, plastic case – and flipped it on. He found a gap in the perimeter and set the scanner down on the ground. The light on the side glowed green to indicate the scanner was linked up with the others. They weren’t going anywhere for a while, but at least there wouldn’t be any surprises, Quantrill thought to himself.

  As it happened, that wasn’t entirely true.

  Chapter 3

  PinkVector

  Quantrill looked around the hilltop. The platoon was idling about the area in relaxed alertness. They had taken their rifles from firing position to carry position – but they weren’t putting them down just yet. The men stood around talking in hushed voiced with their eyes always scanning the surrounding area. They weren’t expecting a combat situation, but they were ready if such a situation showed up.

  “Q,” a quiet voice said. It was Jordan – he had apparently finished recycling his rations. “I don’t know if I can do this, man. This … this is fucked up shit.
”

  “It is,” Quantrill agreed. What the hell could he say? Jordan had a point – maybe he couldn’t handle it. Maybe none of them could. Even if they didn’t end up as Bug food, they would never be the same again. “You’ll be okay,” he finally told the frightened private. “It gets easier.”

  “Fuck,” Jordan sighed. “I don’t see how.”

  “Hey, look at me.” Quantrill tapped the top of his helmet. It was just even with Jordan’s chin. “Jabara’s little sister is bigger than I am. But I’m still out here fragging some 8-legged bitches. Right?” Quantrill had never met Jabara’s family, but the big Marine was fond of comparing Quantrill to his sister Rima. It was an old joke, but never failed to get a laugh.

  “Fuckin’ A,” Jordan agreed with a chuckle.

  “And you’re in a good platoon here,” Quantrill advised. “This LT is the best. He’ll get us home again.”

  “Yeah,” Jordan agreed. “Yeah.”

  “We’re here for the night,” Vanlanding walked up and announced. “LT says Jericho is two days out. Go ahead and start setting up camp.”

  “Aw, where the hell did they go now?” Quantrill groused. It seemed like the starship was always flying off and leaving them behind.

  “That’s above your pay grade, Q. Just set up your fucking PECS, okay?” Vanlanding replied. “Unless you think they should turn a whole fucking starship around because PFC Arlon Quantrill’s feelings were hurt.”

  “Embrace the suck,” Quantrill said ruefully.

  “Embrace the suck,” Vanlanding agreed. Life in the Corps often sucked. The only thing a grunt like Quantrill could do was lie back and take it. He shrugged out of his field pack and pulled out the portable canopy. The PECS or Portable Extensible Combat Shelter was a small, two-man tent made from lightweight fabric with monofilament structure. Each Marine carried half of a complete unit – Quantrill carried the upper canopy and his bunkmate, Jabara, carried the heavier floor panel.