One Good Soldier

bitch, if you don't mind my sayin' it, sir.

As soon as you get inside that shaft, you let me know, and I'll dog it down for the system upgrade and maintenance. If this shit works, I'm crawling in the first door you open and promise to help you do the unlock sequence myself.

ETA two minutes, sir.

Go!

Two teams of the Blair's boarding party converged on the main elevator shaft from opposite directions. Major Frances Jones pinged the corridor with her suit's sensor suite and mapped out the area. Her suit showed only her team and the other one approaching them from head-on. There was no resistance. This was going to be far easier than she had thought. Oh, there had been a team of firemen and a few MPs armed with handguns here and there, but there had been nothing along the lines that a team of AEMs couldn't handle. Too easy. All too easy.

'Ma'am, we're here. Want me to check it out?' her NCO asked.

'Nah, I got it, Jack.' Frances bounced in front of the main elevator with her HVAR at the ready. The metal blue-gray bulkheads and the recessed lighting panels as well as the oversized passageway were exactly like the one on the Blair and other supercarriers she had been on. It always made her feel a little weird to be attacking one of her own ships.

You could damn near get a hovertank in the supercarrier tower elevators. The double-wide doors had to be five meters across when they were fully open. Frances had her AIC hack the electronic lock for the elevator, but nothing happened. Then she noticed a yellow and black striped warning sign taped to the door where it joined. The sign read:

Notice:

Main Elevator System is down for regularly scheduled upgrades and maintenance and is temporarily out of order pending recertification of the system's safety by the Chief Engineer. No entrance to the elevator shaft is to be approved under any circumstances without prior approval from the Chief Engineer. Thank you.

'What the fuck?' the major said. 'Jack, get your ass over here!'

Chapter 7

July 1, 2394 AD

Mars Orbit, Sol System

Friday, 10:40 AM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

'So then Staff Sergeant Suez says to First Sergeant McCandless that he is standing on the target coordinate spot, right?' Private First Class Rondi Howser held up her hands and shrugged her shoulders at the others around her in the shower. The movement of her arms exaggerated her brilliant red, black, and blue cobra high-resolution laser-printed tattoo. It curled around her left leg three times from the knee, up between her legs from behind, across her rippled abdominal muscles, and around both breasts with its open mouth and fangs showing on the left side of her midsection. The red and blue were fluorescent and glowed brilliantly in the low lighting of the showers. 'Then the first sergeant tells the colonel that we had secured the spot.'

'Yeah, we were there. We heard it, Private,' Army Specialist Karla Hammermill responded, almost annoyed by the PFC's story. But the two of them had been running partners for more than a year, since they had both been deployed to the Madira, and the army specialist had gotten used to the marine's tall tales.

'Sure, you may have heard it on the QM wireless, but you didn't see it,' Corporal Sandy Cross, who was in McCandless's team, added. 'I was there. Goddamned FUBAR if we ever get attacked like that in real life.'

'The next thing you know,' Howser continued, 'we—well, shit, we're all standing on the hill looking around at all these empty e-suits and all of a sudden just five of us plus the two sergeants were surrounded by like two hundred fucking marines from the Blair. Snap! Just like that we were outnumbered and surrounded.'

'Don't undersell it, Howser. We were waaay-the-fuck outnumbered,' Cross added.

'Right. We were waaay fucking outnumbered. There was no way in hell that we were gonna hold that hill with those kinds of odds against us barring some kinda fucking