Duty, Honor, Planet

bridge less than an hour before. “Ari, they’ll be on your map.”

“Roger that,” the Lieutenant confirmed, calling up the Heads-Up-Display from his suit’s computer. “We got three escape pod bays, closest one two levels down from here, second on the bridge that we blew through and one more back in engineering.”

“I can check on the pods from here,” Crossman announced, moving to a computer terminal set in the hull next to the docking umbilical. He came up short, looking back at the others with an expression that was half embarrassment and half desperation. “Does anyone read Russian?”

Jason sighed, kicked across the room to the terminal.

After a frustrating series of wrong turns in the complicated Protectorate operating system—some ancient, pre-Collapse relic called “Portholes” or something, he couldn’t quite make out the translation from Russian—Jason finally found the readout that gave the status of the ship’s escape pods.

“Okay,” he reported, “the pod bays below us are empty—we gotta go to engineering.”

“We’d better haul ass, too,” Lambert urged. “In another half-hour, this ship will be nothing but a fond memory.”

“You know the way, Gunny,” Jason waved a hand by way of invitation.

Lambert grunted humorlessly and pushed off from the wall, giving himself a boost in the right direction before he activated his maneuvering jets. The others followed close behind, backtracking through the eerily quiet corridors.

It’s a goddamn ghost ship, Jason thought, a cold shudder running through him. A Mary Celeste, with the food still on the plates. And if we can’t get off of it in time, we’ll be the ghosts.

Gunny Lambert led them back through a central hub that was the connection for the Defender’s independent modules, this time taking a route that led directly away from the bridge. The corridor narrowed until they were forced to move two abreast as they approached closer to the engineering section. Here and there floated the corpses of biomechs and crewmen, killed by Gunny Lambert’s team on their way to the auxiliary weapons center. Their bodies moved hauntingly with the air currents. Jason found his eyes following the corpses as he passed them, half-expecting them to come alive from their horrible wounds and begin shooting at him.

He shook himself, realizing with a start that he was starting to zone out—whether from the concussion of the earlier explosion, the violent decompression, the wound in his leg or a combination of all three. He had to watch himself—being careless could still get them killed. But the eyes on the corpses… they were staring at him with that sharklike blackness…

“Have you seen my master?”

  Jason yelled in surprise, letting go of Ari’s arm as he spun around. And his jaw fell open.

“What the fuck, over?” Tom Crossman asked, and Jason had to admit it was a damn good question.

Standing half-in and half-out of an open doorway in a cloud of blond hair was one of the most beautiful women Jason had ever seen. A look of pure innocence graced her perfect face, an innocence belied somewhat by the fact that she was completely naked. She didn’t seem to even be conscious of her nudity. She made no attempt to cover herself, just hovered there with her hands behind her back like a little girl.

So befuddled was Jason by her appearance that it took him a full five seconds to realize that she had spoken in Russian.

“Have you seen my master?” she repeated in a little-girl voice that sent chills up Jason’s back, a voice that seemed eerily incongruous with her blatant sensuality. “He told me to wait here for you,” she explained, eyes blinking back tears. “He said you’d come. But then he left on the little ship, and he didn’t take me with him.”

“Your master?” Jason asked hesitantly in her language. He felt silly talking to her, still convinced she was but a product of his fevered imagination. “Who’s your master?”

“He’s a great man,” she assured him, nodding firmly, her breasts jiggling with the motion. “He’s the General, and he said I should give this to you.”

Her hands came from behind her back, and cradled lovingly in them as if she held a bouquet of flowers was a small, round object that could only have been some kind of grenade. Her grasp had held the spoon in place, but as she opened her hands the curved metal spoon flew free.

An image of an old training video flashed through Jason’s mind: the spoon’s release would free a plunger that would, in turn, ignite a three-to-five second fuse…

Jason had time to think: Great… other guys see their lives flash before their eyes and my last thoughts are a Marine weapons lecture… before a grey-armored shape zipped past him on a burst of maneuvering jets, slamming into the woman and taking her back through the doorway, grenade and all.

The blast was puny compared to the one that had blown through the hole back on the bridge, but Jason jerked at the bass-drum sound as if the grenade had gone off inside his gut.

“Aw, Jesus!” The Marine medic shot into the room even before the pinging sounds of ricocheting fragments had quieted, and Ari went in on her heels, his face pale.

Jason grabbed one of the Marines by the arm and nodded for the man to take him into the room. It was somebody’s cabin, he realized immediately. A bunk folded out of the hull beneath a wall-mounted locker, and a clothes closet was set into the opposite wall, partially open to reveal a selection of utility fatigues. But those walls were covered with blood, and gobbets of flesh floated hellishly in the periphery of the room. What was left of the girl hovered in the center of the room, a hideous Venus de Milo, lacking arms and a head. She looked less a corpse to Jason than a doll dismembered by some spoiled child.

What the hell was she? Was she human, or something like the biomechs?

Jason shook the thought away as his gaze drifted to the armored body that was cradled in the medic’s arms. Shamir stood by her side helplessly, fists clenching and unclenching, eyes closed. It took McKay a long moment to realize who it was—the blast had shattered the faceplate of the helmet together with the face beneath. But the Sergeant’s stripes marked in subdued black on the sleeve of his combat armor left no doubt: it was Gunnery Sergeant Lambert.

“Christ,” Jason breathed. Looking at Ari, he saw the same hurt and disbelief in the man’s face that had manifested itself in his own visage back on Inferno. But there was no time.

“Ari,” Jason said quietly.

For a moment, he thought the man hadn’t heard him, but then he looked up. His eyes linked with Jason’s and there was so much in that gaze that would never be expressed. So much hurt and betrayal and disillusionment… so much that Jason had already felt.

“Corporal Kurita,” Ari finally said, his eyes never leaving Jason’s, “you’re the platoon sergeant. Everyone out of here! We’ve got to get to the escape pod.”

“What about Gunny’s body?” the medic asked.

“We won’t be able to take him on the pod.” Shamir shook his head.

“But…” she began to argue. His chilling stare stopped her in mid-sentence.

“Let’s worry about the living,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she mumbled, reluctantly letting loose of Lambert’s body and exiting the room.

Jason took one last look at Ari, then headed out, leaving behind the lifeless form of yet another good soldier.

The engineering section was scarred with the pockmarks of bullet impacts and strewn with metal fragments, globules of blood and the chewed-up bodies of dead crewmen and biomechs. Electricity arced from ruined terminals and consoles, sending a haze of light smoke drifted lazily through the compartment. The acrid smell of burnt insulation was thick in the air.

“Where are we going?” Ari asked the Corporal who had been with Lambert’s team.

“This way.” The rangy young Australian waved, leading them down a side corridor through a darkened maze of power conduits and coolant pipes.

The circuitous route finally ended in a small chamber set at the very edge of the hull and a pair of rounded, drum-shaped escape pods.

“Thank God,” someone sighed. Jason couldn’t tell who it was, but he personally wasn’t inclined to be thankful for anything yet.