“Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” the medic was chanting as the capsule shuddered violently, buffeted by a wash of superheated air as the edge of the fusion blast touched the upper atmosphere. Jason wasn’t sure if she was praying or swearing.
“How much control do we have over this thing?” he asked, yelling to be heard over the roaring of the air around the pod. They’d popped the escape pod out of the hull only thirty seconds ahead of the fusion explosion, and Jason was hoping they’d gotten far away enough to avoid a potentially fatal dose of radiation. But that was premature. If they couldn’t bring the pod down safely, they wouldn’t have to worry about radiation poisoning.
“Not much,” Jock told him, struggling with the rudimentary control panel at the center of the pod’s floor. “We got about a minute’s worth of maneuvering fuel left. Where do you want me to try for?”
“We need someplace with people,” Jason told him. “Someplace with enough organization to take care of Vinnie.”
“Some of the cities might not have power,” Ari warned.
“The orbital control center,” Crossman said. “Lieutenant Stark’ll be there—they gotta have a medstation at the base.”
“Can you take us there, Jock?” Jason asked.
“I can try,” he said with a shrug. “At least we’re on the right side of the planet.”
He guided the tiny joystick in gentle moves toward a guesstimated point on the computer-simulated globe in the dinner-plate viewer, then squeezed the thruster control. There was a sound like a sledgehammer pounding on the hull as the maneuvering jets emptied their contents in a series of short bursts.
“That’s it.” Jock shrugged, giving the joystick a slap and watching it waggle. “It’s all in God’s hands now.”
“You believe in God, Jock?” Jason asked him, surprised.
“Not really,” the big man shrugged. “But now’s not the time to be making new enemies.”
Jason looked at Vinnie, head sagging, only his straps holding him upright. His face was pale, his breath so shallow that it took a few seconds’ watching to see it. He looked dead. Maybe God
The pod began to shudder and rock, and Jason’s ears were filled with the roar of the atmosphere as they slowly reentered. Gravity returned with a vengeance, pushing them back into their acceleration couches and against each other. With the return of gravity, the wound in his leg speared him with a fresh spike of pain and he gritted his teeth to push it back. Through the single porthole, Jason could see flames dancing over the surface of the pod as it heated up from atmospheric friction—he knew that the ceramic heat shield on the belly of the capsule had to be glowing cherry red.
Not just a human sacrifice, Jason thought with macabre humor, but a burnt offering.
It looked like the end of the world.
The smoke from the burning vehicles joined with the low, overcast clouds in conspiracy to block out the rising sun, casting a mourning pall over the plain. Shannon shivered, hugged her arms to herself. It was cold. The Indian summer was over.
She hurt—she hurt almost everywhere, and she was sure she’d cracked a rib—but she ignored her own pain, just as she ignored the carnage and death around her. Nothing seemed to penetrate the shell of numbness that she’d built around herself. She’d left the President and Lieutenant Kristopolis in the control room and made her way to the surface without saying a word to her troops, without even bothering to bring a weapon.
What did it matter if she were to die now? The mission was accomplished, civilization was saved, she was expendable. They were all expendable. Those Marines on Aphrodite had been expendable, Nathan had been expendable, Jason…
“Oh God, Jason,” she moaned, rubbing a hand over her face, feeling tears there that she didn’t remember crying.
When she hadn’t cried for Nathan, she hadn’t thought herself capable of it anymore. Now the tears came. In gentle sobs, not the violent spasms that had wracked her on Aphrodite, yet still she cried, crying for Nathan and for Jason… and for herself.
“Ma’am, are you all right?”
Shannon spun at the unexpected voice and saw Corporal Lee stepping up hesitantly behind her. He looked beat up, as they all did, with a blood-stained makeshift bandage wrapped around his forehead and dirt and grease staining his fatigues. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, beyond embarrassment.
“I’m fine, Corporal,” she replied. “What do you want?”
“Well, ma’am,” he said, shrugging, “it’s just that no one seems too sure of what’s going on. I mean, did we win?”
“Oh yeah, Corporal,” she barked a humorless laugh, struggling to hold back a fresh wave of tears. “We won all right.” She shook her head. “The Protectorate ships have been des…” She had to swallow the lump in her throat to continue. “Destroyed.” She let out a deep breath. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to be alone for a while.”
She turned away from him and began to walk toward the shoreline.
“Ma’am?” She heard his persistent call before she’d made it ten paces.
“What is it now, Corporal?” She turned back, exasperation in her face. But the young man was staring into the sky above the satellite control center, eyes squinting.
“Ma’am, what the hell
“It doesn’t look like one of the biomech delivery pods,” she said, brow wrinkling in confusion. “I mean, they had a maneuverable parasail and this has a regular parachute setup. Looks more like some kind of emergency reentry vehicle.”
Shannon’s breath caught in her throat. Without another word, she took off across the grassy field at a dead sprint.
The bulbous metal hulk hissed and pinged, sending up a pale cloud of steam as it heated the morning dew. Its belly had dug a trench in the soft earth a meter deep when it hit, despite the huge silken expanse of the parachutes that trailed behind it now, flapping in the wind. Shannon stopped a few meters away from the thing, going from a full-out run to a haltering stop in two steps, reason finally penetrating the fog of her thoughts.
A Protectorate flag, scorched by the fires of reentry, was emblazoned on the side of the capsule, proving it had indeed come from one of the ships of the invasion fleet, but giving no indication of who—or what—was inside. And she was unarmed.
Shannon jumped involuntarily as a metallic groan issued from somewhere in the guts of the pod. She backed up a step, remembering hordes of biomechs pouring out of drop pods in Capital City. The hatch in the nose of the capsule inched upwards, opening towards her, giving no clue as to what manner of creature lay behind it. Behind her, Shannon heard the hum of a groundcar motor—most likely some of the troops from the control center come out to investigate the capsule, she surmised—but she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the opening hatch.
An arm, clad in dark-hued camo, braced against the edge of the hatchway, giving the leverage needed to push the hatch over. The heavy portal fell open with a hollow, thunderous bong, a sound that Shannon could feel echoing through her sinuses. She blinked involuntarily at the sound, and when her eyes refocused, she was looking into the sweat-drenched, smoke-stained face of Jason McKay.
“Hi honey,” he said with a lopsided grin, “I’m home.”
“I’ll be damned,” she murmured, a smile slowly spreading across her face. “Jason McKay, you have got to be the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
“Yeah, well,” he said, the smile running away from his face, “not all of us were so lucky.”
He clambered slowly and painfully out of the hatch, making room for Jock and Tom to lift Vinnie through, then he helped them lower the wounded man to the ground.
Shannon turned to see the groundcar she had heard pulling up behind her, disgorging Lieutenant Kristopolis and a pair of armed RSC troops.
