Jonathan. With the last of her strength, she turned her face to the sky. Her vision was constricting now, the world shrinking down to a narrow pinpoint. She felt unbearably cold, and then she began to shake as her blood pumped out onto the dry, black, thirsty earth. She couldn’t move. Even blinking was an effort. Her mind felt sluggish, as if she were winding down like an old clock whose gears had simply worn out. In a few seconds, and probably less, she knew that she would slip into a deep, long, dreamless sleep, and she wouldn’t wake up.
The last thing she saw were the dark underbellies of the clouds, avatars of the approaching storm.
• • •
Colonel Linda McDonald’s boots crunched over the ruins of the medical unit. She’d dismounted her King Crab as soon as she’d reached the medical complex. Anger boiled in her gut in counterpoint to the water bubbling in the steam vents beneath the black basalt plain. What a waste of lives! Even though she’d realized that the Zeus had been the only bit of ´Mechs weaponry, it had taken her too many precious moments to relay orders. By then, the damage had been done.
She’d already made a survey of the casualties on the volcano itself, lumbering over the hardened lava flows in her King Crab. She’d picked her way over and around ruined bodies and machines on a battlefield, but that had been a real fight.
But not this. This was a massacre. McDonald’s jaw firmed as her gaze swept over the debris and the broken, shattered corpses of patients and medical personnel flung into haphazard piles of bedding and bloodied bandages. Her people were already going through, recovering remains and zipping them away in black bags. There were some prisoners—patients, mainly, although she spotted one physician, male, red-haired, his uniform soaked with the blood of those he’d tried to save. But it looked to her as if the rest of the command personnel were dead; McDonald had already seen the body of the unit commander, a colonel she didn’t know (a blessing), bundled away. Just beyond, and to the right, next to a smashed Quonset, was the body of another officer: a woman, her long blonde hair dyed to rust with blood. A physician, from the look of her uniform.
She directed her gaze toward the destroyed Zeus. The maniac who started this mess. The ´Mechs lay on its side, the cockpit caved in and its belly ripped open by laser fire. God, if she’d only gotten control of the situation sooner, they might’ve been spared all this.
She heard the crunch of boots and turned to see one of her best pilots—the one who had piloted the Berserker that had destroyed the Zeus. “Peterson,” she said. “You have a report?”
Holding his neurohelmet under his left arm, Peterson, a swarthy man with intense blue eyes and black curly hair, saluted with his right. “We’ve secured a perimeter, Colonel. I think it was just this one ´Mechs . I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault. You were fired on; you returned fire. How were we supposed to know?” And then, because she couldn’t stand the taste of her own anger, she said, “God, what a waste! The Twenty-Third had to know that leaving their wounded…” She stopped when she saw that Peterson’s gaze had flickered right, toward the ruined Quonset. “Captain?”
She watched Peterson take a single, unsteady step forward, then two, like a BattleMech with a faulty gyro; his neurohelmet dropped, unnoticed, to the shattered earth; and then Peterson broke into a run.
“Captain?” she called again. “John?”
But Peterson didn’t stop. He reached the body and then stood there for a long moment, looking down at the woman. And then it was as if his strength gave way because he swayed and tottered. His knees folded, and he sagged to the earth. He gathered the body of the woman into his arms and then McDonald saw his shoulders begin to shiver.
She came up behind Peterson. “John,” she said, and put her hand on his shoulder. She felt a long shudder ripple through his body, and even though she couldn’t see his face, she knew that he was weeping.
“Oh, Liz,” she heard him say, his voice clogged with grief. “Oh, no.”
Understanding blazed through McDonald like a shaft of sun piercing thick clouds. Dear God. McDonald looked down at the woman in Peterson’s arms. Her skin was white as marble, and her lips were parted slightly, as if she were about to speak. Her chest was shredded and so saturated with blood and gore that McDonald caught the odor of wet copper. Through the blood, she saw the sparkle of a diamond in the shape of a single tear.
Slowly, McDonald turned and walked away and gave Peterson the privacy of his grief.
Overhead, lightening flashed. There was a roll of thunder that echoed through the ruins and shook the ground. And then it began to rain.
EIGHT NINE THREE
by Steven Mohan, Jr.
Gaines, Altais
Lyran Protectorate
June 3039
Hikotoro Yamashita strolled toward the front gate of the Gaines Port Authority, nodding and smiling pleasantly at his death as if it were his oldest and dearest friend.
Right now his death was dressed up like a Lyran soldier, a twenty-year-old boy with hard eyes and a suspicious hand on the holstered needler at his hip. The soldier stepped out from a small guard shack. “You there, stop.”
Yamashita obeyed, carefully lowering to the ground the burlap sack he carried. The bottles inside clinked together as the sack shifted. “Ohayo gozaimasu.”
The soldier’s face twisted in confusion. “What?”
“Sumimasen, uh, excuse me, uh,
