me and pressed her mouth against mine. She was breathing hard now. The kiss was warm and wet. I reached through her hair, wrapped my hand around her head, and held her close.
The kiss ended and she pulled her face a few inches from mine. “Wayson,” she whispered.
I could have had her on that night. Instead, I stood to leave. “I love you,” I said, “but I cannot do this. I cannot stay on this planet, and you’re looking for someone who will stay.”
“It’s all right, Wayson,” she said, taking my hand. “I know and I understand.”
By this time, I had already made up my mind, and the mood was gone.
I could have made love to her that night. I should have made love to her that night. As things turned out, we would never make love.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
Ray Freeman crawled forward on his stomach, brought up his sniper scope, and checked on the guards. The scope had night-for-day vision and powerful magnification. The guards were 300 yards away, but that hardly mattered. Using Freeman’s scope, I could have counted the hairs on their heads.
Of the twenty-three combat-aged men, we only brought twenty with us. One was too scared. We left two to guard the camp in case we never returned.
We hid along the edge of that primal forest. We heard the scratch of tiny animals running among the branches overhead and the occasional howl of something larger marching upon the forest floor, but we never saw anything creeping or climbing. These woods were dark in the sunlight and black in the night.
“Have a look at this,” Freeman said.
Two Marines guarded the clearing sitting on a log. They did not have a fire. They did not need one. The night-for-day lenses in their helmets gave them better vision than a fire could ever offer. The ventilation in their bodysuits kept their environment a comfortable 75 degrees.
I lay down on the ground beside Freeman and shifted my weight so that I could peer through the scope. In the distance, the sun had just begun to rise, and that part of the sky was a rich blue. Behind the sentinels, the kettle door was open, and I could peer up the ramp and see the Marines milling about inside.
White light blazed within the kettle. Most of the men inside it wore their body armor, with their helmets off. Then I saw him. A man in a medic’s uniform walked around the kettle distributing plastic cups. The men drank the content out of these cups then crumbled them up.
“This looks promising,” I said.
The medic walked out to the guards and handed them cups. They emptied the little cups like shot glasses, snapping their heads backwards and spilling the liquid into their mouths.
I handed the rifle back to Freeman and knelt beside him. “Give the medicine a few minutes to take,” I said.
We could not use the particle beam pistols because we could not risk damaging the transport. That left us with my two M27s, Freeman’s pistol, and my oversized combat knife. I thought about the knife that Hollywood Harris used in
“Get in position,” Ray said. “I’ll wait for your signal.” I nodded and took five men with me. I brought these elders along as scavengers. They would take weapons off the bodies that Ray and I left behind.
We moved just inside the tree line, crouching, stealing behind thick trunks. When we stopped at one tree, the guards were no more than fifty feet away. They sat slumped on their fallen log. Their helmets were off, so I could see that they were not speaking to each other.
I handed an M27 to one of the elders, a young man who would have looked athletic had he not been so skinny. Then I told all five of them to stay behind the tree.
Things move slowly when you begin stealth missions. Nothing ruins stealth like impatience. I might have taken those five men with me, but when the adrenaline starts to flow, beginners become impatient.
Moving slowly, taking long, shallow breaths that made no sound, I came within twenty feet of the guards. They sat on their makeshift bench, their eyes staring straight out without blinking. Their hands hung down by their sides. They were not comatose exactly, but they were strung out. One of them turned and looked in my direction. I was pretty well hidden between some ferns and a tree trunk. He would have seen me if he had his helmet on and might have seen me anyway, but he showed no reaction. His brown eyes seemed unfocused and his jaw hung open.
I pointed my forefinger straight up in the air, then brought it down as if aiming a pistol and pointed at the guards. The report of Freeman’s rifle was no louder than a man spitting, but it scared two large black birds that had settled a few feet away. The first bullet tore through a guard’s head, blowing off his ear and most of his forehead. The man fell off the log. The other guard fell a moment later. Neither man made a sound as they died, but their armor rattled as it struck the ground. The log blocked my view of the bodies, but a puddle of blood spread into view.
The hormone already started to flow through my veins. I looked around the clearing, took a deep breath, and ran to the transport. Hiding behind one of the doors at the base of the ramp, I knelt to think out my next move. The morning sun beat down. I felt heat reflecting off the ship.
The men inside the kettle were not as dazed as the guards we had just killed. I heard them talking softly among themselves. They sounded mellow, not strung out. Had I not needed this transport, I would have tossed a grenade up the ramp. A grenade in the hole would have killed every one of them. Had any tried to escape, Freeman and I would have shot them as they left the ship. But I needed the transport in working condition.
I signaled for Freeman to come. The elders came, too. I did not want them to see this bloodbath. They looked so young. Most of them were in their thirties; but with their wide eyes and scared expressions, they looked young and vulnerable to me just the same.
“Stay here,” I whispered to the man beside me.
“I can help,” he said.
I pointed to the two dead guards. We could see them very clearly from beside the ship. The tops of their heads were blown off. One of the men had fallen in such a way that his face had turned in our direction. Below his eyebrows and to the right of his nose, everything was intact. Everything else was a wad of soft, bloody meat.
The man beside me looked at the bodies and swallowed. He started breathing hard. I knew the expression on his face. He was imagining himself falling just that way. Fortunately, Freeman arrived before the man could panic.
“I’ll take the left. You take the right,” I told Freeman. “We’ll both start in the middle.”
He nodded. He took his pistol. We edged our way to the bottom of the ramp and ran up shooting. There were thirty-six men on this transport, two pilots and a platoon—less the four men we had killed earlier and the two downed guards.
Most of the men did not even have their guns with them. They turned and looked at Freeman and me with stunned expressions as we opened fire. A man in the back jumped for the bench where his M27 lay. I hit him three times as he flew through the air. His head cracked the bench and he fell to the ground. Another man whirled around and leveled his gun on me. I shot him in the chest and the face, then shot the unarmed man who stood beside him.
Some of the Marines hid in the shadows. As I walked past one of the steel girder ribs, someone reached out and grabbed me by the shoulder and neck. I spun and slammed the butt of my M27 into his chest with so much force that the detachable stock broke.
The force of my blow did not hurt the Marine inside his armor, but it knocked him off balance. He fell to the deck, and I shot him in the back as he tried to climb to his feet. By now the hormone ran thick in my blood.
The noise of our guns was deafening inside the kettle and flashes from our muzzles looked like lightning. A Marine leaped at me from behind. I saw him at the last moment and pistol-whipped him. Shards from the broken rifle stock stabbed into the man’s cheek and lips. He screamed in pain. Blood streamed from the wounds. I shot him.
