in his midtwenties, the same age as me but still just a boy. His black hair hung past his ears. He held his helmet like a bowl of water. He seemed distracted. He did not pay attention as he walked.
We were near a latrine. I approached him. I was about to shove him in the open door of the latrine. There I would…
“Jason.”
The boy turned. “Oh, hey, Frank. Any idea where we’re headed?”
“Perseus Arm.”
“Not again,” the boy whined.
I had no choice. I kept walking and headed into the latrine and watched as my armor on the hoof walked away.
Standing in the door of the latrine, I watched as sailor after sailor trotted past me. I saw no more commandos. I was going to miss my specking transport. I was going to sit out the mission I had specking planned. Then I saw him.
He was the last of the commandos, maybe a sergeant bringing up the rear. As he rumbled past the door of the latrine, I made my move. I grabbed his shoulder armor and swung him into the latrine using his own momentum to force him around the corner and face-first into the wall. He spun so quickly that his feet nearly left the ground. I hoped the shock would cause him to drop his pistol. It didn’t.
I must have picked a fight with the wrong man. The guy kept his wits about him. I expected him to reach for his pistol, leaving himself open for a dozen different deadly attacks. Instead, he took a lethal swing at me with his helmet. The plasticized metal was light but hard, and that old helmet design had lots of corners. He landed a glancing blow with the helmet that bounced off my shoulder and across my face.
Had the guy been wearing normal clothes, I could have hit him in the sternum and knocked the air out of his lungs. Of course, if he’d been wearing normal clothes, I would not have needed to kill him. In a normal fight I might have broken his arm or his leg, but his armor protected his elbows and knees against hyperextension. It also protected him from groin and kidney shots.
At least the guy was too tough to yell for help. Small miracles.
I grabbed the hand with the laser pistol and pushed my weight against it as I spun into his body, coming in too close for him to shoot me. By this time, my combat reflex was in full flow. I felt strong. Still pinning down the arm with the pistol, I twisted my shoulders and flung the man toward a bathroom stall with a poorly executed flip. My move did not lift the guy off the ground, but it had enough force behind it to make him stumble backwards into a stall.
He tripped over the toilet and dropped both his helmet and gun as he caught himself against the wall. I slammed my fist into his face. Blood splattered everywhere. I smashed the cartilage in his nose, and he grunted softly. He must have known he was in trouble as he started waving his hands wildly, but I pinned my knee into his chest and caught him between the wall and the toilet.
Realizing that he would not win the fight, he started to call out. I cut into his throat with the blade of my hand. Blood and spit flew from his mouth. I had no time for sympathy. My third punch shattered both the front and back of his skull.
My fist shattered the bones around his right eye socket. The force of the punch smashed the back of his head against the lip of the stainless-steel toilet. When I pulled the guy up to hit him again, I saw blood in his hair and realized that his skull had caved in. Men have survived with a shattered skull, and a live man has the potential to set alarms. I snapped the man’s neck.
I did not need to hide the dead commando very carefully. Sailors do not visit the latrine during general quarters. The ship was on full alert. Its laser cannons were lit and its rockets ready to fire. Any sailor worth his salt, even a Mogat sailor, would piss down his leg before leaving his station during general quarters.
I did not have so much as a second to waste. Using toilet paper to wipe blood off the armor as I went, I stripped the commando and put on his combat suit. The blood turned into droplets on the waxy surface of the armor. I did not have time to clean it well. I cleaned what I could and dressed in under a minute. During the mass hysteria of general quarters, I did not think anyone would examine me closely.
After placing the dead commando on the toilet seat, I closed the stall. I put on his helmet and holstered his laser pistol, then ran to the launch bay as quickly as I could. Small beads of blood trickled down my right arm as I ran. There might have been blood on my chest plates, as well, but I could do nothing about it.
Sailors ran in and out of hatches around me as I raced down the corridor. I noticed no other commandos. A bad sign. Wondering if I had missed my boat, I skidded through the launch-bay door and leaped between the doors at the rear of the kettle as they slowly closed.
“You took your sweet time, Belcher,” somebody said over the interLink in my helmet. “Good thing Smith wasn’t watching.”
“Yeah,” I said in a voice that sounded a lot like a cough. I knew I wasn’t fooling anyone with that voice.
“I saved you a seat. Over here.” My new friend Corporal Alberts stood and waved his hands, so I pressed my way through the crowd and joined him.
“You okay?” the commando asked as we sat on the bench running along the wall.
“Yeah, just winded,” I said.
“You don’t…”
“Listen carefully.” I placed my laser across my lap so that it pointed at Alberts’s ribs. “This can go either way for you. Take off your helmet and place it on your lap until we reach the drop zone.”
Alberts did not move.
“Now!” I yelled, and I made a show of tightening my finger around the trigger.
He reached up and removed his helmet. Now I could see his mouth and face. He could not make a sneaky little frequency change and warn some other commando using the interLink.
Alberts had fine blond hair cut to stubble. He had brown eyes. I saw anger in his eyes. Like Belcher, apparently the man I killed in the latrine, the guy had some fight in him.
With the doors closed and the emergency bulbs casting their shadowy red light, no one would notice my finger on the trigger. The other commandos were loud.
I reached up with one hand and removed my helmet so that I could whisper to Alberts. “Welcome to Unified Authority Airlines,” I said. I wanted to provoke him into making a move. He was as good as dead already. I wanted him to give me a reason so that I would not need to babysit him. He obliged.
Alberts made a grab at my laser, and I fired it into the side of his ribs. The wound cauterized, but that did not stop part of his armor from bubbling as it melted into his chest.
By the look of things, there was a complement of a hundred commandos in the kettle—a full, standing-room- only flight. No one seemed to care about the flash from my laser. They did not notice Alberts’s hands drop or the way he slumped to the ground before I pulled him back on the bench. The shadowy environment of the kettle had worked in my favor. In a moment, however, somebody was bound to notice the smoke rising out of Alberts’s collar as the highly flammable environmental suit inside his armor continued to burn.
I propped Alberts against the wall and placed his laser pistol on the seat beside him. Then, I rose to my feet and stepped away from the scene without looking back. The kettle was filled to capacity—men sitting on every inch of bench, men standing under all the harnesses on the floor. I took a second to place my helmet back over my head, then weaved my way through the crowd and headed toward the ladder that led to the cockpit.
“Hey…hey, this guy is dead!” somebody yelled just as I reached the top.
Looking back, I saw the commandos crowding into the corner of the kettle where Alberts still sat huddled against the wall. I heard one man shouting for a medical kit. I saw somebody pull a flashlight and shine it on the late corporal’s face. Then I opened the door and stepped into the cockpit. The pilot, a.k.a. Master Chief Petty Officer Emerson Illych, pulled his pistol and watched carefully as I removed my helmet.
“I see you already killed one,” Illych said, nodding to the monitor beside his flight controls. On the screen, men gathered around the dead commando.
“You’re one to talk,” I said. Illych’s dead copilot lay on the floor, his back sprawled around the pedals. “Besides, I made it look like a suicide.”
We were already deep in the graveyard, so to speak. We were back in the battleground where the five Mogat ships had stood down the Outer Perseus Fleet. I saw dead fighters floating around us, more closely packed together than the debris in an asteroid belt. We inched ahead, maybe only ten miles an hour. We should have
