In the glass coffin, Reaper twisted his body exactly as the kid had…
The boy is moaning something in his own language. Reaper touches the insta-translator switch on his headset. “I’m sorry,” the translator voice says, as the kid repeats himself. “Sorry I let them know we were there…I made up for it, Uncle, didn’t I? I made them come to me…”
It hits Reaper that they are the ones who’ve been decoyed.
He puts a bullet in the boy’s forehead, avoiding looking into his eyes as he does this, and heads for the clearing, touching the headset’s transmission node. “Jumper — they’re flanking you, we were decoyed over here, they’re —”
“I’ve got ’em, Reaper, I can hold ’em till you get here —”
Gunfire racketing from the jungle.
“— I can hold ’em if…dammit it quit on me again…” His voice in the headset lost in crackle for a moment.
“What? What quit on you?”
“This fucking M-100, John, it’s jamming, it’s — I can’t get the grenade launcher to work either — oh fuck here they come…where’s Duke? Duke! Portman!”
“Reaper — don’t go out there!”
Ignoring Destroyer’s warnings, Reaper breaks from cover, sprints across the grassy clearing, risking both mines and small-arms fire — as bullets make blades of grass, just behind him, fly like cuttings from a mower.
“Duke!” Reaper shouts into the headset, “can you guys get Jumper’s back?”
“Negative, we’re pinned down! My rifle’s only working every third round!”
Reaper tries his autorifle’s grenade launcher, and he’s in luck: he fires a grenade into the jungle, just where the muzzle flash had been. Sees the blast, hears a scream.
Then he reaches the line of trees, punches through like brush like a linebacker through defense, swearing, shouting for Jumper…
Finds him sitting up against a tree, with the upper half of his head shot almost evenly away.
Nothing left but some nose, a gaping, blood-drooling mouth.
The guerilla who did for Jumper turns, seeing Reaper running at him — and that’s when Reaper’s gun jams. But it doesn’t matter, because he’s using the butt, roaring as he smashes the man’s forehead in, throws the rifle at another guerilla, draws his sidearm, snaps off three pistol shots in two faces. Those two go down, but more are coming — then Goat and Destroyer are there, firing from the hip, their own weapons choosing to work.
Reaper screams and fires and screams and…
“John Grimm? Are you with us?” The lady psych tech’s face — a pretty girl, really, if a bit pudgy — smiling down at him. “We lost track of the memory. Stress levels too high — but I do think we made some progress. How do you feel?”
He thought: Like I’d like to kill you and everyone in here.
But aloud he said, “I want to go back to my unit. Take all this fucking gear off me.”
Reaper was packing his bag, almost cheerful for the first time since they’d gotten back from their tour on the methane fields. How long had it been, six weeks? Seemed like a year.
This part of battle-stress therapy he liked: going on furlough. R&R.
He snorted, as he put a T-shirt in the bag, thinking: “battle stress.” Pretty term for how you felt when you blew a fifteen-year-old kid in half, then found you’d let the closest thing you had to a friend get his head shot off because you’d misread the situation…
And because I agreed to use untested rifles.
The humidity had made the M-100s lock up — they all knew that could happen with cheap ordnance. And UAC was cutting corners on the weaponry. Give me a good chaingun anytime…
Sarge had trusted him with that patrol — and it’d gone south; it was his cluster-fuck, no one else’s. And that kid…probably had been a guerilla for about an hour and a half.
Reaper turned to look at the others, wondering if they thought he was some kind of liability, being ordered to memory therapy.
But they were just chilling in the barracks here in Twentynine Palms, California. Duke, on his bunk with his feet up on a packed kit bag, wearing only a wifebeater and his cammie pants, was squinting against smoke from the cigarette wedged in his lips as he played Space Invaders on a laptop. That was normal enough for Duke.
The others were getting ready for leave, too, or already packed. Portman was checking his kit for the third time to see if he’d remembered his condoms. Goat kneeling at his bunk, praying. That’s what he’d been doing for a lot of the last six weeks. Praying.
Against orders, Goat had piled up a pretty good collection of human scalps, souvenirs from firefights — but he’d thrown those out, first thing, on coming back. He’d changed, after the methane fields. Something about the guerilla kid being from the same ethnicity as Goat — all too much like a cousin.
Goat had been muttering about God and praying ever since; there was a silver crucifix dangling on his chest.
The new kid — Kid, they called him, imaginatively enough — wasn’t going on leave. He’d just gotten here: Jumper’s replacement. A gangly nineteen-year-old, the Kid was sweeping the floor with an old-fashioned broom — they made him use the broom, although maintenance had sonic sweepers. He looked lost and miserable.
Mac was pitching oranges the length of the room to Destroyer, who was “up to bat,” teeth bared.
Reaper thought about complaining about the mess they were making as Destroyer swung the bat, making the orange into a juicy, disintegrating ground ball spattering down the aisle between the bunks…but Reaper didn’t feel like a hard-ass today. Let Sarge deal with it.
Behind Destroyer was a cardboard cutout of a naked girl wearing a catcher’s mask. She caught the next orange on her right breast, as Destroyer whiffed one. Juice ran down her exquisitely taut tummy.
The barracks normally smelled of sweat, leather, and boot-black — but they were getting ready for R&R, so tonight it smelled of aftershave and hair gel.
“I don’t fucking believe this shit,” Portman said, banging his watch on the end of his metal-frame bunk. He glared at the watch, then at the clock on the wall, comparing. “Six months without a weekend, and the fuckin’ transporter’s five minutes late. That’s five minutes of R&R I’ll never get back.”
“Relax, baby,” Duke said, not looking up from his game. “You’re on vacation.”
Portman stuck his hands in his pockets, scowling, came to look over Duke’s shoulders. “Why do you play those fuckin’ stupid old games?”
Duke shot down another video invader with a practiced snap of his index finger. “You ever play chess, Portman? Some games will never die.”
Portman walked away, snorting. Duke shook his head sadly at Portman’s ingrained philistinism. “This game was layered, man.”
Mac tossed an orange up, caught it, tested its weight in the palm of his hand as he looked for a pitch opening. “So where are you going, ’Stroyer?”
Destroyer did a couple of near-light-speed practice swings with the bat, grinning as he thought about his leave. “Grover Island. Surfin’. I’m telling you man, their weather is crazy. Thirty-foot breakers.”
Destroyer put his finger meditatively to his mouth, licked orange juice. “How about you, Portman?” he asked. Every so often one of them remembered to try to “include” Portman.
“I’m goin’ go down to El Honto,” Portman said, a dreamy look coming into his eyes, just as if he was going to talk about sitting on the porch with his dear old granny, “lock myself in a motel with a bottle of tequila and three she-boys.”