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“Well… no, no I don’t.”

Several of the others laughed at that, and even Fred joined in a moment later, his sandy-blonde hair nearly brushing down into his eyes as he finally loosened up.

There were ten of them flying in the single Puma helicopter. Captain Frank Burchak was at the controls and next to him was Sergeant Paul Carson. The other five ‘super soldiers’ were seated in the back, with Chargin’ Charlie, Ronnie, and Fred — the latter being the youngest and least experienced when it came to war, having missed out on Vietnam by just a year.

“How many sorties you been on?” Bobbie said with a laugh. “You sound about as timid as a kitten.”

“Well I ain’t no damn super soldier like you all, now am I?” Fred shot back.

“Alright… alright,” Charlie said, raising his hands to settle Fred down, “take it easy now. Let’s save that fight for the Grays.”

Fred frowned and held his tongue, but only for a few moments.

“What’s the best way to fight those damn things?” he asked.

“Ha!” Robbie laughed. “There ain’t no ‘best way,’ just the only way — hit ‘em with everything ya got!”

Fred was getting good at frowning, but even he set a new record when the Puma’s red warning lights winked on in the cabin.

“Ten miles out from target,” Frank’s voice came back at them, “get yourselves ready for insertion.”

The men tensed up, even the ones that’d fought Grays before — this was the moment.

12 — Landing

Turn looked out the Puma helicopter at the dark mountains below.

“Never thought I’d feel safe flying over a mountain,” he muttered to himself, then looked over at Ronnie to see if he’d been heard, but the astronaut was engrossed with looking toward where their target should be, some hidden cave nestled in a nook of this section of the Rockies.

Turn frowned and made to do the same, but directed his gaze down to the new ‘legs’ he had. He still couldn’t get over the sight of them, his own ‘legs’ in their very own uniform. Of course he couldn’t get over thinking of them as ‘legs’ with quotation marks either, and maybe he never would. They weren’t those mannequin legs and they weren’t those titanium pole legs he’d always worried about getting when he was growing up and thinking of following his father’s footsteps into the military, the kind he’d seen on WWII veterans when he’d accompanied the old man to Memorial Day picnics and been regaled with stories of Tuskegee. No, these were something else entirely.

Turn was no confident that he’d never really know what happened in Cambodia, or much of what had happened before. Waking up in that hospital room and seeing an empty bed where his legs should’ve been was one of the lowest points of his life. The offer of a pair of new ones was one of the highest.

It’d taken months to get them perfectly right, but what Turn most remembered were the first initial days, and it had been days that he’d been worked upon. The tissues at the end of his legs — which now ended well above where his real knees had been — had to be structured with carbon nanotubes, and those in turn had to be propped-up with plant and fungal cells… at least that’s what he’d been told. Turn had also come to accept that he didn’t really want to know exactly how it’d been done.

What he did know was that the legs were state-of-the-art. They had microprocessors that interpreted and analyzed signals from the knee-angle sensors and movement receptors. Any type of motion that Turn made was immediately relayed through the sensors and to his brain, and vice versa. What was truly revolutionary about the cybernetic legs, however, were the hydraulic cylinders in each knee- and ankle-joint. Small valves within those cylinders contained a specially-designed hydraulic fluid, one that did a lot more than just coat the joints that Turn now moved around on… one that increased his speed. And it wasn’t any extra second or two in a 100 meter race kind of speed, no, it was more like the kind that’d allow you to finish a 26 km marathon in 15 minutes instead of 5 hours.

They were strong, too. Made with biocompatible titanium that was specially engineered to stay in the body for sixty years instead of the usual twenty, Turn’s legs were also alloyed with 4 % aluminum and 5 % vanadium, the latter giving them about 50 % more strength. All in all, it meant he’d have to be hit with a sizeable rocket or run over by a tank for the legs to take much of a dent, although both of those events would most likely kill him before that. That was the thing, Turn thought as he glanced out the window of the Puma — he was still human, and still capable of feeling… even if his legs were not.

“Look alive!” a shout came from the front of the helicopter and Turn quickly looked up to see Frank holding his fist up in the air. “There!”

At the shout, Turn looked out the large bay door and saw a small opening of some kind down below, although it looked a lot more like an old and abandoned mine shaft. Further off there were a few old and rusted derricks sitting on one edge of what could only be called a sizeable-pond, the only other modern feature being a large white cylindrical holding tank of some sort, maybe for natural gas, a crumbling-down shack its only company.

The helicopter circled about, avoiding the large derricks further afield before settling down onto a long corridor where the trees had been cut away, almost as if a landing strip had been laid down. Ronnie immediately began motioning out the large bay door.

“Head toward that cave entrance,” he shouted over the sound of the helicopter’s rotor blades.

Eight men in the helicopter did so, leaving just Frank and Ronnie behind. Chargin’ Charlie was the first out, leading the men with his M240 machine gun raised up high in front of him, and then the super soldiers with Fred thrown in for good measure. Turn looked back to see Ronnie staring at him.

“Go,” he said, pointing his drawn gun past Turn and toward the cave entrance, “we’ll be back here in 10 minutes — that’s all you need for this hole.”

Turn nodded, got up and was at the bay door a moment later. He jumped from the helicopter and it immediately began to lift off.

13 — A Nest of Grays

The night was quiet and still and dark as hell. Turn switched on his night vision and quickly picked out the other seven men, all huddled up ahead behind some trees and bushes that fronted the cave. One of them — Robbie by the look of it — waved him over.

“Don’t look like much, do it?” Charlie said when he’d drawn near and they were all together.

“Like some dank-ass cave out in the middle of nowhere,” Fred replied, two lengthy bullet belts slung over his shoulders and trailing down toward the Colt AR-15 Commando XM177 Assault Carbine in his hands, extras the men had… just in case. Turn looked at him and frowned slightly — neither Fred nor Charlie had ever fought the Grays before… he didn’t know how they’d hold up. As if in answer to his thought, Sammy stepped forward, that deep African-American voice of his booming out.

“Just like we briefed on — two teams, side-by-side all the while.”

“This cave complex ain’t supposed to be much more than half a mile deep, if even that,” Bobbie said, spitting a good-sized gob of chewing tobacco down on the forest floor.

Tommy laughed, and Turn had no doubt those crazy eyes of his were darting about under those goggles. “Look at the size of that landing strip — reinforcements could arrive at anytime.”

He nodded back behind them and Turn looked to see a straight-on line of nothing, no trees, no bushes, no boulders or anything else that was much higher than a foot. It looked natural enough, but that was probably just because this particular base had been used for centuries, maybe longer.