"Slugger, Sneak Play!" She shouted into her mike, her voice fighting the crash of battle. "What's your situation?"
"Sneak Play, Slugger is stuck." If Grant was surprised to hear her instead of Abernathy or Aston, his voice gave no sign of it. "We're down to one LAV. Estimate sixty percent personnel casualties, and the woods are on fire."
"Slugger, can you take your wounded with you?"
"Affirmative, Sneak Play."
"Pull out, Slugger. Get clear as soon as possible. Inform me when you reach-" she crouched over her map card "-Victor-Four. Confirm copy."
"Sneak Play, Slugger confirms. Pull back to Victor-Four and advise."
"Luck, Slugger." She switched channels on her radio chest pack. "Romeo One, Sneak Play. Still with us?"
"Sneak Play, Romeo One. Glad to hear your voice. What can we do?"
"Stand by, Romeo One. We'll have targets for you-" She broke off as Staff Sergeant Ernest Caldwell tumbled into the pit with her. The other two survivors of his forward air control team were with him. "Romeo One, our FAC just turned up. I'm handing off to him." The rattle of incoming small arms roared higher. "I'm going to be busy." She turned to Caldwell as she reached for her blaster once more. "When Slugger gets clear, I want those woods hit with everything they've got, Sergeant. Burn them out."
"Yes, Ma'am."
She rose higher in the pit, listening to the cacophony of her men's weapons, her suit sensors and the Troll's dying glare showing her the enemy. She braced her firing hand on the lip of the pit, and her radio was back on Company T's tactical net.
"Here they come, boys," she said calmly. "We've got to hold them till Slugger gets clear-then the airedales can have them."
There was no more time for talk. The Apocalypse Brigade swept towards the Marines, muzzle flashes and the back-flash of recoiless rifles and rocket launchers lighting their positions like summer lightning.
Company T's survivors poured back an avalanche of answering fire, but the attack rolled in. Ludmilla picked a clump of enemies clustered around an M60 machine-gun team and squeezed the trigger.
Ed Staunton watched the bright, blue-white bursts explode below him and wondered what the hell made them.
Her blaster might have broken the attack, but the Apocalypse Brigade had once had energy weapons of their own and they knew its weakness, knew its targeting systems would lock on the first solid object in its line of fire-including trees and underbrush. They recoiled, but they quickly realized there was only one of it and began to work around her flanks.
"Skipper!" It was Jaskowicz, shouting into her ear as she sought fresh targets through the smoke. Flame roared everywhere she had used her blaster, but at least the wind was away from them. "Right flank's going, Skipper!" the sergeant shouted. "Not gonna last another three minutes!"
"Move the reserve squad in!"
"Already done it, Skip!"
"Damn!" She keyed her radio. "Slugger, Sneak Play. State position!"
"Sneak Play, Slugger is at Victor-Five," the reply came back instantly, and Ludmilla nodded. It would have to do.
"Get your heads down, Slugger," she told Grant, then turned to Caldwell. "Set?" He nodded.
"Do it," she said.
The world exploded.
The Hornets shrieked down like invisible demons, a long, endless line of them spilling napalm and cluster bombs, and the Apocalypse Brigade died. Perhaps as many as fifty escaped the attack and the forest fires and managed to sneak past what was left of Slugger Force as the Ospreys swept down into the vicious thermals of the fire-torn night to take Company T's survivors out of Hell.
genesis n., pl. -ses. The coming into being of anything; origin; beginning; creation. [Latin, from Greek, generation, birth, origin.]
-Webster-Wangchi Unabridged Dictionary of Standard English Tomas y Hijos, Publishers
2465, Terran Standard Reckoning
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Richard Aston woke from dreams of agony to an unfamiliar ceiling. He'd never seen that particular swatch of acoustic tiles before, but he'd put in too much recovery time not to recognize a hospital ceiling when he saw it.
He tried to remember how he'd gotten here, but it was a blank. He turned his head and saw the IV plugged into his left arm, then carefully wiggled each finger and toe in turn. It was a ritual testing, first devised thirty years before, and he breathed a sigh of relief as each joint bent obediently, confirming its continued presence.
In fact, he couldn't find a single thing wrong with himself, except for a ravenous appetite. Which was strange. Why was he-?
His thoughts broke off as the door opened quietly. He turned his head and smiled as Ludmilla entered-then frowned as she froze just inside the door. She stared at him, her eyes huge, and he held out his right hand.
"Milla?"
Her name broke the spell, and she hurled herself forward, her arms opening wide, and the strangest thing of all was the tears spilling down her face as she laughed and murmured his name over and over between kisses.
It took fifteen minutes for her to calm, and her tearful, wildly emotional state was a shock. It was so unlike her ... and so filled with love he almost came unglued himself. But the pressure of her feelings slowly ebbed, and she slipped into the chair beside his bed, holding his hand in both of hers as she recounted all that had happened.
"I'd seen neuron whips before, Dick," she said finally, shivering. "I knew you were dying." Her hands tightened on his. "So ... I took a chance. I made the corpsman inject you with about twenty cee-cees of blood-from me."
She paused, her eyes locked with his.
"But-" He broke off, his own eyes widening in shocked speculation.
"That's right," she said. "It could have killed you-should have killed you, really-but you were already dying anyway. So I did it, and ..." She paused again, drawing a deep breath. "It worked."
"It worked?" he echoed blankly. "You mean it-? I-?"
"Yes," she said simply, smiling tremulously. "I know I didn't have any right to do it, but-"
"I'm a ... a Thuselah?" he demanded, unable to grasp it.
"Yes," she said again, smiling at last. The wonder on his face was too much for her, and she lifted his hand to his head. "Feel," she commanded.
His eyes went wider than ever as his palm touched his smooth scalp and felt a soft, downy fuzz. Hair. It was hair!
Then it was true ... he was a Thuselah! And that meant-
He stared at her and saw the future's endless promise in her deep-blue eyes.
"Well, Admiral," President Armbruster said, smiling from the bedside chair, "you did it."
"Yes, Sir." Aston sat upright in bed, a tray of food on his lap. It was remarkable; his symbiote's demands actually made hospital food taste good. "But it cost us."
"Yes," Armbruster said softly, his smile fading, "it did."
It had. A third of Asheville lay in ruins, as did more than half of Hendersonville, and virtually all of half a dozen other small towns and cities. The fighting had cost the North Carolina National Guard over eight hundred dead. The count of civilian casualties was still coming in, and the already hideously high figure didn't yet include the thousands of rioters who'd died ... or the ones whose minds had broken when the Troll was killed.
Nor did it include Company T. Major Abernathy's leg had been saved, but it would be severely impaired for the rest of his life. At that, he was one of the lucky ones. Fifty-two percent of Company T's men were dead; another thirty-one percent had been wounded.