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 gone faster. With its shields and armor, the transport could have shunted these broken Tomcats out of its way like dried leaves. Instead, we waded through.
“You see anything?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Illych said. “Take a close look when we approach that fighter.”
We glided toward a fighter. It had a gray hull with an oblong nose. The area around its cockpit was entirely melted and the glass was smoke-stained and crumpled. One of the fighter’s wings was sheared off. Wires hung from the amputation.
On the remaining wing, clinging and blending in like a chameleon on a leaf, lay a SEAL. I spotted him because his shape did not blend in with the contour of the wing to which he clung. The color of his armor matched the fighter perfectly. As we passed that fighter, I spotted two more SEALs clinging to the fuselage.
“How long can they stay out there?” I asked Illych.
He thought for a moment. “I’ve gone twelve hours. It wasn’t comfortable.”
“Twelve hours in open space?” I had always heard that you would go insane after two hours. There’s not much you can do in space, just cling to an object like a drowning man holding a raft. No pleasant thoughts would pass through your brain as you sat there with only your armor separating you and an infinite expanse of death. “That must have been one hell of an important mission.”
“It was for training. You don’t get your brantoo until you clear a twelve-hour spacewalk.”
“Do all SEALs go through that?” I asked. Before the Navy switched to Adam Boyd clones, only natural-born volunteers could became SEALs.
“We did,” Illych said. He never talked about the days of natural-born SEALs.
We were coming up on the derelict battleship. I saw it ahead. We approached it from a side that had not been damaged in battle. From this angle, the battleship looked ready to fight.
“You’d better lock the door,” Illych said as he pulled off a pair of headphones.
“The door?” I asked.
“Your buddies in the kettle don’t believe the kid you killed committed suicide. They’re on their way up looking for a killer”
“Have you blocked out external communications?” I asked. The transport had an interLink override that could block passengers from communicating with outside sources.
The door rattled.
“I cut their communications the moment we left,” Illych said. The man had ice in his veins.
The door rattled again. This time someone started pounding on it.
“This will quiet them,” Illych said. He reached across the controls and flipped the switch that controlled the gravity generator.