I snorted. “I’m never in control of my destiny—at least, not often. Not unless I’m willing to go rogue and piss everyone off. I’m a soldier. Most of the time, I get ordered around—to fight, and die.”

  “Yes… Don’t worry about it. You have failed—but others will take your place.”

  “Others? What, have you been screwing everyone on the deck to get them to play assassin for you?”

  Right off, after the words were all the way out of my mouth, I regretted them. It was a rude thing to say, but still, I wanted to know the answer.

  I expected her to get mad, but she didn’t. She smiled faintly instead. “You’re jealous.

  Actually involved. I’m flattered—but no, I didn’t have sex with you or anyone else on this boring ship in order to kill Merton. I’m not that prescient, unfortunately. I fell into a rage, and I tried to lash out at the cause of my anger, that’s all.”

  A few blinks later, I relaxed some. Galina wasn’t screwing anyone, and she didn’t seem all that angry. In fact, she even seemed to realize that she’d been in the wrong in this situation. That was a whole bundle of good news for me.

  But then I went back over her words in my mind… She’d mentioned others before, and I’d been thinking about her in a personal sense… but she hadn’t meant that.

  “You’ve got assassins aboard?” I asked her, “…and you sicced them on Merton?”

  She nodded. “Like I said, don’t worry about it. Have a drink with me. We’ll be landing on Tau Orionis soon.”

  I considered it. I honestly did—but I couldn’t. I excused myself and hurried back up to the bridge.

  I was too late. By the time I got there, Merton was dead on the deck. He’d had a heart attack.

  “Most unfortunate…” Galina said from behind me.

  I straightened up and cast a very suspicious eye in her direction. She ignored this and stalked over the deck like a cat that had caught all six canaries.

  “Our brave captain must have been working too hard. Well, he’s in for a rest now. I’m assuming command, as has been stipulated by these orders from Central.”

  Galina stooped and plucked a rattling slip of computer paper from Merton’s dead hand.

  She straightened again, and she looked around at the rest of the ship’s officers. “Oh… that is, unless any one among the flight crew would like to challenge my authority?”

  She said this in a voice that was low, and almost sweet—but no one was fooled. They didn’t even move. They just stared at her from their posts.

  “Good,” she purred. “Let’s go over our approach vectors. I see that corrections must be made immediately.”

  Turov took over, and the crew let her. No one else wanted to be left lingering in the revival queue just to make a moral stand.

  -27-

  Galina and I cooled it after that. We didn’t contact each other, not even officially. That was okay by me—except for the poor sleeping conditions.

  About forty hours later, I found myself happy to suit up and drop on Tau Orionis. Remarkably, I found myself looking forward to the invasion step—anything was better than sleeping in a locker or a warhead casing.

  As my unit had mostly lived, the higher-ups had decided to allow a few revives of key personnel to flesh out my team. Exercising what I considered poor judgment, they’d revived my primary bio-specialist, Carlos Ortiz.

  “Still no sign of enemy activity?” Carlos demanded for the tenth time. “For reals, McGill?”

  “That’s right. They’ve got an automated drilling rig and some slaves and all, but the tiny garrison from Rigel hasn’t even transmitted a challenge to us yet. They’re going to be the sorriest bunch of bears this side of the core when we drop and introduce ourselves.”

  Carlos was all grins and jokes. He loved a weak enemy—who didn’t?

  Unfortunately, onboard Berlin, we’d only had room to bring a single lifter. That meant most of us were going to have to use drop-pods. My unit was to establish a beachhead, secure it, and protect the lifter as it came down with the heavy equipment.

  “Where the hell are we dropping, McGill?” Harris demanded angrily. He was suiting up his lights, which were going down in the first wave. He never liked playing the spearhead. The troops in the spearhead tended to die the most.

  “Right next to the bear’s mining camp, as close as I can tell. We’ll be maybe ten kilometers out at first. As soon as we’re down—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know the drill. But why don’t we just blast that camp to shit from orbit? Why take the risk of fighting the bears at all?”

  “Destroying this place isn’t our mission. We’re here to steal the tech, the planet, and the drilling equipment itself. If we blow up this mining installation, we’ll have to start over again.”

  Harris fumed, but he couldn’t find a flaw in the logic. After all, if we’d been sent here to destroy the place, we wouldn’t even need ground troops. The camp could have just been dusted off from orbit, and we could have gone home.

  Still in a sour mood, he launched his lights down the tubes like the pro he was. One girl hesitated, so he got her attention—then shoved her down the hole. She was gone with a squeak, and although we winced, she didn’t get cut in half by the slamming jaws of her drop pod. She remembered her training, spun in her capsule, and was fired down toward the LZ with shocking force and speed.

  Once the lights were away, we waited for twelve minutes until they’d landed and sent back the all-clear. The heavy platoons went next, then the weaponeers and support staff.

  I went with a heavy platoon. Screaming through the atmosphere, I took the time to read up on the atmospheric composition. Oxygen 24%—a little on the high side, but not enough to be a problem. Nitrogen 69%, and a list of trace inert gases followed. It was damned close to Earth-normal and quite acceptable.

  The gravity was around eighty percent of one standard G, which ought to put a spring in every soldier’s step. The humidity was fairly high, despite the fact there were only a few small oceans. The land to sea ratio was the reverse of that on Earth, this world was three quarters wilderness.

  Approximately four percent of the surface consisted of strange, crystalline zones. From above they looked like glass mountain ranges, or glaciers with no snow on top. We were dropping near the equator, so it was going to be hot.

  Drilling in the warmest region of the planet was doubtlessly a choice the miners from Rigel had made. They liked it hot, I remembered. Oppressively so. Their home planet was like a vast jungle.

  My drop-pod fell through space, punched into the atmosphere and burned its way at an angle toward the ground. After a harrowing ride, I slammed into the surface. I checked a few readouts—just to make sure I wasn’t underwater or something—and popped the lid.

  Scrambling out into the sunshine, I was surprised to realize I wasn’t in a forest. Instead, the area was clear and open. The terrain was rolling green grass, with a wall of trees to the south, and a strange jumbled region of what looked like broken glass looming to the north.

  “That’s frigging beautiful,” Harris said, walking up to me. “Isn’t it? Like massive diamonds the size of mountains.”

  Staring with him, I nodded.

  “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?” he asked. “Those diamond hills?”

  He hadn’t been part of the briefings. Our true mission had been classified from the start. “That’s right,” I told him. “The bears are mining in those cliffs and valleys. We’re here to take over.”

  Harris grinned. “I bet some loose chunks would fetch a good price back home.”

  “If you don’t mind the radiation burns, I’m sure they would.”

  His face fell, and he went back to shouting at his troops. Half an hour later, five cohorts were down on the plain. Soon afterward, the lifter landed on the grass in a shallow depression. Techs began wheeling out gear.

  That’s when the first missile landed and killed a full unit on the fringes of our camp.

  “Incoming!” Harris roared.

  Everyone threw themselves flat. I scrambled toward the lifter on all fours. We couldn’t afford to lose it.

  “Tell the pilot to take off!” I shouted into my radio. “Lift off—run!”

  I needn’t have bothered. Either the pilot had already gotten the order, or he’d come up with the idea all on his own. He didn’t even bother to roll-up his ramps, or give the troops ferrying gear outside a chance to run.

  The big jets flared, and scores of troops were burned to death in a gush of radioactive flame. Those who were carrying gear on the ramps scrambled for safety, some jumping off, others racing inside—as far as I could tell, none of them survived. Those who jumped off were incinerated. Those who tried to make it back into the ship were either crushed as the ramp closed, or fell to their deaths as if the lifter itself seemed determined to shake them off.

  Harris rushed to me and grabbed my shoulder. He shook it, and I looked at him. “Did they get a revival machine down? Did they?”

  “I think so,” I told him.

  He went off into a gale of cursing, walking around in a circle and beating his fists on his thighs. “Of all the damnable luck!” he complained.

  This wasn’t my first rodeo, so I understood his odd reaction. If the legion had left no revival gear behind, the brass back aboard Berlin could have called this first landing a failure and marked us down for dead. Now, however, they’d want us to fight to get their expensive machines back. That meant we were in for a rough ride.

  “They dropped some pigs at least,” I told Leeson. “Steal one and start digging trenches.”

  Supplies were short and then some. Aboard Berlin we’d been cramped, but at least we’d had all the food and gear we wanted. Now, we were in a wide open field of nothing, but we were almost bare-assed naked. We had guns, armor, a ruck full of food and ammo each—and that was about it.

  -28-

  It was pretty obvious to me that the enemy didn’t consist entirely of helpless miners. They were raining down missiles, and it took nearly an hour to get an effective force field up to stop them. In the meantime, they’d managed to kill around five hundred of our five thousand men.

  Now, however, we had trenches, a few basic puff-crete bunkers and some thin force shields overhead. Missiles—especially smart missiles—tended to ruin an infantryman’s day.

  We usually had cover from such basic attacks. Today, we were lucky to have survived long enough to stop the pecking shower of small, smart, AI-guided bomblets that kept seeking anything soft they could find to blow up.

  Graves summoned me and his other centurions to his command bunker. As our blood-primus, he was not only in charge of my cohort, but also the entire operation from the frontlines. Unsurprisingly, Turov had decided to remain aboard Berlin and supervise our support from on-high.

  Graves looked us over stoically. We huddled on benches and circled a shitty-looking battle computer with a big crack down the middle of it. Apparently, that was the best tech we had for the purpose.

  “Here’s our sitrep,” he began. “We started with five thousand dead due to the warp-bubble failure aboard Berlin. Those losses are being replaced now, as revivals have begun in earnest on the battlecruiser.”

  I lifted my hand, gloved palm out—but he ignored me. He didn’t even glance in my direction.

  “Presumably, over the next few days, we’ll be able to add a cohort of reinforcements due to more landings. That’s the good news.”

  My gloved hand waggled, but still it was no dice. Graves just wasn’t in the mood to hear any of my pearls of wisdom.

  “Analysis of the enemy reaction so far indicates they’ve got some small, automated defenses. These missiles are coming from a stationary battery in the middle of their camp. The defense is limited, but effective—until now.”

  He lit up the battle computer, and the crack in it gleamed a jagged white. On one side of the crack were our forces, shown as a series of green cubes. Five cohorts were arranged in a crescent pattern. On the other side of the crack, the enemy mining station was shown as a single red circle. It was rather vague, and we couldn’t know much about what we were facing yet.

  “We have to assume the enemy has called for backup,” Graves continued, tapping the red circle. “We’ve stopped their defensive action so far, and if that’s all they’ve got, they’re doomed. We’ll send out probing attacks in the morning to find out, then we’ll know more.”

  My arm was beginning to ache a little. I had been holding it up for a long time now, and the armor was weighing it down. I thought about supporting the arm with another hand at the elbow for support, but I passed on the idea. I didn’t want to look like a sissy.

  At last, Graves flicked his eyes up and met mine. “We have a question. What is it, McGill?”

  “Sir, do we have any revival machines here on the planet?”

  “Yes. Three of them. That’s not enough, but we’re working on replacements for the men we lost to missiles and splats we suffered during the drop. Did you really hold your hand up that long just for—?”

  I was waggling my hand again. This time, I used my left, as my right was kinda sore.

  “Yes, McGill…?”

  “I suggest we hit them sooner than tomorrow, sir,” I said. “We can’t chance the enemy having more firepower than we expect.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know… an underground army, maybe. Or maybe something they can bring in right away.”

  “We’re pretty far out from Rigel. Not as far as we are from Earth, but—what is it now?”

  “Primus, sir, what if they have high-tech transportation equipment?”

  He stared at me for a second. “That would be most unfortunate. But we’ve seen no sign—”

  “Sir? If I might make an observation.”

  He crossed his arms and glared at me. “Speak.”

  All around, the other centurions were beginning to look disgusted. They didn’t want to hear me flap my gums, they wanted to hear the primus. Only Manfred seemed interested in what I had to say. He was a rare friend among the officer core for yours truly.

  “Have we noticed any kind of spaceships?” I continued. “Anything like freighters, here in orbit?”

  “No, obviously not. No warships were found on the station, either.”

  “Yes sir, and that’s a good thing. A real good thing. But… how do you think the enemy is getting all this mining material—all the raw glass-stuff laced with collapsed matter—how are they moving that off-planet? I mean, there must be some kind of processing center back home on Rigel, right?”

  “Of course. We’ve always assumed they mine the raw materials here and then ship it home to make the armor.”

  “Right… so where are the ships?”

  He shrugged. “One might have just left. Maybe they only come once a month. What frigging difference does it make, McGill?”

  “Uh… just this, sir: what if they’re using gateway posts to ship it home? What if they have a lifeline from here, all the way back to Rigel? What if we sit here on our backsides till breakfast only to march into a freshly assembled Rigellian army under that mountain? What then, sir?”

  Graves froze for a second. He stared at me flatly, and to me, he looked for all the world like a robot that had just been reset.

  Suddenly, he stood up and marched out of the bunker. The rest of the group watched this with upraised eyebrows.

  Standing outside on the grassy, windswept plain, Graves spoke to his tapper. We could see him up there outside the bunker, getting a good signal. Due to the wind, we couldn’t make out the words.

  After a few minutes, he marched back down into the safety of the dark and stood at the head of the broken battle computer again.

  “There’s been a change of plan,” he said evenly. “We’re moving out. We’re not waiting for dawn. We’re going to conduct an all-out assault on the mine in—” here, he glanced at his tapper, “—thirty-one minutes. Get out there, marshal your units. Be prepared to advance at the appointed time. Oh, and don’t carry too much gear. We want to move fast.”

  After that announcement, he shooed us out of his bunker. The centurions poured out, blinking in the sunshine. One of the others slapped me in the breastplate with a set of steel-covered knuckles.

  “Way to go, McGill. No sleep. No rest. No gearing or planning. Your unit should take point to make up for your big mouth.”

  “Huh…” I said, considering it. “That’s an unexpected honor coming from you, Winton.”

  He sneered and moved off. I walked back to my unit’s camp wearing a grin and whistling tunelessly. Carlos and Harris got the wrong idea right away.

  “I see that conniving smile, Centurion,” Carlos said. “Come on, give us the good news! We’re being recalled from this paradise, right? No one’s home, and it’s all a big mistake, right?”

  “Nope.” I proceeded to explain our new reality, and all their good cheer evaporated.

  I didn’t care. I’d been right. Turov and Graves had seen it, and now we were going to take action.

  Sometimes, it’s enough to be taken seriously. You don’t always have to get praised for it.

  -29-

  We marched, double-time, toward the enemy. There was no setup, we barely even lined up. Graves and Turov were clearly so concerned that I might be right—that the enemy might have a direct way to get reinforcements from their home world—that they decided it was too much of a risk to wait around.

  At first, there was no sign of resistance. The smart mini-missiles, about the size of wine bottles, kept raining down on our mobile force-domes. They popped and fizzled up there, destroyed by the tendrils of electromagnetism that protected our advancing troops.

  “Lame defense effort!” Harris remarked. “If that’s all they’ve got, they’re going to be sorry.”

  I waved him and his lights into the front line. The cohorts had spread out, with two cohorts in the front, one in the middle and two behind. Each cohort was more or less covering a rectangle of ground as big as a couple of football fields, but overall, our formation was roughly circular. This was by design, as it allowed our force-dome to protect us evenly from overhead bombardment.