But even as he died, his shock-rod managed to lash out and catch my leg. It sent a painful electric current through my body, and it felt like even my breastplate got a buzz. Sometimes metallic armor wasn’t the best thing to have. I considered trying to cut away the straps and drop it, because with all these electric spears, this was sure not to be the last touch I would have to endure.

  There was no time for such niceties. Immediately, as if to confirm my darkest fears, a crackling spear thudded into my back. It struck my breastplate exactly as intended, and it did prevent the charge from contacting my flesh. But the shock that coursed through the metal was startling, to say the least. It was like being kicked by a horse with lightning for hooves.

  My armor systems flickered and sparked as the electrical discharge overloaded circuits that hadn’t been designed to handle this kind of input. For a moment, I couldn’t feel my left leg at all, and my HUD was dead. Everything was dead.

  The enemy, in the meantime, were everywhere. Collins was rapidly firing at targets that appeared and disappeared in the foam like ghosts. Sometimes she nailed them, turning their faces to sprays of red. Other times the targets vanished before she could get a bead. “I can’t get a clear shot!”

  The confusion and the obscuring chemical fog made movement difficult. What should have been a simple maneuver of having us all circle up on an outcropping of rocks, firing down in every direction at approaching troops, had turned into an exercise that required a great deal of balance and coordination.

  A molecular knife flashed past my head. It was close enough to rip into my helmet, part my hair and leave a burning line across my scalp. I spun and fired blind, hearing someone scream in the distance but not being sure if I’d hit my target or some other innocent bystander.

  Another attacker came at me from the side, and Harris put him down with a burst that spread blood across the white foam in crimson streaks.

  “Stay down, you fuck!” he shouted, kicking the flopping body and pumping more rounds into it.

  The fighting was vicious and confused, both sides struggling to identify targets in the chemical haze. The enlisted troops had the advantage of desperation and numbers. They knew this was their only chance to close with us before the foam dissipated, but we had superior equipment, training, and, most of all, the ability to strike them dead at range.

  I watched as another centurion took a shock-rod to the chest, his armor sparking with the electrical discharge, overloading his power systems. The centurion stiffened, and the lights in his chestplate went dead. He slid down hard but managed to trigger a grenade as he fell. The explosion cleared a circle in the foam and took out three attackers who’d been moving in to finish him off.

  The concussion from the grenade was enormous. In the confined space, my ears were ringing as debris rained down around us. The centurion wasn’t getting up again, and neither were two of his adjuncts. They’d died somehow, perhaps suffocating in the chemical foam.

  “I got Primus Winslade!” someone shouted through the chaos. Somebody drove a knife through his faceplate. Wow, I thought to myself, that recruit had to feel gleeful, lucky—even honored.

  “Miller’s head shattered!” another shouted. “Jenny Miller got a shock-rod rammed up her ass.”

  For some reason, that made us all fight a little harder. Jenny was the prettiest of the centurions. She and I had had a few long, pleasant nights together over the years, and it made me a bit angry to know someone had done her dirty.

  With a feral growl, I got down to business, deciding to abandon tactics, position, and planning. I gave in to the orgy of death, which was what the battle had become. I plunged into the fog and confusion, embracing it. I released a burst of fire at any figure that stumbled out of the mist in my direction. I killed a dozen, then a dozen more, sending them tumbling down in a bloody mess.

  We were fighting individual duels now, fighting in near blindness. I was no longer standing on the line with my fellow officers. I left the rocky hill, and I plunged off into the mists.

  That was damn near insane, don’t think I didn’t know that. I was risking catching a burst of gunfire in the back if nothing else. But the maneuver was also highly effective.

  Behind me, I could see the flashes, hear the booms, the shouts, and the cries. The hard fighting was going on along a ridgeline that we’d originally been standing upon. All the officers were essentially clumped in one area. By separating from them and joining the enemy ranks, they were no longer able to easily identify me and pick me out as a target.

  Getting an idea, I picked up a combat knife in each hand. I let my snap-rifle dangle from its neck strap at my waist. Using the blades, I cut the straps holding my breastplate in place, letting it clatter onto the ground.

  Now I looked like another big veteran, an enlisted man on the warpath. If I used my rifle now, I would just identify myself as an officer. Better to blend in.

  After retreating past a dozen enlisted, who gave me odd looks, but who didn’t strike, I was behind most of them. Now, I began a circling sweep. I was careful not to get too close to the officers with their guns. Otherwise, any one of the numbskulls on my side was likely to blast me right out of my boots.

  Instead, I moved around among the crawling masses of enlisted men. They were cursing and puffing. Many were wounded, but most were hale, whole and determined. They were trying to creep up on the last of the officers, trying to get close and drive a knife in or throw a shock stick and paralyze their victim first.

  I stabbed deep into spines and slashed at the nape of necks. I drove blades into bellies, thighs—anything I could get to. Like a demon in the night, I always moved on, leaving my victim flopping and gargling in shock.

  Essentially, I was backstabbing men, coming at them from an unexpected angle. I never announced myself by using my rifle, but instead using the confusion and the chaos to cover my advance. I always kept moving, too.

  Now and then, of course, some of the enlisted boys would get an idea. They’d grab my leg. They’d shout. They’d jump up and chase after me. But as I kept on running through the fog and kept on stabbing men who were crawling, walking, staggering—but always advancing toward the officer line, it was pretty easy to lose pursuers in the confusion.

  I could hear Harris laughing maniacally as he cut down attacker after attacker, his voice echoing through the artificial environment. He, possibly alone among everyone present, was vastly enjoying himself. “Come on, you little pricks, who wants some of this? Line up and take your turn!”

  The enlisted had taken so many casualties, it seemed like two-thirds of the men who were at my feet were dead rather than crawling on the attack, but I could still hear Harris’s maniacal laughter and snap-rifle bursts. The surviving officers were now retreating, pulling back towards an area of relative light and air.

  The foam had stopped coming down from the ceiling. There were just a few random dribbles now and then. There was also a whooshing noise. I knew what that was. They’d opened up some of the largest vents to the outside universe, allowing the atmosphere to be sucked out into open space. Soon, the air aboard Green Deck would clear up and grow crystal clear and cold. Men without helmets and breathing apparatus would die—but maybe that’s what Graves wanted.

  Cradling a rifle once again, I staggered out into the open air, being recognized by the remaining officers. There could be no more than a dozen of them left on their feet, uninjured. They aimed their muzzles at me, but when I shook my snap-rifle back in their direction, they recognized my epaulettes, the snap-rifle, and my overall unusual size. They knew immediately who I was.

  “McGill! McGill lived through all that shit? I can’t believe it!” It was Manfred. He released a rumbling laugh. “I should have known. Never bet against a madman, boys.”

  I stumbled up to the rest of them.

  “Who’s still breathing?” I asked.

  Responses came back slowly. Voices were hoarse from inhaling chemical foam and smoke and the stress of combat. Something like three-quarters of us were lost, but the enlisted troops had been decimated. Most of their pathetic survivors were retreating toward the far end of Green Deck. They were no longer trying to fight at all. They were simply trying to escape, trying to get out of the nearest portal if they could.

  “Harris!” I called out. “Where’s Harris?”

  I scanned the dispersing foam for signs of my most enthusiastic killer. There was no response. Through the thinning chemical mist, I could see him in the distance, standing over what looked like a pile of bodies. But something was wrong with the picture. He was too still. There was something dark spreading across his chest armor. The spreading stain was too large and too red to be anything but massive trauma.

  “Hey, Harris!” I said, heading toward him in a stumbling run. As I watched, however, he tumbled forward like a felled tree and didn’t get back up.

  Around his position, I could see movement. More enlisted troops emerged from concealment, having waited for him to chase their fleeing comrades into a prepared ambush.

  “Sneaky little bitches,” Manfred said, having followed me. He grumbled, his words full of disgust and grudging respect. “They got him, led him right into that trap, and chopped him up. Should we go after them, mate?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Harris pretty much deserved to die last. He earned it.”

  The fight had gone out of both sides, replaced with exhaustion and a kind of bone-weariness that came from too much killing in too short a time. I looked at the carnage around us, and then at the retreating soldiers and their exposed backs. I fired a few bursts in that direction. A last few unlucky men were caught, spun around, and dashed to the ground in death.

  I had to admit, we’d achieved our objective of killing large numbers of troops, but we’d certainly paid a price for it. Harris’s body was a reminder that even in training, overconfidence could be fatal.

  The timer on Green Deck hit zero not long after that. The buzzer went off with a sound like a death knell, and the all-clear signal echoed across the artificial environment.

  Soon afterward, the bio-teams came out like ghouls to pick up their choice of the dead. They were left with the task of collecting bodies, and afterward presiding over hundreds of rebirths. The resurrection process aboard Scorpio was a grim, but almost priestly duty.

  The bio people looked like they didn’t belong here on this gruesome battlefield. Their medical equipment seemed fresh and clean and gleamed in the artificial sunlight. It would take days, possibly weeks, to revive everyone from this—but we’d all live again.

  Eventually, the foam dissipated entirely, revealing the full extent of the destruction we’d caused to Green Deck and each other. There was going to be some serious renovation needed before it could host another exercise like the one we’d just enjoyed to the fullest.

  I figured, for my own part, I’d learned a valuable lesson, as had the enlisted pukes under us. Sure, we’d had superior firepower and decent equipment. We’d also had our share of overconfidence. That could get you killed just as surely as any other mistake.

  Harris had been a good soldier, but he’d gotten nailed in the end. It was good to remember the enemy was just as hungry for a kill as everyone else.

  I wondered if, when we eventually got to Kepler-62, any battle there would ever rival the vicious nature of this one.

  -14-

  Harris stormed into 3rd Unit module, his face still flushed with the pale, waxy look that came from recent revival. He had slime in his hair, and a dollop dripped off his cheek when I laid my eyes on him.

  The process of rebirth often left people looking like they’d been underwater too long, with skin that had an unsettling, translucent quality. Their eyes would be slightly unfocused, their movements a fraction too slow.

  But Harris—he just looked pissed. More like a recently drowned rat who’d made it out of the sewer at last. He was fresh from being printed out like a piece of equipment. His memories were intact, but his body was still adjusting to the shock of sudden new existence. Most people needed some time to work out the process of having experienced death and coming back—but not Harris. He preferred to work himself into a rage.

  He yelled, throwing his gear onto his bunk with unnecessary force. His equipment clattered against the metal frame: snap-rifle, ammunition containers. All of it was scattered around like he was trying to wake the dead—which, considering that half the unit had not yet been revived, wasn’t far from the mark.

  “Complete, fucking bullshit!”

  “Welcome back, adjunct,” I said in a cheery tone.

  Despite my words, I wasn’t having a fun time, either. I was doing a lot of post-exercise paperwork. This time, the task was particularly nightmarish because a lot of military hardware had been destroyed or damaged.

  Various officials wanted to know why we burned through so much ammo or why the fire suppression foam had ruined some electronics. I was busy marking down anything I could think of in various too-small boxes on a plastic slip of computer paper. It didn’t matter how I answered these inane questions. Anything I could think of to put down was good enough. Just as long as it got me past a little man in the quartermaster’s department, without being pestered further. That was my sole goal.

  I set aside this raft of nonsensical make-work and grinned at Harris. “So, what’s it like to be the returning champion!”

  “It’s shit!” he growled.

  “Aw, come on, Harris. You did well. We should give you a dead man’s medal, or something. We could send it home to your grandkids.”

  “Too bad it wasn’t a real fight,” Leeson remarked.

  Harris glowered at me. “I wasn’t just killed, I was abandoned on the battlefield by my commanding officer. That’s murder most foul—your fault, McGill.” Then, he jabbed a finger at Leeson. “And you… fuck you!”

  Leeson laughed.

  Harris had finally gotten my attention. I left my form-filling behind and looked at him directly.

  Harris was stripping off his revival-issue paper-like jumpsuit and changing into a regular uniform. His movements were aggressive, each gesture loaded with barely contained fury.

  “Who abandoned you?” I demanded.

  “You heard me.” Harris was working himself into a proper rage, which was impressive considering he’d only been breathing again for maybe twenty minutes. The revival process usually left people confused and disoriented. Sort of in a daze for at least half an hour. But Harris was made differently.

  “I was out there,” he began to rant, “hunting down the enemy. Where were you? Sitting back with the rest of the cowards at first. Then, you rushed into the enemy ranks, disappearing into the fog, obviously hell-bent on committing suicide. I was left with lame-ass Collins and lame-ass Leeson, trying to hold the fort.”

  This description of her performance as “lame-ass” made Adjunct Collins bristle. She looked up from where she’d been cleaning off a snap-rifle. She set the weapon aside. The barrel glistened from a chemical residue. That seemed to be her way of dealing with a lot of adrenaline and a hard death. She liked to clean and polish things.

  “You do go off on your own, McGill,” she said. “But Harris here, he fancies he was in charge while you were gone.”

  “That’s not true,” Harris cast her a baleful glance. “Leadership isn’t always due to seniority or prior higher rank,” he said. “It has to do with what people actually do on the battlefield.”

  This pissed off Collins. She fancied herself as second-in-command because she had been a Primus in the past. Leeson also fancied himself as second-in-command because he was the most senior adjunct in this unit. Unsurprisingly, Harris fancied himself as second-in-command because… well… pretty much just because he was Harris.

  “And as to being lame,” Collins said, putting a couple of knuckles into her hip bones. It was a Karen look, something she’d probably mastered before she’d hit eighteen. “All of you should know we killed over seven hundred enemy troops while losing only 35 officers. If that’s lame, then I don’t know what being effective is.”

  “Effective?” Harris laughed bitterly. “What’s effective is winning. We didn’t win. They ran off, sure—but so did we.”

  He was partly right, but I decided not to take sides in this particular squabble. Sometimes, the best thing to do here was not to side with either of my adjuncts, but rather to deflect blame toward a source that both of them were upset with. In this case, it would be Graves.

  “Graves cheated and ended the whole thing unfairly,” I said. “He used fire suppression to quell a perfectly natural fire that broke out in the enlisted men’s refuge. That’s not tactics on his part, because it helped the enlisted greatly. In fact, I’d call it cheating.”

  Adjunct Leeson, who had been malingering out in the hallway outside the officers’ wardroom, suddenly stepped inside, laughing. It started as a chuckle, but quickly escalated to a full-blown howling.

  A few of the enlisted men, including some of the veterans, like Sargon himself, were smiling and chuckling out in the module without even knowing what the joke was.

  “What’s so fucking funny?” Harris demanded, his face reddening yet further.

  “You are,” Leeson said, “and McGill, too. He went charging off like some kind of hero, and you managed to be the only one of our team that died on Green Deck. This is always the way, isn’t it? The guys who die claim the other guys were lame somehow, and then whine about it.”

  Harris clenched his big hands into fists. “You’re bragging about being chicken-shit. Both of you!”

  “We were taking tactical advantage, and you were being an idiot,” Leeson wheezed. “And the funniest part is, Collins and I stayed alive. Don’t be telling me about efficiency.”

  “We’re going to do a kill count,” Harris said. “We’re going to do one right now. I want a full audit.” Harris was stabbing his finger down at the deck to emphasize every one of his words. “I’ll bet you right here and now that McGill and I killed the most of the enemy. You’re not going to get away with weaseling, with cowardice, and then tell us we were in the wrong.”