Chapter One
Mike’s prison was a circle of mud behind a burned out hulk of powered armor, the spot where he’d dozed, shat and shivered since the Sentry had killed everyone but him and Niner. On the first day, the trembling in his jaw had been a delicate distraction from Niner’s screams, a vibration tickling just under the ears. It became spasms that spread into his teeth and then down, until his heart banged behind his ribs like a bird beating itself against a windowpane. By the sixth day of waiting, he had the shakes from fingertips to toes. Bone-rattling tremors, painful spasms, cramping tendons.
Dehydration, the doctor in him observed. The rational parts of himself, the soldier and the medic, watched his own breakdown from a safe, clinical distance. First your kidneys’ll shut down, Mike, and then your liver. You’re already pissing syrup. It won’t be long now.
The rest of him was an animal that clawed at his prison of skin, howling from the inside. Mike stared hungrily at the rifle that God had forbidden him from turning on his brother and then himself. The furthest he’d gotten was to edge the tip of the barrel on his teeth, but his finger wouldn’t curl in on the trigger when he tried to squeeze. Even here, even now, there was no getting around God.
The humid jungle wind blew the stench of death his way. He lay outside of his useless armor, almost numb to the smell of his dead brothers out in the kill zone, and the cold, alien odor of burned and melted steel. Ten AEGIS lay slumped and scattered like twisted statues, turned to slag by the Sentry’s railgun. Some bits were still recognizable; the limbs, mostly. Fat raindrops slid down along jutting cannon barrels, pooled in the palms of their frozen metal hands. Corpses full of corpses. Mike couldn’t even remember which one was Alpha’s. He liked to think it was the one protecting him, because it was close to the front and his lover was that kind of man, but he couldn’t tell. They all looked and smelled the same: burned blood and hair, the metal charred, wet, leaking black fluid from around the cockpit seals.
From out in the narrow mouth of the funnel, Niner moaned.
