Kraneveldt Planetary Defense Force Base, Commitment
If Saturday had been quiet, Sunday was even quieter. So far, only four cars and a pickup had passed them in almost an hour.
Michael began to worry. The eastern sky was lightening by the minute; the plan he and Yazdi had worked out depended on their getting inside the base well before the day shift arrived. Michael did not want some smart-ass pointing out that truck and driver did not belong together.
Binoculars trained down the long stretch of empty road, Yazdi stiffened beside him. “Might have something here. Stand by.”
It was something: a gray Planetary Defense Force truck, heavily loaded judging by the labored way it managed the gentle slope up toward them. Beyond the truck, the road stretched away empty into the distance.
Yazdi scanned the vehicle carefully. “Perfect. Driver’s alone. No passenger. Road’s clear both ways. Let’s do it.”
The truck ground its way up the slight slope toward them. At the last minute, Yazdi stepped out into the road, waving her arms frantically. The driver took the bait, bringing the truck to a stop with a screech of overworked brakes. While Yazdi ran around the truck to the driver’s side, Michael ripped open the door and climbed up into the cab, one hand lunging for the distracted driver’s throat, the other grinding his pistol into the terrified man’s ribs. Michael did not hesitate, dragging the man bodily across the cab and out onto the verge, throwing him into the low scrub that bordered the road. Standing back he looked down. This was no man. He was more a boy, a skinny boy trembling in shock, eyes frantically hunting for help, hands up to keep Michael back.
“What do you want?” the boy stammered, voice trembling with shock. “Please don’t hurt me. Please.”
Michael ignored him. The plan called for a quick shot to the head to make sure no blood got onto the driver’s gray fatigues, but all of a sudden Michael knew he could not-would not-do it. It would be cold-blooded murder.
“What the fuck’s going on?” Yazdi hissed. “Why haven’t-”
Michael’s hand went up to stop her. “Pull the truck off the road while I tie him up, Corp. Then we’ll hide him in the back. That way they’ll find him eventually.”
“Hey! That’s not the-”
Michael turned on her. “That’s a fucking order, Corporal,” he whispered fiercely, “so do it. Now!”
For one heart-stopping moment, Michael thought Yazdi was going to call his bluff, her hand starting down to the gun in her pocket. But she did not. She stopped, nodded slowly, and went to move the truck.
Michael squinted into the lights that flooded the security post, the peak of his stolen cap pulled well down over his face. Heart pounding, he struggled to keep control as he handed his identity card and the card containing the truck’s movement order out the window.
He had every right to be nervous. His plan for getting into the base was so riddled with flaws that it was barely a plan at all. It was more a series of gambles, with his and Yazdi’s lives at stake. And the biggest gamble of all was that a stolen identity card would be enough to get them into Kraneveldt.
Michael did not care. He had rolled the dice so many times in the past few months, why not do it again? If it did not work out, the fallback plan was simple: They would shoot their way in or die in the attempt.
Michael was relieved to see that the young lance corporal on the security gate looked like a sack of shit. He stood, swaying gently, as he studied the movement order Michael had shoved under his nose; the identity card he ignored. Black bags under reddened eyes spoke volumes about the young man’s lack of sleep. The stupid jerk probably had done back-to-back shifts to give one of his mates a decent long weekend. Well, that act of generosity was one this particular lance corporal would live to regret.
The lance corporal yawned as he waved the movement order and the stolen identity card under a scanner. Satisfied that both were genuine and passing up the opportunity to use what looked like a serious biometric scanner to confirm Michael’s identity, he handed them back.
“Know where to go?” The man obviously did not care.
Michael nodded. He had no idea but was not going to admit it.
Thankfully, the lance corporal told him anyway. “First right, keep going. On your way.”
The boom went up, and the crash bollards sank into the road. Michael eased the truck forward, desperately fighting not to stall the damn thing and trying not to look down at Yazdi. She was jammed down into the footwell on the passenger’s side, mostly-but not completely-concealed by a casually thrown jacket.
“Not far now,” he whispered to Yazdi.
“Thank fuck for that,” she grumbled. “I’m dying down here.”
Michael grinned. “Hang on. Won’t be long.”
He turned the truck into a gap between two hangars, stopping before he came out onto the dispersal area proper. The landers were directly in front of him now; with a sense of relief, he saw that the lower access hatches on all of them were wide open, with the stairs down. Even if they had been buttoned up tight, he still could have gotten in, but it would have taken time; standing around in the open in the middle of a Hammer airbase struggling with a recalcitrant lander door was not how he liked to start his day.
A quick look around confirmed that they were alone.
“Okay, Corp. Out you come.”
Yazdi struggled out of the cramped footwell. “Thank Christ for that. I’ve got no legs left.”
“Ready?”
Yazdi nodded.
“Stick close, and if we’re challenged, keep moving. No running. We’re going for that lander there.” Michael pointed out the nearest lander, its massive shape towering over them, its hull a dirty gray-black. It looked well used.
“Got it. Let’s go.”
Praying that nobody got close enough to see that Yazdi was dressed in civilian clothes, Michael climbed out of the truck. He walked smartly across the dispersal area into the shadow of the ground attack lander he had picked, Yazdi following close behind. The instant they were in, he slapped the door controls to retract the stairs and shut the hatch behind them. Breathing heavily, he and Yazdi stood there waiting while the armored hatch thudded home, the interlocks going in with a reassuringly solid thunk-thunk, two green lights above the door coming on to show the hatch had a good seal.
“Fuck! What a way to make a living.” Yazdi laughed nervously. “I’m really glad that’s over.”
Michael could not agree more. The short walk across the tarmac to the lander had taken five lifetimes, his back rigid with tension as he waited for the challenge that never came.
“Me, too,” he replied. “Come on, we’ve got work to do. Check every compartment. I don’t want to be interrupted. I’ll see if we can fly this thing. Oh, and Corp.”
Yazdi turned. “Yes?”
“If there is anyone, stun-shoot them, then tie them up. Okay?”
Yazdi looked long and hard at him.
“Stun-shoot only. Got it?” Michael said firmly.
Michael took an agonizing, nerve-wracking hour before he was ready to make his move. Sitting in the command pilot’s chair, he worked methodically to match the assault lander’s controls and instrumentation with the intelligence summaries provided by his neuronics. While he did that, Yazdi, who was ransacking the lander for survival gear, kept an anxious eye on the airbase around them, but a Sunday was a Sunday, it seemed. Apart from an occasional vehicle, nobody even came close to the landers, let alone took any interest in them. As for the truck, it was ignored totally.
At last, he thought he had it. He had yet to touch a single control or switch on the old-fashioned panels ranged around
the command pilot’s seat, worried that the lander’s control system would lock him out. But by now he was pretty sure the lander would do as it was told.
He turned his attention to the weapons station; it was much simpler and largely matched the intelligence summaries provided by his neuronics. It was the work of only a few minutes to get on top of it. Calling Yazdi over, Michael sat her down and commed her what his neuronics thought were the correct operating procedures for the lander’s twin cannons. He told Yazdi to ignore the rest of the lander’s weapons systems. His orders were simple-answer the voice prompts and, once the system was live, put the laser target designator’s lozenge on the target and press the trigger. If all went well, the system should do the rest. There was one more thing, he added as an afterthought. Speak very, very deeply. Hammer women did not operate lander weapons systems.
Michael took a deep breath to steady himself; he could not put the evil moment off much longer. If they were going to get the lander operational, he would have to bite the bullet.
“Time to go.”
Yazdi smiled, a smile tight with tension. “Too true. Can’t sit here all day, anyway. Eventually someone’s going to wonder what that truck’s doing there.”
Michael nodded. Yazdi was right. They were on borrowed time. Happy that Yazdi was ready, he picked up a headset and plugged it into a spare socket. Without the benefit of neuronics, the Hammer relied heavily on voice-activated systems with touch screens as a backup, and so he was going to have to talk to the damn thing nicely and hope it cooperated.
Ten minutes later, he breathed a huge sigh of relief. Things definitely were going their way. Not much had changed since the last war, and when he had made a mistake, the lander’s control system had prompted him helpfully to do the right thing. Best of all, when it came to security, there was none. Not a damn thing. No identity checks, no password protection, nothing. If one knew what to do, the lander was wide open, and if one did not, the system would supply a prompt. The Hammers clearly assumed that their landers were secure enough behind walls of razor wire protected by dopey, halfasleep lance corporals.
Well, they were about to find out that was a bad mistake, Michael thought, a really bad mistake.
Michael took a deep breath. The assault lander was flightready. He scanned the command holovids one last time. Propulsion, flight control, navigation, weapons, threat warning, target management-all systems were ready to go.
He brought the lander’s two fusion plants online, the lander trembling slightly as cooling pumps kicked in. “Okay to go?” he called across to Yazdi.
“Much as I’ll ever be,” she replied with a nervous smile. Michael grinned. He knew she hated landers. She only tolerated them, she said; they were a necessary evil, useful only for getting marines down dirtside quickly so that they could get on with what they did best-killing people.
“Off we go, then.”
Tapping the brakes off, Michael nudged the lander’s main engine throttles forward gently. Slowly, reluctantly at first, the lander eased onto the taxiway. Once it was clear of the other landers, Michael turned the lander to face along the length of the flight line and stamped on the brakes.
“Right, Corporal Yazdi.” Michael’s command overrode the safety interlocks that prevented the cannons from operating when the lander was on the ground. “Let them know we mean business! Weapons free.”
“Roger that.”
“Let’s go.”
Michael mashed the throttle levers forward, the lander shuddering as raw power ripped the air behind it apart. He released the brakes, and the assault lander accelerated hard down the taxiway past the flight lines and their neatly parked aircraft. Yazdi opened up, the fuselage shaking as depleted-uranium rounds ripped away, the high-pitched buzz-whine of the rotary cannon filling the lander’s command cabin. Michael glanced at Yazdi as she methodically hosed the cannons up and down the flight line. Her teeth were bared in a rictus of sheer animal ferocity. For an airbase that had been empty only a few minutes before, there were suddenly a lot of people around; everywhere, desperate airmen scrambled to get clear of the blizzard of death falling on their heads.
It was carnage, and Michael loved it.
Michael’s headphones were screeching, the panicked voice of the duty controller trying to find out what the hell was going on. Michael ignored him, concentrating hard on keeping the lander’s enormous bulk on the narrow taxiway.
He smiled in grim satisfaction. They were rolling fast now; Yazdi was busy shredding a long line of air superiority fighters, their gleaming plasfiber wing and fuselage panels disintegrating under a vicious hail of cannon fire. One by one, they fragmented into shattered wrecks, their fusion mass driver plants losing containment to explode into vicious white balls of incandescent energy roaring up into the morning sky.
“Kind of them to keep their fusion plants online,” Michael murmured. “Must have planned to go flying today.” They were coming up the serried ranks of ground attack aircraft. Confident that Yazdi knew what she was doing, Michael concentrated on getting the lander safely in the air.
With the end of the taxiway approaching fast, Michael ran the main engines up to emergency power. The lander’s warning systems screeched in protest as its main engines kicked him in the back, the lander climbing sluggishly across the inner perimeter fence. It took Michael a few anxious moments to get used to the sidestick controller, with the lander staggering and wallowing into a shallow climb, but he was relieved to find that it handled much the same as the ones he had trained on. It was heavier and slower to respond, but it did what it was told.
Then things got busy. Michael’s headphones screeched; somebody was awake out there. The radar warning receivers were telling him that Kraneveldt’s close-in air defense radars were coming online. Michael did not hesitate; a voice command launched radar-homing missiles, the radars exploding in plumes of dirty black smoke. A confused and bewildered Hammer air defense command and control was locked into a fatal paralysis of uncertainty and indecision.
Michael accelerated the lander hard but kept it low, bringing it around in a wide turn to run back across the airbase. A second salvo of antiradar missiles raced away to sterilize the base’s remaining air defense sites.
“Hit anything you like, Corp,” Michael urged. “Give them a good hosing. This is our last pass, then we’re gone.”
“Roger that, sir.”
Michael looked quickly across at her again. She was totally focused on the laser designator screen in front of her, teeth bared in ecstasy. A killer doing what she did best, Michael realized. He eased back on the main engines to give Yazdi more time. He lined the lander up for its last run across the base, boiling clouds of dirty gray-black smoke from destroyed aircraft climbing in front of him. Michael flew the lander low across the perimeter wire, the massive machine only meters off the ground. Yazdi opened up again. Twin streams of metal followed the laser designator across the base complex; he could see buildings disappearing in clouds of shredded plasteel, small explosions boiling up and out of the wreckage, men diving desperately for safety as the lander roared past, its fusion-fed main engines ripping the air apart over their heads.
“That’s it,” Michael called, reefing the lander around in a hard left turn, launching another salvo of antiradar missiles to streak away and deal with the latest missile sites to wake up. “See if you can get the base fusion plant on the way past. Should be five clicks, starboard bow. Hundred FedMarks says it’s not protected.” That’s what centuries of beating the crap out of your own people makes you, Michael thought-arrogant, careless, always taking things for granted. Well, the Hammers were about to find out what a mistake that was. A quick check confirmed that the plant’s air defense radars were not even online. He pushed the throttles forward. It was time to go.
The lander roared past the base power plant, and Yazdi did what she had to do. The plant’s ceramcrete outer skin and inner ceramsteel shell were no match for the hypervelocity depleted-uranium slugs laid down by the lander’s cannons. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, with a blast that threw the lander violently onto its side, the plant went up in a huge white flash. A towering column of superheated gray-white smoke shot through with writhing, swirling red flames climbed hundreds of meters high, urged on by the plant’s auxiliary systems as they, too, succumbed to Yazdi’s cannon fire. Finally, they were past and the cannon fell silent.
“Waaah!” Yazdi hissed breathlessly, engrossed in the holovid from the lander’s aft-facing holocam. What once had been a fully operational Hammer airbase fell away behind them, a shattered, smoking ruin. “That was awesome.”
“Good work. Now let’s see if we can get away with it.” Michael pulled the nose up sharply, the lander’s enormous power driving it through the sound barrier and well beyond, passing through the clouds and up into a brilliantly blue sky. Finally he leveled off and eased back on the power. If he did not, the lander would be in orbit and. .
Michael cursed out loud as he shoved the lander’s nose down hard, the sudden negative g-force shoving him hard against his safety harness.
“Oh, Jesus. What the hell are you doing?” Yazdi protested. Michael ignored her and kept cursing. He had completely forgotten the Hammer’s battlesats. Climb too high and the lander would be easy meat without the planet’s atmosphere to take the edge off the enormous power of the battlesats’ ship-killing lasers. They had not been hit yet, which he could only attribute to confusion in the Hammer command hierarchy. Initiative was not a trait much encouraged in Hammer subordinate commanders, and Michael thanked God for that, driving the lander in a plunging dive to safety below the thick gray mat of cloud.
The lander punched through the cloud, and the ground reappeared, closing at a truly frightening rate. Michael chopped the power and pulled the nose up sharply to aerobrake the lander to a more reasonable speed, the violent maneuver bringing yet more protests from the long-suffering Yazdi. She was not the only one who was upset. The lander’s flight management system was beginning to get pissed, too, and the endless warnings-terrain, overspeed, wing loading, hull loading, engine overthrust, vectored thrust nozzles overtemp-were getting to be a real pain in the ass. Even as Michael reminded himself that there was no point going so fast that he’d hit an object bigger and stronger than the lander, he flinched. Something extremely large-it looked remarkably like a rocky, snowcapped mountain peak-had flashed past below the lander’s port wing. “Ouch, that was close,” he muttered. Maybe he should listen to some of the warnings the lander was throwing at him.
He pulled the lander up to a safe altitude, tucking it just below the layer of thick cloud that protected them from orbiting battlesats and their ship-killing lasers. Easing the throttles forward, he settled the lander down to run fast, straight, and level on a course direct for McNair. The good news was that the lander’s long-range search radar was working faultlessly. So far, apart from commercial traffic, there was not one military aircraft in the skies around them.
Barely a minute later, that changed in a hurry. First one, then five more contacts popped onto the holovid display, his headphones warbling to report multiple search radar intercepts. Damn, Michael thought, squinting at the command pilot’s primary holovid. Judging by their speed and rate of climb, they had to be air superiority fighters, probably Kingfishers from the O’Connor Marine Base south of New Berlin; an instant later, the lander’s threat management system confirmed the intercepts as Kingfisher search radars.
Tough as the lander was, it would be no match for a Kingfisher’s heavy long-range air-to-air missiles. What he needed now was speed. He needed to keep the buggers as far away as possible for as long as he could. Slamming the throttles hard onto the stops, he pulled the lander up into a shallow climb, the speed picking up rapidly as clouds swallowed the lander.
“Corp!”
“Sir?”
“Okay. They’re on to us. Air superiority fighters. Six of them. By my reckoning”-Michael did a quick bit of mental arithmetic-“they’ll be close enough to launch missiles in a matter of minutes. So hang on. This is going to be rough.”
“Roger that,” Yazdi replied without enthusiasm.
Anxiously, Michael watched the hostiles closing in from the west. They were joined minutes later by four more coming from the north, probably from one of the bases that ringed McNair: more Kingfishers probably.
Things were getting tricky. The lander was about to become a flying death trap; the only safe place for them was on the ground. They would be cold and hungry, true, but at least they would be safe. For the moment, that was all Michael cared about.
“Hang on. I’m putting down,” he shouted. He pitched the lander downward, the negative g-force setting off a barrage of alarms. He ignored them as the lander drove down hard in a desperate dive for the safety of the sheer-sided valleys that cut through the mountains below. Then, as Yazdi closed her eyes, unable to look at the awful sight of rock walls screaming past only meters from the lander’s left wingtip, Michael cut the power and pulled up the nose sharply. Holding the lander on its tail, he fired belly thrusters, and the lander, protesting loudly at the appalling way it was being treated, began to lose speed rapidly as it came into a hover.
They almost made it, but Michael had left it a minute too late.
The instant he got the lander stable above the only flat piece of ground he could find and lowered the undercarriage, the first Hammer missile, swooping down on them at hypersonic speed, smashed into the lander aft of the port main engine. The shock of the impact hammered the lander’s tail down, with the missile’s boosted high-explosive warhead and residual kinetic energy ripping most of the lander’s port quarter to shreds. Desperately, Michael struggled to regain control, the lander sagging and wallowing, a hairbreadth away from rolling over, the mountainside now dangerously close to their left wing and getting closer by the second. With the shock-damaged port main engine struggling to stay online-Michael had diverted what little power he could get out of it down to the lander’s belly thrusters-he somehow got enough control back to walk the lander away from the mountainside. He did not mess around; he did not have the time to. Chopping power, he let the lander drop like a stone for a second before ramming the throttles back up to full power, the efflux from the belly thrusters incinerating the ground below them. Great clouds of rock and steam billowed up around them in a massive roiling column.
Probably it was the cloud of ionized rock and water that saved them. In its terminal dive, the second missile lost lock only seconds away from impact, enough to drift fractionally off target to slice through the base of the lander’s port wing. The warhead exploded in a huge ball of flame on the ground below, the blast smashing the lander into an uncontrolled roll to starboard and into the ground. Michael winced as the armored hull absorbed the impact of the explosion.
Then the lander hit hard. The impact was much harder than Michael had expected, the shock whipping him violently from one side to the other, his unprotected head slamming back into the headrest with sickening force as the lander bounced one last time before coming to a stop. Blood from a new cut to his head ran down the side of his face. For a moment he teetered on the edge of unconsciousness, waves of foggy blackness threatening and then receding. Head spinning and ears ringing, he struggled out of his harness, slapping the emergency button to blow out the lander’s doors and hatches. Yazdi was slumped forward in her harness. She looked half-dead, a long gash in the side of her head gushing blood all over the place.
Michael ripped her harness off. Grabbing her, he half dragged, half carried her to the ladder. With one hand on her collar, he pushed her through the hatch, hanging on as long as he could before her dead weight took over. He dropped her-he did not have much choice-and she fell with a dull thud to the main cargo deck below.
Pausing only to retrieve their packs and the long-dead DocSec trooper’s gun, Michael dropped into the payload bay. Somehow he got outside, the air stinking of burned rock and acrid with explosive residue, hot gas and steam still rising from the glassy black patch of flame-scorched ground below the lander. Michael looked around in frantic, heart-pounding desperation. Kingfisher air superiority fighters might not have been built for ground attack, but they carried cannon. He and Yazdi had to get clear-now.
Michael found what he was looking for: a small copse upstream, a wind-battered collection of pines clustered around a large boulder-strewn outcrop. It would have to do. With strength born of desperation, he heaved Yazdi over his shoulder, thanking God that she was so small as he struggled onehanded to get his chromaflage cape across them.
With a deep breath, he set off in an awkward shuffling run, head down, with one hand holding Yazdi firmly on his shoulder, the other gripping their packs and his gun. His lungs were heaving as he forced himself to keep going. The terrible fear of falling into the Hammer’s hands again drove him on.
They barely had made it to the copse when the first Kingfisher howled overhead. The rest followed a minute later, the air above ripped into ear-shattering shreds as one after another they climbed under full power over the smoking wreckage of the lander. Trusting that his chromaflage cape would keep the two of them safe from the Kingfishers’ optronics, he staggered on, heart pounding and legs burning, scrambling and scrabbling over broken rocks up into the heart of the copse. A massive slab had split off to form a shallow, flatroofed cave, its entrance protected by the huge boulder keeping it off the ground. It would have to do, and Michael gratefully dumped Yazdi’s dead weight onto the ground, sliding around her to pull her inert body into the cave.
He could not see the lander, only a small patch of sky; he watched the Kingfishers run up the valley in line ahead. One after the other, they raked the lander with withering cannon fire until, with a blinding flash of ultraviolet and an earthshattering crump, the lander’s fusion plants lost containment and the entire craft went up in a towering pillar of gray-white smoke. For one awful moment, Michael thought the huge slab of rock would drop onto their heads, as the shock wave lifted the slab up a few centimeters before dropping it back. After one last pass and more cannon fire for good measure, the Kingfishers left, climbing nearly vertically under full power, their sound and fury fading slowly into the distance.
For a full two minutes-it seemed like a lifetime-he lay still. He did not want to leave, and only the nagging fear of being recaptured got him moving again. He turned to see how Yazdi was doing. She groaned; her eyes opened, unfocused and glazed, as she struggled to get a grip on reality.
“Corp, Corp!” Michael hissed urgently. “Corporal Yazdi! We’ve got to go.”
Slowly, Yazdi came to. She stared up at him, her face a waxy gray under a thin sheen of sweat cut through by red-black trails of blood from a badly gashed forehead.
“Fuck,” she croaked, “you look like I feel.”
“Welcome back, Corp,” Michael whispered. He struggled to keep the concern out of his voice. Yazdi did not look good. “Don’t worry about me. Only a few cuts. How do you feel?”
Yazdi took a long time to reply, her voice slurred and faltering when she finally spoke. “Piss weak. Headache. Can’t see too well. Ribs bad. Feel sick. Give me a minute. I’ll be okay.” She tried to sound confident but failed miserably.
“Let me check.” He accessed her neuronics, then wished he hadn’t. Her vital signs were all in the red. A brain bleed probably, Michael thought. Yazdi needed a regen tank, and soon. Michael smashed a fist onto the ground. There was not a damn thing he could do to help her.
“Corp,” he said. “We can’t stay here. We’re too close to the crash site. We have to go. Can you walk?”
“Probably not,” Yazdi said, a crooked smile breaking through her pain, “but I am a marine, so I will, anyway. Help me out of this stinking rat hole.”
A few minutes later and after a drink of water, Yazdi was as ready as she would ever be. Leaning heavily on Michael, she started to walk.
They almost made it out of the valley.
Yazdi struggled from the start. Approaching the shallow saddle that led away from the crash site, her body sagged heavier and heavier against him. Michael could feel her strength ebbing away with terrible speed. He pushed on, desperate to get clear.
Without warning, Yazdi slipped out of his grasp and slumped to the ground. The climb had been too much for her. “Sorry,” she said softly. “Sorry, can’t do this. Got to. .” Her eyes closed, her head rolling to one side.
A quick look and Michael knew they could not go on. Yazdi’s face was a dirty gray death mask, her breathing shallow and ragged as she drifted in and out of consciousness, mumbling incoherently.
Michael cursed savagely under his breath as he dragged her into the shelter of a hollow protected by two creeperdraped boulders.
Quickly, with Yazdi settled, he pulled his cape off his shoulders. Dragging Yazdi’s cape out of her pack, he lay down beside her, pulling the two chromaflage capes across their bodies. A quick check confirmed that the capes looked like the dirty gray dirt below them. He lay back. There was nothing more he could do now-not for Yazdi, not for himself. Michael did not like their chances. If they were found, they would not see another Commitment day; after the humiliation they had inflicted on the Hammer, a quick shot to the head was probably the only offer they would get from DocSec. He smiled grimly. Truth was, a shot to the head probably would be for the best. He could do without another meeting with Colonel Hartspring and his sadistic sergeant. What was his name? Oh, yes, Sergeant Jacobsen, may he rot in hell. He closed his eyes and tried to doze off.
All too soon the sound of heavy-lift transporters began to fill the valley.