Gwalia Road, Commitment
Shinoda commed Michael. “Just received the final go code from ENCOMM,” she said. “J-Hour is confirmed for 04:00 Universal. So let me see; yes, that’s just on dusk local time.”
Finally, Michael thought. Finally, the beginning of what I really hope will be the end. He cycled through each of the holocams in turn. “About time,” he replied.
“Any sign of life?”
“There’s still nothing moving.” The road was empty in both directions and had been since the last changeover of the base’s watch keepers. Shit! Michael thought with a twinge of panic. We’ve missed something important, very important. “I think we might have a snag, sergeant,” he said.
“A snag?”
“As soon as the shit hits the fan, the missile base will to go from OPSTAT-4 to OPSTAT-5, and our man will come tearing down the road, right?”
“Which is why we’re both here, sir,” Shinoda said. She sounded irritated.
“But we haven’t seen the base go to OPSTAT-5, have we?”
“Not while we’ve been here, no. Why does that matter?”
“OPSTAT-5 is the same as our general quarters,” Michael said, “and that means all the Hammers not on watch have to get back to base to do whatever they do when they’re at general quarters. So when Juggernaut kicks off-”
“I get it, I get it!’ Shinoda said, cutting him off. “We’ll not only see Colonel Farrah, we’ll have every man and his fucking dog coming down the road at us. How could I have missed that?”
“Doesn’t matter. Question is what we do now.”
Shinoda went quiet for a moment. “I know what General Vaas said,” she said softly, “but I think we should do what we came to do.”
“But the road will be thick with truckloads of PGDF troopers,” he said. “I know what Vaas would say.”
“So do I, but we’re here to take out Farrah, and we can do that no matter how many trucks there are. What happens after that …” Shinoda’s voice slid into an uneasy silence.
“It’s suicide,” Michael said.
“Shit happens. But General Vaas isn’t here, so it’s your call. If you tell me to abort, we’ll abort.”
We should abort, Michael thought. We’ll never get away alive.
He took a deep breath. “No,” he said even though he knew he had almost certainly signed their death warrants. “We’ll stay. We can’t walk away from this, not now.”
“I agree,” Shinoda said. “Now, let me see … Yeah, we need to change things to give us a decent chance of getting away. I’m coming to you.”
A fleeting ripple shimmered its way toward him. Shinoda eased herself down beside him. “Right,” she said. “I’ll watch the holovids. When Farrah appears, I’ll take him from here. You get back to the base of the reef. See that boulder?”
“The one sticking out of the reef with the trees in front?”
“Yup. Dig in there. You’ll flank any PGDF brave enough to try and rush me. These are not frontline troops, so they’ll almost certainly fall back to the other side of the road when we hit them. The moment I’ve dealt with Farrah, we need to pull back along the reef. If we can do that before the Hammers get their shit together, we might just make it.”
“Not back to the bot?”
“No. The ground’s way too open, and more than likely there’ll be more truckbots coming up the road. And remember, when I move, you go too. No heroics; just run like hell. Clear?”
“Yes, sergeant.”
“Well, what are you waiting for? Go!”
Michael was dug in beneath the overhang of a massive boulder. He stared out down the road, a thin ribbon of silver-gray in the evening light that lanced down between towering thunderheads, harbingers of yet another storm.
“Stand by.” Shinoda’s voice came as a shock, so intense was his concentration. “One truck. Let it go.”
“Let it go, roger.”
The vehicle tore past, tires squealing and scrubbing as it hit the corner so fast that Michael thought it might roll over. Somehow it stayed upright. It left the corner and accelerated hard toward the base, giving Michael a clear view of the PGDF troopers packed into the back. They were all in combat gear and carried assault rifles. No, not all, he thought. One of them has a KAF-08 machine gun upright between his legs.
His heart sank. What he’d seen wasn’t a bunch of seat polishers, people who spent their time tweaking missiles or buried in bunkers staring at tactical displays, punching buttons. No, they were security troops. They might not be marines, but they would know what they were doing.
“Vehicles inbound … stand by … okay,” Shinoda said. “I have a red mobibot … Yes, image scan confirms that’s our man. Oh, shit. He’s got two trucks right behind him. Okay, here’s the plan. Open fire when I do. Put a long burst into the target, then shift your fire to the lead truck. Don’t let it get too close to us.”
“One burst on the target, then shift to the lead truck, roger.”
Michael wiped the sweat from his hands, then tightened his grip on the battered assault rifle and peered down the road through the stabilized optical sight.
“Yes,” Michael hissed when Colonel Farrah’s red mobibot appeared. The man was clearly visible through the plasglass windshield. He was talking animatedly to the three other occupants of the bot. “Bad day to ask for a lift from the boss, boys,” he whispered.
The moment the mobibot slowed into the curve, Shinoda opened fire. Michael followed suit an instant later. The windshield disintegrated into a maelstrom of shattered plasglass, but the mobibot kept coming despite the hail of hypersonic rounds tearing it apart. Then its snout bobbed as the emergency brakes bit. It slid to a stop in a screech of tortured tires, a smoking, shredded shambles, the bodies of the men inside thrown forward in bloody ruins.
Michael shifted fire. He settled his optical sight on the cab of the oncoming truckbot. Its sole occupant stared open-mouthed at the carnage ahead. Michael squeezed the trigger and put two rounds into the man’s face, dropped his aim to put a long burst into the engine compartment, and emptied the last of his magazine into the camouflaged cover over the truck bed. The truckbot wobbled and swayed before it too shuddered to a halt, but not before its nose had rammed into the bullet-ridden wreck of Colonel Farrah’s mobibot and shunted it another 20 meters down the road.
Michael changed magazines and returned to the attack. A blizzard of fire flayed the truck and anyone stupid enough to try to get to his side of the road. But the Hammers were getting their act together. A significant amount of fire was already coming his way, and now the heavy chatter of machine gun fire joined the assault rifles. Rounds smashed at the rocks around him. Razor-sharp fragments of rock spalled off the rocks around him, stinging and burning when they hit his arms and face. The noise and confusion grew. Microgrenades arced across the road and exploded with ear-splitting cracks that filled the air with dust and the acrid smell of high explosive.
The mobibot’s microfusion plant blew, followed an instant later by the truck’s; the two blue-white balls of light and fire hurled debris in all directions. The concussion was so violent that it picked Michael up and threw him bodily backward; he was left stunned and deafened.
For a moment there was a silence. The respite did not last. The Hammers resumed their attack with full fury.
With an effort, Michael forced his brain back to work. He swore under his breath as he watched the second truck screech to a halt. Troopers spilled out of the back. Michael sent a hail of fire into them, chasing the men off the road into cover. But it was hopeless; there were simply too many of them, and they knew what they were doing. Under cover of heavy suppressing fire, Michael could see one group working its way left past the wreckage of the mobibot; a second was moving to his right. They’re flanking us, he said to himself. Come on, Sergeant Shinoda; it’s time to move.
Shinoda had been listening; she stopped firing. Michael put a single sustained burst into the Hammers, then squirmed and rolled away He scrambled to his feet and ran around the base of the reef to where Shinoda waited. He shot past her. “Go!” he shouted over the noise as he led the way along the path he had scouted earlier. The volume of fire thrown at them dropped off as they moved away from the road.
A Hammer drone arrived and settled into orbit overhead. Within seconds, hostile fire flayed the air around them and microgrenades ripped ground and vegetation apart. Michael flinched as a wayward round tore at his hair and a second seared an agonizing path across his left shoulder, the pain short-lived as his neuronics dumped neural blockers and painkillers into his system.
“Bastards saw us,” Shinoda yelled.
“No kidding,” Michael muttered. He forced his body to run harder. Now he jinked and swerved around rocks and trees. Shredded leaves and branches rained down on his head as the volume of fire intensified.
“Dumb fucks are letting that drone get way too low,” Shinoda shouted. “We can take it, but we’ll only get one chance, so make it count.”
“Got it,” Michael said. The drone was impossible to miss; its 4-meter wingspan and chunky body orbited barely 200 meters overhead.
“On three … one, two, three!”
Michael skidded to a stop. He swung his rifle up, struggling to keep it steady with only one arm. His sight locked onto the drone, and he pulled the trigger the instant the red aiming point settled, his burst joining Shinoda’s. Their rounds smashed home even as the controller sent the drone rocketing skyward. “Fuck it,” Michael said. “We’ve miss-”
They hadn’t missed. With a sharp crack, the drone’s microfusion plant lost containment in an eye-searingly bright ball of blue-white light that bleached all the color and contrast out of the bush around him.
“Nice shooting,” Shinoda said. “Now go!”
Michael needed no encouragement. The Hammers would have more drones backed up by ground-attack landers on the way, and they’d almost certainly put a blocking force ahead of them. On he ran; his mouth gaped wide open as he fought to feed air to lungs that screamed in protest. All that mattered was to keep moving. If there were drones overhead, if the Hammers were getting close, if he was being shot at, he neither knew nor cared. Shinoda led the way now; her pace was relentless, and Michael knew he had to keep up with her. She was all that kept him moving. If he fell back, he was finished.
Without warning, the ground only meters ahead of them vanished beneath a hail of destruction that shattered everything in their path. Their headlong rush to safety came to an abrupt halt as they scrambled for cover.
“Lander-” Shinoda shouted before the howling roar of a light attack lander swamped the rest of her words. The blast from its main engines ripped the air apart over their heads. Its huge black bulk banked and climbed away under full power to clear the reef, its starboard wingtip so close that Michael felt he could almost reach out and touch it. “We’re trapped,” Shinoda went on once the lander had gone. “If we keep moving, they’ll spot us.”
“So what do we do?”
“Best we can do is go to ground,” Shinoda said. She turned to head for the tumbled mass of boulders that fringed the base of the rock reef. “Come on; this way.”
“That’ll work?” Michael asked with a frown.
“I doubt it, but I can’t think of anything better. Here,” she said. She squeezed herself into a narrow fissure between two huge rocks. “This will do.”
“So what’s the plan?” Michael said as he followed her in, wriggling and pushing. The crack was tight. He had to roll onto his side to keep his injured shoulder off the rock wall, praying as he went that none of the Hammers had seen them vanish.
“Hopefully they don’t know we’re here,” Shinoda said, gasping for air, “but if they do, then we’ll just have to take as many of them with us as we can.”
“That’s one hell of a plan,” Michael whispered. He lay facedown in the dust to let his legs and lungs recover. With an effort, he lifted his head to look around. Shinoda had picked well. A massive boulder protected them. It lay propped against the rock wall, leaving a clear space a couple of meters wide.
Shinoda had wormed her way over to a second split in the rock and worked her way into it. She pulled back. “Too small to get through,” she called over her shoulder, “but a great firing position.”
Which means, Michael thought, our only way out is the way we came in.
They were trapped. This was the end. There had to be at least forty PGDF troopers in those first two trucks. Even allowing for casualties, he and Shinoda were badly outnumbered, and that was before reinforcements turned up. As they would. And when they did, it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed.
Shinoda rolled over and sat up. Her shoulders heaved. “Fuck me dead,” she muttered, “I never want to do that again.” She turned. “We’ll-oh, crap,” she whispered when she saw the blood-drenched mess that was Michael’s left shoulder. “When did that happen?” she asked.
“A while ago,” Michael said, “but it’s not as bad as it looks.”
“Let me see,” Shinoda said. She crouched down, knife in hand, and sliced the arm of his shirt open. “Hmm, you’re right; it’s nothing too serious. I’ll get foam and a field dressing on it,” she went on, rummaging through her pack.
“Shiiiit!” Michael hissed through clenched teeth as the woundfoam seared its way into the wound. “Hey, watch it! That stuff hurts.”
Shinoda took no notice of Michael’s protests. She secured the dressing and patted him on the cheek. “That’ll do for now,” she said. “Okay, pay attention. You cover left, I’ll cover right, and remember: Let your chromaflage and this baby-” She patted the rock. “-do the work. Move as little as possible and let me know if anyone looks like he’s going to cause us problems. And do not open fire until I tell you to, understood?”
“Got it.”
Michael ignored his shoulder. Thanks to the drugs his neuronics had dumped into his system, it no longer hurt, but it was stiffening fast; his arm was now all but useless. He dragged himself back to the lip of the narrow cleft they had used to get in. He adjusted his chromaflage cape until only a slit for his eyes remained open and raised his head one millimeter at a time to look outside. He scanned the ground for any signs of the Hammers. There were none visible through the scrappy mix of trees and stunted bushes that fell away down the shallow slope in front of their position. He shunted his neuronics vision processor down into the infrared to check the deepening shadows thrown by the last of the evening light. Still nothing.
He eased back a fraction. “All clear here,” he whispered.
“And this side. Keep watching.”
“Roger,’ Michael said, resuming his scan. Shinoda did not need to tell him what it all meant. Ether the Hammers had pulled back or they were leaving the lander to-
With no warning, Michael’s world exploded. He was galvanized back under cover as cannon shells pulverized the rock. The air turned into a maelstrom of noise and dust. Fragments of rock tore at the arms he had thrown over his head. And then it was quiet. The only sound was the ringing in his ears.
He turned. Shinoda was shouting; he struggled to make sense of her words. “… they’ll come for us now,” she was saying, “but only open fire when I tell you to. And switch your neuronics on. They know where we are now.”
“Yes, sergeant,” he croaked, his mouth and throat choked with dust. This is not good, he thought when he saw what was headed their way. The men were visible because their chromaflage discipline was so poor. Michael’s finger twitched on the trigger of his assault rifle in nervous anticipation. After a while, he stopped counting the number of Hammers working their way forward; all that mattered now was that there were a lot of them. And there’d be many more he couldn’t see.
“Stand by,” Shinoda said. “You take the group moving across to your left. Stand by-now!”
Michael opened fire. His first rounds hit a trooper in the head as he belly crawled forward; the man slumped facedown onto the ground. Michael shifted aim, dropped another shape, and was moving to his third when retribution arrived, a withering barrage of machine gun fire and microgrenades that forced him back, horribly aware of how bad their tactical situation was. They were pinned down, and it was only a matter of time before one of the Hammers got lucky and dropped a microgrenade down his throat. He tried not to think what that would do to him and Shinoda.
He failed.
But until then, he vowed, he’d take as many of the Hammers as he could. He pushed his rifle over the lip of the entrance and loosed a few rounds at random. That provoked another storm of bullets and microgrenades that forced him back again. “We have to move,” he shouted over the steady tap-tap of Shinoda’s rifle.
“No kidding, Einstein,” Shinoda shouted back. “But where the fuck to?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Michael muttered. Since it was only a matter of time before the Hammers got lucky anyway, he decided to not to worry about all the crap they were sending his way. He ignored the incoming fire and pushed himself back up so he could work his rifle along the lines of advancing men. “You scumsuckers!” he shouted. He dropped a Hammer, then another. “We’re not dead yet!”
His abuse sparked off another furious response. The air in front of Michael’s position filled with bullets and the black shapes of microgrenades. One headed right for him, and time slowed to a crawl. He watched in horrified fascination as the grenade grew bigger, a gray blur against the evening sky.
Exactly what provoked Michael to do what he did, he would never know, but without a moment’s thought he burst out of cover. That was what he tried to do, but his left arm refused to play along. He ended up half rolling, half staggering down the short, dusty slope in front of the boulder only a heartbeat before the microgrenade flew over his head. It buried itself in the loose dirt and exploded with a shattering crack.
It was the dirt that saved him. It absorbed the microgrenade’s lethal gift of shrapnel. That and the blast; it blasted a ball of dust outward, forcing the Hammers to fire blind. Bullets plucked at Michael’s body as he wriggled and squirmed to get away in a frantic, floundering scramble toward a fragmentary image lodged in his memory, the image of an opening between two boulders somewhere in the confusion to his left.
His hand felt the hole before he saw it; without a second’s thought, he rammed his body into the opening, chased into safety by wayward bullets. One, its energy almost spent ricocheting off rock, slashed his forehead open. The cut sent blood curtaining down across his face, hot and sticky. He rolled into the back wall of the hole and lay there, wiping the blood out of his eyes.
Shinoda popped into his neuronics. “Where the fuck did you go?” she said, her voice overlaid by the methodical double tap of her rifle.
“Five meters to your right, I think,” Michael said. He wormed his way around to peer out of the hole. “Had to move; a Hammer grenade had my name on it.”
“I’m not sure what they’re up to,” Shinoda said. “They seem to have fallen back …”
Now that Shinoda mentioned it, Michael realized that nobody was shooting at him anymore.
“… which means they’re regrouping. I think they’ll bring the lander in to give us another dose of cannon fire.” Michael swore under his breath; for an instant he had allowed himself to think the Hammers might have had enough. “Then they’ll move in again.”
“Can we move?”
“No point. They’ll have us covered.”
“Shit.”
“Shit is right. Keep your head down until the lander’s gone, then just do the best you can.”
“Will do.” Michael checked Shinoda’s biostats. “You okay?” he asked. “Your blood pressure’s a bit low.”
“Losing a shitload of blood does that to you. Bastards got me in the right arm. But I’ll be fine. I’ve got woundfoam and a dressing on it. Brace yourself. I think I see the lander, and the son of a bitch is coming right for us.”
Michael slithered to the back of his hole and curled himself into a ball. He tried not to think what even a single 30-millleter hypersonic cannon shell would do to his body. Then the attack was on them, and Michael’s world dissolved into more noise and dust and pain as a rock splinters sliced into him. And when he thought it could get no worse, the air turned a blinding white. An instant later, the ground rammed him bodily upward-he swore the rock he was huddled up against moved as well-and then there was silence, a strange, flat quiet broken only by the skittering of pebbles falling around him. “Sergeant! What-”
Something hard, something unseen, something silent smashed into him and battered his body into unconsciousness.
“Colonel, come on. Wake up, Colonel! Hey! Come on.”
Colonel? Michael wondered. What colonel?
“Talk to me, you overpromoted asswipe.”
Overpromoted asswipe? Michael thought. That does it. With an effort, he forced his blood-encrusted eyes open and looked up into Shinoda’s face. “I’m going to have you court-martialed for insolence,” he rasped.
Shinoda pulled Michael upright and pushed a water tube into his mouth. “Be my guest,” she said with a lopsided grin, “but what makes you think we’re going to live long enough?”
“How long was I out?”
“Couple of minutes.”
“What the hell just happened?”
“Juggernaut, that’s what. I think the good guys just took out Gwalia.”
“Gwalia?” Michael frowned. He shook his head to try to clear the mush from his brain. “But the missile base wasn’t on the target list. It’s too far north to be a priority.”
“Maybe Admiral Moussawi changed his mind about that. Anyway, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Whatever it was, it didn’t do the bad guys any favors.”
“They’re gone?”
“Not gone, dead. I don’t think they’ll bother us anymore. Anyway, it’s time we moved on. Can you stand?”
“Get me free of this damn hole and I will.”
Michael’s mouth dropped open when he saw the damage the blast had done. In every direction, the sparse vegetation had been stripped. The ground was littered with shattered trunks and shrubs piled in haphazard heaps along the foot of the reef wall. A body lay wrapped around a tree stump. More were scattered across the dirt. “What the hell,” he whispered, awestruck by the devastation.
“No time for sightseeing,” Shinoda said. She pulled Michael to his feet. He stood, swaying and unsteady. “The Hammers will be mighty pissed by all this, and I don’t want to be here when they arrive to see what the hell just happened.”
“Wait one,” Michael said. He pointed to an object, a white splash in his neuronics-boosted infrared vision, something hot against the cool of the ground. “There; what’s that?”
“Does it matter? We do need to go.”
“Bear with me, sergeant. I’ve a got a bad feeling about this.”
“Five minutes.”
“Two will be plenty.” Michael walked over to where the object lay. It was a jagged piece of flame-seared metal. He tried to lift it; it refused to move. “Shit, that is heavy,” he said. “Ceramsteel armor, I’d say.”
Shinoda frowned. “Ceramsteel armor?” she said. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“A warship, I think.” Michael straightened up and scanned the area around the piece of armor. “There,” he said. He set off through the debris. He stopped alongside a second piece of metal. “Damn them all to hell,” he said softly a moment later.
“What’s up?”
“See those?” Michael pointed to a meter-square cluster of holes punched into the metal fragment. “Those are pinchspace vortex generator ports.”
“So?”
“Hammer ports are hexagonal; ours are circular.’
“Oh!” Shinoda breathed in sharply. “One of ours?”
“From the size of the array, I’d say a deepspace heavy cruiser. Fucking Hammer bastards. Have a quick look around. It’d be good to identify her if we can.”
“Here,” Shinoda called out a minute later. She waved Michael over.
“What … Oh, no,” Michael said when he spotted the distinctive shape of a skinsuited body. “Who is it?”
Shinoda bent down to turn the body over. Michael was thankful that the helmet visor was so scorched and scarred that he could not see the face. “Chief Petty Officer … N … g … u … Nguyen,” she said, reading the name woven into the suit with some difficulty. “Poor bastard. Let me see if I can access the ID. Okay, she was Chief Petty Officer Maddi Nguyen, female, thirty-seven years old, posted to the Recognizant two years ago.”
Michael’s head snapped up in disbelief. “Did you say Recognizant?”
“I did.”
Michael shook his head in despair. “Recognizant was Admiral Moussawi’s ship.” He took a deep breath to fight back a sudden rush of anger. “Let’s go, sergeant. There’s nothing more we can do for any of them.”
They set off without another word, a pair of smoke-blackened, blood-soaked wrecks. What a sight we must be, Michael thought. And how will we stay out of the Hammer’s hands? We’ll be lucky to get ten klicks …
He stopped. “Sergeant, hold on.”
Shinoda looked around. “What’s up?” she asked.
“Look at the blast pattern,” Michael said. “The way the trees are lying, I’d say the Recognizant blew up somewhere to the northwest and was close to the ground when she did. That means the reef will have deflected some of the blast wave. Our mobibot was in a gully. It might still be there.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Shinoda said. “Let’s go see.”
The approaches to Gwalia were a sprawling master class in mindless devastation; the town itself was not much better.
“This’ll teach the bastards to fuck with us,” was all Shinoda said as they were waved through a DocSec security point without so much as a cursory ID check. They rolled on through the Grand Plaza. It was a rubble- and rubbish-strewn wasteland lit with clusters of arc lights. The temple to the might and power of the Hammer of Kraa had been reduced to a mound of debris, and everywhere emergency services teams were crawling over the ruins looking for survivors. Michael felt like cheering at the sight.
Just past the edge of the town, the mobibot came to a stop behind a line of mobibots drawn up at another DocSec checkpoint. The troopers were visible only as black cutouts against their mobibots’ headlights.
“Looking for looters?” Michael said.
“I reckon,” Shinoda said. “Some people can’t help themselves. Hey, what’s happening?”
“I don’t believe it,” Michael said.
Three DocSec troopers were laying into the occupants of the first bot with boots and truncheons. It was a merciless attack. Deep inside Michael something snapped. “Screw this,” he snarled. He reached for his rifle with his good arm and climbed out of the bot. He tucked the butt of the rifle under his armpit. I hope those DocSec pigs don’t fight back, he thought. We’d have trouble dealing with a bunch of schoolkids. “You coming?” he asked Shinoda.
“Just try to stop me,” the sergeant replied.
Faces stared open-mouthed at the two blood-soaked apparitions. Michael and Shinoda walked down the line of bots to where the DocSec troopers were kicking the life out of the three people on the ground.
“Hey, assholes!” Michael shouted. He lifted the barrel of his rifle to cover the men.
The troopers stopped and looked around. “Who the fuck are you?” one of them snarled.
“We’re NRA,” Michael said, his voice flat, “and you’re dead.”
The troopers reached for their pistols. They were three seconds too slow. With clinical efficiency, Michael and Shinoda shot the men. The impact toppled the troopers away and onto their backs. Shinoda walked over. She took a pistol from a dead fist. She checked each man in turn and dispatched the two who were still alive with single shots to the head.
She stood back and spit on the ground. “DocSec scum,” she said flatly.
Michael turned. “Go,” he shouted at the line of bots. “You weren’t here, but never forget that the NRA is your best and only hope of destroying Doctrinal Security. Now go!”
For a moment nobody moved. Then, one after another, the bots accelerated away. Their occupants, wide-eyed with fear, stared back at the specters standing over the dead troopers.
Michael looked around once the last bot had disappeared. “Maybe this wasn’t the smartest thing we could have done,” he said. “What the hell do we do with this lot?”
“We’ll dump the bodies into their bot, then put it on auto and send it to McNair,” Shinoda said. “We’ll be long gone by the time anybody pulls it over.”
Ten backbreaking minutes later, the DocSec vehicle had been dispatched with its grisly load, though not before Michael had stripped the sunburst insignia from their collars, and they were on their way north to Martinsen.
Shinoda’s plan was simple. They would head for the hills, and if DocSec tried to arrest them, they’d blow them aside and keep going. That was one hell of a plan, Michael had said: short, sharp, and simple enough for even the dumbest marine. “That’d be you, sergeant,” he’d added, dodging a halfhearted kick from Shinoda.
The mobibot hummed on into the night. “You look like you’ve had it,” Shinoda said. “I’ll keep an eye on things.”
Michael wanted to argue but could not. He was utterly exhausted. “I’ll take over in two hours, sergeant,” he said.
“Roger that.”
Ten seconds later, Michael was asleep.