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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

City of Nafplio

Planet Odysseus

Bellerophon System

Free Worlds Alliance

January 14, 2553


Sergeant Korina Priscide of the Bellerophon Self Defense Force leaned against the wall of the empty apartment bedroom while sweat seeped down the seals of her body armor. The body glove under it was fresh from stores and still didn’t fit right. New armor normally took a week or so of wear before it was comfortable enough for constant use and optimal performance. Just her luck to be issued a brand-new Mark 12 three days ago.

“Third Squad, you have eyes on the target?” Lieutenant Slovens asked over her earbud.

A private hurried past Priscide into the bedroom and snapped an optic onto the window frame. His well-worn armor was older than the sergeant’s with a slight but noticeable bulge around the middle. Vangelis Agnellis had been called up from the reserves and plugged into Alpha Company to bring it fully up to strength, and his weight had crept a bit over regulation. Fortunately, there was a bit of play built into the Mark 12, so Agnellis’s armor still fit…barely.

“Eyes in place,” he said, and Priscide nodded. The private might be plump and twelve years her senior, but he was also good at his job.

Picture captures flipped up in the upper corner of her visor, showing her the Nafplio Federal Courthouse from multiple dispersed cameras. At least the Feds hadn’t shut down the local police cameras yet, so they hadn’t had to deploy camera drones to get the imagery. In a way, that almost made what Priscide was seeing even more bizarre. She’d already known what the courthouse looked like, but she’d never seen it overlaid with military graphics depicting phase lines and target reference points for mortars.

An Army fire team manned a sandbagged emplacement in front of the building, and the Federation’s flag flew from both flagpoles above it, including the one that would normally have displayed the Bellerophon System’s flag. A Long Eye recon drone hovered above the courthouse, and Priscide bared her teeth in a tight grin as she saw it. Bastards were looking in the wrong direction. Second Platoon had infiltrated into position using the city service tunnels, and one of the first things the SDF had done was to “adjust” the servers that managed the security and safety cameras. They’d planted multiple back doors in all of them, and not just to provide the reconnaissance imagery Priscide was looking at. There was no way to keep the Feds from using the exact same cameras…except for the carefully hidden programs that could command any given camera or group of cameras to loop up to forty minutes of imagery as SDF personnel moved past them. It was unlikely the defenders would be able to get away with that unnoticed for long, but while it lasted…

Nafplio wasn’t anything Priscide would have called a city, and its courthouse wasn’t anything she would have called a critical target. But Nafplio was a fairly large town and the troopers dug in in front of it—and the federal administrator installed inside it—certainly made it a legitimate target. She knew other SDF units were tasked to hit larger targets, and an air defense team from Third Brigade had taken down no less than three Perseus assault shuttles on their approach to the city of Livadeia on the Chalkidiki Peninsula. Beside that, Nafplio was small beer, but that was fine with Priscide.

Bastards don’t have unlimited manpower, especially after Agrino. That means they’ll have to spread themselves thin if they expect to hold us down. And when they do

“Squad leaders.” Lieutenant Slovens’s voice came up in her earbud. “Listen to me. Most of us are veterans. We fought for a Federation that told us it cared for us, that it would protect us and our homeworlds. We found out the hard way that that was a lie . . . those of us who survived. Now our entire star system’s finding out the same thing. The same Federation we fought for killed a quarter million of our people yesterday. What happened to Agrino may have convinced even a butcher like Alaimo to not K-strike more of our cities, but the mass arrests have already started, and we have confirmation of firing squads in Kórinthos and virtually all of the state capitals.

“Any armed combatant you see in there is our enemy. Here to kill us, to enslave us. Remember that.

“That’s why we’re here. We take out the Feds here in Nafplio, and they find out they need bigger detachments to cover their asses outside the major cities. The bigger the detachments, the fewer they can throw out. And if we just happen to acquire a few prisoners of our own to use as bargaining chips, that won’t hurt a damned thing.

“All right, First and Second Squad will clear the holding cells while Third and Fourth—”

“Break, Break, Break.”

An ID code flashed in the corner of Priscide’s visor, but she didn’t need it to recognize Platoon Sergeant Teresiadis’s voice. It took either guts or profound stupidity to interrupt an officer at a moment like this without very good reason, and Pannikos Teresiadis had plenty of the former and very little of the latter.

“We’ve got hostile birds inbound,” he said.

“Oh, shit. Are we compromised?” Agnellis asked over Priscide’s squad channel.

Imagery of Army gunships flying a rooftop profile replaced the courthouse on Priscide’s visor.

“They’re coming right at us,” the private hissed, and double-checked his rifle.

“No, they’re not.” Priscide smacked him on the back of his helmet. “Look at the coordinates. They’re already past us, you idiot. Get your shit together and keep it that way, Agnellis!”

“Thanks, Sarge.” Agnellis nodded slowly. “I see why you’ve got stripes.”

“Stand by…” Lieutenant Slovens said.

An endless five seconds trickled past. Then—

“They’re not vectored toward us or the courthouse. They’re assaulting a house in the Thissio neighborhood.”

“What’s there?” Agnellis asked Priscide.

“Bunch of rich people, I think.” Priscide shrugged.

“Change of mission,” Slovens said. “The courthouse isn’t going anywhere.”

* * *

Captain Yildiz kept a hand on the back of his prisoner’s neck as he directed her toward a waiting gunship. A sequestration hood covered her head and her wrists were cuffed in front of her, anchored to a heavy belt locked around her waist.

His company had assaulted the villa with textbook precision and found the target and several other individuals of interest exactly where their informant had said they’d be. They’d been in—and now they were pulling out—in less than thirty minutes. So far, everything was green, but this was still hostile territory. A Federation planet where every square meter was “hostile territory.”

Yildiz still had trouble with that concept.

Their landing zones had been designed to seal off the target villa, and he’d seen only a handful of Odyssians outside the perimeter his troopers had set up. None of them had approached his people with any sort of useful information. Most had sent obscene gestures and colorful metaphors, instead, and he’d seen naked hatred on most of the faces he’d glimpsed.

That hatred was scarcely a surprise. He’d been on Odysseus for less than forty-eight hours, and he’d already seen exactly how its people thought about the Federation. It was even worse than he’d feared it would be from the mission briefs during the long voyage from Sol, and it wasn’t getting any better. Anything they accomplished out here would last only as long as the Oval was prepared to maintain a massive garrison—an occupation force, on what was supposed to be Federation territory. There was no way that could last forever. It had to come down, one way or the other. He knew that. But for now, he just prayed Odysseus would realize it had to bend the knee at this moment, whatever happened later, before Alaimo decided the planet wasn’t worth the effort and ended the problem with K-strikes.

What had happened in Agrino might dissuade him.

Might.

Personally, Yildiz didn’t think it would. Not in the end. Not if the Odyssians continued to defy him and his ego.

A soldier grabbed the prisoner under her arms and hoisted her into the gunship’s midships hatch.

“Alpha Target secured, collapse the perimeter,” Yildiz announced over the comm while the door gunner swept the muzzle of his weapon slowly from side to side, showing enough alertness to keep any insurgent from considering it an easy target.

Yildiz’s lieutenants acknowledged the order and he watched the transponders for all his people coalesce quickly into the other gunships. Yildiz was the last one off the landing zone, and he banged a fist twice against the gunship roof as he vaulted through the hatch.

The pilots lifted them off the ground, and he settled into the jump seat beside the prisoner’s. Her ankles were cuffed to a ring in the floor, and her entire body shook with fear or adrenaline.

“Shit, Sir.” The door gunner gave him a thumbs-up. “Way too easy. All it took was one rod from God to get them into compliance. Good thing the League don’t know how soft these Fringies really are.”

“Really?” Yildiz said. “Keep that up, and I won’t need to rip you a new one, Harrelson.” The door gunner’s head snapped up, his eyes widening, and Yildiz snorted harshly. “You tell General Dudina and Corps HQ how easy they rolled over, because I don’t think the Odyssians got that memo. They will shoot your sorry ass dead in a heartbeat, and I’d just as soon not get anyone with a brain killed at the same time.”

Harrelson swallowed, then nodded almost convulsively and returned to his weapon.

Yildiz glowered at him a moment longer, then inhaled deeply. The private had needed kicking, but he had to wonder how much of his…vehemence stemmed from his own sense of despair.

The company’s flight plan off the target came up on his visor. They were taking a different route on the way out, skimming past the Federal Courthouse Plaza.

“Green Six, what’s the status on the prisoners in your bird?” he asked over the comm.

“One of the older males decided to be a hero,” Lieutenant Reynolds replied. “He’ll have a couple of new bruises when we get back to the—”

The gunship ahead of Yildiz’s blew up.

The trajectory of its shoulder-fired hypervelocity executioner painted itself across Yildiz’s visor, and the pilots automatically banked hard and dumped altitude.

Yildiz dropped to the floor and put an arm over the prisoner’s shoulders as the door gunner opened fire. The captain didn’t know if he had an actual target, but the chain-saw bellow of his rotary-barrel ripsawed through the gunship and triggered Yildiz’s audio dampers. The comm was chaos as platoon leaders barked orders and pilots called out warnings to each other. An instant later, another SAM took down a second gunship, and then incoming fire ripped through the command gunship’s troop compartment.

The gunner took rounds to his legs that punched up into his body and burst out his throat. He flopped over his weapon, and only the tether from his shoulder harness kept the sudden corpse from falling out of the bird.

“Get us out of—”

A sledgehammer smashed into Yildiz’s gunship. The Federation’s shoulder-fired Wasp SAM’s velocity was over two thousand meters per second. At this short a range and that velocity, it was effectively an energy weapon, not a projectile, but the pilots’ evasive maneuvers almost denied it a clean hit anyway.

Almost wasn’t good enough. The Wasp missed the fuselage, but it punched through the starboard wing root, and the starboard fan, and two thirds of the rest of the wing, disintegrated. The gunship rolled right and into a dive that threw Yildiz against the ceiling. He tumbled toward the troop hatch, sliding helplessly until he slammed into the dead gunner. He hooked an arm around Harrelson’s waist and got an excellent view of the street in the instant before the plummeting gunship smashed into the side of an apartment building.

Smoke and powdered ceramacrete blew into the compartment as the gunship broke through the wall and the third-story floor collapsed across it. Yildiz lay crumpled between the dead gunner and the bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the troop bay. He wiped grit from his visor and made out a dark figure in front of him.

The prisoner hung from the ceiling, twisting in obvious terror—and pain—as she dangled from her chained ankles, and he pushed himself to his own feet. No jabbing pain indicated broken bones, and he keyed his comm with a jab of his chin even as he wrapped one arm around the prisoner. She twisted still harder, but even her panic-fueled struggles meant little beside his armor’s servo-driven strength.

“This is Bulldog Six,” he said over the comm. “My bird is down. Prisoner still viable.”

He reached up with his free hand as he spoke and grabbed the cuffs on her ankles. They sprang open as they synced with his armor’s control codes, and he caught the rest of her weight and set her on her feet before she could hit the ground.

“Quiet,” he hissed at her over his armor speakers. “I don’t want to kill you. Maybe your friends don’t, either.”

“Bulldog Six!” Reynolds came over the comm. “I’ve got eyes on your location, but there’s—Goddamn it! Get fire on that building!”

The rippling thunder of rotary-barrels, grenades, and pod-launched chemical warhead rockets sounded over the comm and echoed through the buildings around them. Yildiz looked for the pilots, but the cockpit had been ripped away. There wasn’t even a body.

He saw light through the swirling dust and pulled the captive behind him, guiding her through the wreckage of someone’s living room. He was tempted to remove her sequestration hood, but she could give away position with a single shout, and Yildiz wanted more firepower around him before that could happen.

They stumbled out into a hallway. Sparks rained down from ruined light fixtures. Smoke clung to the ceiling, swirling in a gray fog.

“Keep moving,” Yildiz told the prisoner. “Just keep moving. I’ll keep you safe.”

A stairwell door burst open and a soldier came through it, sweeping to the right as he entered the hallway in a turn that took him away from Yildiz and the prisoner. He wore standard Mark 12 armor, identical to Yildiz’s, but no transponder came up on the captain’s visor and instead of the star and planet Earth of the Federation, it bore the blue shield and white cross of the Bellerophon System Defense Force.

Yildiz slammed the prisoner against the wall with one hand and fired his carbine with the other.

Bullets smashed into his target’s back and shoulder, knocking the Odyssian forward. Yildiz lunged toward him, slamming the door with his right shoulder and the full weight of his body. It hammered into the weapon of the next man in the BSDF stick coming up the stairs, trapping the weapon, and Yildiz turned his carbine to one side and fired through the metal door as he charged past it after the first Odyssian trooper.

His fire had knocked divots into the insurgent’s armor but hadn’t penetrated. At less than three meters’ range, though, the blows had still hit like hammers, stunning the other man, and Yildiz went to one knee on his back, jammed the muzzle of his carbine under the back edge of his helmet, and squeezed the trigger twice.

The Odyssian’s head flopped forward, dangling by what remained of the bodysuit.

Yildiz released his carbine and the powered sling sucked it around to his shoulder as he took a grenade from his belt. He came back to his feet as he double-clicked the activation stud, then took two long strides back to the stairwell door while the grenade ticked down. He grabbed the bullet-riddled door’s edge and heard confused shouts as he yanked it open just far enough to toss the grenade through it.

He slammed it shut again without slowing, then tackled the prisoner, knocking her to the floor and protecting her with his own body as the grenade exploded. The blast hit him like a full-body punt, shoving him and the prisoner across the hallway and into the other wall.

“Up. Up!” Yildiz grabbed her by the waist-level restraining strap and hauled her to her feet. She was unsteady, probably suffering from a minor concussion, and still blind to everything around her, but she moved where he directed her.

He reached back for his carbine with his right hand as he got her to the emergency stairwell. He held her at his side as he kicked the door open and made a quick combat peek down the stairwell. Neither his eyes nor his armor sensors saw anything, and he hefted the prisoner onto his left hip and started down it.

“This is Bulldog Six. Anyone monitor?”

“Bulldog!” Lieutenant Benson’s voice came back over the comm as he and the prisoner emerged from the stairwell into the apartment building’s lobby. “White platoon is in—What is this place…a steakhouse? One street west of where your bird went down. Enemy is attacking us from—”

A blast rattled the lobby windows, and Yildiz went to his knees, pulling the prisoner with him, to get below sight level. He raised his carbine, using its optics to look out a window, and found a firefight raging from one side of the street to the other. Bullets kicked spurts of dust as they pockmarked walls. Glass rained down, twinkling in the sunlight.

“Get fire on that position before we eat another rocket!” someone shouted.

“White Six, I need smoke!” Yildiz said. “I’ve got the HVI, and she’s unarmored!”

“Hope to hell she’s worth all this,” Benson replied. “Stand by, Bulldog Six.”

Yildiz checked the prisoner. Her entire body shook, and the skin of her hands had a bluish tint. Shock was a risk, he thought, but she was still upright on her knees.

Plasteel canisters bounced into the street, then spewed glittering billows of blue smoke. That smoke was designed to block thermal imaging, as well as most electro-optical systems, and Yildiz cycled through his optics as it filled the space between the buildings. He couldn’t see through it, which meant the enemy couldn’t, either.

“Move.” He snapped upright, grabbed the prisoner by the restraining strap, dragged her up beside him, and dropped his shoulder to bulldoze out the lobby’s doors. He couldn’t see a damn thing through the smoke, but he knew which way he was supposed to go.

A stray round from something far heavier than his own carbine smashed into his shin, and he stumbled hard, kept upright only by his armor’s servos. The pain was manageable, but an icon flashed in one corner of his visor, indicating critical damage to his right greave.

The prisoner coughed hard, then began wheezing.

A wall loomed out of the smoke barely in time for Yildiz to alter trajectory and slam into a door, instead of a stone wall, and crash through into the bar area of what looked like a decent restaurant. One of his troopers swung her rifle toward him, then lifted the muzzle high when she recognized him. The captain grabbed the prisoner by her belt, pulled her farther into the restaurant, and shoved her to the floor, where the air was clearer.

“Sir!” Lieutenant Benson jogged into the room. “We’ve got insurgents coming out of the goddamned woodwork! They’re all over the place. We need Hoplon support!”

“Just hold the perimeter for now,” Yildiz replied, and punched up the company command net.

“Green Six, Blue Six, Bulldog Six,” he said. “What’s your status?”

“Bulldog, this is Green. I’ve got three urgent critical casualties and I lost one prisoner when my bird went in,” Lieutenant Reynolds replied. “We’ve got the building to the north of you secure. Moving to higher floors for better visibility on the roads.”

“Bulldog, this is Blue,” Lieutenant Kelly said. “Got two dead and one ambulatory. We—”

Her transmission broke in a rapid crackle of automatic fire.

“Movement by that van!” Benson snapped.

The lieutenant was raising his weapon when the rocket-propelled grenade smashed through the center of the restaurant logo on the crystoplast front windows. It struck the back of the bar and exploded, shattering dozens of bottles and spraying the seating area with glass and metal shrapnel. Benson took most of the blast and went flying face first into a leather-lined booth. He splintered the wooden table when he hit…and lay ominously still.

The prisoner squealed and collapsed from her knees, wailing in pain.

“Medic! Get a medic over here!”

Yildiz turned the prisoner toward him. A hunk of the wooden bar had impaled her forearm, and a bloody splinter the size of a thick pen jutted out either side of the limb.

She squealed again as Yildiz yanked the splinter free. Blood flowed harder, and he jerked a med pack off his belt and pressed his thumb against a red button. A hypo spray popped out the side. He pushed the prisoner’s head back to expose her neck and gave her a quick press from the nozzle. Another compartment opened, and he plucked a bandage from the pack and stretched the fabric around the bleeding wound. The smart bandage tightened on its own, flooding the skin and flesh with painkillers and quick clotting agents.

“Lieutenant’s down!” someone shouted.

“Monitor her.” Yildiz grabbed a soldier moving toward the booth where Benson had landed and redirected him toward the prisoner.

“Bulldog Six, this is Central,” a nonchalant voice said in his earbud. “Are you viable for evac?”

“Central, this is Bulldog. Yes, we’re viable!”

Yildiz tossed the broken table aside. Benson’s right arm was a mangled mess. His visor was cracked, and blood seeped from his armor. Yildiz put a palm against the lieutenant’s breastplate bio reader and far too many injury codes cascaded across his visor as the lieutenant’s armor’s report scrolled down it. A lacerated artery in the wounded arm pumped blood with each heartbeat, and he pulled a deltoid plate off.

“Talk to me, Benson,” he said as he reached under the plate, hooked a finger into a tourniquet loop, and yanked hard. The built-in tourniquet clamped down, stemming most of the blood flow, and a strained burble came from Benson’s visor.

“I know. Hold on!”

Yildiz pressed a button on Benson’s helmet and the visor popped off, dropping broken shards onto his face. The impact that had broken the visor had crushed the lieutenant’s right eye, as well, and its ruin leaked blood and what looked like retinal fluid down his cheek.

“Bulldog, this is Central. General Alaimo’s authorized evac from your current location. Gunships will extract you from the roof in…nine minutes.”

“Nine?” Yildiz repeated. “We’re still engaged with the enemy. I don’t have the time to—”

A warning icon flashed on his visor. The same lurid flash and digital timer appeared on every other Baker Company visor at the same instant, but only Yildiz’s showed the concentric rings spreading from their current location across most of the town.

“Central…did you just release a K-strike on my location?” he demanded.

“Roger that, Bulldog.”

“But we don’t need—”

“Not my problem, Bulldog. And not much I can do about it. Release order’s been locked, so you’d best have your company in place for evac at the designated location. The birds won’t make a second trip. Central, out.”

Yildiz’s onboard computer connected to the Nafplio civil defense network as it blared sudden warning of the incoming KEW, and he swore with silent venom. Fifteen minutes. That was how long they—and the city’s civilians—had.

“Alaimo’s a lunatic!” he snarled, but he’d retained enough control to mute his comm. Then he shook his head quickly and opened the company’s general frequency.

“Team leaders, team leaders! Stampede order to the top floor of my building. All personnel to the roof ASAP. Don’t worry about gear; get everyone moving. Now!”

“Sir, did you call in a K-strike on us?” Lieutenant Kelly asked. “I didn’t think we were in any danger of being over—”

“No, I goddamn didn’t!” Yildiz snapped. “But there’s not a thing I can do about it now.”

He reached under Benson and pulled two belts out of the lieutenant’s buddy-strap rig. He moved Benson’s legs apart, sat between them, and locked the straps together around his own waist. He reached back, grabbed Benson’s good arm, and pulled the lieutenant against him, then stood up, carrying his platoon leader like a backpack.

“Up the stairs! Now!”

Yildiz pointed to the stairwell in the back of the restaurant. Benson’s platoon—all of whom knew there was a K-strike inbound—didn’t need much more in the way of motivation, and the gunfire slacked off as Green and Blue rushed into the restaurant from neighboring buildings.

Yildiz grabbed one of the incoming noncoms and pointed at the prisoner with his other hand.

“Get her up there, Sergeant Connors,” he snapped, and waited long enough for the sergeant to snatch the prisoner up in a fireman’s carry.

Yildiz himself was the last to the stairwell, and Benson groaned and mumbled as he took the steps two at a time. Bloodstains and red smears from the other wounded marked the way to the roof.

“Bulldog, got eyes on the enemy in the open,” Kelly said in his earbud. “Permission to engage?”

“What are they doing?”

Yildiz reached an arm back to get a better grip on Benson as the lieutenant squirmed.

“Uhhh…they seem to be evacuating civilians,” Kelly replied.

“Negative. Say again, negative—do not engage,” Yildiz said. It came out labored. Even with his armor’s augmentation, the stairwell and the extra weight were taking a toll on him.

He got to the roof in time to see the first gunship lift away and a second touch down. Kelly knelt beside a soldier on a stretcher, yelling at the next pair of fire teams to load into the second gunship, and nameplates for the wounded popped up on Yildiz’s visor.

“Why wasn’t Spellman on the first bird out?” Yildiz asked, turning to let one of the platoon medics take Benson off of him and carry the wounded lieutenant to the gunship.

“He bled out,” Kelly said harshly. “I pulled him for someone with a heartbeat. The HVI went out on the first bird.”

Yildiz’s jaw clenched as he heard the pain in her voice. Dino Spellman had been her platoon sergeant from the day she took over Third Platoon. He knew how that hurt. He’d been there and done that. But—

“That was…a good call,” he agreed.

He touched her shoulder lightly, then looked over the edge of the roof and saw people running out of buildings and down streets, away from his building. BSDF troopers waded through the chaos, directing people toward safety and yelling instructions.

It was damned unlikely many of those civilians would outrun the K-strike, the captain thought grimly. On the other hand, Odysseus was a Fringe World. Unlike lower priority systems, it could probably have relied upon a defense against any light League raiding force, but it wasn’t a Heart World the Navy would fight to the death to save. And because it wasn’t, it still had deep shelters under most of its larger towns and all of its cities, rated to resist most tactical K-strikes. It was remotely possible Nafplio’s were deep enough to ride out this strike, but from the damage projected on his visor, it was from one of Alaimo’s Fulmens and well up into the megaton range. Probably as tactically “excusable” payback for Agrino.

“Move your asses!” a crew chief yelled from the side hatch of a cargo shuttle, hovering beside and just above the rooftop. “How close do you want to cut it?!”

The cargo bird wasn’t part of the evac plan and Yildiz had no idea what an unarmed trash hauler was doing in the middle of this shit-fest, but he didn’t really care as its cargo ramp extended across the edge of the roof. It might be unarmed, but it also had significantly more internal volume than any gunship. At this moment, that was the only thing that mattered, and his remaining soldiers poured across the ramp.

Kelly dragged Spellman’s corpse to the edge of the roof, but the cargo bay was already packed and the crew chief swiped his fingertips across his neck and shook his head.

Yildiz shoved his fingers into the upper edge of Spellman’s breastplate and pulled his ID tag.

“Go.” He grabbed Kelly by the shoulder. “He’s gone. And we need to be, too!”

Kelly set Spellman’s head against the roof gently, patted his breastplate once, then jumped onto the ramp. Yildiz was the last man into the shuttle, and the ramp closed behind him with a hydraulic thump as it sped away from ground zero.

Yildiz checked the timer, and his jaw tightened. They’d cut it close—maybe too close.

He pulled off his helmet and looked at his surviving troopers. Many were wounded…all looked shocked and angry as the shuttle’s engines roared at maximum power. The last city roofs were a blur, flashing past outside the viewports, and they streaked across the suburbs and over the second growth woodland that surrounded the city.

“Brace, brace, brace!” the crew chief shouted, waving his hands overhead.

The shuttle rattled hard as the shock wave from the K-strike hit. Yildiz grabbed a tie-down cleat and held on as the shuttle lost lift for a few seconds and his feet lifted from the deck.

Someone let out a string of expletives as the shuttle leveled back out, then climbed steeply to regain altitude.

“This is bullshit, Sir,” Kelly said in a low, bitter voice.

“Which part?” Yildiz asked.

“All of it! What’re we even doing out here?”

“We’re taking care of our people.” He passed Kelly a set of bloody dog tags. “Because nobody else will do it for us.”

Kelly rubbed a wet, sticky smudge off the tags, then gripped them tightly.



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