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While Wilks was only a sergeant and theoretically subject to command by any officer of line
rank, the truth of it was that on this mission, only Stephens was going to be giving him orders. They
wanted him on this ship and so they d bent over and handed him the soap. Wilks figured he might as
well use it.
The first thing he did was program the ship s computer with a personal override, using the last
bit of the favor he was owed. He could come and go pretty much as he wanted. Getting Billie on the
ship was easier than getting her out of the medical center. When Wilks accompanied two of the
spare hypersleep chambers into the loading bay, Billie was inside one of them, the lid opaqued.
Nobody even bothered to question him; he waltzed past the trooper leaning against the door with
nothing more than a few words.
 Hey, Sarge, the man said.  You cuttin it kinda thin, ain tcha? It s only five minutes to log-on
deadline.
 Live fast, die young  he began.
  and leave a good-looking corpse, the trooper finished. He laughed.
Wilks shook his head. A lot of civilians believed that Colonial Marines were all steely-eyed,
boot-tough, deadly as a box full of Acturian wasps and as sharp as a room full of needles. The
entertainment vids made it out that little, if anything, got past a trained marine. That they could chew
up nails and pee thumbtacks. The truth was that a basic trooper was usually a kid, barely old enough
to be depilating his peach-fuzz whiskers, and as big a sucker as any teenager. It didn t take a genius
to pass basic military entrance exams. If you could find your way to the test site and spell your name
for the computer, you were probably bright enough to get in. How long you stayed alive after that
depended on how well the training took and how stupid your officers were, but the myth of the
take-charge marines was just that, a myth.
Wilks walked the chambers past the trooper, floating them easily on their humming repulsors.
Nobody expected anybody to smuggle a person onto a military ship leaving Earth. Coming back,
maybe, a lot of folks wanted to get home out in the frontier worlds, but few people wanted to go bad
enough to sneak into an outbound ship.
Stephens would shit a square brick when he found out, but by then it would be too late. You
weren t gonna turn a star hopper around and make a fifty-light-year run back to Earth to drop off a
stowaway. And on this mission, you weren t going to take any side trips along the way, either. Hell,
they were going to be gone more than a year in realtime, exactly how long was classified, time they
got back all kinds of things could have changed.
Wilks shrugged. Stephens was an idiot. A desk rider, no field experience at all, much less in
combat. He must have pulled in some chits to get this assignment, and he didn t have the least idea of
how dangerous it was. Jerking the plasma weapons was his first stupid mistake. He just wanted to
show Wilks who was in command. Well. He d live to regret it. Probably they d all live to regret it.
Wilks jockied the chambers into the sleep compartment. He touched a button and the lid on
Billie s fanned up.
 Okay, kid, here s what s happening. We re going to go to the monsters planet. You and I,
we know how these things are, but nobody believes us. Probably we won t be corning back.
Her face went white.
 I can still off-load you, you want.
A long moment hung suspended between them. Finally, she shook her head.  I ve lived with
them most of my life, she said.  Might as well face them and get it over with, one way or the other.
He nodded.  That s about how I see it. All right. I m going to run the lines into this unit and put
you to sleep. See you on the other end.
 Yeah.
He started to close the lid.
 Hey, Wilks?
 Yeah?
 Thanks for coming to get me.
He shrugged.  We got something in common, kid. We both should have died on Rim.
She nodded.  Yes. I know.
 Maybe we can kick some bug-ass before we go.
She nodded again.  I ll keep that thought.
 I hope you don t dream, kid.
 You, too.
He shut the unit and moved it into place. It only took a few seconds to attach the cryo lines and
power supply. He triggered the unit and set the timer.
 Sleep well, kid.
With that, Wilks turned and walked away.
12
DATA SCAN SINGLE READING ONLY
Authorized Personnel, REQUIRED CLEARANCE TS-1. Bionational Internal Memorandum
385769.1/ A, rev. II
Operation Outreach
Progress Report:
Government vessel Benedict lifted as scheduled April 5, 2092 0900, Toowoomba Military
Launch Pad. Standard ship crew, plus Squads 1-4, Fox Platoon, Company Able, 1st. Extee
Division, Second Colonial Marines. Colonel H. S. Stephens, Commanding. (See attached, personnel
appendix, A.)
Bionational ship K-014 launched in pursuit, echo-lock, 4/5/92, 0900.5, full robotics &
expendable EXP-series android crew under the command of Executive Assistant, Security, P.
Massey.
(Joel You know the general layout of this, but I ll recap some of the particulars you might
have missed while you were on vacation. The alien life form the guv guys want is the big nasty, and
naturally they d like to score it for their own weapons program. Needless to say this would
compromise our own profit structure were it to happen. With the recent Supreme Court decision on
patent-able life forms, vis-à-vis created versus discovered, we might spend ten years in the fucking
legal system trying to unsnarl this mess. So up-levels decided that we should tail the feds to the
home-world [the location of which is so damned secret we couldn t pry it out of anybody for
blackmail or money] and get as much info as we could.
And, of course, we don t want the feds to get their own specimen. This guy Massey has his
orders and he s the best there is he will do whatever it takes to stop them.
You probably have heard that Research got its hands on a guy salvaged from a cargo express,
one of ours, fortunately, with one of the big nasty embryos wrapped around his face. The ship was
cold, systems dead, but somehow this thing had kept him in stasis, almost as if he d been in a sleep
tank. Hell, that alone is worth a fortune if we can figure out how the hell it did it.
Anyway, both the crewman and the bug on his face were still alive, so they ve been brought to
the Houston labs for analysis. We re still way ahead of the feds on this, and already geared up for [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]