I averted my eyes... mostly. “How bad what tastes? Is it just me or has the whole world gone insane? And what’s this about a box of cereal?”
“It is insane.” Olivares entered, making it an almost complete squad. We were still missing Aquinas, but she was probably sulking somewhere. “It’s insane that they decided to make you the face of the battle. You, Hero of the Mound.” He pointed to the wall where a plasma television had been affixed to the wall. I could have sworn it hadn’t been there before.
“Where’d that come from?”
“Out of the blue, just like you,” Olivares said. “They put televisions up all over the place.”
A replay of the battle was on the screen. In the upper right corner was a picture of me, smiling. It was actually a pretty good picture. But on the screen was the video image of me,
Man vs. Alien
, firing my minigun, then releasing it, then swinging madly with my blade. It was a triple feed, from me, from someone in Romeo Six named Errington, and from Thompson’s view from the ground. In triptych, Cray claws and hoof spikes scored the outside of my armor as they battled to break through, but they couldn’t. It was like a bug scrabbling against the inside of the bottle, only I was the bottle, and I fought back, killing, ripping, slicing, hacking, and stabbing until there was nothing left except myself, exhausted, red lights blinking inside my suit. And then it showed me helping Thompson to his feet. A photo of him went into the upper left, not half as flattering.
“And with every hero comes a heel,” MacKenzie said. He went over to Thompson and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Never you mind. It could have been me who fell.”
“Yeah,” Thompson said. “Could have been anyone.” But he had yet to meet anyone’s eyes and answer the question,
But why didn’t you get up?
“No one will remember you tomorrow,” Olivares said flatly.
Thompson nodded. “Thanks.”
I exchanged glances with everyone except Thompson. We felt for him, but we weren’t the problem. He was his own problem, and unless he figured out how to get past it, things would only get worse.
I finished putting on my uniform and was tying my boots when MacKenzie and Olivares took Thompson away in search of the mythical possibility of a rumored case of beer. That left Ohirra and me.
I untied my boots and slowly began to retie them as I tried to think of how to broach the subject of Aquinas.
I glanced at the door to see if she was anywhere near. “What did Thompson mean about her religion?” I asked. There was no need to identify who
her
was.
“Don’t you know?” Ohirra gave me a look to see if I was testing her. “You don’t know. Oh, this is way too precious. Didn’t you hear her on the feedback in Phase I?”
“I heard a lot back then. I was dealing with my own shit, too.”
“Maybe you were in Alabama when she said it.”
“You slept through my Alabama trip.”
“Are you sure?”
“Not at all. So what’s her deal?”
Ohirra stared at me for a long moment, then without preamble she said, “Aquinas used to be a nun... or, I guess, almost a nun.”
I actually took a step back. “What do you mean?”
Ohirra shrugged. “I don’t know any other way to say it. She was a nun. She isn’t anymore. She’s here now. That’s that.”
“Wait a moment. That can’t be that. I need to know.”
“Why?”
Now it was my turn to shrug.
Her eyes narrowed. “I’m not going to help you get into her pants. She’s even more broken than the rest of us.”
“I don’t want to get into her pants,” I began, but stopped once I saw the doubt in Ohirra’s eyes. “Okay. So maybe I want to get into her pants, but that’s not now. That’s way the heck down the road. I want to get to know her better. I want to figure out what makes her tick.”
“You want to get to know her?” She put her hands on her hips. “If I had a dollar for every time I heard that line.”
“Come on, Ohirra. Help me understand.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want people to know.”
“We’re all experienced enough to know what happens when we hold things inside,” I countered.
She nodded. “Consider this. If she’d wanted you to know, she would have told you.”
“I don’t buy it. She told you because you’re like a sister. She told Thompson because she thinks of him as a brother. She doesn’t think of me the same way.”
Ohirra laughed. “Now that’s a leap of logic if I ever heard one.”
“Not a leap. Fact. Either she sees me one way or the other.”
“What if she’d rather have nothing to do with you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t get that vibe.”
Ohirra stared at me for a long moment. “I don’t get that vibe either. You know, one minute you can be the densest man I’ve ever known, the other you seem to understand things better than all the rest of us.”
“Trust me,” I said, “it’s a curse. So she was really a nun?”
“Yeah. A certified Bride of Christ in training, or whatever they’re called. I don’t know if she made it to full nunship, but she was on track.”
I thought for a moment. “Was it the peace and quiet?”
“I think so. She talks about it like a time where she didn’t have to think of anyone else except herself. She spent six months in a nunnery south of Seattle. Saint Joseph’s, I think she said.”
“Do you know why she left?”
“She hit one of the other nuns.”
“Hit... as in struck?”
“Hit as in coldcocked with a right cross.”
“What the hell happened?”
“They touched her.”
“Touched as in...”
“No, silly. Not like that. In this case, one just put her hand on Aquinas’s shoulder. Next thing you know, she was lying flat out on the floor, Michelle standing over her. PTSD.” Ohirra’s gaze shifted to someone behind me. Her face went white and her mouth fell open.
“Is this what you do with my confidence?” came a voice from behind me.
I spun, but Aquinas’s eyes were only for Ohirra.
“I thought we were friends.”
Ohirra glanced painfully from me back to Aquinas. “We are. It’s just that he wanted to...” She frowned and glared at the ground. She slammed her locker door. “I knew I shouldn’t have become involved. Now this is all messed up.”
“And you,” Aquinas directed her attention at me. “What gives you the right to pry into my life?”
“I want to get to know you better,” I said with as much honesty as I could muster.
The Filipina stared at me, emotions playing across her face. It was clear she hadn’t expected my response. Finally she said, “Take a number,” and she spun on her heel and left the room.
Both Ohirra and I stared after her. Neither one of us said anything for a few moments.
Then Ohirra brushed past me. “You better fix this,” she said. “Last thing I need is the only other girl in the squad to not be talking to me. Got it?”
“Got it,” I said.
STEP 1. Action on Enemy Contact. The platoon initiates contact. The platoon leader plans when and how his base-of-fire element initiates contact with the enemy to establish a base of fire. This element must be in position and briefed before it initiates contact.
Field Manual 7-8,
U.S. Infantry Rifle Platoon and Squad
Standard Operating Procedures
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I
CHECKED MY
armor before I left. It was a roadmap of what the aliens had tried to do to me. A tech had applied some sort of liquid metal to the scratches, filling them in as best he could. Even semi-fixed, it was a terrible sight. The Cray’s claws, heel and elbow spikes were deadly appendages. Any single scratch could have cut me in half had I not been wearing armor; taken together, they would have left me in dozens of little pieces. I checked my minigun and saw that it had been reloaded and cleaned. My blade was charging as well. The missiles had been replaced in all but one of the tubes, which had been crushed in battle.
It took me a few moments, but I tracked down the tech who’d worked on my suit. He gave me the same silly smile as the rest of them. For a moment I was afraid he’d ask me for an autograph. Thankfully he just let me ask my questions about the integrity of the EXO. I was concerned about the red lights and wanted to make certain that the next time I wore it that the suit would seal.
He said he’d fixed the tears in the Faraday cage and replaced the processors and much of the circuitry. The only thing he was waiting on was a circuit board for my communications gear, but otherwise he promised the EXO was battle ready.
I made my way back towards the common area and realized I was starving. Several times I caught people of all ranks, even some colonels, grinning and approaching me. Most of them just wanted to tell me how great and awesome I was. A few others wanted to touch me for luck, which I found creepy and strange. After all, I was the same dumb grunt I’d been before the battle.
I didn’t know how to respond, so I kept my head down and hurried to the line. They had T-rats, good old just-add-water-and-make-it-edible food. In this case it was chilli mac, a concoction of chilli and macaroni that tasted just enough like its predecessors not to be called cardboard. It was a grunt food staple and I actually liked it. I let them heap the food on my plate, and grabbed several pieces of dried fruit and two bottles of water. I found a table, sat down, and calmly and efficiently inhaled my food, aware all the while that everyone was staring at me.
Now I knew what a movie star felt like. I’d always wondered. I’d always wanted to be one. Now I’d rather have been anyone but. All this notice made me feel as if ants were crawling on my skin. I was about to get up when Olivares set his tray down in front of me.
“Is it getting old yet?” he asked.
“It was old after five minutes.”
“Was that before or after the nurse chased you down?”
I glanced up at him. “How’d you find out about that?”
“Did she touch you in your special place?”
I rolled my eyes. “Everyone’s a comedian.”
He smirked. “Seriously. She stopped by. Left a note.”
I shook my head.
“I put it on top of all the other notes.”
“Other notes?”
“Yeah. Looks like half the women and several of the men in this place want to sleep with you.”
“You read them?”
“What? You expecting us to honor the sanctity of your fan letters? Not a chance. We all know what’s going on here.” He leaned close so that no one could read his lips. “What they did was screw up my team and I’m pretty pissed about that.”
“You talking about Thompson. What happened to him?”
“What does it matter about Thompson?” He shook his head. “It could have happened to any of us. Could have been you. Could have been me. That’s not what I’m talking about, though. I’m talking about you.”
“Me? What’d I do?” I gestured with my hand towards the dozens of people watching us. “I’m a hero, didn’t you see the video?”
He stared at me to see if I was being serious. I made sure my expression promised that I wasn’t.
“Which is the problem. Do you think the Hero of the Mound is going to get to go out and fight again?”
“Of course I am.”
“This army is held together by a single idea: that we can defeat the Cray. Nothing we did, including flying a commercial jetliner into the hive, seemed to have any effect, except for your sorry ass playing Mason the Barbarian with that silly blade they gave us. You are their hopes. You are their dreams. Think they’re going to let you fight now that you’re a hero?” He shoveled food into his mouth and chased it with water. He swallowed and gave me a hard look. “Haven’t you seen the movies? Heroes can’t die.”
“Do you really think they’ll keep me off mission?” The idea was terrifying. I couldn’t stay inside; I’d go crazy.
“If they haven’t realized it yet, they soon will, which is why we’re set to go on mission in another ten hours at 0400.”
“Ten hours?” The food was settling and my eyelids were beginning to droop.
“You can sleep when the aliens are gone.” He downed the rest of his water, grabbed his tray, and stood. “Come on. We have a brief, then we’re getting six hours of your precious sleep before we have our final mission brief.”
We dumped our trays and returned to our squad bay. Everyone was there. MacKenzie was standing over my cot with a piece of paper in his hand.
“...and then I’m going to touch you and feel your strong arms and—”
I ripped the paper from his hand.
“...kiss you all over. Love, Bob,” he concluded.
I swung the paper at him, but he backpedaled deftly away.
I grabbed the stack of papers on my bed, wadded them up and dropped them in the nearest trashcan.
“Mind if I have a couple?” MacKenzie asked, pulling them from a pocket.
“By all means. Have them all.”
“No. I just want the ones from Susan, Mary and Francie.” He turned to Thompson. “I like the name Francie. Think she’s hot?”
I shook my head and threw myself down on my cot. I lay there, one foot on the floor, one arm over my face, trying to remember who I’d been and what I’d become and if I’d even had a choice. Mr. Pink, wherever he’d gotten himself off to, had designed it so that even if I ignored his invitation, OMBRA would get me. Down to the net they’d hauled me up with instead of letting me drown.
D’Ambrosio danced in the flames and I pressed my arm down harder, letting the image evaporate in a blizzard of black and white spots. The conversation in the room was nothing more than a buzz. I lived in a fireball of white and black. There were no memories, no present, no future, no past. Here I wasn’t famous or a jerk or a man, I just was. And I was satisfied for a moment. I was content.
Then something hit me in the face.
I moved my arm and watched as Olivares dripped more water on to me.
“Dude, what the fuck?” I leaped to my feet.
He backed away. “Just seeing if you were alive or not.”
I sat back down, grabbed a towel from the foot of my bed, and wiped my face. “Yeah. I’m alive. Let’s get this meeting over with.”
“Let’s.”
For the next ten minutes, he went over what had happened at the mound. Of Romeo Three, we knew what happened, each of us, with the exception of Thompson, having told the others. Romeo Six had lost three grunts and the entire Vulcan team when their guns jammed and drones descended upon them. Video feeds showed gunners and scouts being jerked into the air just as one of the cannons cleared, ripping them all to shreds as a thousand bullets took their lives, their attackers, and any chance of escape.