Infinity Squad (2 page)

Grimstone looked like a lost sheep. "But General, some of the people against the explosive tank are still alive. And I've only got..." He looked at the motley collection, including a few rifle-armed soldiers who were just arriving. "It's... a bad situation General. It's going to get messy."

"I DON'T CARE IF IT-" the General was yelling as I turned off the radio in Grimmy's hand.

"I've got this," I told him, my voice muffled through the mask. Then I stole the sidearm out of his holster and kicked in the door.

I heard Grimmy call out behind me: "Wait, who was that?"

The spider was sitting on the floor, legs folded like it was meditating, with bloody bodies piled all around it. Most of the still moving bodies were draped around the propane tank I had tried to blow up before. When I kicked the door in, the spider looked right at me, then tilted its head like a dog watching TV and even through the gas mask I heard a low, gravelly voice between my ears.

"Is... that you... again...?"

That spider did not just fucking talk to me inside my head.

I shook my head to clear it, causing another short dizzy spell even as I jumped up on the tables and started running diagonally towards it again. The spider sprang to his feet, tracking me. Then it grabbed a chair and threw it at me. I rolled under it just like I had the first time, then rolled immediately again, dodging the table that landed where I would have stopped.

My new body was longer than the old. So when I came out of the roll into a firing position, I had traveled farther than before and had a piss-poor shot at just the corner of the propane tank. A hopeless shot. But it didn't matter. I sighted along the barrel.

The spider moved to block the propane tank again, with his whole body this time. At the last second, I shifted my aim to the Halon canister I had thrown on the ground between us before starting my rolls and shot it instead. White, powdery gas filled our half of the room instantly.

"It IS you..." the voice said again, deep between my ears, and then the Hell-Spider wobbled on its legs and collapsed in a heap. I kept my gun trained on the fucker for another second, then holstered it and ran to my body. What was left of it.

But the head was all I needed. Everything else was just an organ donation, right? I looked down on my beautiful, sleeping face and blond hair as I started dragging the body towards the door. With my new body, my smaller birth frame seemed amazingly light. I was easily halfway to the door when I saw him.

The wounded soldiers piled around the tank were gasping like fish out of water. One of them, a red-headed sergeant, reached for me, begging with his eyes as he struggled to breathe. God damn it.

I gently lay my body down and sprinted over to the sergeant who was bleeding from both legs.

"What the hell happened in there?" Grimstone demanded when I emerged from the glass door, dragging the sergeant. Grimstone tried to enter the room, took one step inside and started coughing. Then gasping. He stumbled out again. "What did you do?"

"No air in there!" I yelled, lifting the sergeant into a waiting stretcher cart. "Take a deep breath and get the wounded out!" I ran into the room again, still wearing the oxygen mask.

"Seriously," Grimstone demanded behind me. "Who IS that?"

He still didn't know as I burst out ten seconds later, dragging my original body out. That he recognized.

"Oh god... Lieutenant..." Grimstone shook his head, then took a deep breath and dove into the cafeteria with the other waiting soldiers.

As I was muscling my own body onto a second stretcher cart, two medics were looking at the sergeant I had dragged out. One put a buffering band on him while the other checked his legs.

"Leg trauma, probably some broken ribs. Looks pretty bad," the second medic said.

"Probably be months before he's ready for patrols again," the one attaching his buffering band said, checked that all the lights were green, then drew his sidearm.

I heard three gunshots behind me as I was sprinting my cart down the halls.

I raced my cart past two confused looking guards back into the Resurrection room.

"I'm back, Doc! And less than four minutes total!"

"GAAAH!" she cried, recoiling from the bloody mess on the cart. "What is THAT?"

"It's my body- my original one!"

"What do you want ME to do with it?"

The lights on one of the resurrection tubs changed from green to red and the clone in it came alive with a rush of breath and splashes.

"God-damn medics!" he yelled, sitting up and feeling his chest.

The doctor started towards him. "Look, Lieutenant Forrest, was it? I can't deal with that now. I've got others to attend to."

"Doc, they can wait- this is my life! MY body!"

Another clone woke up in a tank, cursing the medics just like the first.

"Lieutenant, look- I can't put you back in. We don't have the tech for that, and even if we did..." She glanced over my body on the cart. "No heartbeat, no HEART, barely one lung, a severed spine and foot-wide trauma in the middle of your chest... it wouldn't be much of a life."

She gave me a weak smile. "The best I can do is take some...um... samples from it. So that your kids can still look like you." She pulled out a foot-long needle and syringe from her cabinet. "But you don't want to be here when I do it."

I sagged forward, holding the cart for balance.

Damn it. So this was going to be it? Goodbye to the body I had worn since birth? I looked down at my sleeping blond face, still ruggedly handsome even in death. And how many miles had I logged on the running trails outside of boot camp, day after day near the Wyoming space port, or in the weight room, or everything, to give it up now? There was the scar from when that dog attacked me when I was ten.

God damn it. I'd have to learn how to shave again.

The Doctor put her hand on my shoulder. "I'll make sure your body is taken care of properly. You should head back to your barracks."

I sighed, then let go of the cart and walked towards the door.

"So, did you want me to take a sper-... um, sample?" she asked.

"No Doc, I gave at the office."

"What's that?"

"Earth. They've got my sample back on Earth." I sighed, then looked up at the red-headed woman. "Hey, Doc. What's your name?"

"Shannon Murphy. Nice to meet you, Second Lieutenant Forrest."

"Yeah, likewise. Hey, Doc, do soldiers ever complain of hearing strange... voices in their head the first time they come back?"

"The tactical implants would be much deeper in your new ear canal than your old one. It may seem like a different voice at first."

I shook my head. "No, this wasn't like the sirens. This was more... personal. Like a voice talking just to me."

"It's probably just nerves, trooper. You've had a rough ten minutes, your first death, and it's still the middle of the night. You should go back to your barracks now, and get some rest."

"Yeah. Rest. That's exactly what I'll get there."

***

Chapter Two

I took a meandering path back to our barracks, thinking. Okay, I was moping. Okay, I was being a little bitch. But the walk helped take me down from "I'm going to cut myself until people care" to "I think I'll write some poetry about rain." Eventually I ran out of places to loiter and came back home.

I could hear the thumping bass line ten steps from our barrack's main door. "Break on Through" by The Doors, which meant Zazlu was in charge of the sound system tonight. Or had bribed the person who was, which was the same thing. I looked up at the gold sideways "8" infinity symbol painted on the metal door and sighed as the synthesizer solo started up, shaking the floor. Yes, the perfect place to calmly gather one's thoughts and rest. Our barracks. I put the barcode on my wrists under the scanner and the door opened.

The music got as loud as being inside Jim Morrison's throat, and the scene was equally tame. Our squad gunner was in his bunk, furiously trying to work the blouse off of that cute blonde radio operator from Flight Control. On the bunk below, our medic Steve was furiously trying to work the pants off of wide-shouldered Trent from the Hangar. Good for Steve; Trent was a total cocktease.

In the center of the room, my eyes and ears, my instrument of discipline in the squad, Second Lieutenant Zazlu Mohammed, was directing a competition on which type of private first class could do the most push-ups: one blasted drunk or one high on cocaine. Cocaine was winning. Our squad's Intelligence Officer, our expert on tactics and recon, Second Lieutenant Ann-Marie Butcher, was making book, announcing odds and writing chits to the gamblers. Which was the entire rest of the squad, five more privates, gathered in a militarily appropriate hooting mob around the competitors.

I started charging towards the sound system hanging on the wall. With First Lieutenant Ridley detached to follow Immortal Squad on patrol tonight, I was supposed to maintain the honor of the squad. Military honor, which stretched in an unbroken string from Ridley, back through the unflinching West Point class where he had graduated, back through the professional, disciplined Prussian army and the fearsome Roman Le-

When cocaine private started imagining cockroaches crawling on his skin just moments from victory and handed the win to the drunk private who was just beginning to dry heave on the deck, I couldn't help but laugh. Really laugh, from my gut. Something my moping self of just ten minutes ago was sure I would never do again. I reached the sound machine and turned it up.

That got Zazlu's attention, and through all the guitars and drums, he boomed at me "HEY! CLONE HEAD! AREN'T YOU IN THE WRONG PLACE?"

Everyone turned to look, even the blonde radio operator and Trent. That's why Zazlu was my instrument of discipline. That, and he was five-foot six, two hundred pounds of Iranian muscle that men would follow into the gates of hell. I turned the music down to elevator levels.

"HEY! I SAID-"

"It's me Zaz," I said, cutting him off with a quiet tone. "Jonah."

"Is it...? Grimmy said that-" he ran up to me, read the name burned into my wrist and looked into my eyes. Then he held my arm up for the squad. "Our Second Lieutenant has returned from the dead!"

Cheers. Even cocaine private stopped scratching his back long enough to clap.

"Look at you!" Zazlu beamed. "Taller, stronger than before! We must celebrate this!"

"No, Zaz, I'm okay, I just want to rest-"

"I will bring out my finest heroin!"

I tried to head towards my bunk. "Really, don't go to any trouble-"

"Cocaine then! White powder for the white man's return!"

"Look, Zaz, I just got into this body! I'm not going to destroy it the first night!"

He stopped me with a grip on my arms, his eyes deadly serious. "Well, we've got to do SOMETHING."

Ten minutes later I took my third hit of the joint and passed it left to a grinning Zazlu. He took a deep drag himself and passed it left around the table to Ann-Marie. She barely made effort to reach for it, leaning back in a chair with her lean runner's legs propped up on the table, her eyes half-closed in a relaxed high. But as much as she looked like a stoned sorority girl in her tight t-shirt and short running shorts, I knew that Ann-Marie could still draw the Glock semi-auto strapped to her bare thigh and wield it like a scalpel at a moment's notice.

Our squad gunner, Private Juan Rodriego, was another story. He would be useless for hours off of what he had already inhaled. His spiky black hair was mussed, his wife-beater and sweatpants askew and rumpled. The movements of his tall, lanky limbs were clumsy, imprecise. That's why we always gave him the big weapons. And I knew he'd be extra eager to use them the next few days, after the blond radio operator had left him high and dry tonight.

Ridley had broken the mold putting this squad together; four lieutenants, no sergeants, and only five privates and a medic to make up the rest. The other squads had two fewer officers to do the thinking, two more NCO's to do the whipping, and five more privates to do the smashing. But Ridley always preached 'lighter, smarter, faster', Zazlu was almost a drill instructor by himself, and I'd rather have ten people around me I could fully trust than fifteen I could trust halfway.

The music was low and the rest of the privates were sleeping off what ever they had drunk, snorted, inhaled or licked before I had gotten there. I would have to check each one for presentability before letting them out for breakfast in the morning. This is the stuff a Second Lieutenant has to keep in his mind, if he wants to keep First Lieutenant's squad running smoothly. Speaking of which...

"Don't worry about that radio chick, Juan," I said. "She didn't look like she was much fun anyway."

Zazlu nodded sagely. "She had very chubby ankles."

"I wouldn't fuck her with YOUR dick," Ann-Marie added, then passed the joint.