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  “Yes, sir.”

  Soldiers were leaving the safety of the barricade and running toward the cars, cheering and celebrating. Wit settled back in his chair, keeping his face in the shadows. The soldiers were still thirty yards away, but they would be on the cars in seconds. The gate was just ahead. “Normal speed,” repeated Wit. “Nice and easy.” The sentries at the gatehouse stepped outside and snapped to attention as the large gate doors slid open. Wit’s car began pulling through the gate, passing the sentries, just as the cheering soldiers behind them reached the second car and began slapping the trunk in celebration. One of the sentries at attention lowered his gaze to Wit’s car and smiled. The smile vanished an instant later. Then the man started yelling and reaching for his weapon, and all went to hell.

  “Gun it, Lobo,” said Wit.

  Lobo floored it. Behind them Bogdanovich did the same. The celebration became a furious mad scramble. Men tried climbing on to the second car, reaching for the door handle. Spider rounds pinged off the glass. Bogdanovich swerved and floored it. Men tumbled off the car.

  “Roadblock,” said Lobo.

  There were two vehicles parked in the road ahead with a half-dozen PCs already leveling their weapons.

  Chi-won was sitting in the backseat beside Wit. “Chi-won,” said Wit.

  “Happy to, sir.”

  There was no explanation needed. Wit lowered his window just as Chi-won did. Their weapons were out the window an instant later, firing. PC suits flashed red and stiffened.

  Lobo gunned it. “I’m going through.”

  “Don’t run over anyone,” said Wit.

  Lobo struck the first vehicle at just the right angle to push it enough to the side to get the car through. Metal crunched. Glass shattered. Tires spun. Lobo put his foot to the floor, the vehicle rocked to the side, and then they were free, racing away. The second car was right behind them. The shots from their rear were less frequent now, but Wit knew they weren’t in the clear yet. Far from it. The cars would be overtaken soon. They still had two hundred men between them and the MOPs camp.

  They drove for another hundred yards around two winding curves and stopped. All nine of them were out of the car immediately.

  Two MOPs soldiers emerged from the woods. Deen, the Brit, and Averbach, the Israeli.

  “Evening, Captain,” said Deen. “We thought you might not be coming.” He looked at the new recruits. “These the new greenies? Pleased to meet, boys. Name’s Deen. Whose crazy idea was this? I love it.”

  “Introductions later,” said Wit. “You’re about to have some angry PCs on your tail. Every vehicle on their base will be on top of you in about ten seconds.”

  Deen shrugged nonchalantly then got behind the wheel of the first car. Averbach jumped into the second.

  “Where I am taking this, Captain?” asked Deen.

  “All over creation,” said Wit. “Have a field day. Just keep them occupied.”

  Deen brushed some glass shards off the front seat. “I see that we’re not concerning ourselves with the paint job.”

  “Try not to total it,” said Wit.

  Deen gunned the engine and put a hand to his ear, smiling. “What’s that, Captain? I didn’t catch that last part.” He laughed and peeled away, with Averbach right behind him.

  Wit gave them a mile at the most. Then the PCs would be all over them. He’d never do such a thing in a real operation, sacrificing two men like this, but Deen and Averbach said they didn’t mind. They’d take a spider round to the chest if it meant they got to trash a few vehicles in the process.

  Wit was running down the slope through the forest with the new recruits. They tossed aside their red berets and replaced them with their helmets. Wit’s HUD flickered to life, barraging him with intel: temperature, distance to the river, projected water depth based on the amount of snow and rainfall in the area that winter. Branches lashed at his suit and helmet. The flag was in his back pouch. They were through the trees. The footbridge over the river was old and dilapidated. Much of the railing had fallen away long ago. The river was twenty feet below. Wit never slowed down. His HUD told him the water was likely deeper to the right. Wit leaped from the bridge. He flew through the air, hit water, and went under. The buoyancy of his dampening suit lifted him to the surface, and the current swept him downstream. His HUD gave him the water temperature and tracked the location of his men. All eight were in the water with him, moving quickly, bobbing along. The current was relatively calm in spots but it raged in others. Twice they saw large groups of PCs heading up the road adjacent to the river, back toward the base, hoping perhaps to stop whomever had the flag. No one looked toward the river. Or if they did, they didn’t see anything in the dark.

  The last mile was uneventful. The river calmed, and Wit moved to the opposite shore. The suits were heavy and waterlogged, but they made good time on foot, reaching camp ten minutes later. Wit was not surprised to see all of the remaining MOPs and about sixty PCs gathered around a bonfire in their undergarments. A tall pile of discarded dampening suits stood off to the side. Most of the suits were stiff and red, but a good number of them were still operable. The PCs and MOPs were mingling and laughing and drinking and playing cards. Four of them were singing a ribald drinking song, much to the delight of those around them. No one noticed Wit and the new recruits, who watched from behind one of the tents.

  Wit’s instructions to the MOPs at camp had been clear. Don’t let the PCs get the flag, but don’t them let feel like failures either. Show humility. These men are allies not enemies.

  Five men were sitting on crates and cargo boxes nearby playing a hand of ganjifa. Calinga, the Filipino MOP, laid down a hand of the circular cards and celebrated. Those playing with him moaned. Calinga’s wrist strap flashed green, and he excused himself. He came to Wit, smiling and keeping his voice down. “Evening, Captain. Things turned out well for you, I assume. These the newbies? Welcome to MOPs, gentlemen.”

  The eight recruits nodded a greeting.

  “How’d we do?” asked Wit.

  Calinga shrugged. “After we’d shot them all, we told them it seemed silly for anyone to lie stiff as a board in the grass until it was over. So we stripped our suits first, so they wouldn’t think we were mocking them, and then we broke out the ration coolers with the vitamin drinks. I think the PCs were hoping for booze, but they seemed grateful enough.”

  “Did we lose any men?”

  “Toward the end of the last assault I shot Toejack and Kimble when no one was looking. It seemed like we should have at least a few wounded. If we were all still standing in the end, it would have felt like gloating.”

  “Well done,” said Wit. He stepped out of his dampening suit and shot it with his weapon. The suit stiffened and turned red. “Drop your suits and shoot them,” he told the others.

  The new recruits obeyed immediately.

  “Now we put them on the pile with the others,” said Wit. “Be exhausted. Don’t act, just let your exhaustion be seen.”

  Wit led the others to the pile. He had a stitch in his side, but instead of suppressing the pain like he normally would, he let it aggravate him and winced at the discomfort of it. He tossed his suit onto the pile. The soldiers around the bonfire saw him, and everyone quieted. The new recruits dropped their suits onto the pile. They looked wet and tired and beaten, when a moment ago they hadn’t even seemed winded.

  Wit spoke loudly. “Those of you in my unit know that I do not like to fail.”

  The camp was silent.

  “I had assumed that we could easily win this exercise, but tonight I’ve learned that you PCs are tougher men than I anticipated. All of us took a beating. If we work this hard over the next few weeks, we’ll learn from each other and become better soldiers and men because of it.”

  Headlights cut through the darkness, and a small convoy of vehicles pulled in. Wit fell silent, watching the cars approach. Major Ketkar stepped down from one of the vehicles, now wearing his fatigues and looking none too
pleased.

  “Atten-tion!” Wit yelled.

  Everyone at the campfire snapped to attention, including Wit, who saluted the major, even though technically it wasn’t necessary.

  Major Ketkar mostly hid his surprise. He looked at the men and the coolers and the sausages and the pile of dampening suits, taking it all in. Then he spoke loudly for everyone to hear. “Captain Wit O’Toole has assured me that the next seven weeks of training will be the most grueling, most painful, and most challenging of your lives. After tonight’s exercise I believe him. In the morning, I intend to forget that I saw a hundred men in their underwear, standing around a fire like a pack of cavemen.” He paused here and looked pointedly at a few of his own men. “But since this is your last night before our hellish training begins, I will turn a blind eye.” He smiled now. “You will forgive me if I keep my uniform on.”

  The men laughed.

  “As you were,” said Ketkar.

  They went back to their drinks and mingling.

  Ketkar turned to Wit. “You owe me two new cars, Captain.”

  “You’ll be reimbursed, sir. Forgive me if we took the game too far.”

  “And damage to one of my trucks, which proved to be a lousy roadblock.”

  “We’ll cover the damage to that as well, sir.”

  “You will do no such thing,” said Ketkar, waving a hand. “Nor will you pay for the cars. I don’t want to have to explain to our vehicle quartermaster how the MOPs made us look like bumbling idiots. I’ll file an accident report instead.”

  “We didn’t win, sir,” said Wit. He reached down to his red suit, removed the flag from the back pouch, and handed it to Ketkar. “Our suits were hit. We were disqualified.”

  Ketkar studied him, suspicious. “And if I were to interview all of my men and ask them which one of them took down the famous Wit O’Toole, someone would step forward?”

  “Many men shot at us, sir. It was chaotic there at the end.”

  Ketkar smiled. “Yes. And somehow with inflated suits you managed to get all the way back to camp. Most impressive.”

  Wit motioned to the flagpole, where a red sheet posing as a flag flapped in the wind. “You have men in your vehicles who are still in the game, sir. If you’d like to take our flag, you won’t meet any resistance. All of us are out of the fight.”

  Ketkar smiled. “I think it best if we call this a draw and leave it at that.”

  “Good idea, sir.”

  Ketkar saluted and got back into his vehicle, and the convoy drove away. Deen and Averbach stepped out of the woods once the convoy was out of sight, their dampening suits still operable.

  “I figured you two would be riddled with spider rounds by now,” said Wit.

  Deen looked offended. “A little confidence, Captain. Averbach and I don’t give up that easy.”

  “I don’t suppose I want to know what you did with the cars.”

  Deen patted him on the arm and took a drink from the cooler. “Nothing a good motor sergeant can’t fix.”

  He and Averbach moved over to the pile of suits and added theirs to the heap.

  “I have to admit this is not what I expected, sir,” a voice said.

  Wit turned. It was Lobo, there beside him in his undergarments, staring into the firelight, soaking wet and holding a vitamin drink.

  “Will the training be as grueling as Major Ketkar says?” Lobo asked.

  “You’re in MOPs now, Lobo. I shouldn’t have to answer that question.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Glaser

  The archives room on Makarhu was a dark, claustrophobic space filled with rows of blinking computer systems and humming servers. Lem was floating in the shadows back near a corner with his holopad plugged into one of the server inputs. A video of the attack on El Cavador played in the holospace above his pad. It showed a laser cutting through a pebble-killer on the hull of the free-miner ship. As Lem watched, the severed PK spun away and struck one of the free miners on spacewalk. Lem moved his hand through the holospace to stop the video, then he wiggled his fingers in the right sequence to rewind the video and play it again in slow motion. He couldn’t be certain, but it looked like, as he had feared, he had killed the man.

  The bump with El Cavador had been far more violent than Lem had anticipated. It was one thing to talk of lasers cutting through sensors and equipment. It was quite another thing to see it all unfold before your eyes as Lem had done—the entire attack had been recorded by several cameras and projected on the big holospace on the helm.

  No, he mustn’t use the word “attack.” That sounded incriminating and prosecutable. “Attack” implied wrongdoing and sparked headlines on the nets like: LEM JUKES ATTACKS FAMILY OF FREE MINERS. Or: HEIR TO JUKE FORTUNE ATTACKS CHILDREN. No, “attack” was far too aggressive a word. It painted a completely inaccurate picture of events. It suggested malicious intent and automatically put people into false categories. Good versus evil. Black versus white. And in truth, there were no good guys and bad guys in this scenario. They were just two parties after the same asteroid, which, let the record show, didn’t legally belong to anyone in the first place. Lem wasn’t taking something from the free miners because it wasn’t theirs to begin with. If they had possessed some deed perhaps or a bill of sale asserting them as the owners of said property, then yes, Lem would be in the wrong. But maneuvering someone away from an asteroid for which they had no right of ownership wasn’t a crime at all.

  Maneuvering. Yes, Lem liked that word much better.

  The PK in the video spun away from the laser again and struck the man. Lem froze the video at the moment of impact. The man’s neck was bent unnaturally to the side. Lem had never seen a broken neck before, but he was fairly certain that was what he was looking at.

  “Mr. Jukes?”

  Lem spun around, banging into two of the servers in the process. The archivist, a Belgian named Podolski, was floating at the end of the row of servers in his sleepsuit, looking at Lem with a confused expression. Lem felt panicked, though he worked hard to conceal it. The man should be sleeping. It was hours into sleep-shift.

  “You startled me,” said Lem, smiling and switching off his holopad.

  The archivist stared, confused. A moment of silence passed.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” said Lem. “I let myself in to review a few files.”

  “The system alerts me when anyone accesses the core files without my authorization code,” Podolski said. “It’s a security precaution.”

  “Ah,” said Lem. He hadn’t known that, or he would have figured out some way to circumvent the code. Lem chuckled. “How stupid of me. I’m so sorry. If I had known that, I would’ve come to you first during normal hours. I feel awful that I woke you.”

  “You do know, sir, that you can access any files we have here in the archives using your personal terminal in your room.”

  Of course Lem knew that. He wasn’t an idiot. But he didn’t want the ship to have a record of the files being transferred to his room—or to any other terminal on the ship for that matter. Nor did he want merely to look at the files; he wanted to erase the only copies in existence here on the main servers.

  “I had some business to attend to in the mining bay,” said Lem. “So I thought I’d slip in here and check a few things. I didn’t know I’d make a stir.”

  It wasn’t the best lie, but Lem had delivered it convincingly enough. And it could withstand scrutiny. The mining bay was close to the archive room, and in the days since the bump, the mining crew had been working long hours in the bay getting ready for the field test. It wasn’t implausible to suggest that Lem had been there.

  Podolski nodded. “Is there something I can help you find, sir?”

  “Very kind, but no. Just finishing up here. Thank you.”

  Podolski nodded again, unsure what to do next. An awkward pause followed. “Well, if you need anything, sir, my quarters are right through that hatch over there.”

  Lem made a show of straini
ng his neck and looking at the hatch even though he knew exactly where it was. “Thank you. If I need something, I’ll let you know.”

  Podolski drifted away, an uncertain look on his face.

  Lem waited for the hatch to close, then began erasing files quickly, not even bothering to review them first. Earlier, when Lem had decided to go through with this and erase any record of the bump, he had briefly considered giving the chore to Podolski, who was obviously more familiar with the servers and thus better qualified. But then Lem had realized how unsettled that would have left him: He would have always wondered if Podolski had made his own copy of the files in the hope of blackmailing Lem in the future. Some of Father’s employees had tried such things over the years—their attempts had always ended in their own humiliation and never in Father’s, but Father had found the experiences exhausting nonetheless. Plus, giving the order to Podolski would only raise the man’s suspicions when most people on board, Podolski included, were still unaware of what had happened during the bump. No one but a few trusted senior officers knew of the incident with the free miner, and Lem thought it best to keep it that way.

  When Lem finished erasing files, he checked and rechecked the servers and backups to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. Then he ran a program that deleted any record of the erasing. The last step was patching up holes. There were now gaps in the video surveillance records, so Lem filled those in with random footage of space already on file. When he was done, every scrap of potentially incriminating evidence was gone.

  Lem pocketed his holopad and made his way to the exit. He had hoped that by erasing the files he would also erase the sting of guilt that had been pecking at him ever since the bump, but as he left the archives room, he felt as anxious as he had before. He shouldn’t have watched the video, he realized. If he hadn’t watched the video he could have maintained the possibility in his mind that the man wasn’t seriously injured. He could have led himself to believe that no lasting damage had been done. That wasn’t an option now.