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  The female tech, not chiding, tells me I’m lucky to get the pistol. Shortages and all.

  The pistol is a mini gravity-drive railgun. It runs on the exact technology behind all of the Grays’ and Trogs’ kinetic weapons.

  My gun shoots tiny projectiles that look like short, headless nails. Each weighs a bit more than a gram, but at the velocities they travel, they’ll punch with the momentum of a .45 slug. My magazine holds nearly three hundred, alternating between titanium-tipped armor-piercing rounds and those of a softer lead alloy designed to flower out on impact and shred soft flesh.

  Unlike the rounds for the rifles that had been the mainstay of terrestrial militaries for centuries, my projectiles aren’t powered by a chemical reaction. So I don’t need the extra weight and bulk of powder and brass in the magazine. I carry just the slugs.

  The woman says, “You’re lucky, both divisions going up today will be carrying the new guns. Everything before was single-shot. These will go full-auto.”

  “Gray rules,” grouses the sergeant. “They tie our hands. If they’d let us build the kind of weapons we used to make when I was a kid, this war would be going differently, I’ll tell you that.”

  And that’s the thing about Grays, they’re a status quo, no-imagination bunch. They have scads of mandates designed to keep humans from creating new things and combining our technologies with theirs, especially when it comes to weapons and gravity tech. It’s only the war we’re losing that’s altered the policies.

  Ignoring the sergeant, the woman says, “Your gun runs off the energy from the micro-fusion power plant in your suit. All the power you’ll ever need. But if you go full-auto, which you shouldn’t with your pistol because you won’t be able to control it, you’ll burn through hydrogen like nobody’s business. The three days you’re supposed to get out of a cartridge happens only if you’re doing a lot of nothing, like watching TV. If you’re using lots of grav and shooting, you might get three hours.” She slaps the spare hydro cartridge on my thigh. “Don’t lose track of how much H you’ve got. It’s your life.”

  Nodding, and pointing to the empty magnetic mounts around my waist, on my thighs, and up my chest, I ask, “What about extra magazines?”

  “Grab what you need off the dead troops,” Sarge tells me. He’s happy to say it, not because the other soldiers will be dead, but because it means I’ll soon be dead, too.

  The female tech nods to confirm. She’s sad and serious. “We can’t build this stuff fast enough.”

  Thinking of my long hours in the grav factory, forging and inlaying plate after endless plate, one of hundreds, maybe thousands of such factories across the globe, I can’t help but think other war industries must be producing just like we were. “How is that kind of shortage possible?”

  “The Ticks don’t understand mass production,” says the woman, slipping into the derogatory slang for Grays. She probably didn’t even realize she’d done it. “They can’t manage a supply chain to save their life. And their concept of math…” she shakes her head and waves at the air.

  “Fuckin’ Grays,” adds Sarge.

  It surprises me, but it turns out he and I at least have something in common.

  Chapter 7

  An American woman in a Korean uniform with large gold and red epaulets walks up. She’s a colonel, and she’s stiffer than the starch in her clothes.

  Sarge salutes her and sulks back a few steps, his posturing ended.

  “Is he ready?” asks the colonel.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Sarge hurries away with the female tech in tow.

  The colonel lifts her data pad but focuses on me. “I’m Colonel Blair. Have you completed your online training?”

  I nod.

  “Yes, ma’am, is the proper response.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The reasons are different, but I decide I don’t like this woman any more than I liked the sergeant.

  “This is your first day, but next time you come into the presence of an officer, salute.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You are Major Commissar Dylan Kane, Solar Defense Force Heavy Assault Division 743.” She looks down at her data pad, “3rd battalion, 6,736th Regiment, Charlie Company.”

  Heavy Assault Division sounds badass to me. I like it. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know what everybody calls the Heavy Assault Divisions?”

  “Yes, ma’am, Grunts.”

  “You know that’s not a sanctioned SDF term, correct?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Do you know why they call themselves Grunts?”

  “Are we making conversation?” I ask, “Or are you testing me?”

  She doesn’t answer my question, but instead looks at her data pad. “You’re married?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And your wife is rearing a Gray hatchling?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You know that exempts you from the draft, don’t you?”

  “I volunteered.”

  “Volunteered?”

  In a tone with a deniable level of sarcasm, I say, “Service to our brotherhood with the Grays is a human’s highest calling.”

  “You believe that?”

  I look down at the shitty orange spacesuit I’m wearing as if that’s a sufficient answer.

  “Caring for the Gray hatchling should be your most important concern,” she tells me. “You know that?”

  “My wife’s sister lives in our house and will care for my wife and the hatchling in my absence.”

  A long pause follows while the colonel scrutinizes me. Finally, she says, “Show me your d-pad screen. Does it work?”

  I lift my arm and turn my palm up, showing Blair the screen built onto the inner forearm of my suit. The LED panel flashes to life. It’s designed to activate whenever it’s in my line of sight.

  “Half the damn things break on the first deployment.” She steps back and looks my suit up and down. “A wonder this thing still holds air.”

  Nothing but sunshine here.

  She nods at the d-pad on my arm. “Call up your ship assignment under the Priority Orders tab.”

  I look at the screen. The software is not the version I trained with in the simulator.

  “Flashing red,” she tells me as she reaches over and points. “That one.”

  I tap it.

  “Your ship assignment, Assault Ship Alpha Delta Kilo Seven Eight Nine Tango Three. You’ll go out with First Platoon. The company’s commander is a Captain Milliken. You’ll be on the same ship as him. The ship designations for the other three platoons are here. One platoon per ship.” She points again.

  “Got it.”

  Her finger hovers over another part of the screen. “For the company roster and ship’s officers, there. Muster station here.”

  I nod and then remember to add, “Yes, ma’am.”

  “After we finish here, you’ll follow the map on your d-pad to your muster station where you’ll be loaded onto a transport and taken to an earth-side staging area. From there, you’ll board your ship. With any luck, in a couple of hours, we’ll be in space.”

  “Earth-side, ma’am? We?” Two questions that are competing for answers.

  “I’m your CO. I’m going up with division command.” She points at my d-pad again. “You’ll see me in the Chain of Command tab.”

  I activate the touch screen and look. She reports directly to Lieutenant General Lee, I assume Korean. Seems like half the MSS are named Lee. I click on Lee and see that he is indeed MSS. MSS has control over every SDF unit through a political command structure that parallels the SDF chain of command. As a commissar, I’m part of the MSS hierarchy. So, in the eyes of the men and women in the platoons I’m responsible for, that’ll make me MSS, too.

  Getting past that is going to be hard. The company’s trust will come at a steep price.

  “Arizona is where we’re headed,” Blair tells me. “The yard there has built out eleven hundred of the new design assault ships. We
’ll be taking almost half of them up.”

  Security around the design has been unusually tight, and nothing I’d heard through the online rumor factories was verifiable. I’m curious. “Anything I need to know about these ships?”

  “New ships,” she tells me, “new tactics.” Then, in a surprise I didn’t expect, her voice turns to a whisper just loud enough for me to hear. “‘bout damn time, too. The Troglodytes have been handing us our asses in this war since day one.”

  The official word on the ground has always been that we’re winning. Only the loyalists and people who like to keep their heads in their asses believe that, though.

  Colonel Blair steps back and examines my face like she’s searching for something false hiding under my skin.

  The things I’m hiding are buried too deep for her to even guess at.

  She points to a side exit. “Walk with me.”

  My suspicions tingle.

  No officer came to escort the commissar who’d kitted up just ahead of me.

  Blair turns to go, and I follow.

  What choice do I have?

  Chapter 8

  Blair says nothing else. She just walks.

  She leads me away from J-33 and down an old road turned to dirt that runs behind the warehouses. The path will take us to the muster stations near the lift pads a mile or so further on in the valley.

  Around us, men and women in spacesuits are shuffling in the same direction. What passed for exuberant patriotism among many of them when they were coming in through the front gate earlier in the day is mostly gone. Now we all have plastic tubes stuck in places we once thought private, and we’re geared in battle suits still damp from the steam that cleaned the remnants of the previous owners out.

  Feet autopilot their way forward.

  Soldier’s eyes search the snowy peaks above, looking for inspiration or God or who-knows-what to fortify their shivering souls.

  Fingers tap frustration into d-pads, as men and women who scammed their way through their military courses try to figure out the software that runs their suits, maintains communication, keeps them alive. Too many of them never expected to need their training. They never thought they’d wear the orange, let alone queue up in front of a grav lift designed to haul cargo into orbit.

  Despite our new weapons, many of us will die soon, not just because we’re overmatched and outnumbered, but for those most rudimentary of reasons historians like to say should have been obvious at the time.

  Number one on that list will be the Grays’ conceited disinterest toward their chattel, us. The telepathic little monsters can’t get past the human necessity to spend undue time learning. Grays easily share with one another what they need to know and believe we should do the same with our rudimentary substitutes for telepathy—the Internet, telephones, and TV.

  And fucking books, I guess.

  To them, sending a productive worker away from a job for ten or twenty weeks to learn about weapons, tactics, and war is a colossal waste of time. It was only the reviled Koreans’ incessant arguments for training camps in the fashion of those utilized by earth’s pre-Gray militaries that we have anything at all.

  The compromise the Grays allowed was better than nothing, but not by much.

  Every able-bodied person sixteen and up is required to demonstrate proficiency on a battery of military simulators, some with goals as simple as learning military hierarchy, so would-be soldiers will know who their boss is. Other sims teach about d-pads, weaponry, and zero-g maneuvering.

  The simulator program is supplemented with privatized hands-on certification courses, that anybody can arrange to take in their time off from work. Few take advantage of these courses because people just can’t resist the temptation to take the shortcut.

  So comes the second guilty reason behind the coming slaughter.

  Anybody with a measure of motivation to shirk the responsibility of military training can find a way out. Cheats for all of the sims are available in any black market for the price of a meal. Most of the private certification enterprises are rubber-stamp operations, designed to herd students through as fast as possible with no regard for the value of the outcome. They operate according to their incentives. Owners get sweatless work and full bellies. Students meet their training obligations with little effort.

  Hence us, the planet’s home-schooled army.

  The leftovers.

  Gristle for the grinder.

  I find sudden certainty in the thought that a battle-hardened Trog is going to shoot me, or hack me, or break my bones so violently their jagged shards will tear through my secondhand suit. My blood will boil into the vacuum as I try to bite back mouthfuls of air escaping my lungs, my breath abandoning me when I need it most, the last oxygen I’ll ever taste.

  Some time later, my suit will be fished out of the void and recycled back to earth. After the remains of my body are washed out, it’ll be patched again, half-ass tested, and wrapped around the shivering body of another unprepared recruit.

  Fly.

  Die.

  Repeat.

  Until there aren’t any humans left on our pale blue planet to massacre in the heavens.

  Revolution will be a moot idea, a wispy dream in the senile minds of those too old to raise a weapon.

  The Trogs will come to harvest the Grays, rooting them out of their cold warrens on the moon. They’ll invade mother earth and find every wrinkled hag hiding a hatchling in a stinking bedroom, and then our parasitic overlords will meet their gruesome end.

  Karma.

  At least there’s that.

  The colonel, unaware of the dark future my thoughts are wandering through, says, “You can gravity compensate by ten or twenty percent, so it’ll be easier for you to make the walk.”

  “No thank you, ma’am,” I tell her. “This will be the last natural g I’m likely to feel for a while.” Maybe forever. “I’ll carry the load.”

  “Drop the ma’am for now. That’s for when we’re in front of the non-coms and grunts.”

  We’re not exactly in private, but I say, “Okay.”

  Without any hint of what’s coming, she says, “Your contact was compromised.”

  The phrase, sudden and shocking, means only one thing to me. I feel like ten pounds of ice just dropped into my stomach. She’s talking about Vishnu, my contact with the Free Army. I stumble.

  Blair reaches out to steady me. “You all right?”

  I smile my lie. “I should have g compensated.” I add the twenty percent and pretend to concentrate on my balance as I concoct an escape plan. I have a pistol. I could put a dozen rounds in Blair’s chest and hope she doesn’t have a kill switch linked to a biosensor under her uniform. Then I could max grav my ass the hell away from here.

  The orange battle suits are built to handle enormous construction loads, but I’ve heard a brave—crazy—person could use the embedded gravity plates to accelerate the thing to Mach 1 in atmospheric flight. Of course, the suit, not being aerodynamic by any measure, would likely kill me at that speed.

  Blair stops walking. “Go ahead, get yourself right.”

  “I already have.” I prepare to yank my pistol off its magnetic mount.

  “Now stop being coy, and let’s talk.”

  “About?” I ask, not ready to give up on coy. I tell myself she can’t know everything about my contact or I’d already be in cuffs.

  “The MSS picked up Vishnuvardhen this morning.”

  They have his full name, but I don’t respond, deciding instead to let her keep fishing. I might learn enough to keep myself alive until I can warn the insurgents—my friends—I’ve recruited over the past several years.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but we don’t have time for it.” She lets that hang in the air, but if she truly had any idea what I was thinking she’d be running in the other direction.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The cliché is the best I can come up with at the moment. I need to calm myself. I nee
d to think clearly.

  Blair huffs, grabs me by the arm, and leads me away from the other soldiers on their long walks toward the lift pads. We crunch our way through brown grass between two hangars. No one else is between the buildings.

  We’re as alone as we can be in the midst of two SDF divisions being processed through a spaceport.

  I’m thinking it’ll be a good place to shred her with a burst of high-velocity metal.

  Few eyes to see.

  Better chance to get away.

  Chapter 9

  “Penny Reed and Phil Barber.” She looks at me to see if I recognize the names.

  Of course I know the names. Phil’s my best friend, my brother-in-law. He works at the grav factory, as does Penny.

  I show Blair nothing.

  She proceeds down her list, naming a dozen more of my coconspirators from the factory. “Do you want me to go through all of it?”

  Sure, if it’ll buy me time to make the necessary choice.

  If I kill her, I give up on all I’ve worked for. My revolution ends here. Shortly after they catch me, my life will end in an MSS interrogation chamber with most of my favorite pieces missing.

  I don’t think there’s another way.

  I glance right and left and casually move my hand over my pistol grip.

  “Listen to what I’m telling you, Kane. I know you’re suspicious. You should be. But if I already know everyone in your network, why wouldn’t they be under arrest already?”

  “How do I know they’re not?”

  “You’ll see Penny and Phil when you board your ship. You three are assigned together. That’s what you requested, right? And that SDF sergeant and the captain Vishnu asked for, I don’t see how you could have pulled them into your network, but they’re on your ship, too.”

  I don’t know what sergeant and captain she’s talking about. I don’t have any contacts in the military, but everything about the Free Army is supposed to be compartmentalized for security reasons. There’s got to be a mountain of important things I don’t know. In fact, I’m counting on it. The revolution can’t be just Vishnu, me, and my friends.

  Which, of course, means Vishnu had to have his contacts up the chain.