Chapter 1

“Well, that sucked.”

Christine lay on her suit’s backpack and stared up at Jupiter through her visor. No visible cracks, and she was still breathing O2-mix, that was a good start. Her suit wasn’t overheating or freezing, that was better. She turned her head to look around for who had spoken, but her neck hurt from the crash so she stopped moving. All she could see was sky, unless she sat up. Christine wasn’t ready to risk trying that quite yet.

“That royally sucked.” Parello. Her new side gunner. She recognized his voice this time. Less than a week in the squad, he’d transferred in from D company. Knew it was him because it was the only voice she didn’t know like her own heartbeat. Also, he sounded like he actually came from Earth rather than one of the inner colonies. Nobody came from Earth anymore.

“Anyone else?” There should be twenty answers, there was only the one.

“Hey, Captain Christine the Fighting Machine! You made it, sir!”

“Don’t call me that, Sergeant.”

“Why not? You reputation reaches far and wide. Guess you earned it, too. There is no way in hell we should be alive.”

“Let’s check suit integrity then see if we’re the only ones.” But she lay there a moment longer looking up at the gas giant. Her back was on Io. And above, the planet named for the god of thunder filled a quarter of the sky, forty degrees of arc.

Jupiter felt as if it filled her whole world and was crushing down upon her chest. She could see every band, every swirl and detail as if she hovered close over the cloudy surface rather than lying on her back like some stunned-puppy recruit four-hundred thousand klicks away.

Everything was so vibrant, all of the way down to her own stink in the suit’s air recyclers. She’d never come so close to death before, maybe that’s what did it, made everything seem so real, so vibrantly present. Even if they were on a dead moon.

Shock. She was in shock from the crash and had to get moving. Her first attempt to sit up elicited level-four alarms from all of the muscles she’d wrenched. Level-five had been the final alarm her Stinger-class ship had offered before it died.

“I’d be glad to check on my suit’s systems, sir, but I can’t see shit.”

Christine nudged the heads-up display with her chin. Toggled to the third screen. The Health and Usage Monitoring System reported that she had a full load: O2, water, ammo. Screen four of the HUMS reported that her O2 scrubber, tracking, command, and waste recycling were okay. Though she wasn’t impressed with the hundred percent suit integrity rating. After what they’d been through that couldn’t be accurate; but at least she wasn’t leaking.

Then she hit the squad screen.

Two signals. Her and Parello. Emma and Marko were both gone. She hit the extended menu which should have give her the read on the troops from the Royal Marines they’d been trying to deliver to the backside of Europa.

Flatlines.

She forced herself upright and scanned the Ionian hillside in the shadowless half-light of Jupiter. Scattered bodies. Not even someone with just a dead radio. No movement, except herself and Parello. He sat upright with his back toward her.

“Just the two of us.”

“Maybe the circuit’s just gone bad.”

She could see the entire half platoon of Her Majesty’s Special Operations Forces scattered across the broad hillside of yellow volcanic ash. Knowing they were going down hard, she’d ejected the troops at twenty meters up, giving her shot-up Stinger ship all the braking thrust she’d dared moments before kicking them loose. Damned spaceship’s HUMS hadn’t tracked something that was damaged, they were always slow to update on mechanical faults in a catastrophe. She should have allowed for that, but there hadn’t been time. Not with how imminent their crash had been.

Whatever it was, it had been too much and the Stinger had shredded smack in the middle of the squad, each soldier falling slowly in the light gravity. Half had already been dead from the attack, the other half… She didn’t see a whole lot of hope that anyone else was alive.

She headed over in Parello’s direction, two careful long strides in the eighteen percent Earth-normal grav. Christine dug in a heel to stop and cursed when she turned and saw Parello’s face plate, his entire visor was one big star crack. There was no way it should still be intact.

“You okay in there, Sergeant?”

“Trying not to breath hard. Puff of air hits this wrong and it’s going to royally ruin my day.” Royally. Parello’s trademark epithet. He also didn’t curse like a Spec Ops grunt.

Christine hated shit like this. They all practiced emergency procedures like helmet changes in atmo a thousand times until they were instinct, but no one was ever dumb enough to try it in the field. Not until had to was the only option. She’d never heard of anyone who’d had to. At least not that lived to tell about it.

She didn’t need to check the readout on the body lying not far from Parello; a spar of the Stinger’s landing strut was punched through the suit’s chest. With a quick slap, she released the latch and twisted the helmet free, barely registering the thick red hair that had made Andrews so easy to spot in a crowd. No blood inside the helmet.

“Ready to change helmets in five,” she told Parello.

He reached up to unfasten his own latch. His hands appeared steady. Good man.

Per training, she spoke calm and steady by rote. “Final deep breath. Close eyes. Remember to exhale slowly. And. Now!”

Parello spun the helmet off, the visor shattering even as he did so, tiny shards blowing outward to ping lightly against her own visor. He quickly dumped his helmet straight back, again per training, getting both it and his arms out of her way. She slapped Corporal Andrews’ helmet on him and gave it a twist to seat the latch. “Continue to exhale for five.” She knew her voice would sound thin as the helmet pressurized.

After five seconds, Parello opened his eyes, then blinked a couple times.

“You’ve got pretty eyes, Captain Merrill. How come I never noticed that before?”

“Because you just transferred in last week. Still glad you did?” She was going to ignore the “pretty eyes” remark. They allowed cross-rank relationships now, had for a century, but she’d always found it useful to keep her distance when in command. Actually, to keep her distance from anyone.

“I’m alive. So, it’s working for me.” He started tapping his chin to toggle the display. “Oh crap! Literally.”

“What?”

“My crapper’s gone. No wonder my ass hurts.” He shifted his hips back and forth on the ground and grimaced.

She flipped him over, on Io he weighed about as much as a sack of potatoes. Sure enough, his suit’s recycling unit had taken a direct hit. Probably all that saved his life as something had hit it real damn hard. That shock would have rammed straight up the pickup funnel pushed partway inside him. Must have hurt like a son of a bitch.

“Detach that one for me, will you?” Christine pointed to the recycling unit on the closest body lying just a half-dozen paces off. Staff Sergeant Halberson’s suit. Knew it was him by the sheer size of the man, didn’t even know suits came that big before she met him. Got to be a weird kinda jock to sign up for a career in cramped space quarters when you were that size. Of course, the Special Operations Royal Marines were nuts to begin with anyway.

Then she looked away, trying not to think of the man it had kept alive for months at a time, until ten minutes ago when all his air had rushed out into this moon’s vacuum through his crushed helmet.

Compartmentalize.Time to think later about how much she’d miss his quiet anchoring of the Special Ops team.

“How did a woman with such pretty eyes go officer?” Parello set to work on Halberson’s suit.

It wasn’t a story she typically told. Okay, not one she ever told. To anyone. But she also had never been one of two survivors on a small airless bluff orbiting Jupiter surrounded by the dead and the thousand fragments of a shattered Stinger.

Parello was off to a good start, fishing wrenches and sealant out of Halberson’s emergency pouch rather than using any of his own fresh supplies. She knew it still felt you were robbing the dead, but Parello clearly had soldiered long enough to understand the necessity of keeping his own supplies fully stocked for as long as possible. He was steady enough to be strategizing his own survival.

She shrugged to herself, her past would give them something to distract themselves with. They probably wouldn’t make it anyway.

Parello loosened the first hoses on Halberson’s recycler.

“It was my dad,” she kept her words short because her jaw was clamped so tight.

“In the service? He proud when you made Captain?”

How did Parello keep his voice so steady? Christine also resisted the urge to open her own kit rather than plunder the dead. She moved over to Lieutenant Emma Perkins’ suit and almost succeeded in ignoring the missing legs. It was only the Lieutenant’s third offensive and now she’d never have a chance to fulfill her academy potential.

She’d been a good pilot, but not great. Hadn’t stopped Christine from liking her, but neither did it stop her wondering if they’d all still be alive if Emma had been better.

Probably not, the attacker had come out of nowhere. They’d managed to kill it, but not before the damage was done.

Christine pulled the tool pouch off what remained of Perkin’s thigh, making it wave its blackened-blood stump obscenely at her. Then she moved across the detritus of Io’s volcanic madness and knelt down behind Parello, the yellow sulfur ash crunching beneath her heavily padded knees.

“Never told him I was in the service. Never had the chance.”

“Oh, sorry, didn’t know he was dead.”

Christine focused on placing all of the tools on the ash, in the order she’d need them.

Parello finished freeing the recycle unit from the base of Halberson’s pack and passed it back to her. Then he dropped down on all fours with his backside to her. A number of inappropriate jokes came to mind, none of which would be funny at the moment.

“I joined to undo all that I could of what he did,” Christine made sure the replacement unit was oriented in the right direction. With the wrench, she pre-loosened the hose lock-rings on either end of Parello’s shattered unit, then undid the four retaining clips.

“Old man was a real cut up?”

“Why do you say that, Sergeant?”

“Because, Captain Christine the Fighting Machine, you are one squared away, hard-ass. And I mean that in the best of ways, sir.”

“Shut up, Parello.”

“Yes, sir, Captain Merrill, sir.”

Christine inspected everything again, making sure it was all set. Then prelit the torch. No need to conserve supplies, more were scattered far and wide around them.

“Do it already!” Parello’s voice wasn’t so easy.

She was starting to hear the strain beneath his easy surface. It made her like him more. He proved he was capable of being an optimist in a scary situation, but not a gung-ho space jock.

His record showed problems with authority, but a kick-ass battle record with an amazing ability to survive. One of the reasons she’d accepted him into E Company 5th battalion of the fighting 160th.

She took her time making sure everything was ready. The surface of Io allowed no room for mistakes.

“Death Waits in the Dark” had been the Night Stalkers motto on Earth when they flew those primitive helicopters on night operations. They’d developed the early generations of Stingers to their own specs and never stopped innovating. After the move to space, it was only natural that the 160th would remain at the flight controls. When the U.S. had ceased to exist in any form but the Night Stalkers hadn’t, they were folded into the remains of King Richards British empire out in the Colony Cans whirling around at the LaGrange 2 point behind the Moon.

“Okay,” she said it as matter-of-factly as she could, partly for her own nerves to steady her hands, but partly to keep Parello calm now that she’d heard the edge. “Okay, this is gonna feel a little weird.”

“No shit!” Then he barked out a laugh on the unintended pun that neither of them commented on. They both knew this was far less likely to work than a helmet change.

“Merrill is my mom’s name. My dad is General Ansel Moore.”

As Parello was distracted by her statement, not even managing a low whistle of surprise, Christine snapped open the two fittings she’d already loosened. Pulling hard on the recycling unit, Parello grunted.

“Ansel Moore,” he managed it through gritted teeth.

“Yep!” She twisted and pulled to break the sealant and the unit came free from his suit, including the collecting funnel. She tossed it aside.

Flash the torch briefly on Halberson’s unit to get the funnel up to somewhere around body temperature, maybe even sterilize it a bit. Careful not to melt it.

Smear sealant around the edges.

Line it up.

And...

She slammed her palm into the unit to seat it firmly.

Inserted.

“Shit that’s cold! General…‘The Sword’ Moore…is your…old man.” He grunted out each phrase as she used the clamps and mounting screws to shove the unit home. “But he started the damn war!”

Her father still wore an old-style U.S. Marine Corps Mameluke officer’s sword, which was considered a bit of a slap in the face to the British generals who wore a similar blade. He’d been known to dispense justice, at least his form of it, with the brutal blade and earned his nickname.

It took Christine another thirty seconds to finish the field repair and run a second line of seal around the edges just in case. It was ugly, nowhere near by the book, but it would keep Parello alive.

“So,” he was taking deep breaths that echoed loudly over the suit radio as he struggled to retain control. “That’s…why you said you…were making up for him.”

“Check function.” Now she wanted him to back off that topic. Was sorry she’d even brought it up to begin with. She heard him clicking through the menus.

“HUMS shows good. Damn I’m glad that’s over. Nothing like showing off your backside to a beautiful officer.”

“You mean your best side?” A tease? Surprised herself; she never teased.

“Not the most attractive view? Damn and I had such hopes, Captain Merrill.” He turned gingerly until he was facing her, kind of working his hips to seat the unit more comfortably, if there was such a thing. One of the many things a space grunt learned to live with. Though not often with someone else’s shit mixed in with their own.

She couldn’t look away from his dark eyes when they were finally turned visor to visor.

“Having him for an old man is too much for anyone to make up for.” He sounded far more wise and insightful about her than she ever wanted anyone to be.

“I was always an overachiever.” Truth.

So done with the subject, she nodded downward as much as was possible in a suit.

“And that’s a cute ass.” Also truth, and not the best choice of new topic for keeping her distance. But she’d been in the suit locker when everyone was stripping down and gearing up. Even among the fine physical conditioning of all her troops, Parello had stood out as an exceptional example. Not a thing wrong with his body.