Chapter 2

“Well,that was a whole lot of nothing.”

“Hate it when you’re right.” Twenty blocks of hyper-vigilant sprinting toward the crash. Run, duck into a doorway, cover Grant as he bolted forward to the next partial hide, who then covered me when I sprinted ahead again.

Of course, sprinting in Lunar gravity was a good trick. No skipping walk. The moment you lost contact with the ground, you lost all ability to maneuver. Of course, scraping your bootheels just made it more likely you’d trip. While there wasn’t any sound bouncing about in vacuum, except what conducted in through our suits, that made a scuff sound damn loud.

Trick was to get the feet moving just high enough that putting down a toe could give you traction for an emergency dodge. And leaning. It was the biggest difference between an Earther grunt and a Loonie. We had spiked soles on our boots so that when we did put down a foot, we could lean hard into that turn to shift our momentum. Mass didn’t go away with weight, not that Earthers ever remembered that.

Grant had adapted though. He always said he hadn’t caught a ride aloft until he was “all grown up.” But he’d adapted just fine, sprinted as smooth as any Loonie. One of the reasons I’d made him my second—the man always had my back.

We ducked into a ground floor living room to catch a breath. A quick scout around and we’d found a couple bodies in the bedroom, frozen together forever in that clench.

“Not even enough warning to stop doing fornicating.”

“Fornicating? Jesus, Grant. You go to a Brit boarding school as a child?”

“Yes. Uni at Edinburgh too.”

Well, he did a fine job of hiding that he might be running on more than the three brain cells that went with his three stripes.

“No wonder you sound like an officer. Fornicating for crying out loud?”

“Looks like more than that. The quake and the atmo didn’t just go away in a millisecond. Humans can survive vacuum for at least sixty seconds. They knew they were goners and just held on tighter.”

It was the only thing that explained why they were still in the position. Giving them their privacy, we shifted back to the living room where I could keep an eye out the window. This couple had acquired some coloring for their walls, but still no sealant. At least it had turned the bleeding red into bleeding blue. Much cheerier.

“If you’ve got all those brains, how did you end up a Delta Marine grunt? And where did you learn to run like a Loonie?”

Grant took a sudden interest in the outside world.

Across the street were a lot of three- and four-story buildings, missing their top two or three stories—a whole lot were missing the ground-level story as well except for a pile of rubble. Every now and then a wall still stood, just a good thing there were no breezes here or they’d be coming down fast.

That lone remaining spire of the Kremlin still defied logic and stood at least ten stories tall in the distance. Like a Russian male’s banger looking to poke the sky.

“Remember the Lift out of Edinburgh in ’67?”

I shuddered. My first run as a newly hashed corporal. The exosuit augmenting my Loonie muscles hadn’t made me feel any lighter as we tried to extract the last refugees north of Hadrian’s Wall. Five, ten times (maybe more) people than we could ever lift. Only the Castle and the wooded tops of Holyrood Park still sticking out above where the rising oceans had filled in the Firth of Forth. Could see people on the latter, but no way to land in the trees.

The Danes somehow knew we were coming. After all the centuries of bad blood, the Swedes had finally gotten even by leaving their asses behind during the Norse Lift. Which made the Danes fully determined not to miss ours.

The battle had been bad.

Scots battling one another to get on our ships.

At the same time, Danish boats and airships going up in flames. Counterattacks plowing holes fifty people wide through the crowds.

“Twelve kinds of ugly,” I managed.

“I was in that. You saved me that day.”

“What? Like personally?”

“Uh-huh.”

Like there’s a chance I’d remember during that mess.

“Guy came after me with an axe he’d scrounged from the castle’s historical display. You just grabbed it in mid-swing, yanked it out of his grasp, then whapped his head with the side of it; knocked him out cold. I stayed hot on your heels, not that you wasted time looking back, just plowing ahead into the fray. Following you is how I ended up on the last ship out.”

It was a weird thing in battle.

The first choice when things were coming apart was to keep moving as a team—best chance of survival, all working together.

Or form up as a two-grunt fire-and-maneuver team like Grant and I were now, depending on each other to fill the boots of four or five grunts each.

And when it all went to shit—like that snowy dawn in the Edinburgh Castle courtyard, with the Danes’ landing boats disgorging like Viking hordes where they’d grounded on the Royal Mile between the old tartan mill and the whiskey distillery—the only answer was to go apeshit. Lunge into battle like there was no tomorrow. Yeah, me and William Wallace.

But even then… Yeah, there’d been a feeling that someone had my back. Maybe not a battle-hardened grunt but there were moments I knew I should have died from an attack from behind—that didn’t happen.

“Well, uh, glad I could help.” This girl wasn’t going to let a little hero worship go to her head, but I wasn’t exactly complaining either. I didn’t remember him, but I did remember the feeling that my six was covered—had ever since.

And the axe. Might still have it hanging on the wall of my lay-down—replica of Robert the Bruce’s Bannockburn war axe after all. I’d done a lot worse with it than knock out a Dane that day. A brutal, visceral weapon.

“Yeah, me too,” he didn’t make a big deal out of it which was decent.

Two of us in the middle of a ruined Russian colony was not a time for things to get weird.

“Anyway, been trying to follow in your footsteps since that day.”

Now it was getting a bit deep. I scanned the broken slabs of plas. “How’s that working for you so far, Grant?”

“We get out of this alive and I’ll file no complaints.”

“You forgetting Camryn?” They had been an item after all.

“Over long ago, Sarge. No match for you.”

Way too deep. This was no time for thinking.

I signaled us out the door and back into a two-person cover-formation run.