9
“Twenty-eight seconds. Again, recruit,” Staff Sergeant Moussari ordered.
On his belly in the mud, Rev resisted rolling his eyes in frustration. He’d cut down his time from almost two minutes, and he had to be getting close. But the sergeant, sitting in her hoverchair, kept pushing him.
He pulled the charge off the wall, zeroed it, removed the fuze, and put it back into his L-Pack.
“OK, I’m ready.”
Just concentrate and get her off your ass.
“On my mark . . . three . . . two . . . one!”
Rev shifted to his side and pulled the MM-901 out of his pack. The wall was cerrocrete, so he rotated the dial to Profile Four.
“Confirm profile, check power, set time, power fuze,” he muttered.
He didn’t need to repeat them. He’d known the process from the moment he’d been assigned the task. But he just couldn’t get his fingers to work quickly enough to implement the steps.
“There!” he muttered as the fuze winked green. He slapped it into the slot on the mine body, then gave it a hard twist to the right. Nothing. He gave it another twist, and this time, the two lights lined up, flashed twice, and turned off.
Rev thumbed the release, activating chameleon pads, then placed the mine on the wall and pushed it firmly before flipping the release lever back. This time, the mine stuck on the wall.
One last step. Don’t screw it up.
The fuze and the mine had a solid connection. All he had to do now was arm it. He ran his finger around the edge and carefully pushed the arming trigger. A single soft beep confirmed that the mine was ready, and if it was real, it would detonate in ten minutes.
Rev twisted in the mud to look back at the staff sergeant. Her face was expressionless as usual. It was as if the Centaur beamer that had vaporized half of her body, from her waist on down, had taken her personality as well.
Which wasn’t fair, he knew. According to Doc Jewel, one of the corpsmen in the field during all training, she didn’t have enough spine left for prosthetics. They had to grow it, which would take another year—a year of puttering around in her hoverchair testing recruits.
“Twenty-four seconds,” she said. “Report to Station Thirty-One.”
Which meant he passed, much to his relief. He pulled off the mine and stood, the mud making a squelching sound as he broke free from its embrace. He handed the dirty training mine to the staff sergeant.
“Don’t just stand there, recruit. Double-time.”
Rev could feel for the staff sergeant, but he didn’t have to like her. He broke into a jog down the path, only to meet Krissy jogging up.
“What is it?” she asked him.
“MM-901. Moussari’s running it.”
“Fucking great,” she said as she ran past him. Then she called over her shoulder, “Good luck with the next one, big boy.”
Rev snorted. At least Big boy was an improvement over young fellah. He’d barely had a chance to talk to her since the CO’s brief. Krissy wasn’t shy in telegraphing her interest in him—not that he’d act on anything while they were still recruits—but he couldn’t even just socialize with the last four days being jammed with training, almost around the clock. He suspected that was by design, to keep their minds off of their coming augmentations.
Rev wasn’t sure what he felt about them. He was a creature of his past, and he’d always been taught that augmentations were evil. But as the CO had said, desperate times called for desperate measures. And if this was the only way to defeat the activated chameleon pads—
Truth be told, he was more than willing to let the frenetic pace of training take up his thoughts. Better not to think of what was going to be done to him at all.
He rounded the path to Station Thirty-One and stopped dead in his tracks. There was a series of at least a dozen obstacles stretched out—obstacles that looked like he was going to need items from his combat kit to traverse. Four of his fellow DC recruits were at various obstacles as they struggled to get through them.
Rev watched for a moment, then with a sigh, headed to the portahead off to the side to empty his bladder.
This one was going to take him a while.