Read Extinction for Free Online

to remember where she
really was.
    “Whoa, marine! Calm down, we’re not in
battle yet. Come on, didn’t you hear the ‘gear-up’ call on the 1MC?”
    “Gear up?” she managed to whisper as
Davies let go of her fist.
    “Yeah, I’ve been trying to wake you for
almost a minute now. I was going to call sickbay in a second if you didn’t come
around.” He stepped back to allow her room to stand and added, “What were you
dreaming about, anyway? You were mumbling Mike’s name and something about him
screwing up. Hey, you’re not believing that stupid story we were fed about that
crash, are you?”
    Daria sent Davies a glare that made him
take a step back and he knew that he had crossed an invisible but very definite
line. “What the hell is going on out there, anyway?” she managed as she
stumbled towards her gear locker.
    “We’re on alert status one, and all base
personnel are to gear up and await orders. I guess this means that your leave
is terminated.” He looked at her with mournful eyes in an attempt to let her
know that he knew she would never believe that lame story about Mike.
    “It’s about time something happened
around here,” she said with a smile. “I was getting bored of playing solitaire.
Let’s gear up and get this thing started.”
    “Well, it’s about time Daria came back!”
Davies almost roared. “I was starting to miss that little hellfire around here.
Let’s go kick the ass of whoever just pissed us off”
    Daria looked at her gear and wondered
what to take. She hated these general calls to gear up. You never knew where
you were going, so how the hell did they expect you to know what to take?
    She grabbed her standard-issue marine assault
rifle, which was not so standard anymore. She had modified the grenade launcher
tube to accept high explosive willey-pete mortars. The mortars were usually
launched from a stable platform mounted to a vehicle’s deck plates. She reduced
the capacity from six grenades to two mortars but she tended to kill more
targets with one willey-pete round than most did with five or six grenades. She
had also shortened the length of the barrel for easier carrying with the rest
of her gear.
    Although she usually spread the medical
gear out among the other platoon members to help with carrying it, she still
had her med pack that she always carried. A regular-sized rifle barrel always
seemed to snag on its front flap or some other part of the bag just when you
least expected or needed it to.
    Grabbing her water recycler, she checked
to make sure that the filter was clean and had a good amount of life left in
it. Of course, she already knew that all her gear was in tiptop shape.
    After Mike’s death, she did nothing but
take apart and clean all her gear every day for almost the first week. You never
wanted to go into the field unless you knew for sure that everything was
perfect. Something always went wrong, so it’s always best to try to reduce the
number of things that could go wrong.
    She looked over her comlink and applied
it to her neck. This was the best gear improvement she had seen in more than ten
years. The new comlinks were a light titanium alloy about the size of a poker
chip and only about two times as thick. When placed up against the neck just
behind the ear, the wearer tripped a switch that activated an electrical
impulse, allowing the device to attach itself to the skin at the molecular
level. And the best part was it drew its energy from the bioelectricity created
by the soldier: as long as you were alive, so were your communications.
    Once attached, you could set it to
different frequencies simply by rotating the outer ring until you got the
frequency you desired. One click for the whole platoon to hear, two clicks to
get a secure channel between you and any other marine within a twenty-meter
radius, three clicks for a secure link to the command center, and four clicks
to raise the transport ship. The device picked up the vibrations in the