Read Firemask: Book Two of the Last Legion Series for Free Online Page A

shame if you start wheezing and quit on us. They’ll have to give the company to me, and send you back to polishing Griersons.
    “Give me a chance to give it some kind of sexy name, like all these steel-teeth units do in the holos. Screw Jaansma’s Jewels, it’ll be Yoshitaro’s … um …
    “Yoinks,” Jaansma said, a smile coming for the first time in he didn’t remember how many days. “Yerks. Yaahoos. Yobbos. Yoodles. Yackoffs.”
    “Shut the hell up,
sir.
And go pack.”
    “Thank you,
Aspirant.
I’ll take your suggestion. God help those poor trainees. Take charge of the company ‘til I get back.”
    “I shall,” Njangu promised. “And you’ll not recognize it for the improvements.”
    • • •
    The Rentiers had built a great tabernacle, almost a fortress, overlooking the city of Leggett, just where the ground rose into the Heights and the aristocrats’ estates.
    Their religion was quiet, formal, full of exactitude, and helped demarcate the established families from the parvenus. A proper Rentier could maneuver easily through the rituals, while still admiring or despising the dress of a competitor or friend, considering whose turn it was to invite a “few friends” over for a postservice meal, or the latest gossip from the night before’s ball.
    The Leader waited until the chorus’s chanting died away in the dim rafters of the temple, then walked forward, his white-and-black robes swishing as he moved.
    “This is the second reading of the matrimony proposed between Loy Kouro and Jasith Mellusin. Again, is there any among us who knows of a reason these two should not be joined in matrimony?”
    He waited.
    Someone, no one ever found out who, far in the back, giggled.
    A few necks stiffened, but no one turned to look.
    “There are none,” the Leader said. “Now, let us turn to this day’s lesson …”
    • • •
    The Grierson came in hot, skidding sideways and letting its momentum smash down brush on the edge of the clearing. Eleven women and men staggered out, anthropoidal under huge packs, blasters cradled in their arms, lumbered to the far side of the clearing, and fell into a defensive perimeter.
    Inside the Grierson, Garvin started to unplug his throat mike, hesitated, keyed a sensor.
    “Vehicle Commander, this is Jaansma.”
    “Yeh,” Ben Dill said flatly.
    “Hey. Sorry I was a shit-for-brains.”
    Without waiting for a reply, he lifted off the flight helmet, pulled on a floppy patrol hat, and lurched out into the center of the perimeter, dropping to his knee beside the trainee named as that day’s patrol leader and her com man.
    She, like the other recruits, had been ground down to the point of emaciation by the long weeks of training in and around Camp Mahan, and her face, which might be pretty after a week’s sleep, was pale in spite of the blazing sun. She was seventeen and, like the others, had her black hair shaved.
    The Grierson’s ramp snapped up, and the combat vehicle lifted away sharply. This was the second time it’d lowered into a jungle clearing, and in common with standard insertion tactics, would do a second false insertion before returning to Camp Mahan.
    The trainee, a woman named Montagna, reflexively waited for Jaansma to tell her what to do, then realizing she was The Man now, recovered. She checked her map hastily, making sure, as best she could, they’d been landed where she’d asked to be put down.
    The patrol order had been set before they lifted off. Montagna nodded to the point man, and he checked his primitive compass, got up, and, moving slowly, eased into the jungle. Jaansma had insisted compasses be used, rather than global positioning SatPos, both to increase the hassle factor and because it was possible for an enemy not only to use satellite positioning to give false locations, but to backplot and locate someone using the system.
    Behind the point man came the woman picked for slack, then the rest of the patrol.
    Jaansma walked behind Montagna