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hears Monster pray, he’ll say, ‘Whatever Monster prays for, I’ll do opposite.’ ”
    “How about you, Price?” Chisnall asked. “You want to pray for us?”
    “Wouldn’t know where to start, bro,” Price said. “Let Wilton do it. He’s all religious.”
    “The hell I am,” Wilton said.
    “Then why do you keep that Bible and that cross and everything in your bunk back in Fort Carson?” Price asked.
    “My family sent them to me,” Wilton said. “Seems wrong to chuck stuff like that.”
    “But you ain’t religious?” Hunter asked.
    “Nope. My family is,” Wilton said. “All of them. Parents, sisters, uncles, cousins, the whole damn tribe. I always wanted to be. When I was young, I used to pray to God every night and ask him to make me a Christian. But he never did.”
    “Angel Five, you are one weird dude,” Price said.
[0430 hours]
[Officers’ Quarters, Republican Guard HQ, Uluru Military Base]
    Lieutenant Yozi Gonzale woke, feeling the subtle shift in the air pressure in the room as the sandstorm howled outside. Sandstorms always woke him. On Bzadia, such storms were more frequent, almost an everyday event, but they were also shorter and much milder—a soft cloud of blanketing dust, compared to the vicious whorls of abrasive sand that scoured the deserts of New Bzadia.
    He lay awake and listened to the storm. Many of his comrades had no trouble getting used to the long Earth days and even longer nights. Half as long again as the days and nights on Bzadia. For some reason, Yozi had never managed to adjust. Fortunately, he had never needed much sleep, and apart from the boredom, the long Earth nights did not worry him, even in winter when the nights went on forever here in New Bzadia.
Australia
, the humans had called it, when they had owned the country.
    “Os-trail-yuh.” He sounded out the word. No matter how hard he tried, the sibilant
S
sound of the humans came out as a Bzadian buzz. “Ozz-trail-yuh.”
    His promotion to the Republican Guards had been hard earned. Months on the front lines. One vicious battle after another. Many of his soldiers were lost as the humans dug their toes in and refused to give up ground.
    Yozi listened to the discordant music of the sandstorm outside and was glad that he was inside the secure stone walls of the officers’ quarters. Hopefully the storm will have subsided before he was due to go on patrol at first light.
    After a while, the others hunkered down and tried to get some shut-eye. Chisnall just listened to the raging sand winds above and thought through the plans for the mission. Was it possible that someone on his team was a traitor to the human race?
    He ran through the list of suspects in his mind. It was a pretty small list.
    Hunter. English. If there was ever a soldier you’d want to have at your side in a difficult situation, it was Stephen Huntington. Never afraid of a fight, no matter what the consequences, and he’d usually be the last man standing.
    Hunter had been hardened like steel, forged in the fires that were the British refugee camps in Massachusetts and Maine. With the fall of Great Britain, he and his working-class family were abruptly thrust into a tent ghetto. Somehow they survived the harsh Maine winters and a society ruled by the fist and the broken bottle.
    Amid the grime of the unpaved streets, Hunter had cracked knuckles until he was the one everyone—even the adults—feared. Hunter had confessed to Chisnall that he would have killed or been killed if he hadn’t been hauled off by the “coppers” and sent to a juvenile hall.
    It was there that his prowess at paintball was noticed.
    The army had given Hunter discipline. Had shaped his steel into a deadly sword.
    Holly Brogan was Chisnall’s sergeant and the only trained medic on the team. Tough, capable, deadly, and gorgeous. She looked like a cheerleader but was the battalion’s unarmed combat champion. Look like a butterfly, sting like a bee, Chisnall had thought