Read The Infinity Brigade #1 Stone Cold for Free Online Page A

to burn through. The shirt stuck where my blood had dried in a way that glued the fabric to my skin. I expected it to hurt when I pulled the fabric away but surprisingly it did not.
    Sergeant Harris examined the shirt. There were a number of holes where shrapnel had passed through it. The snipers had not been trying to hit us but ricochets were hard to fully control. He looked at my arm and side. The skin was unblemished save for the blood stains.
    “You say you did not process through medical yet?”
    “That is correct Senior Drill Sergeant,” I answered crisply.
    “Have you ever received military grade medical nanites?”
    “Affirmative Drill Sergeant. I was given a batch when I went through the MEPS. I had recently acquired a few torn ligaments after a heated discussion with a Master Gunny Sergeant.”
    Harris laughed. “That’s been known to happen. Well son it appears your entire platoon passed the challenge. But fear not son… the day is young.”

Chapter 5: Boot Camp – The Wall
    By the time my platoon got to the end of week two, I was beginning to think I had this whole ‘Boot Camp’ thing in the bag. There was a technical term I had learned in grade school that defined such defective thinking… it was called hubris… that tendency towards excessive pride or self-confidence. Yup, that was me. Fortunately our Drill Sergeants were experts at spotting hubris and rooting it out at its source. It made for an interesting, if somewhat painful next several weeks.
    My platoon and I had developed a rhythm that we fell into each evening.  We spent a few hours together as a team polishing everything that could be polished. Then we cleaned everything that could be cleaned. This included boots, brass, toilets, floors and most importantly our weapons. We had finally been issued real pointers and we learned real quickly that we were expected to treat them like favored children. Where we went… it went. When it needed cleaning… we cleaned it. If it didn’t need cleaning… we checked to make sure it was clean anyway.
    A pointer was an interesting weapon. It fired a plasma bolt that could be used to shock or kill depending on the strength that was dialed into the weapon. Ours were locked into mild stun but even in this mode they could be quite dangerous. They were called pointers because to fire one, you placed a low-powered red aiming laser on the target and pressed the trigger. A more powerful second laser would fire a specially tuned beam that was designed to create an ionized channel in the air that a powerful electric current could flow through. It was not unlike launching a bolt of lightning.
    What made the pointer the weapon of choice for space-based marines was the simple fact that it could be effective in a spaceship without risking the hull integrity of a ship in the way a kinetic round could. What made the pointer an ideal weapon for training was that it could be set to stun only.
    We were about to learn that the humble pointer was also an effective weapon for training in vacuum combat scenarios.  Now this may seem counter-intuitive at first. After all, a pointer works by creating an ionized conduit through an atmosphere in order to do its job. The beauty of the pointer in an airless training scenario was that the ionizing laser could still be easily detected and thus ‘kills’ could be simulated without endangering the trainee. A special gas puffer was attached to the pointer itself to simulate a rifle recoil so the soldier firing the weapon learned to compensate for what he or she would experience in actual combat.
    Before the pointer had been developed Marines had trained with paintball guns. These did not represent a danger to the integrity of a soldier’s space suit but the paintball could impart momentum on the targeted soldier. Momentum, especially uncontrolled momentum in space, was every soldier’s worst nightmare while working in a weightless environment.  The pointer solved this