Read The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley for Free Online Page A

“Shit, shit, shit,” he continued, reaching for the cartridge.
    “Sarge, the gun’s hot,” Wright objected.
    “Screw that,” Buckley said, waving Alejandro away from the breakers. “I want to get this over with before . . .”
    The two specialists never found out what it was he wanted to get it over with before because the problem was a short, but not in the gun or even in the M27 mount. The problem was in the resistor that controlled power flow to the M27.
    The resistor coil stepped down the power that was supplied to all the guns so that the voltage going to the mounts was at the proper level. But in the case of Mount B-146, the resistor was slightly flawed, and it was permitting a higher charge through.
    This charge had been “bleeding over” to the gun, and since the gun was driven by an electrical motor it was causing the motor to run at a slightly higher rpm than it was strictly designed for. But since the gun was on a controlled ground, the full power of the flawed resistor had never been released.
    When Sergeant Buckley grabbed the brass, though, the power, having found a conduit, went to work. And he was suddenly hit by 220 volts of AC power.
    Buckley stood in place, shaking for a moment, until all the breakers for the sector blew out.
    “Damn,” said Wright. “That’s gotta hurt . You didn’t have to blow him to hell to prove your point, Alejandro.”
    “I didn’t,” the specialist replied, pulling an injector of Hiberzine out of the first aid case. “Call the medics while I start the CPR. Tell ’em Buckley’s having a bad day again.”
    * * *
    Sergeant Buckley had come to the conclusion that there were worse things than being in a suit.
    After being electrocuted he had awakened in the hospital in the middle of the Posleen attack. Getting out, finding clothes, weapons and transportation had been interesting. Then, he had barely started on his long journey when a SheVa round had terminated a Posleen Lamprey less than two thousand meters away.
    The good news was that the lander didn’t explode.
    The bad news was that it fell in a sewage retention pond.
    The next thing Buckley knew, the contents of the pond had been scattered over a wide, and in the future extremely fertile, area. An area that included the Humvee he was, with the occasional twitch, driving.
    He had survived, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience. And, unfortunately, the next Lamprey that was hit blew up rather spectacularly.
    He had come to lying in the Little Tennessee River. How he had gotten there was a mystery until he saw the Humvee lying sideways on a shattered tree. He was, however, cleaner. The rest of the retreat was a bit of blur. The Posleen actually got ahead of him at one point, but he managed to get a ride on a five-ton that snuck around them to the east. Then, in Dillsboro, they’d all been unloaded and segregated out.
    Technically he was probably still a patient, but he didn’t make any fuss about being handed a rifle. They’d even given him a “squad.” All eight of the soldiers were clerks with an infantry military operational skill rating. The way that worked was that after going through training to be infantry, some desk jockey would grab them to push papers instead of carry a rifle. So the guys had been trained to be infantry, but only one of them had ever spent any time in the line.
    He, and the one specialist with some line experience, made sure that all the clerks knew how to load and fire their weapons. Then he found some rations and they sat around waiting for somebody to get their thumb out of their butts. Hurry up and wait was all well and good, but the Posleen weren’t all that far back; if whoever was in charge of this cluster-fuck—it looked like a captain which was just crazy, there must have been a brigade’s worth of gear and personnel in the area he was looking at—didn’t get a move on, the Posleen were going to overrun the lot of them.
    Then the rumor got around that the main exit had