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

been cut off. He managed to get his guys to help quell the near riot that erupted, but it turned out it wasn’t just a rumor this time; the Posleen really had cut off their escape route.
    Then they got the word that most of the personnel, and gear, was going to go out by the two alternate routes. Great. He was all for fighting, he’d been doing it for damn near ten years, but it helped to have a way out in case things went south. However, it turned out that “most” did not include the “combat arms” forces.
    The next thing he knew he and his squad were in the back of a Bradley headed up the road to the pass the Posleen had taken.
    Now, he wasn’t a coward by any stretch of the imagination. But he’d gotten a look at the map and taking that pass with the pitiful little force they had was just suicide.
    They finally had a real meeting, where the lieutenant who was in charge of the Brads called all the squad leaders together and told them the plan, such as it was. The SheVa gun, probably the same one that had killed the Lamprey that blasted him into the drink, was going to fire a nuke into the pass. Then they would charge into the pass and clean up the survivors.
    “It’ll be easy,” the lieutenant concluded. “All the Posties will be toasties from the nuke. We just have to secure it until the brigade on the other side makes it up the road.”
    Sarge Buckley had been beating around the Army since before the Posleen had been heard of and he knew when somebody was lying. “The check is in the mail” is nothing compared to “the trucks are on the drop zone.” But the worst military cliché of them all had to be “the artillery is going to pound them flat then we’ll just go in and paint the lines.”
    Buckley looked up as the radio in the track began to honk.
    “NUKE WARNING. NUKE WARNING. TARGET COORDINATES: UTM 17 311384E 392292N. 100 K-T. THIRTY SECONDS!”
    Life just got worse.
    “FIFTEEN SECONDS. TEN . . .”
    They were all gonna die.
    * * *
    This time Buckley heard the crack from the ridge before the Posleen opened fire. Their fire was also much less directed; they seemed to be firing in every direction. He hunkered down for a moment then used the disturbance to move again.
    His vision wasn’t really back; he still had much of his field of view blocked out by a negative image of his hands. He’d heard about “knowing something like the back of your hands,” but he seemed to have the inside of his hands superimposed over everything.
    But he could sort of see and he sort of knew where he was going so it was sort of time to move. He squatted down and duck-walked to the end of the chunk of granite and then paused. When he stuck his head out he would probably be looking at Posleen from less than ten feet away.
    The question as usual was fast or slow. Finally he decided on fast. Pulling a grenade out of its pouch he pulled the pin and took a breath.
    “Once the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend,” he whispered and leaned out.
    Joe waited for the expected flurry of fire to subside then leaned around the concrete pylon and hammered off all five grenades in his AIW as fast as he could pull the trigger. The Posleen were firing before he even pulled back, but over the racket of the railguns—all the plasma gunners seemed to be gone—he could hear a Barrett punching out round after round. Pulling another grenade from his harness he tossed it in the general direction of the trench as he reloaded. One more burst should do it.
    He jacked the first grenade into place and leaned around the concrete obstacle just as the HVM round hit it.
    * * *
    Sergeant Patrick Delf swept his AIW from side to side, using the night scope on it to look for targets. The area around the Blue Ridge overpass was a mass of heat signatures, but none of them were moving. Most of them were unrecognizable. He stepped forward carefully, his feet shuffling for good footing on the rubble-strewn road, and searching for threats