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Three, two, one . . .

She wrenched at the hatch. A hiss of escaping pressure as the hatch rose.

Clarence didn’t move. Just stood beside her, watching, calm, even when she started.

“Damn!”

There was a lot of blood. A man, too. But a lot of blood. More than seemed possible. That was what got to her first. The blood sloshed in the creases of the berth. It ran down the floor to pool in the footwell. It had saturated the man’s clothes. His face was crusted by blood, his eyes white and bulging in the midst of it. Couldn’t at first tell if he really was alive. She and Clarence stared down while he lay there, looking up but not really seeing.

Burgundy grimaced in disgust, mumbled something like “I’ve got to be going,” and fled the hangar. That amused Lopez. Stickybeak’d become unstuck.

Where did the smell come from? Where? It was rank, like the stink she remembered coming off corpses after about three days into a firefight, still pinned down by Covenant at some godforsaken outpost on a planet no one even cared about. But behind that, some sort of infection. She could smell it because she could also smell the antiseptic of whatever the man had used to fight it. The smell reminded her of the nursing home where she’d had to leave her mother a few years back, mumbling prayers and counting her rosary beads.

The man rose up. He rose up like something coming out of darkness into the light, the blood spilling off his chest. Clarence had his gun aimed point-blank between the man’s eyes. Those eyes focused as the man cried out, “Don’t let them get me!” through a torn mouth. Lopez could see that the blood wasn’t just spilling off his chest but out of his chest, and that’s what made her take a step back, more than anything else. That, and the way he looked at her made Lopez realize the man already understood he was dead.

As dead as any corpse they’d recovered from a cryotube.

>Benti 0623 hours

Stabilizing “John Doe” took Benti a few minutes. A thankless task. A pointless task. Not all the bandages in the world would help him now. While a couple of the others lifted him out and onto the stretcher, Clarence kept his gun on the man. Good old Clarence. Other Marines talked behind his back—said he was messed up in the head, said he had his own agenda—but Benti had always liked him. You could depend on Clarence. Who cared about the rest?

With Clarence on the job, Benti kept her calm even with the guy babbling don’t let them take me, please don’t let them take me. This guy wasn’t going anywhere soon. They could have brought a proper bed down; at least Mr. Doe would’ve been more comfortable.

Mr. Doe had kind eyes. Frightened eyes, but kind. Benti could tell. She was a strong believer in what you could figure out from a person’s eyes. It was one reason she trusted Clarence, and why she found MacCraw a waste of space.

Great slashes, vicious and brutal, constituted most of Mr. Doe’s wounds. The worst had penetrated his chest, but his feet were a mess too. If only he’d been wearing shoes. Benti tsked a little at the lack. The left foot had blackened, and it would have to come off. No, scratch that—chopping his foot off won’t save him now. His left arm had a chunk missing. A shattered shoulder and missing ear were just afterthoughts in her catalog of his problems. The bandages she’d applied were pitiful, the skin around them blue, and a down-and-dirty IV had been hooked up. A waste, but Sarge wanted some quality face time with Mr. Doe, so anything to keep him with them a little longer.

For an instant, Benti had a vision of Mr. Doe encountering some great force. That he’d sustained all this damage in one moment of terrible clarity; of knowing, as they would all know eventually, that the universe was stronger, and meaner, than any one of them. It was something the Marine Corps, after Benti’s cushy upbringing in a suburban home on Earth, had been teaching her for five years now.

She depressed the plunger in the syringe. Mr. Doe jerked up, a sudden tension wracking the lines of his body, jaw