Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [43]
But she couldn’t suppress the hard, cold glare she cast at Peruzzi. If you MACOs were anywhere near as good as your rep, we wouldn’t have just got done carrying Ravi’s corpse.
Then O’Neill saw the stunned, haunted look in Peruzzi’s eyes, and instantly hated herself.
Because it was obvious to her that the young MACO was having the very same thought.
Eight
Shuttlepod Two
“SO, WITH ONE HOVER engine down, we couldn’t outrace the Blagees anymore,” Corporal David McCammon said. “That’s when I pulled out all the tricks they don’t teach you in combat flight training.”
“Officially, anyhow,” Corporal Hideaki Chang said, grinning at the others sitting in the back of the shuttlepod. It had been about three hours since they had departed from Enterprise’s Launch Bay 2, and while they had started out completely STRAC—Skilled, Tough, and Ready Around the Clock—with four hours or so more to go before they reached their destination they had relaxed into casual mode and had finally yielded to the urge to start telling one another “war stories.” Chang had heard McCammon recount this same tale to others at least two dozen previous times, and like the anecdotes of many of the other MACOs he knew, this story had grown ever-so-slightly bigger and bolder with each subsequent telling.
“I’ll bite,” Private Colin Eby said, leaning forward, his blue-gray eyes sparkling. He was one of the newbies in Chang’s platoon, fresh out of basic before he passed muster in the MACOs and subsequently joined the Xindi hunt aboard Enterprise. “What tricks?”
“Stop and drop,” McCammon said, his lips curved into a roguish smile beneath his graying mustache. “After making sure our harnesses were secured, I hit reverse and cut power to the grav plating about a nanosecond later. We stopped so fast, it was like slamming into a wall. Then we fell straight down.” He gestured with his hand, pantomiming a falling hovercraft. “Our Blagee pursuers shot right past us before they had time to realize what had happened. Their tail gunners couldn’t get us in their sights because our sudden vector change had forced their weapons locks into starting another random search-pattern cycle.”
“Damn,” Eby said, an envious smile on his youthful face. “You didn’t burn out your one good engine with that stunt?”
“Well, there was a tense moment or two after we went into freefall through the fog below us, and we knew that a rock-hard ocean surface was rushing up to meet us,” McCammon said. “My copilot couldn’t get the propulsion system back on-line, but eventually we jumped that baby back to life.”
Corporal Selma Guitierrez winced and turned away.
Chang had noticed her distracted behavior ever since they’d both reported for duty in the launch bay. He leaned toward her, concerned, his voice lowered. “What’s the matter?”
Smiling grimly, Guitierrez said, “Nothing. Just a bit of spacesickness or something.” She looked at Eby and Chang. “I haven’t been feeling steady since we left the launch bay.”
“The ride hasn’t been that bumpy, Corporal,” Eby said, grinning. “Maybe you’re pregnant.”
Chang saw a brief flash of angry surprise in her eyes, and wondered if it had passed too quickly for anyone else to have noticed it.
“Yeah, right, with quadruplets,” she said, waving her hand as if to shoo Eby away. “I’m fine. It’s probably just Mayweather’s driving. Or the smell of industrial-grade bullshit in here from Dave’s story.”
Guitierrez stood up and stepped past McCammon, who responded to her remark with an exaggerated, theatrical pout. “I’m gonna go sit up front,” she said, “and see if I can give our squid driver some pointers on keeping this tub level. Besides, I already know how this story ends.”
Chang watched her go, studying her movements and her shape, watching both for anything out of the ordinary. He knew she probably wouldn’t confirm his suspicions during this mission, but if Selma really was pregnant, he knew that Hayes would have to be informed about it. Hell, she would have told me about it, he