01 Old Man's War by John Scalzi

Author:John Scalzi
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-07-23T04:00:00+00:00

TEN

Maggie was the first of the Old Farts to die.

She died in the upper atmosphere of a colony named Temperance, an irony because like most colonies with a heavy mining industry, it was sprinkled liberally with bars and brothels. Temperance’s metal-laden crust had made it a hard colony to get and a difficult one for humans to keep—the permanent CDF presence there was three times the usual Colonial complement, and they were always sending additional troops to back them up. Maggie’s ship, the Dayton, caught one of these assignments when Ohu forces dropped into Temperance space and salted an army’s worth of drone warriors onto the surface of the planet.

Maggie’s platoon was supposed to be part of the effort to take back an aluminum mine one hundred klicks out of Murphy, Temperance’s main port. They never made it to the ground. On the way down, her troop transport hull was struck by an Ohu missile. It tore open the hull and sucked several soldiers into space, including Maggie. Most of these soldiers died instantly from the force of the impact or by chunks of the hull tearing into their bodies.

Maggie wasn’t one of them. She was sucked out into the space above Temperance fully conscious, her combat unitard automatically closing around her face to keep the air from vomiting out of her lungs. Maggie immediately messaged to her squad and platoon leader. What was left of her squad leader was flapping about in his descent harness. Her platoon leader wasn’t much more help, but he wasn’t to blame. The troopship was not equipped for space rescue and was in any event gravely damaged and limping, under fire, toward the closest CDF ship to discharge its surviving passengers.

A message to the Dayton itself was likewise fruitless; the Dayton was exchanging fire with several Ohu ships and could not dispatch rescue. Nor could any other ship. In nonbattle situations she was already too small a target, too far down Temperance’s gravity well and too close to Temperance’s atmosphere for anything but the most heroic retrieval attempts. In a pitched battle situation, she was already dead.

And so Maggie, whose SmartBlood was by now reaching its oxygen-carrying limit and whose body was undoubtedly beginning to scream for oxygen, took her Empee, aimed it at the nearest Ohu ship, computed a trajectory, and unloaded rocket after rocket. Each rocket burst provided an equal and opposite burst of thrust to Maggie, speeding her toward Temperance’s darkened, nighttime sky. Battle data would later show that her rockets, propellant long spent, did indeed impact against the Ohu ship, dealing some minor damage.

Then Maggie turned, faced the planet that would kill her, and like the good professor of Eastern religions that she used to be, she composed jisei, the death poem, in the haiku form.

Do not mourn me, friends

I fall as a shooting star

Into the next life

She sent it and the last moments of her life to the rest of us, and then she died, hurtling brightly across the Temperance night sky.

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