Predator: If It Bleeds by Andrew Mayne Mira Grant Kevin J. Anderson Jonathan Maberry Bryan Thomas Schmidt

Author:Andrew Mayne,Mira Grant,Kevin J. Anderson,Jonathan Maberry,Bryan Thomas Schmidt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)

TIN WARRIOR

BY JOHN SHIRLEY

The prisoner paced. It waited. Sometimes the prisoner lifted its head to sniff at the air. The smells were alien, yet becoming disgustingly familiar.

The cell was twenty paces by forty. There were soft places to stretch out but without frames under them; there was plumbing, designed to be impossible to pull out of the floor. The cell was resistant and seamless, so that nothing could be used as a weapon.

The electric lights dialed down automatically in the evening—was this a mock of night? But this dimness was nothing like the deep night of its own world.

The prisoner was reassured by the fact that these soft primates knew little about his world. They had worked long, so long, trying to understand the Yautja technology—what little they could find. They had tried to communicate, using a few words and phrases gleaned from some fool Yautja prisoner—some coward who had betrayed its people; a weakling who had died from a terrestrial disease, apparently.

But the prisoner had not responded to their feeble attempts to communicate. It told them nothing.

They had tried to weaken the prisoner’s mind by drugging its food, with no result except that it had almost died.

The prisoner had recovered—but still, it was trapped.

No matter. They did not control it. Not in its mind, not in its inner life.

The prisoner felt sure its moment would come.

And it would make them suffer for their presumption. Many soft, pink-skinned heads would be added to its trophies.

* * *

“You up for this, Sarge?”

“Lieutenant Curson said I get a week’s furlough after this,” Nialls said, peering into the helmet, reaching in to adjust the radio mic. “You were there, you heard her. She said it’s straight from Dault.”

“What an officer says to us don’t mean nothing,” Corporal Ramirez said, as he squinted at the seams of Nialls’ armor, going through the standard check. “Army gives and the Army takes away, Sarge. Big Green Machine rolls over you any damn time it wants to.”

“I’ve logged three and a half months straight! More’n three months in a blackout base in the middle of the high desert! I’m due, Corporal. I’d wrestle the devil to get that leave.”

Nialls put the helmet on, and Ramirez made some unnecessary adjustments—the helmet was already perfectly in place, because it sealed itself. It was as if a ghost were doing it.

The heads-up display instantly lit up in response, with luminous green readouts alongside his shield mask. It probably wasn’t as information-comprehensive as the Yautja’s own bio-mask, but the HUD had a lot of sensors, it had sharp zoom function, and, rear view scanning. And it fit well. Nialls had spent a lot of time testing in two other prototype armored suits. The Mark I and Mark II suits didn’t do a third of what this new one did. They’d been bulky, clumsy. But the Mark III…

Nialls pulled on his left-hand gauntlet, thinking, The Mark III fits like a glove.

He figured what he had to do today couldn’t be tougher than that last Mosul action in Iraq.

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