Old Man's War #01 - Old Man's War by John Scalzi

Author:John Scalzi [Scalzi, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction
ISBN: 9780330452168
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2007-05-31T23:00:00+00:00

We won. The double-bullet rifle technique thinned out the Consu herd by a substantial amount before they got wise and moved to switch tactics, falling back to launch rocket attacks rather than to make another frontal assault. After several hours of this the Consu fell back completely and fired up their shield, leaving behind a squad to ritually commit suicide, signaling the Consu's acceptance of their loss. After they had plunged their ceremonial knives into their brain cavity, all that was left was to collect our dead and what wounded had been left in the field.

For the day, 2nd Platoon came through pretty well; two dead, including Watson, and four wounded, only one seriously. She'd be spending the next month growing back her lower intestine, while the other three would be up and back on duty in a matter of days. All things considered, things could have been worse. A Consu armored hovercraft had rammed its way toward 4th Platoon, Company C's position and detonated, taking sixteen of them with it, including the platoon commander and two squad leaders, and wounding much of the rest of the platoon. If 4th Platoon's lieutenant weren't already dead, I'd suspect he'd be wishing he were after a clusterfuck like that.

After we received an all clear from Lieutenant Keyes, I went back to get Watson. A group of eight-legged scavengers was already at him; I shot one and that encouraged the rest to disperse. They had made impressive progress on him in a short amount of time; I was sort of darkly surprised at how much less someone weighed after you subtracted his head and much of his soft tissues. I put what was left of him in a fireman's carry and started on the couple of klicks to the temporary morgue. I had to stop and vomit only once.

Alan spied me on the way in. "Need any help?" he said, coming up alongside me.

"I'm fine," I said. "He's not very heavy anymore."

"Who is it?" Alan said.

"Watson," I said.

"Oh, him," Alan said, and grimaced. "Well, I'm sure someone somewhere will miss him."

"Try not to get all weepy on me," I said. "How did you do today?"

"Not bad," Alan said. "I kept my head down most of the time, poked my rifle up every now and then and shot a few rounds in the general direction of the enemy. I may have hit something. I don't know."

"Did you listen to the death chant before the battle?"

"Of course I did," Alan said. "It sounded like two freight trains mating. It's not something you can choose not to hear."

"No," I said. "I mean, did you get a translation? Did you listen to what it was saying?"

"Yeah," Alan said. "I'm not sure I like their plan for converting us to their religion, seeing as it involves dying and all."

"The CDF seems to think it's just ritual. Like it's a prayer they recite because it's something they've always done," I said.

"What do you think?" Alan asked.

I jerked my head back to indicate Watson.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.