Chapter One
"THE SUN WILL COME OUT ... TOMORROW ..." Our pilot hums through her
open mike into zero Fahrenheit cabin air fogged with four hundred
GIs' breath. And fat with smells of gun oil, vomit, and fear. The
sun never comes out here. In Jupiter's orbit, Sol is a pale dot.
It's joke enough that I smile even as my hands shake the rifle
propped between my knees. I'm Specialist Fourth Class Jason Wander,
one of the lucky orphans who in one hour will save the human race or
die trying.
We sit helmeted in paired, facing rows, so red cabin light paints us
like eggs cartoned in the devil's incubator. Eternad battery heated
fatigues warm us against a cabin cooled to the surface temperature
our enemy manufactures a hundred miles below.
Our backs mold against the ship's "pressure hull" that seals out
space's vacuum. "Ship" my ass. It's a 767 fuselage looted from some
airplane graveyard in the Arizona desert, tacked to a streamlined ...
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