Kingmaker Read Free Page A

DECOP, right? You do know what Deceased Enemy Combatant Processing is, don’t you? I’m pretty sure that’s about the farthest thing from respect there is.”
    “Maybe, but that’s not my call. What is my call is how they get treated before they get sent out. It may not be much, but it’s something.”
    “Yeah, it’s something, all right.”
    “Let me ask you something, Collins. You think you’re always going to be on the winning side of this fight?”
    “I damn sure intend to be.”
    “You might intend to be, but what we want and what we get are two very different things, aren’t they? When your number’s up, you want someone pulling your teeth out of your skull with some rusty old pair of pliers, or cutting off your ear and wearing it on a necklace as a souvenir, or dragging your bare-ass body through the streets while everyone spits and pisses on your corpse?”
    “They’ll do all that shit anyway. It don’t matter what we do.”
    “Maybe, but that’s not the point. It isn’t about who
they
are—it’s about who
we
are. They might be our enemy, but that doesn’t mean we have to hate them. We all got our fights to fight in this world.”
    “That’s why we should be out here getting what we can, when we can. If you ask me, we’re passing up a damn good opportunity here.”
    “That’s the thing,” the man said. “I’m not asking.”
    Alexei felt the space around him condense and then he heard the click of several latches. When he opened his eyes again, it was black.

    The time glowing in the corner of his visor told Alexei that it was a little less than three hours before he was loaded onto a freight drone, and then another ten hours before he landed. Environmental scrubbers in his helmet kept carbon dioxide levels in the casket down to 394 parts per million by absorbing thepoisonous molecules into the padding, and he sipped cool, compressed oxygen from the vent over his nose and mouth. The freighter was refrigerated, and when the sensors around Alexei’s torso detected that he was nearly hypothermic, current from the batteries in his boots was forced through the resistant steel fibers woven into his suit’s composite material until his core was back up to ninety-eight degrees. He spent a few hours drifting in and out of sleep and he dreamed that he had the opportunity to kill a man who he hated intensely for reasons he could not recall, but the trigger of his pistol was soft and the bullets just slid down the barrel with a metallic rasp and dropped to the floor at his feet where they bounced and rolled and accumulated into a maddening pile of impotence.
    He felt himself being unloaded and then the casket vibrated as it moved along a track. There were industrial sounds ahead of him: the banging of heavy objects being moved and stacked; the hiss and groan of pneumatics; the robotic whine of servos and actuators; the accumulative cacophony of products either being assembled or destroyed. When the noise entirely surrounded him, Alexei placed his palms against the top of the casket and pushed. The material warped, then reformed to its original shape as soon as he lowered his hands. He made a fist and punched feebly in the small space, but the carbon fiber shell deflected his blows. The casket jerked to a stop and then the top was gone and Alexei was suddenly looking up at the underside of a massive metallic insect. Jointed appendages clattered above him wielding high-speed diamond-tipped saw blades and drill bits, scalpels, retractors, needles, suction tubes, and fiber optic scopes. There wasn’t enough room to vault up and out, so he threw his weight against the side of the casket, but it was locked securely into its track. An array of steel grippers began to descend—mechanisms designed to pin him at multiple points and keep him immobile during the initial cutting—but they paused just above the casket. The noise immediately around him wound down as the machinery’s residual power faded. The