Status Updates From The Gray Death Legion Trilo...

Grayson rolled over, looking up at death. The Thunderbolt’s fire was almost out now, and there were no more inferno rounds coming in. Bullets whanged and keened off the armor from the south as soldiers tried futilely to turn the machine. It took another step, towering into the night, machine guns leveling for a second, final burst.

The silence that followed was as cold as the glacial ice on the mountaintops of Helm. The behavior of the Marik BattleMech forces on that planet had been explained at last. The Conventions of War dictated certain formal ways for troops to behave toward one another during combat, but renegades—city killers—were beyond the pale of even unspoken and unwritten laws.

Grayson knew little about classical statuary, though these looked like something he’d once heard referred to as Rim Worlds Neo-Realist. The forms seemed to represent either nude women or dying warriors, and they must once have been colored in realistic tones. That would have been in the days when the garden had first been opened, long before the nuclear death of Freeport and so much more of this world.

It had been Grayson Carlyle and his men who had liberated the captive women. From that day on, Janice Taylor had become a member of Sergeant Ramage’s Special Ops Force, and had participated in the last, wild battle to free Verthandi’s capital from the Kuritans. When victory and independence had been won, she chose to follow the Gray Death Legion elsewhere among the stars.

Somehow, that small movement was just too much for him. He could see his hands dimly through sweat and blurring vision and blood and smoke…but he just couldn’t make them do what he wanted. Then it no longer mattered, for he couldn’t see anything at all.

He had pulled off his neurohelmet and replaced it with a combat helmet. Dressed only in shorts and combat boots. Gordon’s only body protection was the dark visor that would shield his eyes on a battlefield where stray laser beams were still flashing low across the ground. Anxious to find that sapper, eager to kill, he climbed out of his crippled machine while cradling his Rugan subgun.