Free The Best of Joe Haldeman by Jonathan Strahan, Joe W. Haldeman

still dripped from each ear. Doc Wilson closed the suit back up.
     
    “I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if a bomb went off in her skull.”
     
    “Oh fuck,” Rogers said, “she was Rhine-sensitive, wasn’t she?”
     
    “That’s right.” Cortez sounded thoughtful. “All right, everybody listen up. Platoon leaders, check your platoons and see if anybody’s missing, or hurt. Anybody else in seventh?”
     
    “I...I’ve got a splitting headache, Sarge,” Lucky said.
     
    Four others had bad headaches. One of them affirmed that he was slightly Rhine-sensitive. The others didn’t know.
     
    “Cortez, I think it’s obvious,” Doc Wilson said, “that we should give these...monsters wide berth, especially shouldn’t harm any more of them. Not with five people susceptible to whatever apparently killed Ho.”
     
    “Of course, God damn it, I don’t need anybody to tell me that. We’d better get moving. I just filled the captain in on what happened; he agrees that we’d better get as far away from here as we can before we stop for the night.
     
    “Let’s get back in formation and continue on the same bearing. Fifth platoon, take over point; second, come back to the rear. Everybody else, same as before.”
     
    “What about Ho?” Lucky asked.
     
    “She’ll be taken care of. From the ship.”
     
    After we’d gone half a klick, there was a flash and rolling thunder. Where Ho had been came a wispy luminous mushroom cloud boiling up to disappear against the gray sky.
     
    ~ * ~
     
    XIII
     
    We stopped for the “night”—actually, the sun wouldn’t set for another seventy hours—atop a slight rise some ten klicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren’t aliens, I had to remind myself— we were.
     
    Two platoons deployed in a ring around the rest of us, and we flopped down exhausted. Everybody was allowed four hours’ sleep and had two hours’ guard duty.
     
    Potter came over and sat next to me. I chinned her frequency.
     
    “Hi, Marygay.”
     
    “Oh, William,” her voice over the radio was hoarse and cracking. “God, it’s so horrible.”
     
    “It’s over now—”
     
    “I killed one of them, the first instant, I shot it right in the, in the...”
     
    I put my hand on her knee. The contact made a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. “Don’t feel singled out, Marygay; whatever guilt there is, is...belongs evenly to all of us,...but a triple portion for Cor—”
     
    “You privates quit jawin’ and get some sleep. You both pull guard in two hours.”
     
    “Okay, Sarge.” Her voice was so sad and tired I couldn’t bear it. I felt if I could only touch her, I could drain off the sadness like ground wire draining current, but we were each trapped in our own plastic world—
     
    “G’night, William.”
     
    “Night.” It’s almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body’s response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try...lovely thoughts like this. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through the world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day—
     
    “Mandella—wake up, goddammit, your shift!”
     
    I shuffled over to my place on the perimeter to watch for God knows what...but I was so weary I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Finally I tongued a stimtab, knowing I’d pay for it later.
     
    For over an hour I sat there, scanning my sector left, right, near, far, the scene