Free The Red Queen by Gibson Morales

The Red Queen
    The blood pulsed in Zubren's ears so loud he couldn’t hear the wind buckling against his exosuit. Swaths of green mist coated his visor, thickening in seconds and sliding off, like raindrops on a speeding car’s windshield.
    “Status check?” Zubren said.
    SKIES ARE CLEAR flashed in bright red on his visor’s screen.
    Zubren breathed a sigh of relief. As long as the green mist didn’t find a way through his exosuit’s vents he’d sleep well tonight.
    He dove through wave after wave of the terrestrial spore clouds until he spotted the legion of Crawlers writhing along the charred plateau. Against the black, their mass of bright orange hides stood out like a flow of lava.
    He fixated on a selection of the Crawlers.
    “Optics, magnify by fifty,” he ordered.
    A ping of acknowledgment rang in his ear. A single Crawler, resembling an enlarged version of a common desert scarab with grittier pincers and an elongated thorax, showed up in the corner of his HUD. From a series of statistics, he picked out the height: one meter. Still a threat to a field operator, the Union’s first line of infantry defense against the Crawlers. A sense of foreboding corrupted the excitement he’d deployed with moments earlier.
    It didn’t take a genius to know that flying directly into a swarm of Crawlers was a bad idea. Except that some genius engineer at Sector 20 designed the exosuit he wore. That genius decided it could fly directly into a swarm of Crawlers. One proverbial genius’s word versus one real genius’s word.
    Zubren inhaled deeply and recited the Fleet Services motto in his head: When in doubt, fly faster. That he could do.
    He flicked his ankles. Electricity ran through his gut as his exosuit’s rear thrusters propelled him at an accelerated pace towards the Crawler swarm. Towards certain death? He’d aced all the simulations, so it boiled down to the engineers’ assurances that the exosuit was foolproof. Easy to say when they were sipping coffee behind their control stations.
    He gritted his teeth. Anger. That's why you flew faster. Because flight mode in the sky pushed you to fight mode in your exosuit. Faster flying increased your adrenaline, converting any anxiety into a surge of volition. Now Zubren just needed to harness that volition into completing this raid.
    His HUD told him a hundred meters of sky separated him and the Crawler-infested plateau. No more green spores. Fifty meters. He saw two Crawlers pound up against each other, wrestling. Twenty-five meters.
    Zubren didn’t even have to lift a finger. The exosuit’s computer would activate the thermal shield for him. He sucked in a deep breath as his body tingled. Right now microscopic vents across the exosuit were distributing a layer of plasma-emitting nanobots. The shield term was a misnomer. It was really a weapon.
    The Crawlers suddenly raised their heads in apprehension, pincers clanging together, hard as steel. Together, they were like a sea of fire springing up to meet him.
    Swallowing, he gunned the thrusters and reminded himself not to worry. If anything went wrong, the collision into the ground would kill him instantly. In a yellow flash, a plasma blast burst outward from his suit, incinerating the Crawlers. Darkness enveloped him as he dove underground. Every second he mined through twenty feet of dirt, rock and Crawler colonies. The intense blaze of his exosuit’s thermal shield melted it all away instantly.
    His HUD counted down from 750 meters, the drilling depth required before he could plant the thermonuclear detonators. An intense feeling of elation filled him. This was actually working. When the bombs exploded, they’d wipe out the Crawler colonies entirely from the East Alkebulan Plateau. Their last stronghold on Oras. For the first time in years, maybe in history, victory was within reach.
    * * *
    Zubren planted a single silver note on the polished black wood and closed his trembling hand around a glass of bourbon.
    A