Terms of Enlistment 01.2: Measures of Absolution by Marko Kloos Page B

Jackson still sees on the street are either dead on the ground or running away.
    Jackson puts her knife away. The profound relief and gratitude she feels make her knees shake.
    At Thermopylae, the Three Hundred held back a hundred thousand Persians. Everyone learns about Leonidas and his Spartans in boot camp. One of the epic last stands in history.
    Tonight, Corporal Jackson doesn’t believe the Spartans went down as heroically as the historians claim. She’s pretty sure some of them pissed themselves before the end. Unless they were insane, or inhuman.
    Epic last stand stories are such bullshit.
     
     
     

 
     
     
    Chapter Two
    After
     
     
     
    The drop ship doesn’t go back to Shughart. Great Lakes is closer, and Grayson and the Sarge are in bad shape. Jackson keeps looking over to where the crew chief and the combat medic are stabilizing Grayson, who looks as ashen as the gunmetal paint on the bulkhead. Sergeant Fallon lies next to him, conscious but doped to the gills with painkiller, what’s left of her leg tied off with a tourniquet. Then there’s the rescued drop ship crew, and Priest and Baker. There are more wounded than able-bodied in the cargo hold.
    Jackson feels helpless. She can’t help the medics do their job, and there’s nothing around to kill up here at ten thousand feet. She has to fight the urge to unbuckle and go up to the drop ship’s armory to refill her magazine pouches and grab a bunch of weapons to replace the ones she left behind on the street in Detroit.
    Three years of combat drops all over the country and across the world, and the squad has never received a mauling like this, not even close.
    What the fuck went wrong? Jackson wonders. She looks at the leaking bodies of her squadmates and the dozens of impact marks on the outer shell of her armor.
    Everything , she concludes. Ain’t a damn thing that went right tonight.
    She reaches into her magazine pouch and fishes out the set of dog tags she plucked off the dead rioter just a little while ago. The services all have their own formats for dog tags, and these are rectangular, with rounded edges and a horizontal perforation right across the middle. Jackson isn’t sure, but she thinks they’re old Navy tags, a kind they haven’t issued in a while.
    Military weapons. Squad tactics. Run-of-the-mill welfare rioters don’t chew up a hardened infantry squad. They don’t blot heavily armored drop ships from the sky. You need a certain kind of training and mindset to pull that off.
    Jackson puts the dog tags back into the magazine pouch before anyone can see what she’s looking at.
    Right then she resolves to find out who’s responsible for this ambush—for half her squad laid out bleeding or dead on the deck in front of her. Find the bastards, and kill them.
    When the drop ship lands at Great Lakes, the medics swarm the cargo hold before the tail ramp is fully on the ground. They haul off Grayson and Sergeant Fallon, then the dead bodies of Stratton and Paterson. They come to check her out as she unbuckles herself.
    “I’m fine,” she tells them. “No holes in the armor.”
    “Let’s get you inside anyway,” one of the medics replies. “Just to make sure.”
    They take the combat knife off her harness. She has to suppress the impulse to break the fingers of the medic who unfastens her blade and removes it.
    Let them have it, she thinks as they lead her outside toward a row of waiting stretchers. Like I wouldn’t know how to kill someone without that. Dumb fucks.
     
    She just has a few minor scratches, so they clean her up and put her on a shuttle back to Shughart. They won’t let her see the rest of the squad. The flight back to base all by herself is the loneliest trip she has ever taken in the military.
    Back in the squad bay at Shughart, the ghouls have already cleaned up. Two of the bunks in the room are stripped down to the bare mattress pads, and two lockers stand open and empty.  Jackson walks over to what used