Ghost Drop

"You froze for three seconds," Voss tells him once the squad is back aboard. "I counted." Major Ethan Irons doesn't argue. In combat, three seconds is long enough for a whole squad to die.

The raid should have been clean. Seven of them dropped through a storm onto a graveyard world, a colony bombed from orbit twenty years ago and swallowed by jungle, where the Krell have set up a depot with enough fuel cells and weapons to arm a battalion for raids on the outer settlements. Four sentries fell without a sound.

The charges were set, with ten minutes to spare, when a wide-radius Krell EMP killed every light, comm and targeting system at once, and eight-foot soldiers who see in the dark came through the front door. Ethan's shielded cybernetic eye picked out a seam in the back wall, a maintenance hatch no one else could see, and he got his people into the tunnel before the depot went up. All but one. A plasma bolt took Private Marek in the chest at the hatch.

For those three seconds, Ethan was back in another corridor, watching his brother fall. He has no intention of explaining that to Voss, or to anyone, while Marek waits in cold storage for his funeral. She will be counting next time too.