Predator - Incursion Read Online Free PDF Page B

stubbly scalp, pausing when she encountered the flaking blood. “Much later. A million years from now. Ten million. Maybe a billion years from now, when humans are dust, they’ll still be tumbling through space. Way beyond whatever extremes the Human Sphere might have reached before we wiped ourselves out, or something we found wiped us out.”
    “Fucking hell, cheery bastard today aren’t we, Corp?” Faulkner said. He was a short skinny guy, brusque, but with a sharp mind. He was a private, but Mains sometimes called him their resident scientist. Always good to have someone like him in a unit like this.
    “It is cheery, though,” Cotronis said. “That’s how I want to go. Not blown up or burnt to death or eaten by who knows what? Out there, like that. Drifting away.”
    They all watched the screen. Mains liked the banter between his crew. But now the rec room felt horribly empty, and much bigger than before. Eight were now six, and the deaths would leave a hole that might never be filled.
    “Until your ugly corpse gets in the way of a warping Titan ship and takes out five hundred people,” Lieder said, and they all chuckled softly. Even McVicar. Lieder was ever the comedian, and she usually knew just when to drop a funny. Now, she’d defused the maudlin tension Mains felt building, and one he knew would return again and again in the foreseeable future. They’d all been Marines for a while, some of them a very long time. Most of them had lost friends before, but that never, ever made it easy to accept.
    Lieder glanced back and offered him a sad smile. Mains nodded.
    A gentle romance
, he thought. He’d even whispered that to Lieder once, lying in her bed, the two of them still sticky with sweat and breathing hard. She’d laughed and said,
Didn’t feel that gentle to me
.
    “Let’s get to it,” he said. They were still watching the holo frame, even though the slowly tumbling coffin suits had shrunk to specks, and then disappeared completely. “Lieder, run the programs, set our course and let me know how long it’ll be. Snowdon, full systems check on the
Ochse
. I hate landing her, shakes things up. Unshake anything that needs doing.”
    Lieder and Snowdon nodded, and Faulkner and Cotronis left the rec rooms to take up their stations.
    “Suppose you want me to cook?” McVicar asked.
    “Damn right. I’m hungry as hell.”
    The big man nodded. “I’ll rustle up something. We need a treat.”
    * * *
    The
Ochse
was one of the fastest ships in the Colonial Marines’ arsenal. Specially developed for the Excursionist regiments, the Arrow-class assault and reconnaissance vessel was a product of centuries of spacecraft technological advancement, FTL-drive research, and sheer dogged persistence.
    The breakthrough to faster-than-light travel had come hundreds of years before. Breaking through into FTL travel had been akin to the time when humans first left the surface of their planet, in that the technologies required were unique, dangerous, and slow to develop.
    Some of the early wars in space had shoved development along apace.
    The limits discovered beyond FTL—in sub-space planes where traditional laws of physics were usurped and replaced by a science far more complex, and some would say almost eldritch—had always been crippling, in both physical and monetary terms. Wars aside, Weyland-Yutani had the money. It had the resources. And it had the desire to succeed, aggressively pushing the envelope of the Human Sphere at every point in the Company’s checkered history.
    Once fallen, it had risen to prominence again and taken full control of the Colonial Marines, so that they were sometimes nicknamed the Corporate Marines. This made it not only the oldest and most powerful company in human history, but the most powerful entity, governments included. Since its troubled resurgence, its expenditure of time and money into experimental space-travel technology had multiplied a hundred times.
    The Arrow class sat