The Last Run: A Novella Read Online Free PDF Page A

just maintain the rig. Peter had gotten the message right away, and he had assured Mulligan that he would keep his opinions to himself as long as they were in the vehicle. As far as he was concerned, CJ might be his wife, but she was Mulligan’s to mold.
    “I don’t get it,” Peter said, confused.
    “ID ten T…write it out, and it spells ‘idiot,’” CJ told him, brushing back a strand of dark hair from her face. Her features were a bit sharp and severe, and at first glance, one might think CJ Lopez was a hundred percent ball-buster, all day, every day. The reality was quite different. Mulligan found her to have an arch sense of humor, something he enjoyed tremendously during their off-hours. The Lopez and the Mulligan clans had become friends, and even though Tess and the girls lived off-post, they still socialized with Peter and CJ and their daughter Rachel regularly.
    No slouch in the wit department himself, Peter turned to Mulligan and glared at him sternly. “And just why the hell were you looking for my personnel file, Sergeant Major?”
    Mulligan chuckled. “All right, enough of the small talk. CJ, you ready for this?” Today would be her final qualification run, and if she passed it—which Mulligan had no doubt she would—she would be eligible to serve as senior NCO aboard one of the Self-Contained Exploration Vehicles. Like her husband, the majority of her duties would revolve around maintenance, but she would also log time as pilot-in-command. In Big Army, she had the skills to command a main battle tank, but Harmony’s mission was different; the SCEVs were viewed more as strategic assets as opposed to tactical ones, so only officers commanded them, but CJ would have more than enough time to grow into a command role if the shit hit the fan and the base went into its ten-year lockup cycle.
    “You know I am, Sergeant Major,” she said, her dark eyes blazing with that peculiar ferocity they always seemed to contain. When they had first met, Mulligan had mistakenly identified her as one of those female troopers who had something to prove. He’d been way wrong about that, she didn’t have to prove a damn thing. She was more capable than many, many male soldiers Mulligan had served with over his career. He almost— almost —would have been happy to have had her serve on any Special Forces alpha detachment he had been assigned to.
    Just the same, Mulligan screwed on his No Nonsense Instructor face. “Then let’s get the walk-around started.”
    ***
    T HE TRAINING GROUND was located four miles to the east of Harmony’s vehicle elevators. CJ had the right seat, while Mulligan sat in the left—as CJ was qualifying as a pilot, she would spend most of her time in the right seat, so Mulligan assumed the role of Pilot in Command. Peter was in the rig’s second compartment, seated at the engineering station, watching over the vehicle’s various systems as CJ drove it across the gently rolling grasslands that surrounded the subterranean base. Ahead, a clump of cattle could be seen, watching the SCEV’s passage with a communal, disinterested gaze as they chewed their cuds. The Army had purchased the land from a cattle rancher in the 1980s, and the remaining parcels still under civilian ownership continued to function as an honest to God ranch, albeit a small one of only two thousand head or so. When the rig made its first waypoint, CJ steered it away from the long fence that separated the cattle from the base’s territory. The cows were quickly left behind as the rig bounced over the terrain at thirty miles an hour, its big tires clawing up the dry earth as they rolled along.
    Finally, they came to the training area, located out in the middle of nothing. A series of obstacles had been set up, nothing too terribly dangerous—Quonset huts, old junked cars and trucks, a rough representation of a city block, and a quarter-mile area that had been dug up and made generally impassable…except for one section