“Will do,” Bermont said. “I just have one thing to do first.”

“Right,” Brinks confirmed, trusting his man to know what he was doing. “Once you get those locals clear, I’m going to drop a TB on your location. So when I say bounce…”

“We hit the sky,” Bermont replied.

Major Brinks frowned but didn’t bother saying anything else. One of the problems that you encountered when dealing with Special Operations units—especially when what you had wasn’t a spec ops team, but rather a select gathering of the best spec ops individuals—was the fact that they had a, perhaps justifiable, sense of superiority.

And, of course, they were all insane.

He himself excluded, of course.

Lt. Erin Mackay listened to the radio chatter from the other teams, letting it run in the background as he and the two soldiers with him moved over to the fallen drones. The streets were empty, but his suit sensors could read the occasional motion source flicker by a window, the people inside looking out at the destruction that had rained down on their neighborhood. The area was obviously a suburb of the city, and the buildings here were only twenty or so stories high, not the monstrous buggers that rose against the sky to his back.

Corporal Deacon moved across the fire zone while Mackay covered him and kneeled by the drone they’d taken out.

“A…Are you sure you should be doing that?” the local cop, or whatever she was, asked nervously.

Corporal Deacon glanced back at the local policewoman, exchanged a glance with Mackay, then shrugged in this armor, one of the grossly exaggerated motions that armored troops got used to using. “Just having a look.”

Beside him, Sergeant Steward knelt and reached down to run his finger through the creature’s blood. He instantly yanked back with a curse and drove his hand into a pile of rubble to scrape the liquid off.

“Motherfucker!” the sergeant cursed.

“What is it, Sarge?” Deacon jerked around, his weapon coming up.

“Fucking shit started eating away at my suit!” Steward growled, checking his finger. “Fuck!”

Deacon’s rifle dropped. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Whoa…” the younger man said, his voice filled with a kind of awe. “These things actually got acid for blood? Cool.”

“Shut up,” Steward growled, using a tone that made Deacon take a step back.

“It’s not acid,” Erin muttered, checking the basic analysis his HUD provided. “It’s some kind of superheated compound. It just ate off some of the ablative material that survived your jump, Sarge.”

“Oh,” Deacon sighed, sounding disappointed.

“Deacon, you need to get your candy-ass out of the TV room once in a while and quit watching that sci-fi shit,” Steward told him in no uncertain terms. “That stuff will rot your brain—what’s left of it.”

Deacon didn’t have an audible reply, so Mackay just rolled his eyes as he spoke up. “These things have molten rock or something for blood. Would you two mind saving the mutual bitch session for when we’re back on the Odyssey?”