“Keep it moving along,” the trooper behind him snarled and slammed the butt of his rifle into the small of Johnny’s back. Pain flared, but he ignored it, reducing it to little more than another electrical impulse for his onboard to register and manage. “Boss has a tight schedule to keep.”
Not for the first time on the walk down to the holding bays, Johnny wondered just how much the grim-faced men surrounding him benefited from that schedule. Dressed in fleet standard black “bad-ass” uniforms, they wore matching “Don’t f**k with me” expressions. He suspected that if he broke them in half, they’d have “Templeton’s b***h” running through them like the lettering through cheap stick candy from a resort colony.
He stumbled forward as the trooper shoved again, boots clumping against the plating
