Just about everybody had blown a double hole; everybody but me and three others. I guess we were the only ones paying really close attention when Bovanovitch got into trouble. All of us were a good two hundred meters away. With my image converter turned up to about full power, I watched her disappear over the rim of the crater. After that, I could only listen in on her conversation with Cortez.
“I’m on the bottom, Sergeant.” Normal radio procedure was suspended for maneuvers like this; nobody but the trainee and Cortez was allowed to broadcast
“Okay, move to the center and clear out the rubble. Take your time. No rush until you pull the pin.”
“Sure, Sergeant.” We could hear small echoes of rocks clattering, sound conduction through her boots. She didn’t say anything for several minutes.
“Found bottom.” She sounded a little out of breath.
“Ice or rock?”
“Oh, it’s rock, Sergeant. The greenish stuff.”
“Use a low setting, then. One point two, dispersion four.”
“God dam it, Sergeant, that’ll take forever.”
“Yeah, but that stuff’s got hydrated crystals in it-heat it up too fast and you might make it fracture. And we’d just have to leave you there, girl. Dead and bloody.”
“Okay, one point two dee four.” The inside edge of the crater flickered red with reflected laser light.
“When you get about half a meter deep, squeeze it up to dee two.”
“Roger.” It took her exactly seventeen minutes, three of them at dispersion two. I could imagine how tired her shooting arm was.
“Now rest for a few minutes. When the bottom of the hole stops glowing, arm the charge and drop it in. Then walk out, understand? You’ll have plenty of time.”
“I understand, Sergeant. Walk out.” She sounded nervous. Well, you don’t often have to tiptoe away from a twenty-microton tachyon bomb. We listened to her breathing for a few minutes.
“Here goes.” Faint slithering sound, the bomb sliding down.
“Slow and easy now. You’ve got five minutes.”
“Y-yeah. Five.” Her footsteps started out slow and regular. Then, after she started climbing the side, the sounds were less regular, maybe a little frantic. And with four minutes to go- “Shit” A loud scraping noise, then clatters and bumps.
“Shit-shit.”
“What’s wrong, private?”
“Oh, shit.” Silence. “Shit!”
“Private, you don’t wanna get shot, you tell me what’s wrong!”
“I. . . shit, I’m stuck. Fucken rockslide. . . shit. . . . DO SOMETHiNG! I can’t move, shit I can’t move I, I-”
“Shut up! How deep?”
“Can’t move my, shit, my fucken legs. HELP ME-”
“Then goddainmit use your arms-push! You can move a ton with each hand.” Three minutes.
She stopped cussing and started to mumble, in Russian, I guess, a low monotone. She was panting, and you could hear rocks tumbling away.
“I’m free.” Two minutes.
“Go as fast as you can.” Cortez’s voice was fiat, emotionless.
At ninety seconds she appeared, crawling over the rim.
“Run, girl. . . . You better run.” She ran five or six steps and fell, skidded a few meters and got back up, running; fell again, got up again- It looked as though she was going pretty fast, but she
had only covered about thirty meters when Cortez said, “All tight, Bovanovitch, get down on your stomach and lie still.” Ten seconds, but she didn’t hear or she wanted to get just a little more distance, and she kept running, careless leaping strides, and at the high point of one leap there was a flash and a rumble, and something big hit her below the neck, and her headless body spun off end over end through space, trailing a red-black spiral of flash-frozen blood that settled gracefully to the ground, a path of crystal powder that nobody disturbed while we gathered rocks to cover the juiceless thing at the end of it.
That night Cortez didn’t lecture us, didn’t even show up for night-chop. We were all very polite to each other and nobody was afraid to talk about it.
I sacked with Rogers-everybody sacked with a good friend-but all she wanted to do was cry, and she cried so long and so hard that she got me doing it, too.