“So the medics at Scepter Base take the splint off,” Ericssen said equably. “Where’s the harm in that? Now, you just relax until the blue tab—” the analgesic injector built into Slammers body armor, beside the red tab which injected stimulant “—kicks in.”
The night behind them belched yellow again. The shockwave was a dull thump instead of a world-devouring roar when it reached Hula Girl several seconds later.
“I never thought it’d work,” Panchin whispered.
“Hey snake?” Ericssen said. “You did good to nail that second calliope before it waxed us. I didn’t even see it till you lit the spics up.”
“I’m glad,” Panchin said. He closed his eyes, then opened them again very quickly. He’d throw up if he closed them.
“Blood and martyrs!” Cortezar said. “I don’t get it. We were shaking hands with those bastards and we didn’t even know they were the other side. And them too! It don’t make sense that if everybody’s the same they’re all trying to kill each other.”
The overhead net sagged. The bullet-damaged stake had bent and might break at any moment.
“Maybe in some universe there’s got to be a difference before people kill each other,” Panchin said to his clasped hands. “That’s never been a requirement in the universe humans live in, though.”
Code-Name Feirefitz
“LORD, WE GOT ONE!” cried the trooper whose detector wand pointed toward the table that held the small altar. “That’s a powergun for sure, Captain, nothing else’d read so much iridium!”
The three other khaki-clad soldiers in the room with Captain Esa Mboya tensed and cleared guns they had not expected to need. The villagers of Ain Chelia knew that to be found with a weapon meant death. The ones who were willing to face that were in the Bordj, waiting with their households and their guns for the Slammers to rip them out. Waiting to die fighting.
The houses of Ain Chelia were decorated externally by screens and colored tiles; but the tiles were set in concrete walls and the screens themselves were cast concrete. Narrow cul-de-sacs lined by blank, gated courtyard walls tied the residential areas of the village into knots of strongpoints. The rebels had elected to make their stand outside Ain Chelia proper only because the fortress they had cut into the walls of the open pit mine was an even tougher objective.
“Stand easy, troopers,” said Mboya. The householder gave him a tight smile; he and Mboya were the only blacks in the room—or the village. “I’ll handle this one,” Captain Mboya continued. “The rest of you get on with the search under Sergeant Scratchard. Sergeant—” calling toward the outside door— “come in here for a moment.”
Besides the householder and the trooper, a narrow-faced civilian named Youssef ben Khedda stood in the room. On his face was dawning a sudden and terrible hope. He had been Assistant Superintendent of the ilmenite mine before Kabyles all over the planet rose against their Arabized central government in al-Madinah. The Superintendent was executed, but ben Khedda had joined the rebels to be spared. It was a common enough story to men who had sorted through the ruck of as many rebellions as the Slammers had. But now ben Khedda was a loyal citizen again. Openly he guided G Company from house to house, secretly he whispered to Captain Mboya the names of those who had carried their guns and families to the mine. “Father,” said ben Khedda to the householder, lowering his eyes in a mockery of contrition, “I never dreamed that there would be contraband here, I swear it.”
Juma al-Habashi smiled back at the small man who saw the chance to become undisputed leader of as much of Chelia as the Slammers left standing and alive. “I’m sure you didn’t dream it, Youssef,” he said more gently than he himself expected. “Why should you, when I’d forgotten the gun myself?”
Sergeant Scratchard stepped inside with a last glance back at the courtyard and the other three men of Headquarters Squad waiting there as security. Within, the first sergeant’s eyes touched the civilians and the tense enlisted men; but Captain Mboya was calm, so Scratchard kept his own voice calm as he said, “Sir?”