DJ wore ceramic body armor. It shattered as the projectile coursed through the trooper’s chest and head.
As Birdie Sparrow hosed the countryside with both his tribarrel and main gun, trying to blast an enemy who’d been gone for years, all he could think was, Thank the Lord it was him and not me.
“Look, y’ know it’s gonna happen, Birdie,” said DJ’s ghost earnestly. “It don’t mean nothin’.”
His voice was normal, but his chest was a gaping cavity and his face had started to splash—the way Birdie’d seen it happen three months before; only slowly, very slowly.
DJ had a metal filling in one of his molars. It glittered as it spun out through his cheek.
“DJ, you gotta stop doin’ this,” Birdie whimpered. His body was shivering and he wanted to wake up.
“Yeah, well, you better get movin’, snake,” DJ said with a shrug of his shoulders almost separated from what was left of his chest. The figure was fading from Birdie’s consciousness. “It’s starting again, y’know.”
shoop
Birdie was out of his shelter and climbing the recessed steps to Deathdealer’s turret before he knew for sure he was awake. He was wearing his boots—he hadn’t taken them off for more than a few minutes at a time in three months—and his trousers.
Most troopers kept their body armor near their bunks. Birdie didn’t bother with that stuff anymore.
Despite the ringing alarm bell, there were people still standing around in the middle of the company area; but that was their problem, not Birdie Sparrow’s.
He was diving feet-first through the hatch when the first mortar shell went off, hurling a figure away from its blast.
The body looked like DJ Bell waving goodbye.
When the third mortar shell went off, June Ranson rolled into a crouch and sprinted toward her combat car. The Consies used 100mm automatic mortars that fired from a three-round clip. It was a bloody good weapon—a lot like the mortar in Hammer’s infantry platoons, and much more effective than the locally-made tube the National Army used.
The automatic mortar fired three shots fast, but the weight of a fresh clip stretched the gap between rounds three and four out longer than it would have been from a manually-loaded weapon.
Of course, if the Consies had a pair of mortars targeted on Ranson’s detachment area, she was right outta luck.
Guns were firing throughout the encampment now, and the Yokels had finally switched on their warning klaxon. A machinegun sent a stream of bright-orange Consie tracers snapping through the air several meters above Ranson’s head. One tracer hit a pebble in the earthen berm and ricocheted upward at a crazy angle.
A strip charge wheezed in the night, a nasty, intermittent sound like a cat throwing up. A drive rocket was uncoiling the charge through the wire and minefields on which the Yokels depended for protection.
The charge went off, hammering the ground and blasting a corridor through the defenses. It ignited the western sky with a momentary red flash like the sunset’s afterthought.
Ranson caught the rear hand-hold of her combat car, Warmonger—Tootsie One-three—and swung herself into the fighting compartment. The fans were live, and both wing guns were firing.
Beside the vehicle were the scattered beginnings of an evening meal: a catalytic cooker, open ration packets, and three bottles of local beer spilled to stain the dust. Warmonger’s crew had been together for better than two years. They did everything as a team, so Ranson could be nearly certain her command vehicle would be up to speed in an emergency.
She was odd man out: apart from necessary business, the crewmen hadn’t addressed a dozen words to her in the month and a half since she took over the detachment.
Ranson didn’t much care. She’d seen too many people die herself to want to get to know any others closely.
Hot plastic empties ejecting from Stolley’s left-wing gun spattered over her. One of the half-molten disks clung to the hair on the back of her wrist for long enough to burn.
Ranson grabbed her helmet, slapped the visor down over her face, and thumbed it from optical to thermal so that she could see details again. That dickheaded Yokel reporter had picked a great time to blind her with his camera light. . . .