“Got it.”
Michael ignored his shoulder. Thanks to the drugs his neuronics had dumped into his system, it no longer hurt, but it was stiffening fast; his arm was now all but useless. He dragged himself back to the lip of the narrow cleft they had used to get in. He adjusted his chromaflage cape until only a slit for his eyes remained open and raised his head one millimeter at a time to look outside. He scanned the ground for any signs of the Hammers. There were none visible through the scrappy mix of trees and stunted bushes that fell away down the shallow slope in front of their position. He shunted his neuronics vision processor down into the infrared to check the deepening shadows thrown by the last of the evening light. Still nothing.
He eased back a fraction. “All clear here,” he whispered.
“And this side. Keep watching.”
“Roger,’ Michael said, resuming his scan. Shinoda did not need to tell him what it all meant. Ether the Hammers had pulled back or they were leaving the lander to-
With no warning, Michael’s world exploded. He was galvanized back under cover as cannon shells pulverized the rock. The air turned into a maelstrom of noise and dust. Fragments of rock tore at the arms he had thrown over his head. And then it was quiet. The only sound was the ringing in his ears.
He turned. Shinoda was shouting; he struggled to make sense of her words. “… they’ll come for us now,” she was saying, “but only open fire when I tell you to. And switch your neuronics on. They know where we are now.”
“Yes, sergeant,” he croaked, his mouth and throat choked with dust. This is not good, he thought when he saw what was headed their way. The men were visible because their chromaflage discipline was so poor. Michael’s finger twitched on the trigger of his assault rifle in nervous anticipation. After a while, he stopped counting the number of Hammers working their way forward; all that mattered now was that there were a lot of them. And there’d be many more he couldn’t see.
“Stand by,” Shinoda said. “You take the group moving across to your left. Stand by-now!”
Michael opened fire. His first rounds hit a trooper in the head as he belly crawled forward; the man slumped facedown onto the ground. Michael shifted aim, dropped another shape, and was moving to his third when retribution arrived, a withering barrage of machine gun fire and microgrenades that forced him back, horribly aware of how bad their tactical situation was. They were pinned down, and it was only a matter of time before one of the Hammers got lucky and dropped a microgrenade down his throat. He tried not to think what that would do to him and Shinoda.
He failed.
But until then, he vowed, he’d take as many of the Hammers as he could. He pushed his rifle over the lip of the entrance and loosed a few rounds at random. That provoked another storm of bullets and microgrenades that forced him back again. “We have to move,” he shouted over the steady tap-tap of Shinoda’s rifle.
“No kidding, Einstein,” Shinoda shouted back. “But where the fuck to?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Michael muttered. Since it was only a matter of time before the Hammers got lucky anyway, he decided to not to worry about all the crap they were sending his way. He ignored the incoming fire and pushed himself back up so he could work his rifle along the lines of advancing men. “You scumsuckers!” he shouted. He dropped a Hammer, then another. “We’re not dead yet!”
His abuse sparked off another furious response. The air in front of Michael’s position filled with bullets and the black shapes of microgrenades. One headed right for him, and time slowed to a crawl. He watched in horrified fascination as the grenade grew bigger, a gray blur against the evening sky.
Exactly what provoked Michael to do what he did, he would never know, but without a moment’s thought he burst out of cover. That was what he tried to do, but his left arm refused to play along. He ended up half rolling, half staggering down the short, dusty slope in front of the boulder only a heartbeat before the microgrenade flew over his head. It buried itself in the loose dirt and exploded with a shattering crack.
It was the dirt that saved him. It absorbed the microgrenade’s lethal gift of shrapnel. That and the blast; it blasted a ball of dust outward, forcing the Hammers to fire blind. Bullets plucked at Michael’s body as he wriggled and squirmed to get away in a frantic, floundering scramble toward a fragmentary image lodged in his memory, the image of an opening between two boulders somewhere in the confusion to his left.
His hand felt the hole before he saw it; without a second’s thought, he rammed his body into the opening, chased into safety by wayward bullets. One, its energy almost spent ricocheting off rock, slashed his forehead open. The cut sent blood curtaining down across his face, hot and sticky. He rolled into the back wall of the hole and lay there, wiping the blood out of his eyes.
Shinoda popped into his neuronics. “Where the fuck did you go?” she said, her voice overlaid by the methodical double tap of her rifle.
“Five meters to your right, I think,” Michael said. He wormed his way around to peer out of the hole. “Had to move; a Hammer grenade had my name on it.”
“I’m not sure what they’re up to,” Shinoda said. “They seem to have fallen back …”
Now that Shinoda mentioned it, Michael realized that nobody was shooting at him anymore.
“… which means they’re regrouping. I think they’ll bring the lander in to give us another dose of cannon fire.” Michael swore under his breath; for an instant he had allowed himself to think the Hammers might have had enough. “Then they’ll move in again.”
“Can we move?”
“No point. They’ll have us covered.”
“Shit.”
“Shit is right. Keep your head down until the lander’s gone, then just do the best you can.”
“Will do.” Michael checked Shinoda’s biostats. “You okay?” he asked. “Your blood pressure’s a bit low.”
“Losing a shitload of blood does that to you. Bastards got me in the right arm. But I’ll be fine. I’ve got woundfoam and a dressing on it. Brace yourself. I think I see the lander, and the son of a bitch is coming right for us.”
Michael slithered to the back of his hole and curled himself into a ball. He tried not to think what even a single 30-millleter hypersonic cannon shell would do to his body. Then the attack was on them, and Michael’s world dissolved into more noise and dust and pain as a rock splinters sliced into him. And when he thought it could get no worse, the air turned a blinding white. An instant later, the ground rammed him bodily upward-he swore the rock he was huddled up against moved as well-and then there was silence, a strange, flat quiet broken only by the skittering of pebbles falling around him. “Sergeant! What-”
Something hard, something unseen, something silent smashed into him and battered his body into unconsciousness.
“Colonel, come on. Wake up, Colonel! Hey! Come on.”
Colonel? Michael wondered. What colonel?
“Talk to me, you overpromoted asswipe.”
Overpromoted asswipe? Michael thought. That does it. With an effort, he forced his blood-encrusted eyes open and looked up into Shinoda’s face. “I’m going to have you court-martialed for insolence,” he rasped.
Shinoda pulled Michael upright and pushed a water tube into his mouth. “Be my guest,” she said with a lopsided grin, “but what makes you think we’re going to live long enough?”
“How long was I out?”
“Couple of minutes.”
“What the hell just happened?”
“Juggernaut, that’s what. I think the good guys just took out Gwalia.”