Sword Brother

'I'll miss you-you and Wencit both,' Houghton said, and knew it was true. 'It's been a hell of a ride.'

'That it has,' Wencit agreed. 'I'll try not to catch you up in any more misdirected spells, though.'

'Probably just as well,' Houghton said, regarding Tough Mama's damages. 'The repair bill this time around is going to be enough of a bitch. And I don't even want to think about the paperwork when I start trying to explain!'

'Some things not even a god can protect you from,' Tomanak rumbled. 'Still, the least I can do is see to getting you home again without making Wencit sort through all the possible universes first. Assuming, of course, that he'd get it right this time.'

'Thank you,' Wencit said mildly, and Tomanak chuckled again.

Mashita had finally put away his camera . . . after snapping several shots of Tomanak for his collection, of course. Now he walked across to join the others, and Bahzell turned to clasp his forearm, as well. The younger Marine started to say something, then stopped and simply shrugged. Bahzell nodded back, and Mashita gave Wencit a nod of his own, then trudged back to cimb up onto Tough Mama's scorched and seared deck.

Houghton followed him, climbing back into the commander's hatch and taking one last look around, engraving every detail on his memory. Then he drew a deep breath and looked across at Tomanak.

'Let's do it,' he said.

* * *

Lieutenant Jefferson Enrique Alvarez walked moodily across the vehicle park.

He hadn't gotten much sleep. Company and Battalion had both been less than amused by his report that someone had apparently decided to beam one of his LAVs up to the mother ship, and he wished he could blame them. Unfortunately, he couldn't. He couldn't even blame them for their obvious doubts about his own contact with reality. If he hadn't had over two dozen witnesses who all agreed with one another on the essentials, he wouldn't have believed it, either. Fourteen-ton armored vehicles didn't simply up and disappear in flashes of blue light. They especially didn't simply up and disappear taking his senior noncom with them.

Alvarez's jaw tightened as he admitted the truth to himself. No one liked losing men and equipment, even when he knew what the hell had happened to them, but losing Houghton-that was what really hurt. The Gunny had been the Platoon's true heart and soul. Alvarez might have commanded it; Gunny Houghton had run it. And he'd even managed, along the way, to keep one Lieutenant Jefferson Enrique Alvarez from fucking up.

But he wasn't going to be doing that any-

WHUMPF!

Alvarez stopped dead as an LAV materialized suddenly. It simply blinked into existence, twenty feet in front of him, and a fist of displaced air hit him briskly in the face. A ring of dust blew outward around it, and Alvarez heard a chorus of startled shouts rising from behind him.

The lieutenant stood there, staring at Tough Mama. She was missing one wheel entirely. Her right front wheel well was badly damaged-it looked for all the world as if something with claws had ripped it apart. The upper deck was pitted, burned and singed- looking, the paint badly blistered where it hadn't been scorched completely away. And there were what looked like more claw marks on the front of the turret, as well.

But she was here.

The commander's hatch opened, and a familiar helmeted head poked up out of it. Alvarez's heart leapt with a tremendous sense of relief as he recognized it, but he was a Marine. And so, he folded his arms and glared up at the man standing in that hatch.

'And just where the hell have you been, Gunny?' he barked. 'Do you have any idea how much goddamned paperwork I've already had to do about this? And look at this vehicle! Just look at it! How the hell are we going to explain this-' he unfolded one arm to wave at the battered LAV '-to Maintenance?! What the hell did you do to my perfectly good LAV?!'

There was silence for a moment, broken only by the growing chorus of distant shouts behind them, and Alvarez refolded his arms, tapping one toe in the dust while he waited. And then-

'Well, LT,' Gunnery Sergeant Kenneth Houghton said, 'it's like this . . . .'