The Final Battle

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.”

“Gwalia?” Michael frowned. He shook his head to try to clear the mush from his brain. “But the missile base wasn’t on the target list. It’s too far north to be a priority.”

“Maybe Admiral Moussawi changed his mind about that. Anyway, I don’t give a rat’s ass. Whatever it was, it didn’t do the bad guys any favors.”

“They’re gone?”

“Not gone, dead. I don’t think they’ll bother us anymore. Anyway, it’s time we moved on. Can you stand?”

“Get me free of this damn hole and I will.”

Michael’s mouth dropped open when he saw the damage the blast had done. In every direction, the sparse vegetation had been stripped. The ground was littered with shattered trunks and shrubs piled in haphazard heaps along the foot of the reef wall. A body lay wrapped around a tree stump. More were scattered across the dirt. “What the hell,” he whispered, awestruck by the devastation.

“No time for sightseeing,” Shinoda said. She pulled Michael to his feet. He stood, swaying and unsteady. “The Hammers will be mighty pissed by all this, and I don’t want to be here when they arrive to see what the hell just happened.”

“Wait one,” Michael said. He pointed to an object, a white splash in his neuronics-boosted infrared vision, something hot against the cool of the ground. “There; what’s that?”

“Does it matter? We do need to go.”

“Bear with me, sergeant. I’ve a got a bad feeling about this.”

“Five minutes.”

“Two will be plenty.” Michael walked over to where the object lay. It was a jagged piece of flame-seared metal. He tried to lift it; it refused to move. “Shit, that is heavy,” he said. “Ceramsteel armor, I’d say.”

Shinoda frowned. “Ceramsteel armor?” she said. “Where the hell did that come from?”

“A warship, I think.” Michael straightened up and scanned the area around the piece of armor. “There,” he said. He set off through the debris. He stopped alongside a second piece of metal. “Damn them all to hell,” he said softly a moment later.

“What’s up?”

“See those?” Michael pointed to a meter-square cluster of holes punched into the metal fragment. “Those are pinchspace vortex generator ports.”

“So?”

“Hammer ports are hexagonal; ours are circular.’

“Oh!” Shinoda breathed in sharply. “One of ours?”

“From the size of the array, I’d say a deepspace heavy cruiser. Fucking Hammer bastards. Have a quick look around. It’d be good to identify her if we can.”

“Here,” Shinoda called out a minute later. She waved Michael over.

“What … Oh, no,” Michael said when he spotted the distinctive shape of a skinsuited body. “Who is it?”

Shinoda bent down to turn the body over. Michael was thankful that the helmet visor was so scorched and scarred that he could not see the face. “Chief Petty Officer … N … g … u … Nguyen,” she said, reading the name woven into the suit with some difficulty. “Poor bastard. Let me see if I can access the ID. Okay, she was Chief Petty Officer Maddi Nguyen, female, thirty-seven years old, posted to the Recognizant two years ago.”

Michael’s head snapped up in disbelief. “Did you say Recognizant?”

“I did.”

Michael shook his head in despair. “Recognizant was Admiral Moussawi’s ship.” He took a deep breath to fight back a sudden rush of anger. “Let’s go, sergeant. There’s nothing more we can do for any of them.”

They set off without another word, a pair of smoke-blackened, blood-soaked wrecks. What a sight we must be, Michael thought. And how will we stay out of the Hammer’s hands? We’ll be lucky to get ten klicks …

He stopped. “Sergeant, hold on.”

Shinoda looked around. “What’s up?” she asked.

“Look at the blast pattern,” Michael said. “The way the trees are lying, I’d say the