automated systems of the snipers didn't lock on him.
PFC Howser bounced twice. Her first jump was shorter than Tommy's, putting her about fifty meters behind him. Then she bounced as far as she could up the hill. She was still not even a third of the way to the next cover point. PFC Willingham followed the procedure, putting him somewhere near halfway to the rock pile. Then Sergeant Hubbard made it almost to the two-thirds distance before he slid to a stop and covered himself. Tommy crawled to his hands and feet and then bounced all the way up to the sergeant before he stopped. The two of them held still, planning to make it to cover last.
'Okay, Howser and Willingham, this time go and don't stop until you get there,' he ordered them.
'Got it, Gunny.'
As they bounced up the hill and over the two sergeants, Tommy noted that PFC Howser wasted no time on the bounce as she hit the ground. She bounced flawlessly. Willingham, on the other hand, seemed to be having trouble with his footing on one of the landings, forcing him to hesitate a second too long. His hesitation cost him. It cost him his right leg from the knee down.
One of the automated rifle rounds hit home, punching through his armor just below his right knee. The round trajectory tore upward through the knee joint, blowing out the back and scattering red blood on the asteroid regolith. The red was less pronounced in the red light of the red dwarf star.
'Oww fucking goddamn hell!' he screamed over the net. 'Shit, shit, shit!'
'Gunny! Willingham is hit!' Howser shouted.
'Keep bouncing to that cover, Howser. I've got him on my bounce!' Suez ordered her.
'Need help, Tommy?' Sergeant Hubbard asked him.
'No. You get up there and make sure Howser doesn't do anything stupid.'
'Got it, Gunny.' The marine bear-crawled his armored suit up the hill a few meters to get up speed. Then he kicked off, looking like a four-legged armored menace leaping into the air. He rolled forward into a front roll and put his jumpboots down just in time to maximize his bounce went he hit. Two more bounces and he was behind the rock pile with Howser.
Before Tommy could decide exactly how he wanted to handle Willingham, out of the periphery of his vision to his right he caught a glimpse of two other AEMs bouncing in from somewhere farther down the valley behind him. His blue-force tracker showed the blue dots in his DTM mindview to be the second lieutenant and Corporal Bates. Tommy didn't like the angle they were bouncing at, but they had made it that far without taking a hit. Shit, you couldn't tell Bates anything anyway, but the SOB was lucky. Tommy had to give him that, because just as the two AEMs reached a point that should have been in a firing solution for the ant hills, four FM-12s streaked across the hill, plowing the ridgeline to nothing but dust and smoke. The autosnipers were blown to vapor and dust that scintillated and sparkled quite beautifully in the red sunlight. Tommy stood and bounced fast, coming down beside the second lieutenant and Corporal Bates.
'How is he, Danny?' the lieutenant asked the corporal. Bates had taken on the role of squad medic since the Battle of the Oort. Tommy figured it was because of all the wounded they helped load and unload onto troop shuttles in the aftermath of the battle. It had driven Bates to want to help more than just load and unload screaming and battered soldiers. So he had trained on being a medic in his spare time. The colonel had encouraged it, and it was part of what got Danny promoted to corporal.
'His knee is gone. The suit sealed off the wound. He can still bounce in it, but he won't be winning the AEM Olympics, I bet.' Danny looked him over and had his AIC talk with the wounded marine's suit. The wireless health-monitoring system indicated that Roger was not in any near-term danger from his wound and in fact could function with somewhat diminished capacity.
'Roger, how you doing?' Tommy leaned in to the PFC and took a closer look at the suit. He would be fine. Hell, the adrenaline and the immunoboost were probably already healing the wound, but he didn't have a knee in there. He was going to have to have a replacement knee printed up for him back at sickbay. Until then, the knee-joint mechanism of the suit would move for him. He wouldn't really notice a big difference until he tried to take the suit off.
'I'm good, Gunny. It hurt like goddamned hell at first,' Willingham said.
'Do you wanna evac out or can you keep going, Marine?' Tommy asked.
'I'm good, Gunny. I'm stayin'.'
'If you start dragging on me,
