'Won't be long now,' Cruz muttered.
'Incoming!' Sanchez shouted.
About four kilometers behind the trench in which Cruz sheltered, Mendoza, del Rio and Sergeant Perez sat in the shade of a tarp stretched out from one side of the tank to block out the setting sun. Even with the tarp it was hotter than the hinges on the gates of Hell. The air shimmered. Mendoza knew it would be even worse inside the tank. Many virtues the Jaguar had. Air conditioning was, sadly, not among them.
About seven hundred meters away a century of heavy, 160mm, mortars barked together. The blast was enough to make the tank pitch slightly. The mortars, like the tank, were out of Sumeri range.
'Bastards could warn us when they're about to do that,' del Rio complained, sticking a finger in his ear and rotating it slightly to emphasize the point.
Perez shrugged, indifferent. Mendoza seemed hardly to notice.
'Something bothering you, Jorge?' Perez asked.
Jorge shook his head no, but then added, 'I was thinking about a girl back home, Sergeant.'
'Girlfriend?'
'No… no. Just a girl I used to see at church. Beautiful girl, perfection in miniature. I don't even know her name, never had the courage to ask. But I remember her, wearing a yellow print dress and a white sun hat.'
Both Perez and del Rio turned to look.
'Never had the courage to ask her name?' del Rio asked. 'What? Am I sharing my tank with a pussy? What are you going to do when we roll into town?'
'I'm not afraid of that, Stefano, but girls can be scary. '
Perez laughed. 'Yes, Jorge, girls can be scary. But I'll tell you what; we get out of this, I am going to march you to that church and when the girl shows up again march you over to her and introduce you.'
'Jeez, Sarge, would you?'
'I said they were fucking getting better. I didn't want them to get this fucking good,' Sanchez cursed as he fired his rifle at a Sumeri raiding party that had sprung seemingly out of nowhere.
Rivera's light machine gun chattered, sending streams of mixed ball and tracer out toward the enemy. Cruz simply moved his rifle sights from one shadow to another, firing as the sights lined up. He didn't think he was hitting anybody but one had to try.
From Cruz's right another, heavier, machine gun began to trace lines across the ground. As if the machine gun were a spur to action, one of the Sumeris shouted, ' Allahu akbar,' God is great. Firing from the hip the whole crew began charging at Cruz's position. The machine gun killed a number of them but, without wire to slow the Sumeris down, they were quickly out of its arc of fire and descending on the century's forward trench.
'Shit, there must be a hundred of them,' Sanchez said between shots and bursts.
Cruz set his rifle down and reached for the clackers-detonating devices-that led to a couple of directional antipersonnel mines out to the front. An earlier generation, on a different planet, might have called the mines 'claymores.' Cruz squeezed both clackers and was rewarded with a double blast. Perhaps as many as twenty of the attackers went down, some silently, some moaning, still others screaming. The rest plunged on.
'Fix bayonets! Fix bayonets! Fix bay-' screamed Sergeant del Valle. He never finished as an unlucky bullet hit him from the side and, breaking through the softer armor there, passed through his chest. He fell without another sound.
Cruz fumbled nervously for his own bayonet, fixed to his side by his web belt and its carrier. Then he unsnapped the leather strap that held the blade in place, withdrew it, and fixed it onto the end of his rifle. He didn't have time to see to Sanchez and Rivera before the Sumeris were upon them.
A bearded face approached, shouting something unintelligible. Above the face a rifle, also with fixed bayonet, was held in both hands. It was intimidating looking, but bad technique. Cruz went under the upraised rifle and plunged his own bayonet deep into the Sumeri's gut. The Sumeri's eyes went wide as his mouth formed an 'O' of surprise. His knees crumpled and, as he went to them, his body pulled Cruz's lodged rifle down with it. Cruz struggled to free the blade.
Shit! What is it about me that keeps causing sharp pointy things to get stuck in people?
' Allahu akbar,' sounded from another of the enemy, too close in space and time for Cruz to risk trying to free his rifle. He dropped it and faced the Sumeri, left arm and leg bent and forward, showing as little of his own body to the enemy as possible.
The Sumeri lunged. Cruz batted the rifle slightly to one side, just enough to get inside its reach. His right fist lanced upward, catching the Sumeri on the jaw. The blow wasn't enough to knock his opponent out, but it did manage to stun him. Cruz took advantage of that to land another two blows onto the enemy's solar plexus. The Sumeri dropped the rifle and went down, gasping. Cruz took the rifle away from the Sumeri, grasped it in both his own hands and smashed the butt down onto the Sumeri's head, twice.
'Cruz!' screamed Rivera from where he lay, flat on the ground.
The team leader looked up and saw two of the enemy standing over his light machine gunner. Before he could fire both had driven their bayonets down. One, it was later determined, glanced off the glassy metal plate of Rivera's armor. The other sank into his throat.
Shrieking something incomprehensible even to himself, Cruz charged, firing his captured weapon from his hip. At this range, even that way he couldn't miss. Nor did the Sumeris have body armor. They went down. Then the magazine of the captured rifle went dry. Cruz reloaded from his own magazine pouches-for both sides carried, after all, the same model rifle-and fired again, one burst each, into the two enemy soldiers.
When he turned Cruz saw two things. One was that, on the left, the rest of the century was charging to his aid. The other was Sanchez, snarling and cursing and holding off three of them on his own, his bayonet flicking back and forth to threaten each in turn.
Without help, and soon, it would be a losing game.
Cruz charged. One of the Sumeris broke and ran back from whence he had come. Still others, from different parts of the battlefield, were fleeing as well. One of the two still facing Sanchez turned instead to face Cruz.
The two Sumeris saw the rapidly approaching rest of the century. First one, then the other, dropped their weapons and raised their hands. Sanchez was about to kill his man, even so, when Cruz ordered, 'No.'
'Three dead, sir,' Cruz told Carrera the next morning on the same spot as the previous night's action. Bodies still littered the ground. 'No wounded, ours or theirs. It was… you know… too close for that. Too close to take chances.'
'I understand. Who was killed here?' Carrera asked.
'Sergeant del Valle, he was my section leader,' Cruz answered, 'plus my own light machine gunner, Rivera, and Private Aguinaldo from Second Fire Team.'
The signifer added, 'One of the other sections lost a man as well, Legate.'
'Prisoners?' Carrera asked.
'Cruz and Sanchez took two, Legate,' answered the century signifer. 'I've already had them escorted to the command post. There weren't any others. Not that we've found so far, anyway.'
As if to give the lie to the signifer, one of the medics forward of the trench and examining the bodies felled by the directional mines and the machine gun fire shouted, 'Hey, we need a field ambulance. I've got two live ones here.'
The signifer shrugged. It had been a long night and the morning was young. No surprise they found some men wounded who hadn't been in the close fight.
Carrera looked around again, counting the Sumeri bodies in and around the trench. He noted the clackers lying inside it and the swath of bodies stretched out in two triangles in front of it. He nodded at the signifer who, by prearrangement ordered, 'Corporal Cruz, PFC Sanchez, Attention.' The signifer, the centurion, and the few legionaries standing nearby also went to attention.
'Orders will come along later,' Carrera explained, as he reached into the chest pocket of his battle dress. 'We'll make it formal then, too. For now, though, I see no reason to wait. Gentlemen, I am awarding you the Cruz de Coraje en Acero. This is the first step in the six steps of honor the legion has instituted to recognize and reward bravery. You two are only the fourth and fifth such awards we have made since coming here though I rather doubt you will be the last.' Carrera hung a medal, a simple cross on a ribbon, around the neck of Cruz. He then did the same to Sanchez.
'This medal is, as I said, only the first step. You will wear it today, as this is the day I awarded it to you. You
