“Well, come on in when you want. Where to begin?” mused Mike, taking a sip of bourbon.
“At the beginning is usually best,” commented General Horner dryly. The dozen or so Absoluts had seemed to effect Horner not at all. Mike had heard he had a hollow leg. Now he believed it. The only way to tell he was drunk off his ass was that his normally sober expression had become like iron. Way drunk.
“Yeah. Well, Buckley was one of the guys caught under Qualtren. Now, we had to extract ourselves from the rubble, which we did by blowing through with our grenades and stuff, not a technique I suggest to the unarmored.”
“Oui, they are after all…”
“… antimatter!” Mike finished. “Right. So, everybody was able to figure out how to do this successfully except the unfortunate Private Buckley, or Lefty as we came to call him. Private ‘Lefty’ Buckley, on his first try, slipped out his grenade, extended it as far away as he could, since it was, after all…”
“… antimatter!” chorused Géneral Crenaus and his aide.
“Right. So he sticks his arm out as far as it will go, pushing through the rubble, and thumbs the activator.”
“Oui, oui! Only to find that he can’t retract his arm!” crowed the French general, belly laughing.
“Yeah! The rubble shifted and it’s caught. So, like, this is gonna huuurt, right? Actually, it only hurts for a second ’cause of all the suit systems. Blocks the nerve, shuts down the bleeding, debrides and disinfects the wound, all in seconds. But, ya know, ya got to imagine, I mean…”
“It’s a ten-second count?” asked General Horner, looking grim, which for him was the same as smiling.
“Right, right. So like…”
“Dix, neuf, huit, sept…” interjected Crenaus, with tears of laughter in his eyes.
“Right, ten, nine…” Mike translated, “and then…”
“Wham!” interjected General Taylor, laughing.
“Right. Like, ‘Whoa, is this a Monday or what?’ Anyway, it didn’t, doesn’t really hurt, or it wouldn’t be so funny. Just the really brief but memorable sensation of your hand vaporizing.”
“So, what does that have to do with the command ship detonation?” asked one of the surrounding aides.
“Well,” continued Mike, with another sip of bourbon. “Lefty has made it to the perimeter, and performed a really decent private’s job, as well as he can left-handed. And when the command ship lifts he’s one of the guys that goes with Sergeant Green.” Mike paused and solemnly lifted his glass. “Absent companions…”
“Absent companions,” the officers chorused.
“… he went with Staff Sergeant Alonisus Green to distract the command ship away from the Main Line of Resistance and focus its attention so that I could attempt to plant a friggin’ antimatter mine on its side,” he ended, quite solemnly.
“There was supposed to be a humorous punch line,” said General Horner as the pause became elongated.
“Right, sir,” said Captain O’Neal after a sip of his sour mash. ”… so anyway the whole cockamamie thing works, I get through the defenses, plant the mine and do my now famous imitation of a piece of radioactive fallout…”
“Ten seconds early, might I add!” interjected Géneral Crenaus.
“Man, some people wouldn’t be happy if you hanged them with a gold rope! I go ‘to infinity and beyond’ and all the friggin’ Frenchie can do is complain about premature detonations. Where was I, sirs?”
“Detonation,” answered a very junior aide, a mere stripling of a major.
“Right,” said the captain. “Well, the mine works like a charm, except for some minor little secondary effects…”
“Another three meters and I would have been steak tartare!” the general shouted, holding his arms in the air.
“With all due respect: Quit interrupting, General, sir. Anyway it packs about the wallop of a Class Three Space Mine and it causes some nasty secondaries, most of which are, fortunately, directed away from the MLR and certain unnamed ungrateful Frenchmen…” commented Captain O’Neal, rolling his eyes.
“Did I say I was ungrateful? General Taylor, General Horner, I call you to witness, I never have said I was ungrateful. Nervous? A touch. Frightened? Merde, yes! But not ungrateful, you dwarf poltroon!”
“Hah, stork! Anyway, it tears the living shit out of the command ship, but about a third of the ship hangs together. It apparently was really spectacularly visible from some of the positions on the MLR. This big piece of space cruiser describes a beautiful ballistic arc almost straight up, looking like it’s moving in slow motion,” expounded Captain O’Neal, gesturing with both hands. “You have to remember, this is to the background of a relatively small but quite noticeable nuclear blast…”
“About four kilotons,” interjected Géneral Crenaus, taking a hard pull on his cognac, “and less than a kilometer away!”
“More like three kilometers. Anyway, it rides up on the mushroom cloud, describes this tremendous vertical arc and comes gracefully back down…”
“Right on Buckley,” hooted Géneral Crenaus and cracked up.
“… right smack dab on Private Second Class Buckley. He was one of the guys who was on the roofs, in the blast radius…”
“Sacré Bleu! I was in the blast radius!”
“You guys should have hardly felt it in the blast shadow from the buildings!”
“Blast shadow he calls it! Oui! They were around our ears!” shouted the general, hands waving on either side of his head. “I know, I know…” he continued, holding up a hand.
“Bitch, bitch… anyway, here’s Buckley, grav-boots clamped to some nice powerful structure, miraculously alive, survives looking right into the shockwave, survives looking right into the neutron pulse, survives looking right into the thermal pulse…” Mike paused dramatically.
“It didn’t kill him, did it?” asked one of the aides, right on cue.
“In a suit? Nah, but it did knock him clean out. And this time he waited for somebody to come dig him up. He kinda had to since he was about fifty stories down in the building with a quarter kilometer of space cruiser on top of him,” ended Captain O’Neal, chuckling.
“To Private Buckley!” roared Géneral Crenaus, raising his brandy on high.
“To Private Buckley!” roared Captain O’Neal. “And all the other poor sods who wear the Mask of Hell!” he ended, a touch bitterly.
“Here, here,” chorused General Taylor, after there was a moment’s uncomfortable pause, and everyone raised their glasses and drank. “Is that what you call it, Mike?”
“Isn’t it, sir?” asked Captain O’Neal, swaying like an oak in the wind. “I may joke about a rush, but it’s armor that you can take into a friggin’ nuclear blast. As we have, and will have to again. What else is the mission that I have been working on for two weeks? To go where no one else can go, to do what no one else can do and to do that until we are no more.
“For whatever goddamn reason we are going to get hit with five times the number of Posleen pointed at Barwhon and Diess. As we are all well aware. That level of force will leave us totally invested. No large ships are going to be able to sneak through that firepower!
“So, from when the Posleen land until Fleet is strong enough to invest us and take out the landers, we will be cut off from resupply of GalTech. And that means ten little MI troopers… nine little MI troopers… eight little MI troopers, until ‘we’re singing Glory be to God that there are no more of us, cause one of us could drink it all alone.’ And it is my a-hoo-wah job to take my company into that maelstrom of nukes and gas and hypervelocity missile rounds and fight the Posleen on their own turf at up to one-thousand-to-one odds and cover all the other troops who don’t have the equipment to experience it.