Munchkin folded our gun’s bipod legs back along the barrel, then raised it to her shoulder. We shuffled forward, on-line with our squad mates, our gun as long as she was tall. But I wouldn’t want to be a Slug in front of that muzzle.

After another leapfrog round and a half, our squad was first into the cave. We paused in the cave mouth for our night-vision goggles to adjust. Just long enough to be silhouetted as targets.

On my right, a Slug round struck a rifleman’s forehead. Our helmets will deflect a grazing round, maybe even a small-caliber bullet direct, but Slug rounds come big and fast. His head tore off.

I shoved Munchkin down as I dropped, and we both hit the cave floor before the headless rifleman’s body fell across us. There was no time to think about who he had been or where he was going, just to shove him aside as his arterial blood pulsed onto our gun’s barrel and sizzled.

Munchkin returned fire as the Slug who shot him slunk behind a rock. If we hadn’t been green and exhausted, we would have crawled in the cave entrance instead of making silhouette targets of ourselves. Careless soldiers are dead soldiers.

The little bastard was pinned down, but there was no rushing him in force. His position commanded our axis of advance, which had to be single file between rock walls. He could stay behind his boulder all day and pick off any single soldier who tried to get through. He was too far away to throw a grenade at him, the roof too low for a G-man to lob one in. The Slug just had to keep us outside for a few hours, until the nightstorm could kill us.

“Now what?” I muttered.

Munchkin shifted her aiming point to the rock wall six feet behind the boulder, thumbed her selector switch to full auto and cut loose twenty rounds.

“What—”

Her burst thundered against the wall and a hail of ricochets peppered the cavern. Half of them deflected behind the boulder.

Our gun’s echoes died.

The Slug flopped out from behind the rock, his armor shredded. Ricocheted M-20 rounds were too small and slow to penetrate Slug armor, but when an M-60 talks, everybody listens.

Before any of the dead Slug’s buddies could take over his little sniper’s nest, we were through the gap.

“That was amazing!” I told Munchkin.

“That was bumper pool.” She shrugged.

Once we got a couple squads into the main cave, it was a mop-up. We took no prisoners, not from rage but because the Slugs fought until they died. We lost two KIA. Slug firefights, we were learning, left few wounded. Their rounds tore GIs to pieces.

We secured that cave and a couple of others and copped a night’s rest while the nightstorm howled.

The next morning, Munchkin and I were back on PSD with General Cobb. He huddled up for a staff meeting with his back to a rock wall.

He looked up at the commander of the surviving combat engineers. A skinny lieutenant where there had been a colonel.

The general’s finger inscribed a circle along the holo-model escarpment, making a ring all the way around the mountain, a thousand feet above the plain. “Son, can you blast a trench ring along the military crest?”

“One thing we got’s explosives, sir.”

“Off you go.”

The lieutenant saluted and double-timed away. An hour later we heard the first boom as the engineers began blasting our trench system.

An hour after that Munchkin and I were breaking our backs digging trenches to shelter headquarters when messages beeped up on my Chipboard and Munchkin’s simultaneously.

We both read halfway through the orders, then she turned to me, eyes wide. “We’re reassigned to a line unit, again.”

“You know the casualty numbers. General Cobb figures he can take care of himself. They need our gun on the perimeter.”

We gathered gear and trudged around the mountain toward our new outfit, bent under our gun and ten thousand rounds. As we moved, all along our perimeter, soldiers dug blasted rock from the trenches like their lives depended on it. They did.

We found the line segment held by the platoon to which we were loaned.

Their platoon sergeant had never made it out of their dropship. Their platoon leader bought the farm in a cave the first night. They had shrunk below half strength, otherwise.

Therefore, the platoon’s current stud duck was a corporal from Chicago. We found him squatting beside a boulder, drinking coffee from a therm cup that likely warmed it just enough to unfreeze it. He looked up, and coffee slopped onto his field-jacket front. He didn’t clean it off

“Just you two? That’s all they sent?” He eyed our gun. “We can use the weapon.” He pointed us at a rock pile a hundred yards along his platoon’s sector of the perimeter. “Set up there.”

I looked around. “You mind a suggestion?”

He tugged down his face mask and scratched an unshaven jaw. “Free country.”

The platoon’s sector included a ridge that stuck out from the mountain like Florida stuck out from the United States. “You got a salient here to cover.”

“No shit.” He grimaced. A salient is a bulge in an army’s line. The trouble with bulges is bad guys can attack you from the sides as well as the front. If they succeed when they attack your flanks, they pinch off your salient and encircle the troops left inside. The German

General Staff in World War II assaulted the poor bastards pocketed in a salient at Bastogne. The Battle of the Bulge nearly turned the war for Germany. Salients attracted enemy attention.

Salient or not, there was a right way to defend it. “Your—our—sector’s mostly unscalable cliffs. Except for that ravine, there.” I pointed. “It’s the most likely avenue of approach. Lay our gun to cover it.”

He shrugged, weary. “Suit yourselves. I’m just a grunt. They were supposed to send us a new platoon leader. No loss. He was just some enlisted weenie detached from HQ Battalion.”

Under my fatigues goose flesh rippled my forearms. Besides Munchkin and me, all that remained of HQ Battalion was Howard, Ari, and General Cobb.

I pulled out my Chipboard and read the part of my orders I’d skipped. I swear my pack gained a hundred pounds. “Acting second lieutenant… assume command effective immediately.”

I pulled Munchkin aside and held my Chipboard so she could read my orders. I whispered, “This is a typo. They don’t jump specialist fours to platoon leader. I’m a twenty-one-year-old grunt.”

“Who General Cobb probably recommended for the job personally, because he knew you could do it.”

“Why not you? I’m not even the boss of this gun, you are.”

“I wasn’t born to this. Judge March saw it in you, Jason. So did Sergeant Ord. I believe this is your destiny.”

My head spun. Destiny, shmestiny. I’d think about that tomorrow. “What do I do?”

“Your job.”

I took a breath and turned back to the corporal. “I’m Wander. The weenie from HQ.”

I expected him to roll his eyes, and say, “Oh, sure.” Instead he stood up straight and saluted. GEF was on the ropes, but we were soldiers, after all.

“Yes, sir. I didn’t know, sir.” He stared at me waiting for orders. I prayed to God for a clue. God, as usual, ignored me.

I tugged the corporal’s unfastened equipment harness. “First thing you do, straighten up your gear. If we look like whipped dogs, we’ll fight like whipped dogs.”

“Yes, sir.”

An hour later, I’d walked our sector with him, met my soldiers, repositioned a few, and contacted the platoon leaders to our left and right. Our coverage wasn’t just thin, it was onionskin.

I headed back to the center of our sector, where I’d left Munchkin and found her position.

She had dug in on the escarpment at the military crest, the line below the high point where a soldier could see her field of fire but wasn’t silhouetted against the sky. I crab-walked sideways down loose scree, and she turned at the sound of cascading pebbles.