Get a bullet in your gut (or anywhere else), and the unitard stiffens at the point of impact and transfers the energy across the surface of the suit, rather than allowing the bullet to burrow through. This is massively painful but better than letting a bullet ricochet merrily through your intestines. This only works up to a point, alas, so avoiding enemy fire is still the order of the day.

Add your belt, which includes your combat knife, your multipurpose tool, which is what a Swiss army knife wants to be when it grows up, an impressively collapsible personal shelter, your canteen, a week's worth of energy wafers and three slots for ammo blocks. Smear your face with a nanobot-laden cream that interfaces with your unitard to share environmental information. Switch on your camouflage. Try to find yourself in the mirror.

Third, open a BrainPal channel to the rest of your squad and leave it open until you return to the ship or you die. I thought I was pretty smart to think of this in boot camp, but it turns out to be one of the holiest of unofficial rules during the heat of battle. BrainPal communication means no unclear commands or signals—and no speaking to give away your position. If you hear a CDF soldier during the heat of battle, it's because he is either stupid or screaming because he's been shot.

The only drawback to BrainPal communication is that your BrainPal can also send emotional information if you're not paying attention. This can be distracting if you suddenly feel like you're going to piss yourself in fright, only to realize it's not you who's about to cut loose on the bladder, but your squadmate. It's also something none of your squadmates will ever let you live down.

Link only to your squadmates—try to keep a channel open to your entire platoon and suddenly sixty people are cursing, fighting and dying inside your head. You do not need this.

Finally, forget everything except to follow orders, kill anything that's not human and stay alive. The CDF makes it simple to do this; for the first two years of service, every soldier is infantry, no matter if you were a janitor or surgeon, senator or street bum in your previous life. If you make it through the first two years, then you get the chance to specialize, to earn a permanent Colonial billet instead of wandering from battle to battle, and to fill in the niche and support roles every military body has. But for two years, all you have to do is go where they tell you, stay behind your rifle, and kill and not be killed. It's simple, but simple isn't the same as easy.

It took two shots to bring down a Consu soldier. This was new—none of the intelligence on them mentioned personal shielding. But something was allowing them to take the first hit; it sprawled them on whatever you might consider to be their ass, but they were up again in a matter of seconds. So two shots; one to take them down, and one to keep them down.

Two shots in sequence on the same moving target is not easily accomplished when you're firing across a few hundred meters of very busy battleground. After figuring this one out, I had Asshole create a specialized firing routine that shot two bullets on one trigger pull, the first a hollow tip, and the second with an explosive charge. The specification was relayed to my Empee between shots; one second I was squeezing off single standard-issue rifle ammo, the next I was shooting my Consu killer special.

I loved my rifle.

I forwarded the firing specification to Watson and Viveros; Viveros forwarded it up the chain of command. Within about a minute, the battlefield was peppered with the sound of rapid double shots, followed by dozens of Consu puffing out as the explosive charges strained their internal organs against the insides of their carapaces. It sounded like popcorn popping. I glanced over at Viveros. She was emotionlessly sighting and shooting. Watson was firing and grinning like a boy who just won a stuffed animal at the state farm BB shoot.

Uh oh—sent Viveros. We're spotted get down—

"What?" Watson said, and poked his head up. I grabbed him and pulled him down as the rockets slammed into the boulders we'd been using for cover. We were pelted with newly formed gravel. I looked up just in time to see a chunk of boulder the size of a bowling ball twirling madly down toward my skull. I swatted at it without thinking; the suit went hard down the length of my arm and the chunk flew off like a lazy softball. My arm ached; in my other life I'd be the proud owner of three new, short, likely terribly misaligned arm bones. I wouldn't be doing that again.

"Holy shit, that was close," said Watson.

"Shut up," I said, and sent to Viveros. What now?—

Hold tight—she sent and took her multipurpose tool off her belt. She ordered it into a mirror, then used it to peek over the edge of her boulder. Six no seven on their way up—

There was a sudden krump close by. Make that five—she corrected, and closed up her tool. Set for grenades then follow up then we move—

I nodded, Watson grinned, and when Viveros sent Go—we all pumped grenades over the boulders. I counted three each; after nine explosions I exhaled, prayed, popped up and saw the remains of one Consu, another dragging itself dazedly away from our position, and two scrambling for cover. Viveros got the wounded one; Watson and I each plugged one of the other two.

"Welcome to the party, you shitheads!" Watson whooped, and then bobbled up exultantly over his boulder just in time to get it in the face from the fifth Consu, who had gotten ahead of the grenades and had stayed low while we mopped up its friends. The Consu leveled a barrel at Watson's nose and fired; Watson's face cratered inward and then outward as a geyser of SmartBlood and tissue that used to be Watson's head sprayed over the Consu. Watson's unitard, designed to stiffen when hit by projectiles, did just that when the shot hit the back of his hood, pressuring the shot, the SmartBlood, and bits of skull, brain and BrainPal back out the only readily available opening.

Watson didn't know what hit him. The last thing he sent through his BrainPal channel was a wash of emotion that could best be described as disoriented puzzlement, the mild surprise of someone who knows he's seeing something he wasn't expecting but hasn't figured out what it is. Then his connection was cut off, like a data feed suddenly unexpectedly shut down.

The Consu who shot Watson sang as it blew his face apart. I had left my translation circuit on, and so I saw Watson's death subtitled, the word "Redeemed" repeated over and over while bits of his head formed weeping droplets on the Consu's thorax. I screamed and fired. The Consu slammed backward and then its body exploded as bullet after bullet dug under its thoracic plate and detonated. I figured I wasted thirty rounds on an already dead Consu before I stopped.

"Perry," Viveros said, switching back to her voice to snap me out of whatever I was in. "More on the way. Time to move. Let's go."

"What about Watson?" I asked.

"Leave him," Viveros said. "He's dead and you're not and there's no one to mourn him out here anyway. We'll come for the body later. Let's go. Let's stay alive."

We won. The double-bullet rifle technique thinned out the Consu herd by a substantial amount before they got wise and moved to switch tactics, falling back to launch rocket attacks rather than to make another frontal assault. After several hours of this the Consu fell back completely and fired up their shield, leaving behind a squad to ritually commit suicide, signaling the Consu's acceptance of their loss. After they had plunged their ceremonial knives into their brain cavity, all that was left was to collect our dead and what wounded had been left in the field.

For the day, 2nd Platoon came through pretty well; two dead, including Watson, and four wounded, only one seriously. She'd be spending the next month growing back her lower intestine, while the other three would be up and back on duty in a matter of days. All things considered, things could have been worse. A Consu armored hovercraft had rammed its way toward 4th Platoon, Company C's position and detonated, taking sixteen of them with it, including the platoon commander and two squad leaders, and wounding much of the rest of the platoon. If 4th Platoon's lieutenant weren't already dead, I'd suspect he'd be wishing he were after a clusterfuck like that.