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Chapter VI

Derry ducked instinctively as someone fired at him from the hatch on a tank's turret. Popping around the smoking wreck he was using for cover, the wolf fired a two-shot burst that popped his enemy's head like a zit under a heat lamp. With no time to ponder on the horrible fountain of gore, he rushed forward and jumped up, grabbing an infantry handle to help him climb the immobile vehicle, stuck as it was behind the three front-running tanks that SSgt Herrin and other Marines had disabled with grenades into their repulsor exhaust ports.

In the two seconds it took him to climb up the tank like an infuriated ape, another soldier had pulled his commander's corpse from the turret, and popped up just in time for Derry's flung grenade to hit him in the face with a meaty thud. Shrieking in terror, the soldier dropped his carbine and fell down through the turret, followed by the audible heavy chunk of metal and explosives.

Then the black wolf Marine threw himself back, running from the tank as soon as booted footpaws hit pavement. It exploded behind him, as the grenade lit off improperly stored shells, blowing the vehicle apart and sending him rolling, nano-infused armor saving him by diffusing the explosion and bouncing him like a rubber ball off the ground.

"Ow fuck!"

Derry felt like his face was three sizes too big for its skin. For the third time in a day, his face had been bashed into something far less forgiving than flesh and bone, and as he scrambled to his feet the wolf knew his snout was bleeding and probably re-broken. There was no time to get treated, though.

"Keep moving, Marines! We've got to find that artillery, let second team handle the immobile armor!"

"Yes Staff Sar!"

"Join the Marines," they said... "See the Galaxy," they said...Ugh! "Meet interesting locals, then shoot at them."

Then Niece was running alongside him, as they got past the second rank of disabled armor, and he couldn't help the grin that made his face feel as if it was about to come off. The sleek wolfess gave him a quick glance, smirked, then jerked her chin forward to remind him to keep eyes front.

They both rolled over a concrete divider to rejoin the five others detailed to find the artillery. Corporal Kerr and Clicks had been firing down the perpendicular street to keep the tanks' belated infantry escort pinned down, and her three drones were crouched low, buzzing in what seemed like agitation. To Derry, they looked like a bunch of berserkers, greenish froth dripping down from their front mandibles as they clicked and chattered in excitement and anticipation.

He could imagine the old horn-helmeted humans from Mr. Tenh's story books in their place, crouched down, gnawing on shields and scraping chipped axes against the ground, thirsting for the blood of their enemies. The thought gave him a chill, but didn't slow his run and duck to get in cover next to them.

"Tanks are disabled, Corporal," Niece shouted, grinning in excitement. Her athletic chest was bouncing with heaving breaths, the armor and equipment never seeming to slow her down a bit.

Kerr popped up, fired, then dropped back down as return fire spattered across the foot-thick concrete barrier. Derry blinked, as one of the thirty or so red-outlined tangos showing in his ocular flashed to grey. He'd heard rumors of the Corporal's stint as a sharpshooter, but had brushed them off to being just scuttlebutt. Ten year veteran sharpshooters generally weren't low-ranking Corporals.

Back in the territory they'd just passed, Derry heard another tank go up, a muffled "whumpf!" signaling the death of its crew, engine, and ammo compartment. Somewhere back there, Staff Sergeant Herrin's crew were using the unit's two anti-tank weapons to blast apart immobilized armor as it fired back impotently, unable to effectively target Marines after the damage Derry and Niece had done to their treads and sensor systems, combined with the fact the spotters were now afraid to pop up into accurate rifle fire.

Derry lifted the AR-225 to his chest and slid the selector from three-shot to grenade fire, as Kerr popped up and ended another hostile, before dropping and belly-crawling over.

"Your ocular, it sees through cover doesn't it?"

"Yeah, but dense cover can interfere sometimes."

"How many tangos are out there?"

Derry turned to look, rolling onto his stomach. The barrier was only three feet high, and he didn't trust the thinner top bits to hold under heavy fire. Luckily, enemy troops seemed scared, green, unwilling to put themselves in danger to lay down a field of fire through the haze of partially-obscuring brown fog.

"I count twenty-seven."

Clicks chattered, a sound he knew meant frustration. She couldn't really use a mid or long-range firearm well, thanks to the nature of her compound eyes, or so he'd read. The Corps waived its marksmanship requirements specifically for the Ix'kat exchange warriors, thanks to their sheer ferocity in close combat and ability to take withering fire without serious damage.

Kerr nodded, and popped up to fire again, dropping the number to 26 before returning. Nivea did the same, then Derry, splattering some poor rabbit across his companions as a fist-sized ball of plasma blew up inside his chest. The enemy were now hiding behind cover, their advance halted.

"Okay. Blake, Gordon, set up a smoke screen when I signal, then open up with heavy fire. Doesn't matter of we kill these shits, so long as we can get around them. Staff Sar can handle the rest of these tangos when they get to the fallback, but we have to kill those artillery before they wipe us all out. Clicks, you're with me. We'll head up that alleyway and see if we can find a way around these idiots."

"Corporal, why aren't they charging?" Derry was surprised at not feeling terrified. Here they were, outnumbered massively, and the enemy were cowering behind dumpsters and parked cars, firing rifles with total inaccuracy by sticking them around barriers and holding down the trigger.

"They don't know it's just four of us and some bug drones. Plus, they're not professional soldiers. These guys are wearing Planetary Guard uniforms."

Derry blinked, when he realized Kerr was actually smiling. Not the sort of smile one gets hearing their first pup's been born, or the sort of smile one gets at a birthday party. But it was a smile, the first full-size one he'd ever seen on the normally dour Corporal's face.

The wolf swallowed, and rose up to fire again, popping off a pair of grenade shots. They would rapidly deplete his ammunition if he kept it up, but seeing the terror in how the enemy hid felt grounding amidst the horror of being under fire. He ducked back down as conventional rounds spanged off the cement barrier, blowing chips and flakes and dust into the air.

Then Kerr patted him on the shoulder, and signaled with finger-gloved hands to open up.

Both wolves switched their AR's to automatic fire, then flung smoke grenades in virtually perfect unison. When they heard the things ting off the pavement and begin to hiss, they waited a three-count, then rolled a few paces away from each other and popped up, holding down triggers and hugging tight to their rifles as the weapons spat out blast after blast of tiny white lights.

So these things DO have recoil...

Kerr and Clicks and her three drones were off like a shot, running straight left to use the building's corner as cover against soldiers advancing up the street. In moments, they'd cleared the road and were scaling the exterior of a multi-story building, rushing up a fire escape unnoticed as Derry and Nivea blasted ammunition into the billowing cloud of thick grey smoke.

Return fire chattered off the divider, forcing both wolves back down. Derry snapped open one of the dozen pouches on his chest and withdrew a slender metal cylinder, pulling the pin and holding his grenade to cook. Meanwhile, Nivea dug a similar cylinder from her belt bag and hurled it out overhead.

"Grenade out!"

Somewhere in the no-man's-land between Marines and mutineers the grenade popped, spraying out dozens of little metal balls that imbedded into the pavement. Derry's grenade flew a second later, and landed farther forward. He heard soldiers yelling, and the sound of running footsteps, just before the frag went off.

Screams drew chills up his back, as the front-runners of the enemy soldiers ran straight into the field of metal balls. The things were designed to burst on contact, blasting enemies' legs with nerve-rending sonic vibrations that would leave them feeling like their bones were being incinerated.

Based on the howling agony he was hearing, and the red-outlined shapes thrashing on the ground, they worked as planned. What he hadn't predicted was the fur-raised morbid horror sensation that sound wrenched up from inside him. His mouth felt like it was raw and full of bile, as he straightened up and opened fire again into the soldiers who'd popped out to help their fallen compatriots.

To his right, Niece yelped as a bullet impacted, knocking her to the ground. Unable to go help her for fear the enemy might charge if the fire let up, Derry howled into the storm of bullets and let rip, using his ocular to direct full-auto bursts into targets that broke cover.

Twenty seconds of fire later, he ducked back down to reload, and took a second to look for his fire team-mate.

Nivea had her back to the concrete. He could see sweat matting her fur, and blood seeping from a crack in her armor where the shoulder plate ended near her neck.

"Hey! How bad is it?"

She snarled, white fangs bared at him in annoyance and pain.

"Fuck if I know, I'm fucking shot!"

Kerr's voice cut in then.

"You two alive down there?"

"Yes, Corporal!" Derry answered, as he finished reloading and popped up again to open fire. The new energy cell was full, and he could afford longer bursts, though the approaching enemy were gaining in number, if his ocular's sudden rendering of new red outlines was accurate.

"I see eighty enemy foot tangos headed your way. Pop your remaining Screamers and move straight south. You'll hit an alleyway there that cuts east. We'll rendezvous there while the enemy's taking fire from Staff Sar's position. Over."

"I copy, Corporal. Private Gordon's hit. Don't know how bad, but we'll make it there. Out."

The wolf yelped as his radio cut out, when a storm of hot lead fell sideways on his position, jerking him back as two rounds impacted his upper chest. His head snapped forward as he was jolted towards the ground, and another round impacted his helmet, ripping it right off his head. Derry lay on the ground, stunned and bleeding, his chest feeling like the world's fattest fur had just jumped up and down on his ribs.

Overhead, brown haze obscured the sky. He coughed, once, and tasted copper, while wondering with an odd placidity why the air tasted so bad, like old unwashed gym socks. Then Nivea was on him, yanking grenades out of his chest pouches to pull pins and toss while trying to look him over.

"Derry, you're okay, no penetration! Get up man, we gotta go!"

'Screamer' grenades, more properly M-7A LTL Grenades, were living up to their name as Derry was pulled to his feet. Even shaking off the stun of being nearly killed, he felt like the screams should be coming from himself. They echoed in his ears, a symphony of agony as dozens of enemy troops were incapacitated by nerve-battering pulses of sonic energy from the less than lethal sub-munitions.

Then they were running, two wolves at a dead sprint down the street and toward the alleyway Cpl Kerr had mentioned. Back behind them, as screaming died down, Derry heard the chattering of conventional bullets firing into the concrete divider they'd just left behind, enemy infantry not even yet aware they'd left.

They turned a corner at full sprint, though Derry still felt as if his head were full of buzzing bees. When his chest began to hurt, he took solace in the fact that shock must have been wearing off, and put his mind on making sure he was watching for threats. A moment of terror made him look down, then blow out a breath of winded relief as he realized even in shock he hadn't dropped his rifle.

As they rounded the corner, a dark alley loomed in front of them, and Derry realized something he hadn't noticed before - There was an utter lack of civilian presence here, as if the whole area had been quietly evacuated. No insurgent group could easily manage that, he was certain. At least not quietly.

Kerr waved to them, standing on a fire escape some ten floors up, and the two wolves began scaling without waiting for a called order or direction. Too much shouting might well convince the infantry to come looking for them, instead of assuming they'd run back to their main unit.

Once they reached the Corporal, he stopped the both of them with outstretched palms, then grabbed Derry by the collar of his armor, pulling him close to give the wolf a look over. Then, nodding, he waved the wolf on to continue climbing, and grabbed Nivea.

"You're hit, Gordon."

"It's not bad, Corporal, I can keep going."

"We're behind enemy lines now, you'd better be able to. Looks minor anyway, you got knicked. Let me know if you start getting dizzy or nauseous."

"Yes Corporal."

He pushed her to move ahead, and followed behind, making certain she didn't fall down the steel stairs or pass out to be left behind unnoticed. Despite her injuries, she climbed quickly, the nanos doing their work of constricting on wounds and applying pressure, holding her blood in.

Derry reached the top quickly, despite constantly looking back for Niece and Kerr. Clicks' clawed hands grabbed onto his arm, as the bug queen bounced with enthusiasm, chittering and clicking and pointing down and away from them.

"Whoah, shit, slow down!" he hissed, keeping his voice low to avoid sound carry. Then he followed her frantic pointing, and saw just what she was pointing at.

Oh fuck me...

Ten blocks away, the enemy artillery lay on a flat municipal tarmac, like delicate snacks on a silver platter behind armored glass, presented beyond his street-kid reach. He saw six heavy guns, the sort that must have been used to blow the spaceport apart. Around them, dozens of soldiers milled like ants, defending and loading and preparing them to fire.

Beyond those six guns, hundreds more of the local military were arrayed in what could only be an operational bivouac for Brigade and larger operations. They weren't inactive, either. Columns of mechanized infantry were already departing the impromptu base, headed onto freeway entrances that would take them on the city's massive ringway towards the space port.

"Holy fuck, Corporal..."

"Yeah. We'll be calling in enemy positions to Staff Sar'nt Herrin and the others as they retreat."

"Direct hit, enemy ship is breaking up!"

On the main screen, she'd watched as a massive torpedo had impacted an enemy frigate amid-ships and detonated with a wave of energy that spread outward in the classic shock-pattern of high explosives in space. Then they'd lost sight of the enemy ship as the Fist twisted in a complex dance to evade incoming long-range fire from the enemy force's one true capital ship.

As the Fist hurtled through a debris-scudded void, her Captain had to split attention between a dozen view screens, some showing information on deployed fighters, others on the ship's internal battle damage, others read-outs of remaining munitions; a truly dizzying cascade of information.

In space around her, the enemy's number were still increasing, the tactical display showing new red circles approaching from the asteroid belt every few seconds. The enemy had laid their trap well, and though the Fist had already annihilated some fifteen enemy vessels in a mostly one-sided rain of munitions and fury, Captain Leith was no longer confident they could hold position long enough to retrieve their away teams. Certainly they couldn't launch slow, vulnerable space to ground transports until the shooting stopped.

"Status report, all stations," Captain Leith called out. Around her, the lights kept flickering, as Engineering struggled to keep their electrical system stable. Hundreds of automated damage control stations were activating and deactivating across the ship, and her displays showed in bright red that three fires were burning where enemy weaponry had impacted and set off solid fuel reserves. Little blue dots on those sections of the ship's structural diagram showed that her brave crew were battling fire with all the fury she'd put towards the salvos that had wrecked ship after ship of the fleet that dared ambush the Fist of the Nascent Dawn.

"Six of twenty torpedo tubes are online. Engineering reports two tubes are damaged and unusable, and twelve are still in the process of being uncapped. Estimated time to uncapping is ten minutes." Lt. Commander Torvals was sweating, fingers flying over his two work-stations in a piano concerto of invoked violence. Elsewhere in the Fist's massive structure, gunnery officers and enlisted were reacting to his commands, loading and firing rail guns, cooling and firing particle accelerators, and preparing the next barrage of ship-smashing torpedoes.

"All communications systems are still jammed, Captain!" The young caracal looked terrified, her ears scrunched back, tail fluffed, and back hunched. She was, however, still working with all her frightened energy, analyzing signals for signs of what was causing the disruption.

Other stations reported in as well, singing the song of her vessel's battle damage - Maneuvering was still fine, the gravity rings were undamaged and working efficiently, but their targeting computers were beginning to malfunction, and one of their nine fighter bays had been decompressed by a torpedo strike and was unusable.

Of the hundred fighters she'd disgorged, seventy three were still operational after a half hour of blistering dogfight, eleven were blood-splattered space debris, and sixteen were damaged and undergoing repairs back in the ship's bays as other fighters were being prepped for launch.

In the distance, a black-and-stars painted battlecruiser lit up again with a dozen silver flashes of light, and Captain Leith glared in its direction. Her torpedoes had limited fuel, and their guidance systems were unable to compensate for enemy maneuvering that far out. Firing at a ship so distant would quite simply be a simple waste of ammunition. However, their nameless black and glimmering adversary could use its lesser escorts to hem the Fist in, and thus score occasional hits with her own heavy armaments. It was a brutal tactic, to sacrifice so many smaller ships and their crews, but it would certainly wear the Fist of the Nascent Dawn to nothing if this continued.

She refused to let anger draw her in. The nameless enemy commander was clever, and had kept ten smaller vessels close. Scans had indicated the ships were modified, and Lieutenant Adeling at the radar station had informed her that they were mostly set up to be boarding vessels. They likely carried enough troops to seriously damage the Fist if they managed to get ahold of her, so approaching closer wasn't possible.

That bomb was supposed to knock out power and engines, crippling us for boarding. They were trying to add to their fleet, not get into a slugfest with us. They must be drawing their little modified merchant-ship navy away from the other planets in-system.

Which means we're not their only in-system opponents.

"Mr. Adeling, do you have any information on the location of the 'Starlit Maiden'? She was supposed to be here to escort us."

The iguana shook his head, and punched a few commands on his console. Meanwhile, the Fist continued to rotate and fire, dodging this way and that in a starlit dance of destruction as her gravity rings continued spinning and shifting to manage the hairpin calculations and adjustments. Enemy vessels had lost all sense of formation, and were now simply firing on her with haste and trying to dodge one another's fields of fire.

"No, Captain, last I saw was hours ago, and she was still in the geo-synch dock over Atria's southern continent. Whatever they're jamming us with is stopping our long-range sensors."

"And we still have no contact with the Marine away teams?"

"Affirmative, Captain, still no contact," Lt. Cross chimed in.

Uh..."

"What is it, Mr. Adeling?"

One of her screens shifted, as one of the low-priority screens shifted. What she saw was a high-altitude birds-eye view from one of the Fist's long-range telescopes.

They blew up their own starport to strand my Marines so their docking action would be less contested. Gods damnit!

The image was in live motion, and as she issued orders, her eyes stayed on the action below. Atria's starport sat like a damaged jewel set in a wide white plain of flat ground. Around it, surrounded with blue outlines, small clusters of Marines were fighting a desperate and pitched battle against a sea of bloody-colored enemies. As foes advanced across the open ground, Marines cut them down en masse, using their vehicles as mobile cover and smashing enemy light vehicles with their superior weaponry and firepower.

Despite that, it was clear the Marines were overwhelmed - She counted maybe fifty sapphire marks at a glance, and the cameras weren't able to give her enough resolution to show the mass of enemies coming at them from the east and north. What was more, Captain Leith could see the Marines had taken heavy losses in what had to have been an artillery barrage.

"Mr. Adeling, where are the artillery pieces that bombarded their starport?"

Lt. Commander Torvals responded instead of the young iguana, growling in frustration.

"Captain, we don't have time to give them fire support, if we're going to survive this!"

The iguana spoke a moment later, stammering at the interruption.

"Two cl-clicks from the M-marines, Captain!"

"Fine. Locate the position. Helm, I want you to maneuver us into firing position. Mr. Torvals, I understand your objection, but if we're going to abandon those Marines for now, we'll be leaving them with a fighting chance."

He gave no objections. Leith already knew them. Such a maneuver would expose them to enemy fire for critical seconds while they were stationary to achieve accurate fire through a planet's atmosphere. What's more, the risk of civilian casualties was high, though she was betting the attacking forces would have scattered locals and likely kept them well away from set artillery pieces.

"It looks like their reinforcements are coming from the asteroid belt coordinates corresponding with fast transit from Atria 2 and 3. Helm, plot a course at maximum speed towards the opposite end of the belt. Once we drop that fire support, we'll be making best speed away from the enemy fleet."

Major Thaurun, the grizzled old Marine commander, looked up from his station, then stood and turned towards her. He was a sleek old beast, an otter without the lean and boyish definition most males and females of his species shared. Instead, he had the powerful muscles and wiry build of a warrior, and the map of scars across his hide was said to be impressive.

The Marine and his Captain met eyes, and in his she saw anger well-kept behind deference and respect for the chain of command. Nonetheless, she registered his complaint, and gave him a nod.

"The second we get a chance, Major, we'll be back for them. Right now, we have no choice. If we stay here to support or reinforce them, we'll be blasted apart. If we can get free of the enemy's jamming, we can call for reinforcement. I'm betting their jamming systems are on orbital satellites, so getting away from the planet should give us more options. Do you understand?"

He nodded, and she saw the age in his face for the first time. Sacrificing those Marines would weigh heavy on them both, she realized, when her stomach's knotted pain suddenly made itself noticed. Her mouth tasted sour, and Adriana looked down again at the images of struggling Marines, stubbornly refusing to surrender their position despite twenty to one or greater odds.

She put an open palm against the display, though not to cover the image. The chance those Marines would survive was slim to none, and it felt as if she were placing a hand on a corpse at its wake before the funeral.

We'll be back for you, alive or dead. I promise.

Even several clicks distant, the chattering of machine guns and clashing buzzing noises mixed with a constant barrage of thunder told Derry what was happening back at the starport. For the last ten minutes, they'd been signaling SSgt Herrin and his teams, signals intermittent and filled with the fuzz of low-tech signal jamming.

Corporal Kerr snarled in a way Derry didn't know humans could do, and angrily kicked at the cinder block lip they hid behind, atop the seven-story mess of a building some sign had claimed was an apartment building. All around them, still filled with furniture and all the signs of daily living, abandoned tenements and homes squatted in the increasingly dim and darkening cityscape, every window the eyehole of an empty, dead skull, staring down at their sorrows with the impassive peace of the dead.

"Goddamnit!"

Derry winced. He'd heard all the lectures in Boot and AIT about poise and how morale was affected when a superior lost his cool. He'd never believed such an effect would work on him. Now he knew it for truth - Kerr didn't know what to do, and much as the Corporal tried to hide it, Derry was catching himself agreeing.

Lying down atop the roof right in front of him, Niece Gordon had her armor's chest plate stripped away, and he was working on bandaging her as best he could while the Corporal continually tried and failed to receive meaningful communication from their embattled brethren. Every one of them on that rooftop thirsted to go back, to die with their battle brothers and sisters, rifles in hand and paw, enemy blood on claws and talons.

Niece winced, clenching her jaw so hard it creaked, as Derry yanked and tightened the bandage on her shoulder. The armor would have protected her, except that two bullets had struck the nano-plates over the meat of her shoulder virtually simultaneously, overloading the microscopic machines' ability to ablate force and repair themselves just long enough for one to penetrate.

Luckily for everyone, Derry knew just enough first aid to deal with a through-and-through, and had stuffed the wound with a tampon from the first aid kit before wrapping the whole shoulder in a messy but effective dressing.

Nonetheless, Nivea was cursing under her breath, pale and sweating, by the time he was done wrapping her up.

Kerr, hand shaking with anger, tossed the comm. unit back to Clicks and walked way from the others, running his hands through his regulation-short hair as he approached an edge of the roof. All eyes on him, the Corporal stood there, uncertain, struggling to decide on a course of action.

Finally, Derry cleared his throat, and spoke.

"Corporal uh...What's the plan?"

Kerr stood, staring into the distance, his hands braced atop the roof lip and shoulders hunched forward as he stared towards the brown haze from which all that thunder and fury originated.

"Spaceport is gone, so we've got no ride outta here. If the Fist were going to reinforce us, she'd've done it already. We've got three choices."

Derry just stared at him, as did Clicks. Nivea would have, but all she could see was Derry's chest, given the fact he'd just finished tying off her bandage and hadn't moved off her yet. To her, Kerr's voice sounded like he was talking to himself, more than the rest of them.

"We go back and die fighting, we find some other way to make our deaths useful hurting them, or we go to ground and find some other way off this rock to report back."

Derry grimaced at the dearth of good choices. Half his instincts told him to go back and fight - They had the weapons, the training, and the Spirit of the Corps. The other half, an older half from his time back in the tunnels of the hab dome, told him going to ground was better. Surviving to fight another day, though, at the cost of other Marines? Cowardice.

A soundless flash drew their eyes upward, and Niece pushed at Derry's chest, forcing the bigger wolf to move aside.

"What the fuck...?"

Thunder-pops from the direction of their embattled friends slowed a moment, then began again as the light from overhead faded. A few heartbeats later, Derry's sensitive ears picked up an ominous, rushing moan, as if the air itself were groaning in agony. Neither the half-conscious Nivea nor the human Kerr could hear it, he realized, so he yelled out for their benefit as his ocular implant went berserk with warning flashes and a strange symbol he hadn't seen before.

"Get down, INCOMING!"

Clicks was covering herself, and the drones leapt atop her like a rugby scrum gone wrong. Kerr threw himself flat, years of experience telling him not to question the dreaded I-word. Derry ended up atop Nivea, holding her down and covering his head with both paws as he shielded the squirming wolfess.

The moaning became a rushing of wind, and then rose to a nerve-grinding, chalkboard-slashing screech that had even Kerr's dimmed human ears hurting and the Corporal yelling.

For a second, all the world went black - Something so bright it ate all light zipped down from the darkened sky, scattering ozone and smog in a tornado of wind and air pressure. Part of the building lip came free of its crumbling masonry and flew past them as a flash of unbelievable brightness suffused the blackened light-denuded void.

An impact thunder-clap so powerful Derry felt it like a punch to the gut flew over them, followed by a sonic boom that blew his un-buckled helmet off the top of his head and sent it sailing away on the wind. The shockwave lurched their entire building, and sent one of the Ix'kat warrior-drones fluttering away like so much confetti in a windstorm.

Derry lifted his head an interminable span of instants later, and blinked. He spoke, but the words didn't reach his ringing ears, deafened by the blast noise.

Down below, where enemy artillery and bivoac had been, there was nothing but a gaping, smoking hole four blocks in diameter, glowing at its center like some ancient volcano's magma cone.

Not a nuke, we'd be dead if it was a nuke.

"Recognize the signs of danger on a battlefield, Derry," said Mr. Tenh, holding up a sheaf of old, grainy photographs.

The ancient giant lumbered a step toward him, leaning heavily on the one expensive thing he owned - a cane made of hand-crafted hardwood stronger than some steels. With a gentleness belying his enormous paws, he handed the photos to Derry, whose child-like paws handled them with the utmost reverence he showed to all Mr. Tenh's precious things.

"That top one is the blast crater of an orbital bombardment or meteor impact. Know the signs. Such things are often radioactive, extremely hot, and often quite dangerous. The six below show different types of orbital weapon strikes. Plasma streams, particle acceleration cannons, torpedoes, gauss cannons and the like. Study them. You will be tested."

Thanks, gramps.

His own yelling voice finally cut through the cloud of ringing in his head. He sounded jubilant, child-like, and the rush in his chest told him oddly that he felt that way and somehow hadn't realized it yet.

"Corporal! That's a gauss cannon hit! The Fist's helping us!"

Kerr didn't answer, and Derry whirled to look for him. The Corporal had been knocked flat on his back, his face bloodied from a gash across his scalp that already had purpling bruises around it. Looking down, he saw that Nivea looked to be half-conscious, gripping her shoulder and gritting her teeth to avoid crying from the pain. Clicks just blinked at him. Like most Ix'kat queens, she wasn't the most motivated unless a fairly simple goal was in front of her or an order had come down from a queen of greater status.

The sudden urge to wrap his arms around Nivea and try to make her pain go away was strong. To press his body up against hers and make things better. But there was no time, and besides that he knew she wasn't interested. Never would be.

Oh fuck me...Guess I'm in charge now...

"Clicks! Help me brace Corporal Kerr's neck! Then get your drones to carry him and Niece! We're headed back to Staff Sar'nt Herrin and the others now, before enemy reinforcements can show!"