Final impact

Murphy risked a quick glance across the cobbled street. It was coming up on midnight, but there were hundreds of fires burning all over this part of Calais, and they lit the night. Besides Duffy and himself, there were four others in the room. The rest of the platoon had taken up defensive positions throughout the ruined house.

“Okay. Ammo check?”

Prufrock checked his pouches. “Two mags, two frags, Corporal.”

“Three mags and the LAW,” Chalese reported from his covering position by a door.

Juarez, by the window, had “one mag and fuck-all else.”

Murphy pulled one of his own magazines and tossed it to Juarez. “That leaves me with three. What about you, Al? Ms. Duffy?”

Alcones had two and some spare change.

Duffy didn’t need to check. “I got three full reloads and four grenades. Plus an hour’s worth of video left, if anyone’s planning on doing something dramatic.”

Murphy sighed and took off his helmet. “Ms. Duffy, can you tell where we are or where Reynolds’s squad is? They should be across the street by now. But I can’t see shit with these goggles.”

He tapped his Starlites with a bloodied fist.

She shrugged. “Dunno. Let’s find out.”

If they’d had a workable tac net, she could have just brought up the drone coverage and located her own biosensors in the battlespace display. Duffy was a popular embed for a lot of reasons, partly because she had access to the Fleetnet interface at a 21C level. Unfortunately, that only worked when she was near enough to a relay node to make the link. They were out on their own here, and she hadn’t had a tickle from Fleetnet for-she checked the counter-nearly thirteen hours.

Julia bent low and crept over to the window, pushing aside the torn lace curtain with the muzzle of her carbine. She was the only one with a powered helmet and integrated tac set. It wasn’t her original rig-that had been based on a standard-issue Advanced Combat Helmet, which looked too much like the Nazi “bucket” for comfort. Wearing something like that, she was just asking to get shot in the ass, so she’d paid an engineer from the Eighty-second big dollars to build her a new mount that fit on a contemporary M1 helmet.

She removed the Sonycam from its base and, holding it so that only her hand was exposed, focused it on the cottage across the way. The smart sensors adjusted to the light, and she concentrated on a small pop-up window in her goggles. The nearest house looked deserted.

Then a flash of light drew her attention, and she shifted the camera.

“All-righty then. Two doors down to the northwest, your two o’clock, Murph. Looks like a coupla Fallschirmjдger. And second floor, center window, an MG-Forty-two. Got good intersecting fields of fire. They’ll chop us to dog meat if we go out there.”

She shook her head.

“Man, I wish Fleetnet was up. I could tell you where your other squad is. But as it is, I got nada.”

“Reynolds is going to run into those guys,” said Alcones. “They’ve got to know we’re here, Murph. With all the racket we made getting in here.”

“The kraut by the door is slumped. I’d say he is either sleeping, wounded, or both,” Julia said.

Murphy pondered his options for the moment. Julia had enough confidence in him to shut up and wait. She’d seen way more combat than him, but he’d proved himself a natural the last few days. The corporal put his helmet back on.

“Okay. Alcones, Chalese, get yourselves upstairs. Prufrock, get back out into the hall, give the rest of the guys a heads-up. Tell them to get a bead on that house Ms. Duffy just tagged. On my mark we’re going to put a world of hurt on that joint. Half-’n’-halfs. High explosive and flechette. Got it?”

They nodded and dispersed.

“Ms. Duffy, could you keep an eye on things, make sure no friendlies get into that place before we hit ’er up?”

“Sure thing,” Julia said, checking her batteries and memory blocks again.

Murphy and the lost paratrooper from the 101st, Private Juarez, took up positions by the window, with Murphy loading a fat gray HEMP slug into his grenade launcher. Prufrock poked his head through the hole in the wall to indicate that the rest of the platoon was ready. Murphy nodded and poked his carbine through the shattered window.

The M320 made a thumping sound. Julia followed the round as it crossed the forty or so meters until it sailed through the center of the open window. A flash followed by a crump signaled the start of the fight.

“Open fire!” he yelled.

A crash upstairs preceded long knives of glass falling past her into the street by half a second. Five dull thuds sent the 40mm grenades on their way. The underslung M320-type launchers some of them carried on their carbines weren’t a patch on the programmable 440s she was used to, but they still shot a variety of bomblets up to four hundred meters, with a muzzle velocity of seventy-six meters a second. The target building-no more than forty meters away-shuddered under the impact of the handheld artillery barrage.

Five flashes and peals of thunder rolled into one as a dozen automatic rifles opened up.