Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

four times."
"Good, 'cause they were. Anyhow, we slam into this mud pit. I crawl over to the veep and discover this bastard went and caught a piece of shrapnel through his skull. He's dead as dirt, but my extraction orders don't care. So, I drag this enormous corpse through the jungle. Radio's dead, everything's cooked, I've got one banged up subgun, two mags, and half a day's rations. It's near boiling out, it's about a hundred klicks to the green zone, and I've got to drag Porky the Veep through a Path division on the way."
Rutman jumped in, "So, there he is, out of contact, out of luck, and still stuck on the mission. What does his happy ass do?"
"My happy ass marched itself to extraction, that's what it did!" Hill replied.
"And how?" Rutman prodded. "Tell Princess how you did it…"
"I went through a lot of shit! I had to adapt!" Hill excused. "There were Path patrols, snakes, mosquitoes, malaria-"
Rutman said, "This dumbass catches malaria somewhere in the fucking swamp-jungle, still dragging this bloated corpse. Two weeks later, he staggers across the perimeter onto an airbase tarmac, and he's half-naked, armed with an empty Path pistol and a bowie knife, rolling this black and blue thing in front of him, wearing leaves like a crown. Completely cooked out of his head, like he'd been licking dart frogs."
"I had malaria, Scooch! Malaria!" Hill protested.
Rutman continued, "The lieutenant waltzes over, pissed as hell that this is happening during a base inspection, and demands, 'What in the seven hells are you rolling onto my tarmac'. Reaper salutes and says, 'VIP from Coreza, sir. Doubles as a flotation device, bunker, and downhill kinetic weapon, sir!' Well, the family was standing right there, and they're horrified, so the lieutenant tries to patch it up, and yells, 'God damn it, soldier, all we needed was his identicard!' And Hill turns, says, 'Well piss on that, sir' and belly-flops onto the blacktop, unconscious. I think the el-tee had a fucking stroke."
Firenze tried not to choke. Around the table, others laughed, except for Hill, who just sat there in earnest silence, utterly unperturbed by the absurdity of the tale, but perhaps puzzled as to why it was so funny. Kawalski glanced at him, blurry-eyed, and said, "You think that was bad, Princess, you should have seen Tansana. Scooch, remember that fucking rook?"
Rutman cackled and slapped Hill on the back so hard that the latter man nearly hit the table. Hill popped up, a confused look on his face, but Rutman demanded, "Reaper? Remember that kid?"
"Donkey!? Of fucking course!" Hill declared. He whirled to Firenze, leaned forward as if to communicate some great secret, and whispered, "He's a hero of the Authority. True fucking steel."
Despite himself, Firenze asked, "What-"
Rutman jumped on the story. "Okay, so, we're moving across Tansana - Path has the city locked down tight, they're blasting vertols out of the sky, and they've bunched the AA in with civies, so the orbitals can't scrag 'em. We've gotta clear this quench gun-"
Hill chimed in to explain, "Big fucking gun. Four centimeter bore, hopper fed. Sounds like a goddamn lightning storm when it shoots. Pathies got it tucked into a churchyard. Local legs tried to move in, went quiet, we get told to go poke it."
Rutman continued, "We got caught on a balcony. Big stone thing - dark age construction. I mean the whole deal: pillars, stained glass, fucking ceramic plant troughs. Architectural fucking wonder. A real treasure."
"Path shoot it to shit." Hill added.
Rutman said, "So, we're all lying prone beneath this half-meter stone wall. Beautiful red rock. And across the courtyard, there's this bell tower and some fucking asshole with a heavy k-gun. Anyone who stands up gets blown in half. Guy's a hell of a shot-"
"Never let anyone talk you up a tree." Diaz advised from the end of the table. Of all the people on the team, the soft-spoken marksman was one of the most introverted. Firenze rarely heard him speak, but all the others stopped to listen when he did. Diaz glanced down at the stains on his nearly-empty glass and remarked, "It's a good rule."
"Why's that?" Firenze asked.
Kawalski answered, "Because if you take a rifle up a tree, you ain't climbing back down."
Hill said, "Path ain't too bright. But they got guts for days."
"And they can shoot." Rutman reiterated. "It's me, Reaper, Dag, and Nugget - we're all lying there, useless. Command is on the radio, keeps telling us that someone is going to flank the goddamned sniper, and we need to stand by. We can't crawl more than a goddamn meter, because that oh-so-pretty stone has gaping fucking holes, there's no hard cover unless you feel like sprinting ten meters through a kill zone, and, oh, yeah, we're still babysitting the fucking leg infantry who got trapped here, first."
"This kid is green as you, Princess." Hill said. "His unit got cut up, and he's a fucking radio tech without a link. He's got about eight hundred feet of fiber on his back, no officer, no handset, and no TACNET. Useless as tits on body armor."
Rutman continued, "But... he's small. He's got that outer-zone scrawny thing going on. Fucking stick arms, but thighs like a whole turkey. Kid probably has to run down rats to feed his fucking family. Reaper keeps looking at him, gets this real 'thinking' look on his face, and I swear, the kid's about to piss himself." Rutman had to stop, to regulate his breath, so he didn't trip over his own words. He punctuated with a drink and continued, "So I ask Reaper, 'what are you thinking?'. And he says, 'I armed the hyvel'."
The data packed into Firenze's skull gave that phrase meaning. The hyvel - hypervelocity rocket - was a man-portable antitank/anti-fortification weapon. Disarmed, it was a tube just under seven-hundred millimeters long, stored on the infantryman's back. To arm the rocket, a soldier would give it a quarter twist, and then extend