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rocks and dust in wild patterns, hurling high-velocity gasses against anything too close to strike with deadly force before those gasses dissipated into the emptiness around them.
    No comm signal could punch through that interference. Stark could only wait while the fury ran its course, wait with the silence that marked so much of the violence of war on an airless world.
    It'd only take one shell, one shell penetrating into that bunker. Collapse the whole thing, expose the troops inside to the rest of the barrage, kill 'em all. And I'm the one who ordered it. Please, God, let it be the right thing. From somewhere, a memory of Vic's voice came. Sometimes even doing the right thing doesn't do a damn thing for your conscience.
    A larger force of the enemy, perhaps twenty, came over the ridge crest, firing as they came, and died in another concentrated fusillade.
    "Stark?" He jerked at the transmission, realizing as he did so that it had not come from Sanchez. "This is Lamont. I've got three squadrons of tanks in position on the right flank of the penetration."
    "You do?" He'd missed that, with everything else going on.
    "Yeah. Reynolds sent us up. That's okay by you, right?"
    "Sure as hell right." Stark opened his scan, viewing a larger area. Lamont's armor sat in a half-dozen clusters, ready to rip the guts out of the enemy flank. "You hold fire 'til I give the word."
    "Sure thing," Lamont acknowledged. "Perfect targets out there. This is gonna be like shooting on a firing range."
    "Ethan," Vic chimed in, "you've also got APCs moving up. I'm setting them behind the ridge to help cover it."
    "Thanks." He'd completely forgotten about armored support in the rush of activity, a ground soldier instinctively depending upon his own weapons. "Good job. Damn good job."
    "Sargento?"
    Stark let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. "Anita? Corporal Gomez?"
    "Sí. Sergeant Sanchez, he got a little banged up during that barrage. Partial bunker collapse. Lost some suit systems, but he's okay otherwise. What do we do now, Sarge? Any more of that artillery coming?"
    "Not ours," Stark vowed.
    "Gracias Dios. I don't wanna ever sit through somethin' like that again."
    "God willing, you won't. Now get out on the surface again. That last assault must have been wiped out, but the enemy's gonna try to put some fresh troops together and hit you one more time. Don't worry. I'm about to give them something else to worry about, so just hold on a little longer."
    " Sí ', Sargento. We'll hold 'til hell freezes over. This hill is ours. We paid for it, and I ain't letting no one else take it."
    "Stark?" Milheim again, Fourth Battalion commander. "We just going to hold this line?" he asked doubtfully.
    "No. Listen up, everybody." He could see them, in his mind's eye, armored figures still rushing into final position or poised on the line, waiting for his next words under the black sky and the endless stars. "They've come as far as they're gonna come. We're gonna hit them so hard they won't be back for a long time. We're gonna get even for some of what they did to Third Division."
    "Does that mean no prisoners?" a voice inquired.
    Stark had an image of Sergeant Grace, wishing to take personal revenge on General Meecham for the death of his brother. Now he could do the same, in spades, inflicting the same slaughter on the enemy that Third Division had suffered. He clenched his teeth in sudden anger. "Negative, negative, negative. We take prisoners. We are soldiers, ladies and gentlemen. American soldiers. Despite everything. Don't forget that. We do not kill people trying to surrender."
    "Understood," Milheim rogered-up for the entire force.
    Stark paused, wondering how to issue a single command to Fourth Battalion and also to the polyglot collection of soldiers who had been rallied here. "Listen up. Everybody behind this ridge. You are all part of Task Force Milheim. Understand? Vic, can you link them all?"
    "Roger. Wait one. Okay. Got 'em linked.