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apparently was really spectacularly visible from some of the positions on the MLR. This big piece of space cruiser describes a beautiful ballistic arc almost straight up, looking like it’s moving in slow motion,” expounded Captain O’Neal, gesturing with both hands. “You have to remember, this is to the background of a relatively small but quite noticeable nuclear blast . . .”
    “About four kilotons,” interjected Géneral Crenaus, taking a hard pull on his cognac, “and less than a kilometer away!”
    “More like three kilometers. Anyway, it rides up on the mushroom cloud, describes this tremendous vertical arc and comes gracefully back down . . .”
    “Right on Buckley,” hooted Géneral Crenaus and cracked up.
    “. . . right smack dab on Private Second Class Buckley. He was one of the guys who was on the roofs, in the blast radius . . .”
    “ Sacré Bleu! I was in the blast radius!”
    “You guys should have hardly felt it in the blast shadow from the buildings!”
    “Blast shadow he calls it! Oui! They were around our ears!” shouted the general, hands waving on either side of his head. “I know, I know . . .” he continued, holding up a hand.
    “Bitch, bitch . . . anyway, here’s Buckley, grav-boots clamped to some nice powerful structure, miraculously alive, survives looking right into the shockwave, survives looking right into the neutron pulse, survives looking right into the thermal pulse . . .” Mike paused dramatically.
    “It didn’t kill him, did it?” asked one of the aides, right on cue.
    “In a suit? Nah, but it did knock him clean out. And this time he waited for somebody to come dig him up. He kinda had to since he was about fifty stories down in the building with a quarter kilometer of space cruiser on top of him,” ended Captain O’Neal, chuckling.
    “To Private Buckley!” roared Géneral Crenaus, raising his brandy on high.
    “To Private Buckley!” roared Captain O’Neal. “And all the other poor sods who wear the Mask of Hell!” he ended, a touch bitterly.

When the Devil Dances
    JOHN RINGO
    “I hate these things,” Sergeant Buckley said. “There’s a billion things to go wrong.”
    Sergeant Joseph Buckley had been fighting the Posleen almost since the beginning of the war. He had been in the first, experimental, ACS unit in the fighting in Diess. After Diess, he had been medically evacuated as a psychological casualty; after being caught in a fuel-air explosion, being stuck under a half a kilometer of rubble, having your hand blown off trying to cut your way out, getting swept away in a nuclear blast front and having half a space cruiser land on you, driving you back under a half kilometer of rubble, anyone could tend to go around the bend.
    But desperate times called for desperate measures and in time even Joe Buckley was found fit for duty. As long as it wasn’t too stressful and had nothing to do with combat suits. It was his only insistence, and he was firm about it to the point of court-martial, that he would not have to put on a suit. The series of events on Diess had given him a permanent psychosis about combat suits and all peripheral equipment. In fact, he had come to the conclusion that the whole problem with the war was an emphasis on high technology over the tried and true.
    “I tell you,” he said, ripping the plastic cover off of the recalcitrant M134 7.62 Gatling gun. “What we need up here is . . .”
    “. . . water-cooled Browning machine guns,” said Corporal Wright. “I know, I know.”
    “You think I’m joking,” he said, pulling out the jammed round and snarling at it. “This would never happen with a Browning. That’s the problem, everybody wants more firepower.”
    * * *
    Buckley nodded as the gun continued to fire and then frowned as it clanked to a halt with a shrill scream of disengaged torsion controller. “Shit.” The brass cartridge that had caused the latest jam was clearly evident, “stovepiped” in the ejector.