The Forever War #6
6 We had our first casualty on the third day, learning how to dig holes. With such large amounts of energy stored in a soldier‘s weapons, it wouldn‘t be practical for him to hack outa hole in the frozen ground with the conventional pick and shovel. Still, you can launch grenades all day and get nothing but shallow depressions-so the usual method is to bore a hole in the ground with the hand laser, drop a timed charge in after it‘s cooled down and, ideally, fill the hole with stuff. Of course, there‘s not much loose rock on Charon, unless you‘ve already blown a hole nearby. The only difficult thing about the procedure is in getting away. To be safe, we were told, you‘ve got to either be behind something really solid, or be at least a hundred meters away. You‘ve got about three minutes after setting the charge, but you can‘t just sprint away. Not safely, not on Charon. The accident happened when we were making a really deep hole, the kind you want for a large underground bunker. For this, we had to blow a hole, then climb down to the bottom of the crater and repeat the procedure again and again until the hole was deep enough. Inside the crater we used charges with a five-minute delay, but it hardly seemed enough time-you really had to go it slow, picking your way up the crater‘s edge. Just about everybody had blown a double hole; everybody but me and three others. I guess we were the only ones paying really close attention when Bovanovitch got into trouble. All of us were a good two hundred meters away. With my image converter turned up to about foily power, I watched her disappear over the rim of the crater. After that, I could only listen in on her conversation with Cortez. „I‘m on the bottom, Sergeant.“ Normal radio procedure was suspended for maneuvers like this; nobody but the trainee and Cortez was allowed to broadcast „Okay, move to the center and clear out the rubble Take your time. No rush until you pull the pin.“ „Sure, Sergeant.“ We could hear small echoes of rocks clattering, sound conduction through her boots. She didn‘t say anything for several minutes. „Found bottom.“ She sounded a little out of breath. „Ice or rock?“ „Oh, it‘s rock, Sergeant The greenish stuff.“ „Use a low setting, then. One point two, dispersion four.“ „God dam it, Sergeant, that‘ll take forever.“ „Yeah, but that stuff‘s got hydrated crystals in it-heat it up too fast and you might make it fracture. And we‘d Just have to leave you there, girl. Dead and bloody.“