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.

“Again!” Murphy called out.

The volley was a little more ragged this time, each man firing independently. Five staggered whumps, five more detonations.

Julia raised the camera to the window again, just before Corporal Murphy hoisted his rifle and squeezed off a three-round burst. A German soldier who had come running out of the house covered in blood and beating at flames on his arms was thrown back inside. Only the soles of his boots showed in the darkened doorway. They twitched for few seconds before going still. His burning uniform threw a guttering light on the shambles inside.

“Okay. All right. Stand down,” the corporal yelled.

“Well, that’s that, I figure,” Murphy went on a little more quietly, sliding down the wall to sit with his legs splayed out in front of him. “If Reynolds is alive, he should be able to get here now.”

Juarez, the paratrooper, kept watch.

Julia took a sip of chilled sports drink from the tube at her left shoulder. She was exhausted, too. They’d been fighting their way into Calais for two days, literally blasting a passage through the long rows of terraced houses. It was a murderous business, but marginally less dangerous than moving out in the open.

Amundson had explained that they’d trained for this scenario back in England, using a village that had been specially constructed by the army. She wondered idly whether some genius had picked up the details in an old soldier’s memoir, or whether the marines back in the Zone had passed on the lessons learned from twenty years of urban warfare in the Middle East and South Asia.

Didn’t matter, really. As long as the job got done.

She paused the Sonycam, saving lattice space, and pulled an energy bar out of one of the many pockets on her matrix armor. Before they’d embarked, she’d stuffed about a dozen of the things wherever she could find space. It was wrapped in waxed paper rather than foil, but other than that it was exactly like the energy bars she’d chewed through when running half marathons back up in the twenty-first. She chuckled at the thought.

“Something funny, Ms. Duffy?” Murphy asked.

She broke off a piece of the chewy snack and waved it at Murphy and Juarez. “I’ve got shares in this company, that’s all,” she said. “Eat up, boys. Make me rich.”

Her eyelids were twitching, the way they did when she went without sleep or stimulants for too long. There were uppers you could get, ripped off the formula for stims, but she didn’t like them much. The effects were crude, and the crash was brutal. With her inserts tapped dry she was better off going back to basics: sugar, caffeine, nicotine, and Hooah! bars.

The uproar increased again outside. Two huge bangs shook a broken mirror off the wall above Murphy’s head, and it shattered against the floor. She could hear animalistic screams under the sound of a brief but savage firefight.

“Heads up!” Murphy called out, hauling himself up from the litter on the floor.

Julia powered up her Sonycam again and flicked off the safety of her carbine.

They waited for some word from Reynolds’s guys on the far side of the street, to let them know who had won and who had lost that small, discrete encounter in a very long, strange war.