Mike’s grenade slid through the slit and a moment later there was a jut of silver-green fire out of the head-sized hole. But that didn’t suit his purposes. So Mike armed another, still jinking around the small hillock that made up the bunker, and tossed that one in. The first had been set to be the equivalent of sixteen kilos of TNT. He’d figured that it would crack the bunker. If that didn’t do it, a thousand kilos of TNT should. Hell, he was still an order of magnitude away from its full output. They didn’t call ’em suicide bars for nothing.

This time the front of the bunker opened out in a flower of silver-green leaving a smoking hole. Whatever had been defending the position was gone, gaseous matter barely registerable by the best sensors. A tunnel, partially collapsed, arched downward. It was large enough to take a horse, or a horse sized Posleen, so there was plenty of gap at the top of the rubble pile to crawl through.

Mike jumped into the pit and started to crawl up the rubble just as a hand descended on his shoulder.

“Sir, would you please let us go first for once?” Staff Sergeant Thomas Rawls said. The head of his security detail was clearly tired of trying to keep up.

“Oh, sure, be that way,” Mike said, backing away from the hole. “But I fit better.”

“There’s ways to fix that, sir,” Rawls said, popping out a suicide bar and tossing it in the hole. He quickly ducked to the side and held the general back against the wall of the shattered position.

“You gotta follow ’em fast,” Mike protested. “Use the boot, don’t piss on them!”

“And as you well know, antimatter remains in the explosive matter, sir,” Rawls said, sighing slightly. He sometimes had the feeling in dealing with his boss that he was the adult and the much older general the child. General O’Neal was, almost invariably, upbeat and positive to a fault. But the sergeant had been with him long enough to know that that was very much a façade.