The suit slowly stood and stamped both feet on the seered ground. The stamps crunched through the glassy surface and gave the wearer a solid footing, like a bull pawing the ground just before a charge.

“General O’Neal?” Julio asked, amazed that the corps commander was right on the front lines. “Sir? Are you okay?”

“Never fucking better, private,” Lieutenant General Michael O’Neal growled. “A nuke’s better than a dry cleaners. Now, let’s kick some Postie ass.”

The Posleen commander was good, but he’d just made his first mistake. Two, actually. The casta round, named after the slightly insane human professor who first created an antimatter cluster bomb, had been slightly off-line of the ACS unit deployed across the plain. If it had been directly overhead, Mike would have dug in like everyone else. But as he saw the deployment he immediately recognized that the nukes, large as they were, were too far away to destroy an ACS, especially the customized suit he wore.

The commander’s second mistake was in using a casta at all. The explosion probably caught a few cherries who were too slow to dig in and certainly shut down inter-suit communication while the plasma wash was over the area. But that took only a moment. The Posleen defenders would have had to pull into their bunkers to avoid the blast. It would take them a moment to get back in position, and that assumed that their commo wasn’t down entirely. The 11^th, ACS Corps, the “Black Tyrone,” though, was going to be ready to cock and rock in bare seconds after the explosion. They’d damned well better be ready or they’d have to deal with him. Anyone in the Corps, from the lowest private — like the kid cowering in the hole — up to his division commanders would rather battle a Posleen bare-handed then let him down. And the Bastards were within sprinting distance of the outer Posleen defenses.