“It’s the ‘almost always’ that worries me,” I said. “They seem willing to fight to the last man.”

“Theirs or ours?”

“Whichever comes first.”

A laser beam lanced by over our heads. A grenade exploded somewhere.

“They’re starting up again.”

Vorl ducked her head back into our conversation. “Sir, I’m having a difficult time raising the fleet. A lot of interference on every available channel.”

“Jamming?”

“Possibly. Or something’s wrong with the comm equipment.”

“Great,” I muttered. “Just what we need, to be out of touch with the fleet.”

More firing. But none of the sergeants were reporting in, so I assumed nothing major was developing. Not yet.

“How long can we sit here and hold them off?” Quint asked.

“As long as we have to,” answered Frede.

“Do you have something else in mind?” I asked Quint.

He gave me a curious look: part worry, part eagerness. “The troop’s morale is still high, sir. We’ve been killing those bastards all night long. But if we have to continue just standing here and taking it, morale will start to crumble. Especially if the Skorpis don’t break off their attack at dawn.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I think we should counterattack them, sir. Battles are won by the moral factor as much as by attrition or maneuver. Hit back at them, run them off, scatter them and kill them. That’s what we should do.”

“You live longer on the defense,” Frede said. “Attacking troops take higher casualties than defending.”

“And we have no idea of how many of them are still out there,” Vorl pointed out. “We could be charging into millions of them.”

“That’s the key point,” I said. “We don’t know what we’re up against, how many of the enemy are facing us and what their intentions are.”

A trio of rocket grenades slammed in around us, throwing us against the crumbling sides of the crater.