"No, I'll carry it over as hard copy. They didn't splice the land-lines cut by the bombs yet, just ran commo wire point to point. Their terminal isn't connected-" the young officer glanced around to see that no one outside was listening- "not that anybody there could be trusted to push the right button for a print-out anyway. Hold the fort, boys," he added as he walked out of the warehouse.

Waldstejn sobered as he walked toward the concrete Headquarters building. Dimly on the eastern horizon were the flickers and rumbling of others trying to hold forts in grimtruth.

And failing.

****

"Ouch, you butcher!" cried Churchie Dwyer. "Did you learn to use that in a stockyard?"

"You'd bitch if they hanged you with a new rope," Bertinelli replied calmly. Bertinelli was a Corpsman. He carried a gun like everybody else, but he ranked with the sergeants for pay division. He was secure both in the light touch he knew he had and in the fact that nobody else in the Company could handle the medical tasks as well. "It's just like I told you, I learned in a morgue on Banares, putting accident victims back in shape for open cremation. Now, lie back-" he gestured with the debriding glove with which he was clean ing Dwyer's burns- "or I don't answer for what it's going to feel like."

"They sure are doing a lot of talking," said Del Hoybrin. Bertinelli had recleaned the big man's sores first. NowDel knelt with his triceps on the lip of the bunker, staring up at the transponder. The communications gear hung from a balloon tethered a hundred meters over the 522nd's radio shack. Through the night visor of his helmet, the minuscule heating of the transponder's circuits as it broadcast was a yellow glow. Satellite communications had died in showers of space junk at the beginning of the war, but there were other ways to boost tight-beam communications over useful distances.