“What’re you looking at?” voice husky with the residue of sleep.
I smiled a little.
“Don’t give me that shit. Tell me what you’re looking at.”
“Just looking. It’s time to go.”
She lifted her head and picked up the sound of the helicopter. The sleep slid away from her face and she sat up in bed.
“Where’s the ‘ware?”
It was a Corps joke. I smiled, the way you do when you see an old friend, and pointed to the case in the corner of the room.
“Get my gun for me.”
“Yes ma’am. Black or green?”
“Black. I trust these scumbags about as far as a clingfilm condom.”
In the kitchen, I loaded up the shard pistol, cast a glance at my own weapon and left it lying there. Instead, I scooped up one of the H grenades and took it back in my other hand. I paused in the doorway to the bedroom and weighed the two pieces of hardware in each palm as if I was trying to decide which was the heavier.
“A little something with your phallic substitute, ma’am?”
Sarah looked up from beneath the hanging sickle of black hair over her forehead. She was in the midst of pulling a pair of long woollen socks up over the sheen of her thighs.
“Yours is the one with the long barrel, Tak.”
“Size isn’t—”
We both heard it at the same time. A metallic double clack from the corridor outside. Our eyes met across the room and for a quarter second I saw my own shock mirrored there. Then I was tossing the loaded shard gun to her. She put up one hand and took it out of the air just as the whole of the bedroom wall caved in in thunder. The blast knocked me back into a corner and onto the floor.