Starship Troopers Read Free Page A

Forward!”
    My boss, Sergeant Johnson, echoed, “By leapfrog! Odd numbers! Advance!”
    That left me with nothing to worry about for twenty seconds, so I jumped up on the building nearest me, raised the launcher to my shoulder, found the target and pulled the first trigger to let the rocket have a look at its target—pulled the second trigger and kissed it on its way, jumped back to the ground. “Second section, even numbers!” I called out . . . waited for the count in my mind and ordered, “Advance!”
    And did so myself, hopping over the next row of buildings, and, while I was in the air, fanning the first row by the river front with a hand flamer. They seemed to be wood construction and it looked like time to start a good fire -- with luck, some of those warehouses would house oil products, or even explosives. As I hit, the Y-rack on my shoulders launched two small H. E. bombs a couple of hundred yards each way to my right and left flanks but I never saw what they did as just then my first rocket hit -- that unmistakable (if you’ve ever seen one) brilliance of an atomic explosion. It was just a peewee, of course, less than two kilotons nominal yield, with tamper and implosion squeeze to produce results from a less-than-critical mass—but then who wants to be bunk mates with a cosmic catastrophe? It was enough to clean off that hilltop and make everybody in the city take shelter against fallout. Better still, any of the local yokels who happened to be outdoors and looking that way wouldn’t be seeing anything else for a couple of hours -- meaning me. The dash hadn’t dazzled me, nor would it dazzle any of us; our face bowls are heavily leaded, we wear snoopers over our eyes -- and we’re trained to duck and take it on the armor if we do happen to be looking the wrong way.
    So I merely blinked hard -- opened my eyes and stared straight at a local citizen just coming out of an opening in the building ahead of me. He looked at me, I looked at him, and he started to raise something -- a weapon, I suppose—as Jelly called out, “Odd numbers! Advance!”
    I didn’t have time to fool with him; I was a good five hundred yards short of where I should have been by then. I still had the hand flamer in my left hand; I toasted him and jumped over the building he had been coming out of, as I started to count. A hand flamer is primarily for incendiary work but it is a good defensive anti-personnel weapon in tight quarters; you don’t have to aim it much.
    Between excitement and anxiety to catch up I jumped too high and too wide. It’s always a temptation to get the most out of your jump gear—but don’t do it! It leaves you hanging in the air for seconds, a big fat target. The way to advance is to skim over each building as you come to it, barely clearing it, and taking full advantage of cover while you’re down -- and never stay in one place more than a second or two, never give them time to target in on you. Be somewhere else, anywhere. Keep moving.
    This one I goofed—too much for one row of buildings, too little for the row beyond it; I found myself coming down on a roof. But not a nice flat one where I might have tarried three seconds to launch another peewee A-rocket; this roof was a jungle of pipes and stanchions and assorted ironmongery—a factory maybe, or some sort of chemical works. No place to land. Worse still, half a dozen natives were up there. These geezers are humanoid, eight or nine feet tall, much skinnier than we are and with a higher body temperature; they don’t wear any clothes and they stand out in a set of snoopers like a neon sign. They look still funnier in daylight with your bare eyes but I would rather fight them than the arachnids -- those Bugs make me queezy.
    If these laddies were up there thirty seconds earlier when my rocket hit, then they couldn’t see me, or anything. But I couldn’t be certain and didn’t want to tangle with them in any case; it wasn’t that kind of a raid.