Starship Troopers Read Free Page B

So I jumped again while I was still in the air, scattering a handful of ten-second fire pills to keep them busy, grounded, jumped again at once, and called out, “Second section! Even numbers! . . . Advance!” and kept right on going to close the gap, while trying to spot, every time I jumped, something worth expending a rocket on. I had three more of the little A-rockets and I certainly didn’t intend to take any back with me. But I had had pounded into me that you must get your money’s worth with atomic weapons—it was only the second time that I had been allowed to carry them.
    Right now I was trying to spot their waterworks; a direct hit on it could make the whole city uninhabitable, force them to evacuate it without directly killing anyone—just the sort of nuisance we had been sent down to commit. It should—according to the map we had studied under hypnosis -- be about three miles upstream from where I was.
    But I couldn’t see it; my jumps didn’t take me high enough, maybe. I was tempted to go higher but I remembered what Migliaccio had said about not trying for a medal, and stuck to doctrine. I set the Y-rack launcher on automatic and let it lob a couple of little bombs every time I hit. I set fire to things more or less at random in between, and tried to find the waterworks, or some other worth-while target.
    Well, there was something up there at the proper range—waterworks or whatever, it was big. So I hopped on top of the tallest building near me, took a bead on it, and let fly. As I bounced down I heard Jelly: “Johnnie! Red! Start bending in the flanks.”
    I acknowledged and heard Red acknowledge and switched my beacon to blinker so that Red could pick me out for certain, took a range and bearing on his blinker while I called out, “Second Section! Curve in and envelop! Squad leaders acknowledge!”
    Fourth and Fifth squads answered, “Wilco”; Ace said, “We’re already doin’ it—pick up your feet.”
    Red’s beacon showed the right flank to be almost ahead of me and a good fifteen miles away. Golly! Ace was right; I would have to pick up my feet or I would never close the gap in time—and me with a couple of hundredweight of ammo and sundry nastiness still on me that I just had to find time to use up. We had landed in a V formation, with Jelly at the bottom of the V and Red and myself at the ends of the two arms; now we had to close it into a circle around the retrieval rendezvous . . . which meant that Red and I each had to cover more ground than the others and still do our full share of damage.
    At least the leapfrog advance was over with once we started to encircle; I could quit counting and concentrate on speed. It was getting to be less healthy to be anywhere, even moving fast. We had started with the enormous advantage of surprise, reached the ground without being hit (at least I hoped nobody had been hit coming in), and had been rampaging in among them in a fashion that let us fire at will without fear of hitting each other while they stood a big chance of hitting their own people in shooting at us -- if they could find us to shoot at, at all. (I’m no games-theory expert but I doubt if any computer could have analyzed what we were doing in time to predict where we would be next.)
    Nevertheless the home defenses were beginning to fight back, co-ordinated or not. I took a couple of near misses with explosives, close enough to rattle my teeth even inside armor and once I was brushed by some sort of beam that made my hair stand on end and half paralyzed me for a moment -- as if I had hit my funny bone, but all over. If the suit hadn’t already been told to jump, I guess I wouldn’t have got out of there.
    Things like that make you pause to wonder why you ever took up soldiering—only I was too busy to pause for anything. Twice, jumping blind over buildings, I landed right in the middle of a group of them— jumped at once while fanning wildly around me with the hand