Lavel massaged the stump of his right arm with his remaining hand as he watched eight men cautiously lift a 200mm shell, then lower it with a clank onto the gurney. They paused, panting.
"Go on," he said, "One more and you've got the load."
"Via!"said Riddle angrily.There were bright chafe lines on both of the balding man's wrists. "We can rest a bloody—"
"Riddle!"Lavel snapped."If you want to be wired up again,just say the word. Any word!"
Two of the work crew started to lower their clamp over the remaining shell in the upper of the two layers. The short, massive round was striped black and mauve.Ridges impressed in the casing showed where it would separate into three parts at a predetermined point in its trajectory.
"Not that one!" Lavel ordered sharply. "Nor the other with those markings. Just leave them and bring the—bring one of the blue-and-whites."
Firecracker rounds that would rain over four hundred anti-personnel bomblets apiece down on the target area. No good for smashing bunkers, but much of the Consies' hasty siege works around la Reole lacked overhead cover. The Consies'd die in their trenches like mice in a mincer when the firecracker rounds burst overhead . . . .
Lavel stumped away from the crew, knowing that they could carry on well enough without him. He was more worried about the team bolting boosters onto the shells already loaded onto the hog. A trained crew could handle the job in a minute or less per shell, but the scuts left at Camp Progress when the task force pulled out . . . .
Scuts like Chief Lavel, a derelict who couldn't even assemble artillery rounds nowadays. A job he could do drunk in the dark a few years ago, back when he'd been a man.
But he had to admit, he felt alive for almost the first time since Gresham's counter-battery salvo got through the net of cyan bolts that should've swept it from the sky. It wasn't any part of Lavel's fault, but he'd paid the price.
That's how it was in war. You trusted other people and they trusted you . . . so when you screwed up—
—and Chief knew he'd screwed up lots of times in the past, you couldn't live and not transpose a range figure
—it was some other bastard got it in the neck.
Or the arm and leg. What goes around, comes around.
Lavel began whistling "St.James' Infirmary" between his teeth as he approached the self-propelled howitzer.
