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The Bears slipped down the side of the worm facing downslope. Valentine heard bullets thwack into the worm, and Tikka shifted her riding stance, clinging on to the saddle and fleshy worm hide like a spider on a wall. Somehow she managed to work the reins and goad.
The mortars fired again, blindly, sending their shells down to explode at the base of the hill.
Valentine heard shouts from above, cries in a strange warbling language.
"Drop off now. They'll keep shooting at the worm," Valentine told Gamecock, seeing a cluster of rocks trapping fallen branches and logs.
The Bears scrambled for cover. Preville pulled out his field radio.
"Whenever you're ready, Lieutenant," Valentine said.
Gamecock took out a little torch and heated his knife. "Uh, sir, if I'm not mistaken, you're the brigade commander now. I don't think it's your place to be at the forefront of a hill assault.
Let me and the Bears-"
"There's a good view from that bluff. The Moondaggers are on their way, and I need to assess the situation."
"Red up, red up," Gamecock cried.
Each of Gamecock's Bears seemed to have their own method of bringing the hurt, and with it the willed transformation into fighting madness that made the Bears the killing machines they were. One punched a rock, another stamped his feet, others cut themselves in the forearm or ear or back of the neck. A Bear, perhaps more infection-minded than most, made a tiny cut across his nose and dabbed iodine from a bottle on it.
Valentine heard fire following the worm.
"Time to fuck them up," the one with the iodine rasped, wincing.
Gamecock pressed the hot knife under his armpit, clamped down on it hard.
Preville looked around, gaping. Valentine knew what his com tech was thinking: If this is what they do to themselves, what the hell's in store for the enemy?
If Valentine wanted pain, all he had to do was think of his mother, on the kitchen floor, the smell of stewing tomatoes, what was left of his sister lying broken against the fireplace . . .
Heart pounding, a cold clarity came over him. The next minutes would be either him or them. Doubts vanished. Everything was reduced to binary at its most simple level, a bit flip, a one or a zero. Life or oblivion.
Three ... two ... one ...
"Smoke 'em up," Gamecock yelled.
A Bear from each four-man group pulled the pins on big, cyclindrical grenades. The senior nodded and they all threw toward where they heard orders being shouted.
Valentine smelled burning cellulose. The smoke grenades belched out their contents.
There was a stiff breeze on the heights and the smoke wouldn't last long. Gamecock put two fingers into his mouth and whistled.
"Action up! Action up!"
The Bears exploded out of the cover like shrapnel from a shell burst, save that each piece homed in on the target line with lethal intent.
Valentine followed them through the smoke. Gamecock kept toward the left, where more of the hill and therefore more unknown opponents potentially lay, so Valentine went around the right, trying to keep up with the barking mad Bear with the clipped ears.
White eyes with a thick bushy beard appeared from the growth to the right-a Moondagger opening a tangle of branches with his rifle butt. Valentine swung his machine pistol around and gave one quick, firm squeeze of the trigger and the man fell sideways into the supporting growth, held up by a hammock of small branches and vines. He heard a shout from behind the man, a yapping, unfamiliar word, and fired blindly at the noise.
He followed the sound of bursting small arms fire up the hill.
The four-man groups divided into twos, covering each other as they went up the hill in open order and they vanished into the smoke.
"Target in sight. Grenades!" Gamecock's disembodied voice sounded through the smoke.
Bullets sang through the trees, tapping off down into the thicker timber, followed by the tight crash of grenades going off uphill. Valentine felt the heat of one on his left cheek as it passed.
