We had our first casualty on the third day, learning how to dig holes.
With such large amounts of energy stored in a soldier's weapons, it wouldn't be practical for him to hack out a hole in the frozen ground with the conventional pick and shovel. Still, you can launch grenades all day and get nothing but shallow depressions-so the usual method is to bore a hole in the ground with the hand laser, drop a timed charge in after it's cooled down and, ideally, fill the hole with stuff. Of course, there's not much loose rock on Charon, unless you've already blown a hole nearby.
The only difficult thing about the procedure is getting away. To be safe, we were told, you've got to either be behind something really solid, or be at least a hundred meters away. You've got about three minutes after setting the charge, but you can't just spring away. Not on Charon.
The accident happened when we were making a really deep hole, the kind you want for a large underground bunker. For this, we had to blow a hole, then climb down to the bottom of the crater and repeat the procedure again and again until the hole was deep enough. Inside the crater we used charges with a five-minute delay, but it hardly seemed enough time-you really had to go slow, picking your way up the crater's edge.
Just about everybody had blown a double hole; everybody but me and three others. I guess we were the only ones paying really close attention when Bovanovitch got into trouble. All of us were a good two hundred meters away. With my image converter turned up to about forty power, I watched her disappear over the rim of the crater. After that I could only listen in on her conversation with Cortez.
"I'm on the bottom, Sergeant." Normal radio procedure was suspended for these maneuvers; only the trainee and Cortez could broadcast.
"O.K., move to the center and clear out the rubble. Take your time. No rush until you pull the pin."
"Sure, Sergeant." We could hear small echoes of rocks clattering; sound conduction through her boots. She didn't say anything for several minutes.
"Found bottom." She sounded a little out of breath.
"Ice, or rock?"
"Oh, it's rock, Sergeant. The greenish stuff."
"Use a low setting, then. One point two, dispersion four."
"God darn it, Sergeant, that'll take forever."
"Yeah, but that stuff's got hydrated crystals in it-heat it up too fast and you might make it fracture. And we'd just have to leave you there, girl."
"O.K., one point two dee four." The inside edge of the crater flickered red with reflected laser light.
"When you get about half a meter deep, squeeze it up to dee two."
"Roger." It took her exactly seventeen minutes, three of them at dispersion two. I could imagine how tired her shooting arm was.
"Now rest for a few minutes. When the bottom of the hole stops glowing, arm the charge and drop it in. Then walk out. Understand? You'll have plenty of time."
"I understand, Sergeant. Walk out." She sounded nervous. Well, you don't often have to tiptoe away from a twenty microton tachyon bomb. We listened to her breathing for a few minutes.
"Here goes." Faint slithering sound of the bomb sliding down.
"Slow and easy now, you've got five minutes."
"Y-yeah. Five." Her footsteps started out slow and regular. Then, after she started climbing the side, the sounds were less regular; maybe a little frantic. And with four minutes to go "Crap!" A loud scraping noise, then clatters and bumps.
"What's wrong, Private?"
"Oh, crap." Silence. "Crap!"
"Private, you don't wanna get shot, you tell me what's wrong!"
"I…I'm stuck, damn rockslide…Do something I can't move. I can't move I, I-"
"Shut up! How deep?"
"Can't move my crap, my damn legs help me-"
"Then damn it use your arms-push!-you can move a ton with each hand." Three minutes.
Then she stopped cussing and started to mumble, in Russian, I guess, a low monotone. She was panting and you could hear rocks tumbling away.
"I'm free." Two minutes.
"Go as fast as you can." Cortez's voice was flat, emotionless.
At ninety seconds she appeared crawling over the rim. "Run, girl…you better run." She ran five or six steps and fell, skidded a few meters and got back up, running; fell again, got up again It looked like she was going pretty fast, but she had only covered about thirty meters when Cortez said, "All right, Bovanovitch, get down on your stomach and lie still." Ten seconds, but she didn't hear him, or she wanted to get just a little more distance, and she kept running, careless leaping strides and at the high point of one leap there was a flash and a rumble and something big hit her below the neck and her headless body spun off end over end through space, trailing a red-black spiral of flash-frozen blood that settled gracefully to the ground, a path of crystal powder that nobody disturbed while we gathered rocks to cover the juiceless thing at the end of it.
That night Cortez didn't lecture us, didn't even show up for night-chop. We were all very polite to each other and everybody was afraid to talk about it.
I sacked with Rogers; everybody sacked with a good friend, but all she wanted to do was cry, and she cried so long and so hard that she got me doing it, too.