Singer

> War had shown its claws, and stripped off its mask of cosiness. It was all so strange, so impersonal. We had barely begun to think about the enemy, that mysterious, treacherous being somewhere. - A Storm of Steel, by Ernst Junger

Sanjin, the machinist, had drowned in mud while trying to repair the generator during a rainstorm. Her tilting soprano was gone from the bunker's songs, as were the bassy harmonies of the Trentar twins, who had been shot through the visionslits while digging out a mortar position. So the militiaman sang as he worked alone, no chorus to accompany him.

He held up a silver belt of cartridges and inspected them in his bunker's dusty light. Flicked the linkages. Frowned as they disintegrated at a touch. Sanjin should have been there to finish the welds, but failing that, he should have been able to call on the younger Arbret sister. The quick fingered girl had gone missing in action. Possibly she’d walked out from her post to look for the older Arbret.

If the platoon sergeant had survived, he would have reamed them all out for allowing desertion and dereliction of duty, and probably gone off to drag the Arbrets back into the bunker by their ears. The old Ironhat kept the unit together when orbital metal had pulverized the captain into wet dust, and guided the fighting retreat down into the bunkers.  Even in the brief weeks of basic training, the Arbrets had been inseparable troublemakers, always bringing the Ironhat to a screaming rage.

War, general conscription, and the orbital flattening of the majority of the planetary surface had done nothing to dampen the Arbrets' ringing laughter. He had not even liked the Arbret sisters - too loud, too young, too prone to coming back from leave drunk and then missing reveille. New mountain types of people. Not like he was a career soldier himself, but all he'd wanted was quiet.

The sound of raindrops drumming on concrete. In a bunker a kilometer underground. The militiaman turned his head upwards, listening for the source. He clicked his tongue, set his faulty ammunition belts down, and clambered out of his machinist's harness to search for the leak. He wasn't particularly in the mood to drown like Sanjin did, or to have the water recycler burst on him. Too much dioxin from the burned cities to trust the water in the outside world.

"Nitrogen purge. Counting down from five, four, three, two-"

The militiaman announced his actions out of habit, even though nobody else was alive to stand for the purge drill. He sucked on his air tube and exhaled through his nose, exactly as trained, cleansing his bloodstream enough to don his gear.  He strapped on the bare minimum of walkplate and got out of the airlock as soon as he could. 

He glanced around the bunker's entrance. Nothing. No sign of leaks. He stuck his head gingerly into one of the maintenance tunnels, and then to the other. No water on the sniffers, nothing more than usual. Geiger counter wasn't sounding off either. 

Then he looked up.