A couple hours later, I got an M4 Bravo in my hands, on the firing range. It felt exactly like my trusty old M4, which I'd left behind at Fort Drum when I'd gone home on leave. And I never went back to Drum, so my rifle might still be there. The Kristang supplied us with conversion kits for our regular M4s, and the ammo with explosive tips. We learned later that much of our ammo came straight from Earth, with no fancy enhancements, because the Kristang had a limited supply of the explosive stuff. Each squad would get Kristang clips equal to half the normal weapons load, the rest would be regular 5.56MM ammo. Our allies figured we wouldn't need fancy ammo for the missions they were assigning to us. It was a bit insulting; any tough jobs in this war would be done by the adults, us human soldiers were sitting at the children's table.

My M4B1 came with two clips of explosive-tipped ammo, I took my turn on the firing range, practicing using the button to select explosives or not. The explosive mode was impressive, there was much cheering along the firing line as we saw metal targets shredded. Our regular bullets bounced off the targets, leaving only little shiny dents. One advantage of Kristang ammo is that every cartridge was exactly the same, down to the nano level; even better than what our snipers called 'matched ammunition'. And Kristang ammo fired much cooler and cleaner, so you could rock 'n' roll without melting or fouling the barrel. We still needed to take our weapon apart and put it back together. Blindfolded. And clean it. I took one of the Kristang bullets out of a clip and examined it closely. Other than being a different color and being perfectly smooth with absolutely no scuff marks or scratches, it looked like the standard NATO ammo I'd been using for years.

We were going into battle with none of the hoped-for enhancements, having to hitch a ride to every planet, and we weren't entrusted with any important missions. It was like the Kristang were merely humoring our desire to get into the fight. This was the future.

It wasn’t what I expected.