Free Bill 7 - the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison

Heavenly Peace, not attacking her directly but trying to cut the general off from the rest of the wave. With help from the gunners on the other ships, Bill sliced them to ribbons with his lasers.
    A big target flashed on his screen: AMMUNITION DEPOT, the screen said, 1000 POINTS. Bill needed to rack up points today if he wanted to get that 12-hour pass. The smart missile was launched even before his lips worked their way through the message.
    Eyerackian lasers stabbed out at the missile, trying to keep it from its goal. Which would keep Bill on this ship longer than necessary. He started to take this war personally. He made the missile swoop and dive, turn and twist, weaving it through the web of defenses toward the little bull's-eye that the computer painted on the entry door. Compared to gunning down the counterattack, this was almost fun.
    Bill corkscrewed the missile in around a laser beam. He looped it around an anti-missile missile. He ducked it under some exploding flak, and bobbed it over a line of bullets. He swung it around an oncoming fighter and swerved past an office building. He jumped it over a hedge and threaded it through a copse of trees. And then there was nothing but a straight run for the door.
    There was a sign on the door, and he focused on that as the missile rode in to the ammo dump. There were no pictures, so it was hard to read, but he worked his way through all the text just an instant before the bomb hit it dead center.
    AIR-RAID SHELTER — MAXIMUM CAPACITY 600 CIVILIANS was what it said.
    Something seemed wrong to Bill.
    Hadn't General Weissearse said something about not killing any civilians? It stuck with him because it had seemed a little odd at the time; normally the idea was to kill as many civilians as possible, and it wasn't the military way to make a change of this sort, or to give up the chance to kill people who wouldn't be fighting back.
    It didn't seem like a bad idea, not killing civilians, just an unusual one. Bill could even vaguely remember being a civilian, and at the time he had thought not being killed was a really good idea. And now it looked very much like he had just killed up to 600 civilians.
    But the video screen had clearly labeled the building an ammo dump.
    Moral dilemmas were not within Bill's limited expertise. He wasn't at all prepared to deal with this one. He bucked it upstairs.
    The general responded to Bill's call by appearing in the same small box on the screen where the press conference had been. He was watching another video screen and cheering the bombs as they dropped.
    “What can I do for you, Bill?”
    “General, Sir, I think I just blew up a civilian air-raid shelter!”
    “So?”
    “Well, aren't we supposed to be avoiding that?”
    “Sure we are, Bill, but don't worry about it.” General Weissearse waved the issue away. “It must be a mistake of some sort.”
    “But my target computer gave me 1000 points for it, just like an ammo dump!”
    “Then it must have been something else, like an ammo dump.” The general gave a small cheer as something blew up on the screen before him. “What made you think it was an air-raid shelter?”
    Bill thought hard for a second. “There was a big sign on it that said 'Air-Raid Shelter.'”
    General Weissearse laughed the hearty laugh he had learned at the Imperial Military Heroes Academy. “That's just enemy propaganda, son. Pay it no mind.” He looked intently at the screen for a moment. “Now you'd better do something about that fighter closing in on us, or we'll both be in heaven tonight.”
    The long hours catheterized in the chair paid off. Bill sliced up the fighter and touched his laser to the heads of a small flight of incoming missiles.
    The morning dragged on. Even the adrenaline rush of combat can get routine if there is never a break to recover, and the action continued without a pause. When he was not under attack, Bill had more ground targets than he could possibly hit. And he was under