Hell's Faire

CHAPTER THIRTEEN Knoxville, TN, United States of America, Sol III 2200 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD

The massive cannon belched in flame and that was it. The shot had left too fast for the human eye to follow.

The main viewscreen, though, was slaved to a tracking camera that could manage a view of the projectile as it flew through the air, and everyone let out a sigh of relief at still being there. Next to the image was a shot clock that estimated exit of rounds and detonation. The round was “smart” in that it determined its location and height to lay down its lethal cargo precisely, and the only actual drop that was visible was the first. But after first sub-munition ejection a detonation clock started ticking.

“Seven, six…” Castanuelo said. “Damn, I wanted to be outside to watch this!”

“Could we see it?” President Carson asked.

“They’ll see this in Pennsylvania!”

Horner suddenly opened a metal case and ripped out his AID. “O’Neal! Splash in… one second!”

At the warning O’Neal just shrugged as well as he could inside his armor. He had been tossed around by… Jesus, he’d lost count. At least five nukes in his time. Not to mention being buried in a building by a near-nuclear class explosion, run over by a SheVa gun — twice on that one — and had various and sundry other unpleasant items occur while he was in a suit. Then there was that poor bastard Buckley who had had a space cruiser fall on him.

Frankly, being buried five meters in the ground at the ground zero of a two megaton nuclear explosion wasn’t anywhere near the bottom of his experiences. It was sort of comforting in a way.

“Gotcha,” he said, flipping frequencies to internal. “Battalion, splash over.”

There was a brief rumble, high frequency ground shocks, that preceded the impact, but in less than a second after the first shudder the ground began to spasm around his suit. The shocks went on for about five seconds, about as bad driving a jeep across rough ground, and then it was done.

“That’s it?” someone queried on the general frequency.

“Grandpa?” Cally said softly, looking up at the stranger.

“Yeah, sweetie,” he replied, stepping forward and ruffling her hair. “It’s really me. Sort of. I guess.”

“But you… I thought…”

“Dead?” he said with a snort.

“Um, yeah.”

“Well, there’s a Tch… Tph… a Crab around here that can explain it better. Basically, the Galactics sort of consider death to be not quite the is/isn’t thing that humans perceive.”

“So were you or weren’t you?” Cally asked, angrily.

“Cally, Princess Bride?”

“Oh. So you were ‘mostly dead.’ ”

“Bingo. I think I was flatlined, if that’s what you mean. But the Himmit got to me in time to administer Hiberzine and then the Crab here… restarted me.”

Cally looked at him again and shook her head. “So are you you?”

“I think so,” Papa said, shrugging his shoulders. “I think there are some holes in my memory. I’m younger though. Strong. It feels… amazingly good.”

“Hah, you’re not the only one!” Cally said. “You should see Shari. You’d pop your shorts.”

“Shari?”

“Long story, I didn’t understand all of it. But they survived and got out of the Urb.”

Papa O’Neal nodded and then frowned. “Out of the Urb? Survived?”

“You didn’t know the Franklin Urb was gone?” Cally asked. “Or that the Posleen are all down the Valley?”

“I’ve been out of it for the last few days. What’s happening?” He looked around at the Cyber team who had started to stow their gear. “And are these white hats or black?”

“White, I think,” Cally said. “And we’re about to get hit with a nuke…”

“Oh, shit,” he said, shaking his head. “Another one?”

Something about the way he said it caused Cally to burst into giggles that led inevitably to a belly laugh and then she found herself crying and holding her sides, unable to stop laughing. “Yeah…” she gasped after nearly a minute, wiping her eyes and at the snot running out of her nose. “Another one.” As she said it, the floor began to rumble.

Pruitt maneuvered the pack up out of the bowels of the gun and swung it over to MetalStorm Nine. Nine, for some reason, had done a double fire at some point and was flat out of packs. Getting more up, fast enough, would be tough.

The job wasn’t particularly fun. The Posleen had noticed the MetalStorms and were trying, at very long range, to successfully engage them. So stray rounds, railgun, hypervelocity missiles and plasma fire, were flying by on a regular basis. But, on the other hand, at his height he was pretty sure he had the best view of any being in the battle. And it was one hell of a view; the battle was intense.

The infantry had moved back into position on both sides, although at a fair distance, and in the twilight their red tracers could be seen flickering through the darkness, striking, disappearing and bouncing off into the distance. And, of course, the continuous rain of artillery was fascinating. Then, at intervals, the MetalStorms would open up and spit liquid fire into the valley. And all the while the Posleen were filling the air with streams of plasma.

Really spectacular.

As he thought that, a bright flash to his right, over the mountains, caused him to look up from the monitors. Before his head could even come up, the entire horizon behind the mountains flashed bright white in a lightning ripple of strobes, as if klieg lights the size of a state had been flicked on and then off, lighting up the valley for almost four seconds as if it was bright daylight.

He threw his arm up against the light but it was too late to help. Each of the blasts was a nuclear fireball and in the continuous stream of flashes he could see mushroom clouds rising even as the last lightbulb winked out. It was as if the world to the south had been consumed by a sun and then gone back to black.

“Holy shit,” he muttered, his eyes watering, as ground rumble caused the SheVa to sway back and forth. “I’ve got to redefine my definition of spectacular.”

He sat shaking his head to try to get some night vision, hell any vision, back and then gave up.

“Holy shit.”

Cally stopped laughing as the rumble died away and then grinned at her grandfather. “So, there any cards in this tub?”

“As if I need to lose money on top of everything else,” Papa O’Neal said with an answering grin. “Damn, Granddaughter, it’s good to see your face again.”

Within the cache the impacts caused one corner of the container to buckle and Billy to slip out of Shari’s arms. And then it returned to the silence of a tomb.

“UP AND AT ’EM!” O’Neal bellowed over the battalion frequency. “Head for the Gap.”

He put actions to words, scrabbling at the dirt above him and pushing down with his feet. It was a bare fifteen feet to the surface but it still took time, time he was afraid they might not have. Finally he saw an opening above him and popped his head out to look around at total devastation.

As far as the eye could see, and from the edge of the mountain that was a fair distance, there was nothing but scrubbed dirt. Not a stick, not a house, not a scrap of vegetation survived; the very soil had been stripped off in the titanic fire.

He shook his head and checked his radiation monitors, blanching as he did. The suits were more than capable of handling four hundred rems per hour, but it would kill any human stone dead. Or, hell, most cockroaches.

The dust was starting to clear and the moon was breaking out to shine on the ground, but there was something odd about it. Under the moonlight, everything was gray, even under the enhancements of the suits that brought it to daytime ambient. It was bright, but still in shades of black and gray. But still, there was something…

He toggled a switch and a patch of white light shone down from his suit on the stripped granite at his feet and he swore. He swiveled the light around, then walked away from his hole, looking at the ground and swore again.

“General Horner, this is O’Neal.”

“Glad to hear your voice, old friend,” the general said. “How’d it go?”

“We were underground,” O’Neal replied. Horner could almost hear the shrug over the communicator. “General, about this bomb that just detonated. Where did you say it came from?”

“Knoxville,” Horner replied, puzzled. “Why?”

“I mean, where was it developed?”

“Oak Ridge,” Horner said. “And the University of Tennessee. Why?”

“That figures.” There was a pause. “I just thought that you should know that Rabun County is now orange.”

“What?” Horner thought about that for a moment. “The soil in that area…”

“No, General. The soil, the rocks, the fucking mountains. It’s all orange. And not ‘international distress’ orange, boss. It’s a redder orange than that.”

Horner’s face turned up in a gigantic smile as he looked over at Dr. Castanuelo. The good doctor had just pulled a can of dip out of his back pocket and was reading over the shoulder of one of the techs. He had on a University of Tennessee ballcap and a UT Volunteers windbreaker. Both of them bright orange.

“This is what you get for letting rednecks play with antimatter, boss,” O’Neal said.

Horner didn’t bother to point out an accident of birthplace. There was no question in his mind that the guy who had just painted half of north Georgia in the colors of one of their bitterest football rivals was well described as a “high-tech redneck.”

“Dr. Castanuelo,” he said sweetly, smiling from ear to ear, “could I have a moment of your time?”

Pruitt had gotten back to work pulling MetalStorm packs as soon as his vision returned. He had lights that he could use, including a big-ass spot that would have lit up the whole top like day. But all things considered he didn’t want to be any more of a target than was strictly necessary.

Fortunately the loading system the SheVa repair guys had installed was simplicity in itself and the crane on Nine had an autograppler that worked, unlike the POS he had used in training. All he had to do was snatch the packs out of the hatch, swing the crane and drop them in the appropriate racks. He was even ahead of the way the Storms were running through them.

Finally he was done, and decided to take a good look around. The crane had a couple of good visual systems on it and slaves to the main monitors, so he started flipping through images.

The best view seemed to be from monitor seven. It was mounted high enough that it had a better view even than the crane and it had thermal imaging so sometimes he could pick out details that way.

In the distance he could see streams of Posleen still coming down the road from the Gap but they were more spread out and not moving nearly as fast. It looked as if there was a light at the end of the tunnel. OTOH, a few more area denial rounds couldn’t hurt.

He swept the monitor to the left and noted that he could just see where East Branch came down from the mountains and opened out. He could see the tracks from where the SheVa had come through the last time and sighed. You should only have to take one of these things over the mountains once in your life.

“Over the mountains,” he sung, swinging the monitor around, “take me across the sky…”

There was a cluster of Posleen on the ridge above East Branch and something about them made him sweep back for another look. He dialed up the magnification but it wasn’t until he hit the thermal imaging system that he was sure what he was seeing.

“Colonel,” he breathed after a moment. “You’re going to want to take a look out of monitor seven.”

Mitchell tapped the control and brought the monitor up on the main viewscreen. “What am I looking at, Pruitt?”

“Check out the group on the ridge to the left.” Pruitt sounded dead, as if someone had just ripped his soul out.

“What’s wrong?” the colonel asked, dialing up the magnification. “The ridge just above East Branch?”

“Yes, sir,” Pruitt replied. “Switch to IR.”

Mitchell did, then swore. “Those are… are they human figures?”

“Captain Chan, reload your guns,” Mitchell said, coldly. “Prepare for close fire support. Reeves, back us off the hill. Pruitt, get your ass down to personnel entrance one.”

“Yes, sir.” The driver checked his monitors and then spun the gun in place, pulling back down the hill. Suspecting what the next drive order would be he pulled all the way back and pushed the rear up the Savannah Church hill. He could see the crunchies arrayed on the hill panicking as the giant mass of metal backed towards them but he had other things to worry about. Like, how much longer he was going to be alive.

“Romeo Eight-Six this is SheVa Nine,” the colonel said on the division artillery net. “I need a brigade time on target box centered on UTM 29448 East, 39107 North. I want everything you’ve got.”

“Uh, roger SheVa,” the controller called back. “That will take a few minutes to effect. And, that’s not our priority of fire.”

“Do it,” Mitchell said. “I don’t care about your priority of fire, do it now.”

“SheVa Nine, this is Quebec Four-Seven.” It was Captain LeBlanc’s voice. “What in the hell are you doing?”

“We’re preparing to move forward to East Branch.”

There was a pause while the local commander assessed this statement. “SheVa, that wasn’t the plan.”

“Plans change. There’s a group of humans that are being used as a mobile feed lot for the Posleen. And we’re going to get them.”

Angela Dale had turned to look when the amazing series of flashes had occurred to the south. But since then she had dropped back into her own straitened world. It seemed they had been walking for days since the Posleen had captured her near Franklin. She had already lost track of her parents in the desperate retreat in front of the Posleen advance and she was pretty sure that, like everyone in the group who hadn’t been able to keep up, they were dead. And probably eaten.

She couldn’t remember, didn’t want to remember, how many had died. The group had been much larger to begin with. Sometimes people were added. Once the group had been broken up and occasionally a group of confused refugees would join them, including a bunch of Indowy with massive packs and bundles on their backs.

She had spoken to the Indowy, a simple greeting she had been taught in school, and the little green aliens had apparently decided she was their best friend and huddled around her as far away from the Posleen, and other humans, as they could get. The leader spoke English, haltingly and with a strange accent, and he had told her that the Posleen had brought them from another world, apparently to do engineering for the invaders. They had built some bridges and then, when the centaurs were forced to retreat, they had been added to the group of humans, he used the Posleen term “thresh,” as a mobile pantry. And so it was.

For, most of the time, instead of adding refugees one of the escorting Posleen at some unseen command would reach into the group and drag people out. Then the knives would descend. The humans in the group had been offered the food from time to time but even with their stomachs pressing against their backbones, no one had taken the dripping gobbets of flesh that had until moments before been one of their group.

Now, though, the Posleen seemed to have plenty of food; groups had come to the rear bearing masses of yellow flesh that could only be coming from the battle to the front.

Mostly, she didn’t notice anymore. She had retreated into a warm mental place where nothing could touch her. Someday she would be warm again, safe again. Someday she would be happy again and all of this would be over. She knew that it was unlikely that place would be this side of heaven, but she really didn’t care anymore. She just walked where she was pointed to walk and sat where she was pointed to sit.

So it took her a moment to notice that the artillery fire that covered the plains had stopped and that the fire from whatever had been laying down masses of red death had stopped as well. What went on in the battle didn’t really matter. Nothing was going to save her short of death. And death was beginning to look pretty good. It was the being eaten that still seemed bad.

But after a moment the mutters of the people around her, and the agitation of the Posleen, cut through her fog. She was afraid it meant they were going to choose another and she edged to make sure she was near the center of the group. But quickly it became apparent that something else was going on. And she looked to the north just in time to see, by the light of the fires in the valley and the gibbous moon that had appeared in the east, a mass of metal crest the distant ridge just as the artillery started to fall again.

“Pedal to the metal, Reeves!” Mitchell shouted. The driver had gunned down Church Hill and back up the far ridge at maximum possible drive because this was the worst moment of all. For just a moment the vulnerable underside of the armored gun system was exposed to fire and if the Posleen poured fire into it they were dead. That was where the drive systems and reactors were. Much fire in that area would leave them stopped on the hill, a sitting target for at least fifty thousand Posleen.

But the combination of the artillery fire and the speed and surprise of the assault seemed to work. Fire started almost immediately, but by then they were accelerating down the far side.

“Kilzer! Water curtain, Now!”

“Uh…” Paul looked over and shrugged. “I guess I forgot to mention: we’re out. We’ve only got five minutes and we used it up before.”

“Shit,” Mitchell cursed. “Chan!” But the command was unnecessary as every MetalStorm opened fire as if for dear life. And it was.

The valley was still filled with Posleen and even those that were in close combat with the human defenders on the ridges turned to fire at the giant tank as it tore down the slope and up the road towards Savannah. A storm of fire licked out towards it but SheVa Nine was giving as good as it got.

Again the ribbons of red fire lashed out at the Posleen, jumping from remaining concentration to concentration. The artillery box had opened up a zone of more or less open space and into that space the SheVa rocketed, belching fire in every direction.

“Mitchell!” General Simosin seemed a little upset. “What in the hell are you doing?”

“You wanted a breakout, General,” Mitchell said as rounds caromed through the interior of the SheVa. “You’ve got a breakout.”

“You dumb son of a…”

“There’s a group of humans by East Branch,” Mitchell said. “We’re going there and ain’t nothin’ gonna stop us.”

Arkady Simosin looked at the radio for a moment and then shrugged. “We’ll be right behind you.”

He turned to the driver of the Bradley he was currently occupying and gestured. “Son, if you don’t catch that SheVa before it’s halfway across the valley I’ll have you shot.”

“Yes, sir!” the driver said, kicking the armored fighting vehicle into gear. “Not a problem,” he added with a feral grin as the track commander cycled his guns. The Bradley was one of the scout systems equipped with double 7.62 Gatling guns; and it was getting ready to do some harvesting.

Simosin brushed his RTO aside and keyed the division command frequency as the Brad lurched into gear. There was garbled conversation coming from half a dozen commanders but he overrode them.

“All units, assault NOW, NOW, NOW. Follow the SheVa. Forget plans, forget frag orders. The order is FOLLOW THE SHEVA.”

“Move it!” LeBlanc snarled as she climbed the steps of the tank. And it was a long goddamned way up for a female who was just five feet tall. Really, she should be in a Brad or a Humvee. More radios and fewer distractions. On the other hand, if she wanted to command her unit she had to survive.

“But what are we doing?” the commander of Bravo Company called. The idiot was just standing by the Abrams looking around in confusion.

“We’re going to Savannah!” LeBlanc said, plugging into the vehicle intercom system. She was about to order the driver forward but he had already closed his hatch and started the tank forward. It moved with the smooth oiliness that was the hallmark of the Abrams series and it seemed that nothing could stop it. Of course, one plasma gun that hit just right would do just fine. There had been improvements in the armor of the Abrams series over the course of the war, but they could still be taken out with plasma or HVM fire. If it hit right.

“Get back to your unit and get it moving!” she screamed at the company commander then keyed the battalion command frequency. “All units, general breakout! Follow the SheVa!” She looked out of the TC hatch as the tank accelerated up the hillside and shook her head. The 147^th was a cock-up outfit. That was for sure and for certain. But in the last day or two something had happened, a new spirit had infected them. They might be cock-ups, but they had led the charge from Balsam Pass to here, where other units had failed. And they seemed to have caught the spirit of winning against the Posleen, instead of just taking it on the chin.

Which was why she realized she didn’t have to kick her useless company commanders in the ass. On either side, rising out of their holes like an unstoppable tide, the men of the 147^th were rising. And running forward, screaming.

The Posleen were turning and running before the mass of the SheVa, and the troops of the 147^th were going to get some.

“What a bloody mess,” Mitchell muttered, looking in the monitors. He hadn’t really expected support but he was by God getting it.

The troops of the division, in some cases it seemed without orders, had climbed out of the defensive positions they had occupied for the past several hours and were charging forward. Most of them weren’t in vehicles so they were falling far behind the SheVa, but they were drawing fire away from it. And getting slaughtered themselves.

It didn’t seem to matter, though. Mitchell saw one Bradley crest the ridge and drive right into a concentration of Posleen, running several of them over. For a moment the troops inside raved at the aliens with their mounted weaponry then the troop door opened and they poured out, taking positions around the fighting vehicle and pouring fire into the Posleen.

The aliens, used to throwing themselves onto human defenses, were reacting with shock and apparent fear. It must have seemed to them that the rabbits were attacking the wolves and it was happening everywhere.

The valley was an absolute madhouse. Groups of humans were running down the valley, some of them on the flats and others on the steep ridges along the sides, while a stream of armored fighting vehicles and tanks poured through the Gap. Other vehicles, tanks, Bradleys, Humvees and even some trucks, were coming over the ridges where they were negotiable and charging forward, sometimes stopping to pick up infantry but always moving forward.

The artillery had gotten totally confused and rounds seemed to be falling almost at random, some of them into the human troops. But even that didn’t seem to be slowing them down.

“Are we all insane?” Mitchell asked, flipping back to monitor forward. He looked at the rippling waves of Posleen and the heavy fire coming from them and smiled maniacally. “Yep.”