When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 13 Rochester, NY, United States, Sol III 1925 EDT Monday September 14, 2009 ad

Major John Mansfield crouched low, hiding in the shadows of the roof of the trailer. He could hear the crunch of gravel as his target approached and this time there would be no way to escape. He’d been tracking him for the last four days and tonight would be the time of reckoning. Preparing to spring he pulled his legs under him and clutched the sheaf of paperwork attached to a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other; being adjutant for the Ten Thousand was no picnic.

As the official personnel officer for eleven thousand eight hundred and forty-three soldiers, officer and enlisted, all of whom were about as safe as Bengal Tigers, his was not always the funnest job. But the worst part was trying to pin the colonel down long enough to do his paperwork.

It had become something of a game. Cutprice would set up an obstacle course, human and often physical, between himself and his adjutant. Mansfield would try to pass it to get the colonel to take his paperwork in hand. Once a human being put something, anything, in the colonel’s hand, he was very concientious about completing it. But forget putting it in an “In” box.

But this time Mansfield had him dead to rights. The colonel had become a little too complacent, a little too regular in his schedule. And Mansfield had used all the tricks. A dummy was occupying his bed so no one would know he was stalking the night. No one had seen him crossing the compound so none of the troops would give him away this time. And a female trooper who really needed the colonel to sign a waiver so she could be promoted out of zone, a waiver that had been approved by her company commander, the sergeant major and the adjutant, had spent the evening plying the colonel with Bushmills. With any luck his defenses would be low enough that Mansfield would surprise him for once.

He crouched lower and leaned to the side, peering around the sign announcing that this simple single-wide trailer was the residence of the commander of the Ten Thousand. He glimpsed a shadow and consulted his watch. Yes, it was precisely the time the colonel should be showing up. He readied the pen and prepared to spring as a voice spoke over his shoulder.

“You lookin’ for me, Mansfield?”

Major Mansfield stood up and looked at the figure that was now standing on the stoop of the porch. Now that it was in the light it was clear that the figure was both shorter and darker than the colonel. And wore the wrong rank.

“Sergeant Major Wacleva, I am, frankly, shocked that you would stoop so low as to assist this juvenile delinquent over my shoulder in his avoidance of duty!”

“Ah, don’t take it personal, Major,” the young looking sergeant major responded in a gravelly voice. “It is the age-old dichotomy of the warrior and the beancounter!”

“Since when did you get cleared for words like ‘dichotomy’?” the adjutant asked with a laugh.

“Since the colonel spent half the night getting plastered with Brockdorf,” Wacleva responded sourly. He pulled out a pack of Pall Malls and tapped out a cancer stick.

“Yeah,” Cutprice said with a laugh. “Did you know she was a philosophy major before she enlisted?”

“Yes, I do, Colonel,” Mansfield answered testily, finally turning around to look at the officer. “Which is why she’s one of the very few people I know who can read the Posleen mind. And did you know she needed your signature to get her promotion to E-6?”

“Why the hell do you think I’m standing on a roof in the freezing cold?” Cutprice asked. He took the pen out of the S-1’s hand. “Which one is it?”

“Oh, no, you’re not getting away that easily,” Mansfield answered. “Among other things there’s a real strange one in here. I think we might need to send a squad down to North Carolina to spring one of our officers.”

“Who’s in North Carolina?” Cutprice asked, stepping lightly off the roof and landing on sprung knees. “Goddamn it’s nice to be young again.”

“No shit,” the major responded, landing next to him. “I think the last time I could be assured of doing that and not killing myself was in ’73.”

“With all due respect, sirs, yer both wimps,” the sergeant major growled. “Try being old before ’73. I couldn’t do that when I was datin’ yer mothers.”

Cutprice chuckled and reached for the sheaf of papers. “Gimme the 3420, I promise I’ll do the rest.”

Mansfield and the sergeant major followed the colonel into the trailer and Mansfield extracted a sheet of paper from the pile as the sergeant major went to the sideboard. “One 3420, complete and ready to sign,” Mansfield said.

“Hmm.” The colonel read it carefully. The game went both ways; Mansfield had twice inserted orders transferring himself to a command slot so the colonel was now careful to read the documents he signed. “This looks kosher,” he said, scrawling a signature.

“So is this,” Mansfield said. “There are two documents here. One is from Captain Elgars and the other is from her original shrink.”

“Elgars doesn’t ring a bell,” Cutprice said, picking up the printout of an e-mail.

“And it shouldn’t, she’s never been ‘with’ us, so to speak,” Mansfield said. “She was at the Monument, the sniper who is the reason it has a brand-new aluminum top.”

“Hang on a bit,” the sergeant major rasped. “Redhead, broken arm. What’s she doing as a captain?”

“Just about everybody that was there got battlefield commissions,” Mansfield pointed out. “Unless they specifically turned them down,” he added with a “hrum, hrum.”

“Well, I didn’t turn it down, it’s just a reserve commission and I’m acting in my regular rank,” the sergeant major said with a grin. “That way when I retire I get major’s pay and in the meantime nobody can make me a fuckin’ adjutant.”

“Elgars was in a coma so she wasn’t in a position to turn down a promotion to first lieutenant,” Mansfield continued. “And she got promoted in her zone automatically, since she was officially on the roll as patient status.”

“That’s the silliest fucking thing I ever heard,” the sergeant major said, pouring himself a drink and setting the bottle on the table. Then he paused. “Naw, I take that back. I’ve heard sillier stuff. But it’s close.”

Cutprice glanced at the two letters. He had come up from the ranks himself and he was a little short on college education, but he was a fast and accurate reader. The letter from the psych was the normal bureaucratic gobbledygook. The patient was refusing “treatment” and acting manifestly crazy. The shrink tried to cloak that with words she thought the colonel probably hadn’t heard, but in that the psychologist was wrong; the colonel had heard them before from shrinks talking about him. The letter from the captain was a bit different. Straightforward, spelling wasn’t too great, but that was normal for enlisteds which was what she really was. She wanted to see another shrink, her original one was treating her like she was nuts. Yada, yada. Huh?

“She says she’s got two people’s memories?” Cutprice asked.

“Apparently so, sir,” Mansfield replied.

“No wonder her shrink thinks she’s nuts,” the colonel mused. “She says she thinks the Crabs did it to her.”

“Her treatment was experimental, sir,” Mansfield noted. “It… sort of hangs together. And she doesn’t want to discontinue treatment, she just wants to continue with a psychologist that doesn’t think she’s nuts.”

“Sure, if you’re willing to believe she’s not,” Cutprice said.

“We’ve got a lot of people who are a few bricks short of a load,” Wacleva pointed out. “Look at Olson, I mean, nobody is sane if they go around wearing a God King crest all the time.”

“Well, sure, but…” Cutprice paused. The captain had apparently been a pretty good shooter and she might be a good addition. He read the postscript and frowned. “She says she knows Keren and it got forwarded by Sergeant Sunday. Both of those are recommendations in my book. Better than any fucking shrink’s.”

“That is one of the reasons I’m here, sir,” Mansfield noted. “I talked to Keren and he really went off. He didn’t know she was out of her coma and he wants to go see her. Now. He really had good things to say about her. ‘Greatest shooter on Earth. Natural leader. Crazy as a bedbug…’ ”

“But I can’t afford to send him to North Carolina just to straighten this out.” Cutprice picked up the bottle of bourbon and poured himself a drink. “I’ll tell him that myself and why. Next suggestion.”

“Nichols,” said the S-1. “He’s not an officer, but I cross-checked the records for any of the Ten Grand who have been in contact with her and they both went through the 33^rd sniper course before the Fredericksburg drop. In the same class no less. He transferred to the LRRPs and he’s stationed down in Georgia or North Carolina, in that corps zone. If you send him orders to go see her, he could stop by and talk. Get an idea if she’s nuts or what. But he’ll need written orders; they won’t let the riff-raff in the Sub-Urbs.”

“Nichols?” the sergeant major replied dubiously. “He’s a decent troop, but for one thing he’s not Six Hundred and she is and the other thing is he’s… just a troop. Nothing against Nichols, but he’s just a spear-carrier.”

“Well, the other suggestion is that I know his teamleader,” Mansfield said. “And Jake Mosovich ain’t just a spear-carrier. If I ask Jake very nicely, he’ll probably even do it.”

“I know Mosovich too,” Cutprice said with a chuckle. “Tell ’im if he doesn’t, I’ve got pictures from an SOA convention he doesn’t want to see the light of day. And video from a certain AUSA convention elevator. Okay, send Nichols and ask Jake to backstop. Tell Nichols you just want him to stop by and say ‘Hi,’ but tell Mosovich the real reason they’re there. It’s pointless to add, but tell him to handle it as he sees fit and ask him for an after-action report. Also, put him in touch with Keren. If she’s not crazy, according to Mosovich, I’ll tell her psych to take a running jump at a rolling donut. If she is nuts, and unusable nuts, I want her off the rolls. She’ll always be Six Hundred, but I don’t want her messing up the rolls of the Ten Thousand. Clear?”

“As a bell,” Mansfield said with an evil grin. “I’m sure that Mosovich could use a little authorized ‘comp’ time away from his daily rut. He’s probably getting bored at this point.”

Mosovich swallowed the last of the jerky and washed it down with a swig of water from his Camelbak just as there was a “crack” and a puff of smoke from the saddle.

The device he dropped on the trail had started life as a scatterable mine. The devices were packed into artillery rounds and fired into battlefields to “scatter” and create a problem for the enemy to deal with.

The Posleen response to minefields was to drive normals across them. It was an effective method of clearing and, from the Posleen’s point of view, very efficient since they would scavenge the bodies for weapons and equipment then butcher the dead for rations.

Therefore, generally the humans didn’t use scatterable mines. While “every little bit helped” in killing Posleen, by and large minefields were pretty inefficient. There were, generally, and with the exception of Bouncing Barbies, better uses for artillery.

Scatterable mines themselves, however, were a different story. In bygone days the sergeant major probably would have stopped to set a claymore. While that might have been more effective, it also took more time. Or, if he was in a real hurry, he would drop a “toe-popper,” a small mine that would detonate if stepped on. But toe poppers were, at best, wounding. And, unless you dug a small hole and hid it, which took time, they were also easy to spot.

One of the modified scatterable mines, though, was just about perfect. The “fishing lines” were monofilament trip-wires. They threw out the hooks then pulled them in until there was a graduated resistance. At that point, the mine was “armed” and if the lines were disturbed in any way, either by pulling or cutting, the mine would detonate.

No matter how it was dropped, the first thing the mine did was right itself. So when detonated, as in this case when the lead oolt’os of the approaching company charged up the saddle, it would fly up one meter and send out a hail of small ball bearings.

A claymore had a similar number of bearings in it, and sent them in a single line, which made it more deadly. But the “Bouncing Betty” tore the head off of the Posleen and scattered it over the trail. Good enough.

And it alerted Mosovich. Who lifted his AID.

“Ryan, listen up.”

Ryan leaned forward as the distant AID poured information into the net. The Posleen charging up the saddle were clear and so was Mosovich’s position.

“Are you going to be able to get out of there?” Ryan asked.

“I’ll be fine,” the sergeant major said. “I want fire on that saddle, right now, please, sir.”

“On the way,” Ryan said, sending the fire commands to the prelaid guns. “Twenty-seven seconds. I figured you’d fire up the saddle.”

“Right,” Mosovich said, leaning into the rifle and taking his first shot as the Posleen came into view. “Until we’re done here my AID will give a continuous feed; keep the fire on the pass, though, I don’t want you to follow the Posleen up the hill. And, if you wouldn’t mind, sir, pass this on. I can see Clarkesville from here and I figured out why they’re trying to keep us from observing them. They’re digging in, like they do with their factories, but these are apparently barracks.”

“That’s not a surprise,” Ryan said, watching the artillery flight clock. “Why would they be so worried about that? I mean, we have a pretty fair count on their numbers, so it’s not like they’re hiding anything.”

“Well, they’re barracks and motorpools, I should say,” Mosovich added. He knew that firing the Barrett was giving his position away to the God King’s sensors, but apparently they were all still in the trees. He saw one plasma round hit a poplar and turn it into a ball of fire.

“Motorpools?” Ryan asked suspiciously. “Splash, over.” The rounds were only a few seconds away from impacting.

“Yes, sir,” Mosovich said, as the first rounds started to land in the trees. “For the flying tanks. Splash out.”

“A kenal flak, senra, fuscirto uut!” Orostan shouted. He shook his arm and glared at the flash burn. “I am going to eat that human’s GET.”

“Perhaps,” Cholosta’an said, running up the trail behind the oolt’ondai’s forces. “But only if he doesn’t adjust that artillery onto us!”

The two Kessentai along with the first oolt of Orostan’s force, by pure luck, had been off of the saddle and out of the beaten zone by the time the first round hit. But behind them the sound of superquick detonating in the treetops was mixed with the scream of oolt’os and Kessentai caught in the barrage. That included what was left of Cholosta’an’s oolt, but he wasn’t going back for it either.

A normal ahead of Cholosta’an grunted, slapped at his side and fell sideways screaming down the slope.

“The artillery is masking the fuscirto fire,” Orostan snarled, pointing his plasma gun towards the hilltop. He had had a bead on the sniper earlier, but the thrice-damned trees had gotten in the way. His crest on his left side was scorched so badly it might have to be cut away.

He fired at approximately where he thought the sniper was and the normals around him followed the target point slavishly.

“Uh, Oolt’ondai,” Cholosta’an said, darting past the older Kessentai, “you might want to move around a little.”

As the words left his muzzle, Orostan let out a bellow of rage and clapped at the furrow that had appeared along his flank. “Sky demons eat your souls! Come out and show yourself, you gutless bastard!” he screamed. But he started back up the path anyway, ducking and weaving among the limited cover while peppering the smoking hilltop with shots from his plasma gun. “Gutless abat!”

Jake slapped at the leaves in front of his position to put out the fire. Fortunately the God King seemed to think he was firing from about fifty meters to the west. Unfortunately, he’d missed the one shot he got at the bastard. It was difficult to tell which ones were God Kings at this range, unless they lifted their crests and these seemed to be keeping them down. There was usually a little difference in size, but not enough to be noticeable at eight football fields. God Kings were generally more heavily armed, as well, but judging by this group headed up the hill that wasn’t clear. Most of the Posleen had either heavy railguns or plasma cannon with a few hypervelocity missile launchers thrown in for giggles. Which one was the God King on the basis of weaponry was anyone’s guess. The last difference was “attitude” or at least who did what first. In this case, one particular Posleen sporting a plasma gun had fired, then all the other Posleen followed suit.

Fortunately they all fired at the wrong place, but the misses, thermal wash and ricochets had been mighty interesting for a few seconds there. A chunk of the hilltop the size of a house had been flattened and was surrounded by a growing forest fire. The trees, shrub and dirt in the area were just gone and most of the exposed rocks were smoking. If they’d fired at the right bit of mountain, or if they spotted him, his ex-wife would be getting a telegram and a check.

It wasn’t dying so much that worried him, but it really ticked him off that his ex would get the check.

“I gotta find a better beneficiary,” he muttered, taking a bead on the next Posleen in the line.

Cholosta’an darted around the oolt’ondai and put his hand on the older Kessentai’s chest. “Let the oolt’os go first, Oolt’ondai,” he said.

“I will eat the heart of this thresh,” Orostan ground out. “I swear it.”

From just up the trail came a crack of another mine and the descending scream and clatter of a Posleen falling off the narrow track. “Yes, Oolt’ondai,” the younger Kessentai said. “But you can’t do that if you are dead.”

The oolt’ondai lifted his crest for a moment then lowered it as more oolt’os trickled by. There was a steady stream making it through the artillery beaten zone and there was no way the human was going to escape this time; the other side was too sheer for even one of these damn rock-monkeys to scale.

They had made it far enough up the trail, apparently, that the human could not observe their location. But as he looked back he saw another oolt drop off the trail with a fist sized hole through his midsection and this one, in its flailing, knocked another off the path. The human was up there and still stinging them, but Cholosta’an was right; he would have to live to get any revenge worth savoring.

“Very well, youngling,” Orostan finally said with a hiss of humor. He stepped to the side to clear the path. “We’ll let a few more oolt’os get ahead of us, yes?”

“Yes, Oolt’ondai,” the oolt commander said. He recognized a few of the oolt headed up the trail by sight and smell and that indefinable sense of “mine” that said they were of his oolt’os. But damned few. “So much for being unexpendable.”

“Not at all, youngling,” the oolt’ondai said with a limited crest flap, lest the sniper still have an angle on them. “Again you prove your worth. How many Kessentai in your position would have had the head to hold back? And of those, how many would have thought to stop my impetuousness? And, last, of those very few, how many would have dared?”

“Few, fewer and fewest,” the Kessentai agreed as another “crack!” came from up the trail. “But I could wish that my oolt’os were not so few as well.”

“That we will make up for after this,” the oolt’ondai said, getting back on the path. “But I want to be there at the kill.”

Mosovich stroked the trigger one more time and rolled to his feet. He had been carefully counting the mines on the hill and the last one was, indeed, the last one. If it did not kill the Posleen that had detonated it, a short dash would take the centauroid to the crest of the mountain. That spot was in a thick stand of rhododendron and mountain laurel, but just beyond there the Posleen would be in position to flank Mosovich’s position, and, what was worse, cover the back door to the hide with direct fire.

Mosovich backed out leaving most of the boxes of ammunition and all of Nichols’ dirty socks behind. He wouldn’t, frankly, need either where he was going.

He moved over to the edge of the cliff and hefted the big rifle so he was pointing it unsupported. He couldn’t hold it up for long, and God knows, he wouldn’t be able to fire many rounds. But he wouldn’t have to.

“Don’t eat them!” Orostan bellowed as the boom of a rifle came from over beyond the obscuring vegetation. “They are mine!”

The only response was a burble from beyond the brush as another boom echoed on the mountain. The trees were whipped in a gale as the God King reached the summit and started to descend. The trail was tricky, more broken even than on the way up and the rhododendron, laurel and white pine was whipping in his face as he finally came into the open.

The human seemed to have been waiting for that, for Orostan would always remember the smile. The apparently sole survivor just smiled that tooth-baring human smile, jumped back and fired.

And flipped backwards into nothing.

It was tricky. As expected the shot, which undoubtedly went off into nowhere, gave him a few extra feet of boost. The Barrett had always pushed him backwards a few inches no matter how hard he braced and when he fired it off-hand it had pushed him back a couple of steps with each shot. So firing it completely unsupported, effectively in midair like some sort of damned Coyote/Road Runner cartoon, actually turned him for a somersault.

The good part about this was that the combination took him well out from the ledge. He had chosen his spot carefully and he had actually been standing on an overhang. However, the ground started to slope outward after only a few hundred feet long so it was important to get prepared quickly.

The static rappel system was one of the first that used the more advanced Galactic sciences in a device of purely human design and manufacture. Humans had implemented “old” Galactic technology, some of which was close to the cutting edge of human tech and theory, in many designs. New gun barrels were the most common devices, but there were also some small railguns designed for humans and “human only” fusion plants, that were only five or six times the size of equivalent Galactic and about a third as efficient.

This device was the first that used theories that were beyond human ken. The Tchpth considered gravity to be, at best, a toy and, at worst, a minor nuisance. A few of their “simpler” theories were explainable to humans, such as the theory that led to the Galactic bounce tube.

When Indowy wanted to travel up or down in their megascrapers, they generally travelled by bounce tube. This was a narrow tube that went to a specific floor. You entered it and if you were at the bottom it shot you to the top and if you were at the top it let you drop to a screaming (in initial usage this was literal) stop at the bottom. What it took humans a while to discover was that while bounce tubes were “active” devices on the lift side, they were “passive” on the drop. That is, a device at the bottom detected something coming in at high velocity, generated a very minor field and when the item hit the field it was decelerated using its own positive momentum for energy.

The Tchpth and Indowy considered this purely efficient. The humans initially considered it magic.

However, after staying up for several days, smoking a large amount of an illicit substance and taking a very long shower, a research grad at CalTech suddenly realized that if you took some of the things that the Tchpth were saying and turned them on their sides… sort of, it was a lot of very good stuff… it made a certain amount of sense. Then she wrote them down and slept for three days.

After deciphering what she wrote, which, as far as anyone but her mother was concerned was apparently Sanskrit, she created a little box that when thrown at a wall “threw back.” The energy usage involved was no more than that of a small sensor and it always threw back, even when fired from a low velocity pneumatic cannon. (The cannon was called a “chicken gun” and was usually used to test aircraft windshields. But that is another story.)

There was a current upper limit on the device, that is, when fired at very high velocity it tended to break the windshield, and it was better at stopping itself than it was at stopping stuff coming at it. So there was no “personal forcefield.”

In other words, it was a very fast way to get to the ground in relative safety.

The device was modified and adjusted until it didn’t just stop itself, but created a “static repulsion zone” which, when there was a situation of sudden kinetic change, damped that change. Then it was turned over to TRW for manufacturing purposes. The device was being installed on every vehicle still on the roads and in other places where sudden stops happened in a bad way. And it was issued to all the LRRP teams.

Mosovich looked down at the rapidly approaching ground and swore he was never, ever going to do this again. “It’s not the fall that kills you,” he whispered.

Generally, if you’re going down a cliff or the face of a building, the best way is to rappel. Tie off a rope, hook up any number of devices and lower yourself on the rope. However, there are any number of cases where this is impractical; ropes are not infinitely lengthy. There was another device available that used a very thin wire for the same purpose. And Mosovich really wished he had one with him. But they were much harder to construct than the static repulsion boxes and weren’t standard issue. Given the number of times this sort of thing came up, he was definitely getting one for everyone in the team and keeping them.

The problem was that static repulsion systems didn’t slow your fall at all until they came near solid materials. For example, this system was going to completely ignore the trees he was just about to hit.

“Fuscirto uut!” Orostan shouted, jumping over the corpse of the last oolt’os and darting to the edge. His talons scrabbled on the rock as he almost slid over the side then he looked down the cliff face just in time to see the human disappear into the trees below.

“You cannot escape me that easily!” the oolt’ondai shouted to the winds, knowing that the words were a lie. “I will still eat your heart!”

Orostan looked out over the valley below and screamed in rage. The sun was sinking to the northwest and before anyone could get to the landing area the human, if it was alive, and he doubted that it had just committed suicide, would be kilometers away. In any of three directions.

Cholosta’an came up beside him and looked down. After a moment he pointed downwards with a flap of his crest.

“Yes,” Orostan ground out.

“Alive?” the younger Kessentai asked.

“Probably,” Orostan snarled. “And there was only one.”

Cholosta’an thought about that for a moment. “The last time we had a good count it was over by the town of Seed. There were four.”

“Yes,” Orostan said. “Four.”

“And now there was only one,” Cholosta’an said. “One. And no bodies.”

“No.”

“Oh. Fuscirto uut.”

“I’ll send someone around to look for a corpse,” Orostan said after a few moments’ contemplation. “But I doubt they’ll find anything.” He looked at his tenaral and started to wonder who. Finally he turned away and started back down the hill. The human might have escaped today, but it undoubtedly was “based” beyond the Gap. Its time would come. Soon.

As the last Posleen normal faded out of sight, the “rock” that Mosovich had been standing on shifted and rippled, revealing something that looked very much like a four-eyed, blotchy, purple frog. The creature, if it was stretched out, would have been about eight feet from four-fingered foot-hand to foot-hand and was perfectly symetrical; it had two hands and two eyes on either end with a complex something in the area where a nose might be.

The Himmit scout leaned out from the rock, its rear two foot-hands spreading out over the surface for purchase, and noted the faint heat signature moving away that was probably the human. He then levered himself back and looked towards the retreating Posleen. Such decisions. Human/Posleen, Human/Posleen? Finally, deciding that humans were always more interesting than Posleen — who basically ate, killed and reproduced and who could make a story from that? — it leaned sideways and started flowing from handhold to handhold down the cliff.

Such exciting times.