When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 28 Rabun Gap, GA, United States, Sol III 1519 EDT Saturday September 26, 2009 ad

Cally rolled over and coughed at the dust in her throat. After a few moments choking she sat up and looked around muzzily.

“Shit.”

The main shelter was still intact and the lights were on, but that was the only good news. The tunnels to the bunker and the house were both collapsed. The main tunnel was clear, though, and it looked like both exit tunnels were clear. That left the question of how long she had been in here. She felt her head and there was a pretty good goose egg already started on her forehead. Her watch had stopped from either EMP or impact and she hadn’t been too sure what time it was when they went in the bunker anyway.

She thought about Papa O’Neal’s briefing on nuclear weapons and what to do. They didn’t get used much, but Gramps had been thorough. Unfortunately the lecture had been a few years previous and she wasn’t sure where to begin looking for a geiger counter or how to use one.

She did recall that people could survive better than structures — something about pressure waves — and that meant that Gramps might still be alive. If the bunker falling in didn’t kill him.

So the next job was to get out of the main tunnel and try to find Gramps — dig him out if she had to — then head for the hills.

She stood up then sat down as the ground rumbled to another nuclear detonation.

“Maybe in a while.”

“Ooooh, that’s gotta hurt!” Pruitt shouted.

Reeves already had the SheVa in reverse so the return fire from the landers, with the exception of one plasma round, tore up the ridgeline. That one plasma bolt, though, ripped into the SheVa’s power room.

“Reactors two and three just went offline,” Indy called. She unstrapped and headed for the hatch. “I doubt this is going to be a one-woman job.”

“We’re way down on speed, sir!” Reeves called. He had the throttle all the way open, but the SheVa was barely moving. “Under ten miles an hour!”

“Indy,” the commander called over the intercom. “Tell me we can do better than this! Those landers are going to overrun us in about fifteen minutes at this rate.”

“Not until I find out what went, sir,” the warrant officer called. She slid down the third ladder and grabbed a geiger counter as she sprinted, occasionally being knocked from side to side, towards the reactor room. “We just lost half our power; this is as fast as this thing will go.”

“Damn, damn, damn,” he muttered. “Pruitt, you have the con.”

“What?” the gunner called.

“I’m headed to the reactor room,” the commander said. “I think you can ID these things just fine.”

“Roger, sir,” the gunner replied with a gulp. “Come on, Schmoo, find us another firing position.”

“There’s one by Fulchertown,” the driver said, checking his map. “But it will mean running over a bunch of houses.”

“You afraid of getting ’em stuck in our treads?” the gunner asked sarcastically.

“No… it’s just that…” Schmoo looked up and over his shoulder to where the gunner was grinning. “Never mind. I’ve been trying to stay in the woods so we wouldn’t run people over.”

“Anybody that’s still here deserves to be run over.”

Mitchell waved a hand in front of his face as he went through the door to the reactor room; smoke and steam were pouring out and the air reeked of ozone. “Indy!”

“Over here, sir,” the warrant called from the left side of the room. The room was dominated by the four turbine generators; the smaller reactors were barely noticeable cradled along the sides. Mitchell’s background was in Abrams power packs, big jet turbine engines that drove the tanks at speeds upwards of sixty miles per hour. But the power contained in this room would provide electricity to a city of a hundred thousand people. It was sobering to think that all this power could barely get the SheVa up to twenty miles per hour on a flat surface.

“What’cha got?” he asked. “And are we hot?”

“No, sir,” the warrant called back, handing him one end of a heavy duty cable. “The shot missed the reactors and the turbines, thank goodness, or we might as well have gotten in the Abrams and run. It took out a transformer, through, and cut one of the main power circuits so even though there was a backup transformer there wasn’t any power for it. The reactor went into shutdown immediately.”

“So what are we doing?” the commander asked.

“Well, you’re holding a replacement power cable,” she said impishly. “I’m getting out a really big wrench. Then we’re going to replace the circuit and reboot the reactors.”

“How long?”

“Ten minutes, fifteen tops,” she answered, heading over to where the turbine’s power bars joined in the middle. She applied the wrench to a large nut where the cable came out and then, when it wouldn’t break free, pulled the wrench off and hammered on it repeatedly until the melted plastic sealing it flaked off. “Just be glad it didn’t hit the reactors.”

“Yeah,” the commander said with a laugh. “Or the track. I’d hate to have to break track on this thing.”

“Oh, it’s no trouble at all; you just call up a CONTAC team,” the warrant said, breaking the nut free. “There’s a reason that there’s a battalion in a SheVa repair team. A battalion of engineers and three really big cranes.”

Mitchell dropped the end of the cable on the floor and grabbed a stanchion as the SheVa rocked from a blow. “Uh, oh.”

“I can get this,” Indy said, grunting as she leaned into the wrench. “Get up top, sir.”

“You sure?” he asked.

“Go, I can do this in my sleep,” she said taking the nut out and pulling out the burnt cable.

As he darted out of the room she sighed and picked up the cable. “For this I went to MIT…”

“Flying tanks, sir!” Pruitt said as the commander flew out of the hatch. “Four of them. And they’re spotting for the landers; tracking says they’re all coming this way.”

“Shit,” Mitchell said, looking in his own screen as the flight of tenaral swooped by for another strafing run. The flying tanks each fired several rounds of plasma fire, but only one or two connected. “Concentrate on the landers. Reeves, see what you can do.”

“Doing it, sir,” the driver said. “The best I can do is get up along the hills, though; we’re kind of a big target.”

“Is it just me, or do they seem to be staying at a distance?” Pruitt said as the SheVa rumbled down onto the flat. “Oops. TARGET! Lamprey! Fifteen klicks!”

To get to the third firing point required turning the corner of the mountain. By and large the SheVa’s position was still covered by the intervening hills, however, the last movement, slow and glacial as it seemed, had rumbled the SheVa fully out into the open.

Pruitt had been more or less ready for it, or something similar, keeping his gun pointed southward towards the approaching landers. Fortunately the Posleen ships moved at a snaillike pace near the ground and had not gotten significantly closer than in the previous two engagements. Unfortunately, there were more of them in sight.

“CONFIRMED!” Major Mitchell called, slipping into his seat.

“ON THE WAY!” the gunner called swinging the turret towards the next target.

“Yes!” Mitchell called. “Cat-kill, Pruitt.” The detonation of the Lamprey’s fuel source had not been as large as the first catastrophic kill, but it was still quite spectacular.

“TARGET!” Pruitt answered. “C-Dec! Fifteen klicks!”

“CONFIRMED!” Mitchell called.

Pruitt fired just as the dodecahedron dropped below the ridgeline. “Miss! The bastards are maneuvering! Is that legal?”

“Fuck me!” Reeves called as the tenaral swept by for another strafe. “They seem to be firing at the rear of the gun, sir!”

“I noticed,” the major said with a curse. “The good news is it’s the only part that’s heavily armored. The bad news is it’s the armor on the magazine.”

“No wonder they’re keeping a safe distance,” Pruitt said, sweeping the gun from side to side, looking for targets. “The really good news is that we’re nearly out of rounds so if they do penetrate the magazine there won’t be as large of a boom.” He thought about what he’d just said and shook his head. “Mommy!”

Mitchell keyed for the outside line and called the Screaming Meemie unit. “Whiskey Three-Five this is SheVa Nine; we could use some help, over.”

“What in the fuck is that, ma’am?”

Captain Vickie Chan shielded her eyes against the westering sun and shook her head. “I dunno, Glenn, I just don’t know.”

Captain Chan had joined the U.S. Army in 1989 in payment to University of Nebraska Army ROTC. The ROTC had provided the daughter of Fusian immigrants with a scholarship and monthly spending money. So when the Army in its infinite wisdom assigned her to Air Defense Artillery she had put on her soldier suit and wandered into the wilderness.

One fairly successful tour — very few women in ADA made captain in one hitch — had proven to her that a career in the Army was the last thing she wanted. Towards the end of the tour she had looked around at the senior females and determined that there were two types: sluts and battleaxes. She had no desire to be either so she calmly turned in her papers and went back to civvie street.

However, with the coming of the Posleen, she, along with virtually every other human who had ever worn military uniform, received a letter in the mail ordering her to service. Initially she was assigned to an armor unit, but with the need for anti-lander systems and the creation of the initial systems to combat them, a computer had spit out her name near the head of the list. She had ADA background and, at the time she was transferred, was a commander of an armor company. Perfect.

Then her burgeoning career — she had settled on battleaxe — had been nipped in the bud. She was assigned to one of the first Screaming Meemie units, a system officially referred to as the M-179 “Rosser” Medium Anti-Lander System, and, when it became apparent that the system was suicidal and useless against landers, there she had been left. There was no definable utility for the Meemies, but it was too much trouble to reconvert the Abrams tanks that they had been designed around back to direct fire systems and although the Meemies were very effective there were other systems that were just about as good. So for the last five years she had been shuttled around from one corps to another, shoring up a defense here and there, but generally shuttled back out of the way; nobody knew quite what to do with Meemies and few cared to learn.

At the moment she would have happily traded her current position for any of those other corps or any of those boring useless, days. It was apparent that this corps was in full flight, and driving forward to slow the Posleen down sounded like a permanent solution to a temporary problem; there was no way that one Meemie unit could stop a Posleen assault of this magnitude.

However, here she was. And maybe, just maybe, the company would survive. All they had to do was shoot down these… whatever they were.

“The computer’s balking,” Specialist Glenn said. The gunner was a female, like her commander, and had fine, light brown hair that constantly escaped from under her crewman’s helmet. She brushed it out of the way and looked up. “It refuses to lock them up. The radar sees them, but the computer won’t aim the gun.”

Chan sighed and slipped down into the turret. She was fairly sure she knew what was happening. The computer software had been pulled from the long defunct Sergeant York program. That system had been a nightmare from the word go, but it was the closest analogue to the Screaming Meemies, so the software had been assumed to be similar.

“Assumed” had so many connotations. In this case some bug in the software probably was telling the computer that these were not valid targets. She hated the software. If she ever found the idiots who had written it, she was going to line them up against a wall and shoot them.

With the commander’s machine gun; the ro-ro would probably miss.

She rolled her shoulders and shrugged. “Okay, Glenn, switch control up here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the gunner said. “What are you gonna do?”

“Use up a shitload of ammo,” she answered, switching the gun to manual.

She watched the… whatever they were for a moment. They would come sweeping in, high, really high, behind the SheVa, fire a few rounds into the back deck then bank off and come around for another shot. She considered it for a moment and hit another control.

“All tanks, flip your guns to remote control,” she said over the company net then switched to the SheVa’s frequency. “SheVa Nine, I need you to turn to the east and take a constant bearing for a few minutes, please.”

Mitchell felt like he was driving a wounded elephant. The SheVa was barely lumbering along and smoke was streaming from multiple strikes. So the call from the Meemie commander fell on welcome ears.

“I’d wondered where you’d gone,” he said. “Roger that, will do.”

He flipped to intercom and checked his screen. “Schmoo, turn east and head up the slope; don’t worry about going at max speed, just keep a constant course.”

“Yes, sir,” the private said, turning the lumbering gun to the east.

“Major Mitchell,” the warrant called. “This is Indy. We’re getting hammered, sir. We’re taking damage belowdecks.”

“I know,” Mitchell called back. “How bad is it?”

“We’ve taken some damage to the gun mounts which is really bad,” the warrant called back. “But they’ve got some redundancy in them. I think we can still fire. But if we take many more hits we’re going to be useless.”

“What’s the status on power?” Mitchell asked. “If we can speed up we can throw them off some. They aren’t coming down to engage; I guess SheVa Fourteen’s demise has put a scare in them.”

“I’ve restarted the reactors, sir,” the engineering officer replied. “But the turbines have a required warmup period; you really don’t want me to override it. Another five to seven minutes.”

“Okay,” the commander sighed. “It will have to do.” Mitchell considered his readouts and looked over at the gunner. “You gonna be up to this, Pruitt?”

“Yes, sir,” the gunner said. “We’ve only got two rounds left.”

“I can read,” the commander said, gesturing at his controls. “I’ll call for a reload, but we’re going to have to put some distance between us and them first.” He shook his head at the next series of plasma strikes. “And get rid of our companions; I don’t want them shooting at our reloads.”

“Oh, good God no,” Pruitt chuckled.

“If I recall correctly, the fuel bunker for a Command Dodec is just below center,” Mitchell mused. “I think the next shot you get, they’ll be closer than they have been; under ten klicks…”

“You want me to try to get the fuel bunker,” Pruitt said.

“Simply aim with great care,” Mitchell said. “Let’s see how it goes.”

“Okay, here goes nothing,” Chan said. She watched the six circles rotating around the sky — she had hooked all six “tanks” together and now had them all under manual control — and picked a point above and behind the SheVa gun. “We really don’t want to shoot that thing in the ass.”

“Oh, no,” Glenn said, clamping her hands on either side of her helmet. “This is gonna SUCK.”

The Screaming Meemie was so named due to its passing resemblance to the WWII German mortar system of the same name. The “gun” was mounted on top of the tank on a very heavy-duty rotating pintle that replaced the turret; the tank commander and a gunner were shoehorned into what had been the bottom of the turret with the driver at the traditional position at the front. The gun itself was more or less circular in appearance with six distinct bulges or lobes on the side. The difference between the systems being that the German weapon, properly called the Neubelwerfer, was a multi-barreled mortar system. The modern Screaming Meemie was a MetalStorm 105 twelve-pack.

MetalStorm’s name said it all; each pack could throw up to twelve hundred 105mm discarding sabot rounds into the air in less than a minute. The rounds were packed “nose to tail” into twelve tubes that were both barrel and breach. The system was electrical and could fire either one round or a series at very high rates of fire. Once clear of the “barrel” the rounds, accelerated at slightly different velocities due to the nature of the system, dropped their plastic “shoes” and a sixty-millimeter dart of tungsten headed downrange at tank-killing speeds. With a hundred rounds packed into each tube, and the rounds going off at an electronically controlled sequence, the air quickly became saturated with tungsten and steel.

The amount of energy involved in firing the system led to an enormous number of compromises. One of these was that the system could only shoot “forward” unless it deployed its firing spades or “jacks” as they were called. Otherwise the sheer energy involved in twelve hundred rounds of discarding penetrator heading down-range would flip the massive tank over on its side.

While this had been found to be insignificant against landers, six of the tanks firing into the space the tenaral were passing through was another story.

Tensalarial flapped his crest within the armored enclosure and keyed his microphone. “We need to get lower to destroy this thing; we can’t hit it flying by from this height.”

“Fuscirto uut,” Allansiar replied. “I’m not getting any closer than this! Even this is too close! You saw what happened to Pacalostal!”

Tensalarial flapped his crest again and snarled. It was like something in Posleen was hard coded; when you got one with the sense to do something besides lead an oolt and charge the guns, they also started getting… cautious. The smartest Posleen of all seemed to be Kenstain, which he preferred not to consider too closely.

“Our… mission is to stop this so the landers can destroy it,” Tensalarial said in response, with a tooth snap that was audible over the communicator. “We will perform that mission.”

“Then shoot the tracks,” Allansiar snarled in reply. “Not the body: that is where the fuel and weapons are that blow up. There is nothing to blow up in the wheels!”

“Very well,” the Kessentai replied after a moment. “We shall shoot the tracks on the next pass.”

“Lining up,” Allansiar said. “I’ll even get lower for that.”

“Let us go in one behind the other,” Tensalarial commented. “That way the ones behind can gauge their firing on the basis of the leader. I shall lead.”

“Why not?” Allansiar said with a grunt. “You’re not going to hit anything anyway.”

Tensalarial ignored the jibe and turned the tenaral towards the ground, lining up the manual aiming reticle on the slowly moving treads. The groups had had little opportunity to practice firing before the assault and they were learning by trial and error that the rounds did not go where the aiming reticle was pointed. The reticle was computer generated, but the system was not an actual auto-aiming device; it was simply a heads-up-display of where Goloswin thought the target was going to be. Since all Posleen aiming was done with advanced targeting systems — which Goloswin had never bothered to reverse engineer — the tenaral were beginning to realize that there were some basic concepts missing in the aiming system. Two of the missing concepts were “parallax” and “bore-sighting”; configured as they were, the guns were the functional equivalent of plasma blunderbusses and just about as accurate.

Stooping like a falcon, the Kessentai began dropping plasma rounds all over the landscape.

The target recognition system for the Meemies was sometimes a bit messed up and the radar integration system often malfunctioned. But the manual firing system was mostly taken from a standard M-1 Abrams design and worked rather well.

In this case a laser swept the sky until it got a return, estimated the range, found it to be functionally close to the one that Captain Chan had keyed in manually and began a series of calculations. It checked wind-speed, air temperature, humidity and whether the StormPack had been previously fired. Then it ran a rapid series of calculations and adjusted the aiming point appropriately. And the unknown programmer who had originally designed the system had heard of parallax.

For Captain Chan it was simplicity in itself. She pointed the red circles at the descending tenaral and waited until they flashed green. This took approximately half a second. Then she flipped the thumb selector from “safe” to “full,” closed her eyes, clamped down on the firing lever and held on for dear life.

“Holy shit!” Pruitt called. He had flipped to a screen where he could watch the funny looking tanks arrayed along the top of the ridgeline and now they had disappeared in a wall of smoke and fire. “Did they just get hit?”

“Nah,” Major Mitchell said, flipping momentarily to the same screen. “That’s what they always look like.”

The tanks appeared to have exploded. The air above and to the side was nothing, but smoke, fire and smoking plastic shredding itself on the dense air. Somewhere in there, presumably, were people and functional vehicles, but it seemed impossible that they could have survived. After only a few seconds the firing stopped and the air started to clear, revealing the Meemies, apparently undamaged.

“Holy shit,” Pruitt repeated. Then: “We gots to get one of them, sir!”

Glenn sat up, groaning. “Ooooh. I hate my job.” She pried her fingers off of her helmet and held her shaking hand out in front of her. “I gotta get a transfer.”

The Abrams was never designed to mount the MetalStorm 105. The original Abrams tank was designed to fire a single 105mm cannon that was similar in energy. Until the coming of the Posleen and such monstrosities as the SheVa gun, the concept of a mobile MetalStorm 105 would have been ludicrous. The energy imparted by the gun was sufficient to loft a 747, briefly. Lighter systems were considered possible for mounting on medium armor, but a 105mm, high-velocity penetrator was a different matter. It made the 72-ton tank shake like a mouse in the grip of a terrier and rattled the commander and crew like peas.

“Oh, gee, and miss all this fun?” Captain Chan said, rubbing her shoulder where it had banged into a stanchion.

“Clear sky, captain,” the gunner said, sweeping her sight around.

Chan popped the commander’s cupola and looked around. The air was still hazy with propellant gasses and the smoke from the thousands of bits of plastic littering the ground and the upper deck of the track. But there clearly were no tenaral in the sky. That didn’t mean it was clear.

“All Meemies,” she called, dropping back into the tank. “Back off the ridgeline!” She switched frequencies and called the SheVa. “Hey! Big Boy! You’ve got company south of Dillard.”

“I hate humans,” Orostan growled as the link from the tenaral went dead.

“So you have said,” Cholo’stan pointed out.

“What were those things?” the oolt’ondai asked. “Esstu?”

“I’m still working on that,” the Kessentai admitted. “There is reference to them in combat, but not against flying tenar; they are usually used for ground defense.”

“Well, we will deal with them after the big gun,” Orostan said with a flap of his crest. The oolt’ondai looked at his battlefield schematic and snarled. “Enough of this playing with them, bring us up so we can engage.”

“Pruitt, two rounds,” the commander reminded his gunner.

“That’s all Bun-Bun needs,” the gunner replied.

“Major,” Indy called over the intercom. “I’ve got the turbines up to speed; I cut a few corners, but it looks like we’re going to be okay. Anyway, we’re up to full power.”

“Great,” Mitchell said. “Reeves, when Pruitt fires, back down the ridge. We’ve always moved next. This time, back down then wait for my word. We’ll pull right back into position then head north of Franklin for resupply.”

“Yes, sir,” the driver said, checking as his telltales went back into the green. “We’re up to full power.”

“Okay, engage.”

Reeves engaged the drive and threw the multiton tank up the 30-degree slope, leveling it out at the top.

“Oh… shit,” Pruitt whispered; all the landers were up. In the distance he heard the whine of turbines as Reeves cranked the power until the SheVa vibrated with it.

“Target,” Major Mitchell called. Reacting to a training deeper than instinct he had swiveled the gun and laid it on the lower portion of one of the two C-Decs in sight.

“TARGET,” Pruitt confirmed. “C-Dec, nine klicks!”

“Confirmed,” Mitchell said.

“ON THE WAY!” he called, slamming against his straps as Reeves threw the tank into reverse.

“Miss!” Mitchell called as the round tracked under the maneuvering C-Dec. “TARGET, ON THE WAY!”

The second round, fired from the commander’s console, entered the ship on the lower quadrant just as the return fire from the ships erupted around the retreating SheVa. The giant tank still managed to slip away as the top of the hill erupted upward under the flailing of the guns. Despite the heavy fire, the detonation was evident and the fire cut down almost immediately as the hills to either side were lit in nuclear fire.

“NICE SHOT, SIR!” Pruitt caroled. One of the Lampreys was just visible over the ridge they were descending; it was out of control and just as they dropped out of sight it slammed into the side of High Knob. The explosion had easily been the largest so far. “EAT ANTIMATTER, YOU ALIEN FREAKS!”

“Reeves, put your foot in it and don’t let up until we are north of Franklin,” the commander called, manually rotating the turret in that direction. “We’ve got a reload date to keep.” He thought for a moment and frowned. “Swing east of the town; the Sub-Urb is west of it and I’d hate to find out that one of those things acts as a pit trap for a SheVa.”

“Oh, damn,” Pruitt said suddenly. “The Urb! What about the Urb, sir?”

Mitchell sighed and shrugged. “I think they’re on their own, Sergeant. Let’s just hope we don’t run over any stragglers.”

“I hate humans,” Orostan snarled as six icons dropped off the screen and his own vessels pitched up and down in the shockwave; Chylasarn must have been remanufacturing antimatter already. “Their behavior is bizarre, their reproductive methods are frankly disgusting and they use their weakness as a weapon. There should be a law.”

“Yes, so I am given to understand,” Cholosta’an said, looking down at the obvious trail leading to the north. The SheVa was out of sight and presumably out of ammunition, but they could easily track it down. “Do we follow?”

“We do not,” Orostan said. “We’ll deal with it later. For now we are well behind the timetable for us to have taken our positions. Have the ships that are left spread out to take their objectives. Keep maneuvering, but raise up to where they can increase speed; the SheVa appears to have retreated.”

“Our reports indicate that one of the human underground cities is just ahead,” the intelligence officer said. “It was an objective for Aresseen’s oolt’pos.”

“Detail another to take and hold the entrances,” Orostan said looking at the size of his reduced force again in anger. “The ground forces can detail one unit in three into it. There is much booty and, of course, thresh in one of those; we’ll need the materials to continue the drive. The other two forces should turn up Highway 28 and Highway 441 as planned.”

“Understood,” the S-2 said. “The city will be rich pickings.”

“I don’t know,” Cholosta’an said. “At this rate, I have to wonder if it will be worth it.”