When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 5 Rochester, NY, United States, Sol III 0633 EDT Sunday September 13, 2009 ad

Mike glanced at his monitors and watched the movement without expression. The worst part about it was the ammunition counters. In that one brief engagement, Bravo had used up fifteen percent of their ammunition and there was no end to the Posleen in sight. The plan had been for an orderly advance to the objective, basically a horseshoe by the Genessee Bridge, but he was pretty sure that was out the airlock. The lack of a curtain barrage and the frantic and fragmented nature of the mortar fire that replaced it meant they were going to have to run for it.

This was exactly the situation that he had feared when he had had his confrontation with Horner. The battalion was strung out, in its most vulnerable possible position and still well short of its goal, the top of the ridge overlooking the river.

If they didn’t have the ridge the Posleen could pour fire into the bridgehead, and the battalion, from above. There would be no way to effectively direct fire and there would be no way to reduce the Posleen numbers, much less break their spirit, from in the valley. But when the ACS finally got there, the battalion would come into the view of literally millions of Posleen, millions of still unbloodied Posleen. They needed all the artillery there to suppress the Posleen fire and for smoke missions so that the normals couldn’t target the battalion. So far the majority of the battalion had been able to move with relative impunity because of the supporting fire from the “better” artillery battalions. If that went away the casualties would start to mount fast.

But there were tens of thousands of really angry Posleen starting to dig themselves out of the rubble around the hospital. And they were getting ready to fall on Bravo Company like the hammers of hell. Bravo Company needed all the artillery there to keep from being overrun. If they didn’t get some support, and fast, they were going to be thresh-in-a-can before you could say “Spam, spam, spam, spam and rat.”

The only thing that would save their ass was more artillery, which they weren’t going to get, or sacrificing the Ten Thousand, which he wasn’t willing to do.

There just weren’t enough resources to get the job done.

In other words, just another day fighting the Posleen.

“Duncan, shift all artillery to the north in support of Bravo Company. Battalion… prepare for tena’al charge.” He touched a series of imaginary keys and the scene started to change. Where before the holographic camouflage had been blending the suits into the background it now shifted to reveal larger versions of the demon worked into his own armor. As it changed the armor began to boom out a driving electric drum solo.

“Okay,” he growled, stamping downward on the dead Posleen at his feet to get a better footing. “Playtime’s over. Let’s kick some ass.”

“Jesus, Mike, it’s not that bad?” Horner whispered as the suit units seemed to go into hyperdrive. All of them had shape-shifted into large demonic creatures and then started sprinting for the heights, laying down a curtain of fire as they went. The silver lightning was chewing the ridgeline, sweeping away the front rank of Posleen as they came into view.

He looked to the north and it was apparent that the company there was in serious trouble. The artillery on the hills had stopped and he could only presume that meant it was shifting to the north in support of that unit. The company did not seem to have taken major casualties yet. But there was a huge mass of undirected normals heading for it and if they could not be stopped they were going to hack the beleaguered company to bits. It was clear that O’Neal had chosen to remove the artillery support from the majority of his unit in the belief that the company could hold out. Overall it did not look like a good bet to Horner; spread out as they were, the ACS were inviting defeat in detail. They might take and hold the bridgehead, but it looked like it would be at the expense of most of the battalion.

On the other hand, the overall requirement had been laid by one General Jack Horner. So he couldn’t exactly complain when they did whatever it took to perform the mission.

“Another day at the races,” Colonel Cutprice said from the other window. “I’m not going to wait for the bridge. First Batt is fully airmobile; I’ll send them across immediately using their tenars in support of Bravo company then start ferrying the rest across to support the ridge. Otherwise we’re going to end this day without a battalion of ACS.”

“I’ll go down and see if shouting at people gets the bridges up any faster,” Horner said with a smile, his version of a frown. “And find out why the boats aren’t already assembled.”

“That would be nice,” Cutprice said in a disinterested tone. “It’s going to be kinda lonely over there for a while.”

“ ’Course, what else is new, sir?” Sergeant Major Wacleva asked. “I’ll go get your body-armor.”

Horner looked over at the colonel and smiled again, tightly. “Do you really think that is a good idea, Colonel? Leading from the front is for squad leaders, not colonels.”

“As opposed to, say, watching the ACS slaughtered from across the river, General?” Cutprice asked, pulling out a cigar and slowly lighting it. “Yeah, I think it’s a grand idea.” He looked east where a cloud shadow seemed to be moving rather fast and frowned.

“Ah yes,” Cutprice said after a moment. “Right on time. Wouldn’t be a really screwed up battle without a five percenter.”

Horner looked to the east and up. “Well, that, at least, we can take care of.” He tapped his AID and gestured out the window. “Nag, tell SheVas Twenty-Three and Forty-two to engage the approaching Lamprey at will.”

“Colonel, you know that discussion we had the other day?” Sergeant Major Wacleva asked, walking back into the room with two sets of body armor.

“Which one?”

“The one about ‘when do you know it’s really bad’?”

“Sure.”

“Well, it’s bad if the Ten Thousand shows up. And it’s worse if the ACS shows up. And it’s really, really bad if General Horner shows up. But the ultimate in bad has to be when two SheVas show.”

Attenrenalslar was what the humans had taken to calling a “five percenter.” Ninety-five percent of Posleen God Kings understood only the simplest imperatives. Eat, screw, fight, take territory and repeat until death. However, that remaining five percent was, in some ways, more trouble than the other ninety-five. The “five percenters” were the ones that jammed the humans’ frequencies at seeming random, but always it seemed at the worst possible time. It was the five percenters that occasionally took over a fire net to the consternation of all. It was the five percenters that organized groups of Posleen to act in what was an almost concerted action. And it was the five percenters that used their Lampreys and Command Dodecahedrons as airmobile units.

One of O’Neal’s nightmares was somebody who would organize all the five percenters into one massive unit.

Currently, though, Attenrenalslar was one of the very few God Kings that had determined that the best way to turn the tide of this battle was to take his lander across the river and attack the humans from behind. He might be the only one; the percentages on “air-mobile” had gotten worse and worse for the Posleen of late.

Early in the war it was a nearly guaranteed tactic. The humans had very few weapons that could engage the landers and as long as they stayed below the horizon from one of the few remaining Planetary Defense centers, the humans almost had to wait for them to land before having any real chance to attack the Posleen within. Since the landers also mounted anti-personnel weaponry, not to mention space-to-space weaponry that was good for taking out most of a battalion, they could attack ground units with impunity. The wonder was that the Posleen didn’t use them all the time.

However, that weakness had been noted even before the enemy made their first landing; Mike O’Neal’s first Medal of Honor accrued from almost single-handedly taking out a command ship. But the method was not considered survivable.

In the first major Earth landing it appeared that a battleship had managed, through a fluke more than anything, to take out a Lamprey. From that was born the concept of the SheVa Gun, the sort of weird bastard weapon that is only created in the midst of really terrible wars.

The gun was named after the Shenandoah Valley Industrial Planning Commission, the group that had first solved all the various design problems inherent in the new system, and the majority of the first parts and pieces of the massive construction were made in the Roanoke Iron Works.

The basic parameters for the weapon were simplicity in themselves. The gun was an extended barrel, smoothbore, 16” battleship cannon. Because of the occasional necessity of rapid fire, the standard 16” “bag and round” method of loading, which involved sliding a 1200-pound round followed by fifty-pound bags of powder, had been replaced with a single shell the size of a small ICBM. The SheVa gun carried eight rounds as a “standard load” and a tractor-trailer could haul two “four-packs” that permitted reloading in under ten minutes. Each gun was loaded with standard rounds, but there were at least two tractor trailers “on-call” carrying special munitions, including both sensor and antimatter area effect weapons, at all times.

The other parameters were that it be able to fire from two degrees below horizontal to ninety seven degrees above with a swiveling turret and that the system be fully mobile. It was this combination that had caused all the design teams to almost give up in despair. That was, until the good old boys (and girls) from the Shenandoah went ahead and admitted that the parameters just meant it needed to be bigger than anyone was willing to admit, even privately.

The monstrosity that was finally constructed defied belief. The transporter base was nearly a hundred meters long with two fifty-meter-wide treads on either side supported by four-story-high road wheels. The “gun” was mounted on shock absorbers the size of small submarines and constructed using some of the same techniques. The swivel turret was two stories thick, constructed of multiple pieces “welded” together by an explosive welding technique, and nearly fifty meters across. The upper deck was six-inch steel plate, not for any armoring purpose, but because when the gun fired anything else would buckle.

When the design was mostly done the power source was obvious; there wasn’t enough diesel in the entire United States to support the projected requirements for the guns. On the other hand, Canada’s supplies of pitchblende were plentiful and above the weather-line that the Posleen preferred. Therefore, nuclear was the only way to go. However, putting a large “reactor control crew” onboard seemed silly. Finally, they “borrowed” a South African design for a simple, practically foolproof nuclear vessel called a “pebble-bed helium” reactor. The system used layered “pebbles” that automatically mitigated the reaction and helium — which could not pick up, and thus release, radiation — as the temperature transfer medium. Even if the coolant system became totally open, that is if it started venting helium to the air, no radiation would be released and the reactor would not “melt-down.” Of course, if the reactor took a direct hit there would be “hot” uranium scattered all over the ground but other than that, no problem; the system was absolute proof against “China Syndrome.”

The control center and living quarters were actually located underneath the behemoth and were the size of a small trailer. It wasn’t that it took a large crew; the system could actually be run by one person. It just made more sense that way. The designers looked at the physical requirements for the three-man crew and finally settled on a small, highly armored command center. But the monstrosity had so much power and space to spare that they added to the design until they had a small living quarters that would permit the crew to live independent of the surroundings.

The designers also included a rather interesting evac vehicle.

So when the crews of SheVas Forty-Two and Twenty-Three got the word that a lander was on the way, they dropped their cards, dropped their Gameboys and slid smoothly into action.

“This is Forty-Two, General,” said Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Wagoner. Forty-Two was a brand new SheVa, the newest until there was a “Forty-Three.” And Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Wagoner was a brand new SheVa commander. He had just been transferred, over his howling objections, from command of an armored battalion and was having trouble adjusting to being a tank commander, by any other word, again. But he was pretty sure he could remember how to crank a track, by God. “We’re on it.”

“Okay, boys, blow the camouflage; it’s time to lay some tube.”

Duncan felt a rumbling in the seat of his pants and configured his view to “swing” westward. The remains of West Rochester were shuddering as if the town had been hit by a minor but persistent earthquake and he could see boulders being kicked loose from the hill he was sitting on. When the viewpoint finally swung to the west it became obvious what had caused the effect.

Behind him, about four miles to the rear on the south side of the canal, an oddly shaped hill was shuddering apart. As the greenish foam fell away the enormous shape of a SheVa gun was revealed.

The thing was just ugly. There was no other word to describe it. The bastardized cannon required something like a crane cantilever to keep it from bending and the massive construction of the whole system didn’t permit anything on the order of beauty. Like a steam shovel for a giant open-pit mine or a deep ocean drilling platform, the only things prior to the SheVa to be built on its scale, it was pure function.

The scale of the guns was hard to grasp until you realized that the tiny ants running alongside weren’t even people, they were trucks.

He shook his head as the thing first waggled from side to side to warn all the little “crunchies” that it was preparing to maneuver and then accelerated up the side of a small moraine, smashing a factory to bits on the way.

“Fucking show-off,” Duncan muttered, turning back to the east.

“Forty-two,” called the commander of SheVa Twenty-Three, “be aware that we have two more lift emanations including a C-Dec.”

“Got that,” said Colonel Wagoner. His intent was to use the moraine as cover until they could get a good hull-down shot at the Lamprey. The problem with SheVa guns was that “hull-down” generally required something like a small river valley; the moraine was as good as he was going to get.

But when the other two lifted, they would be in a position to rake Forty-Two’s position from the north. The question was whether to engage them as they came in view or after the leading Lamprey.

“Sergeant Darden,” he called to the driver. “Swing us around to the south side of the moraine with the gun about forty degrees to the angle of the slope. We’ll take the current Lamprey as it bears then continue around the slope to engage the others.” He switched to the SheVa frequency and glanced at the battlefield schematic. “Twenty-Three, prepare to move out. As we engage the first Lamprey, engage the first of the trailers. The we’ll gang up on number three.”

“Got it, sir,” called the other gun. “Time to show these ACS pussies what ‘heavy metal’ really means.”

Duncan just sighed as the ground really started to shake. The secondary screen showed another hill — this one much less artistic; it had buildings sticking out of it — coming apart as the second SheVa went into action, its cantilevered gun pointing to the east.

It suddenly occurred to Duncan that the gun was not pointing particularly high in the sky. He looked at the gun, looked towards the probable target and had just enough time to say: “Oh, shit,” before the weapon fired.

The rounds for the SheVa guns used the equivalent of a battleship 16” gun “max charge.” The bullet, however, was a sabot round, a depleted uranium “arrow” surrounded by a thermoplastic “shoe.” The bullet, therefore, was very light compared to the standard 16” gun “round.” And instead of a rifled barrel, which permitted a round to stabilize in flight by spin, but also retarded the speed of the round, it was a smoothbore. The barrel was also extended to nearly three times the length of a standard sixteen-inch barrel, thus permitting more of the energy from the charge to be imparted to the bullet.

Since round speed is a function of energy imparted versus round weight and barrel drag, the round left the barrel at speeds normally obtainable only by spacecraft.

The plastic “shoe” fell off within half a mile and what was left was an eight-inch-thick, six-foot-long, pointed uranium bar with tungsten “fins” on the back. The fins stabilized its flight. And fly it did crossing the twenty kilometers to the target, trailing a line of silver fire, in just under two seconds. However, such speed and power do not come without some minor secondary effects.

Duncan dug plasteel fingers in the bedrock as the hurricane of wind hit. The sonic boom, which shattered windows and even walls in the hospital down the hill, was almost an afterthought to the wind. It was the wind, driven to tornado speed, which tore at buildings and people throughout Rochester, ripping off roofs, toppling walls, turning trucks on their sides and pitching troops around like bowling pins.

Whatever secondary effects the round might have had, its primary effect was even more spectacular. Simple kinetic impact would usually destroy a Lamprey or even a C-Dec — when the rounds did not explode they tended to punch all the way through the ships. But the designers of the SheVa guns weren’t satisfied with “usually.” So at the core of the SheVa round was a small charge of antimatter. Only the equivalent of a ten-kiloton nuclear weapon.

The effect of the round punching into the ship was obliterated by the rush of silver fire that gouted from every seam and port. For a moment the ship seemed like it would hang together, but then it just came apart in a blossom of fire that consumed the Posleen for a quarter of a mile around. Large pieces, the size of cars and trucks, flew out as far as the human battle lines and bits the size of a human head reached even to Duncan’s location.

“Show-offs,” Duncan muttered, dusting off some dirt. He picked up a piece of Lamprey that had impacted on the hilltop and tossed it in the air. “Sure, it’s easy to do with the right equipment. Try doing it with just a suit sometime.”

“Target,” said Twenty-Three. “Your turn, Colonel.”

“Right,” Wagoner said. “Try to get some elevation next time; the secondaries on that one shook up the whole corps.”

“Crunchies,” Twenty-Three, called. “What can you say?”

“You can say ‘Yes, sir,’ ” said Wagoner. “And get some cover.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Forty-Two out.” He tapped a control and nodded as the line of travel dropped into place. The target line was plotted and potential secondary damage noted. They would be firing over the edge of the corps, but not near any of the hospital like that idiot in Twenty-Three. And they would be higher off the ground by at least a thousand feet. The damage should be minimal.

“Forty-Two, prepare to engage,” he said over the intercom. “Target in three, two, one…”

Attenrenalslar cursed as the trailing command ship exploded and began moving his Lamprey from side to side, hoping to throw off the aim of those demon-cursed weapons.

The vehicle that had engaged the command ship had already disappeared behind one of the small mountains that dotted this plain and he was sure the instruments had detected another for a moment. But deciphering the cursed technology of the Alldenata was a task for those who had studied it; most of the icons were unfamiliar to him.

“Come out, though,” he whispered, caressing a weapons control that was targeted on the distant hillock. “Come out little abat and see what Attenrenalslar has in store for you…”

“Fucker’s maneuvering, Colonel,” Sergeant Pritchett called. The gunner turned the SheVa gun to full auto as the Lamprey came in sight and clamped down on the firing circuit. “Solution coming up.”

Millimeter wave radar on the side of the gun “painted” the target, comparing it to the electronic pictures it stored of various Posleen equipment. The onboard computer determined that, yes, this was a lander and the lack of return from an “Identify, Friend or Foe” query indicated that, yes, this was a valid target. It then ran a laser down the barrel, determining that it was in good condition to fire and another on the outside determining that all the support structures that were supposed to be supporting were in fact functioning. Last it computed barrel distortion, number of rounds fired through the barrel, temperature of the air and a myriad of other variables to arrive at an adequate firing solution.

It also noted in passing that the target was slowly maneuvering. But when the distance to target is less than ten kilometers and the round is traveling at twenty-five hundred meters per second, that is less than four seconds of movement on the part of the target. And it was a biiiig target.

“Fuscirto uut,” Attenrenalslar snarled. “There are two.” It was unlikely that the secondary weapons would scratch that thing; it was the size of a oolt’pos. But he tried to slew the ship to get a plasma cannon to bear.

“On the way!” Pritchett called as the entire world went red.

The gun used more energy in one shot than a brigade of armor and although the gun was heavily reinforced and the platform was the size of an oil rig, it still shook the entire beast like a terrier shaking a rat.

But before the last rumble had faded away, Darden had thrown the monster in reverse and Pritchett was ensuring the automatic loading sequence was progressing properly.

“Target!” Colonel Wagoner said with a note of satisfaction. “Now that is what I call laying tube.” Maybe he could get used to being a tank commander again after all.

Mike grinned inside his armor as a wash of over-pressure blasted Posleen off the ridgeline. “Cool. Now if we could just get a little of that over by Slight.”

The battalion had covered the thousand meters to the heights in just under sixty seconds, long enough for the Posleen landers to react and be neutralized in turn by the SheVa guns Horner had called up. There had been several thousand Posleen in the pocket. Most of them were still dazed from the artillery fire, but quite a few had put up a struggle. None had survived.

Now the Posleen were just below the ridgeline, at the point called the “military crest.” The wash of nuclear fire had probably opened up a fair sized hole in the Posleen on the height, so it was undoubtedly time for the ACS to earn their pay. Mike tapped a control and the entire battalion took one leap to the edge of the natural parapet. They probably weren’t going any farther and with the way the ridge was shaped it wouldn’t even be necessary to dig in. After ensuring that that was the case, he elevated his main gun and took a peek through the sensor system.

“Oh, shit,” Mike whispered. At the first view of the conditions in the valley beyond, his readouts had gone blood red and he just had to clear the visor to see what was really there as the entire battalion opened fire.

From his perch Horner had been able to see some of the forces beyond the ridge, but the view from the ACS made his belly clench; as far as the eye could see the ground was a seething mass of Posleen. Earlier estimates had been something on the order of four million; assuming the density that they saw there and continuing only four miles out of sight Little Nag was calculating it at over for-ty million.

“We can’t do this, we can’t do this…” Mike heard. The circuit was open to the entire battalion and he was picking up bits and snatches of conversation. The suits were protected by the cover of the top of the hill, with only their guns elevated above the crest. But a plasma cannon or hypervelocity missile fired from the far side of the other valley could tear through the ground and take them out with just a couple of hits. For that matter, the number of Posleen meant that some of them were bound to make it through the fire, if for no other reason than that others were masking them. And once the Posleen got to hand-to-hand range, their boma blades could get through the armor. Not to mention point-blank cannon and railgun fire.

“Steady down,” Mike said. He’d turned off the unpleasant view and had pulled up the schematics again. They were saying the same thing, but the view wasn’t so visceral. “Steady down, keep your barrels low and maintain fire dispersion.” He glanced at his readouts and chuckled. “The good news is that even we can’t miss.” Because of the automation of the systems and the fact that the ACS was designed to “spew” fire, it was an article of faith among the conventional forces that they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.

“Major,” said Captain Holder. “We’re getting heavily flanked to the north. It’s not like they’re meaning to do it, but that’s where they’re being pushed.”

“I’m aware of that, Captain,” O’Neal said calmly. The numbers on Bravo did not look good. They had twice the separation, which meant half the fire pressure, that the rest of the battalion did. And in the face of forty million Posleen the main battalion’s fire lanes seemed woefully inadequate. For that matter, Bravo had already expended forty percent of their onboard ammo. “Duncan, get all available fire in front of Bravo Company.”

“What about us, sir?” asked Captain Holder.

“Well,” Mike answered, “we’re just going to have to kill all these Posleen by our own selves.”

“We’re in the right place, though,” Mike whispered to himself. Shelly, correctly, didn’t transmit the mutterings. “We’ve got the heights, we’ve got the position, one flank, at least, is secure. We can do this. All we have to do is hang on.”

The majority of the Posleen directly in front of Alpha and Charlie company for a half kilometer or so had been killed by the explosion of the second lander. But that dead zone was quickly being filled up by the tremendous pressure from the rear. The Posleen, as normal, were coming on fast, hard and blind, charging right into the fire. But this time there were so many of them it might just work.

Mike had gamed out scenarios just about this bad and “won.” That is, some personnel survived and they held on long enough that the follow-on forces were able to get into position. But in this case he had no artillery support and the battalion was just too spread out. It didn’t take him long to calculate their odds of survival.

“Slim to none,” he muttered.

“Battalion,” he called. “All units lay down interlocking fire with your sharpshooters concentrating on the God Kings. Bravo, you need to tuck your corner in a little. All Reapers from all companies to the corner and dig in. All medics and technicians just became ammo runners; start ferrying ammo and power packs. And bring up the Reapers flechette cannons; I think this is going to end up being some close-in work.” He worked his dip and spat as the first hypervelocity missile flew overhead. Over the past five years he swore he’d used up his entire fund of motivating things to say at moments like this. “I can’t get my boots off to count on my toes, but if we win this one I do believe it will be one for the record books.”