Orostan snarled as artillery started to land on the hill. The thick deciduous and white pine secondary growth should have concealed their movements, but the fire had followed closely on another call from the human reconnaissance team. Now it seemed to be closing in on his more elite forces and that was not to be tolerated.
"I am getting tired of these insufferable humans," the oolt'ondai snapped. The team was also slipping out of their sensor range, clearly escaping over the hilltop beyond even as the pincer movement appeared to be closing on them.
Cholosta'an flapped his crest with a great deal more resignation. "Artillery happens. I don't like it, but I have yet to find a battle where the humans don't use it."
"Well, these will not for much longer," the oolt'ondai replied, yanking a weapon up from around his feet.
The gun looked not dissimilar to the shotguns of Cholosta'an's oolt'os. However, when the oolt'ondai fired it was clearly different. For one thing, since the humans had dropped over the back side of the hill and were under cover from direct fire, he would not have been able to hit them. But the senior Kessentai did not seem to be trying to, rather firing into their general vicinity. Another change was that the round was clearly visible, travelling at relatively low speed to drop into the distant white pine and hardwood forest. The last difference was that there was no apparent effect except a slight flicker in the tenar's sensors.
"What was that?" Cholosta'an asked warily.
"A little present Tulo'stenaloor cooked up," Orostan said. "Now to see if it worked."
Nichols peered through the mountain laurels, trying to get a clear shot at the new Posleen force coming around the shoulder of the far ridge. The good news was that his position, hunkered down under two granite outcroppings and surrounded by mountain laurel, was both well concealed and protected from most fire. But the problem was that he would be firing through heavy vegetation. Although the .50 caliber rounds were unusually massive, they nonetheless tended to tumble and stray off course if they hit a branch. So it was critical to get a clear shot. And that didn't seem likely. But when he saw the distant God King lift a weapon and fire something at the hill, he thought he could almost take the shot.
Then his sniper scope went black.
"Sarge," he whispered into his radio. "What the hell just happened? My scope just went blank." There was no immediate reply and he noticed that there was no sound from his earbuds, not even the usual background hiss of the frequency carrier. "What the fuck?"
He turned around and slid down the hill towards where the team had assembled. He was taking rear-end Charlie again, but the position had been good so it was no big deal. But now, with his scope down, he was going to need some help. He hit the diagnostic button on the side as he slid but nothing lit up. It was as dead as a doornail.
The area under the white pines was still fairly dark here on the west side of the ridge and this early in the morning so he flipped down his helmet visor and nearly slammed into a tree in the utter darkness.
"Sergeant Major?!" he yelled.
Mosovich slapped the diagnostic box on his Land Warrior suit and looked up. "Sister Mary?"
"I got nothin', sergeant major," she whispered. None of the communications gear was functioning and even some of the medical devices were not responding.
"Dump anything that doesn't work," he said, slamming his helmet into a tree. "Shit!"
"We're golden, Jake," Mueller said easily. "We can do this."
"We can't call for fire!" the team leader snapped back as Nichols slid to a stop. The team was gathered on a reasonably flat spot that was probably another one of the ubiquitous logging roads from the 1920s and '30s. "Nichols, you down?"
"Everything, Sergeant Major," the sniper said, furiously starting to change out the batteries on the sniper scope.
"That probably won't help," Sister Mary said. "I already tried on the commo gear."
"Did you see anything unusual?" Mosovich asked.
"Yeah," Nichols said, looking at the scope and shaking his head. "That group that was coming around the side of the ridge. One of the God Kings fired something, it looked like a grenade. I thought I was done, but there wasn't an explosion, just my scope going dead."
"EMP," Sister Mary said. "Unbelievable."
"Yep," Mosovich replied. "Just fucking duckey."
"EM-what?" Nichols asked.
"EMP," Mueller answered, beginning to strip his Land Warrior suit. "Electo-fucking-Magnetic-motherfucking-Pulse."
"Yep," Mosovich said again. "Nichols, might as well shitcan that scope. And your helmet systems; keep the helmet, and all the other electronic gear. None of it's going to work now."
"How in the hell did they do that?" he asked, starting to dismount the scope. "And what is electro-magnetic Mfing pulse?"
"It's kind of like a big electro-magnet," Sister Mary answered, starting to dig all the commo out of her rucksack. "It scrambles electronics, completely shuts down anything with a microchip in it. Most military stuff used to be partially hardened, but I guess since the Posleen weren't using anything that generated EMPs they backed off on that."
"The suits were supposed to be," Mosovich said. "Same with the scopes. My guess is that it was just a mother of an EMP burst." He looked over at Nichols, who had nearly finished unbolting the scope. It was not designed to be removed in the field and acted like it. "Can you shoot that mother without a scope?"
"I have," Nichols said, yanking off the last recalcitrant bolt and, just for the fun of it, wacking the $50,000 anchor into a tree. "There's a ladder sight and a ghost ring. I shot with both of them in sniper school." He paused. "But sniper school was a long damned time ago."
"Okay, gather up whatever you're going to carry," Mosovich said, flipping the last piece of nonfunctioning electronics away into the brush and hefting his rucksack. "Just because we got hit doesn't mean the Posties slowed down. So we need to get a move on." Mosovich moved to flip up the map on his visor and frowned when he realized he didn't have a paper backup.
"AID," the sergeant major said, wondering if the Galactic technology had survived. "Do you have maps for this area?"
"Yes, Sergeant Major," the light soprano of the system answered, bringing up a local map as a hologram. The map was three dimensional, which the Land Warrior suit could only do with difficulty, and Mosovich wondered for a moment if the AID was jealous of how much more he used the human systems.
"Okay," he said, pointing to the faintly glowing dot on the hillside that was the team. "We're about a klick and a half from the Soque, if the ground was flat. But it's practically vertical instead. So we get down this hill fast. Unless the Posleen react really fast we should be able to make it across 197 before they get there."
"And if they are there already?" Nichols asked.
"We cross that stream when we come to it," Mueller growled.
Orostan grunted as it became clear that the artillery both at his location and in the gap had ended. "It appears to have worked."
"Yes," Cholosta'an said. "But they still have slipped away," he added, gesturing at the sensors.
"There are oolt moving to the far road," Orostan said with a shrug. "Sooner or later we will box them and without communications they will not be able to call for fire on us. Then we will finish them once and for all."
Mosovich frowned as he caught another tree to keep from falling down the mountain. "AID, can you get a communication back to the corps?"
There was a pause that did not seem to be entirely for effect and the AID answered. "I can, Sergeant Major. The Posleen will be aware that you are communicating."
"Will they be able to find our location?" he asked. "Or decipher it? I assume it will be encrypted."
Again there was a pause. "I calculate a less than one tenth of a percent chance that they will be able to decipher it while in the GalTech net. There is no chance that they will be able to physically localize you. However, I do not have secure entry into the military communications system; all AIDs were locked out of it after the 10th Corps blue-blue event. I can only contact the corps by standard land-line. That system is not only non-secure, it has occasionally been hacked by the Posleen. The alternative is contacting someone in the corps chain-of-command and having them set up secure communications. There is a secure land-line system, but AIDs do not have standard access to it so I can't just connect."
"Why don't I like that option?" Mosovich said quietly.
"The first person in the corps chain of command with AID access is the Continental Army Commander."
Jack Horner balanced his cheek on one closed fist as he watched the hologram. The speaker was a spare man with dark eyes. Dark pupils, dark irises and dark circles. In better days the Continental Army Commander and the commander of the Irmansul Fleet Strike Force had spent some good times together. At this point both realized that there were no more good times. That was not, however, something that they mentioned in anything other than private e-mails. Such as this one.
"With the 'unfortunate' loss of Admiral Chen and his replacement by Fleet Admiral Wright we might get some movement," the speaker said. He turned to the side and picked up a piece of paper. "To give you an idea of how precisely useless it is to have us sitting here, our total actions on Irmansul for the last month were forty patrol-sized actions against unbonded, and in most cases unweaponed, normals. This is what our mutual amie would call 'fucking bullshit.' Not that I would use such language about our benefactors the Darhel. Wright has at least allowed the detachment of a few 'scouting' forces. And I am told that the armor team on Titan Base has made some breakthroughs, so there may be help available from that quarter."
The speaker spat out an untranslatable French epithet that had something to do with donkeys. "My own forces realize that there is nothing for which to return. However, we strain at the leash nonetheless. Yes, there are still Posleen on this planet. There are now and probably always will be; there are too many wilderness areas to eliminate them all and they are in the food chain at this point. But they can be 'managed' by a small police force and the killersats. The Fleet won the last action decisively and with small loss, but if Earth is totally lost it will be for nothing. We must return and we must return soon. And if the Darhel do not release us, soon, we will take that signal honor upon ourselves.
"No matter what."
"Crenaus, out."
Horner smiled like a tiger as the image winked off. It had been clear to him from almost the First Contact by the Galactics that the Darhel were playing their own game. And that the survival of the human race was, at best, incidental to it. However, it was not until fairly recently that he realized the extent to which the Darhel were inimical to the concept of Earth surviving as a functional planet. The Galactic society was very old, very stable and, above all, very stagnant. The humans were more than just physically dangerous; the philosophies, thoughts, processes and methods that they would bring with them would be a deathblow to the Galactic society, a society that the Darhel controlled absolutely. Just the concept of democracy, true, unfettered democracy, and human rights, would in all likelihood destroy the Galactic Federation if they were allowed free rein. Thus it was imperative that the human race be turned into a non-threat.
He had begin to wonder lately why, exactly, the Darhel had waited until practically the last minute, only five years before the invasion, to contact the humans. There were a thousand and one hints that they knew about Earth long before that, from the prepared medicines to the knowledge of all world languages. Some of it was certainly "fear"; the Galactic aliens were nonviolent and nonexpansionistic and the humans were anything but.
General Taylor, the previous High Commander, had wondered some of those things aloud. Just before he was assassinated by "Earth First" terrorists. Of course, five senior Darhel were killed in that spasm of violence, so suggesting it was the Darhel assumed that they were willing to cover their actions by killing five of their own. And it also assumed that the Darhel could kill, period. There were indications that in fact they could not even order killing, much less kill someone themselves.
But that didn't mean that Jim Taylor had gone down to terrorists, either.
It might all be paranoid delusion, but the arguments for not redeploying the Expeditionary Forces were becoming more and more specious. All the arguments were becoming more specious. And even if the EFs left Irmansul orbit at this moment, the only major country with any continuity left was the U.S.; everyone else was for all practical purposes gone. India had some significant hold-out areas and Europe as well. But the fractions that existed there were insignificant compared to the Cumberland basin.
What were the Darhel waiting for? The Americans to lose too?
His AID chimed a priority message and he regarded it balefully for a moment. The device was Galactic provided. And it was more likely than not that the Darhel could read anything sent over one, such as the last message from General Crenaus. Which Crenaus knew as well as he did. So had they already taken the hint, that the message was directed as much at them as at him? He smiled again, a sure sign of displeasure, and tapped the device to answer the call.
"Incoming message from Sergeant Major Jacob Mosovich, Fleet Strike Reconnaissance."
Horner vaguely recognized the name; Mosovich was one of the old hands who had been transferred to Fleet when they swallowed the U.S. Special Operations Command. He also vaguely recalled that Mosovich was the team leader of the LRRPs at 12th Army so he was probably the team leader sent out against the globe that had landed opposite Rabun Gap. But that didn't explain why the sergeant major was calling him directly. "Put it through."
"General Horner, this is Sergeant Major Mosovich," Jake said.
"Go ahead, Sergeant Major," the general said. "What is the reason for the call?"
"Sir, we just got hit with an EMP round by the Posleen and you're just about the only person we can talk to."
Horner rocked back and smiled broadly. "Better and better. From that globe down in Georgia?"
"Yes, sir," the sergeant major replied. "These guys aren't acting like Posleen at all, sir. They've got patrols on all the roads, real honest to God patrols, they're taking out sensors, they're using some half-way decent tactics from time to time, they seem to have expected us personally and now they are all over our asses. And using some sort of EMP round to take out our Land Warrior suits and communications."
"What's your status at present, Sergeant Major?" the general asked, waving at the AID to bring up a map.
"We've temporarily broken contact, sir, and we're trying to put some distance between us and the main force. We hope to be able to stay out of contact, but I won't put money on it. The primary mission is blown, though, sir."
Horner looked at the map and smiled again, tightly. He'd driven through that area a couple of times in better days and the terrain the team was entering really didn't favor humans all that much. "Looks like it's getting ready to flatten out, Sergeant Major. I'd send a flying team of ACS down there if I had anything to give you."
"Oh, we'll make it out, sir," Mosovich answered. "But we do need to talk to our artillery folk. And we can't at present."
Horner gave an unseen nod to the distant team. "AID, connect directly to secure communications and get the sergeant major back in touch with his artillery, will you?"
"Yes, sir," the device answered.
"Will that be all, Sergeant Major?" Horner asked.
"Yes, sir. Thank you."
"Well, good luck," the general said. "I've made a note that I want to see your raw debrief. But that can wait until later. Make tracks."
"Roger that, General. Mosovich out."
Ryan looked up as the planning officer came in the Tactical Operations Center.
"It looks like they're gone, Major," the PO said.
"I sincerely disagree, Colonel," the engineer replied. "We lost a sensor at the same time. It looks like they used something along the lines of an EMP to take out their communications. Which means they might or might not be out there someplace. Their intention was to cross the Soque and swing west of Batesville. So I have the arty laid in to cover that movement."
"That's the point," the planning officer snapped. "That artillery is laid in there 'covering' what is probably a terminated team. We need to talk about retasking."
"We can 'retask' when we're sure they are gone," Ryan snarled. "Until then the damn artillery can just stay pointed. It's not like it's going to wear out the tubes or the personnel to stay up."
He snatched up the buzzing secure phone and snarled: "What?"
"Stand by for connection to Continental Army Command," an electronic voice chirped.
"You might want to tell the commander we have an incoming from CONARC," Ryan said to the planning officer.
The lieutenant colonel gave the major another look and left the room as the tone on the line changed.
"This is the Office of the Continental Army Commander," a light soprano said. "Stand by for direct transfer to Sergeant Major Jacob Mosovich. All connections on this system are fully secured. A directive has been issued for the full debrief of the sergeant major and his team to be forwarded to the attention of the Continental Army Commander. Stand by for transfer."
"Bloody hell," Ryan said with a chuckle.
"That you, Ryan?" Mosovich asked.
"Good to hear from you, Sergeant Major," the major said with a laugh.
"Yeah, I can imagine what was being said. Well, the report of my demise was exaggerated. As usual."
Ryan laughed as the corps commander strode into the TOC. "Well, Sergeant Major, we're set up at three or four points on 197. I'll list 'em out for you and you can get ready to call."
"Gotcha," Mosovich said. "Glad to be back. I've got to slither down this damned mountain now."
"I'll be standing by," Ryan said. "That was Mosovich, sir," he continued, turning to the corps commander. "He's using his AID to bounce through CONARC's AID and then into the secure phone net."
"So it wasn't CONARC calling?" General Bernard asked.
"Not directly, sir," Ryan agreed. "But there is a directive to send Mosovich's full debrief to him, direct and personal. I get the feeling he wants to know what the hell is going on out there."
"The directive to take a look at the globe came from Army," the S-2 said. "But it looked like a rephrase of CONARC."
"Well, I guess if General Horner is going to get his debrief we'll just have to get the team back, won't we?" General Bernard asked tightly. "Is there anything we've missed?"
"We could try to send a flying column out of Unicoi Gap," the planning officer said. "We've got a battalion of mech up there. There's no report of heavy Posleen presence near Helen. If they didn't run into one of these heavy patrols they could, possibly, make it to Sautee or so. South of Sautee there's indications of the outer forces of this globe landing."
"Send a battalion in in support," Bernard said. "And have them send out a company. Tell them to move down to the vicinity of Helen, get in a good hide and stand by for further orders."
"I'll get on it, sir," the planning officer said, heading over to the operations side.
"I hope I haven't just sent out a forlorn hope," Bernard commented.
"Well, we already did that, sir," Ryan said, looking at the map. "The question is whether we can get them back."
Mosovich looked down the hill and shook his head. There was a very steep, very high road cut then the road, which was clear at the moment, then another cut down to the river, then the river and on the far side a short bank and dense underbrush. The best bet, again, would be to go down the hill fast, but that would mean doing a rappel. The distance wasn't far enough for their static rappel systems to engage effectively. And they didn't have a rope that was long enough to loop around a tree. So when they got down, the rope would dangle there as a marker. So they'd have to take it in stages.
"Mueller, rope," he hissed, pulling on heavy leather gloves.
"Gotcha," Mueller said, pulling the line out of his rucksack and shaking it out. The Army green line was the sort of stuff to make a serious climber blanch, simple braided nylon with a very high stretch rate and rather high bulk, but it had a number of features in its favor. One of them was that when doubled over you could "hand rappel" if the slope wasn't absolutely sheer. "Good" climbing ropes were much thinner than the green line and had smoother outer layers. The benefit of the first was reduced bulk and the benefit of the second was reduced wear from "rubbing." But there was no way anyone could slow themselves going down a slope with "good" line without using, at the least, a "figure-eight" rig, and a ladder rig was better. So, using the "bad" green line, the team would not have to stop and get full climbing gear out. Just hold on and hope for the best.
Mueller flipped the rope around a fairly well rooted hickory and slithered both ends so that they were even. If they had any sense at all they would have quick knotted it as well; if anyone lost one of the doubled ropes they would be holding thin air, but sometimes quick knots got stuck and while if the rope slipped one of them might die, if the rope got spotted all of them probably would.
"Me first," Mosovich said, picking the rope up and slipping it under his thigh.
"Let me go," Mueller said. "I'm the heaviest; it'll be the best test."
"Nope," Mosovich said with a chuckle. "We're going in order of weight. I want as many of us as possible to make it down. You go last. And carry the Barrettt."
"Screw you, Jake," Mueller growled. He put one hand on the rope. "Just remember who's at the top with the knife."
"I will," the sergeant major said. He leaned back and started to walk backwards down the slope.
Although he probably could have gotten away with a simple "hand" rappel, holding onto the rope with both hands, Mosovich had set up a "body" rappel with the rope run between his thighs and up over his shoulder. It was much safer and more controllable and he was, frankly, getting a little tired of living on the edge. As it was, it worked well. He went down the slope about seventy feet, well short of the end of the rope and better than two thirds of the way to the road, and found a sort of ledge where a vein of quartz created a shelf. There was just enough room to stand with relative ease. Mountain laurels grew all around it so there was some concealment, and another largish tree jutted out of the soil-covered cliff. This tree wasn't quite as robust as the one Mueller had secured the rope to above and was on a worse slope, but beggars can't be choosers.
Sister Mary came next, fast and smoothly. They had been training together for nearly six months, but she had come with mountain climbing experience from somewhere and she showed it now. She actually bounded down the slope, something Mosovic preferred not to do when on a body rappel, and still managed not to dislodge much in the way of debris. She hit the ledge a bit hard—the quartz was friable and rotten—and dislodged a fairly large rock. But it hit in the mud of the drainage ditch along the road and disappeared into the muck; no harm done.
Next came Nichols, who hadn't had any mountaineering experience before joining the LRRPs. He took the slope very carefully, both moving slowly and making more of a trace than Mosovich or Sister Mary. But he made it, one-hundred-fifty-pound rucksack and all, and shuffled sideways to make room for the next team member, very carefully not looking at the straight drop to the roadbed below.
Instead of coming down, Mueller pulled the rope up. It took Mosovich a second to figure out what he was doing, but when the Barrett and the master sergeant's rucksack came down the slope it was fairly obvious. Mueller followed them in rapid succession, dislodging another rock when he hit.
"I dunno, Jake," Mueller said, looking at the best available tree. It was a twisted white pine that was growing out of the juncture of another decaying quartz vein and the schist it was intruded into, which was weaker.
"I'll take it," Mosovich said, throwing the rope over his shoulder. "Sister, on rappel."
"Okay," Sister Mary said without demur. If the sergeant major said he could hold the rope, he would hold the rope. She took it and slipped it around her body. "I'm going to cross right away."
"Oh, yeah," Mosovich agreed. "And hit the stream. But wait there."
"Roger," she said, dropping over the cliff. Her descent, again, was fast and smooth. When she hit the road she crossed quickly, grabbed one of the saplings on the edge of the bank and dropped out of sight into the streambed.
"Nichols," Mosovich said. "And take the Barrett. Mueller, gimme a hand."
Both of them bracing were able to support Nichols and his massive load. The weight caused the sniper to drop far faster than he had probably preferrred, but he made it to the road and crossed quickly, dropping out of sight on the far side. There was a faint cry that reached their perch over the chuckle of the river and the two NCOs traded glances and a shrug.
"You sure you can support me, Jake?" Mueller asked. "I could go last."
"Sorry man, I'd rather trust myself," Mosovich said. "I can handle it. 'He ain't heavy . . .' "
"Right," said Mueller with a laugh. He dropped over the side of the ledge, but was careful to catch his weight on as many footholds as he could find in the eroded cliff. At the bottom he threw the rope aside and darted across the road.
Which left only Mosovich. Jake looked at the tree he was supposed to depend upon, the eroded hillside and the woods across the way. "What a screwed up situation," he muttered. Then he coiled up the rope, tucked it in his rucksack, turned around and dropped off the ledge.
The technique was another picked up in too many years of risking his life. On a cliff like this, with outcroppings, brush and trees sticking out all over, it was barely possible to slow yourself by catching various items on the way down. It was not a matter of stopping, that was going to happen suddenly at the bottom, but just slowing yourself enough that you didn't break anything.
It was not the sort of technique that anyone but mountain troops used, and then only in extremis, because it was so stupidly dangerous. But, Mosovich thought, that's my life all over. There were two things uppermost in his mind on the short descent. One was that if he dug in too hard, it would leave a path a blind normal would notice. So he couldn't slow himself the way he would have preferred, placing both hands and feet into the slope and "dragging down." The other thing that was uppermost in his mind was that, at the speed he was going, if one of these damned white pine saplings jammed him in the groin there weren't going to be any more little Mosoviches.
The cliff flattened out a bit at the bottom from runoff and caught one foot sending him into a backwards roll. He tucked into it and fetched up, hard, against a rock fallen at some previous time. But all the pieces were in place and nothing appeared to be broken. So it was clearly time to cross the road.
He trotted across and grabbed one of the saplings on the edge to swing down on. He was going to drop directly into the streambed and that was damned near as dangerous as going down the slope; the rounded and slimy rocks of the stream would turn an ankle sideways in a heartbeat and with all the gear they were carrying that would mean a broken tibia just as fast.
He slipped down the slope and looked at the team huddled against the streambank. "Everybody golden?"
"No," Nichols gasped out.
"He broke both ankles jumping off the bank, smaj," Sister Mary said, putting a splint in place.
"Well, Stanley," said Mueller leaning back until his head was in the stream. "Isn't this a fine mess you've gotten us into."