For Tommy it felt like being repeatedly hit by a giant hand while lying face down on a trampoline. The ground came up and slapped him up in the air, then he got slapped down again and up and down and up and down. It was not painful so much as extremely disheartening; he had never felt so completely out of control. He might survive a nuclear blast, was apparently going to survive this one, but he would never, ever, underestimate the power of one again.
After one more lift in the air, which he later surmised was the rising mushroom cloud, he dropped to the ground in a swirl of dust, totally blind.
There was no vision possible; virtually every single sensor was off-line from the chaos around him. His external temperature sensors showed an incredible two thousand degrees Celsius and he had to wonder what in the hell was keeping him alive until he saw the power gauge on his suit visibly dropping. The suits were able to keep a person alive in conditions that many considered flatly impossible, but it was at the cost of using nearly as much power as was being thrown at them.
Finally the external conditions stabilized enough that he could discern items around him and beacons started coming up. As they did, so did His Master's Voice.
Mike bounded to his feet as the sensors started to go live. "Up and at 'em!" he called. "What the hell are you doing on your faces? We've got Posleen to kill! Reapers, we've still got Lampreys coming in to the west! All units, form perimeter on the remaining shuttle and KEEP IT ALIVE."
He yanked Stewart to his feet and started to charge to the north.
"The good news," Stewart said, "is that this has cleared off the welcoming party."
"The bad news is that we're out half our power," Duncan noted, shifting over a battalion power graph. "And we just used up a day's worth in that one event."
"And there will be more to come," Mike noted. "Come to Papa, baby. Bring it right into the cloud. Bring it in fast and hard."
"These things aren't rated to fly through a thousand-degree mushroom cloud, Major," Duncan pointed out.
"No, but the power packs will survive."
The second shuttle, on orders, entered the still growing mushroom cloud. The shuttles were armored, but not well enough to survive that impact and it quickly started to fly apart, its load of much more heavily armored power packs and ammo boxes scattering at random across the LZ. Inevitably, accidents happened.
McEvoy let out a yell of anger as he was slammed in the back by a heavy weight. Rolling on his side, he looked at the antimatter pack that had hit him in the back and let out another yell of fear.
"Now that was elegant," Sunday said.
"Where in the Hell did that come from?" the Reaper said, getting to his feet and backing away from it as if it were a giant spider. Or a potentially lethal nuclear weapon.
"Oh, pick it up, you big baby," the lieutenant said with a grin in his voice. "The Old Man flew the shuttle into the mushroom cloud. That masked it from fire—even the Posleen can't see through one of those—and dropped the power packs at the same time."
"That's nuts!" Blatt said, trotting past. "I keep telling everybody, the Old Man is nuts!"
"He's crazy all right," Sunday said. "Crazy like a fox. Those things are armored against point-blank plasma fire; they weren't going to explode from a little accident like that. Now never mind about the pack, although you might want to step away from it a bit. Reapers, drop your loads and take my mark: The Bear's Comin' O'er the Mountain."
"We've got three surviving lances," Duncan noted. "Do we use them?"
"Not immediately," O'Neal said. "What happened to the other one?"
"The launcher sympathetically detonated," Stewart answered. "It's headed for Atlanta."
"I'll have to bring that up with the manufacturing clan," O'Neal said seriously. "A little thing like a two-hundred-kiloton explosion shouldn't have damaged them!"
"Somehow I suspect you will," Stewart laughed. "But why are we saving them? We've got Lampreys on the way in."
"Lampreys can't point their anti-ship weaponry down," Mike pointed out. "We'll save them for C-Decs."
"Most of the packs are gathered," Duncan noted. "Some of them were gathered by Reapers, though, and they are preparing to receive cavalry."
"Have them deployed to the rifle units in jig time," Mike snapped. "Everyone but the Reapers make a run for the Wall. Reapers can follow but they need to be prepared to engage the big boys."
"It's moments like this that I live for," Blatt said as the rest of the battalion took off at a dead run.
"We're going, we're going," McEvoy said.
"Not fast enough, in my opinion," the specialist noted.
"We still need to recover the weapons pack," Sunday said. "We're going to need those special weapons once we get in place."
"Sir, I think they're toast," McEvoy replied. "The nearest pack is halfway up Oakey Mountain; they don't have our systems keeping them close to home in a blast."
"Fuck me," Tommy noted. "Okay, we'll pick 'em up later."
"Well, one of them seems to have gotten blown to the other side of Black Rock Mountain, sir," Blatt said. "We might be able to recover that someday."
"Your job, Blatt," Sunday said. "As soon as we get in place."
"You're joking, right?" the Reaper asked.
"Negative," the lieutenant replied. "Once we deal with the first wave of landers, we're useless without those mortars and shot-cannons. Recovering them is our number two priority. The number one being engaging landers."
"Speaking of which," McEvoy said as the first Lamprey crested the shoulder of Black Rock Mountain.
"Indeed," Tommy said, targeting one of the secondaries on the side. "Engage."
The long-barreled M-283 grav-cannons had additional acceleration ability over standard systems. In addition, the rounds contained an antimatter driven inertial accelerator and an antimatter "rocket" system similar to that used in the antimatter lances and Space Falcon fighters.
Thus the 75-millimeter round was accelerated to over a thousand kilometers per second by the time it struck the wall of the ship.
To survive the flight to the ship the round needed to be made of sturdy stuff and it was, a composite of gadolinium and monomolecular iron with a carbon ablative coating. But when one struck the armor of the Lamprey, it turned into an expanding hemisphere of boiling white plasma; even the enormous energy of one of the penetrator rounds was no match for Posleen armor.
Of one round.
But there were twelve Reapers firing at the Lamprey, pounding five rounds per second into a contact patch the size of a human hand.
In addition, the aiming system on the penetrators was far more effective. It designated a particular point on the side of the lander, chosen from a database of lander weaknesses, and directed all the weapons in the area to fire on that point.
Thus, when the twelve Reapers paused and opened fire, twelve hundred rounds hit a single weapons pod on the side of the Lamprey, boring a hole into the interior and detonating the feed mechanism of the plasma gun. The rest began flailing around the interior.
As silver and red fire belched out of its side, the lander attempted to escape, reversing course and rotating its configuration to move the damaged portion away from the fire. But the God King at the controls must not have been one of their more elite pilots, as he proved by ramming the ship into the flank of Black Rock mountain just south of the radio tower.
The other Lamprey had engaged the main body of the battalion, and was now heading to the southwest and the Wall in long, swooping strides. But seeing the fire that had taken down its companion, the ship changed targets and began a careful manual rotation to reduce its damage.
"Begin evasive movement," the lieutenant said, putting orders to words as he started a slow trot to the southeast.
The manual fire from the Lampreys was, fortunately, not as accurate as their automatic fire. But it was heavy; the side of the lander sported over twelve medium weapons emplacements. So the ground around the Reapers was torn by fire as they began their move. And some of it was on target.
"Fuck me," Blatt said softly as a line of craters from a heavy plasma gun walked across the ground and onto his position. He attempted to dodge them but with all the other fire there was no place to run.
"Shit," McEvoy said as Blatt's suit of armor came apart in a ball of silver fire. "Motherfucker!"
"We're not getting this one," Sunday said angrily. The rounds were destroying many of the surface emplacements and putting pockmarks all over the face of the Lamprey but with it rotating as it was there was no way to bore into it. And the fire was getting heavier.
"What I wouldn't do for a SheVa gun about now," Tommy muttered.
SheVa Nine, or Bun-Bun as its crew called it, was still faintly smoking when the first blimp appeared over the horizon.
SheVas were the sort of bastard weapon that only occur in the midst of really terrible wars. Early on in the battles against the Posleen one of humanity's greatest weaknesses was the inability to destroy the Posleen ships when they were used for close support of the alien infantry. The event was fortunately rare—the Posleen were not good at combined arms—but when it occurred it was devastating. Many weapons systems were created to try to destroy the Posleen landers, but with the exception of the Galactic-crafted heavy weapons, which were in short supply, only one system had proven effective. And it was monstrous in every meaning of the word.
During the fighting around Fredericksburg the battleship North Carolina had managed to tag a Posleen lander with its sixteen-inch guns and when nine sixteen-inch rounds hit, the alien ship more or less disappeared. So, obviously, sixteen-inch rounds would work. But there were many problems associated with that simple fact. The first was that battleship turrets were not designed for antiaircraft work; the shot had been luck as much as skill and improvisation. The second was that the engagement envelope, how high and far the guns would reach, was very small. The third was that battleships had a very hard time getting to, say, Knoxville, Tennessee.
The answer was to create a new class of guns, superficially similar to the battleship guns. They were sixteen inches in diameter but at that point the resemblance stopped. Like modern tank guns, they were smoothbore and very high velocity. The guns used an electroplasma propellant, extended barrels and secondary firing chambers to accelerate a depleted uranium dart as thick as a treetrunk to twenty-five-hundred meters per second. Firing a single penetrator round, the weapon designed to destroy a Posleen lander, was the recoil equivalent of firing six standard battleship cannons.
Because of the enormous energies involved, a tremendous recoil system had to be designed including shock absorbers the size of small submarines. While it was, relatively, easy to install in the few fixed fortifications that received the guns, the real necessity was for a mobile gun platform.
Most development groups despaired when faced with the challenge, but the Shenandoah Valley Industrial Planning Commission simply accepted that the platform had to be larger than anyone was willing to admit. Thus was born the SheVa gun.
SheVas were four-hundred feet long and three hundred wide, with huge tracks surmounted by a "turret" that looked like a metal factory building. At the rear, concealed in the turret, was a heavily armored magazine for its eight main gun rounds, each of which looked like a cross between a rifle cartridge and an ICBM. The cantilevered gun, massive against any other backdrop, stuck out of the turret like a giant telescope and was so small in comparison it looked like an accidental add-on.
The gun consisted of three main portions, the gun itself and its supporting structures, the monstrous "weather shield" turret that created the gun room, and the drive system.
The gun was a two-hundred-foot-long, multi-chambered "Bull" gun. The basic propellant was an electro-plasma system that used an electrical charge to excite material and provide propulsion far beyond that available with any normal chemical propellant. However, due to power drop-off over distance, the barrel had secondary firing chambers down its side that added their own propulsion to the gigantic projectile. The combination permitted penetrator rounds, discarding sabot rounds with an outer disposable-plastic "sabot" and an inner uranium penetrator, to reach a velocity of nearly twenty-five-hundred meters per second, an unheard of speed prior to the SheVa gun.
It was mounted on a pivoting turret and elevation system that permitted it to fire from just below zero degrees to just beyond "straight up." It was, after all, designed as an anti-"aircraft" gun.
Instead of the normal "bag and round" system of most artillery, where the actual "bullet" was first loaded and then bags of powder rammed in behind, the gun used enormous cartridges that looked like nothing so much as a cross between a rifle cartridge and an ICBM; eight of the rounds were stored in a heavily reinforced magazine at the rear of the turret. Damage to the turret was to be avoided: depending upon whether the system was loaded for "penetrator" or "area of effect" there would be from eighty kilotons to eight hundred kilotons of explosive riding around in a SheVa. For that reason, among others, regular units tried to give them a wide berth.
To protect all of this machinery, some of which was not particularly weatherproof, the gun was encased in a gigantic "turret," actually a simple weather shield, that was a major engineering feat in itself. The shield was a hundred-foot-wide cube that mounted to the turret ring at the base of the gun so that it rotated at the same time as the weapon. The exterior of the shield was six-inch steel plate, not for any armoring reasons but simply because any lesser material buckled whenever the gun fired. The interior, on the other hand, was mostly empty, a vast space of soaring girders and curved braces that held the shield in place.
At the center top of the exterior of the shield was a crane, much better supported than the rest of the structure, that served to move around the humongous equipment necessary for even the simplest repairs to the gun.
To drive all of this structure required more than a little power. That was supplied by four Johannes/Cummings pebble-bed reactors. The core of the reactors were the "pebbles" themselves, tiny "onions" with layers of graphite and silicon wrapped around a fleck of uranium at the center. Due to the layering the uranium itself could never reach "melting temperature" and, therefore, the reactors were immune to run-away reactions. Furthermore, the helium coolant system prevented any radiation leakage; helium was unable to transmit radiation and thus even in a full coolant loss situation the reactor wasn't going to do anything but sit there.
Admittedly there were . . . issues with the reactors. Despite careful use of Galactic heat regeneration techniques, the drive room was hot as the hinges of hell. And if the reactor took a direct hit, as had happened from time to time, the tiny "pebbles" became one heck of a radioactive nuisance. But the power that the reactors provided more than made up for those little shortcomings. And reactor breaches were what clean-up crews lived for.
The drive system for the tank was just as revolutionary, using induction motors on all the drive wheels to provide direct power. Thus the SheVa could lose one or more drive wheels and still continue moving.
Despite their size SheVas were remarkably fragile; they were mobile gun platforms not tanks, a reality that had been proven again and again in the last few days. But despite that, SheVa Nine had fought its way on a long, slow, painful retreat and survived mostly intact.
Only its crew, and especially its engineer Warrant Officer Sheila Indy, realized just how shot up it was. Although the smoke pouring out through the numerous orifices created by hostile plasma fire gave some clue.
"Now that's a sight," Pruitt said. The gunner of SheVa Nine was a short, dark male, stocky but not fat, and he looked about ten years older than he had just two days before. His clothing stunk of ozone and sweat as he looked up at the tower of metal above him.
The SheVa was called "Bun-Bun" mostly because of the gunner, who had hooked the rest of the crew on an addictive webcomic called "Sluggy Freelance" and had personally painted the two-story cartoon of a switchblade wielding rabbit on the front carapace. Most of the picture had been blasted away in the previous day's battle but the motto "Let's Rock, Posleen Boy!" was still faintly evident.
"Bun-Bun or the blimps?" Indy replied wearily. The engineer was raven haired, firm breasted and on the near edge of beautiful, but it was hard to tell at present. She, too, stunk of ozone and sweat and her coveralls were covered in grease and blood, hers and others. The blood was beginning to rot and the smell hung around her like a cloud.
"Either," Pruitt answered. "Both. What's the damage?"
"Two reactors off-line," Indy replied. "One of 'em's got a hole in it; thank God for helium coolant systems. Struts shot out, two tracks severed, damage to the feed mechanism, damage on the magazine wall, electrical damage . . . all over the place."
"I don't think we're getting out of here any time soon," Pruitt said. "Good, I can get some sleep."
"There's a Colonel Garcia coming in on the first blimp," Colonel Robert Mitchell said, walking up behind them. The SheVa commander was a rejuv, so he looked superficially like he was about eighteen. But he had trained as a young armor officer to stop the Soviet forces that might one day pour through the Fulda Gap and that training, to shoot and scoot, had permitted him, and his crew, to survive where others had died. He and his crew had fought a slow, delaying action from the Rabun Valley to their present position near Balsam Gap and they had taken a fair bag of Posleen landers along the way. Now it was his unhappy duty to tell his troops that the party wasn't over.
"He says he can get her up and running in twelve hours."
"Impossible," Indy snapped. "He'd better have at least two reactors with him!"
The SheVa's power source was pebble-bed/helium reactors. They were remarkably stable—even with total loss of coolant they would not go into melt down—but the ones on SheVa Nine had suffered total loss of coolant and weren't going to be going on line short of a full overhaul.
"He's got six reactors with him," Mitchell said. "And a suite of add-on armor. Along with a brigade of repair techs. There are nine blimps on the way."
"Jesus!" Pruitt whispered. "That was fast."
"Garcia seems like an efficient character," Mitchell replied. "He's also got some engineering whiz-kid with him who's going to look us over and do some upgrades." He looked up as the blimp maneuvered into the limited flat area not occupied by the SheVa. "When the repair crew takes over I want you both to rack out. When we get going again, it's going to get interesting. Especially since as soon as we're back on line we've got orders to retake Rabun Gap. At all costs."
"Well, sir," McEvoy said, trying to avoid the Lamprey's fire. "It would be nice to have a SheVa, but we ain't got one."
"No, we don't," Tommy agreed grimly as another round from the lander caught one of the Charlie company Reapers. "Major O'Neal?"
"You're getting hammered, Sunday," Mike replied. The majority of the battalion had just turned the corner on the hill and was closing on the remains of the Wall. The Wall had once been a six-story-high monstrosity of guns and concrete. Now the area looked like it had been assaulted by gophers determined to smooth it flat; with the exception of a small channel for the creek, the whole pass had been leveled.
"Yes, sir," the former NCO replied calmly. "We're also low on ammo. But I think we can take this guy with support. I'd like the whole battalion's on-call fire, if I may."
"More is better?" the battalion commander replied dryly. "I see what you mean, though." He checked his intelligence schematic and there were no forces within sight of the battalion; it made sense for everyone to fire on the Lamprey. "Turning over controls: Now."
"He must really like this guy," Duncan said as a priority targeting karat flashed into view. The karat was behind him and he spun in place and dropped to one knee as the entire battalion opened fire on one point on the lander.
"The Lamprey?" Stewart asked. "I'd target that fucker too, if for no other reason than to kill a smart God King."
"No, Sunday," Duncan replied. "How many times has he turned over full battalion fire to somebody else?"
"Not often," the intel officer admitted. "On the other hand, it's working."
The three hundred rifles of the battalion, when added to the Reapers, had the desired effect. As the continually rotating point passed over one of the weapons positions the armored hard point first vaporized under the fire of the Reapers then belched outward as the grav-guns penetrated into its magazines.
The lander quickly jinked to the south, throwing off the point of aim as it began to fire towards both the main battalion and the Reapers. But the damage was already done; even as it began a movement to the south it first rose then lowered abruptly, finally falling out of the sky, slamming into the side of the mountain and rolling out of sight.
"Okay, I don't know why everybody is just standing around looking at it," O'Neal said. "Change in plan. Charlie, face north. Bravo, face south. Cigar perimeter with the Reapers, wounded, command and staff in the middle. Scouts, figure out how that oolt'ondar got on the mountain; if there's a path destroy it."
He looked around at the still apparently frozen battalion and sighed. "Move, people."
"I do not like this O'Neal fellow," Tulo'stenaloor said, reading the logs of the AID communications. "He thinks altogether too fast for my comfort."
"Yes he does, estanaar," the intelligence officer said uncomfortably.
"What?" the commander asked. He could tell that there was something the S-2 was not saying.
"I was exploring his record," the officer replied, bringing up a file on the human commander. "He has an impressive history in defending many areas since the landings began on this planet. His unit has been more effective, for less casualties, than any of the other metal threshkreen, the 'ACS.' However, his fame among the humans dates from before the landings on this world."
"Oh," Tulo'stenaloor said, turning to look at the information the officer had brought up. "Where does it come from?"
"He was instrumental in the success of the humans on Aradan Five," the intel officer said.
"Oh." The warleader paused and carefully lowered his fluttering crest. "How was he 'instrumental'?" he asked softly.
"It was . . ." the intelligence officer paused. "It was his unit of metal threshkreen which rose out of the sea in the boulevard. Furthermore, it was he, personally, that destroyed Az'al'endai by setting off a nuclear charge on the side of the oolt'ondai's craft. By hand."
"How is he not dead?" the estanaar hissed thinly.
"He was near the center of the blast that destroyed the oolt'poslenar," the officer said with a flap of his crest. "It is believed that a plasma toroid formed around his suit and protected it. It blew him miles out to sea, but yet he lived."
"Impossible!" Tulo'stenaloor said. "Not even metal threshkreen could withstand a weapon that gutted the ship of Az'al'endai!"
"Nonetheless," the officer replied. "Records such as this rarely lie. The humans believe he is invincible, unkillable."
"We will just have to disabuse them of that notion," Tulo'stenaloor said, fingering a crest ornament. "Essthree, push a force of the local levies up the route that Gamataraal used and begin loading oolt Po'osol with oolt; we'll fly them around and land them behind this force to continue the drive."
"Yes, estanaar," the operations officer said. "But I thought that you said that the greatest fault in this war was throwing in a hasty attack."
"It's all a balance," Tulo'stenaloor answered. "If we succeed, it will clear the road quickly. If we fail, what have we lost but a few disposable units? Ensure, though, that the way is not led with scout units; their weapons won't scratch metal threshkreen."
"Yes, estanaar. It will be done."
"And prepare an oolt'poslenar," the warleader added. "We'll just have to see who surrounds whom."
"We lost Captain Holder," Gunny Pappas noted. In the background there was the faint thump of a digging charge going off.
"I noticed," Mike answered. "We lost a total of twenty-two. Frankly, we got hammered."
"They were waiting for us," Stewart said. "It's the only thing that fits all the evidence. Not only for us, but they knew which shuttles had our fuel pods in them."
"We're okay on that, by the way," Duncan said. "We're cycling personnel through the chargers that we have. We recovered five pods including two from the first shuttle. And there are several beacons on the hills; we might still recover those. Using this shit ammo will drain the power fast if we have to maintain sustained fire."
"We'll either have enough or we won't," Mike noted. "There's some possibilities in terms of resupply; we'll see what happens. Stewart, start working on ways they could have known where and when; don't fixate on one, explore all the possibilities."
"All I can come up with right now is a mole of some sort," Stewart admitted. "Nothing else makes much sense."
"Like I said," Mike repeated with a grin in his tone. "Don't fixate; use that febrile mind for good. Pappas, we need the defenses finished quick; we can expect a thorough-going attack soon. I want slit trenches, bunkers and movement trenches. Continuous construction until we get hit and when we reconsolidate."
"Yes, sir," the sergeant major said. "We're on rock; once we get dug into it we're going to be hard to dig out."
"That's why I'll expect a fast attack," Mike said. "He'll try to push us out while we're digging in. So get out there now."
" 'He'?" Stewart asked. "You holding back on your intel officer?"
"Always," Mike said with an unseen grin. "But in this case it's a surmise. This has all the marks of a real planned operation, one that has been planned for a while, for that matter. Look at those flying tanks and the close cooperation of the landers. There is one very smart God King out there who was smart enough to gather other smart Posleen. That's our real enemy. See if you can dig into the Darhel intel files; sometimes they know one Posleen from another. I want to know who I'm facing. I want that very much indeed."
"The hell with intel," Pappas muttered. "I want some fire support."