They do not preach that their God will rouse them a
little before the nuts work loose.
They do not teach that His Pity allows them to drop
their job when they dam'-well choose.
As in the thronged and the lighted ways, so in the dark
and the desert they stand,
Wary and watchful all their days that their brethren's
day may be long in the land.—Rudyard Kipling
"The Sons of Martha"
The blimp, nearly two hundred meters in length, had a giant container attached to the bottom of it. As soon as the skids on the container touched the ground the blimp released it and bounced into the air, heading back over the mountains. One Posleen in the wrong place would take it out in a second, but the nuclear fire from the SheVa had apparently cleared out the entire valley and as long as the blimps stayed low they were out of direct line of sight.
The rear of the container dropped open and by the glare of Klieg lights a line of heavy equipment and troops in black coveralls came pouring out. About half of the group headed for the SheVa as the rest began widening the landing zone.
At the head of the column was a figure riding an ATV. He rapidly crossed the distance to the SheVa crew and pulled the vehicle to a skidding stop.
"Maj . . . Lieutenant Colonel Robert Mitchell," Mitchell said, saluting.
"Colonel William Garcia," the colonel replied. He was wearing black coveralls like the rest of his unit, with a large patch on the shoulder, HC4, indicating that he was part of "Heavy Construction Brigade Four." The colonel returned the salute snappily then reached into the bellows pocket of his coveralls and tossed Mitchell a small package. "Let me be the first to congratulate you on your promotion. Those are $6.50. You can pay me if you survive."
"Thanks," Mitchell said, looking at the package of lieutenant colonel's silver leaves. "What now?"
"My crew is going to do a complete survey," Garcia said, turning to Indy. "You're the engineer?"
"Yes, sir," she replied. "I have a preliminary survey," she continued, holding out her PDA.
"Thanks." He took the proffered device and transferred the data. "Are those MetalStorm packs on top of this thing?"
MetalStorm anti-lander systems were among the less successful devices tried over the years. MetalStorm was a device for firing thousands of rounds in a very short period of time. It basically consisted of a gun barrel filled with bullets. Each of the bullets was fired, in turn, by an electrical charge. The highest rate of fire available was something over a million rounds per minute.
MetalStorm anti-lander systems were a 105mm, twelve-barrel device mounted on an Abrams tank chassis. Each of the barrels was loaded with one hundred rounds. The rounds were the same type as had originally been carried by the Abrams as an anti-tank round, but with the MetalStorm system all twelve hundred rounds could be fired in under twenty seconds. Firing all the rounds in one ripple fire was extremely unpleasant for the crew; it had been described as being put in a barrel and shaken by a giant. Despite that, the system was fairly ineffective at killing landers.
"Yes, sir," Mitchell said uncomfortably. "The chassis were . . . expended by my order."
"I'm sure there's a fascinating story there somewhere," Garcia said with a dry smile. "You haven't been firing them from up there, have you?"
"No sir," Pruitt replied. "They're just chained down."
"Okay, we'll pull them off and lift them out with one of the blimps," Garcia said.
"Hey, boss, let's rethink that." The person rounding the SheVa was apparently a civilian. He was a tall young male, heavily muscled and movie star gorgeous with long blond hair, wearing a black trenchcoat and gold sunglasses, his hands tucked deep in the pockets. He glanced up at the top of the SheVa and shrugged. "There's better stuff to do with them than just fly them out."
"What are you thinking, Paul?" Garcia asked. "Oh, pardon me. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Paul Kilzer. He was one of the original SheVa designers and agreed to come along as a consultant."
Pruitt was staring at the apparition with his mouth hanging open. "Riff?" he asked with a gasp.
"No, my name's Paul," the civilian answered with a frown. "Do I know you?"
"Uh . . . no," Pruitt responded. "But . . . what are you thinking of doing with the Storms?"
"Do we have crews?" the civilian asked.
"They're scattered through the SheVa, racked out," Mitchell responded. "Why?"
"Well, I think I know where we can get some turret rings," Paul said. "Running power to them won't be hard. Run some commo and you've got really cool firepower. You'll need some additional juice, but we've got six reactors along with us. We can upgun this thing along with the armor add-ons. That should help. A bit."
"Dude," Pruitt whispered.
"Do you have a specific plan?" Garcia asked.
"I think I did some planning a while back," Paul said, pulling a book out of his right jacket pocket. "Let me check my notes."
Indy checked a hysterical laugh and looked around at the group. "Sorry."
Garcia looked at his PDA and nodded. "The survey team confirms all your damage reports, Warrant. Why don't you guys go get some rest and we'll get to work on this thing."
"Works for me," Mitchell said, fatigue causing him to sway. "The Storm commander is Major Chan. You'll need to consult with her. And her command, I suppose."
"They're all transferred to you as of now," Garcia said. "I'll handle the details, get some rest, Colonel."
Despite his fatigue, Pruitt found it impossible to sleep. He had taken half a Provigil less than two hours before the repair brigade had landed and until it wore off he was wide awake, if mentally slow. So he laboriously climbed the stairs to the top of the SheVa to get a better look at the activity.
The division of infantry that had been bottled up on the far side of Balsam Gap had finally started to flow through. Its APCs, trucks and tanks were now barreling down Highway 23 towards Dillsboro, probing for the Posleen in the distant valley and finding surviving bridges. Things had been tight, with nearly a million Posleen closing in on the trapped SheVa, until the President had released Bun-Bun to use nuclear fire. But three rounds of antimatter "area effect" weapons had cleared out the main concentration. The division was now probing for the survivors and looking for where the aliens were reconsolidating. Not to mention trying to capture critical terrain features.
In the meantime the bulldozers and earthmovers of the SheVa brigade had opened up a larger landing area, permitting a continuous flow of blimps to drop their loads and pick up the empty containers, clearing the way for the next.
In addition to the earth movers, specialty heavy equipment had flowed in at a tremendous rate. One device, apparently made from a giant steam shovel, was an automated plasma cutter. The massive tracked system had driven directly from the container to the SheVa and begun cutting huge holes in the wall of the drive system. There were also three specialty track breakers which moved from damaged track to damaged track, removing the man-sized bolts that connected the tracks, pulling them off and replacing them with new. Some of the damaged tracks were on the underside; it would be interesting to see what the repair techs did about that.
As Pruitt watched, a massive forklift rolled out of one of the containers carrying a complete reactor pack. It drove from the container to one of the holes that had been cut and right into the interior of the SheVa. Pruitt hoped that any of the MetalStorm troops that had been sleeping in the engineering bay had been moved out of the way.
One whole load had been dropped directly in front of the SheVa. It was wrapped in plastic but appeared to be huge plates of some sort. He saw the civilian consultant pop up out of one of the hatches and painfully got to his feet to walk over.
"What are those?" he asked, pointing over the low railing on the top of the SheVa. They were nearly two hundred feet in the air so the view was somewhat disquieting.
If the height bothered Paul it wasn't apparent. "Add-on armor. We're going to throw it on the front of the track to cut down on damage."
"It looks . . . heavy," Pruitt said, thinking about some of the frankly insane maneuvers the SheVa had gone through in the previous battle. "It's not going to slow us down, is it?"
"Not after we add four reactors," Paul answered. "We're going to pull the two damaged ones and put in all six. Your top speed will stay the same, but your torque will go up, which should help in the mountains."
"What about the tracks?" Pruitt asked. Too much strain on the track connections could cause the entire track to blow free.
"Your driver had better be careful," Paul replied.
"Huh," Pruitt said, shivering in memory. "Did you hear how we got the MetalStorm turrets but not the chassis?"
"No."
"Good story. Got a second?"
Major Vickie Chan watched as the MetalStorm turret was lowered onto the freshly mounted turret ring. The blaze of light from underneath, where repair techs were welding in support struts, vanished as the turret settled onto the ring.
The major was a tall, pretty Eurasian whose calm demeanor was belied by her absolute intensity in combat. She had been a captain until the previous day, in command of a company of MetalStorm tracks. Her company had linked up with the SheVa during the retreat and had followed it the whole way, being carried for the last half. She had gotten used to an independent command. Since nobody knew quite what to do with her guns they had shuttled like gypsies from area to area, but after the loss of her chassis it was pretty clear that was going to end. If she was going to be tied into a larger command structure, a SheVa was probably a good choice. And Colonel Mitchell was a good commander: smart, capable and lucky.
So why did she feel like someone had just walked over her grave?
Maybe it was the speed with which things were changing. The dozen turret rings had appeared as if by magic, requisitioned from a tank repair depot in Asheville. Garcia apparently had a high and unquestioned priority for parts and equipment, but any situation in which Army Group commanders were giving orders for parts to be delivered on a priority basis meant that the situation was totally FUBARed. And, presumably, it was up to SheVa Nine, and its "secondary weapons commander" to unFUBAR it.
Joy.
She turned as the six-inch plate of the SheVa top deck rang to a set of bootheels and smiled at the repair brigade commander.
"That, sir, is something I never thought I'd see," she said, gesturing at the turret that was now being tested for true.
"It's a good basic idea," Garcia said. "As always, Paul's suggestions had to be tweaked for details, but it should significantly aid in the counterattack. May I ask a question?"
"Shoot."
"What happened to the chassis?"
"Heh," she laughed softly. "I'm not sure what happened to them officially. Do you want to know what really happened?"
"Out of school."
"Okay," she said. "Out of school, we used them to unstick the SheVa."
"Errr," Garcia looked down at the massive structure. Next to it the D-9 bulldozers of the construction battalion looked like Tonka toys. "Even a dozen Abrams could barely budge one of these things. I know; I've gotten three unstuck. It generally requires about a week."
"We didn't have a week," Chan said wearily, running fingers through her greasy hair then looking at them in distaste. "Mitchell, the crazy bastard, took us across Betty Gap, which doesn't even have a road. Or it didn't have one. Anyway, on the way down the SheVa started to . . . slide. Most amazing thing I've ever seen, and the scariest. It just . . . skied down the mountainside and ended up jammed between two bluffs. It was under fire at the time I might add."
"What kind?" the colonel asked, fascinated.
"At first it was a group of dismounted Posleen," she said. "We hit them from the flank, though. But then a couple of landers came over the ridge. Pruitt took both of them out at under a thousand meters."
"But that's . . ." Garcia stopped. "If their rounds went through, or if the lander's tanks sympathetically detonated, they were going to be blown away along with the lander."
"They did," she grimaced. "Both rounds went off outside the landers. At that point, though, Pruitt had gotten good at missing the lander's antimatter containment, or hitting it if he preferred. He's very good. Anyway, one of the landers rolled down the hill and nearly hit them; he blew it off by firing under it and turning it with the antimatter blast. That was at under five hundred meters."
"Shit."
"Yeah, very hairy. We got caught in both of the SheVa antimatter blasts. Anyway, at the end of it, the SheVa was stuck as hell. An engineer major happened to be in the area, retreating the same way. He suggested unloading the turrets and basically jamming the chassis under the SheVa like a bunch of boards. It worked but . . . well let's just say getting the crunched metal that we left behind is going to be an interesting exercise in salvage."
"Ouch." Garcia chuckled then shook his head. "Sorry about losing your tanks."
"Oh, I didn't really mind," she said. "You ever been in one of those things when it fires?"
"No."
"Let's just say that the crews cheered when the SheVa crushed them."
"Bad?"
"Indescribable," she said. "We'd just finished firing when one of the SheVa rounds went off. Ten kiloton explosion, maybe nine hundred meters away. You know what my gunner said?"
"No."
" 'What was that last bang?' " She chuckled grimly. "You know it's bad when a nuke going off is anticlimactic."
"I guess we'd better add some reinforcing."
"Yep. Better do that little thing. How's it going?"
"It's not the most shot up SheVa I've ever worked on," Garcia answered. "But it's close. We'll finish in time, though, or an hour or so over."
"How are we going to control the guns?" she asked.
"I'm putting in a secondary control area," Garcia answered. "Paul's design again. You'll be there along with the commo person that Mitchell picked up. You'll have commo with all your tracks but you'll have to draw your information from the SheVa's systems."
"That will work," she said.
"Paul's pouring out plans for a general upgrade on SheVas," Garcia said. "He wants to make them all bristle with secondary weapons. I pointed out that there's no way to control that much firepower without a large crew. He wants to use computer controls." Garcia grimaced.
"And the problem with that is?"
"You don't want to see Paul's idea of artificial intelligence," Garcia sighed. "He wants to rip some code out of a computer game. I've convinced him that that would be bad."
"Heh," Chan laughed. "Missile-armed kangaroos?"
"I've heard that story," Garcia sighed. "Something like that. I've got this image of the guns identifying Himmit as enemy Ghosts and Indowy as Protoss. For the time being, I think that it's better if your crews stay in the turrets controlling the fire."
"I'd better get with the commanders and start working on how to operate. Are they going to be scattered all along the rim?"
"More or less. Five at the front, three at the rear and two on each side. The outer one on each end will be able to support to the sides."
"Lots of firepower, but not much in the way of armor," Vickie pointed out.
"Plenty frontal," the commander said. "And Paul has a couple of additional concepts that he's working out. But if they get in close and swarm, you'll be in trouble."
"And if they do?"
"Well, Captain, that's going to be your job to prevent."
"You know, Stewie, this really sucks."
The battalion was crouched in a double line of mud-filled holes, some of them connected by the trench the unit had been constructing when the Posleen assault hit, with their grav-rifles on extensions, pouring fire into the oncoming waves of centaurs.
The M-300 grav-rifle was attached to the suit by a sinuous organic-looking extender over the right shoulder. The extender included a feed tube that was supplied from the ammunition lockers within the suit. In battle the firing suit could crouch within a hole, or around a corner, and extend the rifle out to engage oncoming targets; the rifle had its own sighting system that led back to the suit control systems.
There had been suggestion that the suits have two rifles attached, but the limit of the guns was not firepower but ammunition availability. The suits had six separate ammunition storage lockers, each with their own blow-out panel, but even so, and despite the fact that the actual "bullets" were nought more than uranium teardrops the size of the end of a pinkie, they could run through their entire on-board store of ammunition in three hours. Especially in what was called "a target-rich environment." And that description certainly met the current conditions.
The Posleen were coming on in good order, packed in like sardines and moving forward at a trot. Until they ran into the intersecting streams of depleted uranium grav-rounds. Where the streams of silver lightning hit the wall of bodies there was a continuous explosion of red fire and yellow blood. Each of the teardrop rounds of the ACS had the force of a small bomb and one that struck killed not only the target, but usually the centaur to either side. The resulting destruction built up a wall of flesh that the centaurs were beginning to find to be an obstacle. But still they kept coming. And if they kept it up for long enough, it might even work.
"We've got supply issues, boss." Duncan was in the line now, something that he had avoided for nearly five years. But with no resupply coming in, and no indirect fire support except the Reapers, and no way or reason to maneuver the battalion, he didn't have much else to do. And every round counted.
"Bullets we have aplenty . . ." Stewart said. "Power . . ."
Two troopers, a rifle troop that had had his grav-gun hit by a lucky HVM shot and a one-legged support troop, wearing a bulbous suit of armor that made him look like the Michelin Man, were crawling along a shallow trench from position to position, feeding power to the suits from the surviving antimatter power packs. The problem was not the power being drained by the suits, they were stationary and the trickle of power for their environment systems was no sort of drain, but from the rounds they were firing.
The bullets were accelerated to a small percentage of the speed of light before they left the barrel of the rifles. This gave them a tremendous, really an overkill, punch at the end, which explained why a three-millimeter-wide, four-millimeter-long teardrop was causing explosions the size of artillery shells.
But that took power, lots of it. The bullets were fired in a stream, much faster than any conventional machine gun, with multiple rounds in the barrel at any one time. And power was power. To cause the effect of a hundred kilos of TNT required that much power be put into pushing them down the barrel.
The power was supposed to come from the rounds themselves. "Standard" rounds had a droplet of antimatter at the base, sufficient to power the round and even bleed a little over to the suits. But the humans didn't have the technology to create the ultra-miniature containment system necessary. So since the blockade of Earth had shut off the flow of Galactic Technology, and as "standard" rounds become few and far between, the suits had fallen back on "emergency" procedures, using the power in their suits to drive their guns.
And that was a major power drain.
Mike watched for a moment as one of the suits topped up, and then he followed the crawling tech suit as it made its way laboriously to the next position. Even as the tech moved, the previous suit's power levels dropped noticeably. And the antimatter pack it was dragging showed yellow.
"I'm open to suggestions," Mike said, trying to keep the weariness out of his voice.
"We're already sniping the God Kings," Duncan replied.
The normals that made up the bulk of the Posleen assault were of subhuman intelligence, but the God King leaders made up for it. With the battalion nearly invisible in their holes, it was hard for the normals to even find a target. But whenever a God King saw the streams of silver it naturally tracked back to the starting point and targeted it. Whenever a God King engaged a target, all the normals around him, bonded and unbonded, tended to aim at the same target. And when those storms of projectiles came in, suits, or at least the extended weapons systems, died.
To reduce the problem, they had sent the scout suits—which used a lower velocity projectile that was nearly undetectable in a battle—up the slopes on either side to target the leaders in the horde.
The problem with that was that spotting God Kings who were off their tenar was hard. They had crests, but if they didn't lift the crests, which laid down against the long Posleen neck, they were almost indistinguishable from their troops.
On the other hand, God Kings tended to raise their crests under stress.
"We're selecting for smart God Kings, you know," Mike said. "We have been for years."
"I suppose we have," Duncan replied.
"If this is what we get for it, I think it was a bad idea," Stewart said, then yelled.
"You okay?" Mike checked his monitors. Stewart's weapon was rated as destroyed.
"Well, I thought I'd seen it all," Stewart replied, slowly. "You know, it's really spectacular when a Posleen round goes in the barrel as one of ours is going out."
"You okay?"
"Well, my hand's still there." The command suits did not have extensors so the commanders and staff were firing their rifles by holding them up out of their holes.
"We've got about four more hours of power," Duncan said, getting the discussion back on track. The guns were firing almost on their own; killing Posleen was an easy multi-task for everyone in the battalion at this point.
"There's a local cache," Mike said, quietly. "It's even got a battalion load of standard rounds in it. And an antimatter pack."
"There is?" Duncan said. "It's not on the maps."
"That's because it's off the books."
"Oh."
"Yeah. And OH." Mike grimaced, unseen, inside his suit. "The problem, of course, is getting to it."
"Where is it?"