by John Ringo
“Very well, Gunny,” said the female contralto. There was a slight pause. “Does that mean I’ll be seeing more of you?”
* * *
Mike skipped past a private from Charlie Company and pointed to the right. “The bouncing ball is that way, Private Vargas. Follow the bouncing ball.”
The suit followed the directions, sidling off to the right just as a cone of railgun fire tore through the space where it had paused.
“Nah, nah, nah, nah,” Mike called, broadcasting the taunt over both speakers and the battalion broadcast frequency. He stopped and directed the holographic dragon head he projected to stick its tongue out at the advancing Posleen mass. “Youuu caaan’t touch meee!” he taunted again, the cry this time going out in Posleen. As the fire of the division twisted towards his location he popped out a string of grenades and sidestepped. “Nah, nah, nah, nah,” he taunted as the storm of fire swept by.
Gone were the fear and uncertainty. Gone were the question and doubt. The high of combat, the joy of battle had taken him and he was once again in his element. There were at least four ways to win the current scenario and do maximum damage to the Posleen. Each of them projected nearly identical casualties for the battalion. Given the choices, he had chosen the one with the maximum style. Even now with the casualty graph climbing and the whole mass of the Posleen force charging them. Whatever the outcome of the battle, they’d fought it “their way.”
But the time for stylish destruction was coming to an end. The Posleen were getting close enough that they could overwhelm the battalion with their massed fire. They were still steering away from the curtain barrage to the north, but it was time to teach them that there were worse things than artillery.
He skipped to the left and hopped over a crossing trooper as he considered the timing. With human troops it was usually better to withhold your heaviest fire until they were within two hundred meters. At that point, human troops felt that no matter how much fire there was, they still had a chance of overrunning the position. So they would come on in droves, through any sort of maelstrom. If your intent was to kill as many as possible, and his was just that, then waiting until they were that close was best.
With Posleen, this magic distance was still unclear. Simulations refused to recognize it, instead opting for an almost suicidal determination on the part of Posleen forces. But he had seen them break and run, even up close. So. When to start the real massacre?
He decided to let the music choose. They had started out the battle with Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” pounding in the background. The tune had become something of an instant tradition for the American ACS units after Diess. That had segued to the Rolling Stones’ “Paint it Black” and that was good. But not quite what he was looking for. Something… more. When the next song started, he smiled ferally.
“Lieutenant Rogers,” he whispered over the comm, trotting sideways towards his predesignated position.
“Sir,” responded the camouflaged acting-company commander.
“Prepare for enfilading fire on my mark.”
“Roger, sir.”
Mike tapped a series of Virtual icons floating in the air in front of his face. The AIDs accepted the commands, considered the current conditions and prepared movement orders for all the individuals in the battalion.
“Execute,” he whispered as the first bars of Black Sabbath’s “The Mob Rules” began to boom out through the battalion’s suit speakers.
* * *
Kenallai exalted as the mass of the Host approached the beast. Despite the beast’s awesome fire and the writhing, difficult to strike heads, the host had passed through the worst of the fire. In moments they would take the beast and drive on to the prizes to the east. They were close enough that nothing could stop the Host now. Some of the dragon’s heads had already fallen, their fire stopped. The rest would fall soon enough. However, as the Host closed to perfect range, everything changed.
Before the eyes of the front rank of the Posleen the creature dissolved into an oolt’ondar of metal-clad thresh. The thresh were visible for only a moment, however, for as fast as they appeared they disappeared into holes dug by special charges. A moment later their guns poked out of the holes and the only thing visible was the guns and the scattered few bodies of metal thresh.
Even as they were greeted by this horrid sight, worse horrors fell upon them.
* * *
“Bravo Company, fire,” said the officer, quietly.
The three companies of the battalion formed a box. Each of the suits could keep up a continuous stream of fire for over thirty minutes with onboard munitions. When a unit of ACS was faced with a unit of Posleen the usual method of engagement was face-to-face. By waving the fire of the individuals back and forth, the Posleen were, more or less, washed away with fire hoses.
However, the current situation was perfect for enfilading fire. By firing the grav-guns straight forward at knee-height each individual suit-trooper created a “beam” of destruction. If a Posleen touched one of the beams, they died. And the fire of the three companies was interlaced.
When the beams of fire from Bravo Company reached out, they slaughtered Posleen by the thousands, driving all the way through the mass of the host. The terrain was nearly flat and there was nowhere for the centaurs to hide. Driving towards the Monument, towards the submerged suits of the majority of the battalion, meant crossing the beams of fire from Bravo. Turning and driving towards Bravo meant crossing not only the fire of the battalion, but that deadly curtain of steel rain which was still falling.
Then the companies started panning their fire.
* * *
It hadn’t been the direct fire of the horrid weapons of the threshkreen that had struck him down. If it had he would have died instantly. The terrible weapons of the threshkreen rended oolt’os and Kessentai alike in a single burst. When one struck it was as if they were hit with a missile, their bodies exploding outward. To be tapped with even a glancing blow was fatal.
No, it had not been the terrible weapons of the thresh, but a weapon of the host that had laid him low. When one of those terrible beams had struck the power-pack of his bodyguard’s railgun, the resulting explosion had broken his back and buried Kenallai under rendered Po’oslena’ar. Now he caught glimpses of the terrible rendering going on on either side.
His personal oolt and the Kessentai of his oolt’ondar were scattered in death around him. There lay brave Alltandai, swift and fell. Behind him lay Kenallurial and Ardan’aath. Before him lay only death.
The battlemaster turned his head from side to side, looking at the piles. Finally it was too hard to hold up and the broad head settled to the ground. It was as well. The host was doomed. The thresh would destroy them somewhere. Somewhen. Better that he not be there to see it. Strange that it was getting dark.
Dimly, he heard the sounds of the other, older, nestlings out in the dark, screaming as they fed. But here beneath his mound of treasured dead he was surely safe. Tonight they would feed on another.
Might they always feed on another.
* * *
The mounding centaurs began to form a wall and the windrow finally obscured the view for the battalion.
“Up and at ’em!” Mike snapped, suiting actions to words as he stood up out of his hole. He marked the next point for the battalion to move to on the dispositions map. “Move to the Seventeenth Street phase-line with rolling fire,” he continued. “Duncan, we need a rolling barrage.”
The line of the battalion was slightly broken up by the windrow of bodies, but the Posleen force was no longer a threat. The survivors had fled into the pocket and very little fire came the way of the battalion as it advanced. Nonetheless they kept up regular fire, picking out any individuals or groups that looked to cause trouble.
The worth of the suits was finally being proven as they followed the fire. Although the barrage would eventually devastate the Posleen force, the fire that the battalion was taking was enough to wipe out a c
onventional infantry force or even tanks. But the suits shed all but the fiercest flame. In some cases the fire from the Posleen force was so great it was like walking into a rainstorm, but it had as much effect. Only the three-millimeter railguns could penetrate the suits, if a round hit perfectly, and the rest of the 1mm and shotgun rounds were no problem. The occasional HVM that fired out of the mass or the fire of a God King’s plasma cannon would remove a luckless trooper. And then it would be silenced by mass fire. The battalion was still able to advance with “acceptable loss.”
Mike pushed the battalion forward until they were on a line with the end of the Reflecting Pool and dug-in one last time. There, with any conceivable Posleen assault broken up by the topography of the monument area and with the Posleen forces pushed into a relatively small area, the final phase of the artillery battle could get underway.
The three companies locked their forces into grazing fire across the paths out of the pocket and Mike called for the final fire plan.
* * *
No more bad guys seemed to be coming over the hill, so Keren took the long walk up the Mound. The smoke across the Potomac was fading, but there was a solid core of it around the Arlington Bridge and the Memorial. It was an eerie sensation to look out over the battlefield. The view was famous from movies and TV shows, the green lawn, the Memoria, the cherry trees. Now it was torn by fire and the tracks of armored vehicles, with white obscurement smoke drifting in the light wind, the scent of burning and slaughtered Posleen carried upon it.
What was going on in the pocket around the Lincoln Memorial was invisible, but it didn’t sound good. The occasional red-cored puff of VT could be seen above the curtaining smoke and there was a continuous clatter from cluster rounds, sounding like the world’s largest Chinese funeral. And that was exactly what it was. The Posleen were being forced into a sausage grinder.
The aliens, without any real internal communication, could not see what was happening in the smoke. And the few who survived for a moment were pushed willy-nilly into the caldron of fire by the pressure from behind. What was happening, however, was clearly evident to the armored combat suits. Their all-weather, all-conditions systems made it all too clear.
The Posleen were literally being ground by the fire. The Variable Time fire would explode overhead, scything down a cluster of Posleen. Then the cluster ammunition would butcher the downed group. As wave after wave fell, the earlier ones would be chopped into smaller and smaller bits under the hammer of the guns. The ground was running with yellow blood, the flood pouring into the Potomac, tinging the brown waters an unwonted sienna.
And it was unrecognized by the oncoming tide. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of the centaurs poured across the bridge in a continuous flood. A few made it through the caldron. A very, very few.
These few were picked off by the interconnected grazing fire of the battalion. The intersecting bars of lightning looked like a light show, but they were lines of death for the Posleen. Bravo had been split, with half the company firing across the Mall while the other half fired at an angle across the opening to the north.
The battalion had been similarly split, with half firing to the south side of the memorial and the other to the north. Posleen in the pocket trying to escape to the north ran into the intersecting beams of Bravo and Alpha Companies. Those trying to escape towards Inlet Bridge ran into the fire of Charlie Company. And all of them ran into artillery.
A few of the survivors made it to the Roosevelt Park, on the south side of the pocket around the Tidal Basin. These shell-shocked survivors were all that told the Posleen something bad was happening.
The forces massing to cross in Arlington could clearly see these battered and bloody remnants of the horde. From that, some few began to deduce that entering the smoke was a bad idea. These few told others. And they told others. Then they started taking notes on the color of the river. North of the bridge, brown. South of the bridge, yellow-brown with lots of yellow streaks. Those few who had made a study of sensors studied them. And came to conclusions. And turned away from the inviting bridge.
But… most stayed. The Posleen were, by and large, a not very bright species. On that horrible afternoon of blood and slaughter they went through a brutally Darwinian evolution. The few, the smart ones, the ones who used their eyes and the sensors wrested from the long-gone Alld’nt, turned away. The many, the stupid and ignorant, those for whom being the warrior was the all and be damned to the technological claptrap, crossed the bridge.
The few survived. For the day.
* * *
Mike watched the slaughter stonily. He had come to understand the Posleen in a way that many humans did not. Sometime in the past of the species tinkering had occurred. And that tinkering, rather than some “normal” process, had led them on the long journey to this field of death. Led them on the quest for newer, fresher worlds to conquer.
Understanding them meant that he could not hate them. They were trapped in a cycle they had not created. But he could be a professional about destroying them. And there was a small, professional satisfaction in the carnage before him. He keyed the AID. “Give me General Horner.”
“Captain O’Neal,” said Horner.
Mike thought he sounded more tired than ever. Maybe they could both get some rest. “General, I would like to report that we have the infestation stopped at the Potomac. As soon as forces are reassembled we can begin reducing them in northern Virginia.”
“That is good, Captain,” said Jack.
“So, formal, sir?” he quipped. It was a heady high to have succeeded so totally in the sight of his old mentor. “It’s okay, General. We’ve taken too much damage, but we’ll take it to them next.”
“Yes, we will, Mike,” said Horner. “Captain O’Neal…” he continued with a catch and stopped.
“Jack,” said Mike with a smile, “it’s okay…”
“No, it’s not, Mike. Captain O’Neal, I regret to inform you that your wife, Lieutenant Commander Sharon O’Neal, was lost in action this morning at approximately oh-five hundred hours.”
“Oh, shit!” said Mike, in a near wail. “Oh, fuck!”
“I convey the regrets of the new President.”
“Oh, goddamn, Jack!”
“I’ve ensured a qualified contact team is on the way to the farm.” Horner waited through the silence, not sure what was happening on the other end. “Mike?”
“Yes, sir,” said Captain O’Neal in a toneless voice.
“Are you going to be okay? I, you can ask for some time, if you want it.”
“No, sir. That will be fine,” the captain said in a monotone. “I’ll be just fine.”
“Mike…”
“I will be fine, sir.”
“If you’re sure?” The general knew that this was not going to be the end of it. But there were other demands on his time. Other needs to fill.
“I will be just dandy, General, sir,” said the captain in an icy voice. “Just dandy.”
And he was, as he watched the remorseless destruction of the centaurs. As he led his battalion in the part of the anvil. For the anvil never cries for the iron.
Visions
Fredericksburg, VA, United States of America, Sol III
0926 EDT October 27th, 2004 ad
The sensor wand was much more sensitive than the detectors on their suits. And Minnet was a maestro. For all the damn good it was doing.
The cold, pouring rain was washing the remaining soil and grit off the ridge. It had already formed gullies around the bits of buildings and roads, uprooting ancient flagstones and undercutting the three-hundred-year-old foundations that were all that was left of Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Minnet took another bound forward on the search grid and second squad bounded with him, grav-guns tracking. In the last two weeks they had hammered the Posleen in the Rappahanock Pocket into gravy. But there were still a few around. And dead was dead.
Using the untouched Fort Belvoir as a base, the b
attalion had split up into companies and had ravaged through the remnant Posleen. When a unit found a concentration they would call for fire then finish off the survivors. If the Posleen force was too large the company could either join up with other companies or fall back on Belvoir. The Army Engineer had been only too enthusiastic about turning his base into a giant fortress. The work was still ongoing, with concrete slowly replacing compacted dirt, but the facilities were more than adequate for the purpose. When a couple of thousand Posleen came up to the walls topped with a giant wooden effigy of the Engineer Corps symbol, they got the point. Just before the battleship rounds started falling. In the south the same was being done by a brigade from the Eleventh MID. With much the same result.
So now the Posleen were down to nuisance levels. The new President was even considering letting people back into northern Virginia. Those who wanted to.
Most of the refugees were already being installed in the Sub-Urbs. The vast underground cities were still under construction, but there was enough done to take the trickle of Virginians. With their homes mostly destroyed and the area still under threat of the Posleen, most of them opted to take the government settlement payment and start a new life. It was better than seeing the wrack of their once-beautiful state.
That was left to the ACS. As usual. They had carefully swept the battlefields of the Ninth and Tenth Corps, hoping against hope for a survivor. All they found was the occasional warrior staff, with a hero beside it. Usually the story was unknown. The biggest surprise had been on the first day of sweeps. They found nearly a whole company of the Third Regiment and a single God King all piled on The Tomb. And two staffs. There must have been a hell of a story there. But there was no one left to tell it.