Eye of the Storm

by John Ringo

  Mike wasn't going to let his boys beat him to it, either. He started forward, slow at first, then accelerating, commanding his suit into a run and loosening his legs so that the suit could exceed the ability of human legs to flicker back and forth. The rest of the units were keeping to the speed of their slowest suit, maintaining a careful line as they sprinted forward. So Mike, who had mastered the skitter run technique before most of his brigade commanders were born, was out in the lead.

  The Posleen defenses were coming back on line, slowly, as God Kings got their normals out of their deep holes, back in position and firing. The wall of the range was one interlocking defense after another and the darting suit was instantly the target of each of the positions in range as they came on line.

  But with the suit handling the running and dodging, he was free to bring up his grav-gun and engage. The M-288 grav-gun accelerated pellets of depleted uranium to a noticeable fraction of light-speed so as each hit it generated a small kinetic explosion.

  Most of the explosions burst back out of the gun positions. Mike had been firing and moving in suits for better than half a century with damned little desk time. He'd have to ask his AID to count the number of alien planets he'd battled Posleen on—and that didn't count five years of fighting them day in and day out on Earth during the invasion. Firing on the run was as natural to him as breathing and far more precise. The grav rounds were entering the tiny firing slits and exploding on the inside of the bunkers.

  That didn't mean he wasn't taking fire. As fast as he took out one defense point another came on line. But hitting a skittering suit was no easy task, even for the God King defenders with automated systems. First of all, he was up to over two hundred kilometers per hour in direct movement and the suit was adding side jinks, especially when it detected targeting systems on it. It telegraphed the jinks to him, the semi-intelligent underlayer of the suit sending him carefully coded nudges and the AID sending small sparkles that told him where the point was going to be as it jinked. Mike, the suit, the AID, had all fought for decades together and existed as an almost cybernetic organism, three systems with one mind.

  He was, by a long shot, the most deadly user of a suit in the short history of the ACS. And he proved it now by a one-man charge through a hurricane of fire until he was right up on the bunker he'd targeted.

  The bunkers were interlocked to provide supporting fire on each other. But the other suits, thousands of them spread over several kilometers of open plain, were starting to catch up. The Posleen had more to worry about than one suit, now.

  He wasn't standing still, though. A solid, direct hit from one of the numerous heavy plasma guns or hypervelocity missile launchers covering the bunker would take him out. So he kept running past the first defense point as one hand flicked out and tossed a suicide bar in through the tiny firing slit.

  The "suicide bar" was an antimatter hand grenade, a ten-centimeter long, one-centimeter in diameter instant Armageddon pack. It didn't take much antimatter to make too much explosion. So the grenades were adjustable. A small quantity of the contained AM would be fired in a controlled detonation. By "squirting" the remainder, it reduced the explosion to what the user desired. The "squirted" antimatter was still hell on earth, but it wasn't Armageddon on a plate. If you were far enough away that the hand grenade didn't kill you, the squirted antimatter probably wouldn't. The instruction manual for the M-613 "matter annihilation device" specifically stated that they were "not for use in hostage situations." So there you go.

  Mike's grenade slid through the slit and a moment later there was a jut of silver-green fire out of the head-sized hole. But that didn't suit his purposes. So Mike armed another, still jinking around the small hillock that made up the bunker, and tossed that one in. The first had been set to be the equivalent of sixteen kilos of TNT. He'd figured that it would crack the bunker. If that didn't do it, a thousand kilos of TNT should. Hell, he was still an order of magnitude away from its full output. They didn't call 'em suicide bars for nothing.

  This time the front of the bunker opened out in a flower of silver-green, leaving a smoking hole. Whatever had been defending the position was gone, gaseous matter barely registerable by the best sensors. A tunnel, partially collapsed, arched downward. It was large enough to take a horse, or a horse-sized Posleen, so there was plenty of gap at the top of the rubble pile to crawl through.

  Mike jumped into the pit and started to crawl up the rubble just as a hand descended on his shoulder.

  "Sir, would you please let us go first for once?" Staff Sergeant Thomas Rawls said. The head of his security detail was clearly tired of trying to keep up.

  "Oh, sure, be that way," Mike said, backing away from the hole. "But I fit better."

  "There's ways to fix that, sir," Rawls said, popping out a suicide bar and tossing it in the hole. He quickly ducked to the side and held the general back against the wall of the shattered position.

  "You gotta follow 'em fast," Mike protested. "Use the boot, don't piss on them!"

  "And as you well know, antimatter remains in the explosive matter, sir," Rawls said, sighing slightly. He sometimes had the feeling in dealing with his boss that he was the adult and the much older general the child. General O'Neal was, almost invariably, upbeat and positive to a fault. But the sergeant had been with him long enough to know that that was very much a façade.

  Every survivor of the "War Generation" seemed to have lost someone. Indeed, with five out of six people on Earth erased and often eaten by the Posleen, entire families, clans, tribes and even nations had been wiped out as if they never existed. In O'Neal's case he had lost his wife, father and one daughter. His sole remaining daughter was only alive because she'd been raised by the Indowy. And that rearing had changed her to such an extent that the general found her nearly unhuman. In effect, he had lost everything in the war. He'd never remarried, never in the two years the sergeant had been guarding him so much as hinted of a romantic interest or even a close friend. He had one drive in life: eliminating every Posleen from the face of the galaxy. And he did it cheerfully, with incredible precision and skill.

  "What's a little antimatter between friends?" Mike asked as the suicide bar went off. The explosion blasted some of the rubble back into the room, pattering the suits in chunks of rock that would have killed an unarmored human. "Can we go now?"

  "Let me check the security of the tunnel, sir," the sergeant said, waving one of the team forward.

  Corporal Albert Norman had only been on the general's security detail for a year. What with transit time and everything, he'd only been on the detail for the cleanup on S-385-Beta and he'd never seen O'Neal in full hunting mode. He thought he was good with a suit until he'd seen the boss. O'Neal was unreal.

  He'd gotten comfortable with dealing on a nearly daily basis with a general but this situation had him nervous. Sergeant Rawls had been killing Posleen for ten years, the boss for, well, more than a half a century. This was the first time he'd been really doing the job under the boss's eye. So he actually had to think through his next actions instead of doing them on automatic.

  He switched on his helmet light, ducked down and crawled up the pile of rubble, poking his head over to the top and giving the tunnel a sweep.

  "All cl—" he said just as the Posleen popped out of a hide. He didn't even have time to finish before the heavy duty plasma gun took off his head.

  Julio had followed the general more or less automatically, but he hadn't been able to keep up with either the general or his security detail. The Hammers were chosen from the cream of the Eleventh and Julio knew he wasn't on their level.

  But he did hop in the hole, trying to avoid the still incoming fire as much as anything, just in time to see one of the Hammers turned into barbeque. Plasma was incredibly hot stuff and when it entered a suit, the interior turned into an oven. Julio hadn't been around long enough to be present when such a suit was opened, but he'd seen pictures. Whoever the guy was, he was just deep baked and fri
ed to a crisp. Besides having his head sheared off, of course.

  Julio vomited into his helmet and dropped into a crouch. The suit, though, had been designed to handle that, designed in fact by the short figure up against the wall. The semi-biotic undergel created a pocket to catch the regurgitant, sealed it away to prevent aspiration and pumped air when Julio reactively inhaled. Half-noticed, a small quantity of undergel swept into his open mouth and cleaned it out. Half a morning of ACS transition training was concerned with just that. The soldiers were fed a hearty breakfast, suited up, given time to half digest, and then their suits fed them a nausea-inducing drug. Repeatedly.

  It's important, knowing deep in your bones that no matter what happens, the suit won't let you drown in your own puke.

  He was cut off from his own section, which was trying to open up a similar bunker about thirty yards away. And he sure as hell didn't want to go out into that fire again. He wasn't, in fact, sure what to do.

  Mike knew he wasn't in charge of one lost grunt but he also recognized the private from their earlier encounter. So he pinged the poor guy's suit.

  "First fight?" Mike asked.

  "Yes, sir," Julio said, choking.

  "I'd say it gets better, but it really doesn't," Mike said. "But we need to get in that hole. One way to make it better is to think. How should we do that, Private Julio Garcia?"

  Julio's mind blanked. The general, survivor of countless similar encounters, the guy who had coined or been the inspiration for so many military jokes and aphorisms he was up there with Patton and a bunch of other guys, was asking Julio how to do it?

  That actually broke him out of his panic. Hell, throw one of his own sayings back.

  "Don't use finesse when force works, sir," Julio snapped back.

  Mike grinned and did the head twitch that was all that was available when wearing a suit. The suits were form-fitting and the helmet was fully closed, presenting nothing more than a faceted plate to the enemy. Wearers got everything from external sensors; a faceplate created a vulnerability. By the same token, the suits, while somewhat flexible, could not nod or shrug. A suited person's body language was highly subtle and reading it took years to learn. What Mike saw was a troop that had potential but needed to get with the program.

  "X-wing option," Mike snapped on the local circuit. "Double threes. Julio does a hop and pop entry."

  Chingadera, Julio thought. The bodyguards were going to drop two three-hundred-kilo dialed grenades into the tunnel and fire it up in an X at the same time. His job, whether he chose to accept it or not, was to run up the rubble and dive through the hole, hoping that the Hammers would check fire before they shot him in the back and that he could get into position before whatever Posleen were defending the tunnel.

  He had to admit that the choice made sense. Urbies were generally shorter and smaller than the norm. The Hammers were mostly big guys. He could just fit better than they could. He probably could dive into the hole; ACS was not particularly cumbersome.

  The other choice was the general. And Julio didn't want to think about that possibility.

  "On my mark," the general continued, not bothering to ask if everyone understood their jobs. Getting a job in ACS required time in a regular Fleet Strike infantry unit and then a six-month course. Julio knew what he was supposed to do. Doing it, though . . .

  Sergeant Rawls designated one other Hammer to toss the second grenade, then pinged readiness. At the general's signal, they tossed the two grenades, then the Hammers formed up on the rubble, leaping forward to get in the general's way. Otherwise the nitwit was going to get himself in the way of plasma from Posleen and grenades.

  There wasn't any fire as they positioned themselves and fired up the hole but the wash of explosive carried a good bit of antimatter with it. Tough as ACS suits were, antimatter would degrade anything. The system automatically noted reduced effectiveness pretty much across the board; their suits had thinned on average three percent. The suits were going to have to go into the shop for a full detailing after this shit.

  His suit kept him apprised of the actions of the line private as the guy scrambled up the rubble hill and then threw himself forward. Like well-oiled machines, the Hammers checked fire while the private was in midair so that he was following a crossing line of relativistic projectiles as he entered the hole.

  The second set of grenades had dropped a portion of the ceiling, leaving large chunks of rubble all over the floor. So when Julio tried to roll to his feet, he stumbled and fell backwards instead. But in the light of his suit helmet he could see a door opening right by his left leg. So he kicked it.

  The door was being opened mechanically. And it was heavily armored, sealed and designed to survive a nearby blast and still open even if there was rubble in the way. So the kick sent the suit spinning in a circle instead of shutting the door and left Julio with his hand at the base of the door.

  That wasn't much use against a Posleen God King with a plasma gun. But Julio wasn't quite willing to die, yet. So as the surprised Posleen tried to train the heavy duty launcher downwards, a shot that would have killed both the ACS suit and the God King if it had gone off, Julio reached up and grabbed the barrel, pressing down and twisting.

  The powerful suit crushed the plasma coils like paper. If the God King had pulled the trigger it would have been very bad as the weapon exploded in the enclosed space. But the twist ripped the weapon out of the God King's hand, unfired.

  That left Julio on his back looking up at an angry, disarmed, God King. The Posleen's next move was so automatic it could have been instinct as he reached over his back and drew his monomolecular boma blade to slash down at the armored human.

  Julio's action wasn't nearly as smooth but it was much more effective. He just poked upwards, hard, with the plasma gun in his hand.

  The butt of a Posleen plasma gun was designed to ride over the shoulder. Thus instead of the flat plate standard on human weapons, it was a curved shape with a not particularly sharp point.

  "Not particularly sharp" is sharp enough when driven by pseudo-muscles that could send an armored fist through three inches of homogenous steel. The plasma gun punched up through the Posleen's armored chest until only the barrel was exposed. The yellow blood of the centaur spattered down its still barrel, smoking off from residual heat as the boma blade clattered to the floor.

  Julio didn't stop to study the image. Training had fully taken over and he rolled to his feet, trained his grav-gun down the tunnel and fired a stream of relativistic projectiles down it before he even started to identify targets.

  Two more doors had opened, with God Kings darting into the passage, weapons up. The first God King, though, was still in the way and barely starting to slump as Julio rolled to his feet and they had a moment of hesitation about firing. If the body in the way had been a normal they couldn't have hesitated, but killing a fellow God King of the same clan and sept was another issue.

  Julio didn't give them time to make up their minds; the stream of explosive kinetic rounds blew the two Posleen in half.

  He flipped his hand down to his side and drew out two suicide bars, setting them both for a hundred kilo charge and tossed them down the passageway, one lightly, the other hard. The CLANG! of another door breaking loose and a secondary from a Posleen plasma gun was all the information he needed; there had been more down the passageway. There were probably lots of Posleen down the passageway. But for now the corridor was . . .

  "CLEAR!"

  Mike had watched the encounter on a feed. He'd have rather been the person in the passage, killing Posleen and breaking things. But he knew his job was at a higher level. He'd actually been following that feed as well as feeds from all three divisions; multitasking in combat was so second nature he didn't think about it. Positions were being captured all over the line but casualties were up; every passage seemed to be heavily defended. And they were defended by God Kings.

  The Posleen came in, broadly, two forms. The vast majority, at a
ratio of about four hundred to one, were semi-sentient normals. They were mildly functional morons which could be pointed in a general direction and told to kill anything non-Posleen in view. They also had implanted skills that could be used to build a civilization. And they worshipped, literally, their bosses, the relatively rare God Kings. A subset of the normals were the cosslain, physically pretty much indistinguishable but considerably brighter. Cosslain were almost sentient in fact.

  God Kings ran things. In open-field battle they generally rode anti-grav platforms called tenar, which mounted heavier weapons and sensors. Occasionally they used Posleen landing craft to give ground forces air support or air-land methods such as rear area assaults. But Mike had never run into a situation where the primary shooters were God Kings. Undoubtedly the lead God King, the one that Julio had just killed with his own gun—neat trick—was the commander of the defenders of the pit. But having this many God Kings forward meant that somewhere there were a couple of thousand normals without anybody to tell them what to do.