by John Ringo
No one ever knew, nor shall they ever know, how many times the penetrators ricocheted back and forth through the ship. Even as the lead Posleen C-Dec heeled over and began to plunge into the sea one of them must have breached its antimatter containment unit. The C-Dec disappeared in a stunning flash that could be seen as far away as Panama City.
Many of the tenar-riding Posleen lost control of their sleds in the shockwave of that blast. Some were spun into the sea at fatal speed; others were torn from their sleds and went over the side to plunge into the murky deep. There, struggling and kicking, attempting to learn in an instant what neither millions of years of evolution nor careful genetic manipulation had taught them — namely, to swim — the Posleen sank like rocks. Still others, riding closer to the exploding lander, had been killed by the heat. For Posleen farther away, the blast was enough to induce blindness, temporary or permanent.
Daisy, pitiless, swept her triple turrets across the tenar-borne survivors of the first C-Dec’s disintegration. Traveling to within less than a kilometer of a lander, the canister shells exploded, usually within microseconds of each other. The three shells from a typical salvo burst apart in puffs of angry black smoke, releasing as they did about twenty-five hundred two-ounce iron balls each. These seventy-five hundred balls traveled on with all the velocity of the original shell, plus a small additional bit of energy from their bursting charge. In such a dense cloud of whistling death, it was the rare Posleen who found neither himself nor his tenar penetrated and wrecked.
As the triples fired and swept, fired and swept, scouring the skies of the unarmored tenar, Daisy turned her anti-lander guns in pairs against the following B- and C-Decs. None of these exploded in nearly as spectacular a fashion as the first. Still, she kept up the fire on pairs of them at a rate of forty-eight rounds a minute until each one targeted either turned and ran or fell into the sea.
The other group, the one that had spread out looking for the indistinctly plotted CA-139, likewise headed for home.
USS Texas
Graybeal, ashen-faced, worried, This flotilla was designed to fight as a team. Who expected us to be split up electronically? And now I’m out here, alone and in the open, with Salem unable to provide close defense and Des Moines too far away to be helpful.
The admiral looked at the plots of his three ships, Salem running like hell for open water, Des Moines — one fight finished — now turning to race to his rescue. He looked at the rapidly approaching swarm of Posleen. No computer was needed for this calculation. The Posleen would reach Texas an easy eight minutes before McNair’s command was in range.
A brief sigh escaped Graybeal’s lips. So sad it has to end now. It was wonderful being a young man again, wonderful to command at sea again. What is left but to make as good a fight of it as possible?
“Captain, do a one eighty,” the admiral ordered.
The captain’s eyes widened at first. Do a suicide run? But then he, too, looked at the plots.
“Try and get right under them, do you think, Admiral? Maybe take one or two with us.”
“It’s the only way to engage with any chance of a kill at all.”
The captain nodded. “Helm, turn us about. Gunnery, prepare to fire at lowest possible elevation. Fire as she bears.”
USS Des Moines
The ship was racing, Daisy Mae cutting power to nearly everything else and straining to make it to Texas’ succor before it was too late.
Holographic tears running down holographic cheeks she asked in a broken voice, “Shall I show you, Skipper? I can sense it well enough to do that. Someone ought to see and remember.”
McNair couldn’t bring himself to speak and was only just able to prevent himself from crying. He gave a shallow nod.
“Jesus!” exclaimed the helmsman as Texas’ last fight sprang into view in miniature over one of the plotting tables in CIC.
The Texas was stricken, that much was obvious. She was already listing badly to port. Three of her turrets had been blasted away completely. Smoke poured, black and hateful, from a fourth, flames casting evil glows upon the smoke. And yet her captain, or maybe it was the admiral, or perhaps it was a simple seaman at the helm, was still in the fight, still desperately twisting the ship to give her sole remaining Planetary Defense Cannon a chance to fire.
The Posleen were having none of it. Standing off to all sides, hanging low to avoid the ship’s last sting, they poured fire — plasma cannon and KE projectiles — into Texas’ superstructure and hull. In the miniature view provided by Daisy recognizably large chunks of steel were blasted off into the sky.
“He got three,” Daisy announced in a breaking voice. “Destroyed or damaged and withdrawn, I can’t say. But there were nineteen that took off after Texas and there are only sixteen now.”
“How long until we’re in range?” McNair asked in a tone tinged with purest hate.
“Two minutes, captain, but… Oh!”
On the projection Daisy had made, BB-35, the United States’ Ship Texas, veteran of three wars, had — fighting and defiant to the end — blown up.
Blonde hair streaming down her face, head hanging, Daisy announced, “The enemy is running for home now. I might be able to pick off a straggler but…”
“But we’re alone now and can’t necessarily take them. And that group that turned tail might return. I know. Revenge will have to wait.”
No one on the bridge who heard McNair speak at that moment doubted that there would be revenge.
Remedios, Chiriqui, Republic of Panama
Binastarion sighed. Sometimes you get the abat and sometimes the abat get you.
He’d lost way too many sons to the thresh of this world. They’d died at the walls of the threshkreen city, David. They’d died in its parks and narrow alleys. They’d died on jungle trails pursuing the thresh who — maddeningly — turned and fought back with a vengeance as they made their escape over the mountains to the north. Lastly, he lost nearly an entire a sub-clan’s worth of Kessentai to the threshkreen’s damnable warships.
And for that what did he have to show? They had destroyed a ship, true, and the biggest of the lot. But the nourishing thresh of the ship; the refined metal of the ship? Lost, lost… irredeemably lost. Sunk to the bottom of an impenetrable sea. They are clever and vicious, these thresh, to deny the victor the fruits of victory. I must remember this. They are the cruelest of species.
While the exchange of so many Kessentai — Each one a son, cousin or nephew! The thought was like a knife in the belly — for a single one of the threshkreen’s warships struck Binastarion as a very bad trade, he had to admit there were redeeming factors. At least the warships will not be firing at my people on the ground any longer. It was bad enough that they wrecked the landing on the southern peninsula, blasting holes in our lines through which the threshkreen poured and smashing any assemblage of the People massing for counterattack. Even now the remnants of the People there, cut up into bite sized bits, bleat for aid which I cannot give them. They will not last long.
Neither, though, the God King contemplated more happily, will the other column of thresh last long. Despite being led by a contingent of the metal threshkreen, they move forward only uncertainly. Otherwise, I’d already have sprung my trap.
Indeed, there was a trap. One of the side effects of being a comparatively small clan, as Binastarion’s was, was that one had to be clever to survive since one was not very strong. One had to be very clever to survive as a clan in the Po’os-eat-Po’os worlds of the People. Thus, while scream and charge was the normal tactical doctrine of powerful clans of Posleen, for the little clans the doctrine became something more like “bait and switch.”
Binastarion, a senior God King more clever than most, had pulled something very like a bait and switch. Even while the column of heavily armed threshkreen pressed up the road between mountains and sea, groups of the People were taking shelter in the former and — to a lesser extent — in the mangrove swamps bordering the latter. Meanw
hile, some of Binastarion’s cleverest eson’soran delayed in the center: take a position, fire, gallop back, pass through a different group, take a position, wait… “Bait and switch.”
It might have been over already, if the thresh had either pressed forward boldly or moved more carefully, securing his flanks. As it was, the thresh seemed more confused in his movements than anything.
Well, time to bring the enemy a little enlightenment.
Interlude
The sun was setting to the west. In part for the warmth, and in part to keep off the annoying insect life of this world, Ziramoth had built a small fire. He and Guanamarioch lay low to either side of the fire, sometimes talking, sometimes just thinking. Ziramoth interspersed conversation with slices of the fish he had caught.
Posleen didn’t cook. Oh, they’d eat thresh that had been caught in a fire and charred, but the idea of actually applying heat or a chemical process to make their food more palatable was something that had not been implanted in them by the Aldenata and which they had never thought upon themselves. Sooner a lion would make and eat crepes than a Posleen would cook food.
Nonetheless, Ziramoth — even one-handed — was a pretty deft hand with a knife and something like sushi was within his repertoire. He and Guanamarioch made a decent meal there, by the mossy riverbank, off raw fish, sugarcane, and a few mangos.
Guanamarioch was certain that Ziramoth was quite a lot brighter than he was. The scars, along with the missing eye and arm, suggested the Kenstain might be braver as well, not that Guanamarioch considered himself to be especially brave.
Most God Kings would have thought the question beneath them even to ask. Most, indeed, were incapable of so much as acknowledging the existence of those who had turned from the path, except perhaps to spit.
Guanamarioch had to ask, “What caused you to turn from the path, Zira?”
The Kenstain, in the process of filleting a fish, stopped in mid-slice and lay stock still for a moment, contemplating how to form his answer.
“It was long ago… six… no, seven orna’adars past,” Ziramoth answered, slowly, before asking, “You know we were once a greater clan than we are now?”
Guanamarioch nodded and answered, “Yes, I read of it on the way here, in the scrolls.”
“The scrolls do not tell all the story, young lordling. I have read them, too, and they do not say how we ended up in such straits.”
“Is this… forbidden knowledge, Zira?”
The Kenstain laughed aloud, a great tongue-lolling, fang-bared Posleen laugh. “To forbid it, they would have to admit to it somewhere. And no one has ever admitted to it.”
“Tell me, Zira.”
The Kenstain acquired a far away look for a moment, as if trying hard to recall something very distant. Then he looked closely at the God King, as if trying to decide if the youth would be harmed by the knowledge he had to impart. He must have decided that knowledge cannot harm, or that, if it could, it could not do more harm than ignorance.
Ziramoth began, “We were great once, among the greatest clans of the People. Our tenar filled the sky. The beating of the feet of our normals upon the ground was like the thunder. The host filled the eye like the rolling sea.
“And then we made a mistake…”
Chapter 18
There are no bad regiments;
there are only bad officers.
— Field Marshall, Viscount William Slim
Remedios, Chiriqui, Republic of Panama
Suarez wasn’t confused; he was infuriated. The orders emanating from Cortez’s headquarters were confusing, to be sure. “Go here… no, wait… no, go there… no, come back… no, go forward… detach a battalion to secure X… no, no, concentrate to attack Y.” But Suarez, rather than being confused, understood completely.
The fucking moron is simply too scared shitless to have a coherent thought.
Right now Suarez’s mechanized regiment was about half scattered around the northern part of the Province of Herrera and the western portion of Veraguas. He had radio communication with most of them, most of the time, but the communication was unreliable at best. Entire battalions would be unreachable for anywhere from minutes to hours. Even in a place that screwed with radio communication naturally, Suarez thought that more than a little suspicious.
As the lead regiment of the division, Suarez had, or was supposed to have, operational control of the company of Yankee ACS attached to the 1st Division. Unfortunately, Cortez interfered, or attempted to interfere, with the gringos even more than he did with his own force. Fortunately, the gringos, like Suarez himself, had learned very quickly to ignore most of what the division commander had to say.
Even more fortunately, the commander of the ACS, the gringo captain named Connors, had an understanding with Suarez. It was the understanding of two soldiers, differing greatly in rank, who recognized a common bond of dedication to the profession and a common bond in being placed under the command of idiots often enough for it to be more usual than not.
“This is not the way to use an armored combat suit formation,” Connors complained to Suarez. “Little penny packets, scattered about, with no oomph and no punch. We should be like armor, concentrated for the decisive blow. Except that we’re better than armor because we can go anywhere and fight anywhere. We should not be used like assault guns, supporting slower moving and less powerful forces. It’s a violation of Principle of War — mass.”
“You’re pulling in your detachments?” Suarez queried.
“Yes, sir,” Connors agreed, nodding unseen inside his suit. “As I can.”
“Well, Captain, while I agree with your assessment of the role of ACS, we’ve got another problem that might make it a little wiser to do some splitting up. How are your internal communications?”
“Good, sir. We’re not having the commo problems your forces are.”
Connors reached up with both hands and removed his suit’s helmet, placing it under one suited arm. Silvery goop retreated from his head and hair, forming an icicle on his chin. The goop reached out a tendril seeking the helmet. When it had found it, it flowed from the chin straight down. As before, Suarez found the image and, worse, the image of what it must be like when in the helmet and surrounded by goop, to be most unsettling.
Suarez shook his head to clear the thought. Blech.
“I think our commo problems are not natural, Captain, even though they seem to be random. Instead, I think someone is… feeling us out, getting a picture of how we work. Maybe it would be better to say that they’ve already done that and have now graduated to the early stage of deliberately fucking with us.”
Connors’ mouth formed a moue. He was a veteran of the early fights. He knew that someone or something often targeted human communications. He was also pretty sure that those doing the targeting were not stupid crocodilian centauroids.
“They’ll blanket you at the worst possible time,” Connors announced. “I’ve seen it before.”
“I agree,” said Suarez. “Which is why I am going to ask you to do something very tactically unsound.”
“You want me to leave a man or two with each of your battalions for backup communications, don’t you, sir?”
Suarez smiled. “Pretty sharp for a gringo, aren’t you?”
“There’s something else too, Colonel,” Connors began. “I have a really bad feeling. We aren’t killing enough Posleen to make a difference. They’re fighting, and running, and fighting, and running. Almost like humans would. It’s unsettling, sir, you know?”
Taking a deep breath and exhaling, Suarez agreed. “Scares me too, son. And I don’t know what to do about it. The division commander’s no help…”
“Well, sir, I have an idea. If I break up one squad for backup communications I still have two squads from one platoon I’ll have shorted. I’d like to send them out as flankers, north and south, in buddy teams. That’ll still leave me two line platoons and a weapons platoon under my control for when things go totally to shit.�
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“Do it,” Suarez ordered. “Do you need any backup from my regiment?”
Connors hesitated, thinking about that. After a few moments he answered, “No, sir. If I were you I’d start pulling in my troops and at least getting ready to form a perimeter. If my guess is right then the best thing you can do for my flankers is give them a solid place to run to. ’Cause, sir, sure as God didn’t make little green apples, we’ve got our dicks in the garbage disposal and someone, or some thing, has his finger on the power switch.”
Darhel Consulate, Panama City, Panama
The Rinn Fain’s clawed finger rested lightly on the blinking green button. He contemplated that claw. What a sad state. We were a warrior people; a people of fierce pride. A people made by evolution to be naturally what the divine intended us to be. And then the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned Aldenata had to meddle, reducing us to meddlers ourselves. The Rinn Fain nearly wept with the sadness of the fate inflicted by the Aldenata on his people. Damn them, and damn those earlier Darhel who acquiesced.
“All is in readiness, my lord,” the slave Indowy prodded. “It will be perfection, now. If you hesitate, the humans may be prepared to counter.”
Smiling through needle sharp teeth at the slave, the Rinn Fain answered, “I am not hesitating, insect. I am savoring the moment. So much perfect destruction to be unleashed, and no violence inherent in it to trigger lintatai. Moments like this are rare, wretch, and must be appreciated to the fullest.”
Even so, the Rinn Fain pressed the button, which went from blinking green to solid red.
North of Remedios, Chiriqui, Republic of Panama
In theory an ACS could simply beat its way through the rain forest, hardly slowing even for the largest trees. In practice, not only did the felled trees tend to build up to the point where they became nearly impenetrable even for one of the suits, the noise had a nasty tendency to attract the attention of ill-mannered strangers.