Hell's Faire

by John Ringo

  "The shuttles!" Aalansar said. His second in command gestured to the east. "We're supposed to wait for their shuttles."

  "They send scouts up the hill," the oolt'ondai snapped. "In a moment we'll be under fire; we can't wait."

  * * *

  "Hey, we gots company, boss," Stewart called. "I make it a lesser oolt'ondai, heavy on weaponry. And it's right up in the gap on Rocky Knob."

  "Now ain't that interesting," Duncan said. "I got no fire support, boss. The nukes are shot out and we're out of range of everybody else."

  "And the Reapers are all loaded for anti-lander," Mike said. "Battalion grenade fire; we need to suppress these guys quick."

  "Call off the shuttles?" Duncan asked.

  "Negative," the commander replied. "Calculated risk; we need to move out, they need to come in. Spread 'em out, though."

  * * *

  "By teams!" Captain Slight called. "Grenades, my target, mark!"

  "We're out of it," Blatt cursed trying to swing the huge bag to a better position as he trotted to the northeast.

  "Not quite," Sunday said calmly. "Lamprey emanations over Black Rock Mountain. Platoon: Target!"

  * * *

  "Battalion, fire!" Mike called and watched the flight of the grenades to their targets. The suits mounted dual launchers and carried 138 of the 20mm balls in onboard storage. Each of the balls had a range of just over three thousand meters and an effective kill radius of thirty-five meters. So the battalion fire mission dropped across the oncoming oolt'ondar like the wrath of God, the grenades detonating at one meter above ground height and flailing the air with shrapnel.

  "Check fire," O'Neal called, noting that most of the enemy had been swept away by the fire mission. "Prepare to receive landers."

  The enemy landing craft were designed for space combat but their secondary weapons could reach down and destroy the spread-out battalion if allowed to engage without resistance. Unfortunately, the battalion had limited resources to take them on. "All Reapers, engage Lamprey targets west."

  "This is getting a tad hot," Duncan remarked, dialing in the grenade targets.

  "Yes, what," Stewart said. "Scouts are reporting a movement up the valley. If we don't get the hell out of here we're going to be walled up."

  "It's all a matter of timing," Mike replied. "Battalion, rifle fire on the hills; suppress Posleen fire for incoming shuttles. All things considered, though," he continued, switching back to the staff frequency, "it might have been better to bring them in with us."

  "Yeah, but we weren't expecting an ambush," Duncan noted. "Now, did they have every LZ covered I wonder?"

  "Yeah, I wonder," Stewart said. "I'm putting that in the intel folder with a high-priority mark. I think we were set up, sir."

  "But they bit off more than they could chew," Mike noted as the battalion fire started to sweep the charging Posleen off the ridgeline. However, he could see trooper icons dropping as well; the force on the hill was as heavily armed as any he had ever seen. "I hope."

  * * *

  "We are getting slaughtered," Aalansar said bitterly.

  "The way the Path has taken us," Gamataraal said as another of the dismounted Kessentai was removed from the Path. "We close, and we kill. As long as they are unable to move, we are well off."

  "Shuttle coming in to the south," his second noted. "But we have no targeting systems." The superior Posleen antiaircraft fire depended upon the sensors and motors of the saucerlike vehicles the God Kings normally rode. However, they also made the God Kings easy targets.

  "The Path is never an easy one," the commander said. "Fire everything at it. Ignore the threshkreen."

  * * *

  "Oh, damn," Gunny Pappas noted. He had just come back from checking out the battalion as it tried to fight its way out of the pocket and the incoming shuttle couldn't have been timed worse. And the reaction of the Posleen wasn't all that peachy either.

  "Now, why would they do that?" O'Neal asked as every single Posleen that was still under God King control turned their fire away from the suits and onto the shuttle.

  "I dunno, but I think it's gonna work," Duncan noted, digging his head into the streambed. "Don't you?"

  "Yeah, probably," Mike noted calmly. "Bank the other shuttle behind Oakey Mountain. Battalion: INCOMING!"

  * * *

  The oolt'ondai was armed with three-millimeter railguns, plasma guns and hypervelocity missiles. The shuttle crested the south shoulder of Oakey Mountain and headed down Stillhouse Branch, accelerating past Mach Four and preparing for a hot inertial drop along Black Creek. It turned out to be hotter than anticipated.

  Most of the fire went behind or to either side, but the targeting systems of the God King's weapons were still good enough to lead the craft, and a hurricane of railgun and plasma rounds hammered the shuttle as it rocketed down the stream. In a blink of an eye it started to come apart, scattering its highly volatile cargo into the fire.

  Class Five Antimatter Reactors, the system installed on shuttles, were designed for combat and to withstand the occasional misdirected round. They were not, however, designed to be hit by a storm of plasma fire. In less than a millisecond the containment was pierced and all hell broke loose.

  * * *

  "ASS TO THE BLAST!" Mueller yelled, dropping to his face then pulling the shrieking children on his back around to cover them. The flash of white had been so bright, like a flashbulb on megaoverdrive, that he could still see the trees and bodies ahead of him even after he shut his eyes.

  All of the adults dropped, grabbing any child still standing, and waited for the blast wave. By luck they were on a relatively flat hill, so when the ground shock hit they merely slid a short distance down the muddy slope then stopped. Shortly after, the outer layer of the overpressure wave hit, but at the distance they were from the explosion it amounted to not much more than a strong wind that shook the brown leaves from the surrounding trees and dropped streams of frigid water onto their backs.

  Slowly most of the screaming dropped to sniffles. No one had been looking at the burst and the distance was far enough that there hadn't been any flash-blindness or thermal pulse burns.

  "This is insane," Shari said, getting to her feet. "Insane."

  "Insane or not, we have to keep going," Wendy replied, tiredly. She hugged Amber to her as the child shivered uncontrollably. "We have to get them out of the wet."

  "Just put one foot in front of the other," Mosovich said, picking up Nathan and perching him on top of his rucksack. "We either make it, or we don't. I'm glad we're not in it, though."

  CHAPTER THREE

  Rabun Gap, United States of America, Sol III

  0257 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD

  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 cal
led. "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.