Posleen FanFic

by Leigh Kimmel

  "Master Sergeant Weaver? Two incoming priority messages from Brigade S3."

  "Go ahead, AID."

  "In perceived order of priority: First, the refugee office in Canada has notified the Rail operator, and has passed over your message. The message arrived too late to get to your wife before the vehicle left Churchill for Winnipeg. There are no AIDs on that vehicle. As soon as the vehicle arrives in Winnipeg, the message will be forwarded to your wife."

  "Thank you, AID. Keep me posted on that, will you?"

  "Yes, Sir. Second message: Inbound Posleen battle globe heading east north east across the Pacific. Expect landings along the Western seaboard and inland, North to Point Arena, South to San Luis Obispo Bay, within fifty minutes."

  * * *

  It was closing time at the Riverbank Army Ammunition Plant, eight and a half kilometers North East of Modesto, but that hadn't stopped the machines as the civil service workers ignored the hooters and bells and continued working frantically.

  At first, the government had quietly started stockpiling large quantities of the 7.62 ball and tracer ammunition that was the primary production output of the factory for the Army. Train car after train car had rolled through and been loaded with thousands of cases of the ammunition needed by the AIW infantry weapons.

  Then came the initial landing warning in the morning, and the factory had gone into overdrive. The warehouse and docks were full to overflowing of the cased ammunition loads, but the trains weren't coming fast enough to bleed off the excess. Not that they were supposed to, the factory had its own local, home-grown, "defense strategy".

  Then came the west coast's first landing warning, and the factory production had, if anything, gone up a further notch. Now, however, the trains had stopped and Army deuce-and-a-half trucks had moved in, even now were rolling through the enclosure, having two pallets of 7.62 ammo loaded via forklift and then rolling back out again.

  But the machines assembling the ammo were still working faster than needed to supply the machines that were taking the fruits of their labor away. The excess production of bullets and powder was being stacked around the fences in a long pile behind hundreds of thousands of brass ingots, along with whatever heavy metal sheeting that could be found. Around and through the pile were being placed large quantities of combustibles and explosives ... and detcord. Lots and lots of detcord, because that was the secondary production output of the factory.

  As months passed before the landings, the ring around the facility had got higher, and thicker, and more substantial.

  The original fence around the Riverbank facility was over two and a half meter high and close on 1200 meters long. By the time that time ran out, just inside the original fence was a new, secondary fence that was a half meter shorter, a meter and a half thicker ... and some wag had painted "Front Towards Enemy" on the inside in meter and a half high characters.

  * * *

  The Battle Globe, or rather what was left of it, glided effortlessly up to the coast and split into thirty or so Battle Decs, each in turn fanning out to cover a wide area of the Northern California area.

  The Globe had started out much larger, much more complete, but it had run into several of the converted frigates of the Earth orbit defense forces, and before destroying them had had a large portion of itself destroyed in turn. It had shed all the damaged landers and Command Decs and had reconfigured itself as best it could, but all told it had gone from several hundred of the Battle Decs to something slightly smaller than one-sixth its original size.

  A one-sixth size Battle Globe is still at least a quarter million Posleen normals and more than 600 Kessentai.

  As the space ship came in over the coast it began shedding single and multiple landers, which spread out and began to drop towards wherever their was enough terrain for them to land on.

  The people in the Northern Central California Coast looked up and watched the invaders' ships as they passed high over head, and for the most part there was panic as many of those who were out and about tried to return home.

  But for many, they had watched video of the East Coast landings on the news and the Internet. They understood that the only way to prevent their family and loved ones from being eaten by the invaders was to stand and fight. Those people were at least somewhat mentally prepared for what was now happening, and they turned to their vehicle cabs, and their trunks, and their gun cabinets, and brought out an infinitely variable collection of weapons, from medium and large bore handguns, to assault rifles bought on the black market, to shotguns.

  As those singleton landers dropped and opened up to disgorge their complements of Posleen normals and lone Kessentai, they were engaged by whatever organized military units, law-enforcement and unorganized civilians that were on the scene and happened to be armed. The remaining civilians in the immediate area changed their status to instant refugee and made a run for it, covered in part by a mass of disorganized fire that took the Posleen by surprise.

  While the Posleen had a vast superiority in weapons, they were still outnumbered at any moment by three or four to one—and each and every one of those pesky Threshkreen were carrying weaponry that, while not as flashy or high tech as those carried by the invaders, still carried enough bullets to drop an oolt.

  Which point the defenders were also noting with glee. While a single 9mm pistol round wouldn't stop one of the horses, the thirty or forty of its mates coming in from every other direction would certainly do so.

  And there were even enough sniper rifles around to put paid to the Kessentai who were aggressive enough to come out of their landers riding their tenar.

  What it meant then was that for the most part, the singleton landers were vastly overwhelmed by the local forces. Battle Decs, however, that dropped their landers where they could support each other, succeeded in making beachheads throughout the area between the coast itself and the coastal mountain ranges. But even they found themselves in highly hostile terrain where even the pens where the Thresh lived would explode if they were entered injudiciously.

  And then they found out what all the mountain valleys in the coastal ranges were good for. They were good for hiding artillery. And artillery likes nothing more than big, fat dumb landers to shoot at, where they don't have to worry about counter-battery fire.

  For the most part, any landings between the coast and the coastal mountain ranges were enveloped, contained and destroyed in short order. Yes, there were massive casualties on the civilian human side. But the sacrifice they made to keep the Posleen bunched up long enough for the Army to show up with the big guns is what saved the day for that part of California.

  But once the remains of the Globe passed over the coastal range and split in half, things were different. The sparseness of the populace coupled with the miles and miles of tactically flat terrain meant that the landers could drop anywhere, in any force, and not face any amount of significant resistance while they organized and moved out to their objectives.

  The Globe commander seemed to realize this, and as it crested the range above Los Banos it turned North and split into two parts.

  * * *

  "What are they up to, Captain?" Lieutenant Colonel Kuzio was finishing his staff meeting when news of the Globes bifurcation came in over the brigade tactical net.

  Captain Rodriquez was looking down at her notes when the question came. She looked up, frowning. "One half, the smaller one, appears to be heading towards Stockton, and will pass over it in approximately fifteen minutes. It's really moving slowly, much slower than we know they are capable of. Division thinks that from the small size of the Globe, and the indications of battle damage, that it is damaged in some way. Or, the commander of the ship has learned restraint. We'll probably never know.

  "The second half is moving towards Turlock. I guess they want Turkey for dinner—"

  "Turkey?" broke in the commander.

  "Turkeys from Turlock, Sir. Turlock's primary export. If they land south of the Tuolumne, we can slow
them down at the river. If north of it, then we'll only have the Stanislaus and a bunch of aqueducts to work with."

  "Ok, but we really need to worry about the smaller bloc at the moment. Stockton is due West of here, and there are no significant terrain features between there and here and Phase Line Nickel." 'Here' was the small town of Farmington, where the command post was currently set up.

  The battalion commander looked down at the floor of the schoolroom in which they were standing or sitting on the little people's desks. "Ok. First priority is the smaller one. Sixes?", he said, to get the company commander's attention. "Move out from the diamond to a line along highway 4, and then move up to the positions at Phase Line Cobalt. Don't go into the hull downs until you get word, though. I might need to swing you around to Nickel on the south front, based on what both halves do. If the small half passes north of Lodi, then they're out of 3d Brigade's Area of Operations, and into Somebody Else's Problem." The colonel looked around. "Questions? Suggestions? Points?"

  "Infantry Support?" asked one of the company commanders.

  "Sorry, we're organic for this one. Infantry are spread out all over hell and gone, because the overall defense plan says they should be. Further deponent sayeth not. If they drop into our AO, we will get some crunchies passing through lines. In what condition they are, again, further deponent sayeth not. Next question?"

  "Refugee streams," said Captain Crupi, the S5. "They've already started coming up highway 4 and on through up into the mountains."

  "Right, those would be the smart ones." responded the colonel. "They stay off the roads. This is all farmland, they walk through the orchards and along the drainage ditches. Orderly vehicles can pass through. Anyone being disorderly can walk. This shouldn't be a problem since they widened the 4 from two lanes to four. Anything else?"

  Captain Rodriquez had her AIDs ear bug on and was listening to something. "Sir, the small one is breaking up and landing. Looks like just south of Stockton ... Brigade confirms, the Metropolitan Airport."

  "And the big one?"

  "Still moving more Eastwards than North, Sir. Maybe pass just North of Turlock, North of the Tuolumne. Might continue beyond the Sierras, Sir."

  "Ok, we ignore it for now. Boogie on out, Ladies and Gentlemen."

  * * *

  The minefields to their front were all clearly marked, because it was assumed that the horses couldn't read English or Spanish. That didn't stop the odd group of refugees from trying their luck, however. The only incident so far had a family group killing themselves by defeating a triple concertina wire fence, and detouring around a warning sign, and then triggering an anti-personnel mine when one of the children kicked it ... The mines were meant for the horses, so to solve the problem, one tank gunner from each platoon position was ordered to fire three round bursts from their co-axial 7.62 machine guns at anyone trying to not use a cleared channel.

  Which meant that anyone not on a road ran the risk of catching a round fired either at them, or at someone else. Anyone who wanted to complain about this was offered a lift back to the Brigade Forward Headquarters in Modesto, which was currently in the state of being overrun by ninety thousand Posleen invaders.

  Surprisingly, nobody took them up on the offer.

  In addition to the tanks along the battle line, there were also several hundred bunkered manjacks, pre-emplaced by Army Corps of Engineer assets at the same time as they had built the tank hull-downs.

  Each bunker had three high-capacity 7.62mm M60 machineguns, manjacks, each with its own 50,000 round battleboxes of ammo.

  * * *

  "Tango six-two, this is Tango four-eight, We've got a situation developing here, Sir, over" Tom said into the tactical radio set, as he looked down over a map projected by his AID.

  There was a short pause, then a voice which Tom recognized as Birch's replacement. "Tango four-eight, this is Six-Two Foxtrot, wait, over."

  Tom looked up from the hood of his hum-vee, where the map was being projected, to look out over the valley towards the sounds of thunder coming from the Stockton landing. Almost immediately, the radio squawked back to life.

  "Tango four-eight, this is Tango six-two actual. Talk to me, Master Sergeant," replied Captain Rundle, still acting as the working S3. Division Headquarters had promised the battalion commander a replacement S3 as soon as they could find one. Nobody, from the battalion commander down, was pressing them however, confident as they were in the team they had now.

  "Sir, Stockton is being chewed up and spit out by the horses. I doubt we'll get anyone out of there who was still within the city limits when the landing hit dirt."

  "How is this a problem for us?" Rundle sounded a bit peeved, but Tom knew it wasn't about his comments. He was probably still fighting off the Brigade Three's "helpful staff". "Less refugees. Improves the human genome. We're selecting for intelligence."

  "Whoa. Bloodthirsty, Sir. But that isn't the problem. The other half of the lander looks like it is about to drop onto Turlock. They've been wandering around up there indecisively for a good ten minutes."

  "Maybe they are trying to figure out what a turkey is?"

  "No way, Sir. Posleen are a strict dichotomy: Can I eat that? Yes, No. Maybe they're having a turf war up there. Whatever. But if they get off their butts and land, that means that we'll be trying to entice both sets into Zinc. And if that happens, we'll do what we can to whittle them down, but I don't think we can do that from Cobalt."

  "No, the Turkeys would roll right up our South flank. Suggestions?"

  "We may need to pull back as far as Charon, Sir, before either the 'turkeys' or the ... the ... well, cows get here."

  "Cows?"

  "Only critter ever to come out of Stockton, Sir."

  "Right. So you believe that if the cows turn this way at all after the turkeys land, then there is no way we can hold Cobalt."

  "Right, Sir."

  "Where are you right now, Master Sergeant?"

  "With Bravo, Sir. They've got a pretty good sight line in the direction of the Stockton landings. Can't see all the way there, but can see a goodly distance."

  "Ok, I'll get with the Six. Anything else?"

  "Not at this time, Sir."

  "Roger, Master Sergeant. Isn't what you are doing the job of the Assistant S3?"

  "Fresh out of officers, Sir."

  "Humph. Ok. Tango six-two, out."

  * * *

  The tank commander of tank Bravo Three Two stuck his head out of the hatch and looked around. Spotting the S3 NCOIC, he called him over. "Something odd on the thermals, Master Sergeant," said the staff sergeant. "You wanna take a look?"

  "Sure, Sergeant. Any reason to hop into a tank nowadays is a good one. Let's see what you've got." Tom grabbed hold of the tow cable that was strapped to the outside of the turret to steady himself, as he stepped across the gap between the wall of the engineer-built hull down position and the M1Es fender.

  He threw a momentary look at the quad-pod of 25mm 'Bushmaster' cannons on the near side of the turret and shrugged ruefully. He'd like to track down whoever it was that thought that up and slap him around a bit. Sure, the firepower inherent to eight bushmasters mounted coaxially on the turret sounded like a good idea. But did the guy know how much damned Ammo those things could go through? The 25mm ammo bunkers almost doubled the size of the turret, in both width and depth, and added almost a foot around the bustle rack, completely covering the blowoff panels for the main gun round bunkers.

  And even then, the guns could go through all of the available ammo in less than twenty seconds of firing on full auto.

  Probably some ex-infantry guy. Damned crunchies.

  The tank commander had dropped down inside the turret and stood behind the breach of the main gun, the loader having scrunched further around to make room. Tom hopped up onto the turret to allow the gunner the ability to traverse the turret without having to worry about ripping the Master Sergeant's legs off. "Ok, Gunner. Show me what you are looking at."

/>   "Right, Master Sergeant. See these glows here? Those are refugees, they were pretty clear a moment ago, but now they just seem to be standing there looking around." The gunner traversed and elevated the gun sights a bit to the left. "And this glow here is what it seems they are looking at. Any idea what that is?"

  The thermal device showed a glowing spot just cresting the distant horizon momentarily before settling back down behind the hill. Tom reached to the side of the display and punched the magnify button just as it started to bob back up.

  Tom froze as he recognized the thing. The Barwhon and Diess campaigns had generated a lot of intel over the past several years, much of which he'd been able to see as part of his various positions during that time, or from having been shown them by the S2 as 'Hey, wanna see something cool?' type video shots ... and even had found a lot of them on the internet using any number of civilian search engines.

  What he was looking at was the perfect thermal signature of a tenar, one of the 'flying saucers' that the Posleen leader caste rode. He gulped. The vehicle was up in the air, and he doubted that it was traveling alone. Probably the mass of its oolt'os would be found just below the horizon created by the range of low hills just to its front. "Ok. Sergeant, take your hands off the cadillacs. Do. It. Now." Once the sergeant had clearly released the turret traverse and gun elevation handles, Tom continued. "Estimate the range on that, Sergeant. Do not, and I repeat, do not use the laser rangefinder."

  "Um." The sergeant reached up and flipped the sight from thermal to visual, then magnified. "I dunno Master Sergeant. Maybe ten clicks?"

  Tom grabbed his AID. "AID, I need the battalion artillery push and the FSO."

  "Frequency enabled. Your call sign is Tango four-eight, the Battalion Fire Support Officer's call sign is Foxtrot eight-eight."

  "Thanks. 88. How fitting." Tom looked down into the turret. "You'd better get back up here Sergeant. The show is now. AID, estimate angle and range to that tenar, and its offset from the nearest Target Reference Point."

  "Yes, Master Sergeant. The Posleen vehicle is at TRP 3, left 300, up 300. Would you like me to call it in?"