by John Ringo
She thought about Papa O’Neal and a lump rose in her throat. He had always seemed… invincible, immortal. He had fought in just about every brush-fire war that existed for nearly two decades then came back to the farm when his father died. With her mother dead and Dad off with the ACS, he had been all she had and for him it seemed like a chance to make up for never being there when her father grew up.
He had taught her, intensively, from the first day she arrived. And she, in turn, had been an apt pupil. Demolitions, close combat, long distance shooting, she had taken to all of it as if only having to be reminded. It had seemed a very odd pair to the few people who knew them, the ancient mercenary and his towheaded granddaughter, and jokes had been made, carefully out of his hearing, about “the farmer’s daughter.” The jokes had tended to die, though, rather than increase as she “blossomed” and turned into a real Appalachian belle, albeit one that walked around with a panther’s stride and a pistol on her hip. And they had stopped, or at least changed fundamentally, after she shot the sergeant major.
The command sergeant major of the 105th had been quite taken by the twelve-year-old beauty in the hardware store. So taken that he had finally trapped her in the nuts and bolts section, which at the time he thought very appropriate.
When a simple “go away” had been insufficient, and when the fat old soldier had his hand down her newly filling blouse, Cally had simply drawn her Walther and shot him in the knee. Then walked away while he rolled around on the ground screaming like he’d actually been hurt or something.
It wasn’t like it was the first time she’d shot a man, and the other time had been far messier. An assassin, an acquaintance of Papa O’Neal from his Phoenix days but young again courtesy of a bootleg rejuvenation, had come recruiting. When it was clear that Papa O’Neal was uninterested in becoming a hired gun for whatever shadowy group Harold had represented, it was also clear that the assassin had revealed too much to let them continue breathing. Cally had realized things were going wrong when Papa’s right hand had started twitching like he was reaching for a gun that wasn’t there, a sure sign of agitation that she had used to good effect while playing poker against him.
Aware that things were about to go from bad to worse, and dismissed by the normally paranoid assassin as an irrelevant eight-year-old loose end that would soon be tied up, she shot the visitor in the back of the head while he was drawing on Papa O’Neal.
Therefore, shooting a fat old sergeant major was no big deal. A point that she made to the judge, without reference to the previous shooting which had, fortunately, never come to the attention of the authorities.
Her self-possession was almost her undoing. The sergeant major was vociferously defending himself on the not inconceivable charge that she had propositioned him and then shot him when he wanted to pay too low a price. In fact, he was trying very hard to get her charged with attempted murder. However, Cally quickly demonstrated that if she wanted to kill him she could have done so with ease. And no one could be found to back up the sergeant major’s assertions about extracurricular activities. In the end the former sergeant major found himself in a penal battalion and Cally’s picture was circulated around all the nearby military encampments where it made a nice pin-up with the caption: “WARNING! Jailbait! Armed and Dangerous!”
She hadn’t had much self-possession after finding Papa O’Neal’s body. She had covered the arm back up and stumbled to the cache to cry her heart out. But as the night went on, she had recognized that she had to leave. There was a full-blown battle going on to the north from the sounds of it, and the Posleen flowing through the Gap were spreading out. She had to head to the human lines, or at least find somewhere further away to hide. The Posleen would pass by something like the cache at first, but later they would come back and dig like badgers if there was any sign of materials or people. So she started to pack.
She didn’t know how long she would be moving, so she had to take food. And the nights were getting colder, so she needed some snivel gear. Papa O’Neal could probably make do with just a poncho liner but she wasn’t nearly as tough, or well insulated, as the old soldier, so she packed a sleeping bag. Extra water, fuel tabs, spare ammo… There was just too much. Even with what she packed if she was in the woods more than five days things would start to get hard.
She stared at the pile, unsure what to take and what to leave, until the floor flipped up and hit her on the face.
CHAPTER TWO
Rabun Gap, United States of America, Sol III
0242 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD
Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ’ow’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ’eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin
to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ’eroes” when the drums begin
to roll.
— Rudyard Kipling
“Tommy”
The external viewers had adjusted the night to sixty percent of daylight ambiance. The wood-shrouded hills were dark and cool under the gibbous moon and the Gap valley was occasionally visible as the shuttles crested the ridges.
Then everything went white.
The weapons were the sole survivors of a massive salvo fired from the northern tier of what was left of the United States. The Posleen assault on Earth had shattered almost every other industrialized nation but through a combination of foresight, ruthlessness and terrain the United States had managed to hold on to productive areas in the eastern Midwest, what had come to be known as “the Cumberland Pocket.” It was comprised of most of Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa and Michigan. In addition there was a northern tier of states — Minnesota, North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana — that were above where the Posleen could effectively campaign.
It was from these latter that most of the nuclear weapons had been fired.
Nuclear missiles from silos throughout the Midwest had been recovered and moved to safety ahead of the Posleen hordes. Violating numerous treaties, they had been converted to mobile launchers and now were positioned throughout the northern tier of states, most of which remained in human hands, and even up into Canada. Many of them would not have the angularity to reach the target area — their “minimum range” was still too long — but a few would. In addition, while most of the nuclear ballistic missile submarines had been converted to transports, a few of them retained their missiles. All of these weapons, enough to gut any country, were available to support the ACS airmobile.
But Posleen antimissile systems were tremendously effective; practically anything that crested the horizon that was under power or maneuvered would be destroyed. So the only viable choice was to try to saturate the defenses. However, it was not just the innumerable weapons on God King saucers that could engage the missiles; as they reached apogee they were visible to the thousands of landers still scattered across North America. So out of the thousands of nuclear weapons that were fired, only a handful survived to enter ballistic trajectories and become mysteriously invisible to the Posleen targeting systems.
Those handful would be more than enough.
The salvo of reentry rounds landed in a triangle pattern, one directly in the Mountain City Gap and the other two in the passes to the north and south. Each of the explosions was one hundred kilotons, almost ten times stronger than the weapon that hit Hiroshima, and wasted a circle three thousand meters in diameter, smashing every tree and scrap of brush to the ground or incinerating them and tossing them into the column of fiery gas that reached to the heavens.
The blast of fire and pressure reached out and scoured the ridges to either side, ripping up the trees and smashing them into toothpicks, flattening the maturing forests and ripping the soil out to the bare rock all the way to the tops of the hills.
* * *
“Sergeant Major.” Jake’s artificial intelligence device still had the toneless tenor that was the “factory”
default. He had never bothered to personalize it. The AID was a Galactic introduction, a small, black, formable piece of what looked like plastic but that was, in fact, a continuous computing unit. The devices were fully AI and linked together in a seamless web of data that stretched across an entire planet. In this case the AID had picked up a piece of information from the net and after a nanosecond’s consideration determined that, yes, this was something that its human needed to know.
“Multiple incoming nuclear rounds targeted on Rabun Gap. The unit is outside the zone of direct danger, but anyone looking in that direction will experience flash-blindness.”
“Holy shit,” Mueller muttered. They were traversing one of the innumerable ridges in the area and while the Gap was quite some distance away, the fireball would not only be visible, it would seem like it was right on top of them. The ridgeline was a knifeblade of rock, made slippery by the rain.
“Down,” Jake snapped, pointing over the edge of the ridge to the north. It wasn’t a cliff, but it was steep.
“How?!” Shari snapped, shifting Kelly higher on her back and freeing an arm to brush hair out of her face. As far as she could tell, one step to the side and she and the girl were both going to slide a couple of hundred feet to rocks.
“Carefully,” Mueller replied. He was carrying both Tommy and Amber but he nonetheless started to shift down the steep hillside. But in a moment he stopped and shook his head. “Jake, it’s not going to work.”
“Why?” Mosovich said then cursed. “I’m a senile old fool: ground-shock.”
“We can make it down, but…”
“It’ll flip us off the side,” Mosovich said, looking around. The ridges in the area were usually fairly easy slopes to either side; just their luck they were on one of the knife-edge portions.
“AID, how long?”
“Five minutes,” the computer replied. “Many of them have been destroyed, but between three and twelve will probably hit. None of them will hit between our present position and the Gap.”
Jake eyed the thin trail along the top of the ridge. In about a hundred meters it started to curve south and flatten out.
“Ma’am, my advice is to run!”
* * *
“Cool,” Sunday whispered, watching the expanding mushroom cloud into which the shuttle was apparently going to fly.
“Yep, that’s the real and the nasty, sir,” Blatt said. “Finally the kind of support we’re designed for.”
“Three minutes: Standby for deployment,” Captain Slight said over the company frequency. “I hope like hell everybody’s awake. If not you’re about to be woken up the hard way.”
Sunday’s chair suddenly straightened then rotated in two directions so that he was standing up, facing backwards.
“All troops,” Major O’Neal said, “prepare to deploy.”
The shuttles suddenly accelerated past Mach One in a series of barely felt sonic booms, approaching the last hill. They continued to accelerate as they hit the first compression wave from the nuclear explosions and began to noticeably rock in the turbulence.
“WHOOOEEEE!” Blatt yelled. “Comin’ in hot and ROCKIN’!”
As the shuttles crested Oakey Mountain they began firing the combat suits at the ground, starting from the back of the shuttle and working forward.
* * *
Tommy felt the slam of ejection over his inertial compensators and bent his knees as the ground came at him at nearly a thousand miles per hour. His on-board compensators and the disposable inertial pack that he was wearing combined to slow his speed to just below the speed of sound before he entered ground effect where a Terran bounce pack included in the inertial set slowed him even more.
The ejection was noticeable but hitting the ground hurt. He was still going at over two hundred miles per hour and felt the shock through his whole body as the suit automatically tucked and rolled backwards.
He went through two more rolls, mainly due to the slope, before the suit was able to establish control and throw him to his feet and a screaming halt.
He immediately turned towards the assembly beacon in the valley and took a count of his troops. The whole group of Reapers were on the ground and, despite exiting after him, were already bounding for the beacon.
Tommy started to shake his head and quelled the reaction, setting his suit to max-run instead and heading down the hill. He had a lot of catching up to do.
* * *
Mike threw the full power of his inertial compensators and half-flew, half-bounced from his position on the shoulder of Oakey Mountain to the battalion staff assembly beacon at the intersection of Black Creek and Silver Branch. It was a point of pride to be the first out and the first assembled, even if he did have farther to go.
“Scouts out,” he snapped as his foot touched down. “Two teams south, three teams north.” He looked around and then went flat into the streambed. Bravery was all well and good but there was plenty of time to get killed on this mission.
“Boss,” Stewart said, checking the intelligence schematic that collected sensor data from all the suits in the battalion. “I’d strongly suggest the last team up Rocky Knob. I’m getting some readings from up that a’way.”
“Concur,” Mike answered. He looked around at the battalion spreading through the bowl and took a deep breath as the first shuttle came under fire in the distance. “Bring in the fuel shuttles and make sure we’re covered on the south.”
* * *
“And you want us to go into that?” Shari said, cradling Kelly under her body as the last shock wave shuddered away into stillness.
The sky to the east was still purple with fading plasma and a massive, complex, mushroom cloud glowed high into the air. Much of it was lost in the incoming cold front, but even that was momentarily shaken by man-made plasma.
“Well,” Mosovich replied, cradling one of the shivering children. “We’ve already given up our coats and our blankets and these kids are still going into hypothermia. So unless you have another suggestion?”
“What about radiation?” Wendy said carefully. She had killed Posleen, had seen them overrun her town, had fought her way out of an underground rat trap, but the towering mushroom clouds were a wholly new experience and she suddenly felt as if none of the previous battles had occurred, like a rank newbie. It was an odd and unsettling feeling.
If Mosovich was unsettled by the change in style of warfare, it wasn’t showing. “AID, radiation patterns.”
“Given the placement of the rounds, there should be no persistent radiologicals in the area of the O’Neal farm. All of the rounds were air-burst and any incidental fallout from irradiated casing or ground material should drift with the prevailing winds to the east. However, I have a secondary ability to sense harmful radiation and will warn you if we begin to experience any radiation high enough to be harmful to humans.”
“We’re going,” Elgars said, standing up. “We can argue all night and all that will happen is the children will die.”
“As if you care?” Shari snapped.
“I see it as my mission to get them to a place of safety,” the captain said, coldly. “Whether I like them or not is unimportant to the mission. And Cache Four is both hidden and strongly made. It is the best location to move to, despite being near the current fighting.”
“I’d like to find out about Papa O’Neal,” Wendy said. “And Cally.”
“All right,” Shari replied, staggering to her feet. Even with the enhancements they had gotten, it had been a long day and night. She was cold, tired, hungry and most of all tired. It felt as if she couldn’t put one foot in front of the other, especially while carrying Kelly. But she did it. And then another.
Elgars watched until she was moving and then took a position directly behind Mosovich.
All of them avoided looking to the east.
* * *
Cally picked herself up and looked around the interior of the cache. Several of the heavy ammunition and storage lockers had been toss
ed off their pallets and several small chunks of rock had fallen. But the Old Man had known what he was doing; a concrete arch and “plug” at the rear of the cache supported the only portion of the rock that wasn’t solid North Georgia granite.
“Fuck me,” she said quietly, wiping a little blood off her lip; her nose had taken the fall badly. It was a hell of a choice. Sit here and hope the shelter held or head out into who knew what. That had been the first nuclear blast in over a day, but that didn’t mean it would be the last.
Really, it wasn’t much of a choice. If the battle ran over her location she would probably die. But as long as the nukes stayed over by the Gap, and so far they had, and they weren’t too large, whatever that meant in terms of nuclear weapons, she should survive.
If she went outside, though, all bets were off.
“Fuck me,” she said again, louder, and started taking off her gear.
“I know there’s a pack of playing cards around here somewhere,” she commented, starting to pile boxes into a second shelter, under the concrete arch, just large enough for one. “Time to play some solitaire. I don’t think trying to build houses with them would work.” After a moment she picked up her helmet from where she had dropped it and put it back on.
* * *
“Blatt, pick up that ammo pack,” Sunday said, pounding past the Reaper. “We’re going to need all the ammo we can load.”