by John Ringo
But she had thought the shot out carefully and the rocks around here were solid. Of course, they were now smoking and cracked from stray rounds. Fortunately, most of the fire was off target, down and to her left. She didn’t know what had kept the Posleen from being their normal accurate selves, but whatever it was, it had saved her ass. And for that she was thankful.
Not so thankful as to fire from this position again, though. As the fire slackened she shimmied backwards, concealed by the ghillie cloak she had donned before firing, and scooted around one of the rocks out of direct line of the Posleen fire.
Time to go find another point.
* * *
Cholosta’an sent one of the oolt’os up the hill to see if there was any sign of the sniper but before the normal was half way up the hill there was another shot and another one of his oolt was hit, dropping to the ground this time with a round straight through the heart.
“This is really getting annoying,” Cholosta’an muttered as he, again, targeted the sniper. He didn’t know why he was missing the gadfly but he intended to track it down and destroy it.
“Up the hill,” he shouted, pointing towards the targeting icon. “After it!”
This was one human that was not getting away; best to kill it before it started calling in artillery.
* * *
Aatrenadar snarled as another volley of artillery scythed thought his oolt’ondar. The human positions were dug in deep, so even with the massed fire of thousands of Posleen the defenders were holding out, laying down murderous direct machine-gun and rifle fire while their blasted “artillery” hammered from above.
What was worse was the situation the Posleen found themselves in. The humans had reacted quickly to the nuclear fire that had reduced the bulk of the host, then had driven forward in a mass tenaral charge, cutting down all the remaining Posleen in their path. Many of the Posleen were so shaken they had never even seen the human tanks and personnel carriers until they were upon them.
This push had pressed the remnant of the host into a pocket just south of the town of Green’s Creek. There was very little room to open out and get a mass of fire upon the humans since the humans had taken the high ground in the defile. Furthermore, the narrow, twisty road behind, while packed with oolt’os and Kessentai from a milling mass on the far side of the gap, barely fed enough through to sustain their losses. Add in the artillery fire that was dropping deeper in the pass and the Posleen, for once, were able to use the term “beleaguered” to describe their situation.
The only bright spot was that while the host could not advance, neither could the humans. If they came out of their holes they would be slaughtered and if there was no way for the Posleen to maneuver there, equally, was no way for the humans to maneuver large forces. It was a battle of attrition and as soon as the combat suit defenders in the southern pass were cleared out, it would be a battle of attrition the humans could not win.
Of course, he would not see the eventual victory, but the Path was a path of pain and death. As well here as anywhere. If he could just sink his teeth into one more human.
“Forward!” he cried. The oolt’os would fight like the simple beasts they were but the younger Kessentai needed encouragement. “Forward for the host! Forward for the Path! Blood and loot at the end!”
He toggled his tenar forward as the line jolted towards the humans, then froze it at a light like a giant flashbulb behind him. After a moment there was another great flash, then another and another. For a moment his shadow, stark and white on the backs of the oolt’os in front of him, was fixed on his vision, then it was as if the sun had darkened. But his enhanced vision quickly adjusted to all the changes in lighting and he thus had a clear view of the mass of metal, like a rolling mountain, that appeared around the shoulder of a distant hill.
* * *
“Third round away, sir,” Pruitt said. “I’m not happy with the accuracy at this range; we have to fire the damned things practically straight up and we have no solid data on winds aloft.”
“Is it going to drift to this side of the Gap?” Mitchell asked.
“No, sir, if anything it will be a bit far out.”
“Then I’ll live with it,” he said, tapping his map controls. “Okay, Pruitt, reload with anti-lander rounds, Major Chan, you’re just about up, Reeves, follow the vector I’ve laid in.” He took a look around the room and shook his head. “Let’s Rock.”
* * *
The monstrosity was as big as an oolt Po’osol and nothing that large should be able to crawl along the ground. It appeared around the side of a hill, leaning at an angle that, given its height, should have rolled it over on its side. But it didn’t fall. It just kept rolling forward, the fire, it seemed, of all the oolt’os and Kessentai in view sparking off its front carapace. Yet, still, with lines of plasma carving the picture on its face, with hypervelocity missiles sparking off of it like fireflies in the night, it kept coming.
Then it disappeared in a wall of water.
* * *
“Excuse me,” Colonel Mitchell said, looking into his suddenly blank monitor. The SheVa had lurched downward, indicating that they were descending into the valley of Sutton Branch, which should reduce some of the murderous fire they had been taking. But losing all visual references in the middle of a battle was… not good. “What in the hell just happened?”
“Colonel?” Chan called. “There’s a big… fountain of water up here. It’s all over the place! We can’t see shit, pardon me.”
“Negative visual, negative radar, negative lidar,” Pruitt sang out. “What in the hell just happened.”
“Darn,” Kilzer said. “Let me check my notes…”
“Mr. Kilzer!” the colonel shouted across the compartment. “Is this your doing?”
“Well, yeah,” the tech rep replied. “It’s an experimental anti-plasma defense. We mounted a fifty-thousand-gallon water tank in the front of the turret and…”
“Well, before you check your notes, kindly shut it off! We’re driving into the rear of an embattled division! Running over their headquarters, for example, would be a really big mistake!”
“HQ’s way back near Dillsboro, boss,” Pruitt pointed out. “But it would be nice to see so we can shoot.”
“Okay, okay,” the civilian muttered, toggling off a switch. “It wasn’t like anybody got killed…”
“Hold it here, Reeves,” Mitchell called, surprised how far forward they had traveled. They were already across the stream and on their way up the flank of the next hill. In fact, looking in his monitor he saw that the church that used to occupy the hilltop itself had just disappeared under a track and the primary power lines that had once been there were now scattered across Bun-Bun’s carapace.
“Oh, no, there goes Tokyo!” Kilzer said.
“Gojira!” Reeves shouted as the main support began to tumble down the hill.
“It’s one of those eternal questions.” Pruitt laughed. “Who would win in a fight, Bun-Bun or Godzilla?”
“Depends on the Bun-Bun,” Pruitt pointed out. “Maj… I mean Colonel, we’re in range of the Posleen, I think.” His comment was punctuated with the bong of another HVM round hitting the frontal plate.
“Major Chan, are you in range?”
“Yes, sir,” the MetalStorm commander replied. “We don’t really have much of a target, but we’re in range.”
“Put it on the road,” Mitchell replied. “They seem to be running right up it. After your initial volley, spread it to either side, arching it over the divisional positions.”
“Yes, sir,” Chan replied. “Whenever you’re ready.”
Mitchell opened his mouth and raised one finger just as Kilzer lifted his hand in a halting motion.
“Colonel, this isn’t strictly necessary, but I heartily recommend it,” Paul said, tapping a control. Over the intercom came a thump of drums, then the sound of bagpipes.
Mitchell paused to listen to the music for a moment, then grinned as the lyrics sta
rted.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, his raised finger starting to thump the time in the air. “What is that?”
“March of Cambreath.”
“You’re right. Works for me. Major Chan!”
“Sir!” the MetalStorm commander replied, nodding her head to the beat.
“Open fire!”
CHAPTER TEN
Green’s Creek, NC, United States of America, Sol III
1648 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD
Axes flash, broadswords swing,
Shining armour’s piercing ring
Horses run with polished shield,
Fight Those Bastards till They Yield
Midnight mare and blood red roan,
Fight to Keep this Land Your Own
Sound the horn and call the cry,
How Many of Them Can We Make Die!
Follow orders as you’re told,
Make Their Yellow Blood Run Cold
Fight until you die or drop,
A Force Like Ours is Hard to Stop
Close your mind to stress and pain,
Fight till You’re No Longer Sane
Let not one damn cur pass by,
How Many of Them Can We Make Die!
— Heather Alexander
“March of Cambreath”
“Lord it’s nice to shoot light stuff again.” Specialist Cindy Glenn was a female, like her commander. Unlike her commander, she did not consider anything about the Army to be a career, especially not in this job.
The basic theory of the MetalStorm system was conceived shortly before First Contact. The idea was simplicity in itself, like most interesting inventions. Instead of putting bullets in a complicated feeding system, load them all into the barrel, one stacked on top of another, with the propellant packed in between. Detonated electronically the device produced an awesome amount of firepower as literally hundreds of bullets spewed out of the barrel in bare seconds; one device had shown a theoretical rate of one million rounds per minute.
It was the “theoretical” part that was the sticking point. Since the barrel was also the bullet supply, “reloading” involved replacing the entire barrel. Furthermore, the “bullet to weight” ratio of the system was just astronomical; it could never be considered a reasonable system for infantrymen who were always overloaded anyway.
But it had certain benefits. After the coming of the Posleen, MetalStorm was used widely as an “area denial” system, laying down masses of bullets that could best be described as a “rain of lead.” When stopping Posleen wave assaults, more was always better when it came to firepower. And there wasn’t much “more” than MetalStorm.
It was also used for some specialty systems, one of which was the “MetalStorm Anti-Lander Enhanced Firepower Armor Combination.” The weapons system consisted of an Abrams tank chassis with a twelve-barrel MetalStorm pack mounted on top. The caliber of the barrels was 105mm and each had one hundred rounds of anti-armor discarding sabot loaded into it. At the touch of a button the system could spew out twelve hundred rounds in under a minute. It was hoped that this storm of depleted uranium, the same type and caliber of round that had originally been designed for the Abrams to defeat Soviet armor, would be capable of penetrating and destroying the Posleen landers that often played havoc on defenses. Unfortunately, it did not quite live up to its design potential.
The designers had been trying to get everyone to call it “Malefic” but they failed miserably. The system was malefic, but only to its crew. The Abrams had been designed with the 105 round in mind. And it had successfully upgraded to the 120mm round, a significant increase in firepower that it nonetheless managed smoothly. However, firing twelve hundred 105mm anti-armor discarding sabot rounds in less than a minute turned out to be… one of the few situations where “more power” was not necessarily the best thing. Crews normally screamed as they fired. Many crew members deserted or deliberately maimed themselves to avoid duty in MetalStorm tracks. Because when those twelve barrels began spewing depleted uranium, the sixty-ton tanks would shake like an out-of-balance blender. Broken bones were commonplace as the crews were slammed from side to side in the vehicles. Most of them likened it to being rolled in a barrel of gravel.
Despite the firepower, however, Malefic turned out to be unsuited to its primary role. The armor on Posleen landers was thick, the ships were large and they did not, unfortunately, approach on the ground. While the MetalStorm tracks could get penetration at short ranges, say down to fifteen hundred meters or so, they seemed unable to do any significant damage at anything other than point-blank range. And at that range, attempting to kill a lander was suicidal.
However, the military had designed the weapons at enormous cost and even fielded a few companies of them. So rather than simply take the turrets off and use the chassis for replacement parts, the powers-that-be decided to use them at the few things they were good at. Notably, area denial.
However, to do that required different weapons systems. The 105mm “twelve-pack” was poorly suited to killing vast numbers of Posleen. The rounds overkilled rather excessively but there were, for a MetalStorm system, relatively few of them.
But since the MetalStorm system replaced not just the ammunition in firing, but the barrel as well, there was no reason that the track was locked in to using 105mm. And a similar pack, even larger, was designed and fielded in 40mm.
The design used the basic 40mm grenade, the same projectile as was found in the venerable Mk-19 Mod 4. It fired a “bullet”-shaped projectile with a three-thousand-meter range that was just under a pound and a half of wrapped explosives and wire. On contact the projectile exploded, sending out a hail of notched wire that killed or injured anything in a five-meter radius.
Each of the MetalStorm “40 Packs” contained twenty thousand projectiles.
Instead of twelve barrels there were one hundred, ten across and ten down in a square block of metal that actually weighed more than the “heavy” pack. And instead of one hundred rounds packed into each barrel, there were two hundred.
A mass of Posleen were visible trying to push through the gap against the heavy fire of the human infantry. They were getting slaughtered, to the point that the following ranks were having to scramble over the bodies of the slain, but they were still inching down the road.
That was about to stop.
Glenn laid her targeting reticle on the front of the column and opened fire.
What spewed from the rectangular packet on a U-shaped mount on the tank looked like nothing so much as a continuous vomit of fire. One in five rounds was a tracer and with the rounds hammering out at such a high rate the tracers were not only continuous but overlapping. It was a wall of fire a meter and a half wide which, when it touched anything, exploded.
The Posleen touched by the wall of flame literally disappeared as dozens of rounds hit each individual centaur. As soon as it was clear the advance had stopped, Glenn started to walk the rounds up the road, toggling the gun from side to side to ensure she got all of the oncoming horde. It was less like a weapon than some flaming broom, that both killed the Posleen and ripped them into nothing larger than hand-sized chunks until what was left behind looked as if some angry god had put it through a meat-grinder.
Unfortunately, even two hundred thousand rounds could be expended in a short period of time. Which was why after only four seconds Turret One fell silent. After a moment Glenn hit the eject button and the massive steel firing pod was ejected backwards to lie on top of the SheVa.
“I’m out, ma’am,” the gunner said, flipping on the reload winch. “I’ll be up shortly, though.”
Chan had seen the effect of the 40 packs often enough, but never in such a concentrated location and it took her a moment to react. “That’s fine. Not a problem. Turret Two?”
“Two.”
“Continue engagement. Three, when two goes dry…”
“Three, gotcha.”
Chan flipped off of the company frequency and down to the SheVa intercom
. “Major Mitchell, we’re going to be out of targets soon.”
* * *
Mitchell shook his head at the blood bath on the roadway. The road-cuts to either side of the narrow gap were splashed with yellow nearly to their tops. And you didn’t often see that.
“When the opening is clear arc your fire over the ridgeline. We don’t have much maneuvering room here; the crunchies are in the way.”
“Understand, sir. I’d like to get us up on the next ridgeline. My map says it opens up on the other side. I think we could do good works up there.”
Mitchell chuckled and nodded his head, unseen. “Concur, and we’re probably in trouble for running over the church. I’ll get on the horn to the division and see if they can clear out a few of their crunchies.”
“Yes, sir.” There was a pause. “We’re shot out on turrets one through six and twelve. The others don’t have the angularity.”
“How long to reload?” Mitchell asked, turning his head sideways as the tech rep waved one arm in his direction.
“About another three minutes, sir,” Chan said awkwardly. “We fire this stuff off way faster than we reload.”
“Hold on a second,” Mitchell replied, cutting the intercom audio and furrowing his brow at Kilzer’s gestures. “Yes?”
“Rotate the turret,” Kilzer said.
“She did,” Mitchell replied acidly then stopped. “Oh. Jesus.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kilzer said, waving his hand. “I’ve been thinking about this stuff longer than you have.”
“So, boss, you want I should rotate the turret?” Pruitt said with a chuckle.
“Major Chan,” Mitchell said, keying the intercom again. “We’re going to rotate the turret to bring the rest of your guns into action.”