by John Ringo
“What do you want me to do?” Pruitt asked.
“Get up to the crane and start hauling out MetalStorm packs,” Mitchell replied. “I think we’re going to need them.”
“I’m going to go survey the damage we took from those hits,” Indy said, unsnapping and standing up to follow the gunner. “I didn’t like the feel of that last engagement.”
“Don’t go out and kick the tracks,” Mitchell said. “I don’t know when we’re going to move.”
He went back to watching the monitors and after a few minutes nodded his head. The antimatter “area denial” rounds they had fired up the road had to have wiped out a good collection of what would be reinforcements for the forces in the valley. And the combination of artillery, which was now shifting out into the main mass, and the MetalStorm fire was now opening up patches of ground. The Posleen looked unlimited, but they weren’t. And the heavy firepower that was now pounding the valley was whittling them away. And doing so rather fast, all things considered. He glanced at his watch and realized that it had been less than fifteen minutes since they had left the hilltop opposite; it seemed like hours. Somewhere to the south, the ACS was getting ready to retake the Gap. Somewhere near Knoxville a true hell-weapon was about to fire. But there was only one and for the ACS to survive, and the plug in the Gap to be maintained, it was necessary to clear out this plug of Posleen and drive on with the mission. Fifteen minutes was starting to sound like a long time.
“Ask me for anything but time.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Clarkesville, GA, United States of America, Sol III
1905 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD
Now, first of the foemen of Boh Da Thone
Was Captain O’Neil of the “Black Tyrone,”
And his was a Company, seventy strong,
Who hustled that dissolute Chief along.
There were lads from Galway and Louth and Meath
Who went to their death with a joke in their teeth,
And worshipped with fluency, fervour, and zeal
The mud on the boot-heels of “Crook” O’Neil.
But ever a blight on their labours lay,
And ever their quarry would vanish away,
Till the sun-dried boys of the Black Tyrone
Took a brotherly interest in Boh Da Thone:
And, sooth, if pursuit in possession ends,
The Boh and his trackers were best of friends.
— Rudyard Kipling
“The Ballad of Boh Da Thone”
Tulo’stenaloor glanced at his sensors then tugged at his earring; he had better things to do than learn skills that others had.
“How much time do we have?”
“Not much,” Goloswin replied thoughtfully. “They are preparing to fire.”
The estanaar looked at the bloody read oval on the schematic and sighed. He had spent years learning to understand maps and now he wished he hadn’t. He could well imagine the results of this hell-weapon.
“And the radiation?”
“Bad,” the technician admitted. “The zone that will be hit directly by the weapon will extend up the valley almost to the town of Dillard. The primary isotope will be carbon 13, which has a high ionization rate and will induce thermal damage on uptake. My model estimates twenty percent casualties for oolt passing through the zone in the first hour with about a one percent decrease per hour thereafter. Humans, of course, are relatively fragile; unprotected humans will not be able to enter the zone for at least ten days.” He fluttered his crest and snapped his mouth in humor. “It’s actually a very… what is that human term? It is a very elegant weapon in its way. The power is frightful, of course, but it also denies territory for some time. However, the ground is fully cleared in a month or two, at least sufficient for life. Elegant.”
“Horrible,” Tulo’stenaloor replied. He turned to his operations officer with a snarl. “Pull all estanaral forces out that can be withdrawn; send only the local forces into this madness. Begin working on a plan to control the movement after the attack; we have been hitting these humans in waves which gives them time to recover. Use the estanaral forces to put gaps between blocks of the locals so that we hit the humans in a continuous stream.”
The operations officer nodded and tapped at the controls on his sensor unit. “Most of the estanaral were prepared for an exploitation attack, so they are back from the area where the weapon will hit. Should I stop the flow for a while? We’re actually getting low on local units.”
“No,” Tulo’stenaloor said after a moment. “We won’t know exactly where the weapon hits until it does. Some of them will survive. It is enough.” He flapped his crest again and keyed his communicator. “Orostan.”
* * *
Orostan looked up the hill at the gap and snarled as his communicator lit up. “Yes, estanaar.”
“The humans are going to fire a hell-weapon into the Gap.” Tulo’stenaloor gave him a brief précis of the situation and then waited.
Orostan flapped his crest in agitation and snarled. “How many of my reinforcements am I going to lose?”
“About half,” the warleader admitted.
“Too much,” the forward leader muttered. “That hellish SheVa gun has been reinforced, strengthened and given many weapons instead of just the one. It has taken a position near Savannah valley and is eating oolt as if they were abat.”
“The idea was to stop it,” Tulo’stenaloor noted. “Not have it stop you.”
“I’m trying,” Orostan snapped. “I have teams waiting for it to come through the pass. I think it is vulnerable on the flanks. When it comes through we will destroy its wheels and tracks. That will stop it. Short of where it can fire at the pass. But you were supposed to take and hold the pass, estanaar. And with the resistance that I am facing from these hell-spit humans, may the demons eat their souls, I need more forces.”
“I’m working on it,” Tulo’stenaloor said. “But the situation, as the humans say, truly sucks.”
* * *
“This really sucks,” Cally whispered. “I’m way too young to die.”
She had managed to break contact with the Posleen but they had stayed on her trail like bloodhounds. Now they were spread out on either side of her hide, beating up the hill. She had thought she could lie low and avoid them but it seemed no such luck.
“Papa wouldn’t have gotten trapped this way,” she muttered, checking her rounds. Out of grenades, two magazines left, one partially empty. One full magazine in the well. Posleen to the right so if she tried to sneak out they would have her there. Ditto on the left. Solid wall up behind her. What was that old saw? “There I was, this is no shit… Was I afraid, sure, I was afraid one of them would get away.”
She just wished they would go away.
There was a rustle in the bushes below and she lined up on where a Posleen would be bound and determined to come in view. “Well, time to get one more,” she sighed, snuggling her cheek into the stock. As the yellow-brown snout nosed around the bushes she took up trigger slack. It was the God King.
Even if she couldn’t destroy all the Posleen in the world, she could destroy this one.
* * *
The team leader paused and raised one fist, sinking into a crouch. Ahead of them through the trees there was a shot from a rifle and a crackle of railgun fire with the occasional thump of a plasma rifle.
Major Alejandro Levi had been a Cyberpunk for more years than he cared to remember. He had been recruited right out of high school, something about being a Westinghouse Scholarship Finalist and the quarterback of the football team. And over the… okay decades would be the best way to put it, he’d been in a lot of hairy missions. But wandering around in the middle of a nuclear battlefield scattered with Posleen, potentially hostile humans and potentially hostile “others,” pretty much took the cake.
He looked to his rear then to his side and stepped to the left. Suddenly, he reached out with his left hand and sank it into what appeared to be na
ked air.
“What do we have here?” he whispered, getting a grip with the other hand as a Himmit shifted camouflage and wrapped three of its hands onto his body. “Spying on us, were you?”
“Spying for you,” the Himmit whistled in passable English. The creature was almost man-sized but lighter than humans and resembled nothing so much as a symmetric frog. It had four “arms” set at opposite ends of its body and a sensory cluster near the center of the body. On each side of the sensory cluster it had a pair of eyes. It appeared as if you could split it down the middle and easily have two “half Himmit.”
Alejandro had it by the cranial cavity, at the center of the delicate sensory area; a twitch of the human’s strong hands would crush his primary sensors, a possibly fatal wound. “You’re here for the same reason I am!”
“How do I know that?” the Cyber said, loosening his grip lightly.
“You’re here to retrieve Cally O’Neal and Michael O’Neal, Senior,” the alien replied. “And you’re late.”
“The traffic was terrible,” Alejandro replied, dryly. “Where are they?”
“Michael O’Neal, Senior, was caught in the pressure wave fromisedander detonation and sustained mortal injuries. Cally O’Neal is the one doing the firing right now. She has been in a running battle with a group of Posleen. I believe she is now trapped.”
“O’Neal’s dead?” the team leader asked, shaking his head.
“Dead is such a definitive term,” the Himmit replied. “He is in my craft at the moment. I do not know his current state of reality.”
“Wha… never mind,” Alejandro said, shaking his head. If he asked an open-ended question the Himmit would go on all day. He was lucky this hadn’t taken longer; the Himmit was clearly out of sorts to be this abrupt. Maybe it was having fingers jabbed into the Himmit equivalent of a nose. “How many Posleen?”
“Less than when she started; she is a remarkable sub-human,” the Himmit said. “She initiated the ambush with — ”
“How many and where?” Levi asked, tightening the pressure ever so slightly.
“Fourteen, seventy-five meters,” the Himmit replied, pointing. “Spread out. She is in cover up the slope, but if she moves…”
“God King?”
“There is one Kessentai, plasma rifle, using portable sensors. He is not using them very effectively; he appears used to having his guns aimed for him.”
The Cyber straightened and made a series of gestures indicating that the team should spread out, prepare to engage the enemy and turn off all electronic devices. The last was a pain, but the God King’s sensors could pick up the slightest emission, even background.
He watched as the team seemed to appear from nowhere, a bit of leaf mold, the bark of a tree, a bush. The Cyberpunks had trained in the days before the war against the Posleen to enter enemy territory and corrupt battlefield systems that could not be “hacked” from a distance. They were trained to be ghosts, shadows, on the battlefield.
But they were also trained to be the deadliest ghosts on earth. Time to see if they were the fastest.
The Himmit watched them as they disappeared into the woods then followed at the fastest rate consonant with remaining concealed.
He wouldn’t miss this for worlds. What a tale.
* * *
Cholosta’an stepped forward cautiously. His sensors said that the human had last been somewhere on this ridge. But since she had cut off her last electronic device, he had lost her. It was possible she had fled over the ridge, but the steep, open slope meant that they probably would have spotted her. She was likely hiding in the bushes along the base of the bluff. If so, they would have her soon.
He had only gotten glimpses of her before, enough to determine that it was a human female, as Tulo’stenaloor had said.
His last thought at the sight over the barrel of the human rifle was “A nestling?”
* * *
Tulo’stenaloor flapped his crest as the datum appeared.
“So much for Cholosta’an,” his operations officer muttered.
“So much indeed,” the estanaar replied. “And so much for stopping the resupply of the threshkreen unit. Or even hitting them from behind, given that all the other forces in the valley are gathering to stop the SheVa.
“It’s a simple solution set,” he continued. “If we destroy the threshkreen in the pass, we can pour enough forces through the Gap to destroy the SheVa, no matter what. If, on the other hand, we can destroy the SheVa, we can eventually wear away the threshkreen. If we do neither… then we have failed.”
“So far we are doing neither,” the essthree opined.
“Agreed,” the estanaar replied. “And we have done no better at it than Orostan. It is our job to destroy the threshkreen in the pass. Part of that is pressure. When we begin moving forces back into the battle, we must have them moving steadily. We were hitting them in fits and starts, in waves. This gives them time to recover.”
“Yes, estanaar,” the lesser oolt’ondai said doubtfully. “The question is ‘how.’ Any time you have a line of oolt, they… move unsteadily, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. It is that which is causing the gaps to occur.”
“We’ll spread them out,” Tulo’stenaloor said after a moment. “Have elite oolt’ondai station their oolt along the route. Create gaps between the oolt that are marching into the battle. Thus, when one hits the fire of the threshkreen and is destroyed another will step into place immediately. This will give us the constant pressure we seek.”
“As soon as the hell-weapon detonates, estanaar.”
“Oh, yes, after that,” Tulo’stenaloor snarled. “Why waste more oolt’os than we must?”
* * *
Cally checked fire as the yellow skull disintegrated under the hammer of the 7.62 rounds and tracked right to where she thought the closest Posleen might be. But as she took up the trigger slack again there was a muffled series of pops and a wild flail from a railgun that bounced ricochets off the rocks above her head.
As far as she knew, the nearest humans (that would be fighting) was her dad’s battalion or maybe the rest of the gang. But none of them had been using silenced weapons. So who was out there? Friend or foe?
An assassin had been sent to kill Papa O’Neal years before and had only been stopped because he discounted the skills of an eight-year-old girl. But that didn’t mean that more wouldn’t be sent. Admittedly, sending assassins in in the middle of a nuclear fire-fight seemed to be overkill, but it wasn’t paranoia if people really were out to get you.
She heard a rustle from below, not even what a deer would make, more like a field mouse. Then there was a human standing over the dead Posleen.
It was a special operations troop, no question. He, probably he, was wearing Mar-Cam and a ghillie net over his back. As she looked he took a step to the side and seemed to just vanish. She squinted for a moment and realized that he now looked for all the world like a bush alongside one of the poplar trees. He was good, better than Papa, probably.
She watched as he stepped forward, slowly, testing each bit of ground, and then stopped again.
* * *
Alejandro stopped as he caught a faint whiff of human scent. He would have detected it, should have, before but the stench from the dead Posleen had overridden it.
The thing about scent is that it’s only mildly directional. There wasn’t any real wind under the hill and the air was wet, cold and still. But somewhere there was a human lying very still. But sweating as if… she had been in a hard run.
He looked around but, remarkably, couldn’t see anything. As close as she was she should have stood out like a mountain. Either he was getting old or she was going to smoke the advanced recon course.
“Cally O’Neal?” he whispered.
“Breathe wrong and you’re history,” Cally said in more of a sigh than a whisper.
Alejandro sighed and looked over at where the sound came from. The girl was under a ghillie net covered in leaves. He wondered
how she hadn’t displaced her surroundings and then realized that she had shaken the small birch bush over her to aid in the camouflage. Clever.
“I was sent to extract you,” he said, straightening but keeping his MP-5 pointed to the side.
“Sure you were, pull the other one, it’s got bells on.” Cally heard another faint sound of movement to the side and realized that she was bracketed. Again. “And if your buddy gets any closer we’ll just have to see how many of you I can take out. Starting with you.”
“I think we’re at an imps arse,” Alejandro said. “You won’t trust me and I have no way of convincing you to.”
“Not quite,” a voice whispered from above.
Cally froze as a Himmit appeared out of mid-air and lowered itself to the ground.
“Miss O’Neal, we are here for your protection,” the Himmit whistled. “We have no proof of that, but I give you my word as a member of the Fos Clan, that you will come to no harm. However, there is a nuclear attack incoming in less than fifteen minutes…”
“WHAT?” Cally shouted. But she was drowned out by the Cyberpunk.
“Rally!” Alejandro shouted. “Where is it aimed at?”
“It is aimed at the Gap, Major Levi,” the Himmit said, shifting back into camouflage. The voice seemed to be moving away. “But the coverage area is… extensive. Consider this spot to be ground zero for a two megaton blast.”
“Wait!” Alejandro said. “Can your craft lift us out of here?”
“Ah, so now you trust me,” the Himmit said, from higher in the trees. “Head due west for six hundred meters. I’ll meet you there.”
“Well, Miss O’Neal,” the Cyber said, turning to the west. “You can come with us or not. Up to you.”
“Out of my way, commando dude,” Cally said, scrambling to her feet and glancing at her compass. “You move too slow.”