by John Ringo
“SheVa Nine, this is Quebec Four-Seven.” It was Captain LeBlanc’s voice. “What in the hell are you doing?”
“We’re preparing to move forward to East Branch.”
There was a pause while the local commander assessed this statement. “SheVa, that wasn’t the plan.”
“Plans change. There’s a group of humans that are being used as a mobile feed lot for the Posleen. And we’re going to get them.”
* * *
Angela Dale had turned to look when the amazing series of flashes had occurred to the south. But since then she had dropped back into her own straitened world. It seemed they had been walking for days since the Posleen had captured her near Franklin. She had already lost track of her parents in the desperate retreat in front of the Posleen advance and she was pretty sure that, like everyone in the group who hadn’t been able to keep up, they were dead. And probably eaten.
She couldn’t remember, didn’t want to remember, how many had died. The group had been much larger to begin with. Sometimes people were added. Once the group had been broken up and occasionally a group of confused refugees would join them, including a bunch of Indowy with massive packs and bundles on their backs.
She had spoken to the Indowy, a simple greeting she had been taught in school, and the little green aliens had apparently decided she was their best friend and huddled around her as far away from the Posleen, and other humans, as they could get. The leader spoke English, haltingly and with a strange accent, and he had told her that the Posleen had brought them from another world, apparently to do engineering for the invaders. They had built some bridges and then, when the centaurs were forced to retreat, they had been added to the group of humans, he used the Posleen term “thresh,” as a mobile pantry. And so it was.
For, most of the time, instead of adding refugees one of the escorting Posleen at some unseen command would reach into the group and drag people out. Then the knives would descend. The humans in the group had been offered the food from time to time but even with their stomachs pressing against their backbones, no one had taken the dripping gobbets of flesh that had until moments before been one of their group.
Now, though, the Posleen seemed to have plenty of food; groups had come to the rear bearing masses of yellow flesh that could only be coming from the battle to the front.
Mostly, she didn’t notice anymore. She had retreated into a warm mental place where nothing could touch her. Someday she would be warm again, safe again. Someday she would be happy again and all of this would be over. She knew that it was unlikely that place would be this side of heaven, but she really didn’t care anymore. She just walked where she was pointed to walk and sat where she was pointed to sit.
So it took her a moment to notice that the artillery fire that covered the plains had stopped and that the fire from whatever had been laying down masses of red death had stopped as well. What went on in the battle didn’t really matter. Nothing was going to save her short of death. And death was beginning to look pretty good. It was the being eaten that still seemed bad.
But after a moment the mutters of the people around her, and the agitation of the Posleen, cut through her fog. She was afraid it meant they were going to choose another and she edged to make sure she was near the center of the group. But quickly it became apparent that something else was going on. And she looked to the north just in time to see, by the light of the fires in the valley and the gibbous moon that had appeared in the east, a mass of metal crest the distant ridge just as the artillery started to fall again.
* * *
“Pedal to the metal, Reeves!” Mitchell shouted. The driver had gunned down Church Hill and back up the far ridge at maximum possible drive because this was the worst moment of all. For just a moment the vulnerable underside of the armored gun system was exposed to fire and if the Posleen poured fire into it they were dead. That was where the drive systems and reactors were. Much fire in that area would leave them stopped on the hill, a sitting target for at least fifty thousand Posleen.
But the combination of the artillery fire and the speed and surprise of the assault seemed to work. Fire started almost immediately, but by then they were accelerating down the far side.
“Kilzer! Water curtain, Now!”
“Uh…” Paul looked over and shrugged. “I guess I forgot to mention: we’re out. We’ve only got five minutes and we used it up before.”
“Shit,” Mitchell cursed. “Chan!” But the command was unnecessary as every MetalStorm opened fire as if for dear life. And it was.
The valley was still filled with Posleen and even those that were in close combat with the human defenders on the ridges turned to fire at the giant tank as it tore down the slope and up the road towards Savannah. A storm of fire licked out towards it but SheVa Nine was giving as good as it got.
Again the ribbons of red fire lashed out at the Posleen, jumping from remaining concentration to concentration. The artillery box had opened up a zone of more or less open space and into that space the SheVa rocketed, belching fire in every direction.
“Mitchell!” General Simosin seemed a little upset. “What in the hell are you doing?”
“You wanted a breakout, General,” Mitchell said as rounds caromed through the interior of the SheVa. “You’ve got a breakout.”
“You dumb son of a…”
“There’s a group of humans by East Branch,” Mitchell said. “We’re going there and ain’t nothin’ gonna stop us.”
* * *
Arkady Simosin looked at the radio for a moment and then shrugged. “We’ll be right behind you.”
He turned to the driver of the Bradley he was currently occupying and gestured. “Son, if you don’t catch that SheVa before it’s halfway across the valley I’ll have you shot.”
“Yes, sir!” the driver said, kicking the armored fighting vehicle into gear. “Not a problem,” he added with a feral grin as the track commander cycled his guns. The Bradley was one of the scout systems equipped with double 7.62 Gatling guns; and it was getting ready to do some harvesting.
Simosin brushed his RTO aside and keyed the division command frequency as the Brad lurched into gear. There was garbled conversation coming from half a dozen commanders but he overrode them.
“All units, assault NOW, NOW, NOW. Follow the SheVa. Forget plans, forget frag orders. The order is FOLLOW THE SHEVA.”
* * *
“Move it!” LeBlanc snarled as she climbed the steps of the tank. And it was a long goddamned way up for a female who was just five feet tall. Really, she should be in a Brad or a Humvee. More radios and fewer distractions. On the other hand, if she wanted to command her unit she had to survive.
“But what are we doing?” the commander of Bravo Company called. The idiot was just standing by the Abrams looking around in confusion.
“We’re going to Savannah!” LeBlanc said, plugging into the vehicle intercom system. She was about to order the driver forward but he had already closed his hatch and started the tank forward. It moved with the smooth oiliness that was the hallmark of the Abrams series and it seemed that nothing could stop it. Of course, one plasma gun that hit just right would do just fine. There had been improvements in the armor of the Abrams series over the course of the war, but they could still be taken out with plasma or HVM fire. If it hit right.
“Get back to your unit and get it moving!” she screamed at the company commander then keyed the battalion command frequency. “All units, general breakout! Follow the SheVa!” She looked out of the TC hatch as the tank accelerated up the hillside and shook her head. The 147th was a cock-up outfit. That was for sure and for certain. But in the last day or two something had happened, a new spirit had infected them. They might be cock-ups, but they had led the charge from Balsam Pass to here, where other units had failed. And they seemed to have caught the spirit of winning against the Posleen, instead of just taking it on the chin.
Which was why she realized she didn’t have to kick her useless company commanders in
the ass. On either side, rising out of their holes like an unstoppable tide, the men of the 147th were rising. And running forward, screaming.
The Posleen were turning and running before the mass of the SheVa, and the troops of the 147th were going to get some.
* * *
“What a bloody mess,” Mitchell muttered, looking in the monitors. He hadn’t really expected support but he was by God getting it.
The troops of the division, in some cases it seemed without orders, had climbed out of the defensive positions they had occupied for the past several hours and were charging forward. Most of them weren’t in vehicles so they were falling far behind the SheVa, but they were drawing fire away from it. And getting slaughtered themselves.
It didn’t seem to matter, though. Mitchell saw one Bradley crest the ridge and drive right into a concentration of Posleen, running several of them over. For a moment the troops inside raved at the aliens with their mounted weaponry then the troop door opened and they poured out, taking positions around the fighting vehicle and pouring fire into the Posleen.
The aliens, used to throwing themselves onto human defenses, were reacting with shock and apparent fear. It must have seemed to them that the rabbits were attacking the wolves and it was happening everywhere.
The valley was an absolute madhouse. Groups of humans were running down the valley, some of them on the flats and others on the steep ridges along the sides, while a stream of armored fighting vehicles and tanks poured through the Gap. Other vehicles, tanks, Bradleys, Humvees and even some trucks, were coming over the ridges where they were negotiable and charging forward, sometimes stopping to pick up infantry but always moving forward.
The artillery had gotten totally confused and rounds seemed to be falling almost at random, some of them into the human troops. But even that didn’t seem to be slowing them down.
“Are we all insane?” Mitchell asked, flipping back to monitor forward. He looked at the rippling waves of Posleen and the heavy fire coming from them and smiled maniacally. “Yep.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Green’s Creek, NC, United States of America, Sol III
2238 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD
If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law —
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget — lest we forget!
— Rudyard Kipling
“Recessional”
Paul Kilzer grinned as he tapped the controls for the close-in defense systems and a ripple of fire tore out from the SheVa. Reeves had apparently been anticipating this because he had driven right into a mass of Posleen and the millions of ball-bearings tore through the group like a mechanical thresher.
“It’s good to be the king.” Kilzer chuckled as the SheVa’s tracks ground the aliens. “I think I remember something about ‘use their guts for track grease’?”
“Patton,” Pruitt said over the intercom. “ ‘Why I almost feel sorry for those poor Kraut bastards.’ I’ve often wondered what he would have done with the Posleen.”
“Seen how many of them he could make die,” Mitchell growled.
* * *
LeBlanc stared at the CEOI for a second and then shook her head. “Alpha, this is battalion, what’s your situation?”
She waited a moment then keyed the radio again as the Abrams hit the bottom of the slope and pitched her around like a marionette. “Bravo!” she coughed. “Charlie! Anybody this net, dammit!”
“This is… oh, hell, this is Captain Hutchinson’s RTO, ma’am,” the radio operator for the Alpha company commander panted. “The company just… got up and started charging after the SheVa, ma’am! The captain’s trying to get them stopped.”
“Stopped, hell!” she shouted. “All stations this net, you will move forward and aggressively engage the Posleen! Support the SheVa! Move forward! Any company commander who doesn’t keep up with his company is going to be relieved. And the last company to Savannah is on extra duty for a month. Don’t stop them, push them.”
She flipped frequencies and snarled as the tank dropped into a streambed and shook her around again. “This is no way to run a railroad,” she muttered. “Scouts!” she snapped, keying the mike.
“Alpha Six-Seven, over.” She remembered that the Scout Platoon commander was a graduate of VMI, a regular of sorts. And apparently he could keep up with the damned CEOI even in the middle of a battle. Although that would be easy if he was still sitting back at Church Hill.
“Where are you?” she snapped.
“About four hundred meters behind the SheVa, ma’am,” the platoon leader said calmly. In the background she could hear the snarl of a Gatling gun. “It’s a pretty exciting place to be at the moment.”
She popped up through the TC hatch and looked around. “We’re coming up behind you, about a klick back and catching up,” she said then paused. “Be advised there’s a Posleen group to your left rear.” She grabbed the pintle-mounted Gatling gun and sent a stream of fire into the mass as she keyed the intercom. “Gunner! Target ten o’clock!”
* * *
Otinanderal couldn’t decide where to turn. The humans, who normally fought like abat, were everywhere. His oolt had poured fire into the massive human tank but it was as if they were scratching the sides of an oolt’pos. Now the human tanks were flying forward all around him and he couldn’t decide where to target his fire. But when one of them started firing at him it was pretty plain.
* * *
“For what we are about to receive…” Glennis muttered as she hit the seat switch and dropped into the belly of the tank. The vehicle shuddered and the temperature jumped noticeably as a plasma round glanced off the front glacis plate. A moment later an HVM round ripped her hatch cover away into the night and filled the interior with reflected searing white light and heat. But by then the gunner had slewed the main gun on target and opened up with main and coaxial.
The Abrams Main Battle Tank was originally designed for the sole purpose of killing other tanks, almost assuredly Soviet and ex-Soviet designs. It had advanced composite armor, a quick-firing, stabilized 120mm main gun, sophisticated targeting systems, nuclear, biological and chemical protection and an amazing turn of speed supplied by its Lycomings jet-turbine engine. Furthermore, on battlefields across the globe, it had proven itself the finest machine in the world for that task, able to both out-fight and outmaneuver any other tank on the planet, seventy plus tons of fast-rolling incredibly deadly meanness. But with the coming of the Posleen, changes in design were inevitable; the Posleen didn’t really have anything worth hitting with a 120mm depleted uranium dart. Or, if they did, it was too large to care about being scratched by an Abrams.
However, the base tank was the finest piece of war machinery ever designed and it seemed a shame to simply throw all that engineering away. At first, when they turned out to be highly vulnerable to plasma and even 3mm railgun fire, the tanks seemed doomed. But technology came to their aid in the form of new, and lighter, armor materials. The M-1A4’s turret and primary frontal armor was a layer of battle-steel, room-temperature superconductor, nano-tube composite and synthetic sapphire threading. The combination meant that frontally it could shed off the fire of anything but a direct and unlucky HVM hit.
From the side it was not so well armored but if the Posleen were on your flank you were screwing up anyway.
To reduce the possibility of being flanked, and to deal with the main problem of the Posleen, the fact that there were just way too many of them, the gunnery of the tanks was modified. On either side of the turret “add-on” weapons were installed. These were 25mm cannons like the main gun of a Bradley, but where a Bradley had one gun the Abrams were mounted with first two, one on either side, then four and finally eight. The .50 caliber TC gun was replaced with a 7.62 Gatling gun capable of hurling 8000 rounds a minute and
the “coaxial” 7.62 machine gun mounted alongside the main gun was switched out for another. Even excepting their main gun, the “A4” Abrams could hurl an amazing mass of lead.
The main gun, however, remained a problem. It seemed a shame to pull the weapon, since it was about as good as it got from a cannon perspective. Finally, it was decided to leave the cannon in place and simply change the ammo mix. The ammo bin still carried a few “silver bullets” for old time’s sake, but the majority of the rounds stored in an A4 were canister.
Unlike the complex depleted uranium or High Explosive Anti-Tank rounds, canister was simplicity in itself; in effect it was a giant shotgun shell. Each round held 2000 flechettes packed in ahead of a powerful firing charge.
As Glennis’ seat hit the bottom of its elevation and another plasma round glanced off the armored front plate, the gunner laid his reticle on the company of Posleen, toggled his joystick to “All” and hit the firing button.
The Abrams didn’t fire quite as many rounds, or as quickly, as the MetalStorm but the effect was similar. There was a blast of what looked like liquid fire and then the Posleen company started to come apart. The fire had only put one round of canister downrange but it had taken out the center third of the company by itself and as the gunner swept the tank’s “secondary” weapons from side to side the rest ceased to exist.
“And that’s what we call balling the jack,” the gunner muttered as the loader slammed in another round of canister. The entire engagement had taken less than four seconds.
“Good job,” LeBlanc said, keying her microphone. “SheVa Nine, this is Captain LeBlanc. We’re closing on your six. What’s your situation?”