Eye of the Storm

CHAPTER ONE

As its defenses crumbled, a Posleen penetrator finally latched onto the side glassis armor of the Richard Waechter and began burrowing.

Even the multi-thousand ton bulk of a SheVa Mark VII continental siege unit could only carry its heaviest armor forward. The side glassis was composed of only two hundred centimeters of ultra-dense, ultra-strong composite made only by the finest Indowy craftsmen. The Posleen smart round first deformed to create an armored beachhead on the hull then shot a concentrated jet of fusion-generated plasma, burning rapidly through the refractory armor. Once a hole was created into the meaty center, it shot an armored penetrator containing a bare ten micrograms of antimatter into the compartmented interior.

The fourteen man crew of the SheVa knew that once a breacher round was on the hull, it was virtually impossible to remove; your best bet of survival was bailing out. The three Taylor Class Heavy Armored Escape Vehicles dropped from under the SheVa and bolted to the rear. They were picked off by plasma fire from the Posleen redoubt even as the SheVa gouted fire from every hatch and the six thousand ton turret lifted fifty meters into the air on an actinic ball of nuclear fire.

As soon as the last SheVa was eliminated, the Posleen popped up a casta round. The maneuvering HVM quickly scattered its load of antimatter bomblets across the front of the approaching line of ACS and disintegrated as the last one detonated.

One hundred and ninety-nine more bomblets detonated almost simultaneously, each the equivalent of sixteen megatonnes of TNT.

As soon as the icon of the casta round appeared on his heads up display, Private Julio Garcia dropped a foxhole round to the ground and crouched, hoping against hope that the round would dig out a hole for him before the casta went off. Shooting the bomblets was futile, that would only make them detonate earlier. The only thing that the armored combat suit corps could do was dig in and try to ride out the detonation. The Indowy manufactured battle armor was very tough indeed but a 16 megaton explosion had a better than even chance of ripping even an ACS suit into itsy bitsy pieces.

As the dirt of R-1496 Delta fountained upwards the armored infantryman dove for the hole. It was times like this that he seriously reconsidered his decision to leave the hell of New Chicago.

Julio was twenty-three, very young for a private in the ACS. He’d been raised in the New Chicago Sub-Urb, an underground city left over from the Posleen invasion of Earth. The refuges had, by and large, done their job of keeping a core of civilization alive throughout the siege but most people got out of them as quickly as possible as soon as the Posleen menace was relieved.

However, in any refugee situation a core, usually running about ten percent, refused to leave the camp or, in this case, underground city. Whether from laziness or ongoing paranoia over what had driven them to the refuge, the “refuseniks” were a problem in any recovery period.

Earth’s government had responded by slowly concentrating them. As each Sub-Urb slowly regurgitated its refugee population, those who preferred to remain in the Urbs were moved to other Urbs and slowly concentrated. Once the refuseniks were fully concentrated in four or five Urbs, they were essentially left to rot.

Minimal and generally unpalatable food was available. Enter one of the eating areas, swipe your implanted chip and you’d be given a measured amount of glop. The brown, unappetizing substance was nutritious and even filling but it had the consistency of wet cardboard and about the same taste.

There was no work in the Urbs and it wasn’t so much that crime was rife as that was the only business going. They were centers for drug trafficking, illegal arms sales (and in the post-war world you had to work for a weapon to be illegal) and prostitution. Indeed, many people thought the only reason they still existed was so that all the criminals could be concentrated in one place. The general opinion of surfacers was that the best use of the Urbs was as dumping grounds and that eventually the government would just toss in some gas bombs and be done with them.

Julio had been in the gangs, it was the only way to survive. And he’d dealt and run and even killed to survive in the Urb. But he didn’t have a criminal record. The few police in the Urbs concentrated on securing the food centers and making sure nobody did anything bad to the fundamental infrastructure. What happened outside those few secure areas rarely came to their attention. Even when it did, they didn’t care.

“You were raped? That’s tough, Miss. Maybe you should move elsewhere.”

There were few ways out of the Urbs. There was no great labor shortage on the surface and surfacers considered Urbers as the lowest of the lowest scum. After the loss of dozens of colonist ships to various accidents and ‘unanticipated Posleen deep space attacks,’ colonization became far less attractive.

There was one way not only out of the Urbs but to a pretty good life, but it depended on surviving it. The military was always recruiting. It had been tasked with “recovery” of the Posleen blight zone, a three hundred light year stretch of the galaxy composed of little but stars and planets either originally uninhabitable or turned into radioactive wastelands. As the Posleen advanced they stripped the planets they took and then, far more often then not, fell out into destructive planet-wide wars that left the world a blasted hulk. But even a hulk had some value. Indowy deep miners could still extract minerals and once their ship-like megascrapers were installed, the Indowy could build factories, live and work anywhere that there was a semblance of an atmosphere. They didn’t care what the world looked like, they just wanted room for their rapidly expanding population.

So the pattern was established. The Fleet, and Fleet Strike, it’s ground and fighter arm, would wipe a planet of concentrated Posleen infestations. Then a specialty human company would come in and establish a fully cleared zone. Last the Indowy would arrive, build their megascrapers using techology that looked a bit too much like wizardry and move in. Other human security companies would ensure the safety of the burgeoning cities, keeping the Posleen out when they could and killing any that penetrated into the megascrapers.

That was the job Julio was after, a nice safe gig with a security company. But they didn’t recruit in the Urbs. They wanted trained soldiers. So first you had to spend time in Fleet’s security arm, the FP bully-boys, or in one of the infantry arms.

Julio had tried to get into Fleet itself, getting trained as a Fleet tech would be even better than getting a security gig. But all the slots for Fleet were filled. It was only after he joined that he discovered Fleet was… restrictive. Towards the end of the War, North America had been cut off and Europe virtually cut to ribbons. Most of the replacement personnel for Fleet, therefore, came from the southeast Asian islands area, Indonesia and the Phillipines especially. These days there were a few remaining original officers and NCOs in the Fleet from Northern European backgrounds but it was about 90% Indo or Flip with a smattering of surviving Chinese. It wasn’t anything official, but it was amazing how few survivors from the rest of the world made it into Fleet.

Fleet Strike, though, was less restrictive. Also less alluring. Fleet’s job when they took a planet was to fly overhead and hit Posleen concentrations with orbital kinetic strikes or, occasionally, a burst of heavy duty plasma. It was about as dangerous as shooting fish in a barrel; no serious concentration of Posleen space-craft had been fought in fifty years. The first three waves of Fleets, shattered units rebuilt and recrewed time and again, had bled to create those conditions. That, too, explained the shortage of people in Fleet with Northern European backgrounds; millions of men and women died in those actions.

Fleet Strike, though, had to do the rest of the work. They had to get down on the ground and dig out the smart ones, the ones that had dug in and tried to hold. They would hunt and flush a planet for a year or more, living down in the muck, until it was considered “pacified.” And occasionally they got into shit like this, a seriously dug in Posleen force with a smart commander. Seriously dug in enough that the Fleet, despite constant pounding, had been unable to defeat it from orbit.

This was when Fleet Strike earned its pay. And especially the SheVa and ACS arm, the most elite of the ground combat forces.

As he flipped upwards, ready for the blast, Julio saw another infantryman crouch by his hole. There was only enough room in the hole for one, but the other man’s suit was small and the private almost pinged for him to pile in on top. But the suit didn’t appear to care that the entire area was about to be hammered by a bagillion joules of energy. The wearer simply crouched, extended rock jacks and took a knee, slamming the meter long jacks downwards until the suit’s gauntlets were balled fists on the ground.

The titanic explosion blotted out almost every sensor. But quantum state view and neutron reads, especially neutron reads, were still up. By the hellish light cast by decaying matter Julio could see the suit leaning into the plasma, seemingly unafraid, even revelling in the wash of stripped atoms. Julio’s suit temperature had hopped up sixteen degrees despite the best efforts of his environmental system; what the other wearer must be experiencing he could hardly imagine and didn’t want to.

As soon as the plasma blast was past, Julio began scrambling out of the hole, checking his readouts to see who in his section had survived. But his suit’s AID automatically overrode his request and frantically pinged a name onto his HUD, the karat laid squarely over the suit beside him. The wearer was short but plug-like, his suit covered in a strange design like a green monster. Despite the blast of plasma, the design was still unblemished, so it was clearly etched deep into the suit, perhaps even woven into the very atomic structure.

The suit slowly stood and stamped both feet on the seered ground. The stamps crunched through the glassy surface and gave the wearer a solid footing, like a bull pawing the ground just before a charge.

“General O’Neal?” Julio asked, amazed that the corps commander was right on the front lines. “Sir? Are you okay?”

“Never fucking better, private,” Lieutenant General Michael O’Neal growled. “A nuke’s better than a dry cleaners. Now, let’s kick some Postie ass.”

The Posleen commander was good, but he’d just made his first mistake. Two, actually. The casta round, named after the slightly insane human professor who first created an antimatter cluster bomb, had been slightly off-line of the ACS unit deployed across the plain. If it had been directly overhead, Mike would have dug in like everyone else. But as he saw the deployment he immediately recognized that the nukes, large as they were, were too far away to destroy an ACS, especially the customized suit he wore.

The commander’s second mistake was in using a casta at all. The explosion probably caught a few cherries who were too slow to dig in and certainly shut down inter-suit communication while the plasma wash was over the area. But that took only a moment. The Posleen defenders would have had to pull into their bunkers to avoid the blast. It would take them a moment to get back in position, and that assumed that their commo wasn’t down entirely. The 11^th, ACS Corps, the “Black Tyrone,” though, was going to be ready to cock and rock in bare seconds after the explosion. They’d damned well better be ready or they’d have to deal with him. Anyone in the Corps, from the lowest private — like the kid cowering in the hole — up to his division commanders would rather battle a Posleen bare-handed then let him down. And the Bastards were within sprinting distance of the outer Posleen defenses.

Mike had considered calling in a casta himself, but he’d have had to convince Fleet higher that it was a “judicious action.” Fucking bean counters. They were more worried about the loss of the suits, each of which cost as much as a corvette, than the men, but it would still take time. Time he didn’t have. By hitting the unit with a casta, the Posleen commander had done his job for him.

Mike took the time as the plasma washed over his suit to do a quick assault frag. It was pretty straightforward. Custer would have loved it. “Take the outer defenses.”

The Posleen “redoubt” was really a small mountain range rising out of plains on all four sides, the geological term was a ‘basolith’. It was the last major point of resistance on R-1496 Delta and absolutely infested with Posleen and their automated forges. There were heavy anti-ship and missile ports in the upper reaches that had intercepted everything that fleet had thrown at them and actually taken two destroyers out that had stumbled into its arc of fire. The mountains, probably tree covered once but now slagged and black from titanic explosions, were impenetrable from space. That left taking them on the ground.

As long as they had food and materials for their ammo, and Mike bet that the commander had stocked up on both, the Posleen could hole up indefinitely. That couldn’t be allowed. He’d been tasked with clearing this dirt ball and he was damned well going to clear it.

Even while he was speaking with the private the orders flashed down to the division commanders then were split to brigades, battalions, companies and even down to the individual soldiers. The basic order: “CHARGE!!!” was the first thing to hit and then subtleties “CHARGE THAT PLASMA PIT!” were filtered through the commanders. In all it took about thirty seconds, which is a long time in combat. But it sure as hell beat aides de camp on horseback.

Mike wasn’t going to let his boys beat him to it, either. He started forward, slow at first then accelerating, commanding his suit into a run and loosening his legs so that the suit could exceed the ability of human legs to flicker back and forth. The rest of the units were keeping to the speed of their slowest suit, maintaining a careful line as they sprinted forward. So Mike, who had mastered the skitter run technique before most of his brigade commanders were born, was out in the lead.

The Posleen defenses were coming back online, slowly, as God Kings got their normals out of their deep holes, back in position and firing. The wall of the range was one interlocking defense after another and the darting suit was instantly the target of each of the positions in range as they come online.

But with the suit handling the running and dodging, he was free to bring up his grav-gun and engage. The M-288 grav-gun accelerated pellets of depleted uranium to a noticeable fraction of light speed so as each hit it generated a small kinetic explosion.

Most of the explosions burst back out of the gun positions. Mike had been firing and moving in suits for better than half a century with damned little desk time. He’d have to ask his AID to count the number of planets he’d battled Posleen on and that didn’t count five years of fighting them day in and day out on Earth during the invasion. Firing on the run was as natural to him as breathing and far more precise. The grav rounds were entering the tiny firing slits and exploding on the inside of the bunkers.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t taking fire. As fast as he took out one defense point another came online. But hitting a skittering suit was no easy task, even for the God King defenders with automated systems. First of all, he was up to over two hundred kilometers per hour in direct movement and the suit was adding side jinks, especially when it detected targeting systems on it. It telegraphed the jinks to him, the semi-intelligent underlayer of the suit sending him carefully coded nudges and the AID sending small sparkles that told him where the point was going to be as it jinked. Mike, the suit, the AID, had all fought for decades together and existed as an almost cybernetic organism, three systems with one mind.

He was, by a long shot, the most deadly user of a suit in the short history of the ACS. And he proved it now by a one man charge through a hurricane of fire until he was right up on the bunker he’d targeted.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t taking fire; the bunkers were interlocked to provide supporting fire on each other. But the other suits, thousands of them spread over several kilometers of open plain, were starting to catch up. The Posleen had more to worry about than one suit, now.

He wasn’t standing still, though. A solid, direct hit from one of the numerous heavy plasma guns or hypervelocity missile launchers covering the bunker would take him out. So he kept running past the first defense point as one hand flicked out and tossed a suicide bar in the tiny firing slit.

The “suicide bar” was an antimatter hand-grenade, a ten centimeter long, one centimeter in diameter instant armageddon pack. It doesn’t take much antimatter to make too much explosion. So the grenades were adjustable. A small quantity of the contained AM would be fired in a controlled detonation. But “squirting” the remainder, it reduced the explosion to what the user desired. The “squirted” antimatter was still hell on earth, but it wasn’t armageddon on a plate. If you were far enough away that the handgrenade didn’t kill you the squirted antimatter probably wouldn’t. The instruction manual for the M-613 “matter annihilation device” specifically stated that they were “not for use in hostage situations.” So there you go.

Mike’s grenade slid through the slit and a moment later there was a jut of silver-green fire out of the head-sized hole. But that didn’t suit his purposes. So Mike armed another, still jinking around the small hillock that made up the bunker, and tossed that one in. The first had been set to be the equivalent of sixteen kilos of TNT. He’d figured that it would crack the bunker. If that didn’t do it, a thousand kilos of TNT should. Hell, he was still an order of magnitude away from its full output. They didn’t call ’em suicide bars for nothing.

This time the front of the bunker opened out in a flower of silver-green leaving a smoking hole. Whatever had been defending the position was gone, gaseous matter barely registerable by the best sensors. A tunnel, partially collapsed, arched downward. It was large enough to take a horse, or a horse sized Posleen, so there was plenty of gap at the top of the rubble pile to crawl through.

Mike jumped into the pit and started to crawl up the rubble just as a hand descended on his shoulder.

“Sir, would you please let us go first for once?” Staff Sergeant Thomas Rawls said. The head of his security detail was clearly tired of trying to keep up.

“Oh, sure, be that way,” Mike said, backing away from the hole. “But I fit better.”

“There’s ways to fix that, sir,” Rawls said, popping out a suicide bar and tossing it in the hole. He quickly ducked to the side and held the general back against the wall of the shattered position.

“You gotta follow ’em fast,” Mike protested. “Use the boot, don’t piss on them!”

“And as you well know, antimatter remains in the explosive matter, sir,” Rawls said, sighing slightly. He sometimes had the feeling in dealing with his boss that he was the adult and the much older general the child. General O’Neal was, almost invariably, upbeat and positive to a fault. But the sergeant had been with him long enough to know that that was very much a façade.

Every survivor of the “War Generation” seemed to have lost someone. Indeed, with five out of six people on earth erased and often eaten by the Posleen, entire families, clans, tribes and even nations had been wiped out as if they never existed. In O’Neal’s case he had lost his wife, father and one daughter. His sole remaining daughter was only alive because she’d been raised by the Indowy. And that rearing had changed her to such an extent that the General found her nearly unhuman. In effect, he had lost everything in the war. He’d never remarried, never in the two years the sergeant had been guarding him so much as hinted of a romantic interest or even a close friend. He had one drive in life: eliminating every Posleen from the face of the Galaxy. And he did it cheerfully and with incredible precision and skill.

“What’s a little antimatter between friends?” Mike asked as the suicide bar went off. The explosion blasted some of the rubble back into the room, pattering the suits in chunks of rock that would have killed an unarmored human. “Can we go now?”

“Let me check the security of the tunnel, sir,” the sergeant said, waving one of the team forward.

Corporal Albert Norman had only been on the general’s security detail for a year. What with transit time and everything, he’d only been on the detail for the cleanup on S-385-Beta and he’d never seen O’Neal in full hunting mode. He thought he was good with a suit until he’d seen the boss. O’Neal was unreal.

He’d gotten comfortable with dealing on a nearly daily basis with a general but this situation had him nervous. Sergeant Rawls had been killing Posleen for ten years, the boss for, well, more than a half a century. This was the first time he’d been really doing the job under the boss’ eye. So he actually had to think through his next actions instead of doing them on automatic.

He switched on his helmet light, ducked down and crawled up the pile of rubble, poking his head over to the top and giving the tunnel a sweep.

“All cl… ” he said just as the Posleen popped out of a hide. He didn’t even have time to finish before the heavy duty plasma gun took off his head.

Julio had followed the general more or less automatically, but he hadn’t been able to keep up with either the general or his security detail. The Hammers were chosen from the cream of the 11^th and Julio knew he wasn’t on their level.

But he did hop in the hole, trying to avoid the still incoming fire as much as anything, just in time to see one of the Hammers turned into a barbeque. Plasma was incredibly hot stuff and when it entered a suit, the interior turned into an oven. Julio hadn’t been around long enough to be present when such a suit was opened, but he’d seen pictures. Whoever the guy was, he was just deep baked and fried to a crisp. Besides having his head sheered off, of course.

Julio vomited into his helmet and dropped into a crouch. The suit, though, had been designed to handle that, designed in fact by the short figure up against the wall. The semi-biotic undergel created a pocket to catch the regurgitant, sealed it away to prevent aspiration and pumped air when Julio reactively inhaled. Half-noticed, a small quantity of undergel swept into his open mouth and cleaned it out. A half a morning of ACS transition training was concerned with just that. The soldiers were fed a hearty breakfast, suited up, given time to half digest, and then their suits fed them a nausea-inducing drug. Repeatedly.

It’s important, knowing deep in your bones that no matter what happens, the suit won’t let you drown in your own puke.

He was cut off from his own section, which was trying to open up a similar bunker about thirty yards away. And he sure as hell didn’t want to go out into that fire again. He wasn’t, in fact, sure what to do.

Mike knew he wasn’t in charge of one lost grunt but he also recognized the private from their earlier encounter. So he pinged the poor guy’s suit.

“First fight?” Mike asked.

“Yes, sir,” Julio said, choking.

“I’d say it gets better, but it really doesn’t,” Mike said. “But we need to get in that hole. One way to make it better is to think. How should we do that, Private Julio Garcia?”

Julio’s mind blanked. The general, survivor of countless similar encounters, the guy who had coined or been the inspiration for so many military jokes and aphorisms he was up there with Patton and a bunch of other guys, was asking Julio how to do it?

That actually broke him out of his panic. Hell, throw one of his own sayings back.

“Don’t use finesse when force works, sir,” Julio snapped back.

Mike grinned and did the head twitch that was all that was available when wearing a suit. The suits were form-fitting and the helmet was fully closed, presenting nothing more than a faceted plate to the enemy. Wearers got everything from external sensors; no faceplate created a vulnerability. By the same token, the suits, while somewhat flexible, could not nod or shrug. Body language was highly subtle and took years to learn. What Mike saw was a troop that had potential but needed to get with the program.

“X-wing option,” Mike snapped on the local circuit. “Double threes. Julio does a hop and pop entry.”

Chingadera, Julio thought. The bodyguards were going to drop two three hundred kilo dialed grenades in the tunnel and fire it up in an X at the same time. His job, whether he chose to accept it or not, was to run up the rubble and dive through the hole, hoping that the Hammers would check fire before they shot him in the back and that he could get into position before whatever Posleen were defending the tunnel.

He had to admit that the choice made sense. Urbers were generally shorter and smaller than the norm. The Hammers were mostly big guys. He could just fit better than they could. He probably could dive into the hole; ACS was not particularly cumbersome.

The other choice was the general. And Julio didn’t want to think about that possibility.

“On my mark,” the general continued, not bothering to ask if everyone understood their jobs. Getting a job in ACS required time in a regular Fleet Strike infantry unit and then a six month course. Julio knew what he was supposed to do. Doing it, though…

Sergeant Rawls designated one other Hammer to toss the second grenade then pinged readiness. At the general’s signal, they tossed the two grenades then the Hammers formed up on the rubble, leaping forward to get in the General’s way. Otherwise the nitwit was going to get himself in the way of plasma from Posleen and grenades.

There wasn’t any fire as they positioned themselves and fired up the hole but the wash of explosive carried a good bit of antimatter with it. Tough as ACS suits were, antimatter would degrade anything. The system automatically noted reduced effectiveness pretty much across the board; their suits had thinned on average three percent. The suits were going to have to go into the shop for a full detailing after this shit.

His suit kept him apprised of the actions of the line private as the guy scrambled up the rubble hill and then threw himself forward. Like well-oiled machines, the Hammers checked fire while the private was in mid-air so that he was following a crossing line of relativistic projectiles as he entered the hole.

The second set of grenades had dropped a portion of the ceiling, leaving large chunks of rubble all over the floor. So when Julio tried to roll to his feet, he stumbled and fell backwards instead. But in the light of his suit helmet he could see a door opening right by his left leg. So he kicked it.

The door was being opened mechanically. And it was heavily armored, sealed and designed to survive a nearby blast and still open even if there was rubble in the way. So the kick sent the suit spinning in a circle instead of kicking the door shut and left Julio with his hand at the base of the door.

That wasn’t much use against a Posleen God-King with a plasma gun. But Julio wasn’t quite willing to die, yet. So as the surprised Posleen tried to train the heavy duty launcher downwards, a shot that would have killed both the ACS suit and the God-King if it had gone off, Julio reached up and grabbed the barrel, pressing down and twisting.

The powerful suit crushed the plasma coils like paper. If the God-King had pulled the trigger it would have been very bad as the weapon exploded in the enclosed space. But the twist ripped the weapon out of the God-King’s hand, unfired.

That left Julio on his back looking up at an angry, disarmed, God-King. The Posleen’s next move was so automatic it could have been instinct as he reached over his back and drew his monomolecular boma blade to slash down at the armored human.

Julio’s action wasn’t nearly as smooth but it was much more effective. He just poked upwards, hard, with the plasma gun in his hand.

The butt of a Posleen plasma gun was designed to ride over the shoulder. Thus instead of the flat plate standard on human weapons, it was a curved shape with a not particularly sharp point.

“Not particularly sharp” is sharp enough when driven by pseudo-muscles that could send an armored fist through three inches of homogenous steel. The plasma gun punched up through the Posleen’s armored chest until only the barrel was exposed. The yellow blood of the centaur spattered down its still barrel, smoking off from residual heat as the boma blade clattered to the floor.

Julio didn’t stop to study the image. Training had fully taken over and he rolled to his feet, trained his grav gun down the tunnel and fired a stream of relativistic projectiles down it before he even started to identify targets.

Two more doors had opened, the God-Kings darting into the passage, weapons up. The first God-King, though, was still in the way and barely starting to slump as Julio rolled to his feet and they had a moment of hesitation about firing. If the body in the way had been a normal they couldn’t have hesitated, but killing a fellow God-King of the same clan and sept was another issue.

Julio didn’t give them time to make up their minds; the stream of explosive kinetic rounds blew the two Posleen in half.

He flipped his hand down to his side and drew out two suicide bars, setting them both for a hundred kilo charge and tossed them down the passageway, one lightly the other hard. The CLANG! of another door breaking loose and a secondary from a Posleen plasma gun was all the information he needed; there had been more down the passageway. There were probably lots of Posleen down the passageway. But for now the corridor was…

“CLEAR!”

Mike had watched the encounter on a feed. He’d have rather been the person in the passage, killing Posleen and breaking things. But he knew his job was at a higher level. He’d actually been following that feed as well as feeds from all three divisions; multi-tasking in combat was so second nature he didn’t think about it. Positions were being captured all over the line but casualties were up; every passage seemed to be heavily defended. And they were defended by God-Kings.

The Posleen came in, broadly, two forms. The vast majority, at a ratio of about four hundred to one, were semi-sentient normals. They were mildly functional morons which could be pointed in a general direction and told to kill anything non-Posleen in view. They also had implanted skills that could be used to build a civilization. And they worshipped, literally, their bosses the relatively rare God-Kings. A subset of the normals were the cosslain, physically pretty much indistinguishable but considerably brighter. Cosslain were almost sentient in fact.

God-Kings ran things. In open-field battle they generally rode anti-grav platforms called tenar which mounted heavier weapons and sensors. Occasionally they used Posleen landing craft to give ground forces air support or air-land methods such as rear area assaults. But Mike had never run into a situation where the primary shooters were God-Kings. Undoubtedly the lead God-King, the one that Julio had just killed with his own gun — neat trick — was the commander of the defenders of the pit. But having this many God-Kings forward meant that somewhere there were a couple of thousand normals without anybody to tell them what to do.

Make that a few hundred thousand normals. All the tunnels were defended by God-Kings. His division commanders hadn’t sent the intel on but he was picking it up on a tertiary feed. Everybody was running into the same thing.

This was going to be a blood-bath. And not in the skin-soothing, like-extending, “send me a hundred virgins” way.

And nobody was any further than Julio. Initial penetrations were held all along the line and too many troops were still out in the open.

Mike composed the intel and fed it down then paused, very briefly, to think.

“Rubble-dubble all openings, Shelly. Multi-entry, heavy. Boot on them, don’t piss,” he muttered to his AID. “Julio.”

“Señor?” the private said, shakily.

“Hold what you got,” Mike said. “Keep tossing subars. Rawls, rubble dubble, now!”

“Roger,” the sergeant said, pulling out another grenade. He pinged the rest of the Hammers and the group all shoved grenades as deep into the rubble as their arms would go, retracting fast. O’Neal, again, had invented the rubble-dubble technique and once upon a time it was dangerous before suits developed an engineering database that could determine trap points. At least one poor bastard had had his hand blown off when he couldn’t pull his arm back in time. But that problem had been solved long ago.

All six of the grenades were detonated on signal and the rubble wall more or less evaporated. The explosion threw one of the Hammers off his feet, but everyone else was cocked and locked.

“Let’s roll,” Mike said, heading for the opening. “There’s Posleen ass to kick.”

“And you get to roll behind us, sir,” Sergeant Rawls said, jumping into the opening.

“Spoil-sport.”

Julio paused at the intersection of the connecting tunnel and looked back. His section, which had ended up collapsing two bunkers for zero openings, had made it across the killing zone to follow the general. But his section head had sent him a quick ping telling him to stay with the Hammers.

That should have meant that his section was out in front and he was following behind. Instead, true to form, the General was on point. Damn it. Which put him at an intersection that was probably going to be crawling with fire.

“C kilo subars,” the general said, palming one of the devices and sliding his armored thumb down the blank face until the readout showed an output equivalent to one hundred kilos, about two hundred twenty pounds, of TNT. “X form. Hammers, right. Bravo Section right. Double stack.”

Julio thumbed a grenade himself, dialing it down then felt a slight thump as someone bumped into him from behind, forming a “stack” of troopers. As soon as the grenades went off, the stack would rush the corridor to the right. He glanced over and saw Corporal Kermit Butler on the point of the left-hand stack.

“Which way are we throwing?” Kermit pinged.

“X form, corp,” Julio replied. “I’m throwing your way. So you sure as hell better be throwing mine.”

“On my mark,” O’Neal said. “Three, two, one, Mark!”

Julio realized it was the General right behind him as he threw the grenade. He threw it hard; as the first guy in the stack he had the best chance of getting it far down the corridor.

The General threw one as well then shoved him, hard.

Julio thought he was crazy. The grenades were on a three second delay which meant they would be running right up on Kermit’s grenade as they entered the corridor.

But as he rounded the corner he saw the General was crazy like a fox. There were four emplaced positions along the corridor but the defenders had seen the antimatter grenades skitter down the corridor. Julio actually caught a flash from one of the defender’s hyper-velocity missile launchers as the Posleen ducked back to avoid the explosion and the wash of antimatter. A mechanical shutter dropped over the hole, closing it entirely.

Julio felt a hand on his shoulder, an almost irrestistable pressure, as the General pinged in his ear.

“Down, son,” the General said. “Take it on your helmet,” he added, pressing the private down and forward.

The explosion, at this range, was almost as bad as the casta round. And he saw his suit counter drop, hard. His armor had taken a serious hit from the antimatter. But he also was within a step of one of the armored positions.

He followed a karat, leading him to a position further down the line. The armored door slid back before he’d taken two steps, though, and he paused, dropping slightly, and targeted the small opening.

Most of the rounds careened off to one side or another but a few got through. The wash of fire out of the opening was unnoticeable compared to the explosions to either side but it was apparently enough. No fire came down the corridor at him.

He’d automatically blanked the surrounding fire but all four of the defense points in their direction were down. The same could not be said of the far end of the corridor, however, where his section was getting hammered.

“I said boot don’t piss on them,” the General muttered on the local net. “Raw… ”

“On it, sir,” Sergeant Rawls said as an HVM ripped Kermit apart.

“And what do we have here… ?”

Mike looked down the right-hand corridor, depending on Sergeant Rawls to get Julio’s former section in gear on clearing their side. The corridor curved, again, which meant there were probably more defense points down it. However, it was also going to have access to both the surface and the deeper areas where the Posleen commanders, and their forges, must reside.

Intel had shown no Posleen moving on the surface since the redoubt was invested. So everything had to move around underground. The problem was, there were a billion ways to defend a position like this. God-Kings in sealed bunkers barely scratched the surface.

However, they were inside. They’d keep digging until all the rats were gone.