Hell's Faire

CHAPTER TEN Green’s Creek, NC, United States of America, Sol III 1648 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD

“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.”

There was another pause and he smiled. “If you’re pounding your head on the TC controls, it’s okay. So am I.”

“Thank you, sir,” Chan called back as Pruitt keyed the controls.

“Hold it there, Pruitt,” Chan said, flipping to the company frequency. “Number Five, you’re up. Everybody watch where the previous turret has fired,” she continued as the blast of fire arched over the nearby ridgeline. “I want to try to saturate the area on the other side of the ridge.”

She nodded as the SheVa turret began to rotate. Pruitt apparently could feel the MetalStorm fire even in the heavily armored control room and had rotated automatically when five had finished its shot. And he did it again when six was done. So she could quit worrying about it.

Time to find something else to worry about.

She popped her head out of the TC’s hatch and watched as Glenn manipulated the loader. There were four packs, three 40s and a 105, connected to the SheVa’s top directly behind the turret. The loader was a multi-angularity forklift that connected to special points on the bottom of the packs. Once it was connected, which was the most ticklish part, all that Glenn had to do was hit the “Load Sequence” button and the multi-ton pack was lifted through three dimensions and carefully dropped into the gun-cradle. Once in place the gun system inserted the pintle and trunnions making the whole system ready to fire.

Simple. So simple that they’d be reloaded before Nine’s turn to fire came up. And so would Nine. The question was whether to continue the fire-mission.

There were packs stashed in the interior. But to get to those would require the crane and someone, Pruitt probably, who was qualified to operate it. Which meant an hour or so to replace all her ready-packs. Which meant she really didn’t want to shoot off all her reloads blind.

“Colonel Mitchell,” she said, switching back over to intercom. “I recommend we give them one stonk from here and then either move forward to the ridgeline or begin our movement towards Franklin.”

Mitchell was regretting releasing Kitteket. The specialist had been dumped on them by accident during the retreat, but having someone to handle all the communications had turned out to useful. SheVas, by and large, did not do a lot of communicating. They mostly stayed in place or were moved by careful coordination of the local force commanders, who “owned” the SheVas as attachments. Operations orders, movement orders and communications were laid out days in advance. Otherwise they tended to run over such unimportant obstacles as front-lines, headquarters or, in one particularly unpleasant accident, the entire logistics “tail” of divisions. There was a reason that SheVa crewmen referred to everything other than SheVas, including “lesser” armor, as “crunchies.”

But the battle for the Tennessee Valley had been a wild scramble and, as far as Mitchell knew, he was an independent command under Army headquarters. Which meant that he wasn’t in the decision loop of the local division. Furthermore, the entire battle both in retreat and advance had been, of necessity, much more fluid than most battles that involved something the size of the Great Pyramids. And then there were the MetalStorms.

All of that meant far more communication load than was normal for a SheVa commander.

Which was Mitchell’s problem at the moment.

“Wait one, Vickie,” he said, switching back to another frequency. “Whiskey Five Echo Six-Four, this is SheVa Nine, over.”

“SheVa Nine, you are not authorized on this net.”

“Great, Echo Six-Four. I’m glad you have such great commo security. The point is that we’re about to make a movement forward and unless we can coordinate it, we’ll run over about two companies of your troops, over.” He was on the division command net and he knew he was supposed to be on a support net, probably a dedicated one. That was how they usually ran SheVas. But he didn’t have a correct frequency. All he had was a hastily scribbled note that said “Local Division” and a frequency.

Welcome to the Real and the Nasty, boys.

“SheVa Nine, authenticate Victor Foxtrot.”

“Look, first of all the damned net is compromised in case you hadn’t been told. Including the current SOI. Second of all, I don’t have your SOI. So, I’m sorry, I can’t authenticate. Look, we’re this great big metal thing on a ridge near Green’s Creek. If you look closely, we have ‘U.S. Defense Force SheVa Nine’ on our side and we have a great big picture of a mini-lop rabbit on the front. And we’re getting ready to roll over one of your battalions. So can we quit the commo games?!”

“SheVa Nine, this is Grizzly Six, over.” The voice was gruff with a slight accent. It fit the name.

“Grizzly Six, this is SheVa Nine, over.” Six meant a commander. Hopefully the commander of the unit they were about to run over so that maybe the crunchies would get out of the way.

“You’re right, the SOI is compromised. But that doesn’t mean you’re you. Rotate your turret back and forth.”

“Hang one, Grizzly, we’re completing a stonk.” Mitchell unkeyed the radio and looked over at Pruitt. “Pruitt, where we at?”

“That was eight. We’re done. Vickie wants to hold onto her ready ammo.”

“Okay, rotate the turret back and forth a bit. And don’t you ever call her Vickie around me again.”

“Will do, boss,” the gunner replied, with a shrug. He tapped the controls back and forth. “What was that in aid of?”

“No idea,” the commander replied. “But at least we’re talking to the locals again.” He keyed the microphone and took a breath. “Grizzly Six, have complied.”

“Roger, welcome to the net,” the commander said. “It will take me at least ten minutes to get those troops prepared to move. Where do you want to go?”

“There’s a saddle on the ridge, directly across from the Savannah Baptist Church. UTM looks to be… North 391111 East 293868.”

Mitchell no longer considered the odd nature of reply. Grid coordinates worked off of imaginary “lines” on maps and depending on the number of digits used, the accuracy of the location got higher and higher. At eight digits the accuracy of the location was less than a meter. So what he had just done was give a location that was accurate to the millimeter. For a “tank” that was a hundred meters wide.

Often he got asked about it. Normally in the military, when someone was just reading a map, they would use, at most, six digits for a location coordinate. So when he gave locations in twelve digit coordinates, it occasioned comment. His answer was fairly simple: The location tracker in the SheVa guns read out in twelve-digit coordinates.

He didn’t know why it did; maybe he ought to ask Kilzer. But it gave twelve numbers. When faced with the numbers, he had one of two choices. He could figure out how to round them off to a six-digit coordinate, which would be normal, or he could just read them off the screen. Rounding them off wasn’t hard, it just took a few seconds, was prone to error and distracted you, often in the middle of a fire-fight. Abstract thought in combat was a good way to end up a hole in the ground and so was taking a few seconds on a nonessential task. So he just read the damned things off the screen.

“Understood, SheVa,” the commander replied after a moment. “I’ll call you when the movement is approved, do not make the movement until I call.”

“Roger, be aware that it is my intention after firing from that position to move backwards and then do a movement out of this zone of control. I prefer not to discuss that over open channels. Please advise the appropriate people. Over.”

“Concur. After your fire, we’ll do lunch.”

“Roger, Grizzly.”

“Grizzly Six, out.”

“Whew,” Mitchell said. “Anybody know if that was the battalion commander or what?”

“The unit in this area is the 147^th Infantry Division,” Kilzer replied not looking up from where he was doodling in his notebook. “Its logo is a grizzly bear.”

“Oh, shit,” Mitchell moaned. “That was the division commander?”

Arkady Simosin was learning about second chances.

Not many corps commanders that lost eighty percent of their corps got a second chance. Most of them never commanded so much as a mess-kit repair company. So he supposed he should be happy.

After First Washington he had been relieved and demoted to colonel. The only reason he hadn’t been kicked out of the Army entirely was that the board of inquiry noted that the hacking of his corps artillery system had been impossible to anticipate or prevent and that there was a critical shortage of officers trained in modern techniques. So he found himself a colonel, again, working in the Third Army Group J-3 office of Plans and Training.

In time he had even stood for brigadier, again. Three times. The first two had been blackballs; one or more members of the flag officer promotion board had felt him unacceptable as a general officer. The third time, though, he had been passed. In the old days you only had one pass at flag rank, but with the war continuing and even generals occasionally becoming Posleen fodder, the rules had been loosened. Slightly.

He’d stayed in Army J-3 then transferred to the Asheville Corps when it became obvious the only “plans” they had were survival.

Asheville was a tough case. The five divisions in its Line had all sustained hundreds of days of combat. With the exception of some of the fortress cities on the plains, Asheville had probably had the toughest fight of all. There were at least three “easy” approaches to the city and the Posleen had hit it, hard, after each of the main landing waves. Landers, C-Decs and Lampreys, had managed to brave the Planetary Defense Center and even land inside the defenses. Probing attacks, really just the odd God King that either didn’t know any better or got a scale up its butt, were a constant problem.

So the units that were actually in the line, usually three of the five divisions, got very little rest and virtually no training. And the two divisions that were out of the line tended to take that fact as permission to just fuck off. That was part of the rationale for replacement and two thirds of the time away from the line was specifically designated as “refit and refresh.” But what they were supposed to do with the rest of their time was train. Improve the individual skills of the personnel, run the officers through “tactical exercises without troops” and do small unit tactical training.

What they did, instead, all of the divisions, was fill in the blocks on their paperwork and let their units fuck off.

This had become obvious at least a year before when a small Posleen force had taken a position on Butler Mountain and used it for intermittent harassing fire on the support forces. First a battalion, then a brigade, and finally an entire division of the “rest and refit” units had been sent forward to try to dislodge the Posleen force that was not much larger than a company. The God King in charge was tenacious and smart, to the point of rebuilding the defense positions and occupying them, but it shouldn’t have taken a division to dislodge him. And if any of the other Posleen in the area had conceived of reinforcing him, Asheville might have fallen.

The problem was that the Line units had become specialists at running their automated guns and had forgotten everything else. Or never been taught it.

The Corps G-3 and commander were relieved and the incoming G-3 had asked for Arkady. So he had found himself in charge of “evaluating” individual unit training.

What he’d found was even worse than anticipated. There were entire units that had never even zeroed their individual weapons or boresighted their heavy weapons. There was an armor storage site with sufficient tracks for two brigades, but none of the brigades had trained on them in three years.

The first thing that he did was cut the “rest and refit” to one third of the “rear area” period. He knew it wasn’t enough time, that units would go back into the line insufficiently rested, but until they learned how to be soldiers again rest would have to wait.

Then, with the concurrence of the G-3, he began finding out which of the blocks were “real” and which ones were in the imagination of the unit commanders. There were a few of those who were relieved and others whose feelings were going to be hurt for a long time. Oh. Well. It was about making sure the soldiers were ready to fight, not just sit in their positions and let the Posleen impale themselves on their weapons.

Physical training, weapons training, tactical training, small unit tactics and mechanized infantry, all of it was crammed in. Along with testing to ensure proficiency on their basic job of, yes, maintaining the automated weapons of the Wall.

Slowly, by cajoling and checking and running around at least eighteen hours per day for the better part of a year and a half, he got some of the units to the point that they could find their ass with two hands. One of the ones that couldn’t was the 147^th.

It was never their fault, of course. It seemed that every time they fell back for refit, they had taken massive casualties on the Wall. Where other units would sustain five or ten percent wounded and killed in a mass attack, the 147^th ended up taking thirty, forty even fifty percent casualties. So they had a constant need for new recruits. And the recruits always arrived half trained.

After the second time the 147^th came through the rest, train and refit cycle, Arkady took a trip up to the Wall when they were returned. The unit had left the rear-area training cycle with, as he well knew, the recruits barely familiar with maintaining and rearming their weapons. But instead of starting a vigorous training series up on the Wall, the division had proceeded to squat in place like so many units of slugs. The few recruits that he talked to all knew they didn’t know how to fight the Posleen even from such heavily fortified positions. But their officers and NCOs rebuffed their requests for advanced training. And in the case of the “veterans” the opinion seemed to be that it was pointless training newbies. Most of them were going to get killed in the first attack, anyway. Why bother?

Of course it was never their fault.

One of the few military aphorisms that Arkady firmly believed was inviolable was “there are no bad regiments, just bad officers.” His brief was specifically for rear area retrain and refit but a word in the G-3’s ear was enough for the “ongoing training” officer to start paying special attention to the 147^th’s methods, just in time for the next attack.

If anyone had figured out how to read the Posleen mind, it surely wasn’t the Asheville Corps G-2. Marshall was a decent guy but the Posleen were just beyond him, or his analysts. Arkady had been in the daily “dog and pony show,” to watch his briefer deliver their daily sermon. He turned up from time to time, just to make sure “his” major didn’t decide to start speaking in tongues or anything. “Trust but verify” was a decent statement for leadership as well as nuclear diplomacy.

The young lieutenant colonel from G-2 — they all looked like kids these days with rejuv but you could tell this guy was a kid, no more than thirty five, maybe forty — had just finished his presentation, in which he had concluded that “only two out of thirty-five indices call for a major Posleen attack in the next week.” In other words, everybody could kick back and relax. Just finished, and the Corps Arty guy was about halfway through his daily delivery of Valium in the form of innumerable columns of more or less incomprehensible numbers:

“Average tube wear rate per battery per day has been trending downward for the last month and a half while consumption versus resupply of standard ammunition types has, happily, been trending upwards. Based upon G-2 analysis of probable future Posleen intentions it is likely that we can begin getting ahead of the tube-wear power curve in no more than three more months. The last quarter has seen significant increases in trunnion stress analysis training among the second-tier maintenance personnel.” All delivered in a deadly dry monotone. It was always the same briefer from Corps Arty and it was one reason that the daily dog and pony show was a must avoid for most of the senior officers that might otherwise attend.

Arkady had just started to drift off, the previous day had been another long one, when the Corps chief of staff, who had to attend this thing every day, it was a wonder the man hadn’t shot the red-leg by now, stood up and, with a decidedly ambiguous expression, stopped the presentation.

“Thanks, Jack, that was just great, as usual, but the 193^rd is reporting a heavy attack on the I-40 Wall. I think we all need to get back to our sections and earn our pay.”

A serious Posleen attack would mean thousands of casualties by nightfall and if it was tough enough it might mean hell and blood for days on end or, if they did their jobs wrong, the fall of the city and millions of civilian casualties. Serious attacks in the past had come close. But it was pretty clear that everyone else in the room was trying to stop themselves from cheering. They’d managed to avoid the rest of the Corps Artillery presentation! Hooray!

The 193^rd got hit in the first attack and then the second attack hit the 147^th. Which promptly, for all practical purposes, went away. It sustained over fifty percent casualties in the assault and if it hadn’t been for one of the reserve divisions relieving it the Wall would have fallen.

Which meant that something had to be done.

As soon as it was recruited back up to strength, Arkady had scrapped the original training schedule, which emphasized a range of skills, and concentrated on getting the recruits up to proficiency in their basic combat duties. The division commander had protested that the training regime was contrary to Ground Force policy and he was right. But the choice seemed to be an entirely unprepared division or one that could at least survive in a fixed position.

He had been in the midst of the retraining program when the Posleen assault on Rabun Gap, and another major assault on Asheville, had hit.

The assault had immediately forced the 193^rd, which was also in its rest phase, to be moved into the Line. And the 147^th would have followed. But then the Posleen took Rabun Gap and started charging up the back hallway to Asheville.

With Posleen at both doors, and more coming knocking through the undefended back, the corps commander had no choice but to deploy the 147^th to try to stop the Posleen coming up from Rabun. The Rabun Corps had been well and truly trashed by the unexpected nature of the assault and several nuclear detonations from a trashed SheVa gun and some landers its mate had potted on the retreat. The simple fact was that the entire unit would have to be either replaced or rebuilt.

In the meantime the Asheville Corps was, “in addition to its other duties” to start pushing the Posleen back out of the bottle. Pushing them back through narrow mountain valleys and passes. Pushing nearly a million of them out of the valley and away from the narrow lifeline of I-40 that was the only thing keeping Asheville alive.

A tall order for any force. And the 147^th got the job.

It was a job for the Ten Thousand, for the Armored Combat suits. It was a job for an elite mechanized infantry unit with heavy artillery backing.

And the 147^th got the job.

The division had been incredibly slow to get off the stick. So slow that a Posleen mobile force had taken the critical Balsam Pass and cut off not only the vast majority of the Rabun Corps, but the only SheVa left that could support the counterattack.

Eventually the 147^th had tried to assault the pass. And tried. And tried. It wasn’t taking many casualties in trying and yet it was still taking too many for the results.

Since, with the withdrawal of the last refit unit, Arkady didn’t have much to do, the corps commander sent him up to figure out what was going on. And it was pretty much what he expected. Highway 74 up to Balsam Pass was a long line of vehicles, just stopped, with troops marching up the side of the road in a double line. None of the vehicles were in defensive perimeters. None of the soldiers seemed to know what they were doing, where they were going, or much to care. They were all sullen and unhappy at having been pulled out of their comfortable barracks. And none of them seemed to have a clue how to do their job in a mobile combat situation.

The division headquarters was worse. He remembered reading a description of the British Expeditionary Force in the first battle of France. Something about “generals wandering around the headquarters tent looking for string.” He’d thought it was a joke until he saw the division commander of the 147^th wandering around asking everyone if they had a sharpened pencil. The man had a pen sticking out of his pocket.

The “front” wasn’t much better. A battalion had been tasked with retaking the pass but they were stymied by Posleen roadblocks. The Posleen force had sent some of its “normals” down the road and placed them in cover to stop the humans.

The initial assault hadn’t even had a scouting element and the first few trucks full of troops had run straight into what was effectively an ambush. Even if the alien on the other end of a gun was a semi-moron. It had killed no more than a platoon or so of troops, but suddenly to all the units the Posleen could be anywhere!

The battalion commander was dithering, the S-3 was blithering and the XO was having a nervous breakdown. They had been stopped by what appeared to be a single Posleen. Orders to the companies in the advance to move forward were ignored; the company commanders couldn’t get their troops up off their bellies. Calls for fire to the artillery section led to fire everywhere but on the target, everywhere including some of the front-rank soldiers. Finally, the lone Posleen was taken out by a mortar section and some of the troops were induced to crawl forward. But it was nearly four thousand meters to the pass, and crawling wasn’t going to get them there any time soon.

Arkady had returned to the corps headquarters and given a short and somewhat profane description of the situation at the pass. After a moment the corps commander dictated a short note.

“Major General (brevet) Arkady Simosin appointed commander of the 147^th Infantry Division vice General Wilson Moser. General Wilson Moser relieved.”

“Arkady, you’ve got twenty-four hours to make it to Rabun Gap,” the commander said.

“It’s going to be ugly.”

“I don’t care. Make it to Rabun, or even close, and those won’t be brevet stars.”

He had his second chance. What he was learning was that no matter how hard the first chance might have been, the second chance was harder.

At the division headquarters he had handed the note to General Moser then read himself in. After that he gave the chief of staff a few orders.

“Get this clusterfuck under control. When I return if I hear one hysterical voice, I will shoot it. If I see one officer running I will shoot him. If the maps are not updated I will shoot you. You’re all on probation. We are going to Rabun Gap. If I get there with a platoon left it will at least be a platoon that knows what in the hell it is doing.”

He’d then gone up to the front. The lead company was stalled, again, by another Posleen outpost.

The company commander was belly down off the side of the road when he walked up.

“Get down, General!” the captain had shouted. From up the road there was a crackle of railgun fire and Arkady could hear it going by overhead.

“Captain, are any of your men dying around you?”

“No, sir?”

“That is when you get down on your belly, Captain.”

The company was hunkered down to either side of the road, still in a tactical roadmarch position. As far as he could determine there was no attempt being made to move forward.

He spotted the company sniper by the side of the road, clutching his Barrett .50 caliber rifle to his chest.

“Son, do you know how to fire that thing?”

“Sort of…”

“Give.” He took the rifle, and the sniper’s ghillie blanket, then slid down the embankment.

The company was huddled behind a curve in the road. There was a sharp road cut and a ditch on the left-hand side and a nearly vertical cliff leading down to a stream on the right. At the turn itself there was a small hillock through which the road was cut. He slid down the embankment, nearly breaking an ankle, then puffed up the hill on the right. At the top he realized how out of shape eighteen-hour days and no PT can make you. But he flipped the ghillie blanket up and slithered forward anyway.

The Posleen was in a similar position about five hundred meters up the road and Simosin was damned if he could spot it. He looked but since everyone was out of sight the damned thing wasn’t firing. The Posleen were not supposed to use snipers; in a way it wasn’t fair.

“Commander!” he yelled down the hill. “Have one of your men stand up!”

“What?!”

“I need to see where the Posleen is. Have one of your men stand up in view of it.”

“I… ” There was a pause. “I don’t think they will!”

“Okay,” the general replied and put a round into the wall by the head of the point. “You! Walk out into the road. As soon as the Posleen fires, you can go hide again.”

He could see the point’s face clearly. The kid was probably about seventeen and terrified. He looked over towards the hill the general was on and shook his head. “No!”

Arkady took a breath and put a round through his body. The fifty caliber bullet caromed off the wall behind the private and blew back out through his gut in a welter of gore.

“You! Behind him! Step out into the road. Now!”

And he did. And Arkady finally spotted the Posleen. One round was all it took.

When he got back to the company CP, he could see his sergeant major standing behind the company commander with a leveled rifle.

“If you had been doing your job, that kid would still be alive,” the general said coldly. “If your men don’t move, you have to make them move. If they don’t obey orders, you have to make them obey orders. I’m giving you a second chance. I want you up that road. If you can’t do it, I’ll get someone who will. And if I have to relieve you, it might just be in a bodybag.”

He turned to the sniper and hurled the thirty-five pound rifle at him. “Learn to use this. If you think you can use it on me, give it your best shot.”

The word got around quick.

After a nuke round took out most of the Posleen, and an attack had hit the survivors from the Rabun side, they had made it to the pass. And on the other side, things started to move. He’d ended up relieving quite a few people, and the people he put in place relieved a few others, but the division had finally started to click. And he’d heard there’d been a couple of other “friendly fire” incidents, at least one of them from the front to the rear rather than vice versa. But he didn’t care. As soon as they had the pass cleared he had sent a battalion of Abrams and Bradleys, with scouts out, barreling down the road past the smoking SheVa. They had taken Dillsboro after light resistance and then barreled up the road to Green’s Creek under increasing fire. The replacement for his artillery officer had finally found people who could hit the broad side of a barn and the replacement for his logistics officer had figured out how to move trucks. All it had taken was explaining that they had better remember old lessons or they would get new ones.

He didn’t like being a son of a bitch. And he really hadn’t liked killing that poor, lonely private. But that one round had gotten the division off the stick better than two months of training or even killing every tenth man.

But at Green’s Creek they were stopped again and it was a fair stop. The lead elements had been so into the chase, or so afraid of what was behind them, that they had gotten chopped to hamburger trying to push the Posleen out of position in the Savannah Valley. And the next brigade had taken more casualties grabbing the high-ground. But they had it. The only problem was, instead of scattered Posleen shell-shocked from the nuke rounds they were faced with apparently unlimited fresh forces pouring down from Rocky Knob pass. He was bleeding troops like water and there seemed no end to the Posleen when the SheVa finally showed up.

He’d worked around them a couple of times but he’d never seen one tricked up like this. It had what looked like MetalStorm 105s on top of its turret and the front was some sort of add-on armor. And the water fountain had been spectacularly visible for miles around. Obviously they’d been doing more than a hasty battlefield repair up Scott’s Creek.

If the thing could take direct fire, and it looked as if it could, and if it could fire into the valley, together with an assault from their present positions he might be able to push the Posleen all the way to the end of the Savannah Valley. The terrain there was even better for stopping the Posleen and together with the nuke rounds the SheVa had fired up towards the gap they might be able to push through.

If, but, might.

Time was awastin’.

“Son, drive up to second battalion,” he said. He had taken to driving around the battle in a Humvee and the word had already gotten out that no matter where you were, The General, two capitals, might show up at any time. “Let’s see if we can find the battalion TOC.”

“Yes, sir.” The battalion commanders had taken to getting right up on the front lines. It was the only way to be sure that most of what you ordered was getting done. And since you were likely to see the general there, too, hiding back in a rear-area CP was just not done.

Which meant that he was going to have to go drive a friggin’ Humvee into the teeth of Posleen fire. Again.

But he wasn’t about to tell this cold, angry officer “no.”

Better to take on the Posleen with a pocket knife.