Hell's Faire

CHAPTER SIXTEEN Iotla, NC, United States of America, Sol III 0317 EDT Tuesday September 29, 2009 AD

Alentracla looked around at the massed host and flapped his crest impatiently. The group had been gathered by the host leader for a very specific mission and he should be glad.

He had been grabbed more or less at random, separated from the stream of Po’oslena’ar headed towards the fighting around Rocky Knob. He and the others had given up their weapons, gladly, when told why. Then, as the host had passed, Kennelai from the warleaders had bartered for heavier weapons from passing forces. They had taken the shotguns and light railguns from Alentracla and his fellows and traded them for hypervelocity missile launchers, plasma cannons and three-millimeter railguns. All of them going to Alentracla and his fellows for no debt! It was amazing!

Not only had his oolt been reoutfitted with the most powerful weapons that were available, but it had also been held out of the blind slaughter occurring in the mountains ahead. The humans had continued to press forward and soon it was expected that they would be down onto the flats. There the Posleen would have many advantages and might even stop them, but in the meantime the host was being slaughtered by the human’s artillery while the ground fighters moved forward relentlessly.

Better to be here, but it was annoying to wait.

He stepped off of his tenar and walked down the lines of his oolt, checking the oolt’os’ weapons. All of them had the skills to handle the devices, but they had only recently been upgraded and he wished to ensure that all was well. Instead of the shotguns and light railguns they had sported only a day before, each of the oolt’os was armed with a plasma cannon or hypervelocity missile launcher. He had been surprised at the apparent generosity of the warleaders, but when he was told the reason it made sense.

If you’re going to hunt big game, you need big guns.

He finished his inspection and was walking back to his tenar when he looked to the north and froze; a giant shadow was moving in the darkness under the mountains. As if one of the hills was cruising along the river.

“Up!” he shouted, pointing to the north. “It comes! It comes!”

Posleen had as much trouble with a flank attack as humans. The oolt’os could care less; they shot where they were told to shoot. But the Kessentai were as susceptible to surprise as humans, perhaps more so. And physically moving the aim-point of the oolt’os was more difficult than moving that of humans; when packed groups of oolt’os tried to turn, simultaneously, they actually tended to fall over.

In this case while Alentracla saw the SheVa’s shadow, and recognized it for what it was, many of his fellow God Kings did not. Even after he opened fire.

But when the SheVa opened up all doubt was erased.

“Hoowah!” Pruitt shouted. “Look at those MetalStorms go!”

The crimson fans of forty millimeter fire were spreading across the mass, erasing whole battalions at a time. And in this case all the guns on the fore part of the turret as well as on the sides were firing simultaneously. For just a moment it seemed their fire would fully suppress the Posleen. But, unfortunately, there were only so many rounds in each pod. And then they had to reload.

Now it was the Posleen’s turn.

“Fire!” Alentracla yelled, suiting action to words in fear of the distant mountain of metal. No wonder Orostan had offered such rich incentives to have it killed; it had just wiped out a third part of this host in one volley.

“Holy Jesus!” Pruitt shouted as the storm of fire hit the SheVa. Most Posleen units had a mixture of railguns, plasma cannons and HVMs, with the weight thrown, generally, in the direction of the railguns. And with the newer armors, even 3mm rounds generally bounced off. This force seemed to be composed of nothing but plasma cannons and HVMs. The MetalStorms had opened fire only a moment before the Posleen, but the red fans of their efforts were dwarfed by the return fire; the fire was so intense it lit the ground like daylight. It was not so much return fire as a wall of plasma striking the front of the SheVa. And they were firing… low.

“Back us out!” Mitchell said. “Now!”

“Doing it,” Reeves said tightly. The SheVa suddenly gave a lurch that did not seem to have anything to do with the ground and the radiation alarms started screaming. “I just lost most of my control on the left side, sir!”

“Indy!”

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” the engineer said as the left front of the reactor room seemed to open up to the night air. She actually saw the round that punched through the number six reactor. The black dust that suddenly filled the air was, fortunately, at the far end of the reactor compartment. And it wasn’t dust, but the black, layered, less-than-a-millimeter-diameter radioactive beads that made up the “pebble” part of a pebble-bed reactor.

She turned and ran for it. There wasn’t much else she could do.

“Reactor breach in the engine room!” she called over the radio. “It hit the pebbles! We’re hot, sir!”

Major Chan involuntarily ducked as a storm of plasma and HVM hit the upper section of the SheVa. Most of the fire had been targeted at the base of the gun system but at least one God King was firing at the MetalStorms. They had engaged with all the forward deployable guns but with the inability to turn the main turret, they were in reload mode before they could significantly affect the mass of Posleen. They had killed a lot of them and cut the fire down somewhat. But not enough.

Now the Posleen were returning the favor.

“This is not fun,” Glenn said as plasma rounds rang against the turret. It was upgraded just like the E4s but even room temperature superconductor could only handle so much heat and the interior of the turret was starting to feel like an oven. Suddenly she felt a lurch that seemed to come from the turret itself and an odd sliding feeling.

“What is that, ma’am?” Glenn said, turning around wide-eyed.

“I think the turret rings are cutting loose,” Chan replied in a totally calm voice as the turret jolted forward again toward the two-hundred-foot drop.

“We’ve also got track damage on the left side,” Mitchell replied as the SheVa finally backed around the corner of the hills, taking a last spiteful blow to the engine room as it exposed that side. The night was still alight with the glow of plasma from the far side of the hill, however, showing that the infantry company on the hillside was fully engaged. It was amazing they could hold out at all; the air above their positions must be reaching hundreds of degrees just from the plasma heat-bloom.

“I’m back in the reactor room,” Indy said, her voice muffled by the GalTech radiation suit. “We took hits in two reactors. One is just vented but the other one scattered pebbles all over the room; it’s hot as shit down here.”

“This is Kilzer,” the civilian said over the same circuit. “It’s not track damage on the right side, it’s in the motors; one of the wheel motors is fried. I’ve cut it out but we’re going to be moving slow until it’s fixed.”

“Moving slow is a bad thing,” Mitchell said. “Kilzer; Chan’s turret has slipped out of the rings or the rings have been shot away. Something like that, I’m getting really confused reports. Get up there and see what you can do. Pruitt, rotate the turret to let the rear Storms fire over the hills. Reeves, park this thing behind Bravo Company. I hope they can hold.”

Bazzett huddled in his scraped hasty fighting position and fired his AIW remotely. He had to stick his hand out into the fire but he could use the connection to his monocular to generally aim it at the approaching mass. Fortunately or unfortunately, there were so many of the centaurs they were hard to miss. The Brads were firing their 25mms in indirect mode from behind the hilltop and that was racking up some kills, and the Abrams had braved the hurricane of plasma to drive forward and engage direct. And, for that matter, the SheVa was still sending its own hell over the hill, wiping out masses of Posleen under the fans of MetalStorm rounds. But that didn’t stop the almost continuous stream of plasma, railgun rounds and hypervelocity missiles coming at the hilltop.

In this case, “sticking his hand into the fire” felt literal; there was more plasma coming his way than he had ever seen in his life. And as he had found out before, while a near miss from an HVM was pretty unpleasant, a near miss from a plasma round was damn near the same as getting hit. The heat-bloom from a strike was lethal at four meters and fell off from there.

He was pretty sure he’d been in the “lethal” zone at least twice in the battle so far and he was starting to wonder if the dirt on his back was burning through his uniform. Fortunately the newer cold weather gear, including gloves, had an outer shell of Nomex, which was probably the only reason he wasn’t a crispy critter already.

He heard the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle below in the next scrape and shook his head; Caprano just wouldn’t quit.

“Cap, dude, you’re gonna get yourself killed!” he yelled. There was no way to fire the big gun off-hand which meant the sniper was raising himself up out of the scrape. He looked over and could see the body rise up against the light.

“I can barely see in this shit!” the sniper called back. His rifle boomed and he ducked down as a plasma round hit just down the hill and covered them both in steaming soil. “Got the fucker anyway!”

“Just ride it out, man!” Bazzett yelled back, spotting some movement at the base of the hill and firing a few rounds in the general direction. With the monocular it was possible to see what the rifle was aiming at, but there was no way to get a decent shot off. It was sort of like looking through a straw. “Keep your ass down!”

“It’s not my ass I’m worried about!” Caprano laughed back, lifting himself up, then screamed as the next bolt washed hot plasma over him.

Bazzett caught the edge of the blast as well and it felt as if his hand turned to cooked meat, but for Caprano it was infinitely worse. The sniper rose to his knees, shrieking in pain. The rifleman could see the sniper’s face and it was a mass of red and black with screaming white teeth in the middle. As he started to drop back onto the smoking ground he was hit by the next blast from the approaching Posleen. What dropped into the hole was steaming legs and hips, with a few juts of bone sticking upward.

Bazzett screamed and fired an entire magazine down the hill in a bloody mixture of fear and rage.

The good news was that he wasn’t cold anymore.

The bad news was that the Posleen were moving forward in their usual suicidal charge mode and if somebody didn’t do something about it they were going to be coming up the hill in just a second or two.

Kilzer hammered at the TC’s hatch but it was welded as solid as if it was a continuation of the turret. He had already tried the gunner’s hatch and found it the same way.

The turret was skewed at an angle on the top of the SheVa, leaning forward precariously with the front edge of the turret ring actually protruding through the front of the SheVa and into open air. The heat was like an oven even through the resistant rad suit. He could hear the environmental system in the turret trying to vent the enormous overload but it must have been nearly impossible.

He lifted up the wrench he’d brought with him and hammered on the metal.

“Anyone alive in there?”

There was an answering hammering which he took for a yes. But he knew that if he didn’t get them out, and fast, they were all going to cook.

“Hold on!” He keyed his radio and looked up at the crane. This had better work.

“Colonel Mitchell, Chan is trapped in her turret. I need Pruitt up here on the double. Have him bring some explosives, some Nomex strips, heat-resistant glue and detonators.”

The question was, of course, how solid a weld they were dealing with.

Pruitt watched from the crane control room as Kilzer laid the explosives around the rim of the hatch. He wasn’t sure what they were for. There was no way the blocks of C-4 were going to cut through the turret and even if they did it would just kill the crew inside.

Kilzer waved at him and keyed his radio.

“Apply pressure,” the civilian said, hooking the cable onto the hatch coaming. “Just pull up until you’ve got a good pressure on.”

Pruitt engaged the transmission and watched as the cables came taut, then applied a touch more motor until he could hear the resistance singing in the system.

“That’s as much as I can do,” he called.

“Hold that then,” Kilzer said, backing away from the turret. He walked to the base of the crane then tapped the remote detonator.

With a clang the C-4 flashed purple-orange and the hatch sprung open. The hook to the crane went flying upwards in a parabola and then back down as the engine whined in overdrive pulling it in.

Pruitt quickly disengaged the transmission then hurried out of the crane as the civilian pulled the crew out of the hatch and carried them across the top of the SheVa to a cooler spot.

“We need to get them below,” Kilzer said. Glenn, the major’s gunner, was already laid out on the cooler steel but it was obvious she needed some serious attention. She was nearly unconscious and her skin was dry as toast.

“There’s an aid station just under the crane,” Pruitt said then paused. “Of course, you know that, don’t you.”

“Yep,” Kilzer replied, dragging Chan across the steel. “It’s also shot full of holes. We need to get them transported back to the battalion aid station.” He turned around to go back and get the last crewman.

“No,” Chan whispered. “Just… find me an IV. I’ll transfer to one of the other turrets.”

“Pruitt,” Mitchell called. “Get your ass back down here; we are leaving.”

“Sir, we’ve got wounded up here!”

“Get them under control quick then, if we don’t move Bravo is going under.”

There was an elevator but that had been a pretty low repair priority and God only knew what damage it had taken in the last exchange. Just getting the crew down to the aid station, the unprotected aid station, was a two story trip.

Pruitt looked up as Kilzer came up dragging the last of the crew.

“Damn,” the gunner muttered, yanking the major into a fireman’s carry. “What we need about now is the cavalry to come riding to the rescue. But we are the cavalry.”

\parΓ Γ Γ

“Hammer it, Nichols,” Major LeBlanc snarled. She was out in front of most of the battalion but she could care less; if the rest of the unit didn’t draw the Posleen off them, Bravo was going away.

The mass of tanks and Bradleys rounded the hills that had sheltered them from view and finally saw the solid wall of plasma and HVM fire striking the hills. It was as if the air was on fire, linking the valley and the hilltop.

“Holy Christ!” she heard over the radio. “What in the hell are these guys?”

“Quiet,” she said. “Echelon left, forward by bounds, Charlie lead.”

“Charlie, open fire!”

“Alpha, echelon left!”

Glennis suddenly felt a cold fire in her stomach, a strange sensation she couldn’t quite place. It was almost sexual, almost orgasmic, and then she understood as the battalion opened out on the flats, the Abrams and Bradleys going to maximum speed on the outer flanks to present one almost continuous line. The maneuver was beautiful, almost flawless as the tanks, bellowing fire, descended on the flank of the Posleen force like an enraged metallic monster.

She had created this. She had planned it, she had planned how to sucker the Posleen into reacting to two separate flank attacks. And it was her battalion, her creation that would destroy this Posleen force, despite their superior weapons, despite their superior numbers.

Glennis grinned like a Celtic Goddess as the first rounds of white phosphorus from the battalion mortar platoon started to drop into the Posleen. The white phosphorus provided a smokescreen for the forces engaged on the hill. And the fact that it threw burning bits of impossible-to-put-out metal all over the Posleen was just a benefit.

This was what she had wrought.

This was command.

“Open fire.”

“Open fire,” Mitchell said, controlling the MetalStorm tracks directly. “Lay a curtain of fire in front of Bravo Company.”

He looked up as Pruitt slid into his gunner’s seat. “Major Chan?”

“Bad dehydration,” the specialist replied. “Same with the other two; Glenn started spasming on the way to the aid station. We’ve got IV’s running in all three of them and Kilzer is rolling Glenn into a water pack. Other than that there’s not much we can do until we can get them to a regular medical facility.”

“With heat injuries generally just rehydrating will work,” Mitchell said. “We’re moving back into position.”

“I noticed,” the gunner said, keying his targeting screen.

“When we clear the hill I want you to fire across the Posleen force,” Mitchell said. “As low an angle as you can manage.”

Pruitt kicked on a map screen and zoomed it out. Then he shook his head.

“No target, sir. What in Sam Hill am I shooting at?”

“Nothing,” the commander said with a faint grin. “Just remember, lowest angle you can manage.”

The fire was getting heavy, the night was bright with the streams of plasma flying through the air and the impact flashes of hypervelocity missiles, but Glennis stayed with her head out of the TC’s hatch, engaging with her Gatling gun and generally enjoying life. The battalion was cutting through the massed Posleen like a scythe to wheat, which was a fine difference from normal. Catch them enough off guard and they didn’t react any better than humans. It was all a matter of maintaining dominance.

She looked to either side and frowned. The other necessity was having enough firepower to maintain dominance. Some of the Posleen were leaking around to the sides, despite her having spread the tracks out as widely as she dared. And they were starting to fire back; as she looked an Abrams on the flank was lit with silver fire and ground to smoking halt. She was going to have to do something fast or the whole battalion would get flanked. Possibly on both sides.

“Charlie, open it out a bit more to the left,” she called. “Alpha, more echelon, battalion prepare to wheel right.”

That would leave them open to the leakers on the east but Bravo was laying down a good base of fire out there and sooner or later the SheVa…

As she thought it, a tongue of flame a hundred meters long lashed across her vision.

“Beautiful!” Pruitt shouted as the backwash from the penetrator threw the Posleen to the front into disarray; while there was no way to use the penetrator itself the blast from the massive cannon was a weapon in itself. The impact hammered the center section to their knees or spun them through the air and even those outside the center of the wash were shocked into momentary immobility.

“Mr. Kilzer, forward antipersonnel systems if you will,” the colonel said calmly. “Let’s finish these visitors off. Maj — MetalStorms, fire at targets of opportunity. Be aware for friendlies to the east.”

“I hate humans,” Orostan said with a ripple of skin that was the Posleen equivalent of a sigh.

“Yes, oolt’ondar.”

He looked over at the younger Kessentai and flapped his crest.

“You’re tired of hearing this?”

“I, too, am tired of humans,” the Kessentai admitted hastily.

“I took hours to set it up! I promised everything but my personal fiefs to its preparation! I made promises, the Net knows, I cannot keep. Those oolt’ondai were waiting to take it in the flank! They were supposed to ambush the SheVa. Not the other way around!”

“Yes, oolt’ondar.”

“I am tired to death of them,” the warleader snarled, looking at the fighting near Iotla. “Why, why, can’t these miserable, duo-sexual, hairy, two-legged, demon-shit, sons-of-grat just once take the sensible path?!”

“I don’t know, oolt’ondar.”

The warleader watched as half of his barely controlled force at the base of the pass turned to regard the distant fighting. And then as the groups, all of them individuals under no discipline except the coercion of the Path and some minor bribery, turned in three different directions, one group moving towards the fighting by Iotla, one to face the main enemy coming down the pass and one to the rear where, surely, there were greener pastures. In no particular order. More or less simultaneously.

What was left was a devil’s cauldron of angry Kessentai and confused oolt’os, many of whom were losing track of their Gods. This tended to make them touchy and that led to them taking it out on the other oolt’os around them.

“Herding cats,” he snarled. “That is what humans call it. Herding cats!” he shouted as the first oolt’os lost its fragile grip on sentience and discipline and started to shoot its way through the group between it and its God. At which point things could only get worse. Especially as a new barrage of artillery started to fall.

“Herding cats. What the hell is a cat?”

Bazzett lifted himself up on his elbows as the fire started to slacken and shook his head; the front slope of the ridge was glazed.

But what was more important was that the Posleen weren’t trying to fire at his position anymore. Some of them were directing their fire at the returning SheVa, which had just rumbled around the side of the hill. As he watched, the SheVa fired, killing a few thousand of the centaurs in front of it from the backwash of the gun; where the penetrator went was impossible to guess.

With the blast from the SheVa, the Posleen were starting to come apart. Some were trying to get reoriented to face the tanks rumbling down on their flank. And a fair number of them were streaming off to the south. There were a few still struggling up the slope of the hill but they were probably outnumbered by the company. And, really, they weren’t all that dangerous one on one.

“Cowards!” he yelled, snugging the rifle into his shoulder and picking out targets for aimed fire. He shot off an entire magazine in single aimed shots, most of them hitting, then slipped in another. To either side he could hear other rifles barking and the stutter of one platoon machine gun. Interspersed he could hear the boom of one of the sniper rifles and see the occasional flare of silver-purple as one of them blew up a God King’s saucer. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the red fans of fire from the SheVa as it ground forward into the river and up the far slope. Suddenly there was a titanic explosion from either side of the SheVa and he was afraid that it had blown up. But afterwards it just ground on and the ground to either side was an abattoir; the damned thing had giant claymores on the side!

Finally, unbelievably, there weren’t any more targets and no more fire was coming their way. He stood up and looked around at the ghostlike figures around him, at the heat rising in waves off the slope and raised the rifle over his head in with a bellow.

“Take that!” he screamed. “Take that you yellow motherfuckers!”

“Quite a few of the yellow motherfuckers,” Stewart commented.

“I think they’re serious this time,” O’Neal replied.

The Posleen had been coming in a solid stream for the last four hours, an unremitting tide of yellow bodies that had done little but create a massive pile of corpses.

However, unlike the earlier attacks, where they had come in waves permitting a moment’s pause between assaults, this had been absolutely continuous. Any break in the line of fire, and there had been many as the occasional lucky shot had carried away weapon or dug into a hole deeply enough to destroy the suit within, had permitted the tide to push forward by increments.

The God Kings were using their saucers again, occasionally popping up above the bulk of the horde to spot and engage the human defenders. While they were easy prey under the conditions, especially since they were automatically designated for engagement by whatever suit had that sector of the line, they had caused damage disproportionate to their numbers. It was mostly the God Kings that had struck into the holes, killing another dozen of the suits, and it was the God Kings that moved the line forward, charging into the teeth of the fire in an attempt to reach the hated humans, or at least get one last clear shot.

The pile of corpses was now more of a broad wall, a wall that concealed both sides equally until the aliens presented themselves at the top of it, slipping and slithering in the body fluids of their brethren, and were swept away to form another layer. Over it all there was a bitter haze of steam rising from the slaughtered bodies and a mist of gaseous uranium so thick it had started to form a thin layer of silver on the ground.

But the rate of their advance could be distinguished by the slow creep of the bodies forward.

“This is annoying,” Mike continued. “We were supposed to be maneuver forces, for God’s sake. Sitting in place waiting to be slaughtered is for Line troops.”

“We’ve tried maneuver,” Stewart pointed out. “Not too survivable in these conditions. It’s just a good thing we don’t have to worry too much about barrel wear. I remember the old joke before the war about ‘if you use up your bin of ammo you can consider it as having been a bad day and take a break.’ The average trooper surviving has fired four million rounds in the last day.”

“I know,” the commander replied. “It’s just so… so asinine. Eventually they’ll force their way through. But we’ve killed, how many? A hundred thousand? Two hundred thousand? A million? And they just keep coming.”

“They always do,” Stewart pointed out, turning his suit to face the commander.

“Almost always,” Mike replied. “This time I’m really surprised. Generally even the Posleen give up after a few million dead on one patch of ground.”

“Well, I’m not coming up with any brilliant stratagems,” Stewart replied, turning back to the battle. “You?”

“Nada,” Mike grumped. “Just sit here and take it.”

“Fortunately, neither are the Posleen.”

“How many have we lost?” Tulo’stenaloor snarled. “Four million here and in the valley?”

“Four point three as of last count,” the essthree replied.

“Four point three,” the commander snapped. “Thank you!” He looked again at the human map and shook his head. “The road over the mountain is well and truly gone, but send at least six oolt’ondar up here on this hill called ‘Hogsback’ and tell them to try to climb over the mountain. Perhaps that will distract the humans.”

He looked at his list of available assets and frowned. “And put out a call for anyone who wishes to try their hand with an oolt Po’osol as well. Usually humans would have retreated by now. We will figure out a way to destroy them!”

“Or else we’re all doomed,” the essthree muttered. But quietly so that the raging warleader wouldn’t hear.