Hell's Faire

CHAPTER TWENTY Franklin, NC, United States of America, Sol III 0726 EDT Tuesday September 29, 2009 AD

“Quebec unit, follow me!” LeBlanc called over the battalion frequency then flipped to intercom. “Drummond, put your foot in it and head down the road!”

“Where are we going?”

Glennis pulled up her map screen and frowned; it was a good question. She scanned the map and finally found what she was looking for.

“Head down 28,” she said, flipping back to the battalion. “All Quebec units. Order of march, Bravo, Alpha, Charlie. We’re going to head to Highway 64 and get on the road embankment; if we get some elevation on the guns the Abrams might be able to engage the C-Decs.”

“That’s crazy, ma’am,” the Abrams gunner said. “Our guns will barely scratch that thing!”

“The SheVa’s only got four anti-lander rounds left,” LeBlanc answered. “There are six ships.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the gunner replied. “Balenton, load a silver bullet.”

“Aye, aye!” the loader said. “But if she starts singing ‘Garryowen,’ I’m outta here.”

“Reeves, back us up, fast,” Mitchell said, glancing at his map. “Head northwest. Major Chan! Switch out for one oh fives, it might come down to that!”

“What’s northwest?” Pruitt asked, lining up the first of the targets. It was a real question; should he take the outside ones and work in or the inside ones and work out? Oh, what the hell, right to left. “Target C-Dec, twelve thirty.”

“Confirm,” Mitchell replied, flipping up the appropriate screen. The Posleen ship was just cresting Pendergrass Mountain, less than five miles away. Others were closer, though, and the SheVa rocked again to the slap of one of their heavy guns. “There’s some hills over by Windy Gap. I don’t think we can make it that far and if we do we’ll probably run into ground mounts. But one problem at a time.”

“On the waaay!” Pruitt called, visually tracking the round into the ship. “Target!” he called as the hatches of the ship gouted silver fire. The lander started to fall to earth and then exploded, but not catastrophically. The remains pelted into Pendergrass Mountain and rolled out of sight. “I think I must have gotten a magazine that time,” Pruitt muttered, tracking to the left. “Bun-Bun’s on the WARPATH!”

“Bloody hellfire!” Kilzer snapped as the back of his rad suit was sprayed by liquid. He looked over at the giant shock absorber of the SheVa gun and shook his head. “Colonel Mitchell, can we call a time out?”

“Boss, I’ve got a red light on hydraulics!” Pruitt called.

“This is not good,” Mitchell muttered. “Kilzer, Indy, talk to me. How bad is it?”

“This is Indy,” the warrant replied, climbing through the hatch from the engineering deck. “We’ve got hydraulic fluid all over the gun room, but I don’t see a breach.”

“There’s not one,” Kilzer said, rubbing his hands up the side of the shock. “It just blew fluid through the seals. We should be able to top it up and be back up shortly.”

“How shortly?” Mitchell snapped, looking at the encroaching C-Decs. “We’re under fire here people!”

“Shortly,” Indy said as she gestured one of the loaned SheVa techs over with a hose. “No more than two minutes!”

“This isn’t good,” Pruitt muttered over the radio. The SheVa shook to another near miss as if to counterpoint his statement.

“We’re working on it.” Indy said.

“Reeves, keep backing us away,” Mitchell ordered. “They’re not coming on very fast.”

“No, but they are coming on steady,” Pruitt said. He had pulled up a reservoir indicator on the hydraulics and watched as the level reached yellow and then green. “Sir…”

“You’re up,” Indy interrupted over the radio. “There will be a short lag between each firing while we top off. And God help us if we run out of hydraulic fluid!”

“I’ll get someone right on that,” Mitchell replied. “Pruitt?”

“Target, C-Dec!”

“Fire at will,” Mitchell replied. The SheVa suddenly lurched to a titanic BOOM through the structure. “Son of a BITCH!”

Indy ducked as a live cable swung overhead throwing sparks. The cable itself dropped onto one of the luckless SheVa techs, sending him spasming across the deck. Indy’s flailing hand snatched a stanchion as the firing chamber filled with a rush of superheated air, and held on for dear life as it seemed the entire weather-shield, with its attached armor, was going to rip loose. The shaking finally stopped and the air cleared, too quickly; she looked up to see stars where four MetalStorm mounts had once been.

“Oh, my God,” she muttered, keying her radio.

“Colonel, we’re hit,” Indy said, unnecessarily. “We just lost the upper left side of the gun cover. Along with three MetalStorm turrets.”

Mitchell closed his eyes and shook his head. “Pruitt, are we up?”

“The gun reads as functional, sir.”

“The gun wasn’t hit,” Indy interjected. “Just the side of the cover. But I don’t think we can fire any of the Storms until we’re sure of the structural integrity.”

“Colonel Mitchell, this is Kilzer,” the civilian said over the radio. “I’m looking at the damage, too. We might be able to fire the right, rear Storms. But all the others aren’t going to have enough structure to withstand the shock of firing. And the frontal armor is… creaky. The hit slagged some of the supports on the left side and I can see support beams dangling. The whole place looks like a pretzel twister with an evil sense of humor got loose in the gun room. I think the combination of the heat and the shock probably broke the welds. And we’ve got a lot of electrical damage.”

“We can still fire the main gun, right?” Mitchell pressed.

“As long as it lasts, sir,” Indy replied, nervously.

“Pruitt, get as many as you can, while you can.”

The gunner slewed the turret and sought out the next target as the SheVa lumbered laboriously to the north. There was nowhere to hide; it was just a matter of shoot and hope like hell the Posties kept missing. So far they had.

Pruitt lined up the third C-Dec as another shot crackled overhead and one slammed into the ground, tearing up soil and leaving a smoking crater large enough to swallow an Abrams.

“On the way!” he called, then “Target!”

This time the target vanished in silver fire, and a mushroom cloud formed where it had been. However, although the nearest C-Dec rocked in the blast front, it neither was destroyed nor wavered in its course.

“Blast, they’re too far apart!” Pruitt snarled. “Why did they have to get smart.” He lined up the fourth ship and then paused. “I want it to get a little closer, sir.”

“Okay,” Mitchell replied. At least the fire had been halved and the third C-Dec had been the closest. Mitchell glanced at his map then at the external monitors. Most of them were down from the damage but a few on the right side were still functioning. “Reeves, to the right rear, see that gap?”

“Yes, sir,” the driver replied, angling the SheVa slightly to the right. “Are we going to be hull down?”

“Close,” the commander replied.

“Okay, they’re closing,” Pruitt said. “Hydraulics are up. On the way!” The round tracked straight and true “through the x ring” and the C-Dec rolled to the side, seeming momentarily to be under power, then dropped into the river before rolling out of sight.

At the tremendous splash, Pruitt sighed. “That’s it, sir. Four rounds. We’re out.” He glanced at his indicators then at the targets. “Then again, maybe not. Sir, where are the lead elements of the division?”

“General Simosin, this is SheVa Nine, over!”

“Station on this net, identify!”

Mitchell frowned at the radio; every other time he had tried to call the general he had gotten the general. So who the hell was holding the radio this time?

“Look, this is SheVa Nine. I don’t have time to identify because, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve got Posleen landers on the way in. We’re going to try to take out the last two, but there’s a problem; what we’re going to do will probably hit the division. Now, where are your lead elements?”

“I can’t answer anything unless you identify yourself and I certainly can’t give you the location of our units.”

“Okay, well, in that case I hope like hell that they’re all behind the line of hills around Wooten Mountain. If they’re as far forward as East Franklin, tell them to duck and cover because it’s about to get nasty. Out.”

“Okay, Pruitt, whenever you’re ready,” the colonel said.

“Sir, are you sure about this?” the gunner said. He had keyed in the particulars and was just updating the target point now. “We are going to catch the division in this blast.”

“I don’t like it, but that’s what we’ve got to do,” Mitchell replied tiredly. “Fire.”

“Roger, sir,” Pruitt replied, looking straight into the rising sun. “On the way.”

The area effect round tracked straight and true to a point two thousand meters above an imaginary line between the C-Decs and then detonated.

The ships were interstellar battle cruisers as well as transports for the Posleen. And under normal circumstances a 100 KT round detonating 2000 meters away would have been shrugged off. In vacuum. Between planets.

In this case, however, it was not in vacuum and it was not between planets except by the widest description thereof. And all of the differences came into play.

The shock wave from the explosion slapped downward, hurling the ships aside. If the violent acceleration from the nuclear-driven hurricane of wind were not enough to defeat them, the sudden stop as they slammed into the unyielding ground did the trick. Subjected to forces they were not designed to withstand, the two ships hit the ground, crunched, bounced, and rolled to a stop, one just east of the Cullasaja Bridge and the other on top of the West Franklin Wal-Mart.

Glennis popped her hatch and looked around, shaking her head to clear the ringing. Most of her tracks appeared to be intact, whatever that said about the crews. Anyone who had had a hatch open was probably dead and at least one Abrams looked that way; it had blown out its ammunition relief panel indicating that bad things had happened inside. One of her Bradleys was upside down as well, which probably indicated the crew hadn’t made it.

She looked to the east and could just see one facet of one the C-Decs sticking up out of the Cullasaja valley. The facet mounted an anti-ship plasma cannon which was throwing sparks into the air from electrical overload. As she watched the emplacement belched purple fire and blew a thousand feet into the air.

“Fuck this,” she muttered. “I want back into intel.”

All in all, though, for having been hit by a bit more than the edge of a nuclear blast, they were looking pretty good.

Of course, they didn’t have any radios to speak of. And she couldn’t have heard one if they did. But all things considered…

“So do we drive back and yell at Mitchell?” she asked herself. “Or just stay here?”

She looked around at the devastated landscape and at the crews who were slowly pulling themselves out of their tracks then shook her head. “Stupid question.”

“Somebody with a working radio call the SheVa and find out how long until it’s up here!” she yelled to the scattered groups of troopers. “We’re not going another inch!”

She smiled at the scattered cheer and slumped into her seat.

“What a fucking night,” she muttered, pulling out a resupply request form. “Let’s see, we need about a hundred bodies, a full load of ammunition…”

In the end, even with the resupply and the standard rounds and the Reapers and the repeated nuclear blasts, there was nothing O’Neal’s battalion could do.

The Posleen, having found a way through the roadblock, had attacked without pause, wave upon wave of the yellow centaurs, climbing over the bodies of their dead to close with the hated suits. With only 140 troopers left there wasn’t enough fire pressure to stop them cold and they came on, meter by meter, against a relentless tide of fire.

“I’m clocking out!” one of the troopers cried as even the seemingly inexhaustible supply of grav-cannon rounds started to run low. “I need resupply!”

The cry went up all down the line as trooper after trooper found his ammo supply running lower and lower, the counters going from the thousands to the hundreds and then zero.

“Breakthrough on the left!” Duncan called, scrambling out of his fighting position and lowering his rifle to fire. The group of centaurs had forced their way through to the remnants of Charlie company and broken the center by the simple expedient of swarming the suits with their boma blades.

The Posleen in the front rank weren’t even firing anymore, just hurtling forward, their blades raised. The monomolecular edge could not penetrate the Indowy-forged armor with one strike, but as chop after chop descended on it the armor eventually gave way and the human within was hacked to death.

With the sundering of the line the beleaguered suits seemed to give up hope. Trooper after trooper lifted himself out of his hole, stepping to the rear, those with remaining ammunition firing to try to keep the Posleen at arm’s length.

“NO!” O’Neal cried, scrambling out of his own position as the suits in front of him obscured his line of fire. “INTO THEM!” He charged forward through the line of troopers and threw himself on the front rank of centaurs, his own blades out, chopping and whirling in place.

“Captain’s down!” a trooper from Charlie called out and was cut off in mid cry.

“Bloody hell, boss!” Stewart cursed, sprinting forward to the side of the commander while laying down blasts from his grav-rifle. “GET BACK!”

“I Am Not Going To Let Them Have This Pass!” O’Neal snarled, chopping sideways. But the tide was irresistible and even he could finally see that. Bravo and Charlie were either falling back or just gone. The Posleen had the line and nobody was left to defend it. The suits still in the line were going yellow then red and dropping off the screen.

“Fall back!” he called, glancing at his readouts. Graphs and charts meant nothing to him now, as indicator after indicator went from green to red. “Fall back on the Reapers!”

Sunday was firing from the hip, flipping out magazines one handed and reloading as each expended mag dropped from his rifle. But nothing seemed to help. The remaining suits were running from the oncoming tide of yellow bodies and no firepower in the world was going to stop them.

“Reapers, prepare for short-ranged volley fire,” he called as the Posleen passed the line of holes that had once been filled with ACS troopers. He didn’t even bother to try to figure out who was left. It was him and his troopers and that was more or less that.

“Gots to die someplace,” he muttered, glad he’d had one last time with Wendy. He flipped another magazine in as Stewart slithered over the side of the hole followed by the major.

“Fall back on the Reapers!” O’Neal called again, flipping around and starting to lay down fire.

“Ammo! I’m out!” One of the Marauder suits scrambled into the supply cache, tearing open boxes, and then cursed. “Reaper ammo!”

“Reapers, open fire!” Tommy called as the front of the Posleen assault came within thirty meters.

The four Reaper suits were each mounted with four flechette cannons, and the hail of metal slivers opened a huge rent in the Posleen mass, even checking it for a moment. But the pressure from the rear pushed the front ranks forward against the tide of fire and the down side to the horrendous amount of fire the cannons could put out was that they ran dry fast.

“Clocking!” McEvoy called. “I’m clocking out!”

“Gotcha,” the Marauder said, popping open the ammunition container and opening the Reapers’ reload bin. “Ammo coming up!” he said, tipping the container up and dumping the contents into the bin.

“Feed me!” another Reaper called, laying down a wall of fire to the north.

But as the Reapers went through bin after bin, and the remaining suits, most of them commanders, laid down their fire, the ammunition ran lower and lower and the wall of Posleen closed in on the surrounded hole.

“I’m cold!” McEvoy called, then looked around at the person behind him. “Hi, Major.”

“Pick up a rock!” O’Neal snarled as his magazine dropped into the hole.

“Boxes are empty!”

“I’m out!” Sunday called as his last magazine dropped free. He reversed his rifle and swung it into the first Posleen to the hole. The heavy duty stock smashed at the impact, leaving him holding only the iridium barrel. Which he then used to smash the next skull in line.

“Fuck this,” O’Neal muttered. “FUCK THIS! I am not going to die in a stinking HOLE!”

“FUCKERS!” Sunday shouted, as the major climbed back out of the hole, slashing and blasting at the centaurs. “Get back here, Major!”

Sunday smashed two more of the centaurs before the first boma blade caught him on the shoulder. He hardly noticed it but then another descended and then another and he could feel himself tiring, trying to slash and crush in all directions, but it was no use, the Reapers were backed up to the rear of the position, trying to beat the Posleen back with their fists and Stewart and McEvoy were down under a tide of bodies and the major was gone and…

The sky lit in fire. For just a moment he could see the pupils of the Posleen’s yellow eyes tighten down to a pinpoint and the reflection of the Lightbulb of God in their irises. And he hit the ground just in time.

He dug his hands into the ground and focused all his effort onto holding on as, again, the hammerblows descended on his back, lifting him up and slamming him down over and over again. He felt himself lifted up and slammed against the wall of the fighting position and his arm cracked backwards, painfully. He could feel that it was broken, but the suit integrity held. If it hadn’t, the fire would have surely killed him. He waited and waited, for a moment, for an eternity, but finally the last echoes of the fire died away and he could look around.

For a time, it seemed like hours, none of his systems could determine anything in his surroundings. But then the sensors slowly came back on-line and he could get some sense of what was around him. Telemetry from suits was coming back first and there wasn’t much. A suit here. A suit there.

He looked for the karat that indicated his commander, but it was nowhere to be seen.

Unlike Sunday, Mike had been out of the hole in the Posleen mass when the SheVa antimatter went off and there wasn’t much he could do. So for the second time in his life he ended up in the path of a nuclear explosion. This time, at least, he had a moment’s warning and instead of trying to grab dirt, which was probably futile, he hopped upward and tucked into a ball wondering where he’d land.

The blast-front picked him up and lofted him south and upward. He felt a brief glance off of something very hard; it bruised him despite the undergel and hard-driven inertial compensators. But after that there was, as such, nothing but air.

His sensors were still off-line but he eventually sensed that the blast-front was reducing and he tracked out into what would have been a free-fall position if he was, in fact, free-falling. He got some control over the inertials and used it to stabilize his flight. But since his externals were still reading over a thousand degrees centigrade, getting any coherent data on his location was quite impossible.

Finally the immense power of the nuclear explosion began to dissipate and the return wave came in, catching him and tossing him back, but not as far.

In all he was airborne, or nuke-borne as the case might be, for less than fifteen seconds. It only felt like an eternity. And then he saw open air.

He looked down and broke out in hysterical laughter. He was in a perfect delta track, two thousand feet up and headed down for the ruins of his old high school. Which was swarming with still-live Posleen.

“I always wanted to come back and make a big entrance…”

“Sunday.”

“Major?”

Sunday scanned the map but the icon of the commander was nowhere in sight. Stewart and Duncan were both heavily injured and no other officers were alive. Even with an arm so dislocated and broken the suit could do nothing but numb it he was as good as it got. But he had less than a platoon left so it wasn’t a particularly heavy burden of command.

“Yeah. I’m alive. For my sins. I’m heading out of Clayton now. I’ve contacted the SheVa; it’s prepared to deliver on-call fire from now until the local Posleen overrun it or somebody comes to save both our asses. You look like you’re clear.”

“Yes, sir. No Posleen in view.”

“They’re reconsolidating by Clayton. I’m calling for fire. But it shouldn’t affect your position. Hunker down and hold what you got. You look to be clean for the near future.”

“Yes, sir.”

“O’Neal, out.”

“SheVa Nine?”

“Go, Major.”

“One area denial round, UTM North 386187 East 280579.”

“Roger. Ah, what’s your position, over.”

Mike looked down at the ground; he was encased up to his armpits in rock and earth.

“Secure. Please fire the round.”

“Shot, over.”

“Shot, out.”

There was a pause. “Splash over.”

“Splash out.”

Mike smiled as the nuclear fireball consumed his old stomping grounds.

“I never really liked Clayton anyway.”

He waited until the majority of the dust had dissipated then looked around for more targets.

“The problem with nukes is finding a good position to be a spotter,” he mused. He dialed up his magnification and shook his head. “SheVa, can you reach UTM North 385846 East 278994. I would swear they’re reassembling over by Tiger.”

“Ah, negative ACS. Still out of our range. And we’re… sort of stuck. Again. The crunchies are on the way, though. As soon as they figure out how to get through the radiation they’ll be in support.”

“555 commander, we can reach that target point. And we’ll be there sooner.”

The voice was German-accented English and in the background a song was playing, just too faintly for Mike to pick out. As Mike watched a streak of fire like a meteor descended from the heavens and a nuclear fireball, followed by a mushroom cloud, erupted over Tiger.

In the distance he could see beams of light leaping into the sky and more beams, and streaks of fire, coming down. He looked around and the same could be seen in every direction into the distance.

“American Defense Command, hold what you got,” another voice entered the net. Presumably all the nets. “This is Vice Admiral Huber, Commander Task Force 77. Heavy fire incoming. Stand by.”

In the distance a wave of fire seemed to leap from the ground as fireball after fireball erupted into the sky. It was clear that kinetic energy weapons were taking out every single Posleen ship and settlement for as far as the eye could see. And undoubtedly beyond. Around the whole globe.

Mike looked up and half shook his head as a line of shuttlecraft, seeming half air and half matter, dropped out of the sky. Troopers began spouting from the sides, dropping on pillars of fire then assembling at impossible speed. Their suits, like the ships, seemed only half there, as if one with the land and sky. And on his sensors they didn’t appear at all. The air was filled with music and he shook his head and laughed hysterically again as the strains of “Ride of the Valkyries” poured through the air.

He lifted himself out of the ground as a shuttle approached and an armored figure dropped to the orange-tinted ground. He waited until it approached and then saluted the figure with the double star-bursts of a Fleet Strike major general on its shoulders.

“General,” Mike said, dropping the salute as it was returned.

“Colonel,” the general replied, taking off his helmet. The face was hard, Teutonic and very familiar.

“Oh, shit,” Mike said with a half laugh. “God damn, Steuben, it’s radioactive as hell out here. Put your damned helmet back on if you would be so good, General, sir.”

“ ‘Sorry we took so long, we had a spot of bother on the way,’ ” the general said, then wrapped the smaller suit in his arms.