When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 24 Rabun Gap, GA, United States, Sol III 1249 EDT Saturday September 26, 2009 ad

When Major Ryan saw the Abrams burst from under the SheVa he very calmly lowered his binoculars, turned around, spotted the nearest bunker and ran for it.

He was surprised when he dropped through the back door that there were not any other inhabitants. The main headquarters didn’t have any structural stability; the main “war room” wasn’t even on a ground floor. He considered for a moment going back to the headquarters and trying to convince the commander that maybe, just maybe, being on the second floor of a building in the way of a nuclear blast might not be the best spot to be.

He’d seen SheVas go up before; he was at Roanoke when SheVa Twenty-Five lost containment. But at Roanoke the SheVa had been on top of a mountain and fairly separated from the main force. Not parked practically on top of the tertiary defenses and right opposite the corps headquarters.

He glanced at his watch and wondered how long it would take. It was possible, possible, that the Posleen would break off their attack before the containment failed. Actually, if they were smart they would break off their attack before the containment failed.

Posleen. Smart.

Not.

As he was looking at his watch and calculating his odds of surviving a run to the motorpool he was joined by a female specialist. She tripped on the entry and tumbled into the far corner.

“Well,” she muttered, sitting up, but not getting to her feet. “That was a hell of an entry.” She looked over at the officer and shook her head. “You might want to get down, sir. I think a nuke is about to go off.”

“Yes,” Ryan said, looking at his watch again. He had just noticed that he could faintly hear the “swish-crack!” of the plasma rounds hitting the distant SheVa gun. At least he could between the sounds of secondary explosions from the artillery and the heavy ship’s weapons tearing the Wall apart. “But we should have about three seconds to bend over and kiss our ass goodbye after the ‘big flashbulb’ goes off.” He smiled at her grimly. “Don’t look towards the light; the light is not your friend.”

“We’re gonna make it,” Edwards said, gunning the tank down the streambed of the Little Tennessee River, the water flying up on either side. “I guess that armor is tougher than they thought.”

“Maybe,” said Major Porter, “if…”

What the conditions were Edwards wasn’t going to find out because as the major spoke the world went white.

The magazine for the SheVa guns was the heaviest armored container ever designed. The inner layer was simple steel, four layers of hardened case steel coated with “supersteel,” a recent development that increased the surface hardness of steel almost fourfold. Outside that were two layers of “honeycomb” armor made of tungsten and synthetic sapphire. The outermost section was multiple layers of ablative explosive plates. These had been found to disrupt Posleen plasma guns, to an extent.

In addition there were four sections that were designed to “control” the explosion and “blow out” if a round went off. And there were internal baffles designed to direct the majority of the explosion away from surrounding rounds. In that way it was felt that the explosion could be reduced to at most one or two rounds. Better a minor cataclysm than a major one.

The Posleen had determined that most tanks placed their engines at the front and rear. And since their orders were to keep pounding until the gun stopped and was burning, they had pounded over four hundred plasma blasts into the rear compartment. There was only so much that even the strongest armor could take.

The round that actually penetrated had one last defense to make it through. But at the end it cut through the thin shell of depleted uranium surrounding the antimatter core with relative ease. The antimatter then did what antimatter does when it comes into contact with regular matter. Explode. Spectacularly.

The accidentally targeted round was only equivalent to 10 kilotons and the engineers were relatively sure that a single round exploding would be controlled by the container. At the most, if it was on the outer rack it would blow out and only be a nuisance to any unit within, say, a mile of the gun. A major nuisance to them, but if you weren’t too close or, say, directly behind the gun, you might survive.

In this case, however, the round was on the inner rack, where there were no available blow-out panels. In addition the plasma rounds worming their way into the gun’s vitals had shattered most of the internal compartmentalization, for whatever good it might have done. So when the round went off it set off all the remaining rounds racked in the magazine.

The gun had fired twice and had one round loaded. So there were only five rounds to blow. But they went in a ripple sequence that was effectively instantaneous. And both the nature of the containment vessel and the damage that it had sustained combined to cause a near optimum explosion.

The fireball was noticeable from as far away as Asheville and the overpressure wave from it reached out to swallow the corps, huddled as it was in a valley.

Damage from nuclear weapons comes from three primary sources: overpressure, heat and radiation. Overpressure is generally referred to as the “shockwave” and is analogous to the effects of a tornado; when the high pressure of the “event” hits a structure, it collapses from the difference in pressure inside and outside its walls. Windows shatter inward, doors collapse and so do walls and ceilings. Combine this with hurricane force winds and close to the center of the blast, everything in its path is destroyed.

The second major cause of damage is from thermal effects. The intense heat of a nuclear, or in this case antimatter, explosion releases an enormous amount of infrared radiation. Any human, or Posleen, in direct view of the fireball, and within a limited distance, could be expected to sustain first-, second- or even third-degree burns. Due to the nature of the fireball, and the momentary containment by the walls of the magazine, thermal damage was minimized.

The third major category of injury was radiation. With antimatter explosions, there was a hard wave of gamma rays, but they were effective only at a limited distance. Like a neutron bomb, hydrogen-antihydrogen conversions gave lots of heat and “power,” but very little lingering radiation. This gamma pulse, however, was quite extraordinary.

It was the gamma pulse, as much as anything, which doomed Major Porter and his driver. They were dead before they even knew it, their bodies ravaged by high energy particles that caused massive systems failure as their nerve cells suddenly discovered nothing worked and the proteins in their musculature changed into a non-functional form. But it wouldn’t have mattered all that much because they were well within the ten psi overpressure zone. The blast wave picked up the seventy-two-ton tank like a sheet of paper and tumbled it into the air.

However, Major Porter was not the only being in the immediate area of effect. Even closer to the explosion were the tenaral of Pacalostal. The explosion tore apart the lightly armored tenar, sending all forty of them into instantaneous oblivion as it washed out over them and the embattled corps.

The shockwave swept over the tertiary defenses and the barracks of the human corps in less than a second, shattering buildings, collapsing bunkers and filling in the few redug trenches. The overpressure wave was still well above five psi when it hit the former school and collapsed the charming brick buildings in less than a second, scattering the bricks and wood of its structure down the hill and into the valley beyond.

The motorpool at the base was still within the worst effects of the overpressure wave, but the major damage was to the buildings as walls and windows shattered inward. Many of the Humvees and trucks in the motorpool had had their windows blasted out; but, by and large, the overpressure wave left them intact and they were shielded from the worst of the blast by the intervening hills.

The heat from the blast did not cause any flash fires outside the immediate vicinity of the SheVa, but the trees on the surrounding hills were tossed aside like matchsticks and those further out were stripped of their leaves.

Further to the west the explosion washed over the remnants of the corps and division artillery, detonating the remaining ordnance and killing most of the surviving artillerymen. The explosion also caught most of the remaining tenaral, however, tumbling them into ruin on the ground.

The human defense of Rabun Gap had been effectively gutted. The majority of its fighting forces were either under assault at the Wall or already dead from the SheVa detonation. The way north was open.

Well, almost.

Papa O’Neal whistled as he walked back to the house. He’d been whistling or humming Van Morrison’s “Moondance” just about all morning and Cally was just about sick of it.

“You’re awful smug today, Gramps,” she said. She was feeling edgy from the artillery; it had started up midmorning and had been hammering solidly ever since. From the amount and duration they were hammering a major attack although only recently had the Wall guns started to sound.

“I’m just in a fine mood, young lady,” he answered.

“Yeah, I suppose you would be,” she said with a malicious chuckle.

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” he said carefully.

Cally set down the knife she had been slicing with and wiped her hands. Reaching under the table she pulled out a Betamax tape and waved it in the air.

“You do recall that the entire house is wired for video,” she said, darting for the door.

“GIVE ME THAT!” he bellowed, chasing after her.

“You’ve got a lot of stamina for an old guy!” she yelled, darting around the woodshed.

“COME BACK HERE WITH THAT, YOU LITTLE VIXEN! IF YOU WATCHED…”

“Where in the hell did you learn that thing with the legs in the air?” she yelled back.

“AAAAH.”

They both stopped at the sound of a large crack from the direction of the Wall. The afternoon was bright, but there was still a visible amount of light thrown off by whatever had caused the sound.

“What in the hell was that?” Cally asked.

“I don’t know,” Papa O’Neal answered. “But it was from the Wall. I think maybe we’d better get ready to lock the farm down.”

A second series of sharp cracks, like a string of very high explosives, came from the direction of the artillery park and a very loud boom indicated a secondary explosion. Papa O’Neal caught a flicker at the valley entrance of something smooth, silver and very fast moving. “What in the hell was that?”

“I dunno, Granpa,” Cally said nervously. “But I agree; time to lock and cock.” She tossed him the tape. “For your collection. May there be many more.”

It took only a few minutes to get all the livestock under cover and the minefields armed, but they barely had finished closing the last gate when the sky lit with a white flash brighter than the sun.

“Granpa?!” Cally called, running towards the house.

“DOWN, DOWN, DOWN!” O’Neal screamed, hitting the ground himself.

The shockwave, when it hit, was hardly noticeable, but there was a distinct change in air pressure and the trees on the heights swayed as if in a high wind. Then the ground wave hit like a minor earthquake.

“What in the hell is happening?” Cally called. She was about fifteen feet from the front door on her stomach.

“All clear!” Papa O’Neal called, standing up and sprinting for the house. “Inside!”

“Was that what I think it was?” Cally asked when they got inside the door.

“It was a nuke,” Papa O’Neal answered. “I think it was probably the Corps SheVa going; the direction and size was about right if I remember correctly.”

Cally beat him through the house connection to the bunker by a hair and started throwing on her Kevlar. “We’re not set up for nukes, Grandpa.”

“I know,” he said, turning on the minefields and electronics before donning his own gear. “What bugs me is not knowing what is going on.” He flipped from one camera to the next, but most of them were dead. “Damned EMP.”

“So what do we do?” Cally asked.

O’Neal thought about that. If it was just one nuke, specifically the SheVa going off, it might not be that bad. It depended, of course, on where the gun was when it went off. But the Wall shouldn’t be affected. There was some fighting from there still; or at least those heavy weapons. Those could be Posleen, but think positive.

There were basically two choices. Plan A was hunker in the bunker, fight anything that came up the notch and wait for the Posleen to get wiped out by the Army. Plan B was run like hell. Since the farm had been in the family for generations, Plan B was not their favorite choice.

Without knowing the condition of the corps he had no idea which plan to go with. He picked up the phone installed in the bunker, but there wasn’t even a dial tone. He could hike up the ridge to where he could see the corps, but that would mean either both of them going or leaving Cally alone. And with a potentially nuclear environment, getting out of the bunker didn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense. Finally he decided to just try to ride it out.

“We’ll stay here,” he said, pulling an MRE out of a cabinet. “We’ll have grilled ham and cheese tomorrow.”

“Yup,” Cally said with a grin. “For tomorrow is another day.” She looked at her MRE and grimaced. “Trade ya.”

“Pruitt, get the gun up, NOW!” Major Robert Mitchell slid into the command seat and started buckling in, flipping all his switches to “On” as fast as he could.

“But, sir!” the gunner called, looking up from his Visor. “It’s the one where Bun-Bun has lost his memory and he’s being held by these kids who think…”

There was a reason that SheVa Nine, now unofficially referred to as “Bun-Bun,” had a two-story picture of a giant, brown-and-white, floppy-eared rabbit holding a switchblade painted on the front carapace. It, and the “Let’s Rock, Posleen-boy!” caption, had taken a few hours to explain to the new commander. After reading the comic, and getting hooked, the commander had reluctantly acceded to the painting; some corps permitted them and some didn’t and they would just have to see what the local corps commander was like. As it turned out, they hadn’t had time to even check in with the corps before the fecal matter hit the rotary impeller.

“NOW, Pruitt!” the major yelled. “Load! Fourteen is under attack! I don’t know what they are…”

“Major!” Warrant Officer Indy called, popping up out of the repair hatch. “Don’t move the track!”

“Why not?” the commander called. “Schmoo, are we hot?”

“Coming online now, sir,” Private Reeves called back. The private was large, pale, doughy looking and somewhat slow, thus the nickname. But he was a good SheVa driver. From deep in the belly of the tank the sound of massive breakers engaging thundered through the structure.

“I don’t have signal!” Pruitt called. “Sensors are offline. I’d guess camo. Whoa! Big EMP spike! It was worse out there than Bun-Bun denied his Baywatch!”

“Crack the camo!” Major Mitchell called. “Manual rotate the lidar.”

“Sir!” the warrant said desperately. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you; the camo-foam isn’t set yet. Until it cures it’s… malleable. Heat it up and it sets hard; if it seals the sensors we’ll never have an acquisition system. They’ll be frozen solid until we can get a CONTAC team out here. With a lot of solvent. I shut them down manually as a safety measure.”

“Oh, shit,” Mitchell said. His schematic was being picked up from a corps intelligence section still well to the rear. They, in turn, were still getting information from forward deployed sensors and surviving personnel and he could see the first wave of the Posleen pouring into the Gap, with the Lampreys and C-Decs backstopping them. “We have a serious problem here. Suggestions would be helpful, Miss Indy.”

“We can probably move the tracks,” the warrant officer answered with a desperate grimace. “If they freeze up they’re strong enough to break the plastic. Same on rotating the turret. But until the stuff sets, we can’t use the automatics to engage. And it could lock up barrel elevation. So we can’t elevate or depress.”

“So what do we do, Miss Indy?” Mitchell asked patiently.

“We need to avoid moving the sensors or the gun for about another twenty minutes, sir,” the engineer said. “We’ve got a control run problem with the gun anyway; I’m working on it.”

“Do we have any solvent?” Mitchell asked.

“I have a couple of five-gallon buckets,” Indy admitted. “But it would mean climbing up on top and pouring it on the antennas. And I don’t think I could clear all the goop; we’re either going to have to let it set or find a POL point that can dump gasoline all over us!”

“Pruitt, help the warrant,” Mitchell said. “After you put a round up the tube. Schmoo, get us the hell out of here.”

“Yes, sir!” the private said, engaging the treads. “One foam-covered, screwed up, disarmed SheVa, getting the hell out of Dodge.”

“You want me to climb up on top of Bun-Bun while we’re moving?” the gunner asked.

“Hopefully not,” the major said, keying the mike to call the support units. “But if you do, think of it as Torg and Riff on another adventure.” After a moment’s thought he started looking for the frequencies for Fourteen’s ammo trucks; if they survived this they were going to need more than eight reloads.

“But she looks more like Zoe, sir,” the gunner said with a shrug, hitting the key to load the first round. “And is it just me, or does anyone else find it odd calling her ‘Miss Indy’?”

“Pruitt, shut up and go help the warrant.” He shook his head and checked his schematics again. The landers, now unopposed, were moving in a leisurely fashion to silence all resistance in the valley. “Just how much more screwed up is this day going to get?”

“Just how much more screwed up is this going to get?” Orostan asked, looking at the mushroom cloud rising over the Gap. “Pacalolstal, report!”

“I don’t think Pacalostal is going to be reporting ever again, Oolt’ondai,” Cholosta’an said. “I suspect that most of the tenaral are gone.”

“Thrah nah toll!” Orostan cursed. “Demons of Sky and Fire, I hate humans!”

“Oh, this isn’t too bad,” Cholosta’an said philosophically. “We’ve only lost two ships, the Wall is down and most of the human soldiers are out of our way. This might actually speed things up.”

“The tenaral were to be used against the metal threshkreen as well,” Orostan snarled.

“We’ll deal with them when we have to,” Cholosta’an said with a flap of resignation.

“We shall indeed,” Orostan said. “Very well; all ships proceed to the Gap. Time for phase two.”