When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 27 Near Dillard, GA, United States, Sol III 1427 EDT Saturday September 26, 2009 ad

Major Mitchell looked at the warrant officer as she popped up through the hatch. “Can we start firing yet?” he asked.

The major was a rejuv and, long ago as a newbie officer, had trained to fight the Soviets in Fulda Gap. After his initial shock at this attack he came to the conclusion that this situation wasn’t all that different. The “tanks” were larger and one side was flying, but, really, the numerical disparity was about right; there were forty or so landers and only one of them. Perfect.

The technique for fighting forces like this was trained into his bone: shoot and scoot. In boxing it was called “stick and move”; fire off a good, well-aimed blow then move away so that the counter-punch missed. Of course, having friends around in war was good, so the Army also called it “shoot, move and communicate.” And Major Mitchell had trained for it most of his adult life. He could jab, he could uppercut and he had the footwork. It was gonna be easy.

Riiight.

The only good news was that they had trained as hard as he could manage over the last few months. The team had been put together even before the SheVa was completed and began working in the simulators and fixed systems at Fort Knox, trying to get a feel for their actions and reactions in a fight. The initial assault had caught him, had caught all of them, off-balance. But he remembered somebody once telling him that surprise was a condition in the mind of a commander. All you had to do was push it aside and play the cards you were dealt.

Now that he was in the groove it was time to do what he had trained for almost his whole life. It was an odd moment, he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

“Yes, sir,” Indy said, sliding into her seat and buckling in. “I’ve taken off the lockout; the lidar should be able to rotate and the guns move.”

“I hate this mechanical monstrosity,” Pruitt bitched, coming up through the hatch and dogging it down. “We need a bigger engineering crew. Or Riff.”

“Engineering?”

“Go,” Indy said. “Everything’s green.”

“Driver?”

“Up,” Reeves said. “We are ready to roll.”

“Gunner?”

“Up,” Pruitt said, sliding into his own chair and slapping on the straps. “Bun-Bun is in the green and ready to kick Posleen.”

Mitchell rotated his shoulders and flipped his commander’s screens live. “Blow the camo, and let’s see what we’re in for.”

“Tulo’stenaloor, this defensive area is reduced and the humans are in flight,” Orostan said. “The support companies have moved up and are gathering what thresh and weapons are salvageable from the pass.”

This latter was another innovation. Usually individual Kessentai would have their forces scavenge as they moved. Tulo’stenaloor had put a stop to that; no matter how efficiently a unit did it, it tended to slow them down. Units moving through the Gap had to move steadily, not stop to loot. So special units under cosslain and Kenstain had been detailed to clean up the battlefield.

“The movement through the Pass is going well. We’re going to move out to our secondary objectives.”

“Agreed,” Tulo’stenaloor said over the circuit. “It has gone very well.”

“Losing most of the tenaral and two ships surely is not ‘very well,’ ” Orostan protested.

Tulo’stenaloor flapped his crest in humor. “I always forget; you’ve never fought humans before. This was easy; fear what is up the valley. The metal threshkreen will be here soon, of that I’m sure. And other humans will do things to torment you as you proceed. Ignore it; stick to the mission and don’t get bogged down by resistance.”

“I will keep that in mind,” Orostan said, gesturing to his communications monitor to give the orders to move up valley. “Nonetheless, we shall prevail.”

“Oh, yes,” Tulo’stenaloor said. “We shall. Nothing can stop us now.”

“I get six landers up, sir,” Pruitt called. “Five Lampreys, one C-Dec. I don’t know where the rest are.” This would be his first “warshot.” He had fired the fixed simulator at Roanoke, where the impact area was all of eastern Virginia. But he’d been told it was different with actual penetrators and in the SheVas; the mobile guns, for all their immense size, were much more susceptible to the shock of firing.

“Probably on the ground,” Major Mitchell said, tapping his screen and highlighting the appropriate unit. “Hit this one and this one,” he said, flipping them so they highlighted. “Then we get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Yes, sir,” Pruitt said, laying the gun on a C-Dec almost directly over the former Mountain City. He was nervous on several levels. They were about to make themselves a gigantic target and the death of SheVa Fourteen had been far too noticeable to think that they were invulnerable. And keeping them alive was going to be about hitting these damned maneuvering ships, not the easiest thing in the world. And then there was firing his first warshot. So, as he waited about a half a second until the C-Dec outlined in green his mouth was dry and his palms were sweating. But he was doing his drill and going to by God let them know that Bun-Bun had arrived. “TARGET!”

“Confirm!”

“ON THE WAAAAAAAAAY!” the gunner called and squeezed the trigger. The result felt like being inside a massive bell that had just been hit by a giant. The command center was heavily sound-proofed, but the result of firing wasn’t so much “sound” as a vast presence that rang through their bodies, shook the massive structure of the tank like a house made of straw and vibrated every surface. It was the most overwhelming, frightening and invigorating feeling he had ever experienced; like he truly was controlling Shiva, the God of Destruction.

“Target!” Major Mitchell called as the lander stopped in midair and dropped like a stone; that was going to make a nice monument once it cooled in a few years. He laid his aiming reticle on the Lamprey over the western valley. “Second target!”

“TARGET!”

“Confirm!”

“ON THE WAAAY!”

Cally ducked into the tunnel and headed back. The tunnel was cut out of the heart of the mountain behind the O’Neal household. When the first Michael O’Neal had settled these hills, he had been just another fortune seeker in the gold rush. He quickly determined two things; that he could make more money selling moonshine to the other miners than by mining himself, and that having a bolt hole to escape from the revenue agents was a good thing.

Subsequent generations had taken the lessons of the first Michael O’Neal to heart and the bolt hole had, from time to time, been expanded, improved and restocked. The tunnel ran back to a mineshaft that was the center of the complex. Another tunnel ran back to the house, connected through the basement, and three other tunnels ran off to various exits; when Papa O’Neal had complained about no bolt hole he had been speaking from experience.

The mineshaft was reconstructed during the Cold War as a true nuclear bomb shelter, with heavy steel replacing the original wooden supports. It was capable of withstanding a near strike by a nuclear weapon and had been stocked, and restocked as necessary over the years, for three years of almost completely autonomous survival.

Cally opened the inner door to the mineshaft and looked back. “Hurry up, Gramps!” she shouted.

“Done,” he called. “Coming…” and the world went white.

“SON OF A BITCH!” Pruitt shouted as all the viewscreens went black then flickered back on. “What in the hell?!”

The western valley of the Gap had a towering mushroom cloud over it and fires had started in every direction. The devastation area was wider than that from the SheVa explosion and there were no landers visible at all.

“Catastrophic kill!” Major Mitchell said. “Yeeeha! Get us the hell out of here, Schmoo!”

“What in the hell caused it, sir?” Pruitt asked as the shockwave hit. “Whoa big fella!”

“Posleen ships use antimatter as an energy source,” Indy said. “You probably managed to penetrate their fuel magazine. I’ve seen the schematics for them; they’re hard to hit and even harder to penetrate. Congratulations. But we’ve lost some systems from the EMP. Nothing major; most of our stuff is hardened and the EMP really wasn’t all that high.”

“A couple more of those and we won’t have to worry about any landers,” Pruitt said, patting his control panel. “Good Bun-Bun, good rabbit. EAT ANTIMATTER, Posleen-Boy!”

Orostan raised his crest to full height and screamed as the shockwave rocked his C-Dec. “WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?!”

“There must have been two of them,” Cholosta’an said with a resigned flap of his own crest. “I’m glad we were landed.”

“ESSTUUUUUU!” the enraged oolt’ondai yelled.

“There was no report, Oolt’ondai,” the Kessentai snarled. “Nothing. It must have just moved into position! I don’t know why it waited until then to fire. It is fortunate that we were not all in flight.”

“Well, we’re all getting up now,” Orostan snarled. “All ships in the air! Find this damned gun and destroy it! Stay low except when you must cross the ridges, then look for it quickly and drop back down. Tenaral, forward! Find it, destroy it if you can, locate it and cripple it at the minimum. Go!”

“Any station this net, this is SheVa Nine,” Major Mitchell called. The frequency was designated for anti-lander units. There was damned little chance that anyone was monitoring it, but just in case there was another SheVa in range to fire he could use some help. “Any unit. This is SheVa Nine.”

Of course, with the loss of Fourteen, there were only forty other SheVas in existence and he was pretty sure he knew that the nearest was in Asheville, but it beat chewing on his fingernails.

“SheVa Nine, this is Whisky Three-Five,” a female voice replied. “Go ahead.”

“We are retreating up the Little Tennessee Valley,” Mitchell said as the gun rounded Hickory Knoll. Firing Point Two was on the shoulder of the Knoll, but they needed to get it between them and the Lampreys and C-Decs that were undoubtedly chasing them. It wasn’t the landers that he was worried about, though. “We are in engagement with an estimated forty landers of both types. SheVa Fourteen was engaged and destroyed by some sort of flying tank. I don’t have a thing onboard to engage them; we could use some cover fire if anyone has anything useful. What sort of unit am I talking to?”

“Uh, SheVa Nine, stand by over,” the voice replied.

He flipped through the codes that he had, but he didn’t have an AA unit listed for Whiskey Three Five. Since the landers could only be engaged, for all practical purposes, by SheVa guns, there weren’t many AA units of any stripe left; most AA personnel had been swallowed by the regular forces.

“SheVa Nine, this is Whiskey Three-Five actual,” a different, more assured female voice answered. “We’re a Screaming Meemie unit attached to Eastern Command, over. Our orders are to move forward and engage the Posleen forces in direct fire mode. What is your situation and location, over.”

“We’re at UTM 17 379318E 3956630N. Our situation is we are engaging an estimated forty landers of all shapes and descriptions. We’re okay with that, but there are some new flying tanks that are a pain in the butt. I think a Screaming Meemie unit is just what the doctor ordered, over.”

“Roger, SheVa Nine,” said the other voice. “I’m sending the situation up to Eastern; pending their override we’re changing our mission to SheVa support. Just do me one favor.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t blow the fuck up, okay?”

“Mrs. President, it is not a question of ‘will you’ release the nuclear weapons,” Horner said calmly. His calm wasn’t fooling anyone, though; he was smiling like a tiger. “It is simply a question of when you will release them. As Major O’Neal pointed out, you have a valid request from a Fleet officer; you are required by treaty to abide by that request.”

“That is arguable, General,” the National Security Advisor said. She was colocated with the President, but there were four others in the video conference, and each would be expected to find something to say. Valid or not. “We are required to fulfill any military request for which we have the materials to supply; however, nuclear weapons release are traditionally a political request, not a military one. Ergo, it is not necessarily a requirement for us to fulfill it.”

“And I have to question the validity,” the High Commander said. The former Fifth Army commander had been promoted to replace General Taylor and was still feeling the limits of his authority. Unquestionably, the Continental Army commander was his subordinate; on the other hand, the reason that most people felt that Horner hadn’t been promoted to High Commander was that no one dared remove him as CONARC. Fifth Army, on the other hand, for all practical purposes had ceased to exist so the former commander was flapping around at loose ends.

“Major O’Neal is requiring a cold LZ. Very well, let them land outside the Posleen area and assault down from Black Rock mountain. I mean, that’s how an air assault is supposed to go; you don’t land right on the objective for God’s sake!”

“And we have to consider the overall effects, Mrs. President,” the communications director cut in. “We have a redistricting battle going on nationwide; it’s probably not a good idea to give the appearance of panic. If it appears that you’re losing in the southeast, and it will if you authorize nuclear release, people will shift towards the other party… And, besides, they’re caught in the mountains; surely conventional forces can handle them there.”

“Right,” Horner snarled. “That’s it. First of all, it wasn’t a request, it was an order. And a valid one. You can try to parse that, but I guarantee you it falls under the letter of the treaty and the Darhel will well and truly cut your legs out from under you if you try to parse it any other way. That assumes that any of us are around to discuss it with them because if we don’t stop this incursion we are all going to be HORSE CHOW.

“Furthermore, Major O’Neal is perfectly correct. There is no way to take the Gap without the Posleen being cleared out. And the only system that conceivably could do it would be using ICBM fire from the upper Midwest.

“I’m so glad that your communications director, with her degree in law from Stanford, is such a military expert! Perhaps she can tell me how I’m supposed to stop the Posleen, who are using airmobile tactics and pouring a hundred thousand troops an hour through the Gap? I have one, repeat, ONE division available to contain them and it will have to cover multiple exits from the zone. Furthermore, they appear to be planning on running up and down the Line, opening up passes. I have no units, except for the occasional Four-F militiaman, to stop them from doing that! It’s not just Georgia that is having problems; we have over fifty thousand Posleen in the Shenandoah sitting on three half finished SheVas. Perhaps she could tell me what I’m supposed to do about that? If she cannot then I suggest that she SHUT THE HELL UP. This is not a political crisis, this is a NIGHTMARE! And the sooner that you all come to understand that this is not maybe losing a city or maybe losing a division, but MAYBE LOSING THE WAR the quicker we can get done.

“There are times when the proper weapon to use is a nuke. You need to come to grips with that, Madame President. We need to use nukes, not want to use them, need to use them. We should have used them at Rochester and at second Roanoke; it would have considerably reduced the casualties that were inflicted on us. By not using them you probably caused me to lose a division of additional casualties. But now we have to use them; the choice is that or die. Welcome to the wall.

“This… political squeamishness has to stop and it has to stop right now! We have one battalion of ACS left available and they are the only unit that can perform the mission and they will evaporate in a second if they don’t have a big hole to drop into. And that means using nukes. I am not going to piss those ACS away. We will use nukes in the initial assault and we will be on call with nuclear suppport until the Posleen are pushed back through the Gap. And if you have a problem with that, you can have my god damned stars right NOW.”

As the High Commander opened his mouth to respond hotly the President raised her hand.

“Is it really that bad?” she asked.

“Madame President,” the High Commander said, “there is no need…”

“Stop,” she said, holding up her hand again. “I asked the question of General Horner.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the general replied. “It’s really that bad. After the Gap there are multiple routes open. Some of them, most of them, are pretty nasty, but there isn’t much to block them with. It’s… complicated, but I can’t get enough forces to all the paths they will probably take to stop the… flow of them. There are too many exits from the Gap. They are able to turn towards the west and open up the 129 route and that will cascade forces onto Chattanooga. And they have enough… force-flow to also head for Knoxville and Asheville. I can’t bottle up all of those forces with what’s in the area; it’s gotten drawn down to help all the other emergencies that have occurred. And now they’re also starting a full court press up and down the Appalachians: There’s just not enough forces to handle all of that and the forces in the Gap. I have to… bottle them up until I can get forces into the area to push them back.

“I have to stop the flow before enough get through to take Asheville or Chattanooga from behind; Madame President, there are three Sub-Urbs between the Gap and Asheville comprising fourteen million people total. And if Asheville falls we might as well all learn to speak Canadian.”

“You can’t stop them with nukes,” the High Commander argued. “There are too many Posleen. It’s not physically possible to ‘glaze the eastern seaboard’ even if we could survive it politically or environmentally.”

“I don’t intend to,” Horner answered coldly. “As you would have noted if you had listened. I intend to open up a hole and drop Mike O’Neal in it to plug it. I’d also like to open up their use at other key points.”

“Hold on a moment, General Horner,” the President said. “I’d like everyone to drop out of this circuit and Mrs. Norris and Ms. Shramm need to leave the room.”

She waited as the others reluctantly left the circuit then turned back to the image of the distant general. “General Horner, the Chinese fired over two thousand nuclear weapons and poisoned the valley of the Yangtze for the next ten thousand years. You propose to do much the same to the Tennessee Valley, you understand that? And they still lost. That is the greatest part of the problem, the very real political and more importantly morale problem. Nukes, now, are considered to be the last desperate weapon of someone who is losing. Who, in effect, has already lost. That is the real reason that I have prevented their use; the image of them being the desperation weapon. Is it worth the… social damage that will occur? Is it worth the physical damage; the Tennessee drains into the Mississippi. For that matter, it is the water source for the entire lower defense line and it will be poisoned by dropping nukes into that valley.”

Horner opened his mouth and closed it then opened it again and sighed.

“First, Madame President, let me say that I appreciate you… explaining that. If you had done so before, however, I could have suggested some ways that we could have… adjusted that public perception. We could have used them in the ‘fortress cities’ in the plains, after telling the public that we were simply opening up, effectively and pardon my language, ‘the whole can of whup-ass.’ I think that would have permitted a reevaluation on the part of the public.

“Second,” he paused, unsure of how to phrase it, “let me say that your knowledge of nuclear warfare and weaponry does you as much disservice as your knowledge of geography does you credit. We’re not using traditional ‘dirty’ nukes for this; we don’t have them. The warheads in the missiles we’ll be using, the last few Peacekeepers we have in silos, are relatively ‘clean.’ The radioactive exposure for persons downwind of the blast, in the ‘fallout zone’ will be less in one year than the acceptable exposure for an x-ray technician.”

“General, if you’re trying to tell me that there won’t be any radiation from these weapons, please save it for the talking heads,” the President snapped. “Even ‘clean’ nukes are dirty.”

“Madame President, you can believe anything you want,” the general said coldly. “And I’m sure that the ‘Greens’ will scream bloody murder. But the radiation left from dropping a couple of billion megatons on that valley, and we don’t have that much, more’s the pity, will raise the background radiation of the Tennessee to that of, oh, living downwind of a coal-fired power plant. And we have lots of those.

“Be that as it may, this is a desperation use. If we don’t plug the Gap, it’s all over but the screaming. You, personally, and your staff and whatever dependents you have there with you, will undoubtedly survive. Something resembling civilization may even continue north of the ‘cold line’; the Posleen can’t organize a logistics line to save their lives so they’re never going to take, say, Athabasca. I understand that Montreal is a very pretty city, but all the survivors in the United States can’t fit in Canada, not in any sort of sheltered fashion, much less survive for any length of time. We have to plug the Gap. We have to keep it plugged. I need nukes to open it up so I can insert the plug. I’ll probably need them again to open up other points and reduce the Posleen in the Valley. We won’t have a lot of other choices this time.” He paused for a moment. “I don’t have any more ACS to throw away.”

The President looked at the papers on her desk for a moment and shook her head. “Will it work? Not just putting the ACS in place; I thought the Posleen shot down anything that was above the horizon. Will the missiles even be able to get to Georgia?”

“I don’t know,” Horner answered. “The remaining silos are all well north of the Posleen lines and there’s a strong storm across the Midwest. The combination should permit most of the missiles to fly. They’re most vulnerable in boost-phase, of course, but they’re going to loft very fast. The Posleen lose some of their efficiency when the targets get into orbital phase. We’ll just have to see if they make it.”

“And if they don’t?” the President asked.

“There’s… at least one other option,” Horner said with a smile that for him indicated extreme unhappiness. “The University of Tennessee has both a SheVa gun enhancement testbed program and a nuclear, antimatter rather, rounds program.”

“So… they can fire?” the President asked. “Antimatter is better than nukes, right? I mean, their fire can reach the Gap? And it’s a better, a cleaner, system?”

“Possibly,” Horner answered. “I’d… Both of the systems are experimental, ma’am. And their… area denial round has never been field-tested. It’s also… rather large, a very heavy warhead; you really would prefer not to know the megatonnage. The first time I fire something, I don’t want the price of failure being the loss of the entire Cumberland Valley.”

“Oh.”

Horner shrugged at her expression. “I suppose this is what I get for letting rednecks play with antimatter; they just don’t know when to say ‘Okay, that’s ’nough!’ Instead, it’s always ‘Hey, y’all! Watch this!’ I only became… apprised of the size of the round when we went looking for something to open up the Gap. I’ve since ordered a ‘reevaluation’ of the program.

“As for the ACS, the Triple Nickle will be caught in a vise. There will be well over a million Posleen passed through before they land. And there are the airmobile forces. And there are now an estimated twelve million gathered to the south. The battalion, what is left of it, will have to hold on to the Gap until we reduce the forces that have passed through and fight our way forward. Whether they survive… ? I don’t know. I do know that there is no other choice.”

The President continued to look down at the papers on her desk and then nodded.

“General Horner, you are permitted to fire into Rabun Gap. But Rabun Gap only, understood? All other uses will require my okay.”

“Understood,” Horner said with a nod. “Rabun Gap only. There may be a need at other times, however. That terrain favors defense; unfortunately we can’t stay on the defense anymore.”

“I understand that, General,” she said tartly. “But I approve each use. Understood? I want these things used precisely, not at the behest of some… officer… at the front.”

Horner took a calming breath before he replied. “Ma’am, I get the feeling you almost said something along the lines of ‘myrmidon’ there. The… officers at the front are trying to keep us from losing more ground, losing more passes. The targets that need to be struck will often change; they come and go as fast as the Posleen can manage it. At some point we’ll need to reduce the level of authority, Madame President.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she said, staring the general in the eye. “In the meantime… I’m the authority. Only I hold nuclear release.” She looked down again and shook her head. “And may the Lord have mercy.”

Horner took pity on her.

“Ma’am,” he said quietly. “I will say this. The only person I could imagine holding that pass, surviving it for long enough, is Michael O’Neal. It will be worth the clearing.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, General,” the President said, looking up angrily. “I was just thinking that I didn’t care much for the major. I don’t care much for someone who is willing to callously slaughter American civilians.”

“Excuse me?” Horner asked.

“There are always survivors,” the president snapped. “There are probably thousands of people in and around the Gap, hiding out. If we drop untold numbers of nuclear weapons on that area, there will be no survivors. I guess the vaunted Michael O’Neal doesn’t care about those poor civilians. The only thing he cares about is his precious battalion!”

Horner’s face was as frozen as a glacier and he waited a full fifteen seconds before answering.

“Madame President,” he said in a voice as cold as liquid helium, “Michael O’Neal’s daughter lives in Rabun Gap.”