When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 33 Betty Gap, NC, United States, Sol III 0714 EDT Sunday September 27, 2009 ad

Pruitt stared into the rising sun, pretty sure he’d never been this exhausted in his life. Whatever the drugs were telling him.

“I feel like I haven’t slept in a week,” he muttered. “Or at least like I could sleep for a week.” He wasn’t exactly tired; the Provigil was making sure that he wouldn’t feel that way and a tiny bit of methamphetamine was ensuring that he was alert. But it had been a long day with a lot of stress and it didn’t look to be ending any time soon.

The route over the mountain had been a long drawn out nightmare and one where he couldn’t do anything except hold on and hope for the best.

The SheVa gun had not been designed to climb mountains and a couple of times he was pretty sure they were just going to go tumbling back down a slope; once just west of Chestnut Gap when they had to ascend a ten-foot bluff while already on a very steep slope and another time when the mountainside was just a bit steeper than it looked on the map. The SheVa often felt like it was going straight up and knowing that there was a multiton gun and two stories of steel above you, pulling the gun over and backwards, was pretty nerve-wracking. It was almost worse the few times that they had had to straddle a ravine with one giant tread half supported on either side; the undercarriage would creak and groan, sounding like it was going to shatter at any moment.

It had been worse for Reeves; the large and airy compartment occasionally got thick with the fear sweat from the driver. But every time that Major Mitchell told him to take a slope, he’d just nod his head and put his foot to the floor. It took a special kind of courage to simply place your faith in a hunk of machinery, that it would take the hill and not turn into a gigantic iron boulder.

The trek had to have been nearly as bad for the Meemies. The Abrams tank was certified to negotiate a sixty degree slope — amazing what placing most of sixty tons of metal near the ground could do for center of gravity — but that didn’t mean that anyone but an idiot liked to go up them. And in places the laboring SheVa had torn the slope to such an extent that its tread holes, which were the only clear route for an Abrams, easily approached sixty degrees. But the commander of the MetalStorm tracks had taken them into and out of those ersatz fighting positions without any apparent qualm.

It would almost have been better if he’d just turned off his screens and gone to sleep, but they didn’t know when the Posleen might do a flyover. And now that he was reloaded, he was ready to kick some Posleen butt.

Where the Posleen were was a big question. Between Major Mitchell and the Storm commander they had managed to scrape up a few other surviving units on the radio. It turned out that the horses had taken the Rocky Face slope and Oak Grove, cutting off a good part of the surviving Corps. But engineers had blown the bridges at Oak Grove and Tennessee before the horses got there and at both points the Posleen were rebuilding the structures while laboriously ferrying troops across.

That last was bad news; nobody liked to think about Posleen having combat engineers; among other things that meant that the entire lower Tennessee was potentially crossable. But it was taking them a few hours to do the structure and the advance was slowed down in the meantime. Currently Major Mitchell intended to head down into Betty Creek and then over Brushy Fork mountain to Greens Creek. After that they would practically have to debouche into the Savannah Creek valley; they had to get ahead of the Posleen and filtering through mountain passes wasn’t going to let them do that.

They had reports that a company of mixed MPs and infantry were holding the bridges over the Tuckasegee River. It wasn’t a big deal to the SheVa — there wasn’t a bridge in the world that would support Bun-Bun — but the Storms needed one to cross the river. If they could make it to the crossing ahead of the horses all would be relatively well. If they didn’t, on the other hand, things would get sticky.

There was also the issue of destroying the bridge. The MPs indicated that they didn’t have any engineers; they had piled explosives around, but the bridge was pretty sturdy and they weren’t sure it would go down. If worse came to worse, of course, Bun-Bun could take care of that little detail as well.

It was near the Tuckasegee crossing, at Dillsboro, that the roads forked. There, Highway 23 separated off and went to Asheville. That was a critical juncture; just up the road at Waynesville was another Urb and if the Posleen got that far it was a mostly open plain all the way into the city. For that matter, at Balsam Gap the road crossed the Blue Ridge Parkway. Since that was a support road for the majority of the Appalachian Line, getting up onto it would permit the Posleen to spread nearly at will. And just east of Waynesville they would hit Interstate 40; that would permit them just about unrestricted movement.

There was part of a division out of Asheville headed towards the Balsam mountains. But Asheville was under heavy attack on two fronts and couldn’t spare much in that direction. Major Mitchell had, therefore, decided to head up the road to Balsam, using the SheVa and the MetalStorms to slow the Posleen advance. This program was not without its detractors; the main road to Balsam Gap was not going to be usable by the SheVa, which meant going off-road. And the terrain around Balsam Pass was worse than what they were crossing at the moment.

But that obstacle was far off. For now it was simply a matter of surviving the descent.

“Good Lord,” Indy said, looking at her own screen. “It’s even worse in daylight!”

The route down from Betty Gap was a normal Appalachian mountainside, carpeted in a mixture of moutain laurel and deciduous trees with a thin covering of loam over schist and gneiss rocks; the morning light had brought with it a thin layer of the wispy fog that gave the Smoky Mountains their name and the pearlous light made the scene almost unreal. Especially since it also was an almost six-hundred-foot drop to the valley in less than a mile, a good bit of it relatively unbroken slope. They had discovered to their occasional despair that the thin coating of loam tended to strip off and act as a lubricant when a seven-thousand-ton tank tried to cross it.

“Sir?” Reeves said in an exhausted tone.

“Go slow,” the major replied. “If we start to slip just… put it in reverse.”

“Yes, sir,” the private said, gently revving the tank in idle. “Of course, I could just put it in forward and try to go down really fast.”

“Please don’t joke,” Indy said. “I’m surprised we haven’t blown a track or a bar yet; I don’t want to think about what hitting the valley floor at ninety miles an hour would be like.”

“Just… take it slow, Reeves,” the major repeated, gripping the arms of his chair and leaning back.

“Bun-Bun would have something quippy to say right about now,” Pruitt said, leaning back like the major. “But at the moment I’m too terrified to come up with anything.”

“Just think of it as skiing?” Reeves muttered.

“I don’t think this will slalom very well.”

“Captain Chan,” Mitchell said, switching to the Storms’ frequency. “We’re going to have to attempt this slope. There is a road along the ridge that should handle your tanks; I suggest you try that first, rather than trying to toboggan after us.”

“Agreed,” Chan replied. “And… good luck.”

Wendy slid from between two of the children and walked to the entrance of the cave. She should have been out like a light, but for some reason she had started awake about ten minutes before and been unable to get back to sleep. Elgars was standing watch, staring off to the east where the first faint glimmer of light could be discerned. The lights of Franklin had been extinguished, but fires had been set throughout the valley, the Posleen being nearly as incendiary as Old World mercenaries. She could barely see the forms moving down below, but she knew that thousands, tens of thousands, millions of Posleen were pouring past to the north, headed for Knoxville, headed for Asheville. Many of them perhaps pouring into their former home.

She looked at her watch and nodded. That was probably what had awakened her.

“Has it gone off yet?” she asked.

Elgars shook her head. “I thought it should have gone off about five minutes ago.”

“ ‘There should have been an earth-shattering kaboom,’ ” Wendy intoned. “ ‘Where was the earth-shattering kaboom?’ ”

“The Martian, right?” Elgars asked.

“You remember?”

“Nah, I saw it while I was watching the kids the other day,” the captain said. As she did, there was a faint shudder in the floor of the cave, and then a second stronger one. It felt like a very small earthquake. To the east, there was a gout of light and a section of land settled slightly then formed a giant, smoking crater.

“I feel, really ambiguous about this,” Wendy said after a moment. “I just lost quite a few friends. People that I care about. On the other hand…”

“On the other hand they were already dead,” Elgars said, standing up and brushing off her butt. “Or as good as. Most of them would have become rations for the Posleen, a use that we have prevented. And we got who knows how many Posleen in there. Yes, it wasn’t pretty. War isn’t.”

“Easy enough for you to say,” Wendy snapped. “Those were my friends.”

“Wendy, with the exception of you, and Shari, and the kids, and…” She stopped and counted on her fingers then nodded. “And Papa O’Neal and Cally and Mosovich and Mueller, the people we just buried are all the people I know in the world. We, I, just buried all my nurses, all my doctors, all my therapists under a billion tons of rubble. They’ll probably never be pulled out; they’ll just put up a monument with a list of names. I did that. With my hands. And if you think I don’t have some problems with that, you’re not the friend I thought you were. But if I had it to do over again, I’d do it over again. Because it was the right decision. Morally and tactically.”

“You’re so sure,” Wendy said quietly.

“That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” Elgars said with a snort. “It’s your turn for guard anyway. Go ahead and think it over for the next few hours. Then get some rest; it’s a long way to Georgia.”

Orostan had found that patience was like a tool with the Indowy. It was clear that the engineers were going as fast as they could, so simply being there and watching patiently was his best bet. But with the coming of dawn, the bridge, a hastily constructed span of I beams torn from buildings and wooden planks, was nearly complete.

“You have done well, thresh,” the oolt’ondai said. “There will be other bridges to build; there is one to the north that will be more difficult. I want you to look at the human maps and make plans to create one more swiftly there. Understood?”

“Yes, lord,” the Indowy replied.

“Your clan yet exists,” the Posleen commander said. “Continue to serve me well and it will be permitted to continue. Fail me, and the last of your clan will be eliminated. It shall be as if you were never born. Understand?”

“Understood, lord,” the clan chief replied. “We will need maps and any pictures of the next bridge that are available.”

“I will ensure you have them,” Orostan replied.

Cholosta’an’s head came up as there was a rumble to the southwest. “What was that, lord?”

“I’m not sure,” Orostan said. “Perhaps this area is prone to earth movements,” he added, forgetting that Cholosta’an was a native-born.

“Not that I’m aware of, lord,” the Kessentai said. “And… I hate to say it, but that is from the direction of the underground city.”

“Arrrrrh!” the oolt’ondai shouted, pulling up his tactical net. “Telenaal fusc! Aralenadaral, taranal! I will eat these humans, body, blood, bone and SOUL!”

“The city is gone,” Cholosta’an said, looking at his own display in disbelief.

“I CAN READ THE NET! Gamasal!”

“Yes, Oolt’ondai?”

The younger Kessentai had been waiting impatiently the entire night; at one point Orostan had wondered if he would have to order him removed when he threatened an Indowy. Now, with the sun coming up and the host about to move again, it was time to release him.

“We can handle bridges, but when these humans get dug into passes they are impossible. Take an oolt’poslenal and oolt’ondar. Move carefully forward, staying away from both the heavy defense points and this damned gun, to take and hold this position.” He brought up a human map. “This is Balsam Gap…”