When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 2 Rochester, NY, United States, Sol III 0755 EDT Saturday September 12, 2009 ad

Mike O’Neal looked down at the smoke shrouded valley where Rochester, New York, used to be. The embattled city was now flatter than any hurricane could have made it; the humans were adept at fighting in rubble whereas the horselike Posleen found it nearly impossible. But that didn’t mean it was a human city anymore. Just that two different species of vermin battled over it.

The rain was misting, a thick, drizzly fog blown in from Lake Ontario. Mike cradled his helmet in one hand and a grav pistol in the other. Behind him was a distant rumbling like thunder and on the east side of the Genesee River a curtain of white fire erupted with the snapping of a million firecrackers. The heights above the former Rochester University were taking another misdirected barrage.

“These mist covered mountains, are home now for me,” he sang, twiddling the pistol in one hand and watching the fire of the ICM.

Dancing in front of him was a hologram. A tall, lithe brunette in the uniform of a Fleet lieutenant commander was talking about how to raise a daughter long distance. The commander was very beautiful, a beauty that had once been an odd contrast to the almost troglodytic appearance of her famous husband. She also was calmer and wiser in the ways of people, an anodyne to the often hot-headed man she had married.

What she was not was as lucky as her husband. A fact he never could quite forget.

Another wash of ICM landed and hard on its heels a flight of saucer shapes lifted into the air and charged west across the river. The Posleen were learning, learning that terrain obstacles could be crossed with determination and a well led force. He watched clinically as the hypervelocity missiles and plasma cannons of the God King vehicles silenced strong points and a force of normals crossed on the makeshift bridge. The wooden contraption, simple planks lashed to dozens of boats scavenged from all over, would have been easily destroyed by the artillery fire but, as usual, the artillery concentrated on the “enemy assembly areas” and “strategic terrain.” Not the Posleen force, without which the terrain would no longer be strategic.

“They learn, honey,” he whispered. “But we never do.”

They hadn’t learned in the unexpected skirmishes before the war officially started, when they lost Fredericksburg and almost lost Washington. When lightly armed “fast frigates” had been thrown willy-nilly at battleglobes.

The battleglobes were constructed of layer upon layer of combat ships. A direct hit by an antimatter warhead would strip a layer off a section of the exterior but the inner ships would simply blow the damage off and reengage. Thus the theory of using a massive punch to break them up and then engaging the scattered ships with “secondaries.” But that required not only fleets of secondary ships, fighters, frigates and destroyers, but a massive central capital ship.

However, rather than wait until the Fleet was fully prepared the Galactic command had thrown more and more ships, practically right out of the shipyards, into the battle. Pissing them away in dribs and drabs not only in Terran space but over Barwhon and Irmansul. The loss of the ships, the secondaries that were vital to the overall plan, was bad enough, but the loss of trained personnel had been devastating.

The invasion of Earth had practically cut it off from space and none of the other races of the Galactic Federation could fight. To provide the planned crews for the Fleet, Earth had been stripped of likely candidates and they were put through months and years of simulator training in preparation for when they would venture forth to triumph in space. Instead, they had been thrown away in skirmish after skirmish, none of them doing any noticeable damage to the Posleen. Thus, the limited number of off-planet forces had been bled white before the first capital ship was completed.

The second invasion wave was fully in swing before the first “superdreadnought” was launched. This massive ship, nearly four kilometers long, was designed to use its spinal hypercannon to break up the globes. And it worked with remarkable facility. Coming in at high velocity from Titan Base the Lexington smashed two of the globes headed for Terra. And then it was swarmed.

Thousands of smaller ships, the skyscraper shaped Lampreys and C-Dec command ships, surrounded the beleaguered superdreadnought and pounded it to scrap. Despite the heavy anti-ship defenses along the sides and despite the massive armor it was stripped to a hulk by repeated antimatter strikes. Finally, when no further fire was forthcoming, the wreckage was left to drift. So durable was the ship the generators at its core were never touched and it was eventually salvaged and rebuilt. But that took more years, years that the Earth didn’t have.

Mike wondered how many other wives and husbands, mothers and fathers were pissed away by the goddamned Fleet. By “admirals” who couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions on the heel. By a high command that kowtowed to the damned Darhel. By senior commanders who had never seen a Posleen, much less killed one.

And he wondered when it was going to be his turn.

He watched the ghost of his wife’s smile as the cold autumn rains dripped off his shaved head and the artillery hammered the advancing centaurs. And flicked the safety of his pistol on and off.

Jack Horner stood arms akimbo smiling at the blank plasteel helmet in front of him. “Where in the hell is O’Neal?”

Inside his armor Lieutenant Stewart winced. He knew damned well where the major was. And so did the Continental Army Commander. What neither one of them knew was why O’Neal wasn’t responding to their calls.

“General Horner, all I can say is where he is not, which is here.” The battalion intelligence officer gave an invisible shrug inside the powered battle armor. “I’m sure he’ll be here as soon as possible.”

The colloquy of commanders and key staff from the Ten Thousand and the ACS were gathered on the hills above Black Creek. From there, even with the waves of cold, misting rain coming off the lake, the successful Posleen assault across the river was clearly visible. As was the ineffectual artillery fire of the local Corps. Whose headquarters, commander and staff were forty-five miles behind the Continental Army Commander’s current position.

“We need to get this penetration contained,” said Colonel Cutprice. The colonel looked to be about twenty until you saw his eyes. In fact he had been one of the most decorated veterans of the Korean War. Thanks to the miracles of Galactic rejuvenation, and a push for more “warriors” in the officer corps, the decrepit old warrior had been restored to youth. And almost immediately started gathering medals again.

The silver eagles on his shoulders were almost an affectation; the “Ten Thousand” force that he commanded was better than a brigade in strength and thanks to its converted Posleen equipment had the combat power of an armored corps. But he refused any rank higher than bird colonel and the one abortive attempt to replace him had resulted in something very close to mutiny. So a colonel commanded a pocket division.

“My boys and the 72^nd Division have ’em contained along Genesee Park Avenue and there’s a company or so of the 14^th holding on in The Park; they’re dug in hard on the hill. But more of the fuckin’ horses are pushing over that damned bridge all the time. We need to drive in a counterattack and destroy the crossing. It would be helpful if we could get some combat suit support on that.”

Stewart winced again at the neutral tone. For conventional forces, or even the unarmored Ten Thousand, assaulting the Posleen was a brutal business. The railguns and plasma cannons of the enemy turned troops in the open into hamburger and the God Kings opened up main battle tanks like tin cans. It was why the ACS, the Galactic supplied Armored Combat Suits, were always used for assaults. But that meant that the ACS had been whittled away in attack after attack, especially on the Great Plains and here in the Ontario Salient. And with Earth interdicted and the only factories for making suits off-planet that had meant “ten little suits, nine little suits.” Until there were none.

There was a trickle of resupply from the Galactics. Stealth ships slipped onto Pacific Islands and transferred their cargoes to submarines. These, in turn, visited high latitude ports such as Anchorage. The cargoes then would be trucked to where the lines were still holding. But that resupply route was pitifully inadequate for making up losses. Which was why the U.S. had gone from two divisions of ACS to less than two battalions, a ninety percent reduction in total force, in the last four years. And it had used up more than four divisions of suits along the way.

1^st Battalion 555^th Mobile Infantry, “The Real Black Panthers,” had lost fewer units than the other battalions and it still maintained a solid core of veterans who had survived every battle. But even they had had a nearly two hundred percent turnover rate. And with the slow rate of resupply that meant eventually even “First Batt” was doomed.

Whereas the supply of Posleen just seemed to be growing.

Horner shook his head and turned to the other suit in the conference.

“If Major O’Neal does not appear soon, I am turning command over to you, Captain Slight.” His blue eyes were as cold as agates. Mike O’Neal had once been his aide and was a hand-picked protégé but if Rochester got turned the next fall-back line was just east of Buffalo. And the front there was twice as long. Holding the Rochester defenses was, therefore, the number one priority in the eastern United States.

“Yes, sir,” said the Bravo company commander. “Sir, it would help if we could free up the artillery. We need it to hit that bridge, not the, pardon my French, fucking ‘logistical tail,’ sir.”

Horner smiled even wider, a sure sign of anger, as Cutprice snorted.

“We’re working that out. As of twenty minutes ago General Gramns was relieved by my order. The Ten Thousand artillery coordinator is up there right now trying to convince them that a pontoon bridge is a better target than ‘assembly areas.’ ”

“With a platoon of my MPs,” Cutprice added. “And two saucers. I told him the first one of those chateau generaling bastards gives him shit, he’s to blast him right in fucking public. With a plasma cannon.” The lean colonel was so utterly deadpan it was impossible to tell if he was joking.

“Whatever it takes to get their attention.” Horner sighed. “And it might take a summary execution. I’d put you in charge of the Corps, Robert, but I can’t spare you. And you can’t do both jobs.”

“I’d end up killing all their rear echelon asses anyway,” the colonel grumped. “And all the goddamned regular Army assholes that can’t get their divisions to fight.”

“The 24^th New York and 18^th Illinois are reassembling near North Chili,” Horner said. “But I don’t want to just slot them into the hole. Once we get the pocket cleared out I want you to throw up bridges and press a counterattack. I’ve sent for Bailey bridge companies and I want you to use them. Harry those horses. Drive them as far east as you can. I guarantee you that there will be infantry for you to fall back on. On my word.”

“What is the target?” Stewart asked. “Where do we stop?”

“The goal is the Atlantic Ocean,” Horner answered. “But don’t outrun your supports. I’d like to see the line pushed back to Clyde. The front would be narrower and the ground is better for us.”

“Gotcha,” Cutprice said with a death’s head grin. “Our flank’s gonna be as open as a Subic Bay whore, though.”

“I’ll have the ACS out there,” the general said quietly. “Whether O’Neal shows up or not.”

Ernie Pappas sighed. The hill was a moraine, a leftover of the glacier that had carved out Lake Ontario. On the back side, facing southwest away from the fighting, a former children’s hospital had been converted to tend to the thousands of wounded produced by the month’s long battle. Including at least a dozen ACS troopers too busted up for their suits to fix.

Even up here in the clean, fresh air the miasma of pain could be sensed. But the hill provided a fine view of the battle that VIII Corps was in the process of losing. A fine view.

Which was undoubtedly why the Old Man had chosen it for his meditations. The major had gotten more and more morose as the war went on and the casualties just kept mounting. There wasn’t anything that anyone on Earth could do about it, but the Old Man seemed to take it personally. As if saving the world was all on his shoulders.

That might have come from the early days when his platoon was credited with almost single-handedly stopping the Posleen invasion of the planet Diess. But that was revisionist history. Some of the best and most veteran NATO units had been involved and it was the Indowy-constructed Main Line of Resistance, and the conventional American, French, British and German infantry units that manned it, that stopped the Posleen butt-cold. O’Neal’s claim to fame, besides being the only human to ever detonate a nuclear device by hand and survive, was in freeing up the armored forces that had been trapped in a megascraper.

But it might be that that had the Old Man thinking he could single-handedly save the planet. Or maybe it was just how he was; the lone warrior, Horatius at the bridge. He really believed in the ethos of the warrior, the philosophy of the knight, sans peur, sans reproche. And he had made his troops believe in it too, by his shining vision and his intensity and his belief. And that shining vision had sustained them. And maybe this was the cost.

Gunnery Sergeant Ernest Pappas, late of the United States Marine Corps, knew that knights in armor had been nothing more than murdering bastards on horseback. And Ernie knew that what you did was survive. Just survive. And maybe you managed to stop the enemy and maybe you didn’t. But as long as you survived to cause them grief that was good enough.

But Gunny Pappas knew that wasn’t what got the boys to get up and shoot. The boys got up to shoot from the shining vision and because they believed with Ironman O’Neal beside them there was no way they could lose. Because that was how it should be.

Pappas looked down at the smoke and flames drifting off the rubble of the city and sighed. This sure as hell wasn’t how it should be. And if Captain Karen Slight tried to carry the battalion into that fire they would evaporate like water on a griddle. Because they wouldn’t believe.

“Major?” he said, putting his hand on Mike’s shoulder.

“Ernie,” the major answered. They had been together since O’Neal had taken command of Bravo back in the bad days when it seemed like the entire Army had lost its mind. They’d been through the ups and the downs, mostly downs. Whether they knew it or not it was the team of Pappas and O’Neal that defined the 1^st/555^th and made it what it was.

“That was a long goddamned climb you just forced on an old man.”

“Great view, though. Don’t you think?” Mike smiled sadly and carefully spit into his helmet where the biotic underlayer picked up the spittle and tobacco juice and started it on its long trail back to being rations.

Pappas glanced at the pistol and winced. “You need to quit listening to Dire Straits.”

“What? You’d prefer James Taylor?”

“We’ve got a situation.”

“Yep.” Mike sighed and rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “Don’t we always.”

“The 14^th Division high-tailed it.” The battalion sergeant major took his own helmet off and shielded his eyes. “They’re halfway to Buffalo by now.”

“What else is new?” O’Neal intoned. “Nice artillery fire, though. Not hitting anything, but very pretty.”

“Corps arty. I doubt they’ll stick around much longer. The whole corps is thinking the ‘bugout boogie’ by now.”

“Ten Thousand plugging the gap?”

“Yep.”

“Yep.”

There was a long silence while the sergeant major scratched at his scalp. The biotic underlayer of the suits had finally fixed his perennial dandruff but the habit lingered on long after the end of the problem.

“So, we gonna do anything about it, boss?”

“Do what?” the battalion commander asked. “Charge heroically into the enemy, driving him back by force of arms? ‘Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage’? Break the back of the enemy attack and drive them into rout? Retake positions lost for months? Drive them all the way back to Westbury and Clyde where they are supposed to be?”

“Is that what you’re planning?” Pappas asked.

“I’m not planning anything!” Mike answered shortly. “But I suppose that is what Jack is expecting. I notice he turned up.”

“It’s how you know it’s serious,” Pappas joked. “If CONARC turns up the shit has truly hit the fan.”

“I also notice that there are no artillery units responsive to calls for fire.”

“They’re working on that.”

“And that both flanking divisions are defined by Shelly as ‘shaky.’ ”

“Well, they’re Army, ain’t they?” the former Marine chuckled. “Army’s always defined as ‘shaky.’ It’s the default setting.”

Artillery fire dropped on the rickety pontoon bridge and the wood and aluminum structure disintegrated.

“See?” said O’Neal. “They didn’t really need us.”

“Horner wants a counterattack.”

O’Neal turned around to see if the sergeant major was joking but the broad, sallow face was deadpanned. “Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack. I thought that was what you was bitching about.”

“Holy shit,” the major whispered. He reached down and put on his helmet then shook his head to get a good seal on the underlayer. The gel flowed over his face filling every available crevice then drew back from mouth, nostrils and eyes. The Moment, as it was known, took a long time to get over and a lifetime to adjust to. “Holy shit. Counterattack. Grand. With Slight in command I presume? Great. Time to go pile up the breach with our ACS dead.”

“Smile when you say that, sir,” the NCO said, putting on his own helmet. “Once more into the breach.”

“That’s ‘unto,’ you illiterate Samoan, and I am smiling,” O’Neal retorted. He rotated his body sideways, turning the snarling face of his battle armor towards the sergeant major. “See?”

“Gotta love his armor,” Cutprice chuckled.

“I wish I had a thousand sets,” Horner admitted. “But I’d settle for a thousand regular sets so that’s not saying much.”

The armor was a private gift to then-Captain O’Neal from the Indowy manufacturer and included all the “special” functions that he had requested when he was a member of the design group. Besides the additional firing ports on wrist and elbows for close range combat, it was powered by antimatter. This eliminated the worst handicap of powered armor, its relatively short combat range. Technically, standard armor was designed for three hundred miles of range or seventy-two hours of static combat. In practice it had turned out to be about half that. Several suit units had been caught when they simply “ran out of gas” and were destroyed by the Posleen.

The drain on suit power had just gotten worse with the ammunition shortage. Because it was impossible for any terrestrial factory to produce the standard ammunition, which had a dollop of antimatter at the base to power the gun, it had been necessary to substitute simple depleted-uranium teardrops. Thus the grav-gun, which should have been powering itself, was forced to “suck” power from the suits. Since the rounds were still accelerated to a fraction of lightspeed, and since that required enormous power, the “life” of the suit batteries had been cut to nearly nothing. It was getting close to a choice of shoot or move for most of the standard suits, the exception being O’Neal’s, which had almost unlimited power.

The flip side, of course, was that if anything ever penetrated to the antimatter reservoir, Major O’Neal and a sizable percentage of the landscape for a mile around would be vapor.

But all of those things were invisible. It was the “surface” that attracted attention; the suit gave the appearance of some sort of green and black alien demon, the mouth a fang-filled maw and the hands talons for ripping flesh. It was startling and barbaric and in some ways, for those who knew O’Neal, very on cue.

“It suits him,” said the colonel from long experience. The ACS went wherever it was hottest. And the Ten Thousand followed.

The Ten Thousand — or the Spartans as they were sometimes called — was an outgrowth of a smaller group called the Six Hundred. When the first Posleen landing occurred, early, by surprise and in overwhelming force, the green units sent into Northern Virginia to stop them were shattered in the first encounter. Many of them, especially rear echelons, escaped across the Potomac. A large number of these gathered in Washington so when the Posleen forced a crossing of the river, right on the Washington Mall, thousands of these soldiers who had been in the rout were directly in their path. All but a tiny handful fled. This tiny handful, six hundred and fifty-three to be exact, had decided that there were some things that were worth dying for in a pointless gesture. So they gathered on the mound of the Washington Monument for the purposes of a stupidly suicidal last stand.

As it turned out it was not, quite, a suicide. Their resistance, and the confusion among the Posleen crossing the bridge, slowed the enemy just enough for the armored combat suits to arrive. Between the ACS and artillery fire the Posleen pocket in Washington was first reduced, then eliminated.

A special medal was struck for those six hundred and fifty-three truck drivers and cooks, infantrymen and artillery, linemen and laundrymen, who had stood their ground and prepared to go to their God like soldiers. After a brief ceremony, they were to be spread throughout the Army with nothing to remember the encounter but the medal. The leader of the resistance, however, successfully argued that there should be a better use than dissemination. Thus the Ten Thousand was born. Most of the Six Hundred were given promotions and used as a nucleus of the force which was then armed from captured and converted Posleen weapons. Once completed, the Ground Forces commander had at his fingertips a fast, heavy and very elite unit.

But it did not assault swarming Posleen; only the ACS could survive that.

“Major,” General Horner said. The use of O’Neal’s rank was the only sign of reproof for his tardiness.

“Jack?” O’Neal answered.

Horner smiled coldly. The ACS was not an American unit; it belonged to the Fleet Strike, a part of the Galactic Federation military. Therefore it would only be common military courtesy, not regulation, that would require O’Neal to use the general’s rank. But the blank name was as much a rebuke as his use of a blank rank. In better times O’Neal had referred to him as ‘sir’ or ‘general’ and even ‘colonel.’ Calling him ‘Jack’ in public was as good as a slap.

“We have a situation,” the general continued.

“People keep saying that,” O’Neal snorted. “What we have is a Mongolian Cluster Fuck, sir. Is General ‘the ACS is an unnecessary expenditure of resources’ gone?”

“Gramms has already been replaced,” Cutprice interjected. “And Captain Keren is currently explaining to his staff the words ‘fire support’ and ‘responsive fire.’ ”

“Do we have a plan?” O’Neal asked. “Or are we just going to get on-line and charge at them screaming?”

“We hold the heights on this side of the river,” Cutprice answered again. “But they’re pressing into the city and up along the canal and the heights on their side are higher so the ones on this side are getting fire support from the groups gathering on the far side. They’re also about to cut our supply line at the Brooks Avenue bridge. I’d like you to open up a pocket between the river and the ridge. My boys will follow in support but you’re going to have to take the first shock.”

“Why not just pin them and hammer them flat with artillery?” Stewart asked. “If you need Keren, by the way, we can always send Duncan over to ‘reason’ with them.”

“Hell no! I want the damned headquarters standing.” The boyish colonel gave the broadest grin anyone had ever seen and burst out in a belly laugh. “I’ve seen Duncan on a roll!”

“We need a crossing and we need it fast, Lieutenant,” Horner said gravely. “Not because I want my name in the news but because the Posleen are just as susceptible to rout, once you get them running, as humans. And we need them to be back at the Clyde lines. Long range recon teams tell us that the defenses haven’t been touched. If we can harry them all the way back to the Clyde half our problems in the East are done.”

“I’ve been watching their numbers building,” Mike pointed out. “They’re headed into this battle like ants headed to honey.”

“So what then?” Horner asked. “You have an idea.”

“Yes, sir,” the major responded, forgetting his anger. “What I’d really like to do is use a flight of Banshees to land behind them; but given the terrain I don’t think it would be possible and I doubt that we could hold out until the reinforcements arrived. Barring that, I want to hammer them flat then paint the lines for once. Nukes are still out?”

Horner winced. He was personally in favor of the use of tactical nuclear weapons in situations like this one. Tac-nukes had a wider “footprint” than any other form of artillery including Improved Conventional Munitions.

The majority of China had fallen in less than two months; it had taken the first major Posleen landing only forty-two days to go from Shanghai to Chengdu. And along the way the Race of Han had been reduced to a shallow splinter as over nine hundred million humans and a five thousand year old culture were wiped from the face of the earth. There were still pockets of resistance in the previous regions of Chinese control, the most notable of which was a small contingent in the Luoxia Shan led by the former head of Red Army procurement and “Radio Free Tibet.”

But in the process of disintegration, the panicking Chinese military had fired off a nuclear arsenal that was six or seven times larger than prewar intelligence estimates. The last spasm had been in the region of Xian, where the rearguard of the column retreating into the Himalayas had expended itself in a nuclear firestorm whose net effect was to slow the Posleen by only a day. The result was that China’s death throes had consumed enough nuclear weapons to poison the Yangtze River for the next ten thousand years. And to poison the political climate for nearly as long.

“No nukes,” Horner said. “There’s things the President will waffle on. And she turns a blind eye to the fact that SheVa rounds and your handgrenades are essentially micro-nuclear weapons. But we’re not going to nuke Rochester.” He held up a hand to forestall the argument he knew was coming and smiled tightly. “Not even neutron bombs or antimatter. No. Nukes.”

Mike turned away and looked at the far heights. The Genesee Valley was an obstacle to the Posleen and conventional forces but nothing to the suits; they were as comfortable in water as in space. However, there were millions of the Posleen swarming in the valley and only a bare handful of suits to oppose them.

“They’re still going to have to be cleared out of the valley before we can move,” Mike said. “That has to happen before we cross the river. I will not perform this assault without artillery fire that I consider adequate. Nor will any member of my battalion.”

He could hear the in-drawn breaths around him but he also could care less. The ACS was, in a very real and legally binding sense, a separate military from the United States Ground Forces. Technically, by the treaties which the U.S. Senate had signed in all innocence, he was Jack Horner’s superior officer. Technically, O’Neal could order a nuclear preparatory barrage and technically General Horner would have to follow his orders. Technically.

Realistically, no ACS major had ever refused an order from a Terran general. Not even “Iron Mike” O’Neal. Mike had occasionally argued about specific orders. But point-blank refusal was new. Call it the result of having watched the battalion have two hundred percent casualties over five years and slowly dwindle away to nothing.

Call it experience.

Horner considered his options for a moment then nodded coldly. “I’ll go get the artillery preparations arranged. I assure you that when you come up out of the water there will be nothing living between the Genesee and Mount Hope Avenue.”

“Ensure that the artillery is prepared to maintain that support,” O’Neal said. “We’ll need a curtain of artillery; I want to walk under a back-scratching all the way to our primary positions. And we’ll need an ongoing curtain until the support is in place. If we don’t get that, I’m not sure this is doable.”

“Agreed,” Horner said with a tight smile. He looked to the east as well and shook his head. “I’ll give you all the artillery I can scrounge between now and tomorrow morning. On my word.”

“Do that, General, and we’ll eat their souls,” Stewart said softly.

“We’re gonna do that little thing,” O’Neal said definitively. “Whether any of us survive is another question. And, Stewart: massage your AID. I want you to see if you can identify the incredibly smart Kessentai that came up with this bridge idea. Such intelligence should be rewarded.”