When the Devil Dances

CHAPTER 38 Near Balsam Gap, NC, United States, Sol III 1937 EDT Sunday September 27, 2009 ad

Sergeant Buckley had come to the conclusion that there were worse things than being in a suit.

After being electrocuted he had awakened in the hospital in the middle of the Posleen attack. Getting out, finding clothes, weapons and transportation had been interesting. Then, he had barely started on his long journey when a SheVa round had terminated a Posleen Lamprey less than two thousand meters away.

The good news was that the lander didn’t explode.

The bad news was that it fell in a sewage retention pond.

The next thing Buckley knew, the contents of the pond had been scattered over a wide, and in the future extremely fertile, area. An area that included the Humvee he was, with the occasional twitch, driving.

He had survived, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience. And, unfortunately, the next Lamprey that was hit blew up rather spectacularly.

He had come to lying in the Little Tennessee River. How he had gotten there was a mystery until he saw the Humvee lying sideways on a shattered tree. He was, however, cleaner. The rest of the retreat was a bit of blur. The Posleen actually got ahead of him at one point, but he managed to get a ride on a five-ton that snuck around them to the east. Then, in Dillsboro, they’d all been unloaded and segregated out.

Technically he was probably still a patient, but he didn’t make any fuss about being handed a rifle. They’d even given him a “squad.” All eight of the soldiers were clerks with an infantry military operational skill rating. The way that worked was that after going through training to be infantry, some desk jockey would grab them to push papers instead of carry a rifle. So the guys had been trained to be infantry, but only one of them had ever spent any time in the line.

He, and the one specialist with some line experience, made sure that all the clerks knew how to load and fire their weapons. Then he found some rations and they sat around waiting for somebody to get their thumb out of their butts. Hurry up and wait was all well and good, but the Posleen weren’t all that far back; if whoever was in charge of this cluster-fuck — it looked like a captain which was just crazy, there must have been a brigade’s worth of gear and personnel in the area he was looking at — didn’t get a move on, the Posleen were going to overrun the lot of them.

Then the rumor got around that the main exit had been cut off. He managed to get his guys to help quell the near riot that erupted, but it turned out it wasn’t just a rumor this time; the Posleen really had cut off their escape route.

Then they got the word that most of the personnel, and gear, was going to go out by the two alternate routes. Great. He was all for fighting, he’d been doing it for damn near ten years, but it helped to have a way out in case things went south. However, it turned out that “most” did not include the “combat arms” forces.

The next thing he knew he and his squad were in the back of a Bradley headed up the road to the pass the Posleen had taken.

Now, he wasn’t a coward by any stretch of the imagination. But he’d gotten a look at the map and taking that pass with the pitiful little force they had was just suicide.

They finally had a real meeting, where the lieutenant who was in charge of the Brads called all the squad leaders together and told them the plan, such as it was. The SheVa gun, probably the same one that had killed the Lamprey that blasted him into the drink, was going to fire a nuke into the pass. Then they would charge into the pass and clean up the survivors.

“It’ll be easy,” the lieutenant concluded. “All the Posties will be toasties from the nuke. We just have to secure it until the brigade on the other side makes it up the road.”

Sarge Buckley had been beating around the Army since before the Posleen had been heard of and he knew when somebody was lying. “The check is in the mail” is nothing compared to “the trucks are on the drop zone.” But the worst military cliché of them all had to be “the artillery is going to pound them flat then we’ll just go in and paint the lines.”

Buckley looked up as the radio in the track began to honk.

“NUKE WARNING. NUKE WARNING. TARGET COORDINATES: UTM 17 311384E 392292N. 100 K-T. THIRTY SECONDS!”

Life just got worse.

“FIFTEEN SECONDS. TEN…”

They were all gonna die.

Pruitt inhaled, then: “Initiate.”

The area effect weapons had similarities to the anti-lander penetrators and differences. Since the gun remained a smooth-bore and the round therefore had to be fin-stabilized, they were discarding sabot. But they were thicker in cross section than the penetrators and flew at a lower velocity. Last, but not least, since they were not penetrators, they were made out of simple carbon steel. Since the metal they were made out of was going to be distributed as a fine dust, better to have it composed of materials the human body could metabolize.

The round flew out of the tube in a river of fire, dropped its sabots and headed for Balsam Gap.

The weapon detonated seventy-three hundred and twenty feet above sea level, two thousand feet above and just about one thousand feet to the northeast of the pass. They say that close only counts in hand grenades and hydrogen bombs, but in this case close didn’t quite count. The fireball swooped down over the Posleen defenses, devouring the trees to either side and gouging out the sharp walls of the pass, especially on the eastern side. However, on the northern side of the pass, the expanding fireball was partially blocked and deflected by the shoulder of Balsam Mountain.

The Blue Ridge Parkway crossed over U.S. 23 at Balsam Gap. The overpass was heavily constructed and many of the Posleen defenses had been built underneath it for additional overhead cover from the expected artillery fire. While the antimatter warhead was very strong, it had been placed as a “personnel killer” rather than a structures killer; therefore between the deflection of the corner of the mountain and the construction, the compression front that hit the structure tore down the southern span, but the northern span remained intact.

Furthermore, Posleen under the bridge were shielded from the thermal pulse and at least some of the radiation release. The result was that although the majority of the oolt’ondai had been swept away in the atomic fireball, a small, but very angry remnant suvived.

Sergeant Buckley hefted his rifle as the Bradley gunned towards the pass. His “squad” was virtually unknown to him, and he knew darned well that humans mostly fought for the people in their “tribe.” When they hit the objective it was just as likely that most of these guys were going to either hit the dirt and stay there or run.

Which meant that actually getting them to fight was up to him. He never asked for this, but the stripes on his shoulder meant he had the responsibility. And he was going to, by God, discharge it.

He looked out the small porthole by him and considered the map. They were probably less than three hundred meters from the objective; he had a hard time telling from the terrain because everything had been so churned up by the nuke strike. But he was pretty sure they were just about on the straightaway for the gap.

He pulled out a magazine and waved it to get everyone’s attention then inserted it in the magazine well. Riding with magazines in meant that some idiot was bound to lock and load. If somebody locked and loaded, they were bound to have an accidental discharge. To prevent that, before loading he had had them take out their magazines and clear their weapons. That way while they were waiting around and bored somebody wouldn’t accidentally fire on full auto; he’d cleaned up a Brad where that happened and it wasn’t pretty. Now they reversed the procedure, slipping in the magazines and pulling back their charging levers. In the dim light he had each of them show him that the weapons were on safe, then looked outside just as the Brad next to them ate a plasma bolt.

Major Anderson wasn’t sure what he was doing leading the charge; he was pretty sure that if General Keeton had heard he would have prevented it. But when he joined the Army it hadn’t been to lay T-1 cables; it was just a fluke of the placement board that put him in Signals.

Now he had that chance that most officers only get to think about, that Patton had phrased as “the opportunity to lead a lot of men into a desperate battle.” It would probably be the only chance he got and, furthermore, he was just about the only officer that most of the group knew. So this time, Signals got to lead the way.

The problem being that the last time he had looked at how to do something like this was in ROTC. He had ordered the tank unit to drive through the objective and then swing back through while the Bradleys, who were supposed to follow right behind, stopped on the objective and unloaded.

Now, however, it was apparent that part of the Blue Ridge overpass had stayed up. And some of the Posleen on the objective were still alive. As the first M-1 that went up could attest. For that matter, those Posleen who were alive were being shielded from the variable time fire by the overpass. Basically, the artillery was useless.

If he had thought there might be significant resistance he would have had the artillery fire smoke; the Posleen generally couldn’t deal with obscurement rounds very well. But it had been assumed that a nuke would do the job. Bad assumption. And by the time they shifted types of fire, the assault would have succeeded or failed; when they passed the last curve and came under fire they had less than four hundred yards to go.

He made an instant decision; the tanks didn’t have any real utility to the mission, it was only the Bradleys that mattered. Getting the infantry onto the objective was the mission.

“Armor team, stream smoke and drive through the objective. Infantry, unload and move forward by fire and maneuver.”

He stooped down and stepped towards the troop door just as the hypervelocity missile impacted on the front slope of his Bradley.

Buckley rocked forward and back as the Bradley screamed to a stop then rolled to the rear as the troop door dropped open filling the interior with streaming red light from the setting sun.

“Come on, you apes! You wanna live forever?!”

He jumped out of the troop door and stumbled to his knees as he tripped on the end. When he stood up and turned around he could see the rest of the squad frozen on the inside.

“Okay!” he yelled. “You’re in the biggest fucking target around!”

He dove into the median and rolled into the ditch down its center. The good news was that now all the plasma bolts and railgun rounds were going overhead. The bad news was that it looked like he was pinned down.

A moment later one of the privates from his squad followed him into the ditch, landing on him and knocking the breath out of the sergeant.

“You wanna get off my back, Private?” he snarled.

The private rolled off to the side with an apology as a second member of the squad rolled into the ditch. However, right after that their Brad, which had just started to move again, ate an HVM.

Buckley shook his head to clear his ears and looked around. The tanks had apparently blown smoke and headed into the pass, but none of them had made it. There had been four. One was on fire, with its ammo cooking off, behind him in the median. The other three were scattered across the front, the closest to the objective less than a hundred meters from it. That one had suffered a catastrophic kill and the turret was fifty feet to the side, buried halfway into the moutainside.

There were two privates with him and that was it. He could hear somebody ahead and to the right firing at the Posleen in the Gap, but he couldn’t see who it was. For that matter, the only thing he could see was an overpass that was apparently shielding the Posleen from overhead fire. Oh, and a C-Dec. Which was just lifting off from the left of the intersection.

Joy.

“But I’m not in a suit!” he growled.

Besonora tapped the younger Kessentai on the shoulder as the oolt’poslenar staggered into the air. “Try to stay low; we must find and destroy that gun or all is lost.”

“I shall try, Oolt’ondai,” the Kessentai answered. “But I have flown very little.”

“Do the best you can.”

The oolt’ondai left the command deck and laboriously headed for the outer levels. He was not one of those who cursed the Alldn’t designed spiral gravity ramps that were the primary method of movement between areas; someday the Posleen would be able to modify and not just copy Alldn’t equipment. Until then, they had to make do with the way it was.

One of the items that would change, if he had his way, would be the fact that things were scattered through the ship apparently at random. Thus, the personnel quads were found almost anywhere throughout the vessel. In the case of the section holding the last “reaction” oolt, it was in the upper “west” quadrant, a silly place since they then had to go to the lower “north” to unload.

He greeted the Kessentai of the oolt and gave him his instructions. As soon as they landed he was to unload, pass around the oolt’poslenar and attack the gun to destroy its ability to fire, in other words, aim at the barrel.

Having done all that he could to prepare, he ordered the Kessentai to begin the laborious movement to the exit and started back to the command deck. As he did, alarms went off throughout the ship.

“Sir!” Pruitt said. “I’ve got anti-grav emanations.”

“Sir,” Kitteket interjected. “I just got word from one of the scouts; a C-Dec lifted off and is headed this way!”

“Where?” both Mitchell and Pruitt asked.

“He doesn’t know right now sir,” the specialist answered. “He says it’s staying low and he lost it in the hills. He’s up on Rocky Face and he said he just saw it for a second by Joe Mountain.”

“I don’t have a direction, sir,” Pruitt said. “I’m up on penetrators. And I’m more or less on vector,” he added, glancing at his map.

“Elevate the gun a bit,” Mitchell said. “Captain Chan, are you listening?”

“I’m here,” the MetalStorm commander replied.

“This may turn into a knife-fight,” Mitchell said. “How well are you chained down?”

“Not well enough to fire,” Captain Chan answered. “Even if we had power. Which we don’t. As for secondary effects… we’ll have to see.”

“Do you want to exit your turrets?” Mitchell asked.

“No,” the captain replied after a moment. “Better the devil you know.”

“Sir, emanations are strong,” Pruitt said. “I get the feeling they’re close.”

“The fire came from near here somewhere, Oolt’ondai,” the pilot said. He gently tapped the controls so the ship wouldn’t slam into the side of the mountain. “Should we unload the oolt?”

Besonora looked at the view from the outside; the side of the mountain was steep and covered in trees. To let them down would require backing up. However, the map showed an open area ahead; they could put them down there just as well.

“No, follow the road around this ridge and drop them here,” he said, showing the Kessentai the map. “In the bend of this creek which is marked ‘Scott.’ ”