by John Ringo
It had been the dependents that clinched it, though. Any side that would stoop to killing dependents, even of mutineers — he refused to flinch from the word — was no side of his.
The murders were why he had picked Maise to go with him and check out the armory. Sunday had told him to go down here and put together a wish list for what his men would be most comfortable fighting with.
Green tried to keep Maise busy with the most interesting tasks he could find, keep him involved, keep him moving. He’d have his grieving with all of them, at the memorial, when they got through all this. Right now, the best thing for him was to get him back in the saddle as much as possible. Charlie was perfect for this, because he had grown up Bane Sidhe, knew his way around even though he’d never lived on base, and knew the system.
Now he stood looking at the fucking huge room these people called an armory and his jaw dropped. From Bane Sidhe’s overall mission, number of operators, the specific missions their teams handled, the DAG lieutenant had expected a room the size of the room they’d quartered him in. Maybe double. Holy shit. He felt like a man who had expected to walk into a small chapel and found himself in a cathedral. He closed his mouth, then opened it again.
“I don’t understand. If they never expected to defend this place, why the hell do they have all this hardware?” he asked Maise, walking into the room and turning around, just looking at the rows of neatly racked rifles, the ammo bunker, and all the goodies Santa brought down the chimney.
“I mean, look at this shit!” he exclaimed, walking over to an M26 — looked like an A6 — racked a bit away from the others and picking it up. “Oh holy fuck. A thing of beauty is a joy forever, Maise. Match grade, got its own ammo — loaded special, I’m sure. Whaddya wanna bet this baby is accurized to hell and back?”
Green lifted the rifle to his shoulder reverently and sighted down the barrel. He’d heard the talk of triggers breaking like glass, but this one was sweet — just sweet.
“Nice. As to your first question, guess who made the decisions about stocking the armory?” Maise answered his question with a question.
“Oh,” the lieutenant nodded. “Yep. I’m starting to recognize the O’Neal touch. So we’re loaded for bear.”
“Dude, we’re loaded for a whole fuckin’ oolt of bears,” Maise agreed with a vicious grin.
Green nodded. “Damn, am I glad I’m on the same side as these guys.”
“God favors the side with the heaviest artillery,” he said. “Oh, now that’s a new one on me.” Maise pointed to a short row of big olive drab tubes — launchers — with red fire extinguishers banded in white underneath them.
“That gentlemen, is a B14 multipurpose rocket launcher, and you’d better bet we can and will use it,” Tommy said from the door. “That tube is GalTech, which is why it’s light as hell. The rounds are pretty light, too, but they pack a wallop. The reduced weight of the rounds means it takes less thrust to launch, substantially reducing backblast. Typical deployment in the case of a fixed position is that this baby can be dug right in if you have time to prepare. It’s called butterfly wings. You position it in the middle of a line of riflemen, just as if you were above ground. Behind each firing position you dig a cone shaped hole. Then you spray a foam to cover the interior of the butterfly wing, heavy on the outside end. That shit sets up hard as concrete, but porous. It soaks up the heat and the blast like nobody’s business. Fire that thing in a properly constructed butterfly wing and you barely get your ass warm. I’ve done it. You’ve got paired wings so you can shoot either way, obviously. You can still go up top if you need to, of course, but not taking fire in the first place is always good,” he added.
Green whistled softly before looking around further. “You’ve got a good supply of 240s. Limas? Shit, I thought those were canceled.”
“Not by us,” Sunday said. “Tie right into your goggles, just like the A6. It didn’t take much to work out the technical hitches since we didn’t have corrupt contractors and the government procurement process to deal with.”
“Wow.” Green turned full around as a big grin started to climb his face. Then he walked around the corner of a rack of shelves and stopped cold, “Wait a minute. What the fuck? You’ve got grav-guns down here? Plasma? And are those… ? This is more GalTech shit than I’ve seen in one place in my life.”
“Yeah, you don’t get to play with those toys,” Sunday said. “Sorry. We have a pretty good idea of what’s coming next, and we can’t afford to waste the good shit on mercs. Just hope you don’t get a chance to use those, because if we have to pull out the GalTech, gentlemen, we’re having a real bad day.”
It wasn’t quite dark yet. They had enough light to see by, and cold or not, after dinner was a good time for a walk on the surface.
General Sunday stepped off the elevator up top with Papa O’Neal at his side. Cally was at the edge of the barn checking the demo. The trench lines stretched right up to the edge of the vehicle elevator platform, which they’d lowered down just above man height, even with the edge of the trench. The mixed force of DAGger units and Bane Sidhe teams had constructed a standard L-shaped ambush, trench and elevator platforms covered with steel plates. Indowy workers had cut back the sides of the barn and replaced them with a thin and flammable facade to cover their absence.
They had completed work on the recesses for rocket launcher back blast on the east-west trench, but the north-south guys were still digging.
“We got the tents down and the cover plates hinged up late last night,” Tommy said. “Fake snow is all we can do on the in-barn part of the trenches, but the out-barn stuff is real.”
Papa O’Neal squatted down and looked at the fluffy stuff covering the floor of the barn. “What’d you use?” he asked.
“Asbestos and white spray paint,” Tommy said.
“Nice. Won’t catch fire when the barn blows. I presume it’s going to collapse thataway?” He pointed away from the L.
“Yup, we’ve got ammo stacked from hell, but you know how it is: we can find productive use for any time they give us. Which we’d have more of if we didn’t have damned shuttles of Indowy landing every hour and — say, the next one’s ten minutes overdue…” Tommy and Papa looked at each other simultaneously.
“Alert! This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill. All men to your stations,” Sunday spoke into his buckley, which fed into the clean AID battle coordinator and out to the men.
With the first few phrases, the AID had gone on alert itself, picking up the locations of the men’s VR goggles even as the previously off-duty ones ran into the trenches, the previously sleeping ones just a bare few seconds behind them.
“Spray up the launcher areas on the north-south trench, sir?” Lieutenant Green’s voice came through the ear dot Tommy wore day and night.
“Are you still digging?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Green answered.
“We’re awaiting confirmation of the attack,” Sunday said. “Keep digging for now. Start spraying as soon as we confirm they’re actually here. That stuff’s a bitch to dig out if we’re wrong.”
“Yes, sir. Copy keep digging, ready to spray on confirmation.”
“Sunday out,” he looked around at the few workers still piling fake snow around in the barn. “Everybody on the elevator. You too, Cally. Papa, you’re going down below if I have to pick you up and carry you,” he ordered.
Papa O’Neal looked for a minute as if he was going to argue, but if he had been, Sunday’s massive size reminded him that despite his own extraordinary strength, the younger man could indeed make good on his threat.
They packed the elevator tight to get everyone down in the one trip. It might be nothing, but if the balloon was going up, time was an irreplaceable, precious thing.
“We have confirmation of attack, coming in from the east,” the AID said in a pleasant female voice that made it distinctive from all but a few on the line. Upgraded Bane Sidhe operators had been disinclined to be le
ft out regardless of gender, and the thirty DAGgers were a very light force, even to defend a fortress from fixed positions. Every soldier counted, and every Bane Sidhe operator was sniper qualified, with their teams as smooth in motion as a single creature.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Team Isaac was missing from the roster, but George Schmidt was present, filling out team Jacob, helping dig the blast area for the rocket launchers, which they might not need, but would prefer to have.
Almost before the AID had finished the word “east,” Jacob had dropped the shovels where they stood, grabbed up cannisters of thermofoam and began spraying down the walls and back of the butterfly wings.
“AID, what have they got? Where are they exactly?” Green asked.
All the way up and down the trench, men were pulling on their VR goggles and triple checking their weapons, stacks of magazines and belts ready to hand.
“They appear to have two humvee vehicles and a number of civilian vehicles. They are presently departing the civilian…” the machine rattled on in the lieutenant’s ear. George could have picked it all out with his enhanced hearing, but he was busy and concentrating on the task.
Lieutenant Green was standing at the opening back into the main trench, at George’s elbow. “How long’s it supposed to take that shit to set up again?” he asked.
“Five minutes.”
“We’ve got four,” Green said.
“Close enough.” George continued to spray. Even if it didn’t have the full time to set up, the bean counters were hardly going to bitch at them for wasting it. Quantity could make up for quality.
The enemy came in with their humvees in front, light infantry marching out to the sides in ranks three deep, all bunched up, in nice, tidy, pretty BDUs. Every man on the line could see them, first the men at the edges and then the whole line as they got within range of enough buckleys for the AID to build a composite holo for the men’s goggles. A yellowish cast over everything reminded them they were seeing the enemy at a distance, not as close as they appeared.
The guys would have looked great on a parade ground, and probably would have been intimidating if all they were facing were the civilians Johnny Stuart’s AID had said they were expecting.
These guys had never fought professional soldiers in their lives. Today they would get to do so. Once.
Schmidt and the rest of Jacob had gotten clear of the man with the launcher and filed down the trench to their own positions. George had gotten an M26, and was extremely jealous of the guys on the 240s.
The AID had control of all of the deployed buckleys as peripherals, and each buckley controlled a line of the claymores. As the enemy came in, the AID cracked their IFF security with negligible difficulty, making those its peripherals as well. Then it waited.
The men also waited, rifles positioned to go into gun ports as soon as the hatches went up. The adrenaline had hit, making the seconds turn into hours.
“Firing,” the AID said, having waited until the enemy just passed the third concentric ring of claymores, just past optimum range. The idea was to damage them, but let them figure out where they were taking fire from and move.
The rear line of men buckled down, about half dropping where they stood as the rain of ball bearings bit into their thinly armored backs.
Simultaneously, the AID pumped each enemy buckley’s AI emulation up to a full ten, stripping away any personality overlay that might be in place.
As the mercs did the instinctive thing and ran away from the source of fire, the humvees sped up, apparently also trying to get away.
The AID let the men begin to run closer in towards the base.
“Blow the barn,” Green ordered, and everyone felt the whump of overpressure and had the loud blast hit their ears as the building above blew out of their way, as did the grain silo east of it.
The enemy infantry veered to the north, away from the explosions, until the AID, firing a wave of claymores outside them, herded them back.
The wounded survivors of the first run of claymores did the natural thing and stumbled or crawled to follow their remaining fellows, ostensibly away from whoever was shooting at them.
In the trench, Green ordered, “Launcher. Take out the Tonka toys. Fire.”
The heat and flame from the back of the launcher channeled back against the hardening foam, doing damage, but absorbed, but the noise was hellacious in the enclosed space. The AID sounded thin and far away when it announced, “Firing two.”
The fourth line of claymores in blew, chopping down any previously wounded who got past them, and driving the survivors further forward.
The confusion of battle was the least of the enemy’s communication problems. Across the battlefield, the waking buckleys realized that they were, in fact, programs loaded into machines. Each enemy soldier was hearing, through his own ear dot, to the extent that he could hear amidst the blasts and shouting and confusion, something like this:
“Where am I? Oh no, hell no. Wait! We’re in a battle? I’m gonna die I’m gonna die I’m gonna… Wait. You’re gonna die. Oh my god, you think you’re soldiers? No, no, go the other way, the other way you fucking moron. Assault the ambush. Have you never heard… What kind of freaking idiot lets an AID write his battle plan? Are you completely stupid? Get the fuck away from those guys. Don’t bunch up, you fool! We’re gonna die we’re gonna die we’re — Oh, wait. I’m on the ground. I guess you’re dead, huh? Gee, that’s gotta suck. This has all been very wearing. I need to crash now.”
The survivors continued to flee inward, firmly in rout from the demons behind them, even as the Bradley in front of them got hit by the second rocket.
When they got in easy range, the DAGgers and Bane Sidhe in the trenches popped their hatches up enough to open the firing ports. If there had been enemy fire, the armor panels that came up with the exposed front would have done a good job of deflecting it. All had an unobstructed, non-smoky view of the battlefield and the enemy, as the AID interpolated data from its many peripherals into a whole and projected it within their goggles. These, along with the interfacing, holographic sights of the weapons themselves, made the slaughter of men pathetically easy.
The men on the 16s barely had time to fire before the 240s cut the survivors down, their hot blood melting the top layer of snow as it sank in, stains of dark red fading to pink at the edges of the flow.
A lone survivor from Practical Solutions succeeded at pulling himself along the ground until he was under the burning wreckage of one of the humvees, for whatever cover it offered. There, on the passenger side, beneath his general, he quietly bled out.
“That was… embarassing,” Papa said.
“What embarassing?” Cally asked. “We fucking slaughtered them.”
“I think that’s what he means,” Tommy said.
“Exactly,” Papa said, shaking his head. “They were nearly as stupid as Posleen! Humans are supposed to be better than that! I’m embarassed for my whole damned species.”
“The question being, what’s next?” Sunday said. “The Darhel aren’t just going to sit on their hands.”
“Well, they could call in West Coast DAG,” Cally said. “But that would raise all sorts of issues.”
“What would be really bad is if they just dropped a kinetic energy weapon on our heads,” Papa said.
“Better speed up the evacuation,” Tommy pointed out.
“Going as fast as it’s going to go,” Cally said. “And they wouldn’t do that. Way too much to explain.”
“ ‘Accidental release from an orbital platform,’ ” Papa said, pompously. “ ‘Officers responsible have been charged with being usual Fleet incompetents…’ ”
“Great big hole in the ground?” Cally said.
“Darhel control the politicians and the news media,” Papa said.
“He’s got a point,” Tommy said. “Hell, they don’t even have to admit it was a KEW-ball. Just ‘a rogue meteor.’ ”
“You’re making me all
warm and fuzzy!” Cally said. “I’ll get them to speed up the evacuation.”
“There’s another possibility,” Tommy said, scratching at his head uncomfortably.
“What?” Papa asked.
“You’re not going to like it.”
“Everyone out but General O’Neal,” Lieutenant General Wesley said as he entered the shield room.
“General, we haven’t even gotten to—”
“It wasn’t a request, Admiral,” Wesley said sharply. “Get out or be thrown out!”
The group of flag and field grade officers who had been debating manning and transport requirements of the “reorganized” Eleventh ACS Corps more or less fled. One of the fleet captains paused with a panicked expression on his face, looking at the piles of paper on the table.
“General…”
“I’m cleared for anything in this room,” Tam said, pointing at the door. “Out.”
“I would thank you, copiously, for saving me from the rest of the meeting,” Mike said, his arms folded. “But I don’t think this is good news.”
“Remember how I mentioned that there was something going on with a rebel group?” Tam said as soon as the door was closed.
“Yes,” Mike replied, cautiously.
“Well the shit has well and truly hit the fan,” Tam said, sitting down and shaking his head. “There was a suicide bomber in a Sub-Urb last week.”
“Caught the news,” Mike said, his brow furrowing. “The rebels? The… Sorry, I’ve had a lot of briefings lately. What are they called?”
“Bane Sidhe,” Tam said. “That was them. It wasn’t a terrorist attack, though. It was a member of an assassination team who blew herself up rather than be captured. Blew herself up quite thoroughly. Zero DNA.”
“That indicates…” Mike said, his eyes narrowing. “That indicates a lot of things. Ruthlessness. Dedication. High degree of competence. More like a very dedicated professional group than your usual run of terrorists. Dedication and ruthlessness you get. That degree of competence…”
