by John Ringo
"My God . . . I've heard of treetop level flying, but automobile antenna level flying? Christ!"
The helicopter had just pulled up to a hover when the blast struck. Though it was in the lee of the storm, being behind the massive State Department Building, shock waves like that tend to flow and fill any space available to be filled. The NSA was knocked down flat on the concrete, scraping her rather delicate and attractive nose. For the helicopter, completely unsheltered from the blast, the pilot's ability to control was overwhelmed. The chopper pitched onto one side and then slammed, hard, into a stout tree. It began to smolder but before it could burst into flames the four man crew emerged out of the side that was open to the sky and scurried away. Two of them carried one of their number who appeared to be unconscious—plus a rifle each—and one more carried the pintle-mounted door machine gun he had had the presence of mind not to leave behind.
Catching sight of the secretary's party as its members staggered to their feet, the warrant officer in charge pointed. The small group ran over as fast as they could, given the body they were dragging.
"Madam," the warrant announced, "Chief Warrant Officer Stone at your service. We were sent to get you but . . ."
"But sometahms things don' quaht work out," the NSA finished with a beautiful, soft Birmingham accent. She was a lady, she was supremely well educated and the daughter of well educated people, as well. But every now and again, under extreme stress, that Alabama accent came out. Nose scraping tended to be a stressful sort of thing.
"Would one ah you fahn gentlemen have a rahfle or a pistol to spare? Mah Daddy, the minister, always said it was better to hahve a gun an' not need it, than to need one and not hahve it. An' Ah think that, raht about now, Ah need one."
The warrant passed over his own pistol, admiringly. Then, hearing firing coming from the south, from the direction of the Lincoln Memorial, the warrant said, "Ma'am, my orders were to get you out. They intended me to fly you out. But that wasn't actually specified. We're going out on foot."
The party headed north on Twenty-First then east on F. Stone—out of radio contact—thought that if there was anyplace from which the NSA had a chance of being evacuated quickly and safely it would be the White House.
The undersecretary for E-T Affairs awakened slowly. Still groggy, he managed to stand and stare out the window of his office toward where Henry Bacon Drive met Constitution Avenue. The intersection was, itself, blocked by the National Academy for the Sciences.
"Oh, my God," he uttered in shock at the sight of a small horde of Posleen coming up Henry Bacon. They apparently turned right once reaching Constitution, the undersecretary could see many of them marching to the east along that broad thoroughfare.
They didn't all turn right, though. Some turned left and skirted the Academy of Sciences building. These marched straight towards State. One look at the fearsome aliens and the undersecretary felt something very warm and very wet begin to run down his leg.
"Run!" shouted Stone as the party came in visual contact with a group of Posleen in the process of storming the Executive Office Building. The sighting was mutual and a subgroup of Posleen turned from their task and began to pursue.
"This way," the secretary ordered. The party turned north on Nineteenth Street, skirting the World Bank.
"Mr. . . . Stone," the lone machine gunner said, panting. "I've run all I can and I'm not runnin' anymore. Y'all go on without me." The secretary recognized an accent not too dissimilar to her own, if perhaps a bit less classy.
"Sergeant Wallace," the warrant said, "you will keep up."
"Nossah, Mr. Stone," the sergeant answered. "I ain't nevah run from nothin' in mah life. And I ain't gonna get in the habit now. Y'all go on. I'll hold them up heah for a whahl." The sergeant tipped his helmet at the secretary. "Ma'am," he said, "Alabama's raht proud o' you."
With the sigh and a sad little smile, the secretary answered, "Sarn't Wallace, your country is raht proud o' you, too."
The machine gun was already firing, at much faster than its normal and sustainable rate, before the secretary and the others turned into the World Bank.
"That wasn't really . . . ?" the secretary began to ask.
"No, ma'am. That Wallace died some years ago. This was just a first cousin, twice removed."
"Remarkable resemblance," the secretary commented.
"Not in everything, Ma'am," the warrant answered.
"Look, I'll give you everything," the undersecretary begged. He opened a valise and held out Galactic bearer bonds to illustrate. The Posleen normal brushed them aside impatiently with the flat of his boma blade.
A slightly taller Posleen with an erect, feathered crest entered the room where the human had been found. He snarled, whistled and grunted several questions, none of which the human could answer. Indeed, he didn't really understand them as questions at all.
The Kessentai said something to the normal, who shrugged and picked the undersecretary up by one arm, dragging him from the room. The entire time the human continued to beg, to make offers of deals, to promise vast largesse. The Kessentai understood not a word—he didn't speak the language—how could the normal, who spoke no language and barely understood that used by its masters?
The normal dragged the still protesting diplomat downstairs and then through some smashed doors into the central courtyard of the building. Other normals, or perhaps they were cosslain, did likewise with other humans that had been found hiding in the building. Soon there were hundreds of terrified humans gathered there, under the soaring eagle sculpture in the open north courtyard. Still, it was only hundreds of the thousands who normally worked in the little offices and cubicles of the State Department. The rest were fleeing north on foot.
An alien, the undersecretary thought it might be the same Kessentai he had previously "met," stuck his head out to look down into the courtyard and shouted something.
One of the normals in the courtyard guarding the humans drew his boma blade and made a gesture. When the human, who understood all too well what the gesture meant, balked, the Posleen simply grabbed her hair and pulled her into a kneeling position. The descending blade cut her screams off very quickly. The normal passed the bloody head to another to slice off the skull cap and remove the brain. The first then began to slice the body into easily transportable chunks.
The undersecretary inched back, trying to get as many people between himself and the Posleen rendering party as possible. The Posleen noticed this and, instead of gaining himself more time, the diplomat was next to be summoned. He began to scream as soon as the alien claw pointed at him, calling him to face a justice higher than the alien could have imagined.
* * *
Once the main assault had been crushed and there was no real chance of successful Posleen reinforcement of their bridgehead over the Potomac, headquarters for the First of the Five-O-Eighth released B Company under Lieutenant Rogers to clear the State Department of Posleen. Sergeant Stewart and his squad were first to reach the northern courtyard of the building. The men didn't retch, but only because such sights, headless corpses half butchered and laid out for complete rendering, had become all too commonplace.
Stewart walked among the corpses, apparently unmoved. "Pretty gross, ain't it, Manuel?" the one called "Wilson" said on the private circuit.
The Hispanic sergeant, hiding under the name of Jimmy Stewart shrugged his shoulders and answered, "I dunno. What good did these chigadera motherfuckers ever do anyone? Why weren't they in the Army? Just turnabout, you ask me; a neat switch."
Interlude
All voyages end, but some end much worse than others. Guanamarioch, inexperienced as he was, couldn't imagine one that ended worse than this. (Truth be told, not one other God King in the fleet had ever actually had any experience like this one. A contested emergence? Didn't the damned humans know that was not in the rules?)
Several days before emergence from hyperspace, the God Kings and Kenstain had begun resuscitating the normals by smal
l groups before leading them to their landers. For those, like Guanamarioch's oolt, resuscitated early and made to wait, this was pure murder, literally, as bored and sometimes hungry normals fought with each other in the cramped hold of a Lamprey.
The globe had emerged into a maelstrom of fire. Even at its incredible mass, nearly equivalent to a small planet or a large asteroid, the globe bucked and jolted from the energies released by its own and the threshkreen fires, as well as from exploding ships. The large view-screen, forward in the Lamprey's hold, was completely ignored by the ignorant normals. Guanamarioch, however, was transfixed by the swirl and glow, the bolts and flashes of the battle in space.
Once he saw in that screen, much magnified he hoped, the gaping maw of a threshkreen super-monitor, coming into alignment with his own globe. There was a bright flash, like that of an antimatter bomb detonating, and a new icon appeared, shading from red to blue to red again. Guanamarioch did not recognize the icon and so asked his Artificial Sentience to explain.
"It is a kinetic energy projectile, lord, moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. The globe cannot tell if it contains an antimatter or nuclear warhead, hence the change in color. Frankly, if it hits us amidships it may not matter if it is an antimatter bomb or not."
Guanamarioch gulped. Involuntarily his sphincter loosened to allow liquid feces to run down his legs to the floor. The smell meant nothing as the normals had been shitting themselves silly ever since awakening. Still, the junior God King part way lowered his head and crest in shame. Shame or not, though, he could not keep his yellow eyes away from the screen.
Despite the speed of the thing, the projectile was so well aligned it was possible to track it, or rather the icon, on the screen. From every outcropping of the globe that mounted a weapon, fire poured down on the KE projectile. It seemed to form an ever more shallow cone with the icon at the apex.
"It's going to hit," the Artificial Sentience announced. "Lower right quarter as the globe bears. It's going to be bad."
Chapter 9
Discipline ought to be used.
—Shakespeare, Henry V
Bijagual, Chiriqui, Republic of Panama
Oh, was Digna in a bad mood. Without a word, in field uniform, holding a switch in her right hand and helmet tucked under the left arm, and accompanied by two stout triple great-grandsons, she burst into the little shack. Her bright blue eyes flashed icy fire.
The woman of the house, in fact Digna's great-great-granddaughter though the woman looked much older than the great-great-grandmother did, took one look and backed away, holding her hands in front of her in supplication.
"Where is the little toad?" Digna demanded, lip curling in a sneer and her voice dripping with scorn.
Fearfully the woman pointed at the shack's sole bedroom. Digna brushed the door open with the switch. Immediately her nose was assailed by the strong smell of cheap rum. In the dim light she looked down on a snoring, disheveled man, unsurprisingly also a great-great-grandchild, and felt the rising heat of murderous anger.
She took half a step forward into the room and began.
Down came the switch across the man's face, hard enough to draw blood.
"Filthy pendejo!"
Again the switch, accompanied by, "Disgrace to my blood!"
"Rotten" . . . switch . . . "Lazy!" . . . swack . . . "Good for nothing!" . . . "Foul!" . . . "Dirty!" . . . "Useless!" . . . whackwackwack.
By the time Digna got to "useless" her great-great-grandson, trying vainly to protect his head with his hands, had rolled onto the floor. He begged for pardon but the beating continued.
"Little rat!" . . . "Cockroach!" . . . "Vermin!"
When Digna's right arm tired she put on her helmet and transferred the switch to her left. When that tired she stopped altogether and, using her rested right arm grasped the man by the hair and began to drag. Digna was small, and perhaps she could not have pulled the man against his will. But, on the other hand, was it worth it to him to lose his hair finding out?
In the shack's main room Digna flashed her eyes at her escorts.
"Arrest your cousin," she ordered. "Three days in the pit for failure to show for drill." Briefly she reconsidered her sentence and then added, "Make that three days on bread and water."
"Si señora," they answered, meekly.
Digna's Officer Candidate School had trained her to be an artillery officer. Specifically she had been trained to command a battery of very old, very surplus, 85mm Russian-made SD-44 guns. To crew the guns she had several hundred each of middle-aged men and suitably strong and healthy young women. And that was only counting her clan alone, be they by blood or by marriage. She also had substantial numbers of what she, with the benefit of a fairly classical education, thought of as the "perioeci"—the "dwellers about"—immediately under her control. Since the guns, with forward observers, fire direction computers and crews only required ninety men, or perhaps one hundred and twenty women, to operate at full efficiency, she had an excess of riches, personnel-wise. She solved this problem by assigning virtually all the unattached or less-attached women and girls of the clan to the guns and forming most of the men into a very large militia infantry company, though perhaps "dragoon" was a better word than infantry. There was not a man or boy who could not ride, and raising thoroughbred horses had been a clan specialty for centuries.
The guns were really quite remarkable specimens of their type; perhaps the ultimate version of the quick firing guns like the French "Seventy-five" that had made the First World War such a nightmare. Compared to the SD-44, the French "Seventy-five" was pretty small beans.
Each could throw a seventeen-pound shell up to seventeen kilometers and do so at a rate of up to twenty-five rounds a minute, maximum, or up to three hundred per hour, sustained. Moreover, since they had been designed by Russians who believed that all defense was antitank defense, the guns had a fair capability against light and medium armor. They were, in fact, the very same design as used on the Type-63 light tanks the gringos had purchased for Panama from the Peoples Republic of China. Lastly, each gun had an auxiliary engine that could propel it along at a brisk twenty-four kilometers per hour without the need for a light truck to serve as a prime mover. They had the trucks, mind you, but they didn't absolutely need them. They also had horses, lots of horses, in case the trucks and guns ran out of fuel.
The guns could fire high explosive, or HE, smoke and illumination. They could also fire an armor piercing shell that would collanderize anything but a main battle tank. Digna knew that the antitank capability was likely to be completely useless.
Best of all, in her opinion, the guns could fire canister: four hundred iron balls per shell—over three thousand from the massed battery—that would make short work of a column attack. So she hoped anyway.
The switch she had used on her multi-great-grandson did as well to spur her horse to where the battery was training under the eye of one of her favorite granddaughters, Edilze, a dark and pretty young woman—she favored her grandfather—and, more importantly, one Digna recognized as having a will and a brain.
Digna had begun by training Edilze and eight others to crew the guns, along with six more in fire-direction techniques. That had actually taken only about ten days. As one of Digna's instructors at OCS had observed, "You can train a monkey to serve a gun. People are only marginally more difficult."
For that ten days she had let the men slide, since she had not a single trained assistant. Not that many of her clan would not be trained. Indeed, many of the young men had already gone off to train with the regular army. But they would stay in the regular army. She had the rest; those too old or those too young. And she had the women and girls.
After the ten days she had called in her sons. These she made platoon leaders. She figured, not without reason, that sons were used to obeying fathers and so based her chain of command fairly strictly on lines of clan seniority. The only notable exception was her foreman, Tomas Herrera, whom she put in c
harge of some of her own and all of the few residents of the area that had no blood or marriage relation whatsoever.
Digna passed the battery where her girls sweated under Edilze's lashing tongue. That's my girl, her grandmother thought. Such a treasure. Digna spurred the horse over to the drill field—ordinarily a flat cow pasture by the quebrada, or creek. There, the men—most of them—drilled on one of the simpler tasks, weapons maintenance. She had no time for close order drill and, given that the clan was already, in the nature of things, a remarkably cohesive unit, didn't feel the need anyway.
