When the Devil Dances lota-3

by John Ringo

  One of the modified scatterable mines, though, was just about perfect. The “fishing lines” were monofilament trip-wires. They threw out the hooks then pulled them in until there was a graduated resistance. At that point, the mine was “armed” and if the lines were disturbed in any way, either by pulling or cutting, the mine would detonate.

  No matter how it was dropped, the first thing the mine did was right itself. So when detonated, as in this case when the lead oolt’os of the approaching company charged up the saddle, it would fly up one meter and send out a hail of small ball bearings.

  A claymore had a similar number of bearings in it, and sent them in a single line, which made it more deadly. But the “Bouncing Betty” tore the head off of the Posleen and scattered it over the trail. Good enough.

  And it alerted Mosovich. Who lifted his AID.

  “Ryan, listen up.”

  * * *

  Ryan leaned forward as the distant AID poured information into the net. The Posleen charging up the saddle were clear and so was Mosovich’s position.

  “Are you going to be able to get out of there?” Ryan asked.

  “I’ll be fine,” the sergeant major said. “I want fire on that saddle, right now, please, sir.”

  “On the way,” Ryan said, sending the fire commands to the prelaid guns. “Twenty-seven seconds. I figured you’d fire up the saddle.”

  “Right,” Mosovich said, leaning into the rifle and taking his first shot as the Posleen came into view. “Until we’re done here my AID will give a continuous feed; keep the fire on the pass, though, I don’t want you to follow the Posleen up the hill. And, if you wouldn’t mind, sir, pass this on. I can see Clarkesville from here and I figured out why they’re trying to keep us from observing them. They’re digging in, like they do with their factories, but these are apparently barracks.”

  “That’s not a surprise,” Ryan said, watching the artillery flight clock. “Why would they be so worried about that? I mean, we have a pretty fair count on their numbers, so it’s not like they’re hiding anything.”

  “Well, they’re barracks and motorpools, I should say,” Mosovich added. He knew that firing the Barrett was giving his position away to the God King’s sensors, but apparently they were all still in the trees. He saw one plasma round hit a poplar and turn it into a ball of fire.

  “Motorpools?” Ryan asked suspiciously. “Splash, over.” The rounds were only a few seconds away from impacting.

  “Yes, sir,” Mosovich said, as the first rounds started to land in the trees. “For the flying tanks. Splash out.”

  * * *

  “A kenal flak, senra, fuscirto uut!” Orostan shouted. He shook his arm and glared at the flash burn. “I am going to eat that human’s GET.”

  “Perhaps,” Cholosta’an said, running up the trail behind the oolt’ondai’s forces. “But only if he doesn’t adjust that artillery onto us!”

  The two Kessentai along with the first oolt of Orostan’s force, by pure luck, had been off of the saddle and out of the beaten zone by the time the first round hit. But behind them the sound of superquick detonating in the treetops was mixed with the scream of oolt’os and Kessentai caught in the barrage. That included what was left of Cholosta’an’s oolt, but he wasn’t going back for it either.

  A normal ahead of Cholosta’an grunted, slapped at his side and fell sideways screaming down the slope.

  “The artillery is masking the fuscirto fire,” Orostan snarled, pointing his plasma gun towards the hilltop. He had had a bead on the sniper earlier, but the thrice-damned trees had gotten in the way. His crest on his left side was scorched so badly it might have to be cut away.

  He fired at approximately where he thought the sniper was and the normals around him followed the target point slavishly.

  “Uh, Oolt’ondai,” Cholosta’an said, darting past the older Kessentai, “you might want to move around a little.”

  As the words left his muzzle, Orostan let out a bellow of rage and clapped at the furrow that had appeared along his flank. “Sky demons eat your souls! Come out and show yourself, you gutless bastard!” he screamed. But he started back up the path anyway, ducking and weaving among the limited cover while peppering the smoking hilltop with shots from his plasma gun. “Gutless abat!”

  * * *

  Jake slapped at the leaves in front of his position to put out the fire. Fortunately the God King seemed to think he was firing from about fifty meters to the west. Unfortunately, he’d missed the one shot he got at the bastard. It was difficult to tell which ones were God Kings at this range, unless they lifted their crests and these seemed to be keeping them down. There was usually a little difference in size, but not enough to be noticeable at eight football fields. God Kings were generally more heavily armed, as well, but judging by this group headed up the hill that wasn’t clear. Most of the Posleen had either heavy railguns or plasma cannon with a few hypervelocity missile launchers thrown in for giggles. Which one was the God King on the basis of weaponry was anyone’s guess. The last difference was “attitude” or at least who did what first. In this case, one particular Posleen sporting a plasma gun had fired, then all the other Posleen followed suit.

  Fortunately they all fired at the wrong place, but the misses, thermal wash and ricochets had been mighty interesting for a few seconds there. A chunk of the hilltop the size of a house had been flattened and was surrounded by a growing forest fire. The trees, shrub and dirt in the area were just gone and most of the exposed rocks were smoking. If they’d fired at the right bit of mountain, or if they spotted him, his ex-wife would be getting a telegram and a check.

  It wasn’t dying so much that worried him, but it really ticked him off that his ex would get the check.

  “I gotta find a better beneficiary,” he muttered, taking a bead on the next Posleen in the line.

  * * *

  Cholosta’an darted around the oolt’ondai and put his hand on the older Kessentai’s chest. “Let the oolt’os go first, Oolt’ondai,” he said.

  “I will eat the heart of this thresh,” Orostan ground out. “I swear it.”

  From just up the trail came a crack of another mine and the descending scream and clatter of a Posleen falling off the narrow track. “Yes, Oolt’ondai,” the younger Kessentai said. “But you can’t do that if you are dead.”

  The oolt’ondai lifted his crest for a moment then lowered it as more oolt’os trickled by. There was a steady stream making it through the artillery beaten zone and there was no way the human was going to escape this time; the other side was too sheer for even one of these damn rock-monkeys to scale.

  They had made it far enough up the trail, apparently, that the human could not observe their location. But as he looked back he saw another oolt drop off the trail with a fist sized hole through his midsection and this one, in its flailing, knocked another off the path. The human was up there and still stinging them, but Cholosta’an was right; he would have to live to get any revenge worth savoring.

  “Very well, youngling,” Orostan finally said with a hiss of humor. He stepped to the side to clear the path. “We’ll let a few more oolt’os get ahead of us, yes?”

  “Yes, Oolt’ondai,” the oolt commander said. He recognized a few of the oolt headed up the trail by sight and smell and that indefinable sense of “mine” that said they were of his oolt’os. But damned few. “So much for being unexpendable.”

  “Not at all, youngling,” the oolt’ondai said with a limited crest flap, lest the sniper still have an angle on them. “Again you prove your worth. How many Kessentai in your position would have had the head to hold back? And of those, how many would have thought to stop my impetuousness? And, last, of those very few, how many would have dared?”

  “Few, fewer and fewest,” the Kessentai agreed as another “crack!” came from up the trail. “But I could wish that my oolt’os were not so few as well.”

  “That we will make up for after this,” the oolt’ondai said, getting back on
the path. “But I want to be there at the kill.”

  * * *

  Mosovich stroked the trigger one more time and rolled to his feet. He had been carefully counting the mines on the hill and the last one was, indeed, the last one. If it did not kill the Posleen that had detonated it, a short dash would take the centauroid to the crest of the mountain. That spot was in a thick stand of rhododendron and mountain laurel, but just beyond there the Posleen would be in position to flank Mosovich’s position, and, what was worse, cover the back door to the hide with direct fire.

  Mosovich backed out leaving most of the boxes of ammunition and all of Nichols’ dirty socks behind. He wouldn’t, frankly, need either where he was going.

  He moved over to the edge of the cliff and hefted the big rifle so he was pointing it unsupported. He couldn’t hold it up for long, and God knows, he wouldn’t be able to fire many rounds. But he wouldn’t have to.

  * * *

  “Don’t eat them!” Orostan bellowed as the boom of a rifle came from over beyond the obscuring vegetation. “They are mine!”

  The only response was a burble from beyond the brush as another boom echoed on the mountain. The trees were whipped in a gale as the God King reached the summit and started to descend. The trail was tricky, more broken even than on the way up and the rhododendron, laurel and white pine was whipping in his face as he finally came into the open.

  The human seemed to have been waiting for that, for Orostan would always remember the smile. The apparently sole survivor just smiled that tooth-baring human smile, jumped back and fired.

  And flipped backwards into nothing.

  * * *

  It was tricky. As expected the shot, which undoubtedly went off into nowhere, gave him a few extra feet of boost. The Barrett had always pushed him backwards a few inches no matter how hard he braced and when he fired it off-hand it had pushed him back a couple of steps with each shot. So firing it completely unsupported, effectively in midair like some sort of damned Coyote/Road Runner cartoon, actually turned him for a somersault.

  The good part about this was that the combination took him well out from the ledge. He had chosen his spot carefully and he had actually been standing on an overhang. However, the ground started to slope outward after only a few hundred feet long so it was important to get prepared quickly.

  The static rappel system was one of the first that used the more advanced Galactic sciences in a device of purely human design and manufacture. Humans had implemented “old” Galactic technology, some of which was close to the cutting edge of human tech and theory, in many designs. New gun barrels were the most common devices, but there were also some small railguns designed for humans and “human only” fusion plants, that were only five or six times the size of equivalent Galactic and about a third as efficient.

  This device was the first that used theories that were beyond human ken. The Tchpth considered gravity to be, at best, a toy and, at worst, a minor nuisance. A few of their “simpler” theories were explainable to humans, such as the theory that led to the Galactic bounce tube.

  When Indowy wanted to travel up or down in their megascrapers, they generally travelled by bounce tube. This was a narrow tube that went to a specific floor. You entered it and if you were at the bottom it shot you to the top and if you were at the top it let you drop to a screaming (in initial usage this was literal) stop at the bottom. What it took humans a while to discover was that while bounce tubes were “active” devices on the lift side, they were “passive” on the drop. That is, a device at the bottom detected something coming in at high velocity, generated a very minor field and when the item hit the field it was decelerated using its own positive momentum for energy.

  The Tchpth and Indowy considered this purely efficient. The humans initially considered it magic.

  However, after staying up for several days, smoking a large amount of an illicit substance and taking a very long shower, a research grad at CalTech suddenly realized that if you took some of the things that the Tchpth were saying and turned them on their sides… sort of, it was a lot of very good stuff… it made a certain amount of sense. Then she wrote them down and slept for three days.

  After deciphering what she wrote, which, as far as anyone but her mother was concerned was apparently Sanskrit, she created a little box that when thrown at a wall “threw back.” The energy usage involved was no more than that of a small sensor and it always threw back, even when fired from a low velocity pneumatic cannon. (The cannon was called a “chicken gun” and was usually used to test aircraft windshields. But that is another story.)

  There was a current upper limit on the device, that is, when fired at very high velocity it tended to break the windshield, and it was better at stopping itself than it was at stopping stuff coming at it. So there was no “personal forcefield.”

  In other words, it was a very fast way to get to the ground in relative safety.

  The device was modified and adjusted until it didn’t just stop itself, but created a “static repulsion zone” which, when there was a situation of sudden kinetic change, damped that change. Then it was turned over to TRW for manufacturing purposes. The device was being installed on every vehicle still on the roads and in other places where sudden stops happened in a bad way. And it was issued to all the LRRP teams.

  Mosovich looked down at the rapidly approaching ground and swore he was never, ever going to do this again. “It’s not the fall that kills you,” he whispered.

  Generally, if you’re going down a cliff or the face of a building, the best way is to rappel. Tie off a rope, hook up any number of devices and lower yourself on the rope. However, there are any number of cases where this is impractical; ropes are not infinitely lengthy. There was another device available that used a very thin wire for the same purpose. And Mosovich really wished he had one with him. But they were much harder to construct than the static repulsion boxes and weren’t standard issue. Given the number of times this sort of thing came up, he was definitely getting one for everyone in the team and keeping them.

  The problem was that static repulsion systems didn’t slow your fall at all until they came near solid materials. For example, this system was going to completely ignore the trees he was just about to hit.

  * * *

  “Fuscirto uut!” Orostan shouted, jumping over the corpse of the last oolt’os and darting to the edge. His talons scrabbled on the rock as he almost slid over the side then he looked down the cliff face just in time to see the human disappear into the trees below.

  “You cannot escape me that easily!” the oolt’ondai shouted to the winds, knowing that the words were a lie. “I will still eat your heart!”

  Orostan looked out over the valley below and screamed in rage. The sun was sinking to the northwest and before anyone could get to the landing area the human, if it was alive, and he doubted that it had just committed suicide, would be kilometers away. In any of three directions.

  Cholosta’an came up beside him and looked down. After a moment he pointed downwards with a flap of his crest.

  “Yes,” Orostan ground out.

  “Alive?” the younger Kessentai asked.

  “Probably,” Orostan snarled. “And there was only one.”

  Cholosta’an thought about that for a moment. “The last time we had a good count it was over by the town of Seed. There were four.”

  “Yes,” Orostan said. “Four.”

  “And now there was only one,” Cholosta’an said. “One. And no bodies.”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Fuscirto uut.”

  “I’ll send someone around to look for a corpse,” Orostan said after a few moments’ contemplation. “But I doubt they’ll find anything.” He looked at his tenaral and started to wonder who. Finally he turned away and started back down the hill. The human might have escaped today, but it undoubtedly was “based” beyond the Gap. Its time would come. Soon.

  * * *

  As the last Posleen normal faded
out of sight, the “rock” that Mosovich had been standing on shifted and rippled, revealing something that looked very much like a four-eyed, blotchy, purple frog. The creature, if it was stretched out, would have been about eight feet from four-fingered foot-hand to foot-hand and was perfectly symetrical; it had two hands and two eyes on either end with a complex something in the area where a nose might be.

  The Himmit scout leaned out from the rock, its rear two foot-hands spreading out over the surface for purchase, and noted the faint heat signature moving away that was probably the human. He then levered himself back and looked towards the retreating Posleen. Such decisions. Human/Posleen, Human/Posleen? Finally, deciding that humans were always more interesting than Posleen — who basically ate, killed and reproduced and who could make a story from that? — it leaned sideways and started flowing from handhold to handhold down the cliff.

  Such exciting times.

  CHAPTER 14

  Rochester, NY, United States, Sol III

  0928 EDT Tuesday September 15, 2009 ad

  Mike looked around the room and then undogged his helmet. The command and staff of the 1st/555th was grouped in a kindergarten schoolroom, sitting on the floor to use the undersized tables. The battlescarred combat suits made an unpleasant contrast to the colored drawings on the walls and the prominent poster of the five food groups.

  “Well, we’ve had worse meetings.” He chuckled as the last of the gel underlayer from his suit streamed off into his helmet. “Much worse.”