When the Devil Dances lota-3

by John Ringo

  “You want to get out of here at all you better jack up that attitude, Lurp-Boy,” the guard snarled from behind the glass.

  Mueller leaned forward until his nose was within inches of the armored glass and smiled. “HEY!” he shouted, then laughed as the guard jumped. He reached into the billow pockets of his blouse and pulled out a charge of C-4. Pulling off an adhesive cover he applied it to the glass then began patting his pockets, muttering “Detonators, detonators…”

  Mosovich smiled. “You wanna open the doors or you want I should come in and press the button?”

  He smiled and nodded as the armored doors behind him slid back. “Thanks so very much. And if you’re thinking about dicking around with the elevators, let me just point out that that means we’ll have to come back.”

  “And… have a nice day,” Mueller said, taking Kelly’s hand and heading for the door.

  “I can’t believe this,” Wendy snarled as she turned the rifle over and over in her hands. “I dropped this thing off immaculate. Like the day it came from the factory.”

  “I doubt it would even work now,” Mueller said with a sigh. “Those things are a bastard when they rust. It’s the firing mechanism; it’s fragile as hell.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Mosovich said. “It’s not like we’re going to get jumped by the Posleen in Franklin.”

  “We heard they were all over the place,” Shari asked nervously, as they reached the elevators to the surface. “That people are killed every day.”

  “Oh, they are,” Mueller said walking over to hit the elevator button. The elevator was huge, easily large enough to carry a semi-trailer, separated into lines by a chain and post arrangement. Several of the chains dangled free and one of the posts rolled on the ground as it lurched sideways. “There must be three or four civilians killed every day by ferals. You know how many people were killed every day in car wrecks before the war?”

  “Yeah,” Mosovich agreed. “Death rates, excepting combat casualties, have dropped in the States.”

  “Why are we going sideways?” Elgars interjected.

  “Oh, sorry, I forgot you’ve never been in one,” Mosovich said. “There are multiple elevators for each shaft, so that incoming refugees could be shuttled down really fast. There’s an ‘up’ shaft and a ‘down’ shaft and they slide between the two.” He nodded as the structure shuddered and began to rise. “I’ve been on one that got stuck; wasn’t pleasant. Anyway, where were we?”

  “Reduced death rate,” Shari said.

  “Not reduced overall, mind you,” Mueller said. “Combat casualty rates have made up for it.”

  “How many?” Elgars asked. “I mean, combat casualties?”

  “Sixty-two million,” Mosovich said. “In the U.S. and of American military forces. And that’s just the military losses. Pales compared to China and India, mind you, but still pretty bad.”

  “Six…” Shari gasped. “Could you say that again?”

  “Sixty-two million,” Mueller said quietly. “At the height of the war there were nearly that many under arms in the Contiguous U.S., what they call CONUS, and in the Expeditionary Forces. But in the last five years, most combat units, most infantry battalions, have had three casualties for every position in them. That is, they have had three hundred percent casualties. At its height, the American portion of the EFs had nearly forty million personnel. But the total casualties have topped that and the AEF is below twelve million, and only half of that is actual ‘shooting at the Posleen’ fighters.”

  “And there’s a steady attrition in the interior,” Mosovich added. “There’s still landings from time to time; there was a globe that made it down, mostly intact, near Salt Lake just last year.”

  “We heard about that,” Wendy said. “But… nothing like those casualty figures.”

  “They’re not very open with them,” Mosovich agreed. “Add in the forty million or so civilian casualties and the fact that we’re fighting this war in the middle of a ‘drop’ in males of prime military age and we’re… well, we’re getting bled white. Even with rejuving older guys, taking a person that has never held a weapon in their hands and teaching when they are eighteen is one thing, doing it when they’re fifty is… different. They, generally, aren’t stupid enough to be good soldiers. Not cannon fodder soldiers. Young guys want to be heroes so the women will love them and have their babies. Old guys just want to live to see the next sunrise.”

  “Which just makes keeping women out of combat units stupid,” Wendy said, shaking her head at the condition of her rifle. “This is…” She shook her head again. “I know that I can depend on you big strong men to protect me. But I don’t want to have to!”

  “Don’t sweat it,” Mosovich said with a chuckle. “We’ll find you a weapon. And women generally aren’t stupid enough either; they can have babies any time they want. That being said; I don’t agree with the policy either, but nobody can seem to get it changed.”

  He stepped through the door into a concrete room. It was about fifty meters wide and a hundred deep with black lines painted on the floor. The walls were covered in condensation and a steady breeze blew out of the elevator towards the glass doors at the end. Halfway down the room there was a series of small bunkers. As they approached them it was clear that most of them were half filled with dirt and garbage, some of it blown in, but much of it dropped into them by passersby. Many of the lines on the floor had peeled up and there was trash all over the room, although clearly little of it was new.

  “I think I know the real reason that it’s nearly impossible for females to get in Ground Force these days,” Mosovich noted. “But it’s a nasty reason and you won’t like it.”

  “I’ve dealt with a lot of stuff I don’t like,” Wendy said. “My life seems to consist of dealing with stuff I don’t like.”

  “In that case I think the casualties are the answer, two answers really,” Mosovich said.

  “The first reason is that we’re being bled white. We’ve lost about eighty percent of our productive-age male population. But even with combat casualties, we’ve only lost about thirty of our productive-age females…”

  “We’re breeders,” Wendy said.

  “Yep,” Mosovich agreed. “The powers that be are obviously thinking that when the Posleen are kicked off planet, it won’t do much good to have nobody left but a bunch of old women and a few children to ‘carry on.’ So they’re conserving the breeding population.”

  “It takes two to tango,” Shari pointed out, adjusting Shakeela’s coat. The bunker was quite cool compared to the underground city they had left and it was clear that the fall had settled in up here. “Where are the ‘breeders’ going to find…”

  “Guys?” Mueller asked. “It’s not a nice answer, but it doesn’t take many guys to make lots of babies, but it’s a one for one ratio with women.”

  “He’s right,” Mosovich said. “It’s not nice, but it is true. That’s only half the story, though.

  “In the first wave there were massive conventional casualties. There was a real question whether we were going to hold everywhere and we didn’t hold a couple of places. Losses among combat formations were huge. And there was a… a disparity in female losses versus male. Losses among women in combat units were nearly equal to males, but they only comprised a third of the force at the maximum.

  “I read your whole packet, Captain,” he continued doggedly. “And I’d already read a classified after-action report in which you were a minor bit player. You did a good job at the Monument, no question, but if it hadn’t been for Keren, you’d be dead right now. And your… experiences in the retreat from Dale City are one of the classic egregious examples.”

  “Who’s Keren?” Elgars asked. “And what do you mean by that?”

  “Keren is a captain with the Ten Thousand,” Mueller said as they reached the doors. There were two sets with a chamber in between and they acted as partial airlocks, reducing the blast of wind that was trying to escape the bunker. “H
e was in a mortar platoon near the rear of the retreat. He apparently picked you up during the retreat and you rode with him all the way to the Monument.”

  “You’d been dumped by another unit,” Mosovich said tightly. He turned left and headed up the wide stairs on the exterior. There were two sets of those as well, one on each side of the entrance. There was a walkway on the wall opposite the doors that joined them near the top. Running along the surface on that side were small concrete combat positions, which were accessible from the walkway. On the far side was an open area nearly two hundred meters across and then a large parking lot filled with dirt covered cars and trucks and one Humvee, parked on the grass on the verge.

  “That was what happened to a good many females in that retreat and others. Some units returned with nearly one hundred percent female casualties versus fifty to sixty percent casualties among the males.”

  “Well, the actual incidence of why she was dumped wasn’t that high,” Mueller pointed out.

  “Why was I ‘dumped’?” the captain said carefully.

  “You’d been raped,” Mosovich said tightly. “Then they took away your sniper rifle and dumped you with an AIW and a single magazine.”

  “Oh,” Elgars said. “That’s… annoying in a distant way.”

  “So, you’re saying that they don’t want me in the Ground Forces because I might get raped in a retreat?” Wendy said angrily. “Then they shouldn’t ought to let their damned soldiers in the Sub-Urbs!”

  “Am I to take it that’s why you were so uncomfortable coming to the surface with us?” Mueller said. “In that case, I’m sorry I asked. And if you’ll give me a name and unit I’ll take care of it.”

  “I was just giving testimony,” Wendy said. She stopped at the top of the stairs blinking her eyes against the light and looked down at the town.

  Franklin had been a small, somewhat picturesque city nestled in lightly inhabited hills before the war. Its main industry was supporting the local farmers and retirees who had moved up from Florida to get away from the crime.

  With the change to a war footing, it became a vital linchpin in the southern Appalachian defenses. Units from just south of Asheville to Ellijay depended upon it for supply and administration.

  The city was now overrun by soldiers and their encampments stretched up the hills on either side of it. The small strip mall that the entrance overlooked had been taken over by pawnbrokers and T-shirt shops with the only sign of “normal” presence being a dry cleaner.

  She looked down over the bustle and shrugged. “When… when the Urb was first set up anyone could come and go at any time. That was… good at first. The corps did a lot of good in the Urb. And… there was a lot of dating. Most of the corps was male and most of the Urb is female so… things naturally happened. Then… the… the attitude sort of changed.”

  “A lot of the girls in the Urb were… lonely,” Shari said. “They would take up with the soldiers and some of the soldiers practically moved into the Urb. A lot of what you could call ‘black market’ transfers went on; you used to be able to find coffee even. But then things started getting out of hand. The security force wasn’t large enough, or effective enough, to keep the soldiers under control and they had an authority dispute with the corps MPs, who were numerous enough and quite ready to crack heads.”

  “We ended up having a…” Wendy shrugged her shoulders and shuddered. “Well, one of the officers that was involved in the investigation referred to it as a ‘sack’ during a long weekend. Something like a riot with a lot of rapes. I made it to the range and Dave and I sort of stood off the couple of groups that came around us.”

  “I had a… well, a group of… boys really that were like kids I was taking care of,” Shari noted. “A couple of them were there when the riots started. I was okay.”

  “Others weren’t,” Wendy said darkly. “So we don’t like the corps in the Urb. Anyway, the Urb was put off-limits to military personnel…”

  “Unless they had orders,” Mueller pointed out.

  “Unless they had orders to go there,” Wendy agreed. “And now they stay up here and we stay down there and any girls who want to go…”

  “Ply a trade?” Mosovich asked. “I get the point. But you don’t have to worry about human threats either.”

  “Oh, I’m not worried,” Wendy said, stroking her rusted rifle. “It might be a bit screwed up, but it will do for a club if it comes to that…”

  CHAPTER 16

  Ground Force Headquarters,

  Ft. Knox, KY, United States, Sol III

  1453 EDT Thursday September 24, 2009 ad

  General Horner read the debrief of the recon team with a blank expression. His intelligence section was of two minds about it; Mosovich had an excellent reputation, but nobody had ever seen flying tanks before.

  Horner didn’t have a problem in the world with the information. It was bad. That was normal.

  He sighed and pulled up a graph that he knew he looked at too much. It was his own AID’s estimate, based upon all available information, of… relative combat strength in the United States. It took into account that the casualty ratio of humans to Posleen tended to be about one thousand to one, but it also took into account the dwindling supplies of soldiers and Posleen birthrates. What it said was that sometime in the next twelve months, when the current crop of Posleen nestlings reached maturity and were given their weapons, there would be enough Posleen to swamp every major pass in the Appalachians. And it wouldn’t even take smart Posleen.

  Add in smart Posleen and things just went right down the old tubes.

  The report from Georgia, though, was very troubling. He knew that Rabun was considered one of the less well maintained defenses, mostly because it had hardly been hit. There was a defense specialist down there, the name hovered on the edge of his recollection, but they needed more than that.

  And Bernard was there. That would give the Posleen all the advantage they needed.

  What to do, what to do…

  First he typed in orders for the Ten Thousand to prepare for movement. They could stay in place, they needed the break, but they went to a four hour recall and were ordered to begin packing all their gear for a move. Cutprice was probably already packed, but it never hurt to be sure. He considered doing the same for the ACS, but if he did O’Neal would probably put everybody in suits and head for… Oh… shit.

  He looked at the map again and shook his head. That put a twist in the whole plan. He really needed to not mention the situation to O’Neal, who really needed a few more days rest. Getting the battalion south fast, though, would be tough. Or not.

  He checked the inventories and they had a sufficiency of Banshee stealth shuttles in inventory. The shuttles had been ordered when it appeared the Galactic largesse was unending. In twenty-twenty hindsight he wished they had the same relative value of suits, but they had to play with the hand they were dealt. If it really dropped in the pot in Georgia he could fly O’Neal and the Black Tyrone down by shuttle. Most of them were out west, but he should have some warning before it dropped in the pot.

  That was the extent of the forces he had immediately available. He would have his staff start looking at what else was available to reinforce in the Gap. But then he noted that it only had one SheVa. Moving one of those was not a short term operation.

  He tapped the controls and noted that there was a SheVa in movement to Chattanooga.

  Not any more.

  * * *

  Mosovich looked at the façade of the building. The business had once been a family-owned barbecue restaurant and Mosovich had vaguely recalled it from years before when he visited the area. The local VFW had been next door.

  Now it was a bar designed to separate soldiers from their money in the shortest possible time.

  The front deck was packed with soldiers, most of them lightly armed and heavily drunk. Squeezed into spaces in between were the waitresses and other working girls.

  He winced as a soldier stumbled ou
t the main door. The unshaven sergeant was supported by a lightly clad female who couldn’t have been over the age of consent. The sergeant squinted at the sunlight, grabbed the girl by a tit and stumbled off down the street, weaving on and off of the sidewalk towards a nearby motel.

  “Not,” he said.

  “Not,” Wendy agreed as she shivered in the wind. “Five gets you ten he gets rolled. Any other bright ideas?”

  “Just one,” Mosovich said, looking up at the sun. They had managed to pack the whole group into the appropriated Humvee by much sitting on laps and packing some of the children in the bed. But travelling much further would be problematic. And the afternoon was upon them; it was October and most of the kids were underdressed for nighttime fall temperatures. “How you doing, Captain?”

  “I’m… fine,” Elgars said, shifting her body to track on the sergeant as he stumbled past. “The… number of armed personnel is throwing me. I’m… feeling twitchy.”

  “That’s normal,” Jake admitted. “And not out of reason; there’ve been some hellacious firefights in these military towns.” He looked around and shook his head. “Franklin is out. There are probably places frequented by the locals, but it would be pointless to look for them.”

  He looked at the sun again, counted on his fingers then looked at Wendy. “Do you trust me?”

  She regarded him calmly for a moment and then nodded. “Strangely enough, yeah. Why?”

  “I’ve got a buddy who’s got a farm near here. He’s got a granddaughter not much older than Billy and he’d probably be more than happy to have some company. We could go there, but it would be an overnight stay.”

  “Oh.” Wendy looked at Shari, who shrugged then looked at the sun herself. “We need to get the kids out of the cold before dark.”

  “That won’t be a problem,” Mosovich said. “Getting back might have been a problem, but not getting there. And, frankly, he’s probably got some clothes that would fit them; they’re the worst outfitted kids I’ve seen in years.”