by John Ringo
“General, if you’re trying to tell me that there won’t be any radiation from these weapons, please save it for the talking heads,” the President snapped. “Even ‘clean’ nukes are dirty.”
“Madame President, you can believe anything you want,” the general said coldly. “And I’m sure that the ‘Greens’ will scream bloody murder. But the radiation left from dropping a couple of billion megatons on that valley, and we don’t have that much, more’s the pity, will raise the background radiation of the Tennessee to that of, oh, living downwind of a coal-fired power plant. And we have lots of those.
“Be that as it may, this is a desperation use. If we don’t plug the Gap, it’s all over but the screaming. You, personally, and your staff and whatever dependents you have there with you, will undoubtedly survive. Something resembling civilization may even continue north of the ‘cold line’; the Posleen can’t organize a logistics line to save their lives so they’re never going to take, say, Athabasca. I understand that Montreal is a very pretty city, but all the survivors in the United States can’t fit in Canada, not in any sort of sheltered fashion, much less survive for any length of time. We have to plug the Gap. We have to keep it plugged. I need nukes to open it up so I can insert the plug. I’ll probably need them again to open up other points and reduce the Posleen in the Valley. We won’t have a lot of other choices this time.” He paused for a moment. “I don’t have any more ACS to throw away.”
The President looked at the papers on her desk for a moment and shook her head. “Will it work? Not just putting the ACS in place; I thought the Posleen shot down anything that was above the horizon. Will the missiles even be able to get to Georgia?”
“I don’t know,” Horner answered. “The remaining silos are all well north of the Posleen lines and there’s a strong storm across the Midwest. The combination should permit most of the missiles to fly. They’re most vulnerable in boost-phase, of course, but they’re going to loft very fast. The Posleen lose some of their efficiency when the targets get into orbital phase. We’ll just have to see if they make it.”
“And if they don’t?” the President asked.
“There’s… at least one other option,” Horner said with a smile that for him indicated extreme unhappiness. “The University of Tennessee has both a SheVa gun enhancement testbed program and a nuclear, antimatter rather, rounds program.”
“So… they can fire?” the President asked. “Antimatter is better than nukes, right? I mean, their fire can reach the Gap? And it’s a better, a cleaner, system?”
“Possibly,” Horner answered. “I’d… Both of the systems are experimental, ma’am. And their… area denial round has never been field-tested. It’s also… rather large, a very heavy warhead; you really would prefer not to know the megatonnage. The first time I fire something, I don’t want the price of failure being the loss of the entire Cumberland Valley.”
“Oh.”
Horner shrugged at her expression. “I suppose this is what I get for letting rednecks play with antimatter; they just don’t know when to say ‘Okay, that’s ’nough!’ Instead, it’s always ‘Hey, y’all! Watch this!’ I only became… apprised of the size of the round when we went looking for something to open up the Gap. I’ve since ordered a ‘reevaluation’ of the program.
“As for the ACS, the Triple Nickle will be caught in a vise. There will be well over a million Posleen passed through before they land. And there are the airmobile forces. And there are now an estimated twelve million gathered to the south. The battalion, what is left of it, will have to hold on to the Gap until we reduce the forces that have passed through and fight our way forward. Whether they survive… ? I don’t know. I do know that there is no other choice.”
The President continued to look down at the papers on her desk and then nodded.
“General Horner, you are permitted to fire into Rabun Gap. But Rabun Gap only, understood? All other uses will require my okay.”
“Understood,” Horner said with a nod. “Rabun Gap only. There may be a need at other times, however. That terrain favors defense; unfortunately we can’t stay on the defense anymore.”
“I understand that, General,” she said tartly. “But I approve each use. Understood? I want these things used precisely, not at the behest of some… officer… at the front.”
Horner took a calming breath before he replied. “Ma’am, I get the feeling you almost said something along the lines of ‘myrmidon’ there. The… officers at the front are trying to keep us from losing more ground, losing more passes. The targets that need to be struck will often change; they come and go as fast as the Posleen can manage it. At some point we’ll need to reduce the level of authority, Madame President.”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” she said, staring the general in the eye. “In the meantime… I’m the authority. Only I hold nuclear release.” She looked down again and shook her head. “And may the Lord have mercy.”
Horner took pity on her.
“Ma’am,” he said quietly. “I will say this. The only person I could imagine holding that pass, surviving it for long enough, is Michael O’Neal. It will be worth the clearing.”
“I’m glad you feel that way, General,” the President said, looking up angrily. “I was just thinking that I didn’t care much for the major. I don’t care much for someone who is willing to callously slaughter American civilians.”
“Excuse me?” Horner asked.
“There are always survivors,” the president snapped. “There are probably thousands of people in and around the Gap, hiding out. If we drop untold numbers of nuclear weapons on that area, there will be no survivors. I guess the vaunted Michael O’Neal doesn’t care about those poor civilians. The only thing he cares about is his precious battalion!”
Horner’s face was as frozen as a glacier and he waited a full fifteen seconds before answering.
“Madame President,” he said in a voice as cold as liquid helium, “Michael O’Neal’s daughter lives in Rabun Gap.”
CHAPTER 28
Rabun Gap, GA, United States, Sol III
1519 EDT Saturday September 26, 2009 ad
Cally rolled over and coughed at the dust in her throat. After a few moments choking she sat up and looked around muzzily.
“Shit.”
The main shelter was still intact and the lights were on, but that was the only good news. The tunnels to the bunker and the house were both collapsed. The main tunnel was clear, though, and it looked like both exit tunnels were clear. That left the question of how long she had been in here. She felt her head and there was a pretty good goose egg already started on her forehead. Her watch had stopped from either EMP or impact and she hadn’t been too sure what time it was when they went in the bunker anyway.
She thought about Papa O’Neal’s briefing on nuclear weapons and what to do. They didn’t get used much, but Gramps had been thorough. Unfortunately the lecture had been a few years previous and she wasn’t sure where to begin looking for a geiger counter or how to use one.
She did recall that people could survive better than structures — something about pressure waves — and that meant that Gramps might still be alive. If the bunker falling in didn’t kill him.
So the next job was to get out of the main tunnel and try to find Gramps — dig him out if she had to — then head for the hills.
She stood up then sat down as the ground rumbled to another nuclear detonation.
“Maybe in a while.”
* * *
“Ooooh, that’s gotta hurt!” Pruitt shouted.
Reeves already had the SheVa in reverse so the return fire from the landers, with the exception of one plasma round, tore up the ridgeline. That one plasma bolt, though, ripped into the SheVa’s power room.
“Reactors two and three just went offline,” Indy called. She unstrapped and headed for the hatch. “I doubt this is going to be a one-woman job.”
“We’re way down on speed, sir!” Reeve
s called. He had the throttle all the way open, but the SheVa was barely moving. “Under ten miles an hour!”
“Indy,” the commander called over the intercom. “Tell me we can do better than this! Those landers are going to overrun us in about fifteen minutes at this rate.”
“Not until I find out what went, sir,” the warrant officer called. She slid down the third ladder and grabbed a geiger counter as she sprinted, occasionally being knocked from side to side, towards the reactor room. “We just lost half our power; this is as fast as this thing will go.”
“Damn, damn, damn,” he muttered. “Pruitt, you have the con.”
“What?” the gunner called.
“I’m headed to the reactor room,” the commander said. “I think you can ID these things just fine.”
“Roger, sir,” the gunner replied with a gulp. “Come on, Schmoo, find us another firing position.”
“There’s one by Fulchertown,” the driver said, checking his map. “But it will mean running over a bunch of houses.”
“You afraid of getting ’em stuck in our treads?” the gunner asked sarcastically.
“No… it’s just that…” Schmoo looked up and over his shoulder to where the gunner was grinning. “Never mind. I’ve been trying to stay in the woods so we wouldn’t run people over.”
“Anybody that’s still here deserves to be run over.”
* * *
Mitchell waved a hand in front of his face as he went through the door to the reactor room; smoke and steam were pouring out and the air reeked of ozone. “Indy!”
“Over here, sir,” the warrant called from the left side of the room. The room was dominated by the four turbine generators; the smaller reactors were barely noticeable cradled along the sides. Mitchell’s background was in Abrams power packs, big jet turbine engines that drove the tanks at speeds upwards of sixty miles per hour. But the power contained in this room would provide electricity to a city of a hundred thousand people. It was sobering to think that all this power could barely get the SheVa up to twenty miles per hour on a flat surface.
“What’cha got?” he asked. “And are we hot?”
“No, sir,” the warrant called back, handing him one end of a heavy duty cable. “The shot missed the reactors and the turbines, thank goodness, or we might as well have gotten in the Abrams and run. It took out a transformer, through, and cut one of the main power circuits so even though there was a backup transformer there wasn’t any power for it. The reactor went into shutdown immediately.”
“So what are we doing?” the commander asked.
“Well, you’re holding a replacement power cable,” she said impishly. “I’m getting out a really big wrench. Then we’re going to replace the circuit and reboot the reactors.”
“How long?”
“Ten minutes, fifteen tops,” she answered, heading over to where the turbine’s power bars joined in the middle. She applied the wrench to a large nut where the cable came out and then, when it wouldn’t break free, pulled the wrench off and hammered on it repeatedly until the melted plastic sealing it flaked off. “Just be glad it didn’t hit the reactors.”
“Yeah,” the commander said with a laugh. “Or the track. I’d hate to have to break track on this thing.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all; you just call up a CONTAC team,” the warrant said, breaking the nut free. “There’s a reason that there’s a battalion in a SheVa repair team. A battalion of engineers and three really big cranes.”
Mitchell dropped the end of the cable on the floor and grabbed a stanchion as the SheVa rocked from a blow. “Uh, oh.”
“I can get this,” Indy said, grunting as she leaned into the wrench. “Get up top, sir.”
“You sure?” he asked.
“Go, I can do this in my sleep,” she said taking the nut out and pulling out the burnt cable.
As he darted out of the room she sighed and picked up the cable. “For this I went to MIT…”
* * *
“Flying tanks, sir!” Pruitt said as the commander flew out of the hatch. “Four of them. And they’re spotting for the landers; tracking says they’re all coming this way.”
“Shit,” Mitchell said, looking in his own screen as the flight of tenaral swooped by for another strafing run. The flying tanks each fired several rounds of plasma fire, but only one or two connected. “Concentrate on the landers. Reeves, see what you can do.”
“Doing it, sir,” the driver said. “The best I can do is get up along the hills, though; we’re kind of a big target.”
“Is it just me, or do they seem to be staying at a distance?” Pruitt said as the SheVa rumbled down onto the flat. “Oops. TARGET! Lamprey! Fifteen klicks!”
To get to the third firing point required turning the corner of the mountain. By and large the SheVa’s position was still covered by the intervening hills, however, the last movement, slow and glacial as it seemed, had rumbled the SheVa fully out into the open.
Pruitt had been more or less ready for it, or something similar, keeping his gun pointed southward towards the approaching landers. Fortunately the Posleen ships moved at a snaillike pace near the ground and had not gotten significantly closer than in the previous two engagements. Unfortunately, there were more of them in sight.
“CONFIRMED!” Major Mitchell called, slipping into his seat.
“ON THE WAY!” the gunner called swinging the turret towards the next target.
“Yes!” Mitchell called. “Cat-kill, Pruitt.” The detonation of the Lamprey’s fuel source had not been as large as the first catastrophic kill, but it was still quite spectacular.
“TARGET!” Pruitt answered. “C-Dec! Fifteen klicks!”
“CONFIRMED!” Mitchell called.
Pruitt fired just as the dodecahedron dropped below the ridgeline. “Miss! The bastards are maneuvering! Is that legal?”
“Fuck me!” Reeves called as the tenaral swept by for another strafe. “They seem to be firing at the rear of the gun, sir!”
“I noticed,” the major said with a curse. “The good news is it’s the only part that’s heavily armored. The bad news is it’s the armor on the magazine.”
“No wonder they’re keeping a safe distance,” Pruitt said, sweeping the gun from side to side, looking for targets. “The really good news is that we’re nearly out of rounds so if they do penetrate the magazine there won’t be as large of a boom.” He thought about what he’d just said and shook his head. “Mommy!”
Mitchell keyed for the outside line and called the Screaming Meemie unit. “Whiskey Three-Five this is SheVa Nine; we could use some help, over.”
* * *
“What in the fuck is that, ma’am?”
Captain Vickie Chan shielded her eyes against the westering sun and shook her head. “I dunno, Glenn, I just don’t know.”
Captain Chan had joined the U.S. Army in 1989 in payment to University of Nebraska Army ROTC. The ROTC had provided the daughter of Fusian immigrants with a scholarship and monthly spending money. So when the Army in its infinite wisdom assigned her to Air Defense Artillery she had put on her soldier suit and wandered into the wilderness.
One fairly successful tour — very few women in ADA made captain in one hitch — had proven to her that a career in the Army was the last thing she wanted. Towards the end of the tour she had looked around at the senior females and determined that there were two types: sluts and battleaxes. She had no desire to be either so she calmly turned in her papers and went back to civvie street.
However, with the coming of the Posleen, she, along with virtually every other human who had ever worn military uniform, received a letter in the mail ordering her to service. Initially she was assigned to an armor unit, but with the need for anti-lander systems and the creation of the initial systems to combat them, a computer had spit out her name near the head of the list. She had ADA background and, at the time she was transferred, was a commander of an armor company. Perfect.
Then her burgeoning ca
reer — she had settled on battleaxe — had been nipped in the bud. She was assigned to one of the first Screaming Meemie units, a system officially referred to as the M-179 “Rosser” Medium Anti-Lander System, and, when it became apparent that the system was suicidal and useless against landers, there she had been left. There was no definable utility for the Meemies, but it was too much trouble to reconvert the Abrams tanks that they had been designed around back to direct fire systems and although the Meemies were very effective there were other systems that were just about as good. So for the last five years she had been shuttled around from one corps to another, shoring up a defense here and there, but generally shuttled back out of the way; nobody knew quite what to do with Meemies and few cared to learn.
At the moment she would have happily traded her current position for any of those other corps or any of those boring useless, days. It was apparent that this corps was in full flight, and driving forward to slow the Posleen down sounded like a permanent solution to a temporary problem; there was no way that one Meemie unit could stop a Posleen assault of this magnitude.
However, here she was. And maybe, just maybe, the company would survive. All they had to do was shoot down these… whatever they were.
“The computer’s balking,” Specialist Glenn said. The gunner was a female, like her commander, and had fine, light brown hair that constantly escaped from under her crewman’s helmet. She brushed it out of the way and looked up. “It refuses to lock them up. The radar sees them, but the computer won’t aim the gun.”
Chan sighed and slipped down into the turret. She was fairly sure she knew what was happening. The computer software had been pulled from the long defunct Sergeant York program. That system had been a nightmare from the word go, but it was the closest analogue to the Screaming Meemies, so the software had been assumed to be similar.
