by John Ringo
* * *
The Posleen scout company trotted in good order down the broad highway. Their God King followed them pensively despite the rearing buildings of the great prize plain before him. His was the fifth company from the oolt'ondar to be in the lead. Between the ambushes of the tenar and the ballistic weapons of the thresh the horde had lost oolt after oolt. He was determined to last longer than the rest.
To avoid the ambushes that had plagued his fellows, he had a scout well out in the lead of his oolt. The oolt'os was a superior individual, it could nearly talk. The Kessentai's sole eson'antai had been born from their coupling and he trusted the oolt'os to respond effectively to mildly complex problems. If any of the oolt'os would spot a problem, it would be that one.
So he froze his tenar then slid to the side when the point let out a surprised cry. However, the cry was not one of fear or anger and the point almost immediately turned and ran towards him.
In the oolt'os's hand was a strange device. A metal stake, dirt dribbling to the ground unnoticed, topped with a symbol. The metal of the symbol looked like . . . but it couldn't be . . .
The God King let out a cry like that of his scout and practically snatched the golden trinket from its hand. He patted the excited semimoron on the back and gave it bits of thresh from his own hand in approval.
A trailing scoutmaster slid his tenar forward, wondering what the excitement was about.
The God King held the implement overhead. "Pure heavy metal," he crowed, waving it back and forth.
"No," shouted the newcomer his crest standing straight up in excitement. "Is there more?"
"Let us find out," he cried and waved to his oolt. "Forward, find more! Follow the road!"
* * *
"They're at the first Babe," said Mosovich, adjusting the sixty-power spotting scope. He smiled faintly at the silent pantomime in the distance. "It looks like they took it hook, line and sinker."
"We ought to fire 'em up," said Ersin sourly, leaning back on the head of the hotel-room bed. From the suite in the Marriott they had a clear view of the advancing host. He took a bite out of the dehydrated peaches from his MRE and wrinkled his face like a rat. "That's what cannon-cockers are for." He stopped talking as the absorbent fruit removed all the moisture from his mouth.
"Suck 'em in, General," said John Keene to the air. "Don't shoot till you see the yellow of their eyes." With the defenses completed, he found himself flapping around at loose ends. After considering his options he decided that the best place to be would be with the SF team. Among other things they were the only people in Richmond he knew weren't gunning for him. They also made fair bodyguards.
He now lay on his back on the floor, nursing the first beer he'd had in two days. He took another sip of the astringent brew and smacked his lips. "Let 'em get in the sack."
"Yeah," said Mueller, assembling a sandwich on the table. He carefully laid out a sliver of ham, layered it with lettuce, then another layer of ham, lettuce, pastrami . . . "We want as many of 'em as possible to reach Schockoe Bottom."
"Fine," snorted Ersin cynically. "Be complicated. All that complicated means is more to go wrong."
"It looks good so far," said Keene, defensively. He sat up and drained the bottle to the dregs. "They're going for it," he finished with a belch and tossed the bottle in the wastecan.
"That they are," agreed Mosovich. "But I don't believe they're going to get to Schockoe without anybody firing. That'd take more discipline than this Army's got."
* * *
"Come to papa," whispered Specialist Fourth-Class Jim Turner, snuggling the .50 caliber sniper rifle into his shoulder. For once he was able to use the tripod that came with the beast and he now waited impatiently for the signal to fire.
The interstate highway was marked at regular intervals by survey stakes with colored ribbons attached to them. With the time they had to prepare, each company was detailed with specific areas of fire and those were then broken down to the point where every rifleman, grenadier and sniper had a specific area to concentrate on. The snipers were given larger fields of fire to work with, but even then the section of interstate that was "his" was only two hundred yards long and a hundred deep. There were currently three God Kings, his particular target, in his box. He had already decided to take the rearmost one first and work his way forward. That one was moving faster than the main force, coming up through the host with his normals trailing. As soon as the signal came, he was history.
Jim was of two minds about whether everyone could hold fire until the signal. The order was to stay out of sight but ready and not watch the approach of the enemy. Most of the troops had been ordered to sit on the floor, their manjacks safed, and wait for the order. How many of them were doing that he didn't know. He wasn't. And then there were the fifteen or twenty thousand manjacks set up to cover the whole of the interstate and Schockoe Bottom. The only reason none of them had fired yet was that all the ones the Posleen had come across were on safe. Sooner or later they were going to cross the laser of one that was overlooked. The odds of everybody getting the word and getting it right were slim.
On the other hand, virtually everybody had also gotten the word that the Posleen reacted violently to fire. If they didn't wait for the signal and somebody fired on their own, the whole host would target that single individual. So, when somebody did screw it up, it'd be Darwin Awards time. And the NCOs and officers were supposed to be . . .
"Turner, Goddamnit!" said Sergeant Dougherty from the doorway.
"I'm just watching, Sergeant," he answered reasonably. Dougherty was a hard case. She ought to have gone Fleet Strike with the way she ran around all the time like a spike was stuck up her ass. On the other hand, she was fair and, more to the point, right. He wasn't supposed to be where he was. "I'm not gonna fire." Nonetheless he stepped away from the rifle.
"I don't give a shit, get on the floor like everybody else! We've been taking magazines away for less than that!"
"Yes, ma'am."
"You ought to know better. If you can't handle the responsibility of being a sniper, we can find somebody who can! An' don't call me ma'am," snapped the short, heavy-set, dishwater blonde in summary. "I work for a living."
Her back straight and face set in a disapproving frown she stepped back into the hallway to continue her circuit of positions. Time to go find some more ass to chew.
* * *
Inevitably everyone didn't get the word.
"How is the road to the east?" asked Artulosten. The returning scoutmaster looked grumpy. Many of his oolt'os were limping and all looked miserable.
"Horrible," snapped Arstenoss. "There is nothing out there, the buildings burned, the roads destroyed or scattered with these." He held up a caltrop. "I've half my oolt injured, many of them made to thresh by these damn things."
The battlemaster took the offending item and looked at it curiously. It was a small bit of metal. He understood its purpose, to present a small knife turned upwards. "How could these kill an oolt'os?"
"They don't kill. But when they are driven into a foot, many of the oolt'os panic and roll. Then they are driven into them all over their body. I had to put nearly two dozen down. I finally said enough and came back. There is nothing of interest out there. I understand that there is a road of heavy metals here?"
"Indeed. This must be a place of great worth. The lead force has encountered no resistance and found marker after marker made of pure heavy metals. They are all on the one road and appear to lead towards the other side of that river." He pointed to where the distant James was partially visible. "That would normally be the objective." He pointed up at the skyline. "And it is packed with thresh, but the host seems content to follow the markers to their source."
The interstate had already started to bend away from the city proper. "Other scoutmasters have returned from the west with much the same news. There is nothing of worth out there now. What would have been of use has been destroyed or removed."
"Tho
se buildings are packed with thresh," noted the scoutmaster, studying his sensors. Every looming skyscraper was patterned with red. "Why don't they fire?"
"Fear of the host," snorted the battlemaster. He gestured to the front where they were preceded by the thousands of Posleen of the vanguard and backward to where another million and a half followed. "They are numerous but not nearly so numerous as the host. They would be fools to fire."
* * *
The Posleen normal was responding to a call of nature. Posleen would drop solid and liquid waste without question. But it was time for a birthing, and that required a modicum of privacy lest a fellow oolt'os succumb to hunger. In camp, even a temporary camp, there would be an egg pit where the leather-skinned egg would be dropped until it hatched. And there would be designated nursemaids to remove the hatchlings to the hatchling pens, there to fight for survival until they reached maturity.
But when the host was moving, the best that could be done was to set the eggs aside and let the hatchlings free. Most would die, even more than in the pens. But there was no easy way on the Path and the normal could care less. All it wanted to do was relieve the discomfort and nausea of the fully mature egg.
It trotted away from its group and down off the interstate to the east; the western wall towards the thresh was a sheer bluff topped with barbed wire so there was no going that way. It had to cut a fence, but that was easily done with its monomolecular short sword. There was a small building of nondescript purpose immediately available. It was under strict instructions not to enter buildings without permission, but being out of sight was enough for the purpose. It trotted around the back of the building and started the birthing process.
Its abdomen began to ripple and the ripples spread quickly up its neck. It had almost waited too long. A bulge appeared at the base of its neck and traveled upward like a python swallowing a cat in reverse. Finally it spat up a spotted, leathery egg the size of a small chicken. It licked the last birth juices off the egg, tossed it disdainfully against the wall of the abandoned subsidized housing and trotted back towards the interstate. Mission complete.
The normal's company had gotten far ahead of it. It hurried through the smashed buildings and hacked-down and burned trees along the interstate trying to catch up to its god. As it did it passed through an invisible beam of light.
Everything was wrong with the manjack. It was not on safe. It was pointed more or less sideways into another brigade's area. And the linked ammunition leading to it was bent around the corner of a desk, ensuring that the weapon would fire for the shortest time possible and then jam.
The team from the Seventy-First Infantry Division had set up the weapon and its bitchingly heavy ammunition cases with unseemly haste. They were more interested in getting back to their crap game than whether the weapon was aimed or the belts of ammunition run smoothly. The sergeant who was supposed to ensure that the gun was aligned properly and on safe was enjoying the fruits of her position with a good-looking and limber young soldier. The first sergeant was playing poker with two of the platoon sergeants and a warrant officer from supply. The company commander was at battalion ensuring that the battalion commander knew just how well his company was being run.
* * *
In the end it was all the same. The weapon fired twelve rounds and then jammed. The 7.62mm bullets, two of them tracer, drifted with apparent laziness through the air until they reached their point of aim and dug into the soil of Virginia. Since the manjack had never been boresighted, they did not even strike their erstwhile target, which continued on towards its objective oblivious of being fired at.
* * *
Specialist George Rendel had just thrown a three and snatched the dice back up. He rattled them a few times and prepared to throw again when the manjack across the room stuttered its twelve rounds. He froze, wide eyes echoed by everyone else in the game.
"We forgot . . ." someone said and the world fell in.
* * *
The Posleen were used to fighting enemies who were visible. Most of their opponents had no history of warfare and, therefore, had never heard of such items as camouflage, cover or concealment.
However, they had developed a process for dealing with humans' cowardly tendency to hide themselves while fighting. The God Kings' saucers possessed not only weapons, but excellent sensors. So, even if the position of a firing platform was not clear, the sensors could pinpoint it. When there were hundreds of positions firing they tended to become overloaded with information, but when there was a single target it was easy. And wherever the God King fired, there fired its company.
There were over twenty God Kings in sight of the manjack. All of them fired at the sensor point. And so did approximately eight thousand normals.
A storm of flechettes and missiles slammed into the side of the skyscraper. Since Posleen aim was weak at that range, the storm was diffused over two or three floors and half the side of the building. Hundreds of soldiers throughout the structure were killed and injured by the storm of fire. The only survivors of the laggard company were the company commander, downstairs in the battalion TOC, and the first sergeant and platoon sergeants in their poker game.
The plasma cannons and hypervelocity missiles, designed to defeat plate armor, cut upward through floor after floor, most of them passing entirely through the building. Structural members were cut and the building reeled with the impact of the storm of fire.
Throughout the line, thousands of heads popped up to see why the storm of fire had occurred. Some individuals, more panicked, brave or foolish than their fellows, started to fire. However, in every case other, wiser, heads prevailed and soldiers were ordered, cajoled or wrestled to the floor to prevent creating another target. The single burst had proven the truth of the order and, despite the ongoing hammer from the Posleen, the check fire held.
With no further fire forthcoming, the Posleen resumed their interrupted advance towards their distant El Dorado.
CHAPTER 50
Richmond, VA, United States of America, Sol III
1417 EDT October 10th, 2004 ad
"This is scary," said General Keeton, staring at the hundreds of monitors set up throughout the battle control room. The large meeting hall in the R.J. Reynolds facility was crammed with intelligence technicians and a few conscripted secretaries. The group was deciphering the data from the video cameras strung along the route of advance and keying it into the battlefield control system. General Keeton was left with the summarized version to work with. The twenty-four-inch monitor appropriated from the head of Reynolds' Management Information Systems department was indicating that the Posleen vanguard had just reached the floodwall and was spreading out to either side of the entrance.
He almost felt embarrassed by the appropriation. The company had been surprisingly enthusiastic in their support of the defense. The local vice president for facilities had organized most of the support and had rousted out the MIS head and dozens of technicians to cobble together the network Keeton was working from. Integrating the military system and the various PCs and Macintoshes that were being used would have taken a military contractor ten years and two hundred billion dollars. The Reynolds' MIS folks, told to just figure out a way, had jury-rigged a fully functional system in hours. It just showed what happened when you gave clear goals, plenty of resources and let competent people get on with the job.
The whole defense was like that. Once the plan was in place, he had barely been able to keep up. So many little details had been handled by people who realized there wasn't time to argue. From Keene, who had been a veritable whirlwind, directing projects here and there, to Sergeant Gleason from the SF team who had strong-armed half a dozen intransigent hospital administrators into providing impromptu MASH units.
There had been the other side as well. He had generated a simple order. If a situation came to the attention of a general officer in which an officer of captain's rank or above was slowing down the progress of the defense for political or bureaucr
atic reasons, that officer was to be relieved of commission and sent to the front to dig foxholes. He had fully twenty former field-grade officers and three flag officers wielding shovels. When the defense was all over he was going to have to sort it all out. The generals were likely to be a problem.
In the meantime he had a godlike view of the approaching enemy, a clear view of the thousands of them spreading through the kill-box and enough support in place to fight for days. And he'd only had to deal with three problems in the last hour. Remarkable.
But it was about time to give the signal to open fire. He suspected he was just about to be very, very busy.
He keyed the headset microphone that connected him to the Tactical Control Officer. "Okay, ADC. Open the ball."
* * *
The technique was called time-on-target. Depending on the distance to the target and the type of weapon, it takes a certain amount of time for an artillery shell to reach its objective. Some artillery, like mortar, fires at a high angle. These projectiles describe a high arc and take a relatively long time to reach their target. Some artillery is fired on a flatter angle and takes less time to reach a target.
This phenomenon was known, but up until World War II no one had paid much attention to it. However, early on during that war a senior American artillery officer had determined that a better "punch" could be gotten if the initial salvo of an artillery barrage arrived more or less simultaneously.
After thinking about this for a relatively short time, he decided to try having guns fire at timed intervals. With proper planning, all of the rounds would arrive within seconds of each other. The technique was discovered to work quite well, as surviving Germans were happy to attest after the war. And a new technique in the old, old game of artillery was born.
* * *
Arstenoss shot a spiteful plasma bolt at the towering wall. The lead Kessentai had loaded their tenars with heavy metal and retreated to the rear. The treasure could be bartered for prime genetic samples and fiefs, disdaining the necessity to fight for them. Now the host had reached this demon-bedamned wall, with the symbol of those thrice-damned and soul-chewed military technicians on it, and there seemed no way to follow the trinkets onward. The few God Kings that had floated their tenars above the wall had been removed from the Path. To make matters worse the trinkets had been getting larger and larger as the road progressed. Demons only knew what the eventual horde would look like. Faced with the potential for riches and the sudden blockage, tens of thousands of the host were packing into the valley, looking for more treasures or for the cowardly thresh to at least show themselves. A small bridge had been found to the east and many Kessentai were leaning that way, but it was both heavily defended and very small. It would take days for the host to cross the river and take the thresh from behind. Occasional blasts of fire out of frustration would drift up towards the dots of positions in the towers without eliciting response.
