Hell's Faire lota-4
Page 19
* * *
“Over here.”
The Himmit had again appeared as if out of thin air, its skin shifting from the color and pattern of tree-bark to its apparently “normal” purple-green. It gestured towards a crack in the ground and flowed rapidly downward and into the hole.
Cally stopped, panting and shook her head. “Hiding in a hole isn’t going to keep us alive in a nuclear explosion!” she shouted.
“You may come or stay,” the Himmit said, sticking the “rear” half of its froglike body out of the hole. “I was requested to retrieve you and the Cyber team. It was not a requirement of debt, however. And I am not going to stay here and be turned into radioactive dust! Four minutes.” With that it disappeared downwards.
“Shit,” she muttered, glancing at Alejandro. “Cybers, huh?” she said, then bent over and slithered into the crack.
It was wider than it looked but not easy to negotiate, even for her; she wasn’t sure if the Cyber team would be able to make it. She crawled and slithered downward at about a twenty-degree angle through a series of turns. It quickly got dark but she crawled onward, wondering what would await her. Probably a Himmit butt, not that they had butts. She had just begun to wonder if the damned thing was simply a Stygian route to hell when she noticed a purple light. Rounding another corner she saw the open hatch of a Himmit ship and a compartment beyond. She quickly crawled through and then moved to the far end to see if the Cybers could make it.
The Himmit was nowhere in sight.
She had heard about Himmit stealth ships but never really expected to see the interior of one. It was… odd. Definitely alien in a way that was hard to define. The compartment was about three meters across with a set of seats on either side. While it was high enough for her, she suspected it would be cramped for the Cybers. The light was just wrong and the seats, while they appeared to be made to fit human-sized creatures, clearly were made wrong for humans. She sat in one to try it out. The seat back was too low and the seat itself too narrow; it was uncomfortable for her and she suspected that the longer-legged Cybers would find it torture after a short while. She supposed that it would be equally difficult for a human to make something comfortable for a Himmit.
The smell in the compartment was acrid, like a leak at a chemical plant that occasionally dealt in garbage and there were odd squeaks and groans in the background. All in all, it was a pretty unpleasant place.
She had just come to that conclusion when the first Cyber clambered out of the narrow passageway and stooped his way into the compartment. He quickly moved to the seat across from her and leaned back, taking off his camouflage hood.
“Himmits,” the guy muttered. “Why’d it have to be Himmits?”
“I take it you’ve been on one of these before?” Cally said, wondering what response she’d get.
“It’s how we got here,” the Cyber replied, looking to the entrance. “We were supposed to walk out and link up with vehicles. I’d rather walk a hundred miles than spend fifteen minutes in one of these things.”
“Well, any port in a storm,” Cally said, philosophically, then frowned. “Not to bitch to a stranger, but this has been a lousy couple of days. My dog’s dead, the horses are dead, my cat’s dead and my grandfather’s dead. My dad is in a fucking forlorn hope and will probably be gone by morning. Oh, and I’ve been in two nuclear bombardments. Being in a Himmit ship is starting to look pretty good.”
She shook her head as the next Cyber entered the compartment, rapidly followed by the rest of the team; the team leader was the last through the hatch. As he stepped through it started to cycle shut. At almost the same time what appeared to be the “front” wall of the vessel dilated open and a young human stepped through.
All of the Cybers froze at the sight of the unknown visitor but Cally couldn’t look away. Except for height, build and hair color he looked a lot like her father; it could have been a brother if Mike O’Neal had one.
On second glance that wasn’t quite the case. The visitor’s arms were longer, hanging almost to his knees, and his nose was much smaller than her dad’s. Actually, except for his age, he looked like…
“Grandpa?”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Knoxville, TN, United States of America, Sol III
2200 EDT Monday September 28, 2009 AD
The massive cannon belched in flame and that was it. The shot had left too fast for the human eye to follow.
The main viewscreen, though, was slaved to a tracking camera that could manage a view of the projectile as it flew through the air, and everyone let out a sigh of relief at still being there. Next to the image was a shot clock that estimated exit of rounds and detonation. The round was “smart” in that it determined its location and height to lay down its lethal cargo precisely, and the only actual drop that was visible was the first. But after first sub-munition ejection a detonation clock started ticking.
“Seven, six…” Castanuelo said. “Damn, I wanted to be outside to watch this!”
“Could we see it?” President Carson asked.
“They’ll see this in Pennsylvania!”
Horner suddenly opened a metal case and ripped out his AID. “O’Neal! Splash in… one second!”
* * *
At the warning O’Neal just shrugged as well as he could inside his armor. He had been tossed around by… Jesus, he’d lost count. At least five nukes in his time. Not to mention being buried in a building by a near-nuclear class explosion, run over by a SheVa gun — twice on that one — and had various and sundry other unpleasant items occur while he was in a suit. Then there was that poor bastard Buckley who had had a space cruiser fall on him.
Frankly, being buried five meters in the ground at the ground zero of a two megaton nuclear explosion wasn’t anywhere near the bottom of his experiences. It was sort of comforting in a way.
“Gotcha,” he said, flipping frequencies to internal. “Battalion, splash over.”
There was a brief rumble, high frequency ground shocks, that preceded the impact, but in less than a second after the first shudder the ground began to spasm around his suit. The shocks went on for about five seconds, about as bad driving a jeep across rough ground, and then it was done.
“That’s it?” someone queried on the general frequency.
* * *
“Grandpa?” Cally said softly, looking up at the stranger.
“Yeah, sweetie,” he replied, stepping forward and ruffling her hair. “It’s really me. Sort of. I guess.”
“But you… I thought…”
“Dead?” he said with a snort.
“Um, yeah.”
“Well, there’s a Tch… Tph… a Crab around here that can explain it better. Basically, the Galactics sort of consider death to be not quite the is/isn’t thing that humans perceive.”
“So were you or weren’t you?” Cally asked, angrily.
“Cally, Princess Bride?”
“Oh. So you were ‘mostly dead.’ ”
“Bingo. I think I was flatlined, if that’s what you mean. But the Himmit got to me in time to administer Hiberzine and then the Crab here… restarted me.”
Cally looked at him again and shook her head. “So are you you?”
“I think so,” Papa said, shrugging his shoulders. “I think there are some holes in my memory. I’m younger though. Strong. It feels… amazingly good.”
“Hah, you’re not the only one!” Cally said. “You should see Shari. You’d pop your shorts.”
“Shari?”
“Long story, I didn’t understand all of it. But they survived and got out of the Urb.”
Papa O’Neal nodded and then frowned. “Out of the Urb? Survived?”
“You didn’t know the Franklin Urb was gone?” Cally asked. “Or that the Posleen are all down the Valley?”
“I’ve been out of it for the last few days. What’s happening?” He looked around at the Cyber team who had started to stow their gear. “And are these white hats or black?”
“Oh, shit,” he said, shaking his head. “Another one?”
Something about the way he said it caused Cally to burst into giggles that led inevitably to a belly laugh and then she found herself crying and holding her sides, unable to stop laughing. “Yeah…” she gasped after nearly a minute, wiping her eyes and at the snot running out of her nose. “Another one.” As she said it, the floor began to rumble.
* * *
Pruitt maneuvered the pack up out of the bowels of the gun and swung it over to MetalStorm Nine. Nine, for some reason, had done a double fire at some point and was flat out of packs. Getting more up, fast enough, would be tough.
The job wasn’t particularly fun. The Posleen had noticed the MetalStorms and were trying, at very long range, to successfully engage them. So stray rounds, railgun, hypervelocity missiles and plasma fire, were flying by on a regular basis. But, on the other hand, at his height he was pretty sure he had the best view of any being in the battle. And it was one hell of a view; the battle was intense.
The infantry had moved back into position on both sides, although at a fair distance, and in the twilight their red tracers could be seen flickering through the darkness, striking, disappearing and bouncing off into the distance. And, of course, the continuous rain of artillery was fascinating. Then, at intervals, the MetalStorms would open up and spit liquid fire into the valley. And all the while the Posleen were filling the air with streams of plasma.
Really spectacular.
As he thought that, a bright flash to his right, over the mountains, caused him to look up from the monitors. Before his head could even come up, the entire horizon behind the mountains flashed bright white in a lightning ripple of strobes, as if klieg lights the size of a state had been flicked on and then off, lighting up the valley for almost four seconds as if it was bright daylight.
He threw his arm up against the light but it was too late to help. Each of the blasts was a nuclear fireball and in the continuous stream of flashes he could see mushroom clouds rising even as the last lightbulb winked out. It was as if the world to the south had been consumed by a sun and then gone back to black.
“Holy shit,” he muttered, his eyes watering, as ground rumble caused the SheVa to sway back and forth. “I’ve got to redefine my definition of spectacular.”
He sat shaking his head to try to get some night vision, hell any vision, back and then gave up.
“Holy shit.”
* * *
Cally stopped laughing as the rumble died away and then grinned at her grandfather. “So, there any cards in this tub?”
“As if I need to lose money on top of everything else,” Papa O’Neal said with an answering grin. “Damn, Granddaughter, it’s good to see your face again.”
* * *
Within the cache the impacts caused one corner of the container to buckle and Billy to slip out of Shari’s arms. And then it returned to the silence of a tomb.
* * *
“UP AND AT ’EM!” O’Neal bellowed over the battalion frequency. “Head for the Gap.”
He put actions to words, scrabbling at the dirt above him and pushing down with his feet. It was a bare fifteen feet to the surface but it still took time, time he was afraid they might not have. Finally he saw an opening above him and popped his head out to look around at total devastation.
As far as the eye could see, and from the edge of the mountain that was a fair distance, there was nothing but scrubbed dirt. Not a stick, not a house, not a scrap of vegetation survived; the very soil had been stripped off in the titanic fire.
He shook his head and checked his radiation monitors, blanching as he did. The suits were more than capable of handling four hundred rems per hour, but it would kill any human stone dead. Or, hell, most cockroaches.
The dust was starting to clear and the moon was breaking out to shine on the ground, but there was something odd about it. Under the moonlight, everything was gray, even under the enhancements of the suits that brought it to daytime ambient. It was bright, but still in shades of black and gray. But still, there was something…
He toggled a switch and a patch of white light shone down from his suit on the stripped granite at his feet and he swore. He swiveled the light around, then walked away from his hole, looking at the ground and swore again.
“General Horner, this is O’Neal.”
* * *
“Glad to hear your voice, old friend,” the general said. “How’d it go?”
“We were underground,” O’Neal replied. Horner could almost hear the shrug over the communicator. “General, about this bomb that just detonated. Where did you say it came from?”
“Knoxville,” Horner replied, puzzled. “Why?”
“I mean, where was it developed?”
“Oak Ridge,” Horner said. “And the University of Tennessee. Why?”
“That figures.” There was a pause. “I just thought that you should know that Rabun County is now orange.”
“What?” Horner thought about that for a moment. “The soil in that area…”
“No, General. The soil, the rocks, the fucking mountains. It’s all orange. And not ‘international distress’ orange, boss. It’s a redder orange than that.”
Horner’s face turned up in a gigantic smile as he looked over at Dr. Castanuelo. The good doctor had just pulled a can of dip out of his back pocket and was reading over the shoulder of one of the techs. He had on a University of Tennessee ballcap and a UT Volunteers windbreaker. Both of them bright orange.
“This is what you get for letting rednecks play with antimatter, boss,” O’Neal said.
Horner didn’t bother to point out an accident of birthplace. There was no question in his mind that the guy who had just painted half of north Georgia in the colors of one of their bitterest football rivals was well described as a “high-tech redneck.”
“Dr. Castanuelo,” he said sweetly, smiling from ear to ear, “could I have a moment of your time?”
* * *
Pruitt had gotten back to work pulling MetalStorm packs as soon as his vision returned. He had lights that he could use, including a big-ass spot that would have lit up the whole top like day. But all things considered he didn’t want to be any more of a target than was strictly necessary.
Fortunately the loading system the SheVa repair guys had installed was simplicity in itself and the crane on Nine had an autograppler that worked, unlike the POS he had used in training. All he had to do was snatch the packs out of the hatch, swing the crane and drop them in the appropriate racks. He was even ahead of the way the Storms were running through them.
Finally he was done, and decided to take a good look around. The crane had a couple of good visual systems on it and slaves to the main monitors, so he started flipping through images.
The best view seemed to be from monitor seven. It was mounted high enough that it had a better view even than the crane and it had thermal imaging so sometimes he could pick out details that way.
In the distance he could see streams of Posleen still coming down the road from the Gap but they were more spread out and not moving nearly as fast. It looked as if there was a light at the end of the tunnel. OTOH, a few more area denial rounds couldn’t hurt.
He swept the monitor to the left and noted that he could just see where East Branch came down from the mountains and opened out. He could see the tracks from where the SheVa had come through the last time and sighed. You should only have to take one of these things over the mountains once in your life.
“Over the mountains,” he sung, swinging the monitor around, “take me across the sky…”
There was a cluster of Posleen on the ridge above East Branch and something about them made him sweep back for another look. He dialed up the magnification but it wasn’t until he hit the thermal imaging system that he was sure what he was seeing.
“Colonel,” he breathed after
a moment. “You’re going to want to take a look out of monitor seven.”
* * *
Mitchell tapped the control and brought the monitor up on the main viewscreen. “What am I looking at, Pruitt?”
“Check out the group on the ridge to the left.” Pruitt sounded dead, as if someone had just ripped his soul out.
“What’s wrong?” the colonel asked, dialing up the magnification. “The ridge just above East Branch?”
“Yes, sir,” Pruitt replied. “Switch to IR.”
Mitchell did, then swore. “Those are… are they human figures?”
* * *
“Captain Chan, reload your guns,” Mitchell said, coldly. “Prepare for close fire support. Reeves, back us off the hill. Pruitt, get your ass down to personnel entrance one.”
“Yes, sir.” The driver checked his monitors and then spun the gun in place, pulling back down the hill. Suspecting what the next drive order would be he pulled all the way back and pushed the rear up the Savannah Church hill. He could see the crunchies arrayed on the hill panicking as the giant mass of metal backed towards them but he had other things to worry about. Like, how much longer he was going to be alive.
“Romeo Eight-Six this is SheVa Nine,” the colonel said on the division artillery net. “I need a brigade time on target box centered on UTM 29448 East, 39107 North. I want everything you’ve got.”
“Uh, roger SheVa,” the controller called back. “That will take a few minutes to effect. And, that’s not our priority of fire.”
“Do it,” Mitchell said. “I don’t care about your priority of fire, do it now.”