by John Ringo
“I’d say fifteen more minutes until they round the corner,” Stewart commented.
“That’s enough time and more,” O’Neal said with a quizzical tone.
“They’re not moving as fast as usual,” Stewart admitted, “but can you see what’s between the blocks?”
“Gaps,” O’Neal responded. “And look right on the edge of the picture,” he continued. There was another pause. “They’re spacing out their battalions.”
“So they hit in a solid stream?” Stewart mused. “I don’t like smart Posleen, boss, I don’t like them at all.”
“Well, they may be smart but they’re slower. Let’s use the time as well as we can.” He looked up to the mountains on either side and frowned. “And let’s hope they don’t figure out how to climb.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Green’s Gap, NC, United States of America, Sol III
0037 EDT Tuesday September 29, 2009 AD
Pruitt looked at the tree-covered mountains filling the main viewscreen and laughed. “Bun-Bun’s a rabbit, not a monkey!”
The repairs on the SheVa had been expedited with remarkable speed, since the SheVa brigade was already in place. By the time the gun got to them, Kilzer and Indy, between them, had worked up a full survey of the damage. After the welders and electricians were done, and some new antipersonnel defenses were installed, it was time to roll. This time with an escort of Abrams and Bradleys, spread out like Chihuahuas herding an elephant.
They had headed up Brushy Fork creek, the Bradleys, Abrams and six-wheel-drive trucks struggling with the torn path left by the SheVa; where the SheVa passed, the rougher parts were laid flat but the weight of the gun turned granite to dust a meter thick. It was, however, the SheVa path or nothing; the narrow dirt road would have been impassable to the tanks even without the damage the giant gun system was doing to it.
They had eventually made their way to their current stopping place, the shoulder of a ridge at the head of Brushy Fork about three thousand meters across a couple of narrow valleys from Green’s Gap. The smaller vehicles had arrayed themselves on other ridges, with a few of the tanks down in the gullies of the creek; there was room for only the SheVa on the hilltop.
The tank crews were up in their hatches looking at the route and shaking their heads in the cold. The sun was long gone, taking with it any warmth. The nearly vertical mountains glittered, frosty under the moon.
“Okay, I for one vote that we turn around,” LeBlanc’s voice crackled over the radio.
“O ye of little faith,” Kilzer said. He had a multicolored three-dimensional view of the terrain up on his display and now tapped a control to bring sections of it up on Pruitt’s targeting system. “Okay, Pruitt, load up a penetrator.”
Pruitt looked at the screen and shuddered. “You’re joking, right?”
“Nope,” Kilzer said, tapping his keyboard again and bringing up a set of fifteen target points on the mountainside. “Okay, it’s going to be an expensive road. But we’ll have a road. And I won’t have to go skiing with you.”
Pruitt looked over at the colonel, who had a pensive expression on his face. “Colonel?”
“Is this going to work, Kilzer?” the officer temporized. “The rounds aren’t that big…”
Kilzer’s laugh was deep and infectious. “Oh, Lord, that’s a good one, sir!” he chuckled. “You’ve obviously been in SheVa combat too long, sir. They’re TEN KILOTON rounds! That’s the equivalent of ten thousand tons of TNT, sir. Twenty million pounds of explosives!”
“Hmm…” After a moment Mitchell grinned and chuckled in return. “You’re right. My version of what is a ‘small’ explosion has gotten sort of skewed. Go on.”
“Each of them is going to vaporize a big chunk of North Carolina rock, sir,” the tech rep pointed out. “And the rock around it is going to settle in rubble. Fifteen shots, by my calculations, will reduce the ridgeline by only two hundred feet or so. But that two hundred feet is going to take out the steepest portions and lay down a ramp — a steep ramp, admittedly — on both sides.”
“Pruitt?” Mitchell said.
“I dunno, sir,” the gunner admitted. “I mean, one side of me says ‘hey, it’s Bun-Bun. No problemo.’ And then the rational side of me says ‘It’s a frigging mountain.’ ” He rubbed under his helmet for a moment then grinned. “What the hell, sir. If fifteen doesn’t do it… Hey, how many do we have in reserve?”
“There’s more coming from the Asheville reserves,” Mitchell said. “We’ll have two full loads of penetrator and six area denial after we shoot fifteen.”
“Colonel, this is your add-ons. What’s the situation?” Major Chan could not hear the conversation and thus was getting curious.
“We’re just discussing some engineering details,” Mitchell replied over the group net. “Okay, Pruitt. Do it.” He keyed his mike again and sighed. “Okay, everybody, stand by for big noise.”
* * *
Major LeBlanc had never seen a SheVa fire and she had to admit that even for someone who crewed Abrams tanks it was impressive. The sixteen-inch smoothbore belched fire with a blast of sound that was like the bellow of a giant. The round itself was, essentially, an enlarged version of the Abrams main anti-tank round, a depleted uranium dart. The main difference being that the SheVa round had a dollop of antimatter at its core.
But like the Abrams “silver bullet” rounds, and the teardrops of the ACS grav-guns, the depleted uranium penetrator and its tungsten stabilization fins left a streak of silver light behind. The light went directly into the shoulder of the right-hand mountain and vanished. There was a flash of light out of the hole, quickly extinguished, and a muted rumble through the ground.
“I hope the next one is a little more impressive,” one of the tank crews said. The shot might as well have been a pebble dropped in the ocean for all the mountains seemed to care.
* * *
Pruitt methodically fired all eight of his onboard rounds. Each of them disappeared virtually without a trace.
“We’re not making any impression that I can see, Kilzer,” Mitchell said.
“We will, sir,” the tech rep replied. But he looked a tad nervous.
Pruitt waited while the reload process went on. Each of the reload trucks, specially fitted HMETT vehicles, had to pull up to the back of the SheVa and load one round at a time. Then the rounds were transported up to the turret armory. It took quite some time and by the end of the exercise the tank crews had gotten out and were walking around, talking, joking and smoking. Some of them were lighting fires to heat up their rations.
“Colonel, you might want the crews in their vehicles,” Kilzer noted as Pruitt loaded the next round.
Feeling like a bit of a martinet, Mitchell passed the order on to LeBlanc who slowly collected her crews. Finally everyone was loaded back up and Mitchell gave Pruitt permission to fire.
The first set of eight rounds had been in a flattened U, following the line of the gap and about two hundred feet below the actual ridgeline. The ninth and tenth rounds were at the center of the U and had the same effect as the others, precisely none.
“Are we going to see any result soon, Kilzer?” Mitchell asked impatiently.
“I thought that last one would have shifted something,” Kilzer said with a frown. “Let me check my notes…”
“What the hell,” Pruitt said, lining up the next shot. “I’ve got rounds to spare.” He aimed at the next target point, on the shoulder of the first hill about sixty feet above the first shot and fired.
Each of the previous rounds had, in fact, made a very solid impression. The antimatter explosion had vaporized a sizable chunk of rock, a sphere ranging from fifty to a hundred meters in diameter. But the refractory material above the explosions had managed to survive and each of the explosions was widely enough spaced that there were ersatz “pillars” between the newly wrought, extremely hot, slightly glowing, caves in the pass’s heart.
The eleventh round, however, penetrated ro
ck that had already been fractured by previous rounds and the impact of the ten kiloton blast propagated along the lightly supported bridge of rock across the top of the pass. With, literally, earthshattering results.
* * *
“Holy shit!” LeBlanc muttered, looking up as the entire pass began to move. Down. “Back us up!” She watched helplessly as a section of mountain larger than the SheVa slowly turned to rubble and began sliding towards three of her tanks. She noted in passing that all of the personnel had dropped into the belly of the vehicles and that they were just getting into motion when her own tank suddenly revved and reversed, slamming her into the coaming. She bounced back into the slag where the hatch used to be, banging her back and tearing a hole in the back of her uniform then howled like a banshee as first one and then two of the tanks disappeared in the avalanche.
* * *
“Ah,” Kilzer said. “Now we’re getting somewhere…”
* * *
“It’s okay, Major,” the colonel said as soothingly he could manage. It had taken a while to get the battalion, and their commander, calmed down enough to have any sort of conversation. Fortunately, most of the tanks weren’t loaded with anything that could really harm a SheVa. Otherwise, it might have come to blows. “Their gun tubes are still exposed. We can hook up to them on our way up the slope and pull them out.”
“You’re going to make more shots!” LeBlanc snapped. “They’re going to get buried.”
“Oh, probably not,” Kilzer said. “Most of the rest of the rubble should go onto the other side. That shot was just designed to lay down a ramp.”
“Lay down a ramp!?” the major shouted. “You just buried two of my crews!”
“It’s not like they’re dead,” the tech rep replied. “I mean, they were in their vehicles when the avalanche hit, right?”
“I am going to come over there — ”
“No, you’re not,” Mitchell said. “Kilzer, shut up and go check your notes or something. Look, Gl… Major, we can get them out. After we finish the shots and open up the pass. As long as we can get a chain around anything, the SheVa will yank them out like a cork.”
“I knew it was a bad idea coming along on this trip.”
* * *
Pruitt picked up a largish rock and banged on the only bit of metal visible on the turret, which was the edge of the hatch. “Anybody in there?” he called.
The response was muffled but somehow the profanity filtered through. Actually, from the sounds of it it was surprising it didn’t scorch through.
“Okay!” he yelled. “We’ll have you out in a second!”
The crew of the first Abrams to be yanked out of the rubble was scattered across the scarred surface of their tank, breathing real air and swearing like… well, soldiers that had been buried alive and then unceremoniously yanked out of the ground. The vehicle itself was fully functional — it took more than a multiton avalanche of granite to break an Abrams — but the company commander and the major were having a hard as hell time convincing them that they had to get back in and drive.
Pruitt checked the fit of the massive chain on the gun mantlet and then walked up the slope about a hundred meters. There was always the possibility that the chain could slip and he wanted to be far enough away that any possible reaction to that mishap would pass him by. He wasn’t particularly worried about the chain breaking; it was the same design used to anchor aircraft carriers and had been adapted for SheVa recoveries. An Abrams tank, even covered in rubble, was not even in the same country much less league.
“Okay, Reeves, do it.” He looked up at the SheVa as it began to inch up the slope. He could tell that the driver had applied less than ten percent power. Despite that, and despite going up a thirty-degree slope, the chain snapped taut for just a moment and then the seventy-two-ton tank came out of the ground like a racehorse out of the gate.
“Whoa there, big fella!” he called as the weight of the chain dragged the Abrams farther up the slope and then stopped. “And the next time you need roadside assistance…”
* * *
Mitchell walked over to where the battalion commander was checking on the crew of the second tank. They hadn’t taken any damage in the avalanche but the TC had managed to break his nose when the vehicle was ripped out of the ground like a weed.
The colonel waited to the side until LeBlanc was done talking to the crew, then walked farther away as she strode over. The ground was rough, littered with rocks from boulders the size of small cars down to pebbles and dust, so he had to watch his step. In more ways than one.
“Well, we have a road,” he said, gesturing at the pass. What had previously been a slight saddle with sharp cliffs on each side was now a deep and nearly flat U shape. “You have your tanks back and everybody’s happy.”
“They could have been killed,” she muttered, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She turned to look up at the SheVa and shook her head. “That thing is just…”
“Amazing?”
“Dangerous,” she answered, but after a second she grinned. “And amazing.”
“Yeah, it is that,” Mitchell said softly. “But when you’ve got a seven-thousand-ton vehicle on one side and a seventy-ton vehicle on the other, being able to tow it, or, hell, pull it out of set concrete, isn’t that surprising. The bad part is, we haven’t met up with what all that amazing design is made to fight. And if you think this has been bad, wait until we meet up with our first lander.”
* * *
Getting the support forces across the gap turned out to be much harder than getting the mech over the ridge. In the end, the Abrams and the SheVa had been forced to tow the trucks over much of the rubble.
But they had finally made it down into the Cowee valley and the whole assemblage stopped just short of the intersection of Cowee and Caler creeks to work out their movement plan.
“We’ve got to get down the Tennessee Valley and link up with the division, probably near Watauga Creek.” Colonel Mitchell shone a flashlight on the maps and then looked up at the surrounding hills. Most of the armored force was up on them, looking around for Posleen, with a few of the vehicles refueling at a time. None of the tracks were particularly low on fuel but this might be the last chance to stop for gas, and tankers hated running on anything other than a full tank.
So far the enemy had been staying out of sight, which was fine by him.
“Not a long drive but a pretty hard one. It’s going to be a tight fit going through by Iotla. And there’s probably going to be Posleen in front of us and behind. I don’t know why there aren’t any in this area. There were when we came through the first time, but they were behind us then. I’d, frankly, expected this valley to be crawling with the little bastards.”
“I’ll put a couple of recon squads of Brads out front,” LeBlanc said. “Maybe three, four thousand meters out. In this country any further would be pointless and that way if they run into trouble we can snug up fast.”
“Works for me,” Mitchell said. “But we need to keep some support on the trucks.”
“I’ll put Charlie company in ass-end Charlie position,” the mech force commander said, taking off her crewman’s helmet and scratching her hair. “I’d say Bravo on point, then Alpha, then you, then the support vehicles and Charlie in trail. I’ll ride with Alpha.”
“Concur,” the colonel replied, flicking off the light. “I figure I don’t have to remind you to keep an eye out in every direction?”
“Nope,” LeBlanc said with a tight smile. “But you can be sure I’ll pass the word along.”
LeBlanc scanned the commander’s viewer around and shook her head. She had paused the company along the forward slope of the ridges south of Cowee Church as Bravo bounded forward. So far the enemy had yet to make an appearance, which just made no sense whatsoever.
There were high ridges to both sides and the Tennessee River snuggled the ridges to the west. It flowed northward from the wide valley near Franklin, then passed through a na
rrow gap which opened up into the valley they were currently in. The terrain was extremely broken, with a mixture of farms and woodland. The area was actually well suited to defense, against either humans or Posleen. The problem being that they were in a movement to contact and if they made contact they would have to assault through. The terrain was not well suited to assault.
She swung the viewer to the southwest at the lower hills across the river. Posleen, by and large, were not very good at reading maps but they had a certain logic to their movement. They wanted big targets, towns, factories and cities, so they tended to stick to large roads, making the generally valid assumption that they would lead to the best targets. But they occasionally branched off on small roads and there was a network of those across the river. She took another look at the map and shrugged, keying her microphone.
“Juliet Six-One, this is Alpha Six-One, over.” Time to send some screening forces across the river.
“Juliet Six-One, over.”
Well, at least Lieutenant Wolf, the new Bravo company commander, was awake. He’d been the Bravo executive officer until Savannah, when the former commander had turned up among the missing. She’d found out after the battle that the XO had ended up leading the charge and immediately put him in command.
“Find a ford and send a platoon to make sure we don’t have any visitors across the river, over.”
“Roger, out.”
She waited a moment until she saw a force of three Bradleys and an Abrams nosing down towards the river then looked to the south again.
“Charlie Six-One, what’s your position, over?”
“Getting ready to stop just west of Buzzard Ridge; recon elements are just short of Iotla. Be aware that we’re basically in road march formation; there’s no room to spread out and there’s no way to cross the river around here.”
