John Ringo - Vorpal Blade

“We’ll hold ’em,” Hedger said. “We’ve got the stairway covered and… Aaaaah!”

“Dr. Robertson, did you get that?” Bartlett asked.

“Yes, I did,” the biologist said. “And, no, I don’t know what it means.”

“All teams,” Lieutenant Mark Van Groll said calmly. “They’re coming up through the floors. Second level is—” The platoon leader of Third Platoon was cut off in mid-sentence.

“ Grapp , grapp , grapp! ”

The Marines were boiling up the stairs and taking positions around the room.

“They’re tearing through the floor!” Revells yelled. “They’re—” The stone floor under him erupted and he dropped into the hole, screaming and firing his Gatling at the monsters that were tearing at his armor.

Captain MacDonald looked out the window at the courtyard. No joy, there; it was covered in Demons. As he watched, a beetlelike head erupted, looked around, then most of the courtyard punched up as the massive beast surfaced.

There was, however, a roof below. It wouldn’t hold the Wyverns, but…

“Dr. Robertson,” the captain said, holding out a hand. “How well do you jump?”

Clay felt the ground under him give way and he shook his head.

“This is a grapped -up place to die.”

“No maulk , man,” PFC Smith said, turning to present his back.

The two went back to back and as they dropped they stayed together, arms locked. The Gatlings didn’t need arm controls, being controlled by eye movements.

The Demons had stacked on top of each other to tear at the floor and the two descending Wyverns knocked the pyramid over. The Demons just scrambled back up and started tearing but the two Gatlings tore into them, ripping them to shreds. The two suits of armor were still against a wall and for a moment they held the horde off.

Then one of the ripped Demons pulled itself forward, its guts trailing on the floor, and ripped up into Clay’s armor.

“Sir, if I may,” Top said.

“Go for it,” the CO said.

“Join arms if you will, sir,” Top said. “Bartlett! Roberts! Marines! Circle up, face out!”

The Demons were coming up the stairs as well and when Staff Sergeant Rocco tried to retreat from the door they swarmed him.

“Concentrate fire on that, please,” Top said, even though he was facing the other direction. “Right, now, hop !”

Two hops was all it took and the overstressed floor gave way.

There were Demons waiting on the level below, but when two tons of rock and fourteen tons of Wyvern dropped on them, they weren’t doing much fighting.

The group not only fell through that level but the one below and, floor by floor, into the basement.

“Right,” Top said, clambering out of the rubble. “Down the hole.”

There was still a trickle of Demons coming out of the hole, but most of them seemed to have been in the upper floors. Quite a few of those had fallen with the group, but they were in a daze from the rocks and fall, those that weren’t killed by it, and the group finished them off, then darted to the hole.

“Top, this is where they’re coming from,” the CO pointed out.

“And there is a rather large one in the courtyard, sir,” the first sergeant said. “But we will fight our way to the courtyard, then hunker down. How long until the ship gets here?”

“Mac, you still there?”

“Some of us, sir,” the captain said.

“We’re on sight. Clearing the courtyard… now.”

“We’re going out of commo,” MacDonald said. “But we’ll be back in a moment.”

“Bailey, Holland, you have point,” Top said.

“Roger that, Top,” Corporal Chris Bailey gestured for his rifleman then got down on elbows and knees. “Let’s go, Holley.”

“This really sucks,” PFC Holland said, squeezing into the narrow tunnel next to his team leader. Immediately, he saw a Demon headed for them and bit down on his fire circuit, blowing it to pieces. They were big pieces, though. “How we getting through that ?”

“More power,” Bailey said, firing his Gatling and ripping up the Demon even more. “Now we push.”

“Bartlett, Roberts, you’ve got back door,” Captain MacDonald said.

“Roger that, sir,” Bartlett said. “You first, Garrett.”

“No arguments,” the staff sergeant said, backing into the hole.

A Demon dropped from the upper floors and Bartlett blew it against the wall, then started backing into the tunnel.

As he did, a rock rolled aside and a Demon reached out with one claw, ripping into the back of his Wyvern, severing his ammo feed and piercing the back of his armor.

“ Grapp ,” Bartlett said. “Gun’s down and I’ve lost containment.” He turned his head and saw the claw ripping into his armor.

Another and another dropped from the still uncleared upper floors. The two Demons approached the trapped SF master sergeant cautiously, but he couldn’t fire.

“Right,” Bartlett said. “Gary, you well back?”

“What are you going to do, Ed?” the staff sergeant asked.

“Just get the grapp out of here,” Bartlett said. “I’m going to close this grapping hole. Get way the grapp back.”

“Top Sergeant, we gotta move!”

“We’re moving as fast as we can,” First Sergeant Powell said. “Why do we have to move faster?”

“Because this place is about to blow!”

Smart people in the military are a joy and a pain. The problem is that military life creates a great degree of boredom. And smart people try to find ways to become unbored. Certain types of smart people play practical jokes. Others act up. Still others, though, tinker.

Master Sergeant Ed Bartlett was a tinkerer. So when he’d gotten a Mark V Wyvern, he had tried to discover everything that a Wyvern should and should not do.

One of the things he discovered, and told no one else, was that under certain very precise conditions, the americium reactor on the Wyvern could be forced to do things other than engage in controlled reaction. It was a very “hot” reactor, the radioactive material very pure and very finely packed. It was, in fact, right on the edge of being a nuclear bomb, rather than a nuclear reactor.

And in certain circumstances it could be forced to change its mind.

The term is “sub-critical reaction.” The bomb was below the yield of any weapon in the nuclear inventory. Only a very little bit of the americium could be forced to enter unrestricted chain reaction. But a very little bit of nuclear explosion is a lot of explosion.

“Whoa!” the XO said as the converted barracks blossomed up and outwards. “What the grapp caused that?”

“Command, Tactical. We just got a nuclear spike from the location of the palace.”

“I’m pretty sure we didn’t issue any special munitions down there,” the CO said. “We didn’t issue any special munitions, right?”

“I’m sure we would have noticed, sir,” the XO said.

“Mac, you there?” the CO said. “Talk to me, Mac.”

“Sort of!” Captain MacDonald said.

The narrow tunnel had blossomed out into some seriously un narrow tunnels. And the big beetle that had been in the courtyard had reoccupied them when it felt its armor getting singed by lasers.

Now the Marines surrounded it, pouring fire into the thing. Which its armor was shrugging off.

“Aaah!” Corporal Bailey screamed as one of the thing’s claws caught him and flung him across the thirty meter wide room. He slammed into the wall and slid to the ground, his armor limp.

“Check fire!” Top shouted. “Holland! Wave at it!”