John Ringo: Eye of the Storm

Julio had tried to get into Fleet itself, getting trained as a Fleet tech would be even better than getting a security gig. But all the slots for Fleet were filled. It was only after he joined that he discovered Fleet was… restrictive. Towards the end of the War, North America had been cut off and Europe virtually cut to ribbons. Most of the replacement personnel for Fleet, therefore, came from the southeast Asian islands area, Indonesia and the Phillipines especially. These days there were a few remaining original officers and NCOs in the Fleet from Northern European backgrounds but it was about 90% Indo or Flip with a smattering of surviving Chinese. It wasn’t anything official, but it was amazing how few survivors from the rest of the world made it into Fleet.

Fleet Strike, though, was less restrictive. Also less alluring. Fleet’s job when they took a planet was to fly overhead and hit Posleen concentrations with orbital kinetic strikes or, occasionally, a burst of heavy duty plasma. It was about as dangerous as shooting fish in a barrel; no serious concentration of Posleen space-craft had been fought in fifty years. The first three waves of Fleets, shattered units rebuilt and recrewed time and again, had bled to create those conditions. That, too, explained the shortage of people in Fleet with Northern European backgrounds; millions of men and women died in those actions.

Fleet Strike, though, had to do the rest of the work. They had to get down on the ground and dig out the smart ones, the ones that had dug in and tried to hold. They would hunt and flush a planet for a year or more, living down in the muck, until it was considered “pacified.” And occasionally they got into shit like this, a seriously dug in Posleen force with a smart commander. Seriously dug in enough that the Fleet, despite constant pounding, had been unable to defeat it from orbit.

This was when Fleet Strike earned its pay. And especially the SheVa and ACS arm, the most elite of the ground combat forces.

As he flipped upwards, ready for the blast, Julio saw another infantryman crouch by his hole. There was only enough room in the hole for one, but the other man’s suit was small and the private almost pinged for him to pile in on top. But the suit didn’t appear to care that the entire area was about to be hammered by a bagillion joules of energy. The wearer simply crouched, extended rock jacks and took a knee, slamming the meter long jacks downwards until the suit’s gauntlets were balled fists on the ground.

The titanic explosion blotted out almost every sensor. But quantum state view and neutron reads, especially neutron reads, were still up. By the hellish light cast by decaying matter Julio could see the suit leaning into the plasma, seemingly unafraid, even revelling in the wash of stripped atoms. Julio’s suit temperature had hopped up sixteen degrees despite the best efforts of his environmental system; what the other wearer must be experiencing he could hardly imagine and didn’t want to.

As soon as the plasma blast was past, Julio began scrambling out of the hole, checking his readouts to see who in his section had survived. But his suit’s AID automatically overrode his request and frantically pinged a name onto his HUD, the karat laid squarely over the suit beside him. The wearer was short but plug-like, his suit covered in a strange design like a green monster. Despite the blast of plasma, the design was still unblemished, so it was clearly etched deep into the suit, perhaps even woven into the very atomic structure.

The suit slowly stood and stamped both feet on the seered ground. The stamps crunched through the glassy surface and gave the wearer a solid footing, like a bull pawing the ground just before a charge.

“General O’Neal?” Julio asked, amazed that the corps commander was right on the front lines. “Sir? Are you okay?”

“Never fucking better, private,” Lieutenant General Michael O’Neal growled. “A nuke’s better than a dry cleaners. Now, let’s kick some Postie ass.”

The Posleen commander was good, but he’d just made his first mistake. Two, actually. The casta round, named after the slightly insane human professor who first created an antimatter cluster bomb, had been slightly off-line of the ACS unit deployed across the plain. If it had been directly overhead, Mike would have dug in like everyone else. But as he saw the deployment he immediately recognized that the nukes, large as they were, were too far away to destroy an ACS, especially the customized suit he wore.

The commander’s second mistake was in using a casta at all. The explosion probably caught a few cherries who were too slow to dig in and certainly shut down inter-suit communication while the plasma wash was over the area. But that took only a moment. The Posleen defenders would have had to pull into their bunkers to avoid the blast. It would take them a moment to get back in position, and that assumed that their commo wasn’t down entirely. The 11 th, ACS Corps, the “Black Tyrone,” though, was going to be ready to cock and rock in bare seconds after the explosion. They’d damned well better be ready or they’d have to deal with him . Anyone in the Corps, from the lowest private — like the kid cowering in the hole — up to his division commanders would rather battle a Posleen bare-handed then let him down. And the Bastards were within sprinting distance of the outer Posleen defenses.

Mike had considered calling in a casta himself, but he’d have had to convince Fleet higher that it was a “judicious action.” Fucking bean counters. They were more worried about the loss of the suits, each of which cost as much as a corvette, than the men, but it would still take time. Time he didn’t have. By hitting the unit with a casta, the Posleen commander had done his job for him.

Mike took the time as the plasma washed over his suit to do a quick assault frag. It was pretty straightforward. Custer would have loved it. “Take the outer defenses.”

The Posleen “redoubt” was really a small mountain range rising out of plains on all four sides, the geological term was a ‘basolith’. It was the last major point of resistance on R-1496 Delta and absolutely infested with Posleen and their automated forges. There were heavy anti-ship and missile ports in the upper reaches that had intercepted everything that fleet had thrown at them and actually taken two destroyers out that had stumbled into its arc of fire. The mountains, probably tree covered once but now slagged and black from titanic explosions, were impenetrable from space. That left taking them on the ground.

As long as they had food and materials for their ammo, and Mike bet that the commander had stocked up on both, the Posleen could hole up indefinitely. That couldn’t be allowed. He’d been tasked with clearing this dirt ball and he was damned well going to clear it.

Even while he was speaking with the private the orders flashed down to the division commanders then were split to brigades, battalions, companies and even down to the individual soldiers. The basic order: “CHARGE!!!” was the first thing to hit and then subtleties “CHARGE THAT PLASMA PIT!” were filtered through the commanders. In all it took about thirty seconds, which is a long time in combat. But it sure as hell beat aides de camp on horseback.

Mike wasn’t going to let his boys beat him to it, either. He started forward, slow at first then accelerating, commanding his suit into a run and loosening his legs so that the suit could exceed the ability of human legs to flicker back and forth. The rest of the units were keeping to the speed of their slowest suit, maintaining a careful line as they sprinted forward. So Mike, who had mastered the skitter run technique before most of his brigade commanders were born , was out in the lead.