John Ringo: Eye of the Storm

The Posleen defenses were coming back online, slowly, as God Kings got their normals out of their deep holes, back in position and firing. The wall of the range was one interlocking defense after another and the darting suit was instantly the target of each of the positions in range as they come online.

But with the suit handling the running and dodging, he was free to bring up his grav-gun and engage. The M-288 grav-gun accelerated pellets of depleted uranium to a noticeable fraction of light speed so as each hit it generated a small kinetic explosion.

Most of the explosions burst back out of the gun positions. Mike had been firing and moving in suits for better than half a century with damned little desk time. He’d have to ask his AID to count the number of planets he’d battled Posleen on and that didn’t count five years of fighting them day in and day out on Earth during the invasion. Firing on the run was as natural to him as breathing and far more precise. The grav rounds were entering the tiny firing slits and exploding on the inside of the bunkers.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t taking fire. As fast as he took out one defense point another came online. But hitting a skittering suit was no easy task, even for the God King defenders with automated systems. First of all, he was up to over two hundred kilometers per hour in direct movement and the suit was adding side jinks, especially when it detected targeting systems on it. It telegraphed the jinks to him, the semi-intelligent underlayer of the suit sending him carefully coded nudges and the AID sending small sparkles that told him where the point was going to be as it jinked. Mike, the suit, the AID, had all fought for decades together and existed as an almost cybernetic organism, three systems with one mind.

He was, by a long shot, the most deadly user of a suit in the short history of the ACS. And he proved it now by a one man charge through a hurricane of fire until he was right up on the bunker he’d targeted.

That didn’t mean he wasn’t taking fire; the bunkers were interlocked to provide supporting fire on each other. But the other suits, thousands of them spread over several kilometers of open plain, were starting to catch up. The Posleen had more to worry about than one suit, now.

He wasn’t standing still, though. A solid, direct hit from one of the numerous heavy plasma guns or hypervelocity missile launchers covering the bunker would take him out. So he kept running past the first defense point as one hand flicked out and tossed a suicide bar in the tiny firing slit.

The “suicide bar” was an antimatter hand-grenade, a ten centimeter long, one centimeter in diameter instant armageddon pack. It doesn’t take much antimatter to make too much explosion. So the grenades were adjustable. A small quantity of the contained AM would be fired in a controlled detonation. But “squirting” the remainder, it reduced the explosion to what the user desired. The “squirted” antimatter was still hell on earth, but it wasn’t armageddon on a plate. If you were far enough away that the handgrenade didn’t kill you the squirted antimatter probably wouldn’t. The instruction manual for the M-613 “matter annihilation device” specifically stated that they were “not for use in hostage situations.” So there you go.

Mike’s grenade slid through the slit and a moment later there was a jut of silver-green fire out of the head-sized hole. But that didn’t suit his purposes. So Mike armed another, still jinking around the small hillock that made up the bunker, and tossed that one in. The first had been set to be the equivalent of sixteen kilos of TNT. He’d figured that it would crack the bunker. If that didn’t do it, a thousand kilos of TNT should. Hell, he was still an order of magnitude away from its full output. They didn’t call ’em suicide bars for nothing.

This time the front of the bunker opened out in a flower of silver-green leaving a smoking hole. Whatever had been defending the position was gone, gaseous matter barely registerable by the best sensors. A tunnel, partially collapsed, arched downward. It was large enough to take a horse, or a horse sized Posleen, so there was plenty of gap at the top of the rubble pile to crawl through.

Mike jumped into the pit and started to crawl up the rubble just as a hand descended on his shoulder.

“Sir, would you please let us go first for once?” Staff Sergeant Thomas Rawls said. The head of his security detail was clearly tired of trying to keep up.

“Oh, sure, be that way,” Mike said, backing away from the hole. “But I fit better.”

“There’s ways to fix that, sir,” Rawls said, popping out a suicide bar and tossing it in the hole. He quickly ducked to the side and held the general back against the wall of the shattered position.

“You gotta follow ’em fast,” Mike protested. “Use the boot, don’t piss on them!”

“And as you well know, antimatter remains in the explosive matter, sir,” Rawls said, sighing slightly. He sometimes had the feeling in dealing with his boss that he was the adult and the much older general the child. General O’Neal was, almost invariably, upbeat and positive to a fault. But the sergeant had been with him long enough to know that that was very much a façade.

Every survivor of the “War Generation” seemed to have lost someone. Indeed, with five out of six people on earth erased and often eaten by the Posleen, entire families, clans, tribes and even nations had been wiped out as if they never existed. In O’Neal’s case he had lost his wife, father and one daughter. His sole remaining daughter was only alive because she’d been raised by the Indowy. And that rearing had changed her to such an extent that the General found her nearly unhuman. In effect, he had lost everything in the war. He’d never remarried, never in the two years the sergeant had been guarding him so much as hinted of a romantic interest or even a close friend. He had one drive in life: eliminating every Posleen from the face of the Galaxy. And he did it cheerfully and with incredible precision and skill.

“What’s a little antimatter between friends?” Mike asked as the suicide bar went off. The explosion blasted some of the rubble back into the room, pattering the suits in chunks of rock that would have killed an unarmored human. “Can we go now?”

“Let me check the security of the tunnel, sir,” the sergeant said, waving one of the team forward.

Corporal Albert Norman had only been on the general’s security detail for a year. What with transit time and everything, he’d only been on the detail for the cleanup on S-385-Beta and he’d never seen O’Neal in full hunting mode. He thought he was good with a suit until he’d seen the boss. O’Neal was unreal .

He’d gotten comfortable with dealing on a nearly daily basis with a general but this situation had him nervous. Sergeant Rawls had been killing Posleen for ten years, the boss for, well, more than a half a century. This was the first time he’d been really doing the job under the boss’ eye. So he actually had to think through his next actions instead of doing them on automatic.

He switched on his helmet light, ducked down and crawled up the pile of rubble, poking his head over to the top and giving the tunnel a sweep.

“All cl… ” he said just as the Posleen popped out of a hide. He didn’t even have time to finish before the heavy duty plasma gun took off his head.

Julio had followed the general more or less automatically, but he hadn’t been able to keep up with either the general or his security detail. The Hammers were chosen from the cream of the 11 thand Julio knew he wasn’t on their level.