John Ringo: Eye of the Storm

Julio didn’t give them time to make up their minds; the stream of explosive kinetic rounds blew the two Posleen in half.

He flipped his hand down to his side and drew out two suicide bars, setting them both for a hundred kilo charge and tossed them down the passageway, one lightly the other hard. The CLANG! of another door breaking loose and a secondary from a Posleen plasma gun was all the information he needed; there had been more down the passageway. There were probably lots of Posleen down the passageway. But for now the corridor was…

“CLEAR!”

Mike had watched the encounter on a feed. He’d have rather been the person in the passage, killing Posleen and breaking things. But he knew his job was at a higher level. He’d actually been following that feed as well as feeds from all three divisions; multi-tasking in combat was so second nature he didn’t think about it. Positions were being captured all over the line but casualties were up ; every passage seemed to be heavily defended. And they were defended by God-Kings.

The Posleen came in, broadly, two forms. The vast majority, at a ratio of about four hundred to one, were semi-sentient normals. They were mildly functional morons which could be pointed in a general direction and told to kill anything non-Posleen in view. They also had implanted skills that could be used to build a civilization. And they worshipped, literally, their bosses the relatively rare God-Kings. A subset of the normals were the cosslain, physically pretty much indistinguishable but considerably brighter. Cosslain were almost sentient in fact.

God-Kings ran things. In open-field battle they generally rode anti-grav platforms called tenar which mounted heavier weapons and sensors. Occasionally they used Posleen landing craft to give ground forces air support or air-land methods such as rear area assaults. But Mike had never run into a situation where the primary shooters were God-Kings. Undoubtedly the lead God-King, the one that Julio had just killed with his own gun — neat trick — was the commander of the defenders of the pit. But having this many God-Kings forward meant that somewhere there were a couple of thousand normals without anybody to tell them what to do.

Make that a few hundred thousand normals. All the tunnels were defended by God-Kings. His division commanders hadn’t sent the intel on but he was picking it up on a tertiary feed. Everybody was running into the same thing.

This was going to be a blood-bath. And not in the skin-soothing, like-extending, “send me a hundred virgins” way.

And nobody was any further than Julio. Initial penetrations were held all along the line and too many troops were still out in the open.

Mike composed the intel and fed it down then paused, very briefly, to think.

“Rubble-dubble all openings, Shelly. Multi-entry, heavy. Boot on them, don’t piss,” he muttered to his AID. “Julio.”

“Señor?” the private said, shakily.

“Hold what you got,” Mike said. “Keep tossing subars. Rawls, rubble dubble, now!”

“Roger,” the sergeant said, pulling out another grenade. He pinged the rest of the Hammers and the group all shoved grenades as deep into the rubble as their arms would go, retracting fast. O’Neal, again, had invented the rubble-dubble technique and once upon a time it was dangerous before suits developed an engineering database that could determine trap points. At least one poor bastard had had his hand blown off when he couldn’t pull his arm back in time. But that problem had been solved long ago.

All six of the grenades were detonated on signal and the rubble wall more or less evaporated. The explosion threw one of the Hammers off his feet, but everyone else was cocked and locked.

“Let’s roll,” Mike said, heading for the opening. “There’s Posleen ass to kick.”

“And you get to roll behind us, sir,” Sergeant Rawls said, jumping into the opening.

“Spoil-sport.”

Julio paused at the intersection of the connecting tunnel and looked back. His section, which had ended up collapsing two bunkers for zero openings, had made it across the killing zone to follow the general. But his section head had sent him a quick ping telling him to stay with the Hammers.

That should have meant that his section was out in front and he was following behind. Instead, true to form, the General was on point. Damn it. Which put him at an intersection that was probably going to be crawling with fire.

“C kilo subars,” the general said, palming one of the devices and sliding his armored thumb down the blank face until the readout showed an output equivalent to one hundred kilos, about two hundred twenty pounds, of TNT. “X form. Hammers, right. Bravo Section right. Double stack.”

Julio thumbed a grenade himself, dialing it down then felt a slight thump as someone bumped into him from behind, forming a “stack” of troopers. As soon as the grenades went off, the stack would rush the corridor to the right. He glanced over and saw Corporal Kermit Butler on the point of the left-hand stack.

“Which way are we throwing?” Kermit pinged.

“X form, corp,” Julio replied. “I’m throwing your way. So you sure as hell better be throwing mine.”

“On my mark,” O’Neal said. “Three, two, one, Mark!”

Julio realized it was the General right behind him as he threw the grenade. He threw it hard; as the first guy in the stack he had the best chance of getting it far down the corridor.

The General threw one as well then shoved him, hard.

Julio thought he was crazy. The grenades were on a three second delay which meant they would be running right up on Kermit’s grenade as they entered the corridor.

But as he rounded the corner he saw the General was crazy like a fox. There were four emplaced positions along the corridor but the defenders had seen the antimatter grenades skitter down the corridor. Julio actually caught a flash from one of the defender’s hyper-velocity missile launchers as the Posleen ducked back to avoid the explosion and the wash of antimatter. A mechanical shutter dropped over the hole, closing it entirely.

Julio felt a hand on his shoulder, an almost irrestistable pressure, as the General pinged in his ear.

“Down, son,” the General said. “Take it on your helmet,” he added, pressing the private down and forward.

The explosion, at this range, was almost as bad as the casta round. And he saw his suit counter drop, hard. His armor had taken a serious hit from the antimatter. But he also was within a step of one of the armored positions.

He followed a karat, leading him to a position further down the line. The armored door slid back before he’d taken two steps, though, and he paused, dropping slightly, and targeted the small opening.

Most of the rounds careened off to one side or another but a few got through. The wash of fire out of the opening was unnoticeable compared to the explosions to either side but it was apparently enough. No fire came down the corridor at him.

He’d automatically blanked the surrounding fire but all four of the defense points in their direction were down. The same could not be said of the far end of the corridor, however, where his section was getting hammered.

“I said boot don’t piss on them,” the General muttered on the local net. “Raw… ”

“On it, sir,” Sergeant Rawls said as an HVM ripped Kermit apart.

“And what do we have here… ?”

Mike looked down the right-hand corridor, depending on Sergeant Rawls to get Julio’s former section in gear on clearing their side. The corridor curved, again, which meant there were probably more defense points down it. However, it was also going to have access to both the surface and the deeper areas where the Posleen commanders, and their forges, must reside.