John Ringo: Hell's Faire

Might as well share the misery.

“What the hell is that?” Lieutenant Tommy Sunday asked as a strange keyboard melody started on the command override frequency.

“ ‘Don’t Pay the Ferryman,’ ” SPC Blatt said. The Reaper’s armor had a purple and pink holographic teddy bear on the front of it and when the music started, the bear jumped to its feet and began to dance, shaking its fat little belly in time to the music. “The Old Man must be really depressed.”

The Grim Reapers were the heavy weapons suits of the ACS. They were designed for long-range indirect fire or heavy-duty close-in support and generally carried four weapons (versus the standard one rifle of the Marauders). These might range from anti-ship heavy grav-cannons to long-range auto-mortars to flechette cannons capable of spewing millions of rounds per minute.

The Reapers’ suits were bulkier and slower than the standard Marauder suits, looking a bit more fat bellied than the “muscle” look of the Marauders, but given that most of their weapons had much higher ammunition bulk than the Marauders, that was all to the good. The flip side was that their armor was lighter, so getting into direct fights with the Posleen was usually a losing proposition.

“Christ,” PFC McEvoy cursed, rubbing at his nearly bald head. He’d detached the gauntlets of his suit and his hand made a rasping sound over the short, thick stubble. He leaned forward as far as he could and looked to the doors at the front of the compartment. “I hope it’s not that whole ‘we’re all a gonna DIE!’ playlist. If I hear ‘Veteran of the Psychic Wars’ one more time I’m gonna puke.”

The shuttles were small, designed to carry thirty-six troopers and two “leaders” in no particular comfort. Each “suit segment” was rigid, with clamps to hold the suits in place against the worst possible maneuvering and designed to swivel and fire the troopers out into a hostile environment. This did not make for the most comfortable of seating.

“Nah,” Blatt replied. “James Taylor next. Betcha five creds.”

“Sucker bet,” McEvoy replied. “I hear the Old Man’s daughter was in the Gap.”

“Ah fuck me,” Blatt said, shaking his head. “That sucks.”

“She’s tough,” McEvoy said, leaning forward to spit into his helmet. “So’s his dad from what I hear. They might make it.”

“That is questionable,” Sunday said, looking up from his hologram. “According to seismographic and EM readings, there have been multiple nuclear detonations in the area of the Gap. And we’re about to make the area extremely unpleasant ourselves.”

“I didn’t think we’d opened up nukes yet, sir,” Blatt commented. He started to put his gauntlets back on as a timer in his suit tinged. “Twenty minutes.”

“We have recently,” Tommy answered, putting on his helmet. “But these appear to be secondary explosions.”

“Oh, that’s okay then,” Blatt said. “As long as they’re not targeted on us or anything…”

“Yeah,” McEvoy agreed. “The last time I worried about nukes was the first time I got hit by ’em.”

“Any suggestions?” the lieutenant asked.

“Lay flat,” Blatt said with a laugh.

“Yeah, getting tossed through the air is the worst part.”

“I’d think having your arms and legs ripped off would be the worst part,” Tommy commented.

“Well, the only one who’s survived from that close is the Old Man, sir,” Blatt pointed out. “You don’t wanna be that close; getting an arm blown off smarts .”

“Agreed,” Tommy said. “Been there done that.”

The lieutenant was new to the armored combat suits but not to battle; up until a few weeks before he had been an NCO in the Ten Thousand, the most elite unit short of the suits. The Ten Thousand was armed with captured Posleen weapons and other devices and shuttled from crisis to crisis, thus in his time in the unit Tom Sunday, Jr. had seen more than any trooper short of the ACS. And he had managed to survive and rise in rank to staff sergeant. All of which spoke for his versatility and ability to take cover when the shit hit the fan. But even the best soldier tended to run out the law of averages from time to time.

“Which one, L-T?” McEvoy asked. The officer was new to them and they hadn’t had much time to get to know him.

“Right, just above the elbow,” the lieutenant said. With his helmet on it was impossible to tell where he was looking but McEvoy was pretty sure it was directly at him.

“Ah,” the Reaper said. “Just asking.”

“You’re right,” the lieutenant said. “It smarts. So does taking a shotgun flechette in the chest. Or getting your right kidney taken out by a three millimeter that was, fortunately, going too fast to do much more damage. And getting caught in your own company’s mortar fire sucks. So does getting shot in the back by a cherry radioman who panics. All in all, I imagine it’s really unpleasant to get blown through the air by a nuclear explosion.”

“I guess so, sir,” the gunner said, swinging his heavy grav-gun from side to side to ensure it tracked smoothly. “All things considered I guess wearing armor is the way to go.”

“Ah hell,” Blatt said, changing the subject. “It looks like you were right. Here we go with ‘Veteran of the Psychic Wars.’ ”

“He’s something pissed at those Posleen,” McEvoy said.

“I’m sure he’s not the only one,” Sunday said quietly.

Captain Anne Elgars looked at the motley group gathered around the small fire and sighed. The captain appeared to be about seventeen and had a heavily muscled body with long, strawberry-blond hair. She was, in fact, nearer to thirty than twenty and had until recently been in a coma. Her recovery from the coma, the musculature, odd skills and personality quirks that had arisen from the recovery, were mysteries that were only starting to be illuminated.

There were two other adult females, two soldiers and a group of eight children in the small, wooded dell tucked into the North Carolina mountains. The women and children had been in a Sub-Urb, an underground city, when the Posleen struck the Rabun Valley and swiftly pushed most of the defenders aside. Through a combination of luck and ruthlessness the three women had reached the deepest areas of the Urb, intending to escape through the service areas, when they happened upon a hidden installation tucked into the Urb. It was there that they had been “upgraded,” their wounds repaired, and imparted with both increased strength and some basic weaponry skills. They had also found an escape route.

Trying to make their way to human-controlled areas they had first been cut off by the advancing Posleen and then encountered the two soldiers, Jake Mosovich and David Mueller. Now the question was where to go now that the easy route was closed.

“It’s agreed?” Elgars asked, her breath ghosting white in the frigid air. “We’ll head for the O’Neal farm and raid the cache?”

“Don’t see any choice,” Mueller replied. He was a bear of a man, not only tall but wider in proportion, with a thin shock of almost white blond hair. The master sergeant had been running around snooping on Posleen since before the first invasion and he had regularly found his ass in a crack, enough times that he’d frequently asked himself why in the hell he kept doing it. But none of the other times did he have to worry about getting three women and eight children out of the crack. And in this case, the crack included that the children, at least, were likely to die of exposure if something wasn’t done.

“There wasn’t anything to use at the Hydrological Station.” The Posleen raided for loot, then destroyed every trace of previous habitation. While the station hadn’t been leveled it had been emptied. As had every other building they had checked.