John Ringo - Hell's Faire

Somewhere around Franklin they should reach a point in range of the Gap. The problem was twofold: angularity — they had to be able to fire into the Gap — and height — the Gap was slightly higher than Franklin and since they had to use air-bursts they needed a tad more range than a ground burst would require. The first and best chance was the hill that Franklin had once occupied, even though it would make them a better target. Failing that, they would keep moving forward until they had a good and secure firing point.

Pruitt was watching the ballistic targeting reticle slowly creep up the Rabun Valley, sometimes getting closer to the Gap, sometimes farther away, when the SheVa rocked in the shock wave from a heavy plasma gun.

“Jesus!” the gunner yelled, slewing the turret as he kicked on his long-range radar and lidar.

“Colonel! We’ve got four, no six C-Decs cresting the ridges! And they’re spread out .”

“Crap,” Mitchell muttered, flipping up the terrain map. The SheVa had taken on more than six ships during the retreat, occasionally at the same time. But in that case they had had terrain to hide behind and “shoot and scoot.” Unfortunately, the Franklin Valley was relatively open, at least for something on the scale of the SheVa: rolling hills with the occasional higher stony prominence. It offered some obscurement to the ground-mounted Posleen but it was as open as a putting green when taking on ships.

The sole and only chance they had was that Posleen gunnery was not all that great; the ship guns had to be manually aimed at ground targets like the SheVa and it had been apparent on the retreat that the concept of “training” was foreign to the invaders. So they didn’t get really accurate until they were inside the firing range of the SheVa. But taking on six with nowhere to hide, especially with only four rounds of anti-lander left and a max speed of fifteen miles per hour, wasn’t going to be particularly survivable.

“Better call the ACS and tell ’em we’re gonna be a little late.”

Tommy crouched behind the laser and targeted the first C-Dec cresting the ridge. This was going to be tight.

The holographic sight showed interior and exterior targets as well as the antimatter containment system. Tommy deliberately avoided that, firing the beam along a vector to penetrate on a weak point and enter the battlecruiser’s engine room.

The weapon spat a beam of coherent purple light just as the C-Dec opened fire with the first weapon that bore, an anti-ship plasma weapon. The ship’s fire missed the battalion, striking north of it on the graded roadbed laid down by the Posleen and digging out a crater the size of a house.

The weapon was a poorly controlled nuclear reaction that was captured between massive electromagnetic fields and converted to pure photons. The beam itself was rated in gigajoules per second and cut through the heavy armor of the Posleen ship like tissue paper. It lanced through interior bulkheads and into the engineering compartment, destroying the antigravity system and removing power to most of the external weaponry. Denied its antigravity support, the cruiser lurched and dropped through the air.

“Oh, crap,” Duncan snorted, looking up. He had seen the cruiser drifting towards his position but the weapons of the three on the ridgeline would have been love-taps to the ship so he had just hunkered down and hoped it would find another target. But when the terawatt laser hit it in the side, it was just about directly over their position.

The cruiser staggered and then started to drop, fast, and he knew there was nothing he could do.

The ship fell straight down at thirty two feet per second per second and impacted on the top of the ridgeline, only fifteen meters from his position and, fortunately, on the Posleen side of the ridge. Then it started to roll.

The impact of the multiton ship had flipped all three suits into the air and they fell back with a couple of bounces. But Duncan was up on the ridge again almost immediately. This he wanted to see.

The dodecahedral ship was not the best item at rolling, but the slope was steep and it didn’t really have much of a choice. Still randomly firing, with occasional blasts of fire and plasma jutting out of hatches and along weapons positions, the gigantic ship rolled down the hill, over the Posleen scrambling to find a purchase on the side and onto the roadbed below, partially blocking it.

“Damn, couldn’t have planned that one better myself,” Duncan muttered, looking over at the other two ships. They were Lampreys, far smaller and less dangerous than the C-Dec. But dangerous nonetheless. “Now if that damned laser will just hold together.”

Tommy swung the laser onto the leftmost Lamprey, which was a tad higher and had a better shot at the battalion. It had already opened fire with one of the heavy lasers on one of its five facets and the line of fire was wiggling randomly across the ground but in the general direction of the battalion command post.

In this case Sunday didn’t target quite so carefully; the ship was farther away and if the antimatter containment system detonated it wouldn’t disturb things quite as much.

The purple laser flashed out again, digging into the side of the ship in a flash of silver fire and penetrating deep into its vitals. The shot missed the containment system but cut the feeds from it to the engine. Once again the ship stopped and dropped like a stone. Some of the Posleen in both ships would be alive but they were relatively unimportant compared to stopping the ships themselves.

He quickly rotated the weapon onto the third ship but in this case he was just a tad too late.

“Captain Slight!” Mike called, cursing. “Behind you!”

Karen Slight had survived innumerable battles and skirmishes in the five years since she had taken over as the Bravo Company commander. Sometimes she felt like a fugitive from the law of averages. But if so, they had just caught up.

She flipped her vision to the rear and leapt to her feet as she saw the line of flashes from a heavy HVM launcher closing on her position, but it was just a fraction of a moment too late. Before she, or First Sergeant Bogdanovich, could do more than stand up the weapons had hit their hole. And when it walked on there was nothing to be found but scattered armor.

“Shit,” Tommy muttered, as he targeted the third ship. This ship had learned from its predecessors and tried to jink aside, spreading the fire. The terawatt laser was not, however, like the lighter grav-guns. They had only a fraction of the power available to the laser. It scythed into the third ship, clawing through crew quarters and the command bridge. For that matter, the ship pilot had not had significant training in flight at such low levels. The Posleen ships, by and large, managed their operations on automatic, so manual flight was something for which very few Posleen were trained or prepared. And it was evident in this case as the ship, accelerating sideways to avoid the laser, slammed into Black Rock Mountain and bounced backwards, hard, into the very laser it was trying to avoid.

In this case it was unclear if it was the laser fire or the sudden impact, but the third ship stopped, droppped and rolled down the hill and impacted with the C-Dec, where the two of them almost entirely blocked the narrow pass.

Tommy watched the ship roll down the hill then extended the tripod on the laser to jut over the top of the fighting position to where it had a clear line of sight on the approaching Posleen. Down below they must be having a tough time forcing their way past the roadblock created by the two fallen ships but there was still a solid wall of them attacking the front ranks. And with the death of their first sergeant and company commander, Bravo company had started to slacken its fire, letting the Posleen drive forward against that side.