John Ringo - Hell's Faire

“FUCKERS!” Sunday shouted, as the major climbed back out of the hole, slashing and blasting at the centaurs. “Get back here, Major!”

Sunday smashed two more of the centaurs before the first boma blade caught him on the shoulder. He hardly noticed it but then another descended and then another and he could feel himself tiring, trying to slash and crush in all directions, but it was no use, the Reapers were backed up to the rear of the position, trying to beat the Posleen back with their fists and Stewart and McEvoy were down under a tide of bodies and the major was gone and…

The sky lit in fire. For just a moment he could see the pupils of the Posleen’s yellow eyes tighten down to a pinpoint and the reflection of the Lightbulb of God in their irises. And he hit the ground just in time.

He dug his hands into the ground and focused all his effort onto holding on as, again, the hammerblows descended on his back, lifting him up and slamming him down over and over again. He felt himself lifted up and slammed against the wall of the fighting position and his arm cracked backwards, painfully. He could feel that it was broken, but the suit integrity held. If it hadn’t, the fire would have surely killed him. He waited and waited, for a moment, for an eternity, but finally the last echoes of the fire died away and he could look around.

For a time, it seemed like hours, none of his systems could determine anything in his surroundings. But then the sensors slowly came back on-line and he could get some sense of what was around him. Telemetry from suits was coming back first and there wasn’t much. A suit here. A suit there.

He looked for the karat that indicated his commander, but it was nowhere to be seen.

Unlike Sunday, Mike had been out of the hole in the Posleen mass when the SheVa antimatter went off and there wasn’t much he could do. So for the second time in his life he ended up in the path of a nuclear explosion. This time, at least, he had a moment’s warning and instead of trying to grab dirt, which was probably futile, he hopped upward and tucked into a ball wondering where he’d land.

The blast-front picked him up and lofted him south and upward. He felt a brief glance off of something very hard; it bruised him despite the undergel and hard-driven inertial compensators. But after that there was, as such, nothing but air.

His sensors were still off-line but he eventually sensed that the blast-front was reducing and he tracked out into what would have been a free-fall position if he was, in fact, free-falling. He got some control over the inertials and used it to stabilize his flight. But since his externals were still reading over a thousand degrees centigrade, getting any coherent data on his location was quite impossible.

Finally the immense power of the nuclear explosion began to dissipate and the return wave came in, catching him and tossing him back, but not as far.

In all he was airborne, or nuke-borne as the case might be, for less than fifteen seconds. It only felt like an eternity. And then he saw open air.

He looked down and broke out in hysterical laughter. He was in a perfect delta track, two thousand feet up and headed down for the ruins of his old high school. Which was swarming with still-live Posleen.

“I always wanted to come back and make a big entrance…”

“Sunday.”

“Major?”

Sunday scanned the map but the icon of the commander was nowhere in sight. Stewart and Duncan were both heavily injured and no other officers were alive. Even with an arm so dislocated and broken the suit could do nothing but numb it he was as good as it got. But he had less than a platoon left so it wasn’t a particularly heavy burden of command.

“Yeah. I’m alive. For my sins. I’m heading out of Clayton now. I’ve contacted the SheVa; it’s prepared to deliver on-call fire from now until the local Posleen overrun it or somebody comes to save both our asses. You look like you’re clear.”

“Yes, sir. No Posleen in view.”

“They’re reconsolidating by Clayton. I’m calling for fire. But it shouldn’t affect your position. Hunker down and hold what you got. You look to be clean for the near future.”

“Yes, sir.”

“O’Neal, out.”

“SheVa Nine?”

“Go, Major.”

“One area denial round, UTM North 386187 East 280579.”

“Roger. Ah, what’s your position, over.”

Mike looked down at the ground; he was encased up to his armpits in rock and earth.

“Secure. Please fire the round.”

“Shot, over.”

“Shot, out.”

There was a pause. “Splash over.”

“Splash out.”

Mike smiled as the nuclear fireball consumed his old stomping grounds.

“I never really liked Clayton anyway.”

He waited until the majority of the dust had dissipated then looked around for more targets.

“The problem with nukes is finding a good position to be a spotter,” he mused. He dialed up his magnification and shook his head. “SheVa, can you reach UTM North 385846 East 278994. I would swear they’re reassembling over by Tiger.”

“Ah, negative ACS. Still out of our range. And we’re… sort of stuck. Again. The crunchies are on the way, though. As soon as they figure out how to get through the radiation they’ll be in support.”

“555 commander, we can reach that target point. And we’ll be there sooner.”

The voice was German-accented English and in the background a song was playing, just too faintly for Mike to pick out. As Mike watched a streak of fire like a meteor descended from the heavens and a nuclear fireball, followed by a mushroom cloud, erupted over Tiger.

In the distance he could see beams of light leaping into the sky and more beams, and streaks of fire, coming down. He looked around and the same could be seen in every direction into the distance.

“American Defense Command, hold what you got,” another voice entered the net. Presumably all the nets. “This is Vice Admiral Huber, Commander Task Force 77. Heavy fire incoming. Stand by.”

In the distance a wave of fire seemed to leap from the ground as fireball after fireball erupted into the sky. It was clear that kinetic energy weapons were taking out every single Posleen ship and settlement for as far as the eye could see. And undoubtedly beyond. Around the whole globe.

Mike looked up and half shook his head as a line of shuttlecraft, seeming half air and half matter, dropped out of the sky. Troopers began spouting from the sides, dropping on pillars of fire then assembling at impossible speed. Their suits, like the ships, seemed only half there, as if one with the land and sky. And on his sensors they didn’t appear at all. The air was filled with music and he shook his head and laughed hysterically again as the strains of “Ride of the Valkyries” poured through the air.

He lifted himself out of the ground as a shuttle approached and an armored figure dropped to the orange-tinted ground. He waited until it approached and then saluted the figure with the double star-bursts of a Fleet Strike major general on its shoulders.

“General,” Mike said, dropping the salute as it was returned.

“Colonel,” the general replied, taking off his helmet. The face was hard, Teutonic and very familiar.

“Oh, shit,” Mike said with a half laugh. “God damn, Steuben, it’s radioactive as hell out here. Put your damned helmet back on if you would be so good, General, sir.”

“ ‘Sorry we took so long, we had a spot of bother on the way,’ ” the general said, then wrapped the smaller suit in his arms.

“Sir, General Steuben’s here.”