John Ringo: Hell's Faire

After one more lift in the air, which he later surmised was the rising mushroom cloud, he dropped to the ground in a swirl of dust, totally blind.

There was no vision possible; virtually every single sensor was off-line from the chaos around him. His external temperature sensors showed an incredible two thousand degrees Celsius and he had to wonder what in the hell was keeping him alive until he saw the power gauge on his suit visibly dropping. The suits were able to keep a person alive in conditions that many considered flatly impossible, but it was at the cost of using nearly as much power as was being thrown at them.

Finally the external conditions stabilized enough that he could discern items around him and beacons started coming up. As they did, so did His Master’s Voice.

Mike bounded to his feet as the sensors started to go live. “Up and at ’em!” he called. “What the hell are you doing on your faces? We’ve got Posleen to kill! Reapers, we’ve still got Lampreys coming in to the west! All units, form perimeter on the remaining shuttle and KEEP IT ALIVE.”

He yanked Stewart to his feet and started to charge to the north.

“The good news,” Stewart said, “is that this has cleared off the welcoming party.”

“The bad news is that we’re out half our power,” Duncan noted, shifting over a battalion power graph. “And we just used up a day’s worth in that one event.”

“And there will be more to come,” Mike noted. “Come to Papa, baby. Bring it right into the cloud. Bring it in fast and hard.”

“These things aren’t rated to fly through a thousand-degree mushroom cloud, Major,” Duncan pointed out.

“No, but the power packs will survive.”

The second shuttle, on orders, entered the still growing mushroom cloud. The shuttles were armored, but not well enough to survive that impact and it quickly started to fly apart, its load of much more heavily armored power packs and ammo boxes scattering at random across the LZ. Inevitably, accidents happened.

McEvoy let out a yell of anger as he was slammed in the back by a heavy weight. Rolling on his side, he looked at the antimatter pack that had hit him in the back and let out another yell of fear.

“Now that was elegant,” Sunday said.

“Where in the Hell did that come from?” the Reaper said, getting to his feet and backing away from it as if it were a giant spider. Or a potentially lethal nuclear weapon.

“Oh, pick it up, you big baby,” the lieutenant said with a grin in his voice. “The Old Man flew the shuttle into the mushroom cloud. That masked it from fire — even the Posleen can’t see through one of those — and dropped the power packs at the same time.”

“That’s nuts !” Blatt said, trotting past. “I keep telling everybody, the Old Man is nuts !”

“He’s crazy all right,” Sunday said. “Crazy like a fox. Those things are armored against point-blank plasma fire; they weren’t going to explode from a little accident like that. Now never mind about the pack, although you might want to step away from it a bit. Reapers, drop your loads and take my mark: The Bear’s Comin’ O’er the Mountain.”

“We’ve got three surviving lances,” Duncan noted. “Do we use them?”

“Not immediately,” O’Neal said. “What happened to the other one?”

“The launcher sympathetically detonated,” Stewart answered. “It’s headed for Atlanta.”

“I’ll have to bring that up with the manufacturing clan,” O’Neal said seriously. “A little thing like a two-hundred-kiloton explosion shouldn’t have damaged them!”

“Somehow I suspect you will,” Stewart laughed. “But why are we saving them? We’ve got Lampreys on the way in.”

“Lampreys can’t point their anti-ship weaponry down,” Mike pointed out. “We’ll save them for C-Decs.”

“Most of the packs are gathered,” Duncan noted. “Some of them were gathered by Reapers, though, and they are preparing to receive cavalry.”

“Have them deployed to the rifle units in jig time,” Mike snapped. “Everyone but the Reapers make a run for the Wall. Reapers can follow but they need to be prepared to engage the big boys.”

“It’s moments like this that I live for,” Blatt said as the rest of the battalion took off at a dead run.

“We’re going, we’re going,” McEvoy said.

“Not fast enough, in my opinion,” the specialist noted.

“We still need to recover the weapons pack,” Sunday said. “We’re going to need those special weapons once we get in place.”

“Sir, I think they’re toast,” McEvoy replied. “The nearest pack is halfway up Oakey Mountain; they don’t have our systems keeping them close to home in a blast.”

“Fuck me,” Tommy noted. “Okay, we’ll pick ’em up later.”

“Well, one of them seems to have gotten blown to the other side of Black Rock Mountain, sir,” Blatt said. “We might be able to recover that someday.”

“Your job, Blatt,” Sunday said. “As soon as we get in place.”

“You’re joking, right?” the Reaper asked.

“Negative,” the lieutenant replied. “Once we deal with the first wave of landers, we’re useless without those mortars and shot-cannons. Recovering them is our number two priority. The number one being engaging landers.”

“Speaking of which,” McEvoy said as the first Lamprey crested the shoulder of Black Rock Mountain.

“Indeed,” Tommy said, targeting one of the secondaries on the side. “Engage.”

The long-barreled M-283 grav-cannons had additional acceleration ability over standard systems. In addition, the rounds contained an antimatter driven inertial accelerator and an antimatter “rocket” system similar to that used in the antimatter lances and Space Falcon fighters.

Thus the 75-millimeter round was accelerated to over a thousand kilometers per second by the time it struck the wall of the ship.

To survive the flight to the ship the round needed to be made of sturdy stuff and it was, a composite of gadolinium and monomolecular iron with a carbon ablative coating. But when one struck the armor of the Lamprey, it turned into an expanding hemisphere of boiling white plasma; even the enormous energy of one of the penetrator rounds was no match for Posleen armor.

Of one round.

But there were twelve Reapers firing at the Lamprey, pounding five rounds per second into a contact patch the size of a human hand.

In addition, the aiming system on the penetrators was far more effective. It designated a particular point on the side of the lander, chosen from a database of lander weaknesses, and directed all the weapons in the area to fire on that point.

Thus, when the twelve Reapers paused and opened fire, twelve hundred rounds hit a single weapons pod on the side of the Lamprey, boring a hole into the interior and detonating the feed mechanism of the plasma gun. The rest began flailing around the interior.

As silver and red fire belched out of its side, the lander attempted to escape, reversing course and rotating its configuration to move the damaged portion away from the fire. But the God King at the controls must not have been one of their more elite pilots, as he proved by ramming the ship into the flank of Black Rock mountain just south of the radio tower.

The other Lamprey had engaged the main body of the battalion, and was now heading to the southwest and the Wall in long, swooping strides. But seeing the fire that had taken down its companion, the ship changed targets and began a careful manual rotation to reduce its damage.