John Ringo - When the Devil Dances

“Well, sir,” Pruitt said quietly. “The first thing to do is clear out Balsam Gap, don’t you think?”

“Okay,” the colonel said taking a deep breath. Removing a key from his dogtags he opened up the safe over his head, removed a manual and turned to the back page. “I need verbal confirmation. I have release codes. Does everyone agree? Schmoo?”

“Yes.”

“Pruitt?”

“Yes.”

“Indy?”

“Yes.”

“What about me?” Kitteket asked.

“You’re not an official crew-member,” the major said. “But I do need that second set of codes you received.”

He pulled a purple hard plastic package out of the back of the book and broke the back of it along a perforation. Inside was a red piece of plastic that looked somewhat like a credit card. Turning to the appropriate section of the manual he took the codes from Kitteket and, using the numbers and letters on the card, determined the correct codes to enter.

The program was referred to as “Positive Action Locks.” To get the area effect rounds to work required codes from the President. But the presidential codes were then put through a “filter” at the actual system. The method was cumbersome, but when talking about nuclear weapons it only made sense.

He keyed the final sequence into a box by his head then waited until it gave a “Go” code. Normally the “Go” was a green number. Instead, in this case, there was a small infinity symbol that made the bottom drop out of his stomach. Trying to ignore it he he entered “One” as the number of rounds released. “That’s my code. Warrant Indy?”

Indy followed the same procedure, pulling out her own manual and keying in her translated codes.

Pruitt for once looked properly chastened. “I’m green on one area effect round.”

“Very well,” Colonel Mitchell said. “I want one round, at optimum airburst, right over Balsam Gap.”

“We’re keyed to transmit nuke warnings,” Kitteket said.

Pruitt turned and opened up a new control panel, using the same key to unlock and then lift a red, semi-transparent cover. He ran his fingers over it for a moment then brought up a map of the local area, tapping Balsam Gap as the target. He cross-checked that it was the correct UTM coordinates then keyed for airburst and let it compute optimum height. Finally the system flashed confirmed.

“We’re prepared, sir,” Pruitt said. “Coordinates set. Permission to load?”

Mitchell checked the cross-linked information and then nodded. “Load.”

There was a series of thunks as the SheVa switched out the anti-lander round that was “up the spout” and loaded the explosive round.

“UP.”

“Kitteket, send the nuke warning.”

Sergeant Buckley had come to the conclusion that there were worse things than being in a suit.

After being electrocuted he had awakened in the hospital in the middle of the Posleen attack. Getting out, finding clothes, weapons and transportation had been interesting. Then, he had barely started on his long journey when a SheVa round had terminated a Posleen Lamprey less than two thousand meters away.

The good news was that the lander didn’t explode.

The bad news was that it fell in a sewage retention pond.

The next thing Buckley knew, the contents of the pond had been scattered over a wide, and in the future extremely fertile, area. An area that included the Humvee he was, with the occasional twitch, driving.

He had survived, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience. And, unfortunately, the next Lamprey that was hit blew up rather spectacularly.

He had come to lying in the Little Tennessee River. How he had gotten there was a mystery until he saw the Humvee lying sideways on a shattered tree. He was, however, cleaner. The rest of the retreat was a bit of blur. The Posleen actually got ahead of him at one point, but he managed to get a ride on a five-ton that snuck around them to the east. Then, in Dillsboro, they’d all been unloaded and segregated out.

Technically he was probably still a patient, but he didn’t make any fuss about being handed a rifle. They’d even given him a “squad.” All eight of the soldiers were clerks with an infantry military operational skill rating. The way that worked was that after going through training to be infantry, some desk jockey would grab them to push papers instead of carry a rifle. So the guys had been trained to be infantry, but only one of them had ever spent any time in the line.

He, and the one specialist with some line experience, made sure that all the clerks knew how to load and fire their weapons. Then he found some rations and they sat around waiting for somebody to get their thumb out of their butts. Hurry up and wait was all well and good, but the Posleen weren’t all that far back; if whoever was in charge of this cluster-fuck — it looked like a captain which was just crazy, there must have been a brigade’s worth of gear and personnel in the area he was looking at — didn’t get a move on, the Posleen were going to overrun the lot of them.

Then the rumor got around that the main exit had been cut off. He managed to get his guys to help quell the near riot that erupted, but it turned out it wasn’t just a rumor this time; the Posleen really had cut off their escape route.

Then they got the word that most of the personnel, and gear, was going to go out by the two alternate routes. Great. He was all for fighting, he’d been doing it for damn near ten years, but it helped to have a way out in case things went south. However, it turned out that “most” did not include the “combat arms” forces.

The next thing he knew he and his squad were in the back of a Bradley headed up the road to the pass the Posleen had taken.

Now, he wasn’t a coward by any stretch of the imagination. But he’d gotten a look at the map and taking that pass with the pitiful little force they had was just suicide.

They finally had a real meeting, where the lieutenant who was in charge of the Brads called all the squad leaders together and told them the plan, such as it was. The SheVa gun, probably the same one that had killed the Lamprey that blasted him into the drink, was going to fire a nuke into the pass. Then they would charge into the pass and clean up the survivors.

“It’ll be easy,” the lieutenant concluded. “All the Posties will be toasties from the nuke. We just have to secure it until the brigade on the other side makes it up the road.”

Sarge Buckley had been beating around the Army since before the Posleen had been heard of and he knew when somebody was lying. “The check is in the mail” is nothing compared to “the trucks are on the drop zone.” But the worst military cliché of them all had to be “the artillery is going to pound them flat then we’ll just go in and paint the lines.”

Buckley looked up as the radio in the track began to honk.

“NUKE WARNING. NUKE WARNING. TARGET COORDINATES: UTM 17 311384E 392292N. 100 K-T. THIRTY SECONDS!”

Life just got worse.

“FIFTEEN SECONDS. TEN…”

They were all gonna die.

Pruitt inhaled, then: “Initiate.”

The area effect weapons had similarities to the anti-lander penetrators and differences. Since the gun remained a smooth-bore and the round therefore had to be fin-stabilized, they were discarding sabot. But they were thicker in cross section than the penetrators and flew at a lower velocity. Last, but not least, since they were not penetrators, they were made out of simple carbon steel. Since the metal they were made out of was going to be distributed as a fine dust, better to have it composed of materials the human body could metabolize.