John Ringo - When the Devil Dances

The damage control panel came apart like a bomb as the last burst of plasma buried itself in the console. Control runs fused together sending power arcing through the panel and into the primary gun controls.

Sergeant Edwards flew back from his controls with a yell, hitting the chair release and backing away as sparks flew out of the targeting system. The fire control computer sparked on for a moment and then died with a rasp.

Major Porter coughed on the smoke and shook his head. “Is it just me or is this like a bad TV sci-fi show?” He hit his own chair release and pulled the warrant officer’s back. In the red emergency lights he could see that the warrant had massive burns across his face and chest, but the engineer was still breathing. “Will the gun fire at all?”

“Negative!” Edwards shouted nervously. “I can’t even clear the round in the breech!”

“Oh, this is so very good,” Porter muttered, laying the warrant’s chair flat and gently unstrapping him.

“Uh, sir,” Edwards said, supporting half the weight of the warrant as they lifted him out of his chair. “I think we’re mostly getting hit on our back deck…”

“I noticed,” Porter said, looking around. “Tamby! Abandon ship!”

There was no reply from the driver’s position so he slid across the smoking deck and looked down.

The driver’s position was surrounded by multiple monitors so that the drivers had an almost 360-degree view at all times. Unfortunately, that meant that when a power surge hit there were thousands of volts all of a sudden going nowhere.

Porter slid down into the position, trying not to put his feet into the carbonized figure strapped into the driver’s chair, and checked the drive controls. They, remarkably, seemed to be working so he set them on auto, driving forward, and climbed back out. Then he slid back across the floor and hit the escape hatch. The red painted panel opened with a susurrant hiss and lights came on below.

“Where’s Tamby?” Edwards asked, dragging the limp warrant officer towards the hatch.

“Tamby won’t be joining us today,” Porter said, taking the warrant’s feet. “You drive. And drive like a bat out of hell.”

“Who’s going to gun?” Edwards asked.

“Who the hell cares?” Porter said. “If we’re not at least five miles away before they pound through the magazine nobody’s going to be driving!”

Atrenalasal flapped his crest and keyed his communicator. “Pacalostal! The gun has stopped firing! We should join the attack on the artillery.”

“No,” the tenaral commander replied. “The orders are to continue firing until it is stopped and burning. Follow the orders.”

“Very well,” the Kessentai replied. For some reason, pounding plasma round after plasma round into the burning hulk seemed… wrong. But orders were orders.

Major Porter hit the lowering circuit before Edwards was even in his seat, but the gunner had the escape vehicle starting before they had dropped more than a meter. Porter sighed as the scream of the jet turbine engine caused the vehicle to purr like a tiger. Functional power was a good thing.

“Thank God for General Motors,” he said. He glanced at the height reading then hit the release as another wash of plasma hit the massive SheVa above them. Fuck it. The torsion bars would handle the drop.

At forty miles per hour and accelerating the still bouncing M-1 Abrams burst from under its larger brethren and headed for the shadow of the nearest ridge.

Behind it, plasma rounds continued to dig into the more recalcitrant armor on the back deck of the SheVa gun, right over its nearly full magazines.

When Major Ryan saw the Abrams burst from under the SheVa he very calmly lowered his binoculars, turned around, spotted the nearest bunker and ran for it.

He was surprised when he dropped through the back door that there were not any other inhabitants. The main headquarters didn’t have any structural stability; the main “war room” wasn’t even on a ground floor. He considered for a moment going back to the headquarters and trying to convince the commander that maybe, just maybe, being on the second floor of a building in the way of a nuclear blast might not be the best spot to be.

He’d seen SheVas go up before; he was at Roanoke when SheVa Twenty-Five lost containment. But at Roanoke the SheVa had been on top of a mountain and fairly separated from the main force. Not parked practically on top of the tertiary defenses and right opposite the corps headquarters.

He glanced at his watch and wondered how long it would take. It was possible, possible , that the Posleen would break off their attack before the containment failed. Actually, if they were smart they would break off their attack before the containment failed.

Posleen. Smart.

Not.

As he was looking at his watch and calculating his odds of surviving a run to the motorpool he was joined by a female specialist. She tripped on the entry and tumbled into the far corner.

“Well,” she muttered, sitting up, but not getting to her feet. “That was a hell of an entry.” She looked over at the officer and shook her head. “You might want to get down, sir. I think a nuke is about to go off.”

“Yes,” Ryan said, looking at his watch again. He had just noticed that he could faintly hear the “swish-crack!” of the plasma rounds hitting the distant SheVa gun. At least he could between the sounds of secondary explosions from the artillery and the heavy ship’s weapons tearing the Wall apart. “But we should have about three seconds to bend over and kiss our ass goodbye after the ‘big flashbulb’ goes off.” He smiled at her grimly. “Don’t look towards the light; the light is not your friend.”

“We’re gonna make it,” Edwards said, gunning the tank down the streambed of the Little Tennessee River, the water flying up on either side. “I guess that armor is tougher than they thought.”

“Maybe,” said Major Porter, “if…”

What the conditions were Edwards wasn’t going to find out because as the major spoke the world went white.

The magazine for the SheVa guns was the heaviest armored container ever designed. The inner layer was simple steel, four layers of hardened case steel coated with “supersteel,” a recent development that increased the surface hardness of steel almost fourfold. Outside that were two layers of “honeycomb” armor made of tungsten and synthetic sapphire. The outermost section was multiple layers of ablative explosive plates. These had been found to disrupt Posleen plasma guns, to an extent.

In addition there were four sections that were designed to “control” the explosion and “blow out” if a round went off. And there were internal baffles designed to direct the majority of the explosion away from surrounding rounds. In that way it was felt that the explosion could be reduced to at most one or two rounds. Better a minor cataclysm than a major one.

The Posleen had determined that most tanks placed their engines at the front and rear. And since their orders were to keep pounding until the gun stopped and was burning, they had pounded over four hundred plasma blasts into the rear compartment. There was only so much that even the strongest armor could take.