John Ringo - When the Devil Dances

Finally the rage spent itself fully; there was no emotion left to feel. His office now had a new door, one big enough to fit a car through, and a circle of interested and worried onlookers. He ignored them and strode through the debris path to where the AID still showed a picture of Horner floating in the air.

“Nukes,” O’Neal rasped. “We’ll go. But only if that entire area is slagged to the ground. I’ll have my staff work up a fire plan. You will fire it. If the President balks, tell her it is an order of a Fleet officer and she is under treaty to follow military orders of Fleet officers. You will follow our fire plan, and stand by for on-going nuclear support. We will prepare for the mission. We will board the Banshees. We will fly south. If we don’t get the nukes, you can kiss my fat, hairy ass before we will go near the Gap. And if at any point I feel that we are receiving insufficient support, I will withdraw on my cognizance alone. Call me when you have nuke release and only when you have nuke release, and it had better be open release. Shelly, end transmission.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, cutting off Horner.

“Shelly, I don’t ever want to talk to that bastard directly ever again,” Mike rasped. “When he sends nuke release, just tell me.”

He looked around at the group that had gathered. Most of them were enlisted from Bravo Company — Pappas must have been telling the truth about hearing him at the Barracks — the rest were officers and NCOs from battalion.

“Okay, boys,” he rasped, looking around at the group. “Let’s all go get kil’t.”

It had been nearly thirty minutes since the last sound of activity around the Wall. There was sound down in the valley, but it was the sound of thousands of feet and the occasional crack of a railgun or plasma cannon, drifting up the hills on the light wind.

“Damn,” Cally whispered as the first Posleen came into sight at the notch. “I don’t think there is a corps anymore, Granpa.”

“Yeah,” O’Neal said. “But that’s not the worst,” he continued, pointing at the tenaral floating up into sight over the eastern edge of the holler. “That’s worse.”

Cally looked out the firing slit to the west and tapped his arm. “No, that’s worse.”

Papa O’Neal flinched at the shadow that was looming over the farm; the Lamprey was heading west from the Gap at about four thousand feet above ground level. As he watched, a beam of silver stabbed downward into the valley and there was a secondary explosion from the direction of the artillery park.

“Are we gonna get shot by that if we fire at them?” Cally asked nervously as the first mine went off. “I don’t like that idea at all.”

“Neither do I,” Papa O’Neal said. “Okay, Plan B is activated.”

“Run like hell?” Cally asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Or at least as far as the mine; it is reinforced for a nuke; we’ll hole up there for a while until the first wave should be past, then we’ll head up into the woods.”

“Let’s go,” Cally said, turning around and pressing in the plywood on the back of the bunker. It pushed inward slightly then popped out on hinges revealing a heavy steel door set well into the hill. She undogged the hatch and stepped through. “You are coming right?”

“Yeah,” Papa O’Neal said, “keep the door open, I’ve got to set all these command mines on a timer. And rig the final destruct sequence; the hell if these bastards are gonna have my house.”

“Well, move it,” Cally said nervously. “I don’t want to go crawling around these hills on my own.”

“Be there in a minute,” Papa O’Neal said. “Get moving.”

Major Mitchell looked at the warrant officer as she popped up through the hatch. “Can we start firing yet?” he asked.

The major was a rejuv and, long ago as a newbie officer, had trained to fight the Soviets in Fulda Gap. After his initial shock at this attack he came to the conclusion that this situation wasn’t all that different. The “tanks” were larger and one side was flying, but, really, the numerical disparity was about right; there were forty or so landers and only one of them. Perfect.

The technique for fighting forces like this was trained into his bone: shoot and scoot. In boxing it was called “stick and move”; fire off a good, well-aimed blow then move away so that the counter-punch missed. Of course, having friends around in war was good, so the Army also called it “shoot, move and communicate.” And Major Mitchell had trained for it most of his adult life. He could jab, he could uppercut and he had the footwork. It was gonna be easy.

Riiight.

The only good news was that they had trained as hard as he could manage over the last few months. The team had been put together even before the SheVa was completed and began working in the simulators and fixed systems at Fort Knox, trying to get a feel for their actions and reactions in a fight. The initial assault had caught him, had caught all of them, off-balance. But he remembered somebody once telling him that surprise was a condition in the mind of a commander. All you had to do was push it aside and play the cards you were dealt.

Now that he was in the groove it was time to do what he had trained for almost his whole life. It was an odd moment, he wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

“Yes, sir,” Indy said, sliding into her seat and buckling in. “I’ve taken off the lockout; the lidar should be able to rotate and the guns move.”

“I hate this mechanical monstrosity,” Pruitt bitched, coming up through the hatch and dogging it down. “We need a bigger engineering crew. Or Riff.”

“Engineering?”

“Go,” Indy said. “Everything’s green.”

“Driver?”

“Up,” Reeves said. “We are ready to roll.”

“Gunner?”

“Up,” Pruitt said, sliding into his own chair and slapping on the straps. “Bun-Bun is in the green and ready to kick Posleen.”

Mitchell rotated his shoulders and flipped his commander’s screens live. “Blow the camo, and let’s see what we’re in for.”

“Tulo’stenaloor, this defensive area is reduced and the humans are in flight,” Orostan said. “The support companies have moved up and are gathering what thresh and weapons are salvageable from the pass.”

This latter was another innovation. Usually individual Kessentai would have their forces scavenge as they moved. Tulo’stenaloor had put a stop to that; no matter how efficiently a unit did it, it tended to slow them down. Units moving through the Gap had to move steadily, not stop to loot. So special units under cosslain and Kenstain had been detailed to clean up the battlefield.

“The movement through the Pass is going well. We’re going to move out to our secondary objectives.”

“Agreed,” Tulo’stenaloor said over the circuit. “It has gone very well.”

“Losing most of the tenaral and two ships surely is not ‘very well,’ ” Orostan protested.

Tulo’stenaloor flapped his crest in humor. “I always forget; you’ve never fought humans before. This was easy ; fear what is up the valley. The metal threshkreen will be here soon, of that I’m sure. And other humans will do things to torment you as you proceed. Ignore it; stick to the mission and don’t get bogged down by resistance.”