John Ringo: Gust Front

Now they had come to the center. The detector would sniff out any living human, no matter how damaged, no matter how buried. But so far they were coming up empty.

“Hey, Sarge,” called Wilson, waving for Stewart to join him.

The small NCO bounded over towards Wilson. He looked at his map and shook his head. He should have been standing on the site of the oldest Presbyterian Church in America. Instead there was a scoured flat waste. And one upthrust warrior staff with a small device dangling from it.

“What kind of unit was it here?” asked Wilson.

The question was probably rhetorical. They had been briefed. But Stewart answered anyway. “Engineers. A light battalion.”

Wilson plucked the device off the staff. “Well, they must have been some bad news juju,” he said grimly. He handed the scrap of cloth to Stewart.

Stewart popped off his helmet and turned his face up to the pouring rain. The cold fall would probably be sleet by morning. But now it worked admirably to wash away the tears. The bloody scrap of cloth was a tab from an engineer officer’s uniform.

“Bad fuckin’ juju, man,” he agreed, his voice thick. He wiped his eyes and put the helmet back on. The nannites scurried to carry away the intruding water. If they had been human they might have clucked in approbation.

“ Contact! ” shouted Minnet, swerving to the side. He bounded twenty feet through the air and landed on a section of crumpled road. The point was damn near ground zero of the fuel-air explosion. How anything could have survived was a mystery.

Stewart caught a flash out of the corner of his eye and started to track on it before he realized that it was the captain. The officer was taking full use of the almost unlimited power available through the antimatter generator in his suit. He now flew towards the reported contact. The lidar on Stewart’s suit clocked him at over four hundred klicks an hour. When they all had those it would make things a lot easier.

“Where?” said O’Neal, landing next to the sensor-toting private.

“Right under your feet, sir. Two forms. In hibernation or so it tells me.” The private dropped and started to pull up the mixture of concrete, asphalt and glass that overlaid the find.

O’Neal laid a hand on his shoulder. “Hang on.” He slid out his monomolecular fighting knife and cut into the mixture. A few slices and he had a cube of the overlay which he threw to the side.

The rest of the squad dove in and before long they were to a brick ceiling.

“What the hell is this, sir?” asked Stewart. The captain was tracking again, which was good. It had looked rocky the first day. But he seemed to be coming around. If he didn’t, there wasn’t a hell of a lot they could do about it.

“Dunno,” said O’Neal, flipping through his database on Fredericksburg. “There’s no mention of structures like this.” A quick sonic pulse indicated that it was a single layer of brick. Mike lifted himself on his AG drive and took a slice out of the ceiling.

The gray light and cold rain fell on two dust-covered forms, one male, one female. The two young civilians lay in each other’s arms on a mattress of body armor. To either side were automatic weapons. The sensors unnecessarily confirmed that the weapons had seen use.

Mike lifted himself out of the hole as the squad dropped in to extract the two. He snorted a few times then gave a deep braying laugh. Shelly had enough experience to know when he was talking to himself so the laugh was not broadcast. Nor was the statement, “Those poor Posleen bastards.”

“ Contact! ” shouted another sensor wielder, closer to the river. “ Big contact! ”

This time the construction was a concrete bunker. Mike first wondered how the hell the engineers had managed to make it during the battle, but a brief study indicated that it was an earlier construction. Although what was not obvious.

“Whatta we got?” asked Pappas, kicking the wall of the concrete monstrosity.

“Lots of signal,” said the sensor wielder. “All hibernating as far as I can tell. If there are any conscious, it’s lost in the mass.”

“How many?” Mike barked.

“Don’t know, sir,” said the tech. “Lots.”

Ampele deployed his cutter and tackled an exposed corner. He was standing up to his knees in the rising river, but he didn’t seem to notice. It took three cuts to get a hole in the thick concrete walls. He lifted his head up to look in and received a shotgun blast full in the face.

The blast, gnatlike to a suit of combat armor, hardly fazed the phlegmatic Hawaiian, but he dropped down anyway. Better to let whoever was on the other side of the shotgun realize what they’d shot.

Mike lifted himself on compensators and flew over to the opening. “This is Captain Michael O’Neal of the Mobile Infantry. We’re friends.” He lifted up until he was opposite the hole.

Inside there was a woman in what appeared to be a soiled waitress’s uniform. She had stringy, unwashed blonde hair and a wild expression in her eyes. Having been trapped under a building one time, Mike could well appreciate her frame of mind; he still got a bit panicky in the dark. So he could never afterwards decide if he was brilliant or stupid to take off his helmet.

The woman took one look at the human face and burst into tears.

Mike lifted himself up so he could see in and almost recoiled in horror. The room was filled with bodies and they at first appeared to be corpses or even vampires. Their skin was waxy with red-flushed cheeks. Their lips were swollen and flushed and their eyes were open and glassy. But the same effect was caused by Hiberzine. It was just that he had never seen hibernation patients piled willy-nilly in a sarcophagus before. He shook his head and offered his hand to the woman. “Are you alone?” he asked solicitously.

The answer was another flood of tears but the woman took his hand and slid through the hole. “Ah, ah,” she gasped for a moment then caught her breath. “There was a… a firewoman with me at first. But she… she couldn’t take the walls. I had to… to…”

“Sedate her,” said Mike. He shook his head again. Strength was an odd commodity. Like hope, it sprouted in the strangest places.

Keren watched the video for the umpteenth time. The networks, overrun with incredible images of heroism and cowardice, competence and idiocy, had settled on this one to wrap them all up in a nice neat network package.

The crowd surged back. The lander had dropped perfectly; just far enough that none of the humans were injured, but too close for them to run far. As the giant landing door dropped the panicking crowd washed away from the single, still armored soldier in its midst.

The foreground held a crying child, her forearm obviously broken. If any parent had been in that crowd they had been swept onward, as had the guards of the figure standing in the background, perfectly poised against the foreground of the sobbing child. As the door dropped, silently in this version, the grav-cannon on the back of the figure dropped forward. The figure took a perfect position, a picture from a Fort Benning textbook of a rifleman firing from the standing position. One hand cradled the grav-cannon while the other pulled it into the shoulder. One foot was cocked slightly backwards with feet shoulder-width apart, body slightly canted towards the target.

As the Posleen descended from their craft, harvesting swords held high, the figure opened fire.