As the waypoint loomed up through the haze he thumbed the manual winch control. The descent braked to a stop just as Michelle intoned “Ahhh, Mike?”
“Gotcha,” he laughed. Again the lack of response was pointed. The braking maneuver immediately started him spinning near the far side of the three-meter tube. He let out a few more feet and tried to “fly” over to the opening by twisting his body into a position used in skydiving called a “delta track.” Essentially it forms the body into a self-directed arrow. Unfortunately, the external design of the suit did not lend itself to the maneuver and although he swung briefly toward the opening he just as swiftly swung back. He grasped the line and tried to swing toward the opening again, but the current and the geometry of the movement defeated him.
He finally stopped the spin by the simple expedient of switching on his boot clamps, universal binders again, locking his feet onto the far wall, and studied the problem. He had to cross three meters of water with every bit of physics working against him. Wait, which way was gravity? Well, it was perpendicular to the direction of movement, so that was no help. He slowly paid out the line until he was perpendicular to the wall on which he stood facing into the current. He deliberately stopped thinking about gravity again, and stretched his arms as far as they would go. No way to reach, he was way too short. What to do, what to do?
Suit boots. Damn. He released his right boot, stepped a foot sideways and reclamped it. Then the left boot. Step. Clamp.
“Lieutenant O’Neal?” sounded a concerned Sergeant Green a few minutes later.
“Yeah?” Mike puffed.
“You okay, sir?”
“Yeah,” Mike grunted, fighting the physics of the situation was like carrying a boulder up a hill and the suit almost made it worse; the pseudomusculature had never been designed to side step against current. My fault again. “I’m almost to the first waypoint,” he gasped. “Get the first team ready.”
“Yes, sir.”
Now he was climbing up the side of the slippery tunnel. The boots refused to slide, a tribute to the Indowy makers he decided, not the idiot designer, but getting them to clamp was noticeably harder. Finally he got a boot over the sill and with his right hand he clamped a binder onto the waypoint wall. Switching grips on the binder he rolled into the still waters of the side tunnel with a final grunt.
“No rest for the wicked,” he rasped, sucking in oxygen and pulling himself up the wall. “Michelle, increase the O2 percentage, please, before I panic.”
“Say again sir?”
“Nothing Sergeant,” Mike said, fighting a desire to tear off the armor and get a really deep breath. Of water. The increased O2 level started to help the oxygen starvation. “I’m down. Recheck those binders and I’ll clamp off on this end.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Send the next suck… ah, volunteer for the bound down first.” Mike said as he clamped the end of the line to the ceiling. He let out a few feet of slack and then clamped his line to the wall, belaying himself into the tunnel. “I definitely need to brief him. This is not as easy as I thought it would be.”
“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Green, with a chuckle. “I will tell you that you just made me fifty bucks. The betting was five to one that you wouldn’t make it at all.”
“Beg pardon. I designed these systems. I, at least, had total confidence in them.” In a pig’s eye. “It’s just the last part that’s hard.”
“Ah, airborne, sir, whatever you say.”
The rest of the move out of the zone of destruction was time consuming, but not dangerous. As the move progressed the line men discovered myriad techniques to overcome the flow. Notably, stopping before the occasional turn and walking through. After three more hours they reached a pump room four kilometers beyond Qualtren in the subbasement of another megascraper.
Ensuring that there were no Posleen in the area, Mike put the AIDs on guard and ordered the troops to get some rest. He, on the other hand, had to keep going. His problem was that although he had fifty some odd troops who, as soon as they got some rest, would be ready to murder anything with more that two legs, they were effectively weaponless. Their external weapons had been swept away in the explosion and only the few gunners with sidearms still had projectile weapons. On the other hand they each were carrying several thousand rounds of ammunition that used antimatter as a power source so there had to be something they could do. First he had to catch up on “the big picture.”
Mike felt too drained to use the voice systems so he called up a virtual desktop. His first query reported the current overall battlefield. The schematic was far worse. There was now a second green line in contact with the Posleen mass. The primary defensive line the mobile units were supposed to hold the Posleen back from for twenty-four hours had been reached at twelve.
The mobile units, what was left of them, had been pushed to the sea and were encircled with their backs to it. Mike ran another query and watched as the perimeter withdrew, flickered and died. Eight hours. The same operational projection called for the primary defense line to break in eighteen to twenty-four.
Next he located the remainder of the 325th in reserve of the primary defensive line. The ACS unit had been the only mobile unit able to retreat fast enough to avoid being encircled. He did not bother to determine his new chain of command, he assumed that Major Pauley was no longer in command and that would make the new commander Major Norton. That was no improvement from his point of view. It looked on the map like the American unit had been grouped with, possibly under, the German unit.
The encircled perimeter of armor units consisted mainly of French, German and English units. The 17th Cav, farthest from the sea and with its right flank left vulnerable by the retreat of the 325th must have been rapidly eliminated. Shades of Little Bighorn. It didn’t have to happen this way. The primary Posleen assault through the sector had been decisively crushed, literally, by the demolition of Qualtren and Qualtrev. With the reinforcement of the battalion, 7th Cav could have survived. If the oil had not detonated, shattering the battalion’s morale and killing Colonel Youngman. It would have worked… And it could work again, he thought. No weapons, but lots of explosives. We could break that encirclement. He started sketching out a battleplan.
“Michelle, see if you can get either General Houseman or General Bridges. I think we can pull this rabbit out of the hat, yet.”
“Sir, First Lieutenant O’Neal, from the ACS unit is on the horn. He insists on talking to you.”
Lucius Houseman was in no mood to talk to Lieutenant O’Neal at the moment. He could read maps just as well as the lieutenant and if he could not he had any number of staff officers ready to tell him what the morrow would bring. Once the mobile units trapped against the sea were finished off, the Posleen there would come after the primary defensive line in a serious way. It would be poorly defended without the support of the cavalry divisions destroyed by the retreat. He now had to agree with the lieutenant that the ACS unit had not been ready for combat, not that as a cavalryman he had ever had the liveliest faith in the damn airborne. But he also did not want to listen to O’Neal say “I told you so!” in any way shape or form.
He also had heard some rumor that the destruction of the battalion before the combat was even fully joined was because of some cockamamie plan on the part of the “expert” he had been saddled with. He considered for a full minute whether to take the call. His thinking, after twenty hours of watching his forces being destroyed piecemeal, was getting sluggish. He took a sip of tepid water from a canteen and considered his options. I guess that is what I get for splitting my forces in the face of the enemy. We could go nuclear, he thought, it would give us a breather, push them back for a space. Finally he nodded and the aide handed him the receiver.