The explosions started rippling down the boulevard and Tulo’stenaloor could see what was coming. The white fire seemed to expand from side to side of the avenue, each pair of enormous explosions coming a fractional second apart. There was no escape through the south building; most of the entrances had been destroyed in the fighting and those that remained were choked with the most fleet of foot or saucer.
As the barrage progressed towards his retreating battalion, the battlemaster found himself cringing at each drawn out pause between crashes. All of the grenades were fired at the same time but some had farther to travel. So each hellish interval got longer and longer as the rounds neared them.
He knew he could flee, leave his oolt’os and take the other kessentai and escape on their tenars. But to lose his oolt’ondai that he had built so carefully over the years of only the finest genetic material; no, it would be better to die than to start over. Like Lot, he turned his face away and led his flock to safety as the doom came nearer and nearer.
As they reached the far intersection the latest pause drew out and out. Tulo’stenaloor finally took heart to look back.
From the ocean inward half the length of the building was a carpet of Po’oslena’ar dead, oolt’os and kessentai intermingled, in death their difference reduced to a fraction in size. No living Po’os moved in all that vast abattoir, no living thing. The energy of the explosions caused superheating of the immediate surroundings. The smell of cooked Posleen filled the air, a soft steam arising from the baked flesh, and smoke rose from the shattered tenar as well.
As his oolt’ondai turned south into the cross street he looked back once more and saw the sea demon ripple and dissolve into a grouping of thresh in hulking metallic space armor. This then for their sea demon. As he watched they finished off the few scattered oolt’os with their terrible silver lightning and began to advance implacably down the boulevard in ground-devouring bounds. He had seen and would remember; these thresh’akrenallai were tricky, tricky.
38
Andata Province, Diess IV
1009 GMT May 19th, 2002 ad
Major Steuben pulled himself up on a block of masonry and wiped the blood from his mouth. The ringing in his ears seemed permanent but he was alive, something on which he would not have taken odds at any point in the last twenty-four hours. Total hearing loss seemed at the moment a small price to pay. He tried to stand but a wave of dizziness overcame him and he sat back down. It was then that he saw the first squad of MI bounce forward and spit silver fire downrange. The crash of the kinetic energy weapons was a dull ringing in his ears, but it was the first sound he had heard since the explosions.
He remembered the flame from the illusory dragon wiping the attacking God King out of the air like swatting a fly. That sight was a bucket of cold water to his sanity and he dove off the masonry mound, scooping up the G-3 in passing, and headed to one of the hasty bunkers the grenadiers had cobbled together. He needed to get to communications now that it seemed the unit might miraculously survive. Before he could reach it he was blocked by a Leopard panzer snuffling forward, scenting Posleen blood in the water. The blast from its main gun was an assault on his ears and he despaired for a moment of regaining any control in this mad and chaotic world.
He ducked behind a shattered wall support and poked his rifle around the corner. The scene beyond was shocking even given the horror of the past few days. He was slightly elevated so he could see the holographic dragon heads pouring fire into the massed Posleen on the division’s seaward flank. The Posleen were unable to maneuver or flee, trapped by the inertia of bodies, and they were now being blasted apart like a clay cliff before a fire hose; bits and pieces flew into the air under the concentrated hammer of the dragon’s breath. When the pile had grown so large as to be an impediment, the lower heads leapt up and forward over the mound of bodies, first half the heads, then the other half, the streams of fire never stopping, even in midair. As the second set of heads landed the single lifted head dropped to the ground and a group of small, round objects flew upward and outward from them.
It took a moment to think about what those might be. Major Steuben had been briefed, a thousand years ago on Earth, about the capabilities of the Fleet armored combat suits. He watched the harmless looking, relatively tiny little balls drift lazily upward then begin to drift down. He suddenly turned sheet white, screamed “INCOMING!” and dove backwards with his hands over his ears.
Now he pulled himself to his feet again, determined to force his recalcitrant body to bend to his will, and stumbled out into the street. As the second group of MI bounded forward he lurched directly in front of one of the flankers, an NCO by the stripes on his shoulder. Steuben hoped the sergeant would be able to see him. There was no apparent visor, the front of the helmet was blank, sloped gray plasteel.
“Officer!” he shouted at the trooper, pointing at his collar tabs. “I need to talk to your commander!”
The trooper’s weapon never wavered from the targets downrange and continued to hammer at them. Major Steuben swatted the trooper’s arm; it was as useful as punching an I-beam and nearly broke his hand. He felt he was talking to some insensate robot and wondered for a moment if there was a human in the suit.
“Eine Minute, bitte Herr Major. Der Leutnant ist hierher unterwegs,” the trooper said in accentless Hochdeutsch.
“Was? Was? Ich bin ein wenig taub.” Louder!
“Eine Minute bitte, Herr Major. Der Leutnant ist hierher unterwegs,” the suit boomed again.
“Sind Sie Deutscher?” shouted Major Steuben, surprised; he could see the red-white-and-blue patch on the suit’s shoulder clearly, despite the gouges it had taken in the day’s battle.
“Nein, Herr Major, Amerikaner. Die Rüstung hat einen Übersetzer. Bitte, Herr Major, ich muss gehen.” (No, Major, American. The suit has a translator. Excuse me, Major, I have to go.) The platoon bounded off leaving a short set of combat armor behind. It stumped over to the major and saluted with a clang of gauntlet to helm.
“Leutnant Michael O’Neal, Mein Herr,” the suit boomed loudly. “Tut uns leid dass es so lang gedauert hat. Wir hatten unterwegs eine Störung.” (Sorry we took so long. We had a spot of bother along the way.)
“Better late than never, Lieutenant. Do you need to move out with your unit? Where is your commander?”
“I’m it, sir. The rest of the battalion is either dead, buried under Qualtren or in the MLR.” O’Neal suddenly had a pistol in his hand. The weapon spat a stream of fire into the darkness of the far building’s lower story. There was a dwindling scream and by the time the major looked back the pistol was in its holster again. The whole action happened in less time than Steuben could have pulled a trigger.
“Well,” Steuben said, shakily. “You are looking at the last of the 10th Panzer Grenadiers as well. We don’t even have enough left to bury our own dead, if we could find them.”
“Yes, sir,” said the suit of armor, stoically. “We’ll all face the reaper someday but just too damn many met him today.”
“Ja. What are your orders?” asked the major. He began to blink with fatigue as the adrenaline rush of the last few minutes wore off. He felt a sudden urge to vomit, barely suppressed.
“I have verbal orders from General Houseman to relieve the units in this building and expedite getting them to the MLR, sir.”