The canister, however, unlike the grenades and ammunition, was heavily shielded against damage. The possibility of penetrating damage that reached the bottle was anticipated by the designers. The bottle was not only made of a heavy plasteel similar to the armored combat suits, but also had a heavy-duty energy shield around it.
When the first ammunition detonated, the rapid explosions, effectively one expanding nuclear fireball, were shrugged off. Likewise the initial explosions of the grenades; the explosive force simply was too weak to destroy the integrity of the well-designed antimatter containment system.
However, the grenades were detonating practically in contact with the bottle, and their iridium casings were accelerating at nearly half the speed of light.
The first few bits of molten forged iridium shrapnel plastered themselves to the outside and sublimated under the expanding fireball. But by a few microseconds after the explosion of the conventional grenade thousands of forged particles were bombarding the outside of the canister. Under the assault, first the outer shielding, then the plasteel armor, and finally the inner shielding failed.
At which point nearly a quarter kilogram of antimatter detonated, with an explosion to rival the Big Bang.
* * *
The buffet of the suit occurred as the God King commander performed his last panicked course change. The course change placed Mike's suit slightly around the corner from the antimatter limpet mine and above it when it detonated.
The first few microseconds as the rifle ammunition and grenades detonated saw a number of occurrences. The ship was rocked backwards and up, slamming into the suit again. The wash of the initial explosion destroyed the plasma cannon that had been firing at the rapidly retreating suits permitting the last few survivors of the platoon to make good their escape. And the buffet of the explosion slapped the ship commander into the controls, taking him out of play.
The second impact also slapped Mike into unconsciousness. At that action the biotic-gestalt reacted and injected him with Hiberzine; once the user was out of play the gestalt could make its own tactical judgments. It analyzed the situation:
1. A nuclear weapon was detonating in close proximity to its ProtoPlasmic Intelligence System.
2. The likelihood of the survival of its PPIS was low.
3. Termination of the PPIS would result in the termination of the gestalt.
This analysis was suboptimal. Immediate remedies for the analysis were in order.
Thus, when the initial wash of energy swirled around the edge of the cruiser, it struck a set of armor that was rapidly becoming as insubstantial as a feather. The suit was nearly thirty meters away from the ship, nearly inertialess, being flooded with oxygen, and outward bound at high acceleration when the main packet detonated. Under the circumstances, it was the best the gestalt could do.
The explosion tore the space cruiser in half, vaporizing the facet against which the material had been placed and blasting two separated pieces of ship away from each other. One was blasted sideways into the nearest megascraper, which was already coming apart from the nuclear wave front. It slammed into the top of the mile-cube building and smashed half of it to the ground, taking out two more buildings as well before it finally ground to a halt.
The other section of the massive ship was blasted nearly straight up. It rose on the edge of the mushroom cloud, a black spot of malignance on the edge of the beautiful fireball, and finally curved back downward to smash into another Posleen-held megascraper.
Mike's suit was near the former section of ship. Initially shielded by the downward hurtling half of the space cruiser, it was soon caught on the edge of the main nuclear fireball and rapidly accelerated to over four thousand miles per hour. The suit skipped across two megascraper roofs, where the legs were scraped off, and finally through a seaside megascraper, where it lost one arm. The remnant cuirass and helmet came out of the megascraper on the back side of the wave front and skipped several times on the roiled ocean. Finally the bit of detritus slowed enough to enter the water and settled beneath the waves in two hundred feet of water.
An armored combat suit cost nearly as much as a combat shuttle, and even the most damaged suit held some residual value. When the suit was settled in its watery grave, the final salvage beacon, installed at the absolute insistence of the Darhel bean counters, began its plaintive bleat.
* * *
Either the bureaucrats were prescient or they were idiots. The SEALs attached to the expeditionary force had yet to decide which. When they were ordered to Diess, at the last possible moment, no one could tell them why. Since SEALs are used for a variety of purposes besides covert strikes, it could have to do with virtually anything. They could be there for explosive ordnance disposal. They could be there for cross training foreign forces. They could be there to investigate the Posleen rear area by seaborne insertion.
As it turned out, they were doing a booming business in salvage.
The nuclear explosion the week before had blasted all sorts of things out to sea. Besides various bits of reusable Indowy equipment, the armored combat suits were the most ubiquitous, their beacons calling for pickup in a most depressing way. Of the fourteen that had been recovered, only four had survivors.
This one was a sure write-off. The plasteel looked cooked, portions of the metal had turned blue from the nuclear blast. One arm and the legs were missing and a worm was struggling to fight its way past the biotic seal over a protruding bit of burnt brown flesh. About the only part that looked intact was the head, torso and abdomen.
"Man," said the team leader over the underwater communicator, "this guy got hammered. Check 'im out, Spock." He brushed a questing siphonophore off his wet-skin, the delicate creature disappearing in a luminous cloud.
The PO tech kicked over to the head of the suit and attached a lead. The hastily cobbled together device sent a pulse for update to the suit's final distress center. The readout came back slowly.
"This is that lieutenant they've been lookin' for, sir," said the petty officer to the background of bubbling air. He patiently waited for a condition update. "The AID is cooked, and most of the environmental. I don't think they're gonna get much . . . Holy shit!"
40
Andata Province, Diess IV
1324 GMT June 24th, 2002 AD
Mike swallowed, "A month?"
"Yep," said General Houseman, "you've been in the body and fender shop over a month and you'll be here for a while yet. It took them two weeks to do a proper number on the radiation damage alone."
"What's happened to the expeditionary force? On Diess?"My platoon? he wanted to say.
"Well, the C-Dec blew up quite spectacularly and did a number on a large section of the city. We sortied in the aftermath. The Posleen weren't able to move through Ground Zero and we used that terrain obstacle to our advantage. Then, holding those positions, we got the Indowy to build us an abattoir," he smiled grimly. "Then we slaughtered those sorry bastards."
"Would you care to be more specific?"
"Do you know what murder holes are?" asked the general, holding a cup of water with a straw up for the lieutenant to drink from. His newly grown arm was still weak.
"Like in castles? Holes to pour oil in the entrances?"
"Burning oil and stick spears through, yes. Towards the end of the castle period and into the twentieth century they used a different technique.
"Just inside the main gates would be a field for sorties to form on. Occasionally the enemy got through the first gates. The walls on either side of the sortie field would be gun ports, hundreds of them. The enemy would pack onto this field and it would become a killing field; the origin of the term, by the way.