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.
Aberdeen Proving Grounds, MD, United States of America, Sol III
1626 EDT October 13th, 2004 ad
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.
Cheyenne Mountain, CO, United States of America, Sol III
1423 EDT October 14th, 2004 ad
She had never planned on being President. Her position was to balance the ticket. And she sure as hell did not want to be President stuck in a concrete bunker in the middle of a mountain in Colorado.
But she had to admit it made more sense than a combat suit in the middle of D.C.
The cabinet was scattered to hell and gone. And so were the staffers. And there was no conventional transport faster than trains. Trains. They were reduced to using trains.
But the Galactics weren’t. The Tir Dol Ron would be here any minute, courtesy of a Himmit stealth ship. She supposed she could probably avail herself of one as well. But reassembling a staff was still going to take months.
She had had damn little staff with her when the landings started. And not many more had made it here so far. One of those, though, had turned out to be a goldmine. The girl was a total airhead about everything outside her narrow specialty, but she had an immense understanding of the Galactics and their punctilious protocol.
Which might make or break the war.
Washington Monument, Washington, DC
United States of America, Sol III
1430 EDT October 14th, 2004 ad
“It is you people, and other soldiers like you, who will make or break the war to come,” said General Taylor.
Immediately following the battle, the two colonels and their sergeant majors had gathered the survivors of the Battle of The Monument and made a list. The six hundred or so that survived, along with a dazed platoon of engineers extracted with some difficulty from the Memorial, were now gathered at the site of their triumph to be decorated.
The tall black general looked around at the group with a penetrating eye. “Many of you, in years to come, will belittle that moment. That is a fundamental nature of true heroes. But I tell you now, this battle will be remembered with Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord. Not only because those were battles that formed a great nation, as this was a battle that saved one. But because they were small skirmishes that presaged a great and terrible war. And the survivors from those small skirmishes formed the core of the great army that arose from their ashes.” He smiled faintly.
“But enough of the words. We all know there ain’t no extra pay, and rations will be catch as catch can. But we still got plenty of medals!”
Rabun County, GA, United States of America, Sol III
1820 EDT October 14th, 2004 ad
The reporter from the local station shook water from the hood of his raincoat and looked at the camera.
“And three, two, one… Good afternoon, this is Tom Speltzer from WKGR, reporting from Habersham, Georgia. It seems like there are plenty of medals for the soldiers, but it wasn’t only soldiers that beat the Posleen.