As Colonel Robertson waited patiently for the young lieutenant to finish with his conference he found himself starting to nod off. He glanced at his watch and realized that they had successfully held the Posleen back for over six hours. On the other hand, with the Posleen across 95, through the defenses on the Jeff Davis and pressing up Tidewater Trail, it was really all over but the shouting.
Lieutenant Young turned away from the construction worker and nearly walked into the colonel. When the lieutenant finally focused on the obstacle he swayed for a moment and snapped off a salute. Sometime during the hellish evening he had lost his glasses and peered at his superior owlishly.
“Good evening, sir.” He looked around and swayed again in fatigue. “I am pleased to report that we have sufficient room for all the remaining women and children.” He looked at the line of crying children and worn women who were all that remained of the Fredericksburg noncombatants.
Only hours ago they had been as relatively carefree as any group of people could be in the face of an impending invasion: middleclass matrons and their children, the flower of American suburbia. Now they shivered in the freezing dark as predatory aliens closed in on either side and only a forlorn hope stood between them and an end in the belly of the beast. “This had better work.”
“It will,” the colonel assured the plan’s developer. He had his own dark thoughts about the likelihood, but it was far too late to voice them. And when it came down to cases it was not a choice between this plan and a better one, but a choice between this plan and nothing.
“Well, even if it doesn’t, sir, they’ll never know.”
“You’re going to Hiberzine all of them?”
“All except the last few coherent mothers, sir. In the unlikely event that something goes wrong that is fixable, it would be a hell of a note to have the whole group die because nobody was awake to fix it.”
“Like a leak or a fire or something?”
“Yeah, or somebody having an allergic reaction, whatever. It just seemed like a good idea. Sir,” he added belatedly.
“I think at this point we can more or less dispense with military courtesy, Kenny. Aren’t they going to use up too much air? I thought that would be a limiting factor.”
“Well, the Public Safety folks and Quarles Gas came through again. They each had some CO2 scrubbers for work in confined spaces. So, anyway, the bunker will be outfitted with sufficient power and light for a two-week stay, at which point the sentry mothers will be instructed to put themselves under and hope for the best. If they’re still alive at that point the Posleen will not have found them, which is good, but on the other hand neither did the Army so it would be a wash.”
“Sir,” said Colonel Robertson’s radio operator, “the XO.”
“Uniform 51, this is Uniform 82-actual, over.”
“This is Uniform 51-actual, over.”
“Uniform 51, we have penetration to Sunken Road and Kenmore House. Estimate old town entry in five, say again, five minutes. Over.”
“Roger, Uniform 82. Am with Uniform 49 at Point Delta. Plan Jackson is nearly complete. Coordinate with…” His mind blanked on the call sign for Charlie company. “Coordinate with Charlie 6, over.”
“Roger, Uniform 51. This is Uniform 82.” There was a pause then the radio crackled one last time. “Nice knowing you, Frank.”
“Same here, Ricky. God will surely know his own.”
“Roger that. Out here.”
Colonel Robertson handed the mike to the RTO, swallowed and cleared his throat. “Despite all your good work, we need to get a move on,” he said, gesturing at the dwindling line.
“Yes, sir, I heard. I’m going to go coordinate some more overburden, but if you want to go chivvy some civvies, well, we work for you.”
The colonel chuckled at the weak joke. “I wish we could get some support, any support. Any distraction right now would be a good one.”
CHAPTER 35
Andrews Air Force Base, MD, United States of America, Sol III
0323 EDT October 10th, 2004 ad
“All right, here’s the plan, such as it is,” said Lieutenant Colonel Augusta Sherman, commander of the Twenty-Second Tactical Fighter Squadron. The squadron ready room at Andrews Air Force Base was heavily soundproofed. The soundproofing was legacy of the days when fighters and supply aircraft thundered into the skies; the padded walls reduced the thunder to a dull rumble. In the face of the grounding of aircraft worldwide it created an eerie silence into which the squadron commander’s soprano voice dropped like pebbles in a tomb.
“We know that the Posties are in and around Fredericksburg,” she continued. “But we don’t have a hard fix on numbers, depth, locations or any other damn intel. Army AirCav Kiowas have fixed a route in that is out of sight of any of the landers by sneaking along with their sensor masts just above the trees. In case you need a reminder, flying in sight of landers is a definite no-no.”
She pointed to the snaking course drawn in on the map. “It’s pretty close to following the Rappahanock River. But just north of Fort A.P. Hill they ran into solid Posleen forces and really got mauled by the God King’s automatic targeting systems.”
She looked around the ready room at the group of blue-suited squadron pilots. Until the coming of the Galactics, American military hardware was the crème de la crème and the F-22E was the cutting edge. But with the coming of the Galactics and the Fleet Fighter Force the cream of the world’s fighter pilots was sucked off into space. So many fighters were needed for the fleet that virtually anyone with a background in flying or even a strong aptitude was offered a slot.
What was left to fly the hottest plane ever developed through purely Terran technology was a ragbag group of relative losers. There was Kerman, who had his flight license suspended after putting his crop duster into a house then registering a blood alcohol level of .25. The investigator had it retaken because it seemed an impossibility anyone could fly with that much blood in his alcohol. There was Lieutenant Wordly, who spent as much time holding on to a puke bag as he did the stick, Jefferson Washington Jones, plane lover, GED graduate, a functional illiterate until he was twenty-five, whose first solo, at the age of fifty-seven, was in a jet trainer, and all the others.
And there was one antiquated squadron commander who got such a severe case of agoraphobia after one trip out of the atmosphere she could no longer fly above two thousand feet. It’s not the height, General, it’s the horizon.
On the other hand, they had a plane that practically flew itself and every single pilot was bound and determined to do the best job they possibly could.
“They tried sending in Predator drones, but they got mauled too. The powers-that-be hope that the combination of Terran stealth and high speeds will give us some limited survivability. It’s really the only reason they produced the Echo, for a situation just like this.”
She took a sip of coffee to give an appearance of calm and took another look around the room. Most of the pilots were simply listening, taking it all in. There would be hardly time to breathe on a mission like this one, much less read notes. And the whole mission would be programmed into their birds. This was just so the pilots had some idea what was happening when they had to change the plan. Kerman picked up the sheet of paper in front of him and started to fold it, whistling quietly through his teeth.