The plane made a hard jink to the left and dropped as a huge explosion occurred behind her and to the right. Slapped by the shockwave, she at first thought she had dropped her load early and looked in her rearview at the wrong moment. As she snapped her head back to the front she got tone just as the Peregrine cleared the woods west of Fredericksburg.
The area in and around the interchange was a seething mass of Posleen. Forces driving from the north and south had met at the interchange and tens of thousands of them were creating a sea of alien centaurs in their haste to enter the city before it could be fully sacked. But that same pileup made for thousands of God Kings and they all swiveled towards the target as Colonel Sherman’s fighter rocketed fully into the open.
Before her thumb could complete the fractional movement to the firing button, hundreds of lasers and plasma cannon shredded her aircraft. The high-tech fighter came apart in a shower of carbon fibers, jet fuel and rocking explosions, but before those cannons and lasers tattered her aircraft the last burst of data from her sensor rig, video, radar and all, was received by the ground controller.
“That’s a hard target for Showboat, sir,” said the technician, stabbing the monitor with her finger in eagerness.
“Concur,” said the ANGLICO captain, looking over her shoulder. “Call ’em up. Tell ’em to give it all they’ve got; there’s no humans in that mass.”
“Fire mission, continuous!”
With the setting of the sun, the wind had died and the Potomac River was as still as a pond. The ship had already dropped its anchors to hold it in place against the slight current and the huge guns now swiveled westward in their turrets.
“Load M-One-Four-Four!”
Doors opened in the side of turrets and the long green rounds slid across the compartment, up the carriage and into the breeches.
“Elevation twelve-fifty, five bags.”
The tubes slowly elevated as teenage seamen and women hurled the heavy bags of powder onto the rammers, doing the same job their great-grandfathers had done over sixty years before. With a sussurant hush the fifty-pound bags were shoved up behind the antipersonnel cluster rounds.
“Warning Light is ON!”
Throughout the ship sailors opened their mouths and clamped hands over ears already stuffed with earplugs.
“Fire!”
And the newly refurbished USS North Carolina, one of the seven remaining battleships in the world — pulled from her berth in Wilmington where she had spent nearly fifty years as a state monument — shivered as flame lanced from her sixteen-inch guns for the first time in over sixty years.
CHAPTER 36
Fredericksburg, VA, United States of America, Sol III
0456 EDT October 10th, 2004 ad
“Jesus Christ!” Lieutenant Young shouted, clamping his hands over his ears, “what the fuck was that?!”
“Had to be one of the new Peregrines to survive this far in,” Colonel Robertson surmised, shaking his head to clear the ringing. Just when his hearing was getting back to normal from the noise of landing, the human fighter had slammed it again. “It was definitely a jet.”
The mothers, intent on getting into shelter, paid little or no attention to the cries of their children as they carried them, with the help of the many defenders who had gathered in the area, up the ramp to safety. There were fewer than fifty to go, but the line had started to slow.
Lieutenant Young was peering past the Klieg lights in the direction the fighter went when there was a tremendous explosion to the west. Again the group was rocked by a pressure wave as a huge fireball climbed above the trees in the distance. For a moment the city was lit as if it were day, then the magenta and orange flash faded. A split second later there was a second, fairly anticlimactic, explosion to the northwest.
“Well, there goes the fighter,” said Lieutenant Young. “So much for support.”
“I think that first one was the armory,” Colonel Robertson corrected. “The second was probably the fighter. But if he was running a direct feed, we might get some artillery. Depending on how far out the Posleen go, One-Five-Five might reach. And there might be more fighters, there’s a whole squadron up at Andrews.”
“I don’t think they’re going to slow them down, though,” the lieutenant commented grimly.
“No, probably not,” the commander agreed. His tone was fairly philosophical. His unit had done its job and more. When he died he would know that no one could have done more. It was a form of peace. “I think I will go chivvy some civvies.”
“Okay, sir. I think I’ll head over to the Executive Building and see how that’s going.”
“Good luck, Lieutenant.”
The young officer straightened up and snapped a parade ground salute. The old commander solemnly returned it. Without another word they turned away, each in the direction they felt that duty called them.
Ted Kendall found himself, unfamiliar rifle in hand, in a line of figures shuffling past the Executive Building. Led by a tough old bird from the National Guard armory, they were headed towards the sounds of rifle fire to try to slow down the Posleen. It was their last detail, having spent the previous three hours working on the bunker being prepared for the women and children. He stopped when he saw a familiar figure hunched over a large piece of banner paper.
“Morgen, honey,” he rasped, his voice gone from passing commands in the construction around the bunker, “what do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m making a sign.” Morgen Bredell had been in one cheerleading or pep squad or another since she was eight. She knew she was not as brilliant as she was good-looking, but if there was one thing she could get straight, come hell or high water, it was making a sign out of banner paper and paint. She could even paint a picture, after a fashion. She reached for the Red Brick color as she continued: “When the Posties get here, I think they should have a sign. Don’t you?” She started crying as she slowly dabbed in a building on the banner paper.
“Sure, honey, sure,” he comforted. “I love you, Morgen.”
“I love you too, Ted. Sorry about the fight.”
“Yeah, me too, honey. Good luck.”
“Yeah.” She did not look up. “You too.”
“Yeah.” He shook his head and hurried to catch up with the last platoon of the militia reserve.
“This is insane,” Wendy muttered as they lifted another piece of antique furniture onto the pile under the glassless window.
“Death is lighter than a feather, duty is heavier than furniture,” misquoted Tommy, stepping back and dusting his hands off.
“Would you quit with the Zen quotes, already,” she snapped.
“Well, you could just blow your brains out and be done with it,” he answered serenely. He gestured at the pistol. “That’ll do the job nicely.”
“What? You want me to kill myself?” she retorted.
“No, I want you to be as happy as you can be in what are probably your last few minutes of life,” he answered with a grim smile. “What’s the point of getting angry? It just reduces the quality even further.”
“Sorry, but I’m not even completely through the denial stage, okay?”
“It’s not upsetting me, it’s upsetting you. What we have here is a case of pronoun trouble.”
“This is a great way to spend the last hour of life,” she continued, pulling over a table to lean against as she fired. “Not. Besides, the old thing about, ‘you don’t want to die a virgin, do you?’ keeps running through my head.”