Thus, when the twelve Reapers paused and opened fire, twelve hundred rounds hit a single weapons pod on the side of the Lamprey, boring a hole into the interior and detonating the feed mechanism of the plasma gun. The rest began flailing around the interior.
As silver and red fire belched out of its side, the lander attempted to escape, reversing course and rotating its configuration to move the damaged portion away from the fire. But the God King at the controls must not have been one of their more elite pilots, as he proved by ramming the ship into the flank of Black Rock mountain just south of the radio tower.
The other Lamprey had engaged the main body of the battalion, and was now heading to the southwest and the Wall in long, swooping strides. But seeing the fire that had taken down its companion, the ship changed targets and began a careful manual rotation to reduce its damage.
“Begin evasive movement,” the lieutenant said, putting orders to words as he started a slow trot to the southeast.
The manual fire from the Lampreys was, fortunately, not as accurate as their automatic fire. But it was heavy; the side of the lander sported over twelve medium weapons emplacements. So the ground around the Reapers was torn by fire as they began their move. And some of it was on target.
“Fuck me,” Blatt said softly as a line of craters from a heavy plasma gun walked across the ground and onto his position. He attempted to dodge them but with all the other fire there was no place to run.
“Shit,” McEvoy said as Blatt’s suit of armor came apart in a ball of silver fire. “Motherfucker!”
“We’re not getting this one,” Sunday said angrily. The rounds were destroying many of the surface emplacements and putting pockmarks all over the face of the Lamprey but with it rotating as it was there was no way to bore into it. And the fire was getting heavier.
“What I wouldn’t do for a SheVa gun about now,” Tommy muttered.
SheVa Nine, or Bun-Bun as its crew called it, was still faintly smoking when the first blimp appeared over the horizon.
SheVas were the sort of bastard weapon that only occur in the midst of really terrible wars. Early on in the battles against the Posleen one of humanity’s greatest weaknesses was the inability to destroy the Posleen ships when they were used for close support of the alien infantry. The event was fortunately rare — the Posleen were not good at combined arms — but when it occurred it was devastating. Many weapons systems were created to try to destroy the Posleen landers, but with the exception of the Galactic-crafted heavy weapons, which were in short supply, only one system had proven effective. And it was monstrous in every meaning of the word.
During the fighting around Fredericksburg the battleship North Carolina had managed to tag a Posleen lander with its sixteen-inch guns and when nine sixteen-inch rounds hit, the alien ship more or less disappeared. So, obviously, sixteen-inch rounds would work. But there were many problems associated with that simple fact. The first was that battleship turrets were not designed for antiaircraft work; the shot had been luck as much as skill and improvisation. The second was that the engagement envelope, how high and far the guns would reach, was very small. The third was that battleships had a very hard time getting to, say, Knoxville, Tennessee.
The answer was to create a new class of guns, superficially similar to the battleship guns. They were sixteen inches in diameter but at that point the resemblance stopped. Like modern tank guns, they were smoothbore and very high velocity. The guns used an electroplasma propellant, extended barrels and secondary firing chambers to accelerate a depleted uranium dart as thick as a treetrunk to twenty-five-hundred meters per second. Firing a single penetrator round, the weapon designed to destroy a Posleen lander, was the recoil equivalent of firing six standard battleship cannons.
Because of the enormous energies involved, a tremendous recoil system had to be designed including shock absorbers the size of small submarines. While it was, relatively, easy to install in the few fixed fortifications that received the guns, the real necessity was for a mobile gun platform.
Most development groups despaired when faced with the challenge, but the Shenandoah Valley Industrial Planning Commission simply accepted that the platform had to be larger than anyone was willing to admit. Thus was born the SheVa gun.
SheVas were four-hundred feet long and three hundred wide, with huge tracks surmounted by a “turret” that looked like a metal factory building. At the rear, concealed in the turret, was a heavily armored magazine for its eight main gun rounds, each of which looked like a cross between a rifle cartridge and an ICBM. The cantilevered gun, massive against any other backdrop, stuck out of the turret like a giant telescope and was so small in comparison it looked like an accidental add-on.
The gun consisted of three main portions, the gun itself and its supporting structures, the monstrous “weather shield” turret that created the gun room, and the drive system.
The gun was a two-hundred-foot-long, multi-chambered “Bull” gun. The basic propellant was an electro-plasma system that used an electrical charge to excite material and provide propulsion far beyond that available with any normal chemical propellant. However, due to power drop-off over distance, the barrel had secondary firing chambers down its side that added their own propulsion to the gigantic projectile. The combination permitted penetrator rounds, discarding sabot rounds with an outer disposable-plastic “sabot” and an inner uranium penetrator, to reach a velocity of nearly twenty-five-hundred meters per second, an unheard of speed prior to the SheVa gun.
It was mounted on a pivoting turret and elevation system that permitted it to fire from just below zero degrees to just beyond “straight up.” It was, after all, designed as an anti-“aircraft” gun.
Instead of the normal “bag and round” system of most artillery, where the actual “bullet” was first loaded and then bags of powder rammed in behind, the gun used enormous cartridges that looked like nothing so much as a cross between a rifle cartridge and an ICBM; eight of the rounds were stored in a heavily reinforced magazine at the rear of the turret. Damage to the turret was to be avoided: depending upon whether the system was loaded for “penetrator” or “area of effect” there would be from eighty kilotons to eight hundred kilotons of explosive riding around in a SheVa. For that reason, among others, regular units tried to give them a wide berth.
To protect all of this machinery, some of which was not particularly weatherproof, the gun was encased in a gigantic “turret,” actually a simple weather shield, that was a major engineering feat in itself. The shield was a hundred-foot-wide cube that mounted to the turret ring at the base of the gun so that it rotated at the same time as the weapon. The exterior of the shield was six-inch steel plate, not for any armoring reasons but simply because any lesser material buckled whenever the gun fired. The interior, on the other hand, was mostly empty, a vast space of soaring girders and curved braces that held the shield in place.
At the center top of the exterior of the shield was a crane, much better supported than the rest of the structure, that served to move around the humongous equipment necessary for even the simplest repairs to the gun.
To drive all of this structure required more than a little power. That was supplied by four Johannes/Cummings pebble-bed reactors. The core of the reactors were the “pebbles” themselves, tiny “onions” with layers of graphite and silicon wrapped around a fleck of uranium at the center. Due to the layering the uranium itself could never reach “melting temperature” and, therefore, the reactors were immune to run-away reactions. Furthermore, the helium coolant system prevented any radiation leakage; helium was unable to transmit radiation and thus even in a full coolant loss situation the reactor wasn’t going to do anything but sit there.