“Thanks.” He took the proffered device and transferred the data. “Are those MetalStorm packs on top of this thing?”
MetalStorm anti-lander systems were among the less successful devices tried over the years. MetalStorm was a device for firing thousands of rounds in a very short period of time. It basically consisted of a gun barrel filled with bullets. Each of the bullets was fired, in turn, by an electrical charge. The highest rate of fire available was something over a million rounds per minute.
MetalStorm anti-lander systems were a 105mm, twelve-barrel device mounted on an Abrams tank chassis. Each of the barrels was loaded with one hundred rounds. The rounds were the same type as had originally been carried by the Abrams as an anti-tank round, but with the MetalStorm system all twelve hundred rounds could be fired in under twenty seconds. Firing all the rounds in one ripple fire was extremely unpleasant for the crew; it had been described as being put in a barrel and shaken by a giant. Despite that, the system was fairly ineffective at killing landers.
“Yes, sir,” Mitchell said uncomfortably. “The chassis were… expended by my order.”
“I’m sure there’s a fascinating story there somewhere,” Garcia said with a dry smile. “You haven’t been firing them from up there, have you?”
“No sir,” Pruitt replied. “They’re just chained down.”
“Okay, we’ll pull them off and lift them out with one of the blimps,” Garcia said.
“Hey, boss, let’s rethink that.” The person rounding the SheVa was apparently a civilian. He was a tall young male, heavily muscled and movie star gorgeous with long blond hair, wearing a black trenchcoat and gold sunglasses, his hands tucked deep in the pockets. He glanced up at the top of the SheVa and shrugged. “There’s better stuff to do with them than just fly them out.”
“What are you thinking, Paul?” Garcia asked. “Oh, pardon me. Ladies and gentlemen, this is Paul Kilzer. He was one of the original SheVa designers and agreed to come along as a consultant.”
Pruitt was staring at the apparition with his mouth hanging open. “Riff?” he asked with a gasp.
“No, my name’s Paul,” the civilian answered with a frown. “Do I know you?”
“Uh… no,” Pruitt responded. “But… what are you thinking of doing with the Storms?”
“Do we have crews?” the civilian asked.
“They’re scattered through the SheVa, racked out,” Mitchell responded. “Why?”
“Well, I think I know where we can get some turret rings,” Paul said. “Running power to them won’t be hard. Run some commo and you’ve got really cool firepower. You’ll need some additional juice, but we’ve got six reactors along with us. We can upgun this thing along with the armor add-ons. That should help. A bit.”
“Dude,” Pruitt whispered.
“Do you have a specific plan?” Garcia asked.
“I think I did some planning a while back,” Paul said, pulling a book out of his right jacket pocket. “Let me check my notes.”
Indy checked a hysterical laugh and looked around at the group. “Sorry.”
Garcia looked at his PDA and nodded. “The survey team confirms all your damage reports, Warrant. Why don’t you guys go get some rest and we’ll get to work on this thing.”
“Works for me,” Mitchell said, fatigue causing him to sway. “The Storm commander is Major Chan. You’ll need to consult with her. And her command, I suppose.”
“They’re all transferred to you as of now,” Garcia said. “I’ll handle the details, get some rest, Colonel.”
Despite his fatigue, Pruitt found it impossible to sleep. He had taken half a Provigil less than two hours before the repair brigade had landed and until it wore off he was wide awake, if mentally slow. So he laboriously climbed the stairs to the top of the SheVa to get a better look at the activity.
The division of infantry that had been bottled up on the far side of Balsam Gap had finally started to flow through. Its APCs, trucks and tanks were now barreling down Highway 23 towards Dillsboro, probing for the Posleen in the distant valley and finding surviving bridges. Things had been tight, with nearly a million Posleen closing in on the trapped SheVa, until the President had released Bun-Bun to use nuclear fire. But three rounds of antimatter “area effect” weapons had cleared out the main concentration. The division was now probing for the survivors and looking for where the aliens were reconsolidating. Not to mention trying to capture critical terrain features.
In the meantime the bulldozers and earthmovers of the SheVa brigade had opened up a larger landing area, permitting a continuous flow of blimps to drop their loads and pick up the empty containers, clearing the way for the next.
In addition to the earth movers, specialty heavy equipment had flowed in at a tremendous rate. One device, apparently made from a giant steam shovel, was an automated plasma cutter. The massive tracked system had driven directly from the container to the SheVa and begun cutting huge holes in the wall of the drive system. There were also three specialty track breakers which moved from damaged track to damaged track, removing the man-sized bolts that connected the tracks, pulling them off and replacing them with new. Some of the damaged tracks were on the underside; it would be interesting to see what the repair techs did about that.
As Pruitt watched, a massive forklift rolled out of one of the containers carrying a complete reactor pack. It drove from the container to one of the holes that had been cut and right into the interior of the SheVa. Pruitt hoped that any of the MetalStorm troops that had been sleeping in the engineering bay had been moved out of the way.
One whole load had been dropped directly in front of the SheVa. It was wrapped in plastic but appeared to be huge plates of some sort. He saw the civilian consultant pop up out of one of the hatches and painfully got to his feet to walk over.
“What are those?” he asked, pointing over the low railing on the top of the SheVa. They were nearly two hundred feet in the air so the view was somewhat disquieting.
If the height bothered Paul it wasn’t apparent. “Add-on armor. We’re going to throw it on the front of the track to cut down on damage.”
“It looks… heavy,” Pruitt said, thinking about some of the frankly insane maneuvers the SheVa had gone through in the previous battle. “It’s not going to slow us down, is it?”
“Not after we add four reactors,” Paul answered. “We’re going to pull the two damaged ones and put in all six. Your top speed will stay the same, but your torque will go up, which should help in the mountains.”
“What about the tracks?” Pruitt asked. Too much strain on the track connections could cause the entire track to blow free.
“Your driver had better be careful,” Paul replied.
“Huh,” Pruitt said, shivering in memory. “Did you hear how we got the MetalStorm turrets but not the chassis?”
“No.”
“Good story. Got a second?”
Major Vickie Chan watched as the MetalStorm turret was lowered onto the freshly mounted turret ring. The blaze of light from underneath, where repair techs were welding in support struts, vanished as the turret settled onto the ring.
The major was a tall, pretty Eurasian whose calm demeanor was belied by her absolute intensity in combat. She had been a captain until the previous day, in command of a company of MetalStorm tracks. Her company had linked up with the SheVa during the retreat and had followed it the whole way, being carried for the last half. She had gotten used to an independent command. Since nobody knew quite what to do with her guns they had shuttled like gypsies from area to area, but after the loss of her chassis it was pretty clear that was going to end. If she was going to be tied into a larger command structure, a SheVa was probably a good choice. And Colonel Mitchell was a good commander: smart, capable and lucky.