So why did she feel like someone had just walked over her grave?
Maybe it was the speed with which things were changing. The dozen turret rings had appeared as if by magic, requisitioned from a tank repair depot in Asheville. Garcia apparently had a high and unquestioned priority for parts and equipment, but any situation in which Army Group commanders were giving orders for parts to be delivered on a priority basis meant that the situation was totally FUBARed. And, presumably, it was up to SheVa Nine, and its “secondary weapons commander” to unFUBAR it.
Joy.
She turned as the six-inch plate of the SheVa top deck rang to a set of bootheels and smiled at the repair brigade commander.
“That, sir, is something I never thought I’d see,” she said, gesturing at the turret that was now being tested for true.
“It’s a good basic idea,” Garcia said. “As always, Paul’s suggestions had to be tweaked for details, but it should significantly aid in the counterattack. May I ask a question?”
“Shoot.”
“What happened to the chassis?”
“Heh,” she laughed softly. “I’m not sure what happened to them officially. Do you want to know what really happened?”
“Out of school.”
“Okay,” she said. “Out of school, we used them to unstick the SheVa.”
“Errr,” Garcia looked down at the massive structure. Next to it the D-9 bulldozers of the construction battalion looked like Tonka toys. “Even a dozen Abrams could barely budge one of these things. I know; I’ve gotten three unstuck. It generally requires about a week.”
“We didn’t have a week,” Chan said wearily, running fingers through her greasy hair then looking at them in distaste. “Mitchell, the crazy bastard, took us across Betty Gap, which doesn’t even have a road. Or it didn’t have one. Anyway, on the way down the SheVa started to… slide. Most amazing thing I’ve ever seen, and the scariest. It just… skied down the mountainside and ended up jammed between two bluffs. It was under fire at the time I might add.”
“What kind?” the colonel asked, fascinated.
“At first it was a group of dismounted Posleen,” she said. “We hit them from the flank, though. But then a couple of landers came over the ridge. Pruitt took both of them out at under a thousand meters.”
“But that’s…” Garcia stopped. “If their rounds went through, or if the lander’s tanks sympathetically detonated, they were going to be blown away along with the lander.”
“They did,” she grimaced. “Both rounds went off outside the landers. At that point, though, Pruitt had gotten good at missing the lander’s antimatter containment, or hitting it if he preferred. He’s very good. Anyway, one of the landers rolled down the hill and nearly hit them; he blew it off by firing under it and turning it with the antimatter blast. That was at under five hundred meters.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, very hairy. We got caught in both of the SheVa antimatter blasts. Anyway, at the end of it, the SheVa was stuck as hell. An engineer major happened to be in the area, retreating the same way. He suggested unloading the turrets and basically jamming the chassis under the SheVa like a bunch of boards. It worked but… well let’s just say getting the crunched metal that we left behind is going to be an interesting exercise in salvage.”
“Ouch.” Garcia chuckled then shook his head. “Sorry about losing your tanks.”
“Oh, I didn’t really mind,” she said. “You ever been in one of those things when it fires?”
“No.”
“Let’s just say that the crews cheered when the SheVa crushed them.”
“Bad?”
“Indescribable,” she said. “We’d just finished firing when one of the SheVa rounds went off. Ten kiloton explosion, maybe nine hundred meters away. You know what my gunner said?”
“No.”
“ ‘What was that last bang?’ ” She chuckled grimly. “You know it’s bad when a nuke going off is anticlimactic.”
“I guess we’d better add some reinforcing.”
“Yep. Better do that little thing. How’s it going?”
“It’s not the most shot up SheVa I’ve ever worked on,” Garcia answered. “But it’s close. We’ll finish in time, though, or an hour or so over.”
“How are we going to control the guns?” she asked.
“I’m putting in a secondary control area,” Garcia answered. “Paul’s design again. You’ll be there along with the commo person that Mitchell picked up. You’ll have commo with all your tracks but you’ll have to draw your information from the SheVa’s systems.”
“That will work,” she said.
“Paul’s pouring out plans for a general upgrade on SheVas,” Garcia said. “He wants to make them all bristle with secondary weapons. I pointed out that there’s no way to control that much firepower without a large crew. He wants to use computer controls.” Garcia grimaced.
“And the problem with that is?”
“You don’t want to see Paul’s idea of artificial intelligence,” Garcia sighed. “He wants to rip some code out of a computer game. I’ve convinced him that that would be bad.”
“Heh,” Chan laughed. “Missile-armed kangaroos?”
“I’ve heard that story,” Garcia sighed. “Something like that. I’ve got this image of the guns identifying Himmit as enemy Ghosts and Indowy as Protoss. For the time being, I think that it’s better if your crews stay in the turrets controlling the fire.”
“I’d better get with the commanders and start working on how to operate. Are they going to be scattered all along the rim?”
“More or less. Five at the front, three at the rear and two on each side. The outer one on each end will be able to support to the sides.”
“Lots of firepower, but not much in the way of armor,” Vickie pointed out.
“Plenty frontal,” the commander said. “And Paul has a couple of additional concepts that he’s working out. But if they get in close and swarm, you’ll be in trouble.”
“And if they do?”
“Well, Captain, that’s going to be your job to prevent.”
“You know, Stewie, this really sucks.”
The battalion was crouched in a double line of mud-filled holes, some of them connected by the trench the unit had been constructing when the Posleen assault hit, with their grav-rifles on extensions, pouring fire into the oncoming waves of centaurs.
The M-300 grav-rifle was attached to the suit by a sinuous organic-looking extender over the right shoulder. The extender included a feed tube that was supplied from the ammunition lockers within the suit. In battle the firing suit could crouch within a hole, or around a corner, and extend the rifle out to engage oncoming targets; the rifle had its own sighting system that led back to the suit control systems.
There had been suggestion that the suits have two rifles attached, but the limit of the guns was not firepower but ammunition availability. The suits had six separate ammunition storage lockers, each with their own blow-out panel, but even so, and despite the fact that the actual “bullets” were nought more than uranium teardrops the size of the end of a pinkie, they could run through their entire on-board store of ammunition in three hours. Especially in what was called “a target-rich environment.” And that description certainly met the current conditions.
The Posleen were coming on in good order, packed in like sardines and moving forward at a trot. Until they ran into the intersecting streams of depleted uranium grav-rounds. Where the streams of silver lightning hit the wall of bodies there was a continuous explosion of red fire and yellow blood. Each of the teardrop rounds of the ACS had the force of a small bomb and one that struck killed not only the target, but usually the centaur to either side. The resulting destruction built up a wall of flesh that the centaurs were beginning to find to be an obstacle. But still they kept coming. And if they kept it up for long enough, it might even work.