“Son, we all do,” Mosovich said reasonably. All of the other children, Wendy, Elgars and Mueller were already out, laid on mattresses across the spread-out remaining boxes. The biggest fear was that something would fall on them; if the walls of the cache failed nothing would save them anyway. And if anyone remained out of hibernation in the room the oxygen would quickly be used up; already Mosovich felt the air getting close and fetid. “There’s not enough air in here for us to stay awake.”
“I’m not going to do it,” the boy said stubbornly, shaking his head.
Shari’s face was strained and tired but just as determined. “Everyone’s going under this time, Billy. Even me.” She shifted to the side and spread her empty hands wide. “You just have to trust me. Somebody will come.”
“I don’t want to,” Billy repeated, trying not to whine. “I can’t.”
Mosovich waited until he was outside the boy’s peripheral vision and then struck like a viper, injecting him in the side of the neck. He caught him as he twisted and started to fall, laying him out carefully on the boxes.
“Just us,” he said.
“I guess so,” Shari said, lying down and taking Billy and Susie in her arms. “I don’t like this any more than he did,” she added, her face pinched.
“Like any of us do,” Mosovich muttered, injecting her in the neck and watching as her face slackened. He replaced the disposable container in the injector then lay down next to Elgars, looking at the injector and then at his watch.
“Oh, well, here goes nothing.”
In another moment the cache was still.
“Well, Dr. Castanuelo, you’re sure this thing isn’t going to blow?”
The control center for the experimental cannon looked like NASA. There were at least fifteen operators in the center, all of them busy monitoring various aspects of the gun. The weapon itself was mounted in a building the size of a large observatory placed at the edge of the UT campus and surrounded by fences keeping out the curious and suicidal. It had finally been loaded and now, with the ACS battalion resupplied, it was time to find out if Knoxville was going to disappear, or North Georgia.
“Yes, sir,” the academic said. “Almost definitely.”
“How reassuring,” President Carson said. “General, if you give us another hour we can have most of the region evacuated.”
“In another hour one hundred thousand Posleen are going to pour through the Gap, Mr. Carson,” Horner replied. “Dr. Castanuelo, are you sure enough to push the firing button?”
“Yes, sir,” Mickey replied.
“Then do it.”
Mickey flipped up the cover of the firing mechanism and sounded the preparatory warning. “Preparing to fire,” he announced over the intercom. He hit the controls to begin the liquid propellant cycling then turned the key activating system. Last he hovered his hand over the actual firing button. Then he screwed up his eyes and stabbed downward.
Horner was amused to watch the reaction. He, himself, simply turned to the video cameras monitoring the event and watched it eyes open. He figured that if it was a screw-up, he’d never know it.
The gap they were crossing was not much larger than the SheVa was long so they ended up straddling the road, nearly three meters in the air.
“This is not good for the frame,” Indy commented idly as the SheVa creaked and groaned its way from one hill to the next.
“It’ll take it,” Kilzer replied. “We ran it through trials on things like this.”
They all realized that they were just avoiding the thought of what they were about to do. The light of plasma and HVM fire could be seen sparkling all along the ridgeline and it was clear that, despite the fire of the MetalStorms and a hurricane of artillery, the Posleen were heavily massed on the other side of the slope. As soon as they crested the ridge, they would be the biggest target in sight.
“Sir, I can’t get us hull down on this one,” Reeves said. “The slope’s wrong.”
“Do what you can,” Mitchell replied.
Reeves nodded his head and gunned the giant platform up the side of the ridge. As he did he could see the infantry pulling out of the defensive positions along the top. Some of them had trenches connecting them but mostly they were just foxholes and the defenders had to crawl out into fire to retreat. Some of them weren’t making it. And it was apparent that the Posleen were now firing from close range.
“This is going to be tricky,” Mitchell muttered as the first MetalStorm opened up on the ridgeline. There was the usual storm of fire, but in this case most of it was clearing the ridgeline and dropping into the dead ground on the far side. “Crap, I was afraid of that.”
Because of their height, the 40mm rounds had about a four-thousand-meter range. And they would arm within fifty meters. But the guns could only depress a few degrees below the horizon. Therefore the SheVa had a large zone around it in which the guns could not engage, depending on the MetalStorm and the angle at which the SheVa was at, that could range anywhere from five hundred to a thousand meters.
The problem in taking the ridge was, therefore, two-fold. They would be a target to every Posleen in sight. But even worse, the ones that were close would have a free shot.
“Colonel, this is Chan.” The MetalStorm commander had the toneless voice of the well trained who were in a very bad situation. “I can’t get the close ones and we can see them coming up the hill. The valley is… Look, sir, we’re talking Twenty-Third Psalm here. This is definitely the Valley of the Shadow of Death.”
“Don’t worry,” Kilzer muttered as the top of the SheVa crested the hill and the first plasma and HVM rounds began to ring on the armor. “Got it covered. For Bun-Bun is the baddest motherfucker in the valley.”
“What?” Pruitt asked. For the first time he felt completely useless. His only job was managing the main gun, and there was nothing he could fire at in these circumstances.
“Let them get in close,” the tech rep said. “I can’t do anything out at range, but in close we’re covered.”
Finally the main gun, and the visual systems associated with it, crested the top of the hill and the view on the other side became apparent. And the comparative frenzy on the MetalStorm channels made sense.
The artillery had shifted to create a curtain barrage all along the front. The sun had begun to set behind the mountains to the west and the purple flashes of variable-time artillery were a continuous ripple along the base of the ridge. But in the dying light the valley seemed to heave and ripple, as if covered in cockroaches. After a moment it was apparent that what it was covered in, from slope-edge to slope-edge, was Posleen. Thousands of them, tens, hundreds of thousands of them, all pressing forward to try to force their way over the ridges and through the Gap. And an increasing number of them were firing at the SheVa.
As Mitchell watched another swath of destruction was cut by the MetalStorms. But as fast as the Posleen were cut down, the gaps were filled by the pressure from behind. And he could see the surviving centaurs picking up scraps of meat from their deceased fellows, and heavy weapons that had survived, and either storing them on their backs or passing them to the rear.
“We’re not killing them, we’re just filling their larder,” he muttered.
Another storm of fire came in and more of it was striking from the side, passing through the relatively light metal along the edge of the turret. Time to rethink and regroup.
“Major Chan, maintain maximum sustainable fire on all targets in view,” he said. “Reeves, back us off the ridge. We need to get most of the hull and turret somewhere along here where the MetalStorms have an angle of direct fire but the rest of the gun is down.”