Pruitt maneuvered the pack up out of the bowels of the gun and swung it over to MetalStorm Nine. Nine, for some reason, had done a double fire at some point and was flat out of packs. Getting more up, fast enough, would be tough.
The job wasn’t particularly fun. The Posleen had noticed the MetalStorms and were trying, at very long range, to successfully engage them. So stray rounds, railgun, hypervelocity missiles and plasma fire, were flying by on a regular basis. But, on the other hand, at his height he was pretty sure he had the best view of any being in the battle. And it was one hell of a view; the battle was intense.
The infantry had moved back into position on both sides, although at a fair distance, and in the twilight their red tracers could be seen flickering through the darkness, striking, disappearing and bouncing off into the distance. And, of course, the continuous rain of artillery was fascinating. Then, at intervals, the MetalStorms would open up and spit liquid fire into the valley. And all the while the Posleen were filling the air with streams of plasma.
Really spectacular.
As he thought that, a bright flash to his right, over the mountains, caused him to look up from the monitors. Before his head could even come up, the entire horizon behind the mountains flashed bright white in a lightning ripple of strobes, as if klieg lights the size of a state had been flicked on and then off, lighting up the valley for almost four seconds as if it was bright daylight.
He threw his arm up against the light but it was too late to help. Each of the blasts was a nuclear fireball and in the continuous stream of flashes he could see mushroom clouds rising even as the last lightbulb winked out. It was as if the world to the south had been consumed by a sun and then gone back to black.
“Holy shit,” he muttered, his eyes watering, as ground rumble caused the SheVa to sway back and forth. “I’ve got to redefine my definition of spectacular.”
He sat shaking his head to try to get some night vision, hell any vision, back and then gave up.
“Holy shit.”
Cally stopped laughing as the rumble died away and then grinned at her grandfather. “So, there any cards in this tub?”
“As if I need to lose money on top of everything else,” Papa O’Neal said with an answering grin. “Damn, Granddaughter, it’s good to see your face again.”
Within the cache the impacts caused one corner of the container to buckle and Billy to slip out of Shari’s arms. And then it returned to the silence of a tomb.
“UP AND AT ’EM!” O’Neal bellowed over the battalion frequency. “Head for the Gap.”
He put actions to words, scrabbling at the dirt above him and pushing down with his feet. It was a bare fifteen feet to the surface but it still took time, time he was afraid they might not have. Finally he saw an opening above him and popped his head out to look around at total devastation.
As far as the eye could see, and from the edge of the mountain that was a fair distance, there was nothing but scrubbed dirt. Not a stick, not a house, not a scrap of vegetation survived; the very soil had been stripped off in the titanic fire.
He shook his head and checked his radiation monitors, blanching as he did. The suits were more than capable of handling four hundred rems per hour, but it would kill any human stone dead. Or, hell, most cockroaches.
The dust was starting to clear and the moon was breaking out to shine on the ground, but there was something odd about it. Under the moonlight, everything was gray, even under the enhancements of the suits that brought it to daytime ambient. It was bright, but still in shades of black and gray. But still, there was something…
He toggled a switch and a patch of white light shone down from his suit on the stripped granite at his feet and he swore. He swiveled the light around, then walked away from his hole, looking at the ground and swore again.
“General Horner, this is O’Neal.”
“Glad to hear your voice, old friend,” the general said. “How’d it go?”
“We were underground,” O’Neal replied. Horner could almost hear the shrug over the communicator. “General, about this bomb that just detonated. Where did you say it came from?”
“Knoxville,” Horner replied, puzzled. “Why?”
“I mean, where was it developed?”
“Oak Ridge,” Horner said. “And the University of Tennessee. Why?”
“That figures.” There was a pause. “I just thought that you should know that Rabun County is now orange.”
“What?” Horner thought about that for a moment. “The soil in that area…”
“No, General. The soil, the rocks, the fucking mountains. It’s all orange. And not ‘international distress’ orange, boss. It’s a redder orange than that.”
Horner’s face turned up in a gigantic smile as he looked over at Dr. Castanuelo. The good doctor had just pulled a can of dip out of his back pocket and was reading over the shoulder of one of the techs. He had on a University of Tennessee ballcap and a UT Volunteers windbreaker. Both of them bright orange.
“This is what you get for letting rednecks play with antimatter, boss,” O’Neal said.
Horner didn’t bother to point out an accident of birthplace. There was no question in his mind that the guy who had just painted half of north Georgia in the colors of one of their bitterest football rivals was well described as a “high-tech redneck.”
“Dr. Castanuelo,” he said sweetly, smiling from ear to ear, “could I have a moment of your time?”
Pruitt had gotten back to work pulling MetalStorm packs as soon as his vision returned. He had lights that he could use, including a big-ass spot that would have lit up the whole top like day. But all things considered he didn’t want to be any more of a target than was strictly necessary.
Fortunately the loading system the SheVa repair guys had installed was simplicity in itself and the crane on Nine had an autograppler that worked, unlike the POS he had used in training. All he had to do was snatch the packs out of the hatch, swing the crane and drop them in the appropriate racks. He was even ahead of the way the Storms were running through them.
Finally he was done, and decided to take a good look around. The crane had a couple of good visual systems on it and slaves to the main monitors, so he started flipping through images.
The best view seemed to be from monitor seven. It was mounted high enough that it had a better view even than the crane and it had thermal imaging so sometimes he could pick out details that way.
In the distance he could see streams of Posleen still coming down the road from the Gap but they were more spread out and not moving nearly as fast. It looked as if there was a light at the end of the tunnel. OTOH, a few more area denial rounds couldn’t hurt.
He swept the monitor to the left and noted that he could just see where East Branch came down from the mountains and opened out. He could see the tracks from where the SheVa had come through the last time and sighed. You should only have to take one of these things over the mountains once in your life.