The first set of eight rounds had been in a flattened U, following the line of the gap and about two hundred feet below the actual ridgeline. The ninth and tenth rounds were at the center of the U and had the same effect as the others, precisely none.
“Are we going to see any result soon, Kilzer?” Mitchell asked impatiently.
“I thought that last one would have shifted something,” Kilzer said with a frown. “Let me check my notes…”
“What the hell,” Pruitt said, lining up the next shot. “I’ve got rounds to spare.” He aimed at the next target point, on the shoulder of the first hill about sixty feet above the first shot and fired.
Each of the previous rounds had, in fact, made a very solid impression. The antimatter explosion had vaporized a sizable chunk of rock, a sphere ranging from fifty to a hundred meters in diameter. But the refractory material above the explosions had managed to survive and each of the explosions was widely enough spaced that there were ersatz “pillars” between the newly wrought, extremely hot, slightly glowing, caves in the pass’s heart.
The eleventh round, however, penetrated rock that had already been fractured by previous rounds and the impact of the ten kiloton blast propagated along the lightly supported bridge of rock across the top of the pass. With, literally, earthshattering results.
“Holy shit!” LeBlanc muttered, looking up as the entire pass began to move. Down. “Back us up!” She watched helplessly as a section of mountain larger than the SheVa slowly turned to rubble and began sliding towards three of her tanks. She noted in passing that all of the personnel had dropped into the belly of the vehicles and that they were just getting into motion when her own tank suddenly revved and reversed, slamming her into the coaming. She bounced back into the slag where the hatch used to be, banging her back and tearing a hole in the back of her uniform then howled like a banshee as first one and then two of the tanks disappeared in the avalanche.
“Ah,” Kilzer said. “Now we’re getting somewhere…”
“It’s okay, Major,” the colonel said as soothingly he could manage. It had taken a while to get the battalion, and their commander, calmed down enough to have any sort of conversation. Fortunately, most of the tanks weren’t loaded with anything that could really harm a SheVa. Otherwise, it might have come to blows. “Their gun tubes are still exposed. We can hook up to them on our way up the slope and pull them out.”
“You’re going to make more shots!” LeBlanc snapped. “They’re going to get buried.”
“Oh, probably not,” Kilzer said. “Most of the rest of the rubble should go onto the other side. That shot was just designed to lay down a ramp.”
“Lay down a ramp!?” the major shouted. “You just buried two of my crews!”
“It’s not like they’re dead,” the tech rep replied. “I mean, they were in their vehicles when the avalanche hit, right?”
“I am going to come over there — ”
“No, you’re not,” Mitchell said. “Kilzer, shut up and go check your notes or something. Look, Gl… Major, we can get them out. After we finish the shots and open up the pass. As long as we can get a chain around anything, the SheVa will yank them out like a cork.”
“I knew it was a bad idea coming along on this trip.”
Pruitt picked up a largish rock and banged on the only bit of metal visible on the turret, which was the edge of the hatch. “Anybody in there?” he called.
The response was muffled but somehow the profanity filtered through. Actually, from the sounds of it it was surprising it didn’t scorch through.
“Okay!” he yelled. “We’ll have you out in a second!”
The crew of the first Abrams to be yanked out of the rubble was scattered across the scarred surface of their tank, breathing real air and swearing like… well, soldiers that had been buried alive and then unceremoniously yanked out of the ground. The vehicle itself was fully functional — it took more than a multiton avalanche of granite to break an Abrams — but the company commander and the major were having a hard as hell time convincing them that they had to get back in and drive.
Pruitt checked the fit of the massive chain on the gun mantlet and then walked up the slope about a hundred meters. There was always the possibility that the chain could slip and he wanted to be far enough away that any possible reaction to that mishap would pass him by. He wasn’t particularly worried about the chain breaking; it was the same design used to anchor aircraft carriers and had been adapted for SheVa recoveries. An Abrams tank, even covered in rubble, was not even in the same country much less league.
“Okay, Reeves, do it.” He looked up at the SheVa as it began to inch up the slope. He could tell that the driver had applied less than ten percent power. Despite that, and despite going up a thirty-degree slope, the chain snapped taut for just a moment and then the seventy-two-ton tank came out of the ground like a racehorse out of the gate.
“Whoa there, big fella!” he called as the weight of the chain dragged the Abrams farther up the slope and then stopped. “And the next time you need roadside assistance…”
Mitchell walked over to where the battalion commander was checking on the crew of the second tank. They hadn’t taken any damage in the avalanche but the TC had managed to break his nose when the vehicle was ripped out of the ground like a weed.
The colonel waited to the side until LeBlanc was done talking to the crew, then walked farther away as she strode over. The ground was rough, littered with rocks from boulders the size of small cars down to pebbles and dust, so he had to watch his step. In more ways than one.
“Well, we have a road,” he said, gesturing at the pass. What had previously been a slight saddle with sharp cliffs on each side was now a deep and nearly flat U shape. “You have your tanks back and everybody’s happy.”
“They could have been killed,” she muttered, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in it. She turned to look up at the SheVa and shook her head. “That thing is just…”
“Amazing?”
“Dangerous,” she answered, but after a second she grinned. “And amazing.”
“Yeah, it is that,” Mitchell said softly. “But when you’ve got a seven-thousand-ton vehicle on one side and a seventy-ton vehicle on the other, being able to tow it, or, hell, pull it out of set concrete, isn’t that surprising. The bad part is, we haven’t met up with what all that amazing design is made to fight. And if you think this has been bad, wait until we meet up with our first lander.”
Getting the support forces across the gap turned out to be much harder than getting the mech over the ridge. In the end, the Abrams and the SheVa had been forced to tow the trucks over much of the rubble.
But they had finally made it down into the Cowee valley and the whole assemblage stopped just short of the intersection of Cowee and Caler creeks to work out their movement plan.
“We’ve got to get down the Tennessee Valley and link up with the division, probably near Watauga Creek.” Colonel Mitchell shone a flashlight on the maps and then looked up at the surrounding hills. Most of the armored force was up on them, looking around for Posleen, with a few of the vehicles refueling at a time. None of the tracks were particularly low on fuel but this might be the last chance to stop for gas, and tankers hated running on anything other than a full tank.