“Back us out!” Mitchell said. “Now!”
“Doing it,” Reeves said tightly. The SheVa suddenly gave a lurch that did not seem to have anything to do with the ground and the radiation alarms started screaming. “I just lost most of my control on the left side, sir!”
“Indy!”
“Holy Mary Mother of God,” the engineer said as the left front of the reactor room seemed to open up to the night air. She actually saw the round that punched through the number six reactor. The black dust that suddenly filled the air was, fortunately, at the far end of the reactor compartment. And it wasn’t dust, but the black, layered, less-than-a-millimeter-diameter radioactive beads that made up the “pebble” part of a pebble-bed reactor.
She turned and ran for it. There wasn’t much else she could do.
“Reactor breach in the engine room!” she called over the radio. “It hit the pebbles! We’re hot, sir!”
Major Chan involuntarily ducked as a storm of plasma and HVM hit the upper section of the SheVa. Most of the fire had been targeted at the base of the gun system but at least one God King was firing at the MetalStorms. They had engaged with all the forward deployable guns but with the inability to turn the main turret, they were in reload mode before they could significantly affect the mass of Posleen. They had killed a lot of them and cut the fire down somewhat. But not enough.
Now the Posleen were returning the favor.
“This is not fun,” Glenn said as plasma rounds rang against the turret. It was upgraded just like the E4s but even room temperature superconductor could only handle so much heat and the interior of the turret was starting to feel like an oven. Suddenly she felt a lurch that seemed to come from the turret itself and an odd sliding feeling.
“What is that, ma’am?” Glenn said, turning around wide-eyed.
“I think the turret rings are cutting loose,” Chan replied in a totally calm voice as the turret jolted forward again toward the two-hundred-foot drop.
“We’ve also got track damage on the left side,” Mitchell replied as the SheVa finally backed around the corner of the hills, taking a last spiteful blow to the engine room as it exposed that side. The night was still alight with the glow of plasma from the far side of the hill, however, showing that the infantry company on the hillside was fully engaged. It was amazing they could hold out at all; the air above their positions must be reaching hundreds of degrees just from the plasma heat-bloom.
“I’m back in the reactor room,” Indy said, her voice muffled by the GalTech radiation suit. “We took hits in two reactors. One is just vented but the other one scattered pebbles all over the room; it’s hot as shit down here.”
“This is Kilzer,” the civilian said over the same circuit. “It’s not track damage on the right side, it’s in the motors; one of the wheel motors is fried. I’ve cut it out but we’re going to be moving slow until it’s fixed.”
“Moving slow is a bad thing,” Mitchell said. “Kilzer; Chan’s turret has slipped out of the rings or the rings have been shot away. Something like that, I’m getting really confused reports. Get up there and see what you can do. Pruitt, rotate the turret to let the rear Storms fire over the hills. Reeves, park this thing behind Bravo Company. I hope they can hold.”
Bazzett huddled in his scraped hasty fighting position and fired his AIW remotely. He had to stick his hand out into the fire but he could use the connection to his monocular to generally aim it at the approaching mass. Fortunately or unfortunately, there were so many of the centaurs they were hard to miss. The Brads were firing their 25mms in indirect mode from behind the hilltop and that was racking up some kills, and the Abrams had braved the hurricane of plasma to drive forward and engage direct. And, for that matter, the SheVa was still sending its own hell over the hill, wiping out masses of Posleen under the fans of MetalStorm rounds. But that didn’t stop the almost continuous stream of plasma, railgun rounds and hypervelocity missiles coming at the hilltop.
In this case, “sticking his hand into the fire” felt literal; there was more plasma coming his way than he had ever seen in his life. And as he had found out before, while a near miss from an HVM was pretty unpleasant, a near miss from a plasma round was damn near the same as getting hit. The heat-bloom from a strike was lethal at four meters and fell off from there.
He was pretty sure he’d been in the “lethal” zone at least twice in the battle so far and he was starting to wonder if the dirt on his back was burning through his uniform. Fortunately the newer cold weather gear, including gloves, had an outer shell of Nomex, which was probably the only reason he wasn’t a crispy critter already.
He heard the Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle below in the next scrape and shook his head; Caprano just wouldn’t quit.
“Cap, dude, you’re gonna get yourself killed!” he yelled. There was no way to fire the big gun off-hand which meant the sniper was raising himself up out of the scrape. He looked over and could see the body rise up against the light.
“I can barely see in this shit!” the sniper called back. His rifle boomed and he ducked down as a plasma round hit just down the hill and covered them both in steaming soil. “Got the fucker anyway!”
“Just ride it out, man!” Bazzett yelled back, spotting some movement at the base of the hill and firing a few rounds in the general direction. With the monocular it was possible to see what the rifle was aiming at, but there was no way to get a decent shot off. It was sort of like looking through a straw. “Keep your ass down!”
“It’s not my ass I’m worried about!” Caprano laughed back, lifting himself up, then screamed as the next bolt washed hot plasma over him.
Bazzett caught the edge of the blast as well and it felt as if his hand turned to cooked meat, but for Caprano it was infinitely worse. The sniper rose to his knees, shrieking in pain. The rifleman could see the sniper’s face and it was a mass of red and black with screaming white teeth in the middle. As he started to drop back onto the smoking ground he was hit by the next blast from the approaching Posleen. What dropped into the hole was steaming legs and hips, with a few juts of bone sticking upward.
Bazzett screamed and fired an entire magazine down the hill in a bloody mixture of fear and rage.
The good news was that he wasn’t cold anymore.
The bad news was that the Posleen were moving forward in their usual suicidal charge mode and if somebody didn’t do something about it they were going to be coming up the hill in just a second or two.
Kilzer hammered at the TC’s hatch but it was welded as solid as if it was a continuation of the turret. He had already tried the gunner’s hatch and found it the same way.
The turret was skewed at an angle on the top of the SheVa, leaning forward precariously with the front edge of the turret ring actually protruding through the front of the SheVa and into open air. The heat was like an oven even through the resistant rad suit. He could hear the environmental system in the turret trying to vent the enormous overload but it must have been nearly impossible.
He lifted up the wrench he’d brought with him and hammered on the metal.
“Anyone alive in there?”