“It ain’t stupid,” Mitchell concluded. “Chance of success?”
“Honestly?” Garcia said. “Probably forty/sixty. Maybe thirty/seventy. But it’s a chance. A normal weld won’t hold. Period.”
Mitchell looked around and rubbed at his face tiredly inside the suit. The faceplate had fogged up and it made everything look gray and unreal. Finally he shook his head.
“Do it,” he said. “Down is down. It gives us a chance to be up again.”
“One last problem,” Indy said. “All this hydraulic fluid is going to catch on fire.”
“Oh, I think that we can handle a little fire,” Garcia said with a tired chuckle. “Some nice normal problem like a little fire would be nice for a change.
“Holy Toledo!” Paul yelled, waving the fire-extinguisher into every corner in reach; the entire interior of the firing room was engulfed in flames. “I think I should have checked my notes!”
After most of the brigade flooded the interior with extinguishers, nitrogen guns and finally blankets, the raging fires were finally put out. Many of them went out on their own; the hydraulic fluid was thinly spread and tended to flare and then die.
“It’s a good thing we were shot so full of holes,” Indy snapped as the commanders and Kilzer met back at the scene of the crime. “If we hadn’t been, we probably would have blown up.”
“Oh, get a grip,” Kilzer snapped. “Hydraulic fluid has a very high vaporization temperature. We were hardly ever in danger of blowing up.”
“Hardly ever,” Indy giggled hysterically. “Hardy ever.”
“Oh, shut up.”
Colonel Garcia had been examining the scorched metal wrapped around the shock. There was a slight indentation around the edge but it looked as if the unorthodox technique had worked.
“I think this will do,” he said.
“It will probably leak like hell after the first shot,” Kilzer noted. “But as long as Indy keeps it topped up, and as long as it doesn’t blow off entirely, the gun should be functional.”
“Indy’s got a lot of other things on her plate,” Mitchell noted.
“I think I’ll call for a platoon of volunteers to accompany you on this ride,” Garcia said. “There’s still a lot of damage and you’re going to sustain more. You could use the help.”
“Amen,” Indy muttered.
“Works for me,” Mitchell said. “Where are we at otherwise?”
“All that can be done has been done,” the SheVa repair commander replied. “We had to pull one wheel as too damaged to replace, but with your reduced speed that shouldn’t matter. She’s not exactly ship-shape and Bristol fashion, but she’ll run.”
“Okay, let’s get ready to rumble.”
“Orostan, I note that the SheVa is still coming on.” The warleader looked at the maps and shook his head. “This is not a good thing.”
“I expected it to follow the humans over the pass, or lead them,” the oolt’ondai replied angrily. “Not come around on my flank. It was that which broke the defense at the base of the pass!”
“Humans are like that,” Tulo’stenaloor said, rattling his crest. “Always turning up when you least expect it. But it has to be stopped.”
“I’m trying.”
“Yes.” The warleader looked around and then clapped his lips in humor. “I have more oolt’poslenar than I have trustworthy pilots. But I think I’ll send out some of them, good pilots or not. They’re doing me no good here.”
“This SheVa is incredibly lucky,” Orostan pointed out. “I don’t know how many of our ships it has destroyed, but it is many. And when it does…”
“Yes, problems, problems, problems,” the estanaar replied. “I’ll handle it on this end. You just mass your forces and stop that damned thing. Or we’ll both end up as decorations on some human’s wall!”
Duncan bounded up the hill and flopped to his belly, crawling forward the last few yards so as not to sky-line himself.
Getting out of the position had been harder than getting to the top of the hill. The Posleen fire was almost continuous over the battalion position so the only way out was through the connecting trenches. However, although the Reapers and technical suits had dug trenches to all the fighting positions and command holes, that was as far as they went. There hadn’t been anywhere “else” to go, so the troops hadn’t bothered digging their way out of the fire zone.
It had been up to Duncan and the two troops with him to dig their way to the rear and then around to the east until a projection of rock cut off the sight, and fire, of the advancing Posleen. It hadn’t taken all that much time, but it had been time consuming. So as soon as they got out of the area he had hurried up the hill to the Wall.
The Long Wall had been laboriously constructed in the years between the first scattered landings and the last major wave. It traveled, more or less, the entire length of the eastern Continental Divide but in this little patch of hell it was a shambles. At passes and other areas that might be struck by heavy Posleen attacks it was built up into modern fortresses of concrete and steel bristling with weaponry. Everywhere else along its length it was about twenty feet high and made out of reinforced concrete with a reinforcing “foot” on the inner side. And, despite the protests of environmentalists, it had no openings. On the inside of the wall was a road, a track really, that had been carved across the entire eastern U.S. Along this wall, when there wasn’t a murthering great battle going on, patrols would crawl along, looking over the wall from time to time to make sure the Posleen weren’t sneaking up the far side.
However, where the UT hell-weapon had hit, the reinforced concrete had taken a bit of a battering. The wall along the top of Hogsback had already had problems, legacy of the first Posleen attack on the battalion when a small force had blasted holes in it to get through to the humans’ landing zone. But the hell-weapon had done far more, smashing a good third of the wall in the area to the ground and truncating all that was left.
The good part to that was that the remaining stumps made dandy temporary fighting positions.
So it was that the company commander stuck his head over a bit of concrete and swore.
“Apparently good sense is contagious,” he muttered; the Posleen were building a road.
It wasn’t much of a road and they weren’t going it very well. But they were clearing away rubble and digging into the hillside, cutting a serpentine path up the hills that, otherwise, were impossible for them to scale. They had barely started, though, so there was plenty of time to deal with it.
“Race, move down that way about thirty meters,” Duncan said, gesturing to the east. “Poole, same distance to the west. Open fire when I do. Target the God Kings.”
He waited until the two suits were in position and had lined up the distant targets. At the base of the hill, about two thousand meters away, was a cluster of concrete stumps that revealed little more than that there had once been buildings there. It was around those ruins that most of the God Kings were clumped but even two thousand meters was was a simple shot with AID targeting systems. He checked that they had designated their targets then lined up on his first and snuggled the rifle, unnecessarily, into his shoulder.