Tommy had been looking at the same indicators and now he grinned. “Nah, I’ll take care of it.”
The lieutenant left the puzzled suit to wonder what that meant and laid out two power packs as he prepared the item that he had kept under a blanket.
He turned as his sensors indicated a suit entering the hole and started to nod at the battalion commander. His head just sort of wallowed in the mush within the helmet and his vision swung wildly. But he corrected after a moment and saluted instead.
“So how, exactly, were you planning on taking out three landers, Lieutenant?” Mike said, returning the salute with a wave.
“With this, sir!” Tommy replied, removing the silvery cloth from the device in the hole. “Ta-da!”
“Hmmph,” O’Neal grunted, looking at the terawatt laser. The weapons had been common in the early days of the war but had been dropped out of service within the first couple of years. They were, however, remarkable anti-lander systems, at least against Lampreys and unsuspecting C-Decs. So it would probably work in this instance. “And why were you keeping it a secret?”
“I figured if nobody else knew about it, neither would the Posleen, sir,” Tommy said. “I hope that was all right.”
“Your AID knew,” Mike said thoughtfully.
“I asked it to modify the inventory it sent back,” the lieutenant replied, carefully. “If you didn’t get the word, then neither would the Posleen. Sorry about that, sir.”
“Oh, it’s okay,” Mike waved. “Do you know why these were removed from service?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Tommy said. “It never made any sense to me.”
“Well, it won’t affect anything in this battle,” the battalion commander replied. “I’ll just head back to the battalion hole. Good luck, Lieutenant. Good shooting.”
“Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”
Mike slithered into the hole that had been dug out for the battalion headquarters just as the first lander crested the ridge.
“Why isn’t he having his suits rearm?” Stewart snapped.
“Oh, he’s got a better idea,” Mike said with a chuckle. “I had a terawatt laser in the cache.”
“And he’s going to use it?” the battalion S-2 said.
“Looks like it. Should be fun to watch. Preferably from a safe distance.”
“I think they’re serious this time,”
SheVa Nine crawled forward slowly over the ruins of downtown Franklin searching for a firing point.
The hill that had once held downtown Franklin, and all the rolling hills in every direction as far as the eye could see, was covered with detritus of the nuclear strike. There was rubble from the houses as well as lighter debris scattered across the roads, and in the neighborhoods around the city there were trees fallen across the roads and fires smoldering from the intense heat of the fireball. There was a fan of tracks out in front of them but for once since its wounding the SheVa could make nearly as good time as the Abrams and Bradleys; what they had to dodge, it could crush underfoot.
Somewhere around Franklin they should reach a point in range of the Gap. The problem was twofold: angularity — they had to be able to fire into the Gap — and height — the Gap was slightly higher than Franklin and since they had to use air-bursts they needed a tad more range than a ground burst would require. The first and best chance was the hill that Franklin had once occupied, even though it would make them a better target. Failing that, they would keep moving forward until they had a good and secure firing point.
Pruitt was watching the ballistic targeting reticle slowly creep up the Rabun Valley, sometimes getting closer to the Gap, sometimes farther away, when the SheVa rocked in the shock wave from a heavy plasma gun.
“Jesus!” the gunner yelled, slewing the turret as he kicked on his long-range radar and lidar.
“Colonel! We’ve got four, no six C-Decs cresting the ridges! And they’re spread out.”
“Crap,” Mitchell muttered, flipping up the terrain map. The SheVa had taken on more than six ships during the retreat, occasionally at the same time. But in that case they had had terrain to hide behind and “shoot and scoot.” Unfortunately, the Franklin Valley was relatively open, at least for something on the scale of the SheVa: rolling hills with the occasional higher stony prominence. It offered some obscurement to the ground-mounted Posleen but it was as open as a putting green when taking on ships.
The sole and only chance they had was that Posleen gunnery was not all that great; the ship guns had to be manually aimed at ground targets like the SheVa and it had been apparent on the retreat that the concept of “training” was foreign to the invaders. So they didn’t get really accurate until they were inside the firing range of the SheVa. But taking on six with nowhere to hide, especially with only four rounds of anti-lander left and a max speed of fifteen miles per hour, wasn’t going to be particularly survivable.
“Better call the ACS and tell ’em we’re gonna be a little late.”
Tommy crouched behind the laser and targeted the first C-Dec cresting the ridge. This was going to be tight.
The holographic sight showed interior and exterior targets as well as the antimatter containment system. Tommy deliberately avoided that, firing the beam along a vector to penetrate on a weak point and enter the battlecruiser’s engine room.
The weapon spat a beam of coherent purple light just as the C-Dec opened fire with the first weapon that bore, an anti-ship plasma weapon. The ship’s fire missed the battalion, striking north of it on the graded roadbed laid down by the Posleen and digging out a crater the size of a house.
The weapon was a poorly controlled nuclear reaction that was captured between massive electromagnetic fields and converted to pure photons. The beam itself was rated in gigajoules per second and cut through the heavy armor of the Posleen ship like tissue paper. It lanced through interior bulkheads and into the engineering compartment, destroying the antigravity system and removing power to most of the external weaponry. Denied its antigravity support, the cruiser lurched and dropped through the air.
“Oh, crap,” Duncan snorted, looking up. He had seen the cruiser drifting towards his position but the weapons of the three on the ridgeline would have been love-taps to the ship so he had just hunkered down and hoped it would find another target. But when the terawatt laser hit it in the side, it was just about directly over their position.
The cruiser staggered and then started to drop, fast, and he knew there was nothing he could do.
The ship fell straight down at thirty two feet per second per second and impacted on the top of the ridgeline, only fifteen meters from his position and, fortunately, on the Posleen side of the ridge. Then it started to roll.
The impact of the multiton ship had flipped all three suits into the air and they fell back with a couple of bounces. But Duncan was up on the ridge again almost immediately. This he wanted to see.
The dodecahedral ship was not the best item at rolling, but the slope was steep and it didn’t really have much of a choice. Still randomly firing, with occasional blasts of fire and plasma jutting out of hatches and along weapons positions, the gigantic ship rolled down the hill, over the Posleen scrambling to find a purchase on the side and onto the roadbed below, partially blocking it.