“Colonel Mitchell, this is Kilzer,” the civilian said over the radio. “I’m looking at the damage, too. We might be able to fire the right, rear Storms. But all the others aren’t going to have enough structure to withstand the shock of firing. And the frontal armor is… creaky. The hit slagged some of the supports on the left side and I can see support beams dangling. The whole place looks like a pretzel twister with an evil sense of humor got loose in the gun room. I think the combination of the heat and the shock probably broke the welds. And we’ve got a lot of electrical damage.”
“We can still fire the main gun, right?” Mitchell pressed.
“As long as it lasts, sir,” Indy replied, nervously.
“Pruitt, get as many as you can, while you can.”
The gunner slewed the turret and sought out the next target as the SheVa lumbered laboriously to the north. There was nowhere to hide; it was just a matter of shoot and hope like hell the Posties kept missing. So far they had.
Pruitt lined up the third C-Dec as another shot crackled overhead and one slammed into the ground, tearing up soil and leaving a smoking crater large enough to swallow an Abrams.
“On the way!” he called, then “Target!”
This time the target vanished in silver fire, and a mushroom cloud formed where it had been. However, although the nearest C-Dec rocked in the blast front, it neither was destroyed nor wavered in its course.
“Blast, they’re too far apart!” Pruitt snarled. “Why did they have to get smart.” He lined up the fourth ship and then paused. “I want it to get a little closer, sir.”
“Okay,” Mitchell replied. At least the fire had been halved and the third C-Dec had been the closest. Mitchell glanced at his map then at the external monitors. Most of them were down from the damage but a few on the right side were still functioning. “Reeves, to the right rear, see that gap?”
“Yes, sir,” the driver replied, angling the SheVa slightly to the right. “Are we going to be hull down?”
“Close,” the commander replied.
“Okay, they’re closing,” Pruitt said. “Hydraulics are up. On the way!” The round tracked straight and true “through the x ring” and the C-Dec rolled to the side, seeming momentarily to be under power, then dropped into the river before rolling out of sight.
At the tremendous splash, Pruitt sighed. “That’s it, sir. Four rounds. We’re out.” He glanced at his indicators then at the targets. “Then again, maybe not. Sir, where are the lead elements of the division?”
“General Simosin, this is SheVa Nine, over!”
“Station on this net, identify!”
Mitchell frowned at the radio; every other time he had tried to call the general he had gotten the general. So who the hell was holding the radio this time?
“Look, this is SheVa Nine. I don’t have time to identify because, in case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve got Posleen landers on the way in. We’re going to try to take out the last two, but there’s a problem; what we’re going to do will probably hit the division. Now, where are your lead elements?”
“I can’t answer anything unless you identify yourself and I certainly can’t give you the location of our units.”
“Okay, well, in that case I hope like hell that they’re all behind the line of hills around Wooten Mountain. If they’re as far forward as East Franklin, tell them to duck and cover because it’s about to get nasty. Out.”
“Okay, Pruitt, whenever you’re ready,” the colonel said.
“Sir, are you sure about this?” the gunner said. He had keyed in the particulars and was just updating the target point now. “We are going to catch the division in this blast.”
“I don’t like it, but that’s what we’ve got to do,” Mitchell replied tiredly. “Fire.”
“Roger, sir,” Pruitt replied, looking straight into the rising sun. “On the way.”
The area effect round tracked straight and true to a point two thousand meters above an imaginary line between the C-Decs and then detonated.
The ships were interstellar battle cruisers as well as transports for the Posleen. And under normal circumstances a 100 KT round detonating 2000 meters away would have been shrugged off. In vacuum. Between planets.
In this case, however, it was not in vacuum and it was not between planets except by the widest description thereof. And all of the differences came into play.
The shock wave from the explosion slapped downward, hurling the ships aside. If the violent acceleration from the nuclear-driven hurricane of wind were not enough to defeat them, the sudden stop as they slammed into the unyielding ground did the trick. Subjected to forces they were not designed to withstand, the two ships hit the ground, crunched, bounced, and rolled to a stop, one just east of the Cullasaja Bridge and the other on top of the West Franklin Wal-Mart.
Glennis popped her hatch and looked around, shaking her head to clear the ringing. Most of her tracks appeared to be intact, whatever that said about the crews. Anyone who had had a hatch open was probably dead and at least one Abrams looked that way; it had blown out its ammunition relief panel indicating that bad things had happened inside. One of her Bradleys was upside down as well, which probably indicated the crew hadn’t made it.
She looked to the east and could just see one facet of one the C-Decs sticking up out of the Cullasaja valley. The facet mounted an anti-ship plasma cannon which was throwing sparks into the air from electrical overload. As she watched the emplacement belched purple fire and blew a thousand feet into the air.
“Fuck this,” she muttered. “I want back into intel.”
All in all, though, for having been hit by a bit more than the edge of a nuclear blast, they were looking pretty good.
Of course, they didn’t have any radios to speak of. And she couldn’t have heard one if they did. But all things considered…
“So do we drive back and yell at Mitchell?” she asked herself. “Or just stay here?”
She looked around at the devastated landscape and at the crews who were slowly pulling themselves out of their tracks then shook her head. “Stupid question.”
“Somebody with a working radio call the SheVa and find out how long until it’s up here!” she yelled to the scattered groups of troopers. “We’re not going another inch!”
She smiled at the scattered cheer and slumped into her seat.
“What a fucking night,” she muttered, pulling out a resupply request form. “Let’s see, we need about a hundred bodies, a full load of ammunition…”
In the end, even with the resupply and the standard rounds and the Reapers and the repeated nuclear blasts, there was nothing O’Neal’s battalion could do.
The Posleen, having found a way through the roadblock, had attacked without pause, wave upon wave of the yellow centaurs, climbing over the bodies of their dead to close with the hated suits. With only 140 troopers left there wasn’t enough fire pressure to stop them cold and they came on, meter by meter, against a relentless tide of fire.
“I’m clocking out!” one of the troopers cried as even the seemingly inexhaustible supply of grav-cannon rounds started to run low. “I need resupply!”
The cry went up all down the line as trooper after trooper found his ammo supply running lower and lower, the counters going from the thousands to the hundreds and then zero.