“How long do you want?”
“Seven seconds.”
There was a short battalion of Abrams and Bradleys parked a thousand meters from the gate, all of their hatches shut and their environmental overpressure systems going full-bore. The ground radiation count was high and the vehicles were going to have to be decontaminated after they were withdrawn. More likely they’d be scrapped; after a few hours at ground zero they were metaphorically going to be glowing like a Christmas tree.
Airbursts of nuclear weapons were relatively clean and caused limited radioactive fallout. But the pulse from the fusion explosion irradiated everything in a large circle. The alpha and beta particles, as well as gamma rays, struck common materials, carbon, silica, iron, and transmuted them to radioactive isotopes. Sometimes they were split and formed highly radioactive isotopes of lower-weight elements.
So the ground zero of even the cleanest nuclear weapon was highly radioactive. The radiation would fade over time, most of the particles would degrade in no more than a year and while some lingering radiation would exist for thousands of years to come it would be not much beyond background. Hiroshima, which was hit by a relatively “dirty” bomb, had been resettled since the 1950s. The only sign that it had ever been destroyed by a nuclear weapon was the memorial at its city center.
In the meantime, though, Eustis was hot as hell.
As the Abrams drew to a stop in front of the gate it was the bad time. The firesupport from the vehicles in their defensive positions behind was blocked. If the Titcher came through the gate the Abrams would be blocking the defending units. So far, no Titcher had come through the gate since the explosion. But bad things tend to happen at the worst possible time.
So Weaver and the SEAL hurried. They had planned this carefully and practiced it once, all the time they felt they could afford. They set their weapons down, leaning on the front of the Abrams, and grabbed the big bomb off the glacis. It had been secured with duct tape but the tape tore loose easily at the yank from two Wyverns.
They set the bomb down a half meter from the gate, retrieved their weapons, set them down to either side of the bomb and then Weaver waved at the Abrams, whose driver put it immediately into reverse and stomped the gas.
Chief Miller, in the meantime, seemed to be doing a routine from Saturday Night Fever, his feet moving back and forth and to either side while his hands flailed wildly in the air.
“Excited, Chief?” Weaver said over the radio.
“Damned disco dance, you were right,” Miller said, panting.
“Steady down, just quit trying so hard and it will damp out,” Weaver replied. After a moment it did and the chief stooped and grabbed one of the handles on the bomb with both hands, hooking the release tab over his thumb. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Weaver said, stooping and picking up the bomb.
“One,” Miller said, starting the swing.
“Two,” Weaver, replied.
“Three!” they both said, letting go just short of the apex of the arc.
Weaver turned and picked up his Bushmaster and then started into a clumsy run. The mecha-suits did tend to walk like Frankenstein, a problem of lack of mobility in the “ankle” of the suit and complete lack of feedback, but they could get up a fair turn of speed and he was going just about twenty kilometers per hour when a giant picked him up and tossed him in the direction he had been going anyway.
He hit hard and a yellow light popped up, indicating that his left arm power system was down. That was really going to suck.
He rolled onto his belly after a couple of kicks, centered his right arm under him and used it to lever himself to his feet. It would have been nearly impossible for a normal human but the Wyvern’s design made it surprisingly easy. Which was good because he could tell from the feel that the left arm was under muscle power only. His internal rad counters were higher, also, and he figured he’d popped environmental somewhere. That was really going to suck.
The chief was up as well and running back to the gate so Weaver made the command decision that he’d ignore those minor little issues. He picked up his Bushmaster and clumsily trotted over to the gate, carrying the Bushmaster in his right hand.
“You okay?” the chief said.
“Couldn’t be better,” Weaver replied, hooking up his ammo feed slide. “You?”
“Peachy,” the SEAL answered, manually cocking the 30mm. “Okay, let’s rock.”
With that the two of them bent over — the mecha suits were fourteen feet tall and could barely fit together though the gate — and stepped, lurched really, through the looking glass.
“I think he’s losing it,” Crichton said, turning up the news broadcast.
“Who?” Earp replied, looking up from the latest bulletin from FEMA.
“The CBS anchor,” the sergeant replied.
The anchor was beginning to show signs of the strain of trying to keep up with the news.
“Another Titcher gate has opened in Staunton, Virginia,” he said, pronouncing it, correctly, as Stanton. “National Guard units have responded but the initial attempt by state police to stem the attack has failed with heavy casualties among the state police. In other news the State Department has announced that the Mreee have officially requested the loan of mobile nuclear weapons and that the Russians have agreed to sell the U.S. several SS-19 mobile missile launchers…” The reporter, who had won his spurs in Vietnam reporting all the news that was detrimental to the United States and who had been a quiet, but major, advocate of the antinuclear/antimilitary brigade for decades, was reporting the latest news with a rictus smile. “The Mreee have relayed a request from the Nitch, a race of intelligent spiderlike creatures…” He stopped and giggled. “I can’t say this. Yes, I know, I’m reading it on my TelePrompTer but this can’t be happening! This JUST CAN’T BE HAPPENING!”
The screen changed to a female anchorwoman who was rubbing furiously at her nose with her index finger. She looked up in startlement and then recovered quickly.
“We seem to be having some technical difficulties in New York,” she said with studied aplomb. “In other news…”
“Score one for reality overload,” Crichton said as he turned the sound back down. “Failed his SAN roll.”
“Just proud to be here,” Earp replied.
“I gotta ask,” the sergeant muttered. “Look, Earp’s not a really common name…”
“My great-great-grandfather was a cousin,” Earp replied. “A wanted felon up around Dodge City. They had a gentleman’s agreement; Wyatt didn’t come up where Ryan was and Ryan didn’t go near Tombstone.”
“Thought it might be something like that…”
And in other news, Weaver tripped, almost immediately, on a dead dog on the other side of the gate.
The Titcher side of the gate was littered with dead and dying aliens, many of them torn limb from limb by the big explosion. As he lurched forward Weaver caught a glimpse of one of the rhino-tanks over on its side, one leg blown off and green lightning rippling over its surface.
There had been thousands of aliens in the gate room and most of them had suffered some effect from the expansion bomb. But many of them had simply been stunned or thrown off their feet and they were getting up and charging the humans who had been imprudent enough to invade their space.
Weaver felt glad he’d fallen as a line of needles passed through the space he would have occupied standing up. The armor of the suit probably would have stopped them but better to be out of the way. He toggled his top-side camera, brought the Bushmaster up to his shoulder one-handed, propped it up as best he could with his left hand and opened fire.