Not all of them, though, and Slight grunted again when she saw the first data lead go dead from her company. The location and name of the trooper, Garzelli from third platoon, flashed briefly on her heads up then faded. She didn’t allow herself to focus on it, she just noted it and marked it for pickup. Her first sergeant would have done the same thing, but no harm in being sure.
She looked up at the heights overlooking the battlefield. The slope was actually sharp and the battalion was enjoying some cover from the Posleen that were massed above. They had not been under the hammer of fire and were fresh; when they moved to engage things would be hot and Bravo would be in the thick of it.
Most of the remaining fire on the flat had been suppressed, however, and she noted and passed the battalion commander’s orders to begin the movement to the next phaseline.
This was when it got a tad tricky. Only one of her platoons, third, was actually going to be “on-line” with the rest of the battalion, the other two were going to be echeloned to provide cover for the left flank. This required that the two platoons wait as the battalion moved forward and string themselves out like beads along that side. She waited until about half of them had started forward and then moved out herself. After a few steps she stumbled and looked down at the Posleen she had tripped over. It was impossible to tell if it was a God King or a normal, the entire front half had been devoured by one of the 155mm impact rounds. But there was enough left to get in her way and as they progressed it was only going to get worse. She was having a hell of a time watching the whole company while also watching out for herself and she sometimes wondered how in the hell O’Neal did it.
Mike didn’t even notice, consciously, the icon for friable ground, but he stamped down, shoving his boot through the chest cavity of the Kessentai then kicking to free it as he moved on. The symbology for the ground around him would have been impossible for anyone else to read, a hyper-compressed schematic showing ground level and conditions. The original schematic had replaced a lower screen view that he had originally used after falling through ice a couple of times. Then the half screen of images had been compressed laterally until all that was left was an inch high readout stretching all the way across his view.
His “view” of the battle, after five years of command, was nothing but a mass of icons and graphs; an external view was nothing but a distraction. He ran his eyes across the readouts with satisfaction. All the companies were moving out in good order and Captain Slight was doing an excellent job getting Bravo in position along Elmwood Avenue. Sooner or later the mass of Po’oslena’ar around the Strong Memorial Hospital, what was left of it, was going to come tear-assing down in a tena’al charge and smash into Bravo like an avalanche. As long as they waited until Bravo was fully in the groove it shouldn’t matter. And so far all was in the green.
A couple of the bridges were showing as questionable, the icons outlined in yellow. He didn’t bother to try to find out why; his AID was processing data from a thousand sources and any of it could have led to that conclusion. Over the last few years Shelly had become remarkably adept at gauging the quality of units and if she said the bridges probably would take a bit longer than anticipated to move into the hot zone she was probably right. Another screen showed the symbology for the Ten Thousand getting into position.
There were high buildings across the river and he noted the fact that Kessentai on the heights were beginning to drop. The snipers of the Ten Thousand were obviously getting into the act, using both their own weapons and tripod mounted “teleoperated” systems. At those ranges, though, it was unlikely that they could get rounds into the power storage compartments of the tenar, which was unfortunate; when one of the .50 caliber sniper rounds hit the storage crystals the unstable matrix tended to turn into a good copy of a five-hundred-pound bomb.
The battalion had reached the Conrail line, and he ordered a short stop to get everything set. The Reapers, who had been responding to calls for fire all along, yanked charging tubes out of the huge ammo baskets welded on their backs while the regular ACS troopers checked ammunition levels and shifted as necessary. The standard suits carried hundreds of thousands of the depleted uranium teardrops but the grav-guns fired nearly five hundred a second. This meant that the suit troopers occasionally had to worry about running out of ammunition, a situation that would have been considered impossible before the war.
Bulbous bodied medic and engineer suits moved forward supplying additional ammunition to the fighters and checking on the dropped data links. Such damage usually meant that the trooper was terminal, a DRT or Dead Right There in the cold battlefield parlance of the medics, but occasionally it was just massive suit damage that the trooper had survived. In that case, nine times out of ten, the medic would leave the trooper anyway.
A few troopers had fallen back from the fight with serious injuries or damaged weapons. Usually anything that penetrated a suit was fatal, but, again, if the trooper survived the initial shock the suits would keep them alive until pickup, sealing the injury, debriding the wound, attacking infection and either putting the trooper out or shutting down the nerve endings depending on the tactical situation. And even such injuries as lost limbs were, at worst, an inconvenience as O’Neal was well aware; he came away from Diess with only one functioning limb. Regeneration and Hiberzine were perhaps the two greatest boons the Galactics had presented to humans and the suit troopers well knew it; most of the veterans had lost at least one limb at some point.
Mike spit a bit of dip into a pocket in the undergel. The icons for the Posleen on the heights indicated that they were starting to get their shit together. Among other things, there were signs of Kessentai going ground-mounted. If they were also smart enough to keep their crests down, the snipers across the river were going to have a damned hard time spotting them. Even if the snipers could pick them out it was a bad sign. It meant there was a God King who knew what he was doing and could command the obedience of others. Now was when the battalion was really going to earn its pay. Time to Dance.
Duncan hunched forward and wished he could get a Marlboro in the suit. He’d done it a couple of times before, but the suit had a hell of a time handling the fumes. The undergel acted… real strange for a couple of days afterwards. He didn’t know if it was toxic shock from the smoke or if it had just gotten pissed off; the underlayers developed “personalities” after a while that were still something of a mystery. But whatever the reason, he finally decided it was a bad idea and gave it up.
Which left him trying to direct nearly a division of artillery while having a nicotine fit.
He was watching the same icons as the battalion commander and if he didn’t have Mike’s instincts for how the Posleen moved he could tell they were shaping up for an attack. He’d been calling for fire from the two battalions of 155 tasked for “on call” fire, but they were half useless. He’d finally switched to using the organic mortar elements of the waiting divisions and the Ten Thousand. There were quite a few of those that were not very responsive, or bloody inaccurate, but there were also nearly twice as many of them as the artillery. Coordinating all of them was a bastard; some of them wouldn’t respond to electronic commands while others would… but incorrectly. It left his AID “faking” his voice all over the nets. But they were starting to get some good fire going on the Posleen assembly areas just as the main force began its push.
He took a look at the flow of the icons and wished he could scratch his head. His guess was that they were going to come down the sidestreets around PS 49. Most of them had been using West Brighton and Elmwood Avenues to move up to the flimsy crossing. If they followed the same route they’d be filing right into the “corner” of the battalion and cutting hard into Bravo company.