But Gunny Pappas knew that wasn’t what got the boys to get up and shoot. The boys got up to shoot from the shining vision and because they believed with Ironman O’Neal beside them there was no way they could lose. Because that was how it should be.
Pappas looked down at the smoke and flames drifting off the rubble of the city and sighed. This sure as hell wasn’t how it should be. And if Captain Karen Slight tried to carry the battalion into that fire they would evaporate like water on a griddle. Because they wouldn’t believe.
“Major?” he said, putting his hand on Mike’s shoulder.
“Ernie,” the major answered. They had been together since O’Neal had taken command of Bravo back in the bad days when it seemed like the entire Army had lost its mind. They’d been through the ups and the downs, mostly downs. Whether they knew it or not it was the team of Pappas and O’Neal that defined the 1st/555th and made it what it was.
“That was a long goddamned climb you just forced on an old man.”
“Great view, though. Don’t you think?” Mike smiled sadly and carefully spit into his helmet where the biotic underlayer picked up the spittle and tobacco juice and started it on its long trail back to being rations.
Pappas glanced at the pistol and winced. “You need to quit listening to Dire Straits.”
“What? You’d prefer James Taylor?”
“We’ve got a situation.”
“Yep.” Mike sighed and rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “Don’t we always.”
“The 14th Division high-tailed it.” The battalion sergeant major took his own helmet off and shielded his eyes. “They’re halfway to Buffalo by now.”
“What else is new?” O’Neal intoned. “Nice artillery fire, though. Not hitting anything, but very pretty.”
“Corps arty. I doubt they’ll stick around much longer. The whole corps is thinking the ‘bugout boogie’ by now.”
“Ten Thousand plugging the gap?”
“Yep.”
“Yep.”
There was a long silence while the sergeant major scratched at his scalp. The biotic underlayer of the suits had finally fixed his perennial dandruff but the habit lingered on long after the end of the problem.
“So, we gonna do anything about it, boss?”
“Do what?” the battalion commander asked. “Charge heroically into the enemy, driving him back by force of arms? ‘Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage’? Break the back of the enemy attack and drive them into rout? Retake positions lost for months? Drive them all the way back to Westbury and Clyde where they are supposed to be?”
“Is that what you’re planning?” Pappas asked.
“I’m not planning anything!” Mike answered shortly. “But I suppose that is what Jack is expecting. I notice he turned up.”
“It’s how you know it’s serious,” Pappas joked. “If CONARC turns up the shit has truly hit the fan.”
“I also notice that there are no artillery units responsive to calls for fire.”
“They’re working on that.”
“And that both flanking divisions are defined by Shelly as ‘shaky.’ ”
“Well, they’re Army, ain’t they?” the former Marine chuckled. “Army’s always defined as ‘shaky.’ It’s the default setting.”
Artillery fire dropped on the rickety pontoon bridge and the wood and aluminum structure disintegrated.
“See?” said O’Neal. “They didn’t really need us.”
“Horner wants a counterattack.”
O’Neal turned around to see if the sergeant major was joking but the broad, sallow face was deadpanned. “Are you serious?”
“As a heart attack. I thought that was what you was bitching about.”
“Holy shit,” the major whispered. He reached down and put on his helmet then shook his head to get a good seal on the underlayer. The gel flowed over his face filling every available crevice then drew back from mouth, nostrils and eyes. The Moment, as it was known, took a long time to get over and a lifetime to adjust to. “Holy shit. Counterattack. Grand. With Slight in command I presume? Great. Time to go pile up the breach with our ACS dead.”
“Smile when you say that, sir,” the NCO said, putting on his own helmet. “Once more into the breach.”
“That’s ‘unto,’ you illiterate Samoan, and I am smiling,” O’Neal retorted. He rotated his body sideways, turning the snarling face of his battle armor towards the sergeant major. “See?”
“Gotta love his armor,” Cutprice chuckled.
“I wish I had a thousand sets,” Horner admitted. “But I’d settle for a thousand regular sets so that’s not saying much.”
The armor was a private gift to then-Captain O’Neal from the Indowy manufacturer and included all the “special” functions that he had requested when he was a member of the design group. Besides the additional firing ports on wrist and elbows for close range combat, it was powered by antimatter. This eliminated the worst handicap of powered armor, its relatively short combat range. Technically, standard armor was designed for three hundred miles of range or seventy-two hours of static combat. In practice it had turned out to be about half that. Several suit units had been caught when they simply “ran out of gas” and were destroyed by the Posleen.
The drain on suit power had just gotten worse with the ammunition shortage. Because it was impossible for any terrestrial factory to produce the standard ammunition, which had a dollop of antimatter at the base to power the gun, it had been necessary to substitute simple depleted-uranium teardrops. Thus the grav-gun, which should have been powering itself, was forced to “suck” power from the suits. Since the rounds were still accelerated to a fraction of lightspeed, and since that required enormous power, the “life” of the suit batteries had been cut to nearly nothing. It was getting close to a choice of shoot or move for most of the standard suits, the exception being O’Neal’s, which had almost unlimited power.
The flip side, of course, was that if anything ever penetrated to the antimatter reservoir, Major O’Neal and a sizable percentage of the landscape for a mile around would be vapor.
But all of those things were invisible. It was the “surface” that attracted attention; the suit gave the appearance of some sort of green and black alien demon, the mouth a fang-filled maw and the hands talons for ripping flesh. It was startling and barbaric and in some ways, for those who knew O’Neal, very on cue.
“It suits him,” said the colonel from long experience. The ACS went wherever it was hottest. And the Ten Thousand followed.
The Ten Thousand — or the Spartans as they were sometimes called — was an outgrowth of a smaller group called the Six Hundred. When the first Posleen landing occurred, early, by surprise and in overwhelming force, the green units sent into Northern Virginia to stop them were shattered in the first encounter. Many of them, especially rear echelons, escaped across the Potomac. A large number of these gathered in Washington so when the Posleen forced a crossing of the river, right on the Washington Mall, thousands of these soldiers who had been in the rout were directly in their path. All but a tiny handful fled. This tiny handful, six hundred and fifty-three to be exact, had decided that there were some things that were worth dying for in a pointless gesture. So they gathered on the mound of the Washington Monument for the purposes of a stupidly suicidal last stand.
As it turned out it was not, quite, a suicide. Their resistance, and the confusion among the Posleen crossing the bridge, slowed the enemy just enough for the armored combat suits to arrive. Between the ACS and artillery fire the Posleen pocket in Washington was first reduced, then eliminated.