"What does it fire?" Elgars asked, still staring at the slowly disappearing monstrosity.
"A sixteen-inch discarding sabot with a nuclear round at the center," Wendy said with a smile in her voice. "When you care enough to send the very best . . ."
"Antimatter, actually," Mosovich said. "Much cleaner than even the cleanest nuke. It's a bit of overkill for the Lampreys; the penetrators generally tear them up pretty good. But it's necessary for the C-Decs, the command ships. They're bigger and have more internal armoring. I hear when they hit a lander's containment system it's pretty spectacular."
"Why's it here?" Shari asked nervously. "This corps already had one, right? I thought they were pretty rare."
"They are," Mosovich said thoughtfully. "Like I said, I guess Eastern Command decided we needed some backup."
"So, is something about to go wrong?" Shari asked.
* * *
"I hate these things," Sergeant Buckley said. "There's a billion things to go wrong."
Sergeant Joseph Buckley had been fighting the Posleen almost since the beginning of the war. He had been in the first, experimental, ACS unit in the fighting in Diess. After Diess, he had been medically evacuated as a psychological casualty; after being caught in a fuel-air explosion, being stuck under a half a kilometer of rubble, having your hand blown off trying to cut your way out, getting swept away in a nuclear blast front and having half a space cruiser land on you, driving you back under a half kilometer of rubble, anyone could tend to go around the bend.
But desperate times called for desperate measures and in time even Joe Buckley was found fit for duty. As long as it wasn't too stressful and had nothing to do with combat suits. It was his only insistence, and he was firm about it to the point of court-martial, that he would not have to put on a suit. The series of events on Diess had given him a permanent psychosis about combat suits and all peripheral equipment. In fact, he had come to the conclusion that the whole problem with the war was an emphasis on high technology over the tried and true.
"I tell you," he said, ripping the plastic cover off of the recalcitrant M134 7.62 Gatling gun. "What we need up here is . . ."
" . . . water-cooled Browning machine guns," said Corporal Wright. "I know, I know."
"You think I'm joking," he said, pulling out the jammed round and snarling at it. "This would never happen with a Browning. That's the problem, everybody wants more firepower."
The fighting position was on the second tier of the Wall, overlooking Highway 441. Clayton was out of sight around the edge of the mountain, but they had gotten warnings from the Black Mountain observation post that there was a Posleen swarm on the way up the road. So getting Gun Position B-146 back in operation was a priority.
The Wall was a mass of firing and observation ports. Beside the Gatling ports, there were regular heavy weapons, designed for engaging tenar, and rifle ports for the soldiers, whose main job was feeding the guns, to get in the occasional shot if they so desired. But, really, it was the Gatling guns, and the artillery hammering down from above, that did most of the damage.
The gun was mounted on an M27-G2 semi-fixed mount. On command, it would automatically move back and forth across a fixed azimuth, putting out a hail of bullets. The firing circuit was keyed in parallel with all the other guns in the B-14 zone, and at the press of a button, a button located in an armored command center, all twelve weapons would open up, each spitting out either 2000 or 4000 rounds per minute, depending on the setting, and filling the air with 7.62 rounds.
At least, that was the theory. The M134 was a fairly reliable system and the basic M27 mount design was older and more tried than Buckley. But tiny changes in design, necessary to convert both systems to a ground, universal availability, fixed, remotely controlled firing system instead of an aerial, regular availability, firing system, had led to tiny quirks, some of them related to the design, but most of them related to trying to integrate it. To manage those quirks, six soldiers, under Sergeant Buckley, were supposed to keep the guns mechanically functional and "fed" both between battles and during them.
In the case of Buckley's squad, instead of one soldier per two guns it seemed that they needed two soldiers per gun. Buckley, personally and publicly, blamed this on the units that they replaced; duties in the defense line rotated between the three divisions of the Corps and Buckley was convinced that the units that had the guns in the other divisions never pulled maintenance and/or actively sabotaged the guns.
The Wall unit, one of the three divisions in the corps, was on duty twenty-four hours per day for four weeks, living in rather squalid quarters within the Wall itself; then it was rotated to the rear. There it went through a maintenance and support cycle, living out of barracks and, in the event of a heavy attack, moving to tertiary defenses that were actually behind the corps headquarters. After four weeks in that status, the unit would rotate "forward" to the secondary defense positions, which meant it had to be "on call" for combat. Until recently that had meant sitting in the barracks reading girly magazines and getting into fights. However, since that engineer prick from headquarters had shown up it meant working on the trenches and bunkers twelve hours per day. After twelve hours of shovelling and filling sandbags you could barely make it to the club.
Buckley was morally positive that those bastards in the 103rd had sabotaged his guns. And now they were probably sucking down a cold one in the NCO club and laughing at him behind his back.
Everyone else in the squad, and in the company for that matter, privately blamed the situation on Buckley. Anyone who has a ship fall on them tends to get a bad luck reputation and that condition seemed to have spread to everything he touched. Whether it was an issued Humvee or the guns on the line or even his personal rifle, something odd and unusual always seemed to happen to it.
In this case it was Gun B-146, which absolutely refused to fire in any sort of reliable and continuous manner.
"I think it's a short," Specialist Alejandro said, ramming a cleaning rod with a Breakfree-soaked swab down the number four barrel.
"We checked for a short," Buckley snarled. "The gun's drawing what it should and no more."
"I think it's the ammo," Wright said.
"We replaced the box," Buckley said, pointing to the huge case of belted 7.62 mounted under the gun. "And ran the ammo on 148; it ran fine."
"I think it's a ground fault coming off of the M27," Alejandro insisted, pulling out the cleaning rod. "The M27 is acting funky too."
"I think it's you, Sergeant," Wright said, rotating the gun manually.
"It's those fuckers from the 103rd," Buckley said. "They're fucking with all the guns. I tell you, they just want us to look bad."
"Well, that's not hard," Wright said quietly.
"What's that, Specialist?" Buckley said.
"Nothing, Sergeant," Wright answered. "It's functioning now, let's test it."
"Okay," Buckley said, stepping back. "Reset the breaker, Alejandro."
The specialist ensured the barrels were free of obstructions, took the tags off the breakers for the gun and the mount and threw them over. "We're hot."
"Safe off," Buckley said, plugging in a local controller. "Weapon is hot," he continued, rotating a round into the first chamber.
"Earplugs aren't in," Wright said hastily, reaching in his breast pocket.
"It's just a short burst," Buckley answered. "Here goes."
He set the gun to four thousand rpm, max speed, and pressed the fire button.