The globe had emerged into a maelstrom of fire. Even at its incredible mass, nearly equivalent to a small planet or a large asteroid, the globe bucked and jolted from the energies released by its own and the threshkreen fires, as well as from exploding ships. The large view-screen, forward in the Lamprey’s hold, was completely ignored by the ignorant normals. Guanamarioch, however, was transfixed by the swirl and glow, the bolts and flashes of the battle in space.
Once he saw in that screen, much magnified he hoped, the gaping maw of a threshkreen super-monitor, coming into alignment with his own globe. There was a bright flash, like that of an antimatter bomb detonating, and a new icon appeared, shading from red to blue to red again. Guanamarioch did not recognize the icon and so asked his Artificial Sentience to explain.
“It is a kinetic energy projectile, lord, moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. The globe cannot tell if it contains an antimatter or nuclear warhead, hence the change in color. Frankly, if it hits us amidships it may not matter if it is an antimatter bomb or not.”
Guanamarioch gulped. Involuntarily his sphincter loosened to allow liquid feces to run down his legs to the floor. The smell meant nothing as the normals had been shitting themselves silly ever since awakening. Still, the junior God King part way lowered his head and crest in shame. Shame or not, though, he could not keep his yellow eyes away from the screen.
Despite the speed of the thing, the projectile was so well aligned it was possible to track it, or rather the icon, on the screen. From every outcropping of the globe that mounted a weapon, fire poured down on the KE projectile. It seemed to form an ever more shallow cone with the icon at the apex.
“It’s going to hit,” the Artificial Sentience announced. “Lower right quarter as the globe bears. It’s going to be bad.”
Chapter 9
Discipline ought to be used.
Oh, was Digna in a bad mood. Without a word, in field uniform, holding a switch in her right hand and helmet tucked under the left arm, and accompanied by two stout triple great-grandsons, she burst into the little shack. Her bright blue eyes flashed icy fire.
The woman of the house, in fact Digna’s great-great-granddaughter though the woman looked much older than the great-great-grandmother did, took one look and backed away, holding her hands in front of her in supplication.
“Where is the little toad?” Digna demanded, lip curling in a sneer and her voice dripping with scorn.
Fearfully the woman pointed at the shack’s sole bedroom. Digna brushed the door open with the switch. Immediately her nose was assailed by the strong smell of cheap rum. In the dim light she looked down on a snoring, disheveled man, unsurprisingly also a great-great-grandchild, and felt the rising heat of murderous anger.
She took half a step forward into the room and began.
Down came the switch across the man’s face, hard enough to draw blood.
“Filthy pendejo!”
Again the switch, accompanied by, “Disgrace to my blood!”
“Rotten”… switch… “Lazy!”… swack… “Good for nothing!”… “Foul!”… “Dirty!”… “Useless!”… whackwackwack.
By the time Digna got to “useless” her great-great-grandson, trying vainly to protect his head with his hands, had rolled onto the floor. He begged for pardon but the beating continued.
“Little rat!”… “Cockroach!”… “Vermin!”
When Digna’s right arm tired she put on her helmet and transferred the switch to her left. When that tired she stopped altogether and, using her rested right arm grasped the man by the hair and began to drag. Digna was small, and perhaps she could not have pulled the man against his will. But, on the other hand, was it worth it to him to lose his hair finding out?
In the shack’s main room Digna flashed her eyes at her escorts.
“Arrest your cousin,” she ordered. “Three days in the pit for failure to show for drill.” Briefly she reconsidered her sentence and then added, “Make that three days on bread and water.”
“Si señora,” they answered, meekly.
Digna’s Officer Candidate School had trained her to be an artillery officer. Specifically she had been trained to command a battery of very old, very surplus, 85mm Russian-made SD-44 guns. To crew the guns she had several hundred each of middle-aged men and suitably strong and healthy young women. And that was only counting her clan alone, be they by blood or by marriage. She also had substantial numbers of what she, with the benefit of a fairly classical education, thought of as the “perioeci” — the “dwellers about” — immediately under her control. Since the guns, with forward observers, fire direction computers and crews only required ninety men, or perhaps one hundred and twenty women, to operate at full efficiency, she had an excess of riches, personnel-wise. She solved this problem by assigning virtually all the unattached or less-attached women and girls of the clan to the guns and forming most of the men into a very large militia infantry company, though perhaps “dragoon” was a better word than infantry. There was not a man or boy who could not ride, and raising thoroughbred horses had been a clan specialty for centuries.
The guns were really quite remarkable specimens of their type; perhaps the ultimate version of the quick firing guns like the French “Seventy-five” that had made the First World War such a nightmare. Compared to the SD-44, the French “Seventy-five” was pretty small beans.
Each could throw a seventeen-pound shell up to seventeen kilometers and do so at a rate of up to twenty-five rounds a minute, maximum, or up to three hundred per hour, sustained. Moreover, since they had been designed by Russians who believed that all defense was antitank defense, the guns had a fair capability against light and medium armor. They were, in fact, the very same design as used on the Type-63 light tanks the gringos had purchased for Panama from the People’s Republic of China. Lastly, each gun had an auxiliary engine that could propel it along at a brisk twenty-four kilometers per hour without the need for a light truck to serve as a prime mover. They had the trucks, mind you, but they didn’t absolutely need them. They also had horses, lots of horses, in case the trucks and guns ran out of fuel.
The guns could fire high explosive, or HE, smoke and illumination. They could also fire an armor piercing shell that would collanderize anything but a main battle tank. Digna knew that the antitank capability was likely to be completely useless.
Best of all, in her opinion, the guns could fire canister: four hundred iron balls per shell — over three thousand from the massed battery — that would make short work of a column attack. So she hoped anyway.
The switch she had used on her multi-great-grandson did as well to spur her horse to where the battery was training under the eye of one of her favorite granddaughters, Edilze, a dark and pretty young woman — she favored her grandfather — and, more importantly, one Digna recognized as having a will and a brain.
Digna had begun by training Edilze and eight others to crew the guns, along with six more in fire-direction techniques. That had actually taken only about ten days. As one of Digna’s instructors at OCS had observed, “You can train a monkey to serve a gun. People are only marginally more difficult.”