When the Devil Dances

“That’s more or less what it is,” Mueller answered. “They fire full rounds, not projectiles, bullets, with propellant bags or something. They’re the biggest cartridges ever made and the most complicated; among other things the system uses a plasma enhancer that requires resistors to be threaded through the propellant. They’re not just stuffed with cordite or something.”

“In an hour it will look like a big, green and brown mound,” Mosovich said. “Then when landers come over the horizon, it just drives out and engages; the foam flakes off relatively easily. And it’s a hell of a lot easier to set up than that much camouflage netting.”

“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.