When the Devil Dances

The amount of energy involved in firing the system led to an enormous number of compromises. One of these was that the system could only shoot “forward” unless it deployed its firing spades or “jacks” as they were called. Otherwise the sheer energy involved in twelve hundred rounds of discarding penetrator heading down-range would flip the massive tank over on its side.

While this had been found to be insignificant against landers, six of the tanks firing into the space the tenaral were passing through was another story.

* * *

Tensalarial flapped his crest within the armored enclosure and keyed his microphone. “We need to get lower to destroy this thing; we can’t hit it flying by from this height.”

“Fuscirto uut,” Allansiar replied. “I’m not getting any closer than this! Even this is too close! You saw what happened to Pacalostal!”

Tensalarial flapped his crest again and snarled. It was like something in Posleen was hard coded; when you got one with the sense to do something besides lead an oolt and charge the guns, they also started getting… cautious. The smartest Posleen of all seemed to be Kenstain, which he preferred not to consider too closely.

“Our… mission is to stop this so the landers can destroy it,” Tensalarial said in response, with a tooth snap that was audible over the communicator. “We will perform that mission.”

“Then shoot the tracks,” Allansiar snarled in reply. “Not the body: that is where the fuel and weapons are that blow up. There is nothing to blow up in the wheels!”

“Very well,” the Kessentai replied after a moment. “We shall shoot the tracks on the next pass.”

“Lining up,” Allansiar said. “I’ll even get lower for that.”

“Let us go in one behind the other,” Tensalarial commented. “That way the ones behind can gauge their firing on the basis of the leader. I shall lead.”

“Why not?” Allansiar said with a grunt. “You’re not going to hit anything anyway.”

Tensalarial ignored the jibe and turned the tenaral towards the ground, lining up the manual aiming reticle on the slowly moving treads. The groups had had little opportunity to practice firing before the assault and they were learning by trial and error that the rounds did not go where the aiming reticle was pointed. The reticle was computer generated, but the system was not an actual auto-aiming device; it was simply a heads-up-display of where Goloswin thought the target was going to be. Since all Posleen aiming was done with advanced targeting systems — which Goloswin had never bothered to reverse engineer — the tenaral were beginning to realize that there were some basic concepts missing in the aiming system. Two of the missing concepts were “parallax” and “bore-sighting”; configured as they were, the guns were the functional equivalent of plasma blunderbusses and just about as accurate.

Stooping like a falcon, the Kessentai began dropping plasma rounds all over the landscape.

* * *

The target recognition system for the Meemies was sometimes a bit messed up and the radar integration system often malfunctioned. But the manual firing system was mostly taken from a standard M-1 Abrams design and worked rather well.

In this case a laser swept the sky until it got a return, estimated the range, found it to be functionally close to the one that Captain Chan had keyed in manually and began a series of calculations. It checked wind-speed, air temperature, humidity and whether the StormPack had been previously fired. Then it ran a rapid series of calculations and adjusted the aiming point appropriately. And the unknown programmer who had originally designed the system had heard of parallax.

For Captain Chan it was simplicity in itself. She pointed the red circles at the descending tenaral and waited until they flashed green. This took approximately half a second. Then she flipped the thumb selector from “safe” to “full,” closed her eyes, clamped down on the firing lever and held on for dear life.

* * *

“Holy shit!” Pruitt called. He had flipped to a screen where he could watch the funny looking tanks arrayed along the top of the ridgeline and now they had disappeared in a wall of smoke and fire. “Did they just get hit?”

“Nah,” Major Mitchell said, flipping momentarily to the same screen. “That’s what they always look like.”

The tanks appeared to have exploded. The air above and to the side was nothing, but smoke, fire and smoking plastic shredding itself on the dense air. Somewhere in there, presumably, were people and functional vehicles, but it seemed impossible that they could have survived. After only a few seconds the firing stopped and the air started to clear, revealing the Meemies, apparently undamaged.

“Holy shit,” Pruitt repeated. Then: “We gots to get one of them, sir!”

* * *

Glenn sat up, groaning. “Ooooh. I hate my job.” She pried her fingers off of her helmet and held her shaking hand out in front of her. “I gotta get a transfer.”