When the Devil Dances

Pruitt stared into the rising sun, pretty sure he’d never been this exhausted in his life. Whatever the drugs were telling him.

“I feel like I haven’t slept in a week,” he muttered. “Or at least like I could sleep for a week.” He wasn’t exactly tired; the Provigil was making sure that he wouldn’t feel that way and a tiny bit of methamphetamine was ensuring that he was alert. But it had been a long day with a lot of stress and it didn’t look to be ending any time soon.

The route over the mountain had been a long drawn out nightmare and one where he couldn’t do anything except hold on and hope for the best.

The SheVa gun had not been designed to climb mountains and a couple of times he was pretty sure they were just going to go tumbling back down a slope; once just west of Chestnut Gap when they had to ascend a ten-foot bluff while already on a very steep slope and another time when the mountainside was just a bit steeper than it looked on the map. The SheVa often felt like it was going straight up and knowing that there was a multiton gun and two stories of steel above you, pulling the gun over and backwards, was pretty nerve-wracking. It was almost worse the few times that they had had to straddle a ravine with one giant tread half supported on either side; the undercarriage would creak and groan, sounding like it was going to shatter at any moment.

It had been worse for Reeves; the large and airy compartment occasionally got thick with the fear sweat from the driver. But every time that Major Mitchell told him to take a slope, he’d just nod his head and put his foot to the floor. It took a special kind of courage to simply place your faith in a hunk of machinery, that it would take the hill and not turn into a gigantic iron boulder.

The trek had to have been nearly as bad for the Meemies. The Abrams tank was certified to negotiate a sixty degree slope — amazing what placing most of sixty tons of metal near the ground could do for center of gravity — but that didn’t mean that anyone but an idiot liked to go up them. And in places the laboring SheVa had torn the slope to such an extent that its tread holes, which were the only clear route for an Abrams, easily approached sixty degrees. But the commander of the MetalStorm tracks had taken them into and out of those ersatz fighting positions without any apparent qualm.

It would almost have been better if he’d just turned off his screens and gone to sleep, but they didn’t know when the Posleen might do a flyover. And now that he was reloaded, he was ready to kick some Posleen butt.

Where the Posleen were was a big question. Between Major Mitchell and the Storm commander they had managed to scrape up a few other surviving units on the radio. It turned out that the horses had taken the Rocky Face slope and Oak Grove, cutting off a good part of the surviving Corps. But engineers had blown the bridges at Oak Grove and Tennessee before the horses got there and at both points the Posleen were rebuilding the structures while laboriously ferrying troops across.

That last was bad news; nobody liked to think about Posleen having combat engineers; among other things that meant that the entire lower Tennessee was potentially crossable. But it was taking them a few hours to do the structure and the advance was slowed down in the meantime. Currently Major Mitchell intended to head down into Betty Creek and then over Brushy Fork mountain to Greens Creek. After that they would practically have to debouche into the Savannah Creek valley; they had to get ahead of the Posleen and filtering through mountain passes wasn’t going to let them do that.

They had reports that a company of mixed MPs and infantry were holding the bridges over the Tuckasegee River. It wasn’t a big deal to the SheVa — there wasn’t a bridge in the world that would support Bun-Bun — but the Storms needed one to cross the river. If they could make it to the crossing ahead of the horses all would be relatively well. If they didn’t, on the other hand, things would get sticky.

There was also the issue of destroying the bridge. The MPs indicated that they didn’t have any engineers; they had piled explosives around, but the bridge was pretty sturdy and they weren’t sure it would go down. If worse came to worse, of course, Bun-Bun could take care of that little detail as well.

It was near the Tuckasegee crossing, at Dillsboro, that the roads forked. There, Highway 23 separated off and went to Asheville. That was a critical juncture; just up the road at Waynesville was another Urb and if the Posleen got that far it was a mostly open plain all the way into the city. For that matter, at Balsam Gap the road crossed the Blue Ridge Parkway. Since that was a support road for the majority of the Appalachian Line, getting up onto it would permit the Posleen to spread nearly at will. And just east of Waynesville they would hit Interstate 40; that would permit them just about unrestricted movement.