When the Devil Dances

He knew that if he set the suit systems to simulated vision, the female officer would be tapping her fingers on the front of her helmet. It was a nervous habit that was the best substitute she had for nibbling her fingernails. Which, when she was out of armor, was what the commander did constantly. He could practically hear the plastic on plastic thunking sound from here.

“On call, sir,” the captain said. “I’ll want to make the company even more of an ‘L’ shape. And they’ll eventually get in behind us.”

“We’ll make that bridge when we come to it,” Mike answered. “Captain Holder, d’you have a problem taking the center?”

“Negative, Major,” the commander replied. “We’ll hammer them flat.”

“Okay,” O’Neal answered, resetting the markers for the three line companies. The three units were already short of bodies and inverting Bravo to cover the flank, necessary as that was, would reduce the density of fire, the “plowing the road” that the ACS depended on to reduce the Posleen swarms. The only reserve was going to be their Grim Reaper heavy weapon suits. Since the suits were configured for indirect fire support, if there was a breach in the line, the only people to take care of it would be the battalion command and staff. Not a pleasant thought, but it had happened before. He reconfigured the companies while the Artificial Intelligence Devices spread the line of attack for each individual trooper in the companies. The lines of attack were only recommendations, though. The ACS troops knew that if things changed they were supposed to think on their feet and get the job done. “Maximum aggression” was the byword. From the saying their commander used all too often, they just called it “Dancing with the Devil.” “The artillery’s getting ready to wind down support. Let’s get reconfigured, fast.”

The commanders handled it without even moving and from the surface the movement would have shown nothing but a series of odd ripples. The suit troopers accepted the change without comment; their systems gave them more than enough individual data to understand the reason and they were all chosen for more than just their aggressiveness. It was apparent that they were going to lose the support of the curtain barrage. Without it, the main threat changed to the left flank. And that meant, naturally, that Bravo company would be reassigned. Much as Mike tried to rotate the companies, everyone agreed that when it was really tough, Bravo got the call.

The troopers therefore handled the unexpected move with equanimity and dispatch. They had been arrayed on a line, ready to move out. This required shuffling nearly two hundred suits, under ten feet of water, but that, too, was no problem. The AIDs in each suit gave the path and the troopers followed the guidance, “flying” with their suit drivers in and around each other until all of them reached their assigned positions.

O’Neal didn’t even look to see if there was a problem. The Panthers had been hammered until all that was left was bare metal; they could handle the move in their sleep. They could handle the next battle the same way, but the casualties would be steep. And then the battalion would be even shorter, with no significant resupply in sight.

He glanced at his timer and grimaced. He had hoped to move forward in the last stages of the artillery strike; the barrage wasn’t going to hurt the suits. But the time-on-target was lifting already and they were just getting into place. It would have to be good enough.

“Move out.”

Karen Slight grunted when she saw the actual conditions on the land. Until the suits had crested the water the situation had been a thing of icons and readouts. She could have slaved a view off of Duncan’s suit, but it wouldn’t have told her anything the sensors didn’t. In fact, it would have been far less clear. But what the sensors couldn’t give her was the graphic image of the shot-torn hell that was central Rochester.

The time-on-target had been a mixture of variable time, impact and cluster ammunition that stretched in a one kilometer box with the canal on the south side, Castleman Avenue on the east, the river on the west and Elmwood Avenue on the north, and it had flayed the Posleen in the pocket. There had been thousands, tens of thousands at least, of the centauroids preparing to push across the river and most of them had been killed outright by the fire. The bodies of the Arabian horse sized aliens were strewn across the shattered rubble of the city, three and four deep in spots.

This left a ruined wasteland of piled rubble, scattered bodies and the wispy miasma of propellant fumes, smoke and dust that lingered over a battlefield. But in that fire-laden mist, shapes were moving.