When the Devil Dances

Then the rumor got around that the main exit had been cut off. He managed to get his guys to help quell the near riot that erupted, but it turned out it wasn’t just a rumor this time; the Posleen really had cut off their escape route.

Then they got the word that most of the personnel, and gear, was going to go out by the two alternate routes. Great. He was all for fighting, he’d been doing it for damn near ten years, but it helped to have a way out in case things went south. However, it turned out that “most” did not include the “combat arms” forces.

The next thing he knew he and his squad were in the back of a Bradley headed up the road to the pass the Posleen had taken.

Now, he wasn’t a coward by any stretch of the imagination. But he’d gotten a look at the map and taking that pass with the pitiful little force they had was just suicide.

They finally had a real meeting, where the lieutenant who was in charge of the Brads called all the squad leaders together and told them the plan, such as it was. The SheVa gun, probably the same one that had killed the Lamprey that blasted him into the drink, was going to fire a nuke into the pass. Then they would charge into the pass and clean up the survivors.

“It’ll be easy,” the lieutenant concluded. “All the Posties will be toasties from the nuke. We just have to secure it until the brigade on the other side makes it up the road.”

Sarge Buckley had been beating around the Army since before the Posleen had been heard of and he knew when somebody was lying. “The check is in the mail” is nothing compared to “the trucks are on the drop zone.” But the worst military cliché of them all had to be “the artillery is going to pound them flat then we’ll just go in and paint the lines.”

Buckley looked up as the radio in the track began to honk.

“NUKE WARNING. NUKE WARNING. TARGET COORDINATES: UTM 17 311384E 392292N. 100 K-T. THIRTY SECONDS!”

Life just got worse.

“FIFTEEN SECONDS. TEN…”

They were all gonna die.

* * *

Pruitt inhaled, then: “Initiate.”

The area effect weapons had similarities to the anti-lander penetrators and differences. Since the gun remained a smooth-bore and the round therefore had to be fin-stabilized, they were discarding sabot. But they were thicker in cross section than the penetrators and flew at a lower velocity. Last, but not least, since they were not penetrators, they were made out of simple carbon steel. Since the metal they were made out of was going to be distributed as a fine dust, better to have it composed of materials the human body could metabolize.

The round flew out of the tube in a river of fire, dropped its sabots and headed for Balsam Gap.

* * *

The weapon detonated seventy-three hundred and twenty feet above sea level, two thousand feet above and just about one thousand feet to the northeast of the pass. They say that close only counts in hand grenades and hydrogen bombs, but in this case close didn’t quite count. The fireball swooped down over the Posleen defenses, devouring the trees to either side and gouging out the sharp walls of the pass, especially on the eastern side. However, on the northern side of the pass, the expanding fireball was partially blocked and deflected by the shoulder of Balsam Mountain.

The Blue Ridge Parkway crossed over U.S. 23 at Balsam Gap. The overpass was heavily constructed and many of the Posleen defenses had been built underneath it for additional overhead cover from the expected artillery fire. While the antimatter warhead was very strong, it had been placed as a “personnel killer” rather than a structures killer; therefore between the deflection of the corner of the mountain and the construction, the compression front that hit the structure tore down the southern span, but the northern span remained intact.

Furthermore, Posleen under the bridge were shielded from the thermal pulse and at least some of the radiation release. The result was that although the majority of the oolt’ondai had been swept away in the atomic fireball, a small, but very angry remnant suvived.

* * *

Sergeant Buckley hefted his rifle as the Bradley gunned towards the pass. His “squad” was virtually unknown to him, and he knew darned well that humans mostly fought for the people in their “tribe.” When they hit the objective it was just as likely that most of these guys were going to either hit the dirt and stay there or run.

Which meant that actually getting them to fight was up to him. He never asked for this, but the stripes on his shoulder meant he had the responsibility. And he was going to, by God, discharge it.

He looked out the small porthole by him and considered the map. They were probably less than three hundred meters from the objective; he had a hard time telling from the terrain because everything had been so churned up by the nuke strike. But he was pretty sure they were just about on the straightaway for the gap.