When the Devil Dances

Just down from the ridge, along what one of the sniper instructors had termed the “military crest,” there was a line where some of the trees had stayed up, sheltered from the blast. It wasn’t exactly a “path,” but it was better than what he’d been crossing and it gave him a chance to angle up the ridge out of sight of the Posleen.

Finally, finally he limped up to the top of the ridge and got down on his stomach. The blast had dropped many of the trees more or less parallel to each other and for a change it was the direction he was going. So he was able to belly up through the gaps in between until he could see first the overpass, then the Posleen positions under it.

He also could see the burning tracks on the road; the infantry guys had really gotten the shit kicked out of them from the looks of it. But he could see two of them low-crawling towards the Posleen position.

Time to give them some covering fire.

* * *

The last time Joe Buckley could remember low-crawling was the last time he took an EIB test. That would have been in the dawn of man when the only thing he had to worry about was breaking his leg on a jump or wrecking his bike or getting into a fight over some fat chick on Bragg Boulevard.

Man, those were the days. No Posleen. No skyscrapers falling on you. No ships exploding. Just the occasional pissed-off sergeant and watching Pinky and the Brain while waiting for afternoon formation. It just didn’t get any better.

He tucked his butt lower as a round skittered off the pavement and whistled by overhead. Frankly, it was lots better then than now.

One of the two privates had gotten a little too high and was toasted by a plasma gun for his mistake. The other one had frozen halfway and was now belly down and shivering in the median. Buckley wasn’t sure why he was still going. It might have been sheer stubbornness; these Posleen had started to really piss him off. Or it might have been that he knew if they didn’t clear the pass, they were going to get royally corn-cobbed anyway.

He snuggled even closer to the ground as the first artillery shell plunged out of the sky. If all went well, his approach would be covered by the fire.

On the other hand, if the gunners or FDC screwed up, it was just as likely to land on him.

It didn’t, though; it hit on top of the overpass. He waited impatiently as the RTO walked it down off the overpass and onto the ground. Falling as it was now, the majority of the fragmentation from the round should be thrown under the overpass and onto the Posleen. It didn’t mean it stopped them, but it should keep their heads down a bit, making it a tad easier for him to move. As he moved out, a round from the next gun came screaming in.

The ditch he was crawling in, which had really shallowed out for a while, had started to deepen. Enough that he felt he could raise up just a tad and move a little faster.

He got partially up on his elbows and knees. Not a high crawl, not enough cover for that. But not a low crawl either. Call it a really fucked up medium crawl. He started to shimmy forward, spread out like a crab, when there was a racket from the Posleen lines and all of a sudden his butt felt like it was on fire.

Dropping onto his stomach again he felt behind him and swore as his hand came away wet. Either he had the worst case of hemorrhoids in the world or some Posleen son of a bitch had just shot him in the ass.

* * *

Thomas shook his head at the poor brave son of a bitch down in that ditch. It was pretty clear in the thermal imaging scope that he’d just got shot in the ass — there was a noticeable blood splatter giving off residual heat — but he was still crawling forward. Another one was down on his stomach, not dead by the temperature, probably just too scared to move. And there was another bright white, headless body in the ditch. That one was so hot, and obviously dead, that it must have eaten a plasma round. Other than that, it looked like most of them had been killed in the first few moments.

He swung his scope around to the Posleen position and shook his head. All the fire from their plasma guns had left noticeable trails on the road and heated up the air under the bridge. And every time an artillery shell hit, the flare of light from it shut down the scope for just an instant. But he could still pick the horses out; they were slightly cooler than humans, but much warmer than the increasing chill of the evening and the cold ground under the overpass. And there weren’t many of them, fourteen it looked like, maybe fifteen; there was one who was down on the bottom of the trench not moving.

Now to figure out which ones were the God Kings.

He noticed a haze around the head of one for a moment and switched off the thermal scan for visible light. In the green haze he could just barely see that that one had a crest; it must have lifted it for just a moment and created that thermal halo around its head.