When the Devil Dances

Horner looked over at the colonel and smiled again, tightly. “Do you really think that is a good idea, Colonel? Leading from the front is for squad leaders, not colonels.”

“As opposed to, say, watching the ACS slaughtered from across the river, General?” Cutprice asked, pulling out a cigar and slowly lighting it. “Yeah, I think it’s a grand idea.” He looked east where a cloud shadow seemed to be moving rather fast and frowned.

“Ah yes,” Cutprice said after a moment. “Right on time. Wouldn’t be a really screwed up battle without a five percenter.”

Horner looked to the east and up. “Well, that, at least, we can take care of.” He tapped his AID and gestured out the window. “Nag, tell SheVas Twenty-Three and Forty-two to engage the approaching Lamprey at will.”

“Colonel, you know that discussion we had the other day?” Sergeant Major Wacleva asked, walking back into the room with two sets of body armor.

“Which one?”

“The one about ‘when do you know it’s really bad’?”

“Sure.”

“Well, it’s bad if the Ten Thousand shows up. And it’s worse if the ACS shows up. And it’s really, really bad if General Horner shows up. But the ultimate in bad has to be when two SheVas show.”

* * *

Attenrenalslar was what the humans had taken to calling a “five percenter.” Ninety-five percent of Posleen God Kings understood only the simplest imperatives. Eat, screw, fight, take territory and repeat until death. However, that remaining five percent was, in some ways, more trouble than the other ninety-five. The “five percenters” were the ones that jammed the humans’ frequencies at seeming random, but always it seemed at the worst possible time. It was the five percenters that occasionally took over a fire net to the consternation of all. It was the five percenters that organized groups of Posleen to act in what was an almost concerted action. And it was the five percenters that used their Lampreys and Command Dodecahedrons as airmobile units.

One of O’Neal’s nightmares was somebody who would organize all the five percenters into one massive unit.

Currently, though, Attenrenalslar was one of the very few God Kings that had determined that the best way to turn the tide of this battle was to take his lander across the river and attack the humans from behind. He might be the only one; the percentages on “air-mobile” had gotten worse and worse for the Posleen of late.

Early in the war it was a nearly guaranteed tactic. The humans had very few weapons that could engage the landers and as long as they stayed below the horizon from one of the few remaining Planetary Defense centers, the humans almost had to wait for them to land before having any real chance to attack the Posleen within. Since the landers also mounted anti-personnel weaponry, not to mention space-to-space weaponry that was good for taking out most of a battalion, they could attack ground units with impunity. The wonder was that the Posleen didn’t use them all the time.

However, that weakness had been noted even before the enemy made their first landing; Mike O’Neal’s first Medal of Honor accrued from almost single-handedly taking out a command ship. But the method was not considered survivable.

In the first major Earth landing it appeared that a battleship had managed, through a fluke more than anything, to take out a Lamprey. From that was born the concept of the SheVa Gun, the sort of weird bastard weapon that is only created in the midst of really terrible wars.

The gun was named after the Shenandoah Valley Industrial Planning Commission, the group that had first solved all the various design problems inherent in the new system, and the majority of the first parts and pieces of the massive construction were made in the Roanoke Iron Works.

The basic parameters for the weapon were simplicity in themselves. The gun was an extended barrel, smoothbore, 16” battleship cannon. Because of the occasional necessity of rapid fire, the standard 16” “bag and round” method of loading, which involved sliding a 1200-pound round followed by fifty-pound bags of powder, had been replaced with a single shell the size of a small ICBM. The SheVa gun carried eight rounds as a “standard load” and a tractor-trailer could haul two “four-packs” that permitted reloading in under ten minutes. Each gun was loaded with standard rounds, but there were at least two tractor trailers “on-call” carrying special munitions, including both sensor and antimatter area effect weapons, at all times.

The other parameters were that it be able to fire from two degrees below horizontal to ninety seven degrees above with a swiveling turret and that the system be fully mobile. It was this combination that had caused all the design teams to almost give up in despair. That was, until the good old boys (and girls) from the Shenandoah went ahead and admitted that the parameters just meant it needed to be bigger than anyone was willing to admit, even privately.