When the Devil Dances

Thomas Sunday, Junior, had joined the United States Ground Forces on his seventeenth birthday. In the intervening years he had grown into the spitting image of his father, an All-Pro linebacker in his time, and “Little Tommy” now stood six foot eight inches tall in his stocking feet and weighed in at nearly three hundred pounds. He hadn’t been this big when he joined, though. His seventeenth birthday had been four months after the fall of his hometown of Fredericksburg, Virginia.

In the first landing, Fredericksburg had been surrounded and cut off from any aid by an estimated four million Posleen. A scratch force of the local Guard unit, a combat engineering battalion, and the local militia had held off the advance of the Posleen force for nearly twelve hours while a special shelter was prepared for the women and children. At the end of that long night the defenders had detonated a massive fuel-air bomb as cover for the hidden noncombatants and to remove any capability for the Posleen to use the bodies of the defenders as food, “thresh” as the Posleen called it.

The Posleen had come away from Fredericksburg with a healthy respect for the twin-turreted castle that was the symbol of the Engineers. Thomas Sunday had come away with a girlfriend and memories.

Of the people that he had grown up with, only four were left alive. Of the defenders of Fredericksburg, people with actual guns in their hands, he was one of only five still alive, including his girlfriend.

Not one member of his militia group. Not one friend, only a few acquaintances. His mother and sister had survived in the shelter and were now in a Sub-Urb in rural Kentucky. Everyone else was gone.

All of them were gone, wiped from the face of the earth as if they had never existed.

The Posleen had gone away with a respect for the Engineer, and by extension all humans. Little Tommy had come away with memories. And a burning desire to kill Posleen.

He did so now, dropping into the prone, snuggling up to the shattered combat suit for better cover and sticking his head up over the ridge to get a look at the conditions.

“Man, I have just got to get a transfer,” he muttered.

The slope downward from his position was just carpeted with dead Posleen. There were still millions left to kill, sure, but the ACS must have accounted for nearly a million all by itself and at this point the remaining ranks were finding it hard to make it up the hill for all the bodies. There was no single bit of ground visible for at least a klick from the very top of the ridge down to the valley. Every single square inch was covered in bodies, most of them two, three, even four deep. And it was apparent to Sunday that very little of it had been artillery fire; Posleen that had been hit by artillery looked more chewed up for one thing.

He set the railgun up on a tripod and set it to autofire as he opened up the battle-box. There were four cases of ammunition and a dozen battery packs in it as well as a second railgun which he set up alongside the first. Then he ganged the ammunition cases together, giving two to each of the guns, and ganged up the battery packs. When all of that was done — he pulled his personal weapon — a 7.62 Advanced Infantry Weapon that had had the original barrel switched out for a “match grade” — off his back and adjusted his shooting glasses.

“Now to have real fun,” he chuckled.

Crouching down he ran down the ridgeline a few meters, ensuring that the rest of his section was emplacing their weapons. Each of them was armed with a railgun and each three-man team manhandled a battle-box into place. Then as two of the members covered the third, the “layer” installed the last railgun in “auto” mode.

Basically, Sergeant Sunday had emplaced nearly as much firepower as half his team.

Now he found a comfortable spot to set up and peeked past a shattered cornerstone. The Posties were getting their shit together again and they just couldn’t be allowed to do that.

Whistling the opening bars to “Dixie,” Thomas Sunday, Junior, took a bead on a God King and gently squeezed the trigger. Just like a tit.

“Speaking of which,” he said to himself as the first God King pitched backwards off his tenar. “One of these days I’ve just got to get down to North Carolina.”

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