When the Devil Dances

“Yeah,” Wacleva said with a laugh, pulling out an unfiltered Pall Mall. “Keren started the Spanish Inquisition. Send in a platoon of MPs each with a sheet of questions and answers. Walk up to the senior officers and NCOs and ask them three questions off of the sheet. If they don’t get two out of three right, they’re relieved. Before you know it, you’ve lost half your dead weight and people who know what they’re doing are all of a sudden in charge.”

“The only thing I’ve got against it is that I didn’t think of it first,” Mike said. He put the cigarette in his mouth, lifted his left arm and a two meter gout of flame suddenly spurted from one of the many small orifices on the surface of his suit. He took a drag on the cigarette and the flamethrower went out. “It’s not much good with infantry and armor units, but artillery is a skilled branch. If you don’t know how to shore a fucking trench, you shouldn’t be in the engineers. If you don’t know how to calculate the proper size of an antenna, you shouldn’t be in commo. And if you don’t know how to compute winds aloft, you shouldn’t be a artillery battalion-fucking-commander.”

“I gotta get me one of those,” Sunday said, pulling out a pack of Marlboros. “Can I try?”

“Sure,” O’Neal said.

Sunday leaned back from the gout of flame and sucked on the cancer stick. “Love it.”

“It’s not standard,” Mike pointed out. “It’s one of the modifications I suggested that got nixed in committee. I believe in a Ronco suit.”

“It slices, dices and makes Julienne fries?” Cutprice said with a laugh.

“You got it,” O’Neal said soberly. “Obviously it’s not just for lighting cigarettes. So, how do we get these fuckers reduced to the point that we can get them backing up? And maybe have somebody standing after we’re done.”

“I take it you’re not up to the task?”

“Nope,” O’Neal said, leaning back on the late Sergeant Juarez. “We took about one in four casualties this morning. Not as bad as Roanoke — that was a real shitstorm — but if we go over that ridge they’ll eat us alive. We can hold the box but not move out of it. And we only hold the box because the arty is holding one side.”

“They’re getting slaughtered down there,” Wacleva said with a gesture of his chin towards the hospital. “That’ll cut down on ’em some.”

“Have you really looked over the hill, Sergeant Major?” Sunday asked incredulously. “They’re losing maybe a thousand a minute, which seems like a lot. But at that rate we’ll be here for forty days and forty nights.”

“Yeah, and in the meantime they’ll be reproducing all up and down the coast,” Mike pointed out. “The horny bastards.” He scratched his chin and took another drag on the cigarette. Reaching over he picked up a shattered boma blade and held it overhead. After a few moments, railgun rounds started to crack overhead followed by the occasional missile. Finally a stream of rounds smashed the sword out of his hand, taking half of the remaining blade away in the process.

“Fire pressure’s still up there,” O’Neal opined as the others dug themselves out of the ground again. “Sometimes if you pin them in place and don’t kill the first million or so they run out of bullets. But when you’re killing wave after wave the guys behind are always fresh and have full loads. We used that in… Christ… Harrisburg One, I think. Pinned the front-ranks down until they ran out of fire, moved forward and dug in again so the rear ranks could come forward a bit then did it all over again. Sort of. I think. It’s been a long time. But if we try that here, we’ll get flanked. That was when we were retaking the outer defenses and we were covered on a narrow front.”

“So obviously that is out,” Cutprice said sourly. “Any other ideas?”

Mike rolled on his back and looked at the sky. It was still overcast, but the light rain had faded. The sun was up in the east and it might just burn off sometime after noon. He thought about that and realized it was already after noon.

He rolled over to the side and fingered the dirt. The brick buildings of the area had been pounded to a fine red clay that reminded him of home. And underneath? He sniffed at the ground for a moment, looked down the hill towards the river with his head sideways as if measuring the angle then flicked the cigarette over the crest of the hill and put his helmet on.

Cutprice hit the ground again as the thermal signature attracted a storm of fire. “Are you just communing with nature or do you have a plan?”

Mike held up one finger in a “wait a minute” gesture then rolled back over. “I have a plan,” he intoned. “My mother would be proud; reading is finally going to save my ass.”

“Reading what?” Sunday asked.

“Keith Laumer short stories.”

* * *

Colonel Wagoner looked at the video in his heads-up-display in disbelief. “Pardon me, General. Would you mind repeating that?”