Eye of the Storm Read online

  Eye of the Storm

  by

  John Ringo

  Table of Contents

  EYE OF THE STORM

  John Ringo

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by John Ringo

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN10: 1-4391-3273-9

  ISBN13: 978-1-4391-3273-9

  Cover art by Kurt Miller

  First Baen printing, July 2009

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ringo, John, 1963–

  Eye of the storm / John Ringo.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-4391-3273-9

  I. Title.

  PS3568.I577E48 2009

  813'.54—dc22

  2009011713

  Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Jim Baen,

  my mentor, my publisher and my friend.

  Just trying to pay forward.

  Baen Books by John Ringo

  The Legacy of Aldenata Series

  A Hymn Before Battle

  Gust Front

  When the Devil Dances

  Hell's Faire

  The Hero with Michael Z. Williamson

  Cally's War with Julie Cochrane

  Watch on the Rhine with Tom Kratman

  Yellow Eyes with Tom Kratman

  The Tuloriad with Tom Kratman (forthcoming)

  Sister Time with Julie Cochrane

  Honor of the Clan with Julie Cochrane

  Eye of the Storm

  The Last Centurion

  There Will Be Dragons

  Emerald Sea

  Against the Tide

  East of the Sun, West of the Moon

  Ghost

  Kildar

  Choosers of the Slain

  Unto the Breach

  A Deeper Blue

  Princess of Wands

  Into the Looking Glass

  Vorpal Blade with Travis S. Taylor

  Manxome Foe with Travis S. Taylor

  Claws that Catch with Travis S. Taylor

  Von Neumann's War with Travis S. Taylor

  The Road to Damascus with Linda Evans

  with David Weber:

  March Upcountry

  March to the Sea

  March to the Stars

  We Few

  Acknowledgments

  I'd like to thank some people for their help in finally getting this novel done.

  Jim Baen, deceased by three days when I finally figured out how to continue the story of Michael O'Neal. Because I swear to God I heard him say "do it this way, Johnny." This one's for you, Jim.

  Miriam Sloan for back rubs, hot tea and just being her.

  Rogue, Jessica and the rest of Crüxshadows.

  Tom Kratman and Julie Cochrane for expanding the vision of the Aldenata universe and the characters therein. And for telling me "It's done, John. Turn it in."

  Ben-David Singleton for actually organizing my randomized characters, systems and TOE.

  The various members of RingTAB for corrections of some very obvious errors.

  Conrad Chu, Ph.D., and Doug Miller, USAR, for physics and electrical help, respectively.

  Now on with the show.

  Chapter One

  The trials you now are facing

  They are not greater than your will

  For there is nothing under heaven

  You cannot overcome

  —

  Crüxshadows

  "Eye of the Storm"

  As its defenses crumbled, a Posleen penetrator finally latched onto the side glacis armor of the Richard Waechter and began burrowing.

  Even the multithousand ton bulk of a SheVa Mark VII continental siege unit could only carry its heaviest armor forward. The side glacis was composed of only two hundred centimeters of ultradense, ultrastrong composite made only by the finest Indowy craftsmen. The Posleen smart round first deformed to create an armored beachhead on the hull then shot a concentrated jet of fusion-generated plasma, burning rapidly through the refractory armor. Once a hole was created into the meaty center, it shot an armored penetrator containing a bare ten micrograms of antimatter into the compartmented interior.

  The fourteen-man crew of the SheVa knew that once a breacher round was on the hull, it was virtually impossible to remove; your best bet of survival was bailing out. The three Taylor-class Heavy Armored Escape Vehicles dropped from under the SheVa and bolted to the rear. They were picked off by plasma fire from the Posleen redoubt even as the SheVa gouted fire from every hatch and the six-thousand-ton turret lifted fifty meters into the air on an actinic ball of nuclear fire.

  As soon as the last SheVa was eliminated, the Posleen popped up a casta round. The maneuvering HVM quickly scattered its load of antimatter bomblets across the front of the approaching line of ACS and disintegrated as the last one detonated.

  One hundred and ninety-nine more bomblets detonated almost simultaneously, each the equivalent of sixteen megatonnes of TNT.

  As soon as the icon of the casta round appeared on his heads up display, Private Julio Garcia dropped a foxhole round to the ground and crouched, hoping against hope that the round would dig out a hole for him before the casta went off. Shooting the bomblets was futile; that would only make them detonate earlier. The only thing that the Armored Combat Suit Corps could do was dig in and try to ride out the detonation. The Indowy manufactured battle armor was very tough indeed but a 16-megaton explosion had a better than even chance of ripping even an ACS suit into itsy bitsy pieces.

  As the dirt of R-1496 Delta fountained upwards, the armored infantryman dove for the hole. It was times like this that he seriously reconsidered his decision to leave the hell of New Chicago.

  Julio was twenty-three, very young for a private in the ACS. He'd been raised in the New Chicago Sub-Urb, an underground city left over from the Posleen invasion of Earth. The refuges had, by and large, done their job of keeping a core of civilization alive throughout the siege but most people got out of the Urbs as quickly as possible as soon as the Posleen menace was relieved.

  However, in any refugee situation a core, usually running about ten percent, refused to leave the camp or, in this case, underground city. Whether from laziness or ongoing paranoia over what had driven them to the refuge, the "refuseniks" were a problem in any recovery period.

  Earth's government had responded by concentrating them. As each Sub-Urb eventually regurgitated its refugee population, those who preferred to remain in the Urbs were moved to other Urbs and slowly concentrated. Once the refuseniks were fully concentrated in four or five Urbs, they were essentially left to rot.

  Minimal and generally unpalatable food was available. Enter one of the eating areas, swipe your implanted chip and you'd be given a measured amount of glop. The brown, unappetizing substance was nutritious and even filling but it had the consistency of wet cardboard and about the same taste.

  There was no work in the Urbs and it wasn't so much that crime was rife as that was the only business going. They were centers for drug trafficking, illegal arms sales (and in the post-war world you had to work for a weapon to be illegal) and prostitution. Indeed, many people thought the only reason they still existed was so th
at all the criminals could be concentrated in one place. The general opinion of surfacers was that the best use of the Urbs was as dumping grounds and that eventually the government would just toss in some gas bombs and be done with them.

  Julio had been in the gangs; it was the only way to survive. And he'd dealt and run and even killed to survive in the Urb. But he didn't have a criminal record. The few police in the Urbs concentrated on securing the food centers and making sure nobody did anything bad to the fundamental infrastructure. What happened outside those few secure areas rarely came to their attention. Even when it did, they didn't care.

  "You were raped? That's tough, miss. Maybe you should move elsewhere."

  There were few ways out of the Urbs. There was no great labor shortage on the surface and surfacers considered urbies as the lowest of the lowest scum. After the loss of dozens of colonist ships to various accidents and "unanticipated Posleen deep space attacks," colonization and other planets became far less attractive.

  There was one way not only out of the Urbs but to a pretty good life, but it depended on surviving it. The military was always recruiting. It had been tasked with "recovery" of the Posleen blight zone, a three hundred light-year stretch of the galaxy composed of little but stars and planets either originally uninhabitable or turned into radioactive wastelands. As the Posleen advanced they stripped the planets they took and then, far more often than not, fell out into destructive planet-wide wars that left the world a blasted hulk. But even a hulk had some value. Indowy deep miners could still extract minerals and once their shiplike megascrapers were installed, the Indowy could build factories, live and work anywhere that there was a semblance of an atmosphere. They didn't care what the world looked like, they just wanted room for their rapidly expanding population.

  So the pattern was established. The Fleet, and Fleet Strike, its ground and fighter arm, would wipe a planet of concentrated Posleen infestations. Then a specialty human company would come in and establish a fully cleared zone. Last the Indowy would arrive, build their megascrapers using techology that looked a bit too much like wizardry, and move in. Other human security companies would ensure the safety of the burgeoning cities, keeping the Posleen out when they could and killing any that penetrated into the megascrapers.

  That was the job Julio was after, a nice safe gig with a security company. But they didn't recruit in the Urbs. They wanted trained soldiers. So first you had to spend time in Fleet's security arm, the FP bully-boys, or in one of the infantry arms.

  Julio had tried to get into Fleet itself; getting trained as a Fleet tech would be even better than getting a security gig. But all the slots for Fleet were filled. It was only after he joined that he discovered Fleet was . . . restrictive. Towards the end of the War, North America had been cut off and Europe virtually cut to ribbons. Most of the replacement personnel for Fleet, therefore, came from the southeast Asian islands area, Indonesia and the Phillipines especially. These days there were a few remaining original officers and NCOs in the Fleet from Northern European backgrounds but it was about ninety percent Indo or Flip with a smattering of surviving Chinese. It wasn't anything official, but it was amazing how few survivors from the rest of the world made it into Fleet.

  Fleet Strike, though, was less restrictive. Also less alluring. Fleet's job when they took a planet was to fly overhead and hit Posleen concentrations with orbital kinetic strikes or, occasionally, a burst of heavy duty plasma. It was about as dangerous as shooting fish in a barrel; no serious concentration of Posleen spacecraft had been fought in fifty years. The first three waves of Fleets, shattered units rebuilt and recrewed time and again, had bled to create those conditions. That, too, explained the shortage of people in Fleet with Northern European backgrounds; millions of men and women died in those actions.

  Fleet Strike, though, had to do the rest of the work. They had to get down on the ground and root out the smart ones, the ones that had dug in and tried to hold. They would hunt and flush a planet for a year or more, living down in the muck, until it was considered "pacified." And occasionally they got into shit like this, a seriously dug-in Posleen force with a smart commander. Seriously dug in enough that the Fleet, despite constant pounding, had been unable to defeat it from orbit.

  This was when Fleet Strike earned its pay. And especially the SheVa and ACS arm, the most elite of the ground combat forces.

  As he flipped upwards, ready for the blast, Julio saw another infantryman crouch by his hole. There was only enough room in the hole for one, but the other man's suit was small and the private almost pinged for him to pile in on top. But the suit didn't appear to care that the entire area was about to be hammered by a bagillion joules of energy. The wearer simply crouched, extended rock jacks and took a knee, slamming the meter-long jacks downwards until the suit's gauntlets were balled fists on the ground.

  The titanic explosion blotted out almost every sensor. But quantum-state view and neutron reads, especially neutron reads, were still up. By the hellish light cast by decaying matter Julio could see the suit leaning into the plasma, seemingly unafraid, even reveling in the wash of stripped atoms. Julio's suit temperature had hopped up sixteen degrees despite the best efforts of his environmental system; what the other wearer must be experiencing he could hardly imagine and didn't want to.

  As soon as the plasma blast was past, Julio began scrambling out of the hole, checking his readouts to see who in his section had survived. But his suit's AID automatically overrode his request and frantically pinged a name onto his HUD, the karat laid squarely over the suit beside him. The wearer was short but pluglike, his suit covered in a strange design like a green monster. Despite the blast of plasma, the design was still unblemished, so it was clearly etched deep into the suit, perhaps even woven into the very atomic structure.

  The suit slowly stood and stamped both feet on the seared ground. The stamps crunched through the glassy surface and gave the wearer a solid footing, like a bull pawing the ground just before a charge.

  "General O'Neal?" Julio asked, amazed that the corps commander was right on the front lines. "Sir? Are you okay?"

  "Never fucking better, Private," Lieutenant General Michael O'Neal growled. "A nuke's better than a dry cleaners. Now, let's kick some Postie ass."

  The Posleen commander was good, but he'd just made his first mistake. Two, actually. The casta round, named after the slightly insane human professor who first created an antimatter cluster bomb, had been slightly off-line of the ACS unit deployed across the plain. If it had been directly overhead, Mike would have dug in like everyone else. But as he saw the deployment he immediately recognized that the nukes, large as they were, were too far away to destroy an ACS, especially the customized suit he wore.

  The commander's second mistake was in using a casta at all. The explosion probably caught a few cherries who were too slow to dig in and certainly shut down inter-suit communication while the plasma wash was over the area. But that took only a moment. The Posleen defenders would have had to pull into their bunkers to avoid the blast. It would take them a moment to get back in position, and that assumed that their commo wasn't down entirely. The Eleventh ACS Corps, the "Black Tyrone," though, was going to be ready to cock and rock in bare seconds after the explosion. They'd damned well better be ready or they'd have to deal with him. Anyone in the corps, from the lowest private—like the kid cowering in the hole—up to his division commanders would rather battle a Posleen bare-handed than let him down. And the bastards were within sprinting distance of the outer Posleen defenses.

  Mike had considered calling in a casta himself, but he'd have had to convince Fleet higher that it was a "judicious action." Fucking bean counters. They were more worried about the loss of the suits, each of which cost as much as a corvette, than the men, but it would still take time. Time he didn't have. By hitting the unit with a casta, the Posleen commander had done his job for him.

  Mike took the time as the plasma washed over his suit to do a quick assault
frag. It was pretty straightforward. Custer would have loved it. "Take the outer defenses."

  The Posleen "redoubt" was really a small mountain range rising out of plains on all four sides; the geological term was a "basolith." It was the last major point of resistance on R-1496 Delta and absolutely infested with Posleen and their automated forges. There were heavy antiship and missile ports in the upper reaches that had intercepted everything that fleet had thrown at them and actually taken two destroyers out that had stumbled into its arc of fire. The mountains, probably tree covered once but now slagged and black from titanic explosions, were impenetrable from space. That left taking them on the ground.

  As long as they had food and materials for their ammo—and Mike bet that the commander had stocked up on both—the Posleen could hole up indefinitely. That couldn't be allowed. He'd been tasked with clearing this dirt ball and he was damned well going to clear it.

  Even while he was speaking with the private the orders flashed down to the division commanders then were split to brigades, battalions, companies and even down to the individual soldiers. The basic order: "CHARGE" was the first thing to hit and then subtleties like "CHARGE THAT PLASMA PIT!" were filtered through the commanders. In all it took about thirty seconds, which is a long time in combat. But it sure as hell beat aides de camp on horseback.