When the Devil Dances Read online

  "I do' . . . n'er'stan'," Elgars tried to enunciate.

  Wendy looked at her with an arched eyebrow. "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?"

  "Nu."

  Wendy sighed and hitched the bag higher. "They trade sex for money, Captain. And goods. Like better clothes and food than you can get down here. And electronics gear: that's almost nonexistent these days."

  Elgars looked around at the high plastic walls and the unending corridors. She thought about being stuck in here for years and shook her head. "So?"

  Wendy looked at her again and shook her head. "Never mind. It would take too long to explain why people find that bad."

  The captain nodded as they turned into a door marked "S&A Securities." There was a small alcove on the far side and another door which was locked.

  Wendy pressed a buzzer and looked up at a security camera. "Lemme in, David, I bring a visitor."

  "You're carrying, honey. I'm surprised you made it." The deep voice came from a speaker almost directly overhead as the door buzzed.

  "I just walked around all the detectors," Wendy said as she entered the sparse room beyond. "And it was a good thing I was."

  There were steel weapons lockers with mesh fronts along the left hand side of the room. The shape of rifles and submachine guns could be seen faintly though the mesh. Opposite the door was a low desk; as Wendy and Elgars entered the room a dark, burly man pushed a wheelchair out and came around to the front.

  "You have problems?" the man asked.

  "Nothing we couldn't handle," Wendy said with a shrug, still bleeding off adrenaline.

  "Who's your visitor?" the man said, watching her with eyes that knew darned well that it hadn't been something minor.

  "David Harmon, meet Captain Anne O. Elgars," Wendy said with a smile. "Captain Elgars took a little damage a while back and she's not quite up to form." Wendy frowned. "Actually, she's got amnesia, so she doesn't have a clue about weapons. But she used to. We need to see what she remembers."

  "Remembers?" Harmon said with a frown. "My legs don't remember running. How are her hands going to remember shooting?"

  "The doctor said she's remembering most of her motor skills; she can write and eat and all that stuff. And . . . well . . . I think the Blades would safely say that she recalls some basic fighting skills. I thought we could try at least."

  "You ever been on a range?" Harmon asked Anne. "Blades?" he queried Wendy.

  "Crazy Lucy and Big Boy," Wendy said, jerking her chin at Elgars. "She spent most of her time toying with them."

  "I do-o . . ." Elgars said with a frown. "I do-o-o 'member . . . W'a'n't toy'ng."

  "The captain's still recovering," Wendy said quietly. "She's . . ."

  "Got a serious speech impediment," Harmon said. "Yeah, well ain't none of us whole in this fucking place," he continued with a snort and a gesture at his legs.

  He unzipped the ballistic bag and started extracting hardware. "MP-5SPD. Nice. Silencer package. Did you used to do point, Captain?"

  "Du-du-dunno," Elgars answered. "Do' 'member."

  "She also had a Barrett in the locker," Wendy added.

  "That doesn't make sense," Harmon said with a frown. He pulled out the next piece and frowned. "Desert Eagle .44. This is not the weapon of a sniper. At least, not one from a regular unit. Were you in special forces or something?"

  "No," Elgars said and frowned. "At least, I d-d-don't thin'. P-p-papers s-s-say Th-th-Thirt'-Third. Then uh S-s-six hunnert." She frowned again and snarled, bearing even, white teeth. "S'all wrong."

  Harmon looked over at Wendy with a lifted eyebrow. "You didn't mention that."

  "She's on 'detached duty,' " Wendy said with a shrug. "Hospital detachment. I don't know if they're going to put her back through training or what. But it makes sense for her to re-learn the basics."

  "Uh huh," the weapons instructor grunted. "Makes as much sense as anything else that has happened to me in the last six years."

  He cleared the chamber on both weapons and rolled over to a locker. "Get her a set of earmuffs and I'll set up the range."

  * * *

  Harmon extended the Glock to the captain and watched her hands carefully. "The weapon is not loaded, but you never take a person's word for that. Keep it pointed downrange and keep your finger off the trigger."

  Elgars took the pistol with a puzzled expression and rotated it from side to side. The indoor range had been set up with man-sized targets placed at various distances between five and thirty meters. She glanced in the chamber and cocked her head to one side like a bird then picked up one of the magazines. "S'fam-uh . . . famil'ar. Kin ah lock an' load?"

  "Go ahead," said Harmon watching carefully.

  Elgars swept the unloaded weapon back and forth keeping it pointed downrange. "Th'somethin' wrong," she said, turning to look at the instructor. Following her body the pistol swung to the left and down. Directly at the wheelchair-bound range-master.

  "Up!" Harmon said sharply, blocking the swing of the pistol up and out. "Keep it pointed up and downrange! Go ahead and pick up the magazine and seat it, then lock and load. This time, though, keep it pointed downrange, okay?"

  "S'rry," Elgars said with a frown. "S'all wron'. S'righ' an' wron' a' same time." She picked up the magazine with a puzzled expression, but there was no fumbling as it was seated and she jacked back the slide.

  "Uh, 'The firing line is clear'?" Wendy said with a grin.

  " 'Re'y on uh lef'?" Elgars muttered with a frown.

  Harmon smiled. "Ready on the left? The left is ready. Ready on the right? The right is ready. Firing line is clear. Open fire."

  Before the former police officer's chin could hit his chest all five targets had taken two shots in the upper chest and one in the middle of the face. The sound was thunder, a series of blasts like a low speed machine gun, then the magazine dropped to the ground and the weapon was reloaded. He had never seen her hand move to pick up the spare; the weapon seemed to reload itself by magic.

  "Bloody hell," Harmon muttered while Wendy just stood there with her mouth open.

  "Was that okay, sar'nt?" Elgars asked in a shy little voice.

  "Yeah, that was pretty good," Harmon said, waving away the cordite residue. "Pretty good."

  CHAPTER 7

  Rochester, NY, United States, Sol III

  1014 EDT Sunday September 13, 2009 ad

  "I think this is goin' pretty good," Colonel Cutprice opined. He ducked as a stray railgun round glanced off the shot-up piece of combat armor shielding him. "Could've been worse."

  "Would've been worse if it hadn't been for that late shipment of Bouncing Barbies," Sergeant Major Wacleva grumped. "And the Spanish Inquisition."

  " 'I've got a list, I've got a little list,' " Sunday said, belly-crawling over to their position. "We could use a few Bouncing Barbies out here, sir." He popped his head up over the armor and ducked back down. "There has been a fine killing, but it could always be better."

  Cutprice shook his head. "You know why they're called 'Bouncing Barbies,' Sunday?"

  "Yes, sir," the sergeant replied. "They really ought to be called Duncan's Folly. But they call 'em 'Barbies' because it is alliterative and, like Barbie, they just up and cut you off at the knees if you get anywhere near them. You know she would. The cold-eyed bitch."

  The M-281A anti-Posleen area denial weapon was one of the few commonly available bits of "GalTech," the technology that the Galactic Federation had first offered then been unable to supply in any significant quantity.

  The device was the bastard child of a mistake, a mistake made by one of the members of the 1st Battalion 555th Mobile Infantry. In the early days of the conflict, Sergeant Duncan, who was a notorious tinkerer, had tinkered a Personal Protection Field into removing all its safety interlocks and then expending all of its power in a single brief surge.

  The surge, and the removed safety interlocks, had created a circular "blade" that cut through several stories of the barracks he was in at
the time. And, quite coincidentally, through his roommate's legs.

  It took quite some time for all the right questions to be asked and in the proper way. But finally it was determined that the boxes were relatively easy for the Indowy technicians to produce, even one at a time. And they easily could be fitted into a human device called a "scatterable mine platform."

  The resultant artillery round threw out forty-eight mines, each of which was slightly mobile and had a conformable appearance; the mine was a flattened, circular disk, somewhat like a "cow-patty." The surface could change color and texture depending upon the background, but the default setting was the yellow of Posleen blood, for reasons that became obvious.

  After being released from the artillery round in flight, the disks would scatter across a "footprint" about two hundred meters long and seventy meters wide. Then if anything came within two meters of it, the mine would "hop" up one meter and create a field of planar force that extended out fifty meters in every direction. The field would cut through anything except the most advanced Galactic armor, which meant sliced and diced Posleen.

  What was nice about the system, from the humans' perspective, was that it had up to six attacks on "onboard" batteries. After its attack it would scuttle sideways slightly and "hide" again, waiting for the next wave of Posleen and looking for all the world like one of the unpleasant "Posleen bits" that was left behind. Although the piles of chopped up Posleen generally gave away the fact that there were Bouncing Barbies in the area. Even to the moronic normals. Since the Posleen generally reacted to minefields by running normals over them until they were clear, this gave the capability to deal with multiple waves, which normal mines did not.

  "We really need some out here, sir," Sunday insisted. "For one thing, when they fall on a big pile of dead like this they chop 'em up into bits. It would make it easier to move out. And it's a hell of a lot of fun to watch."

  "You're so ate up you make O'Neal seem like a piker, Sunday," Sergeant Major Wacleva said with a death's head grin. He obviously approved.

  "Call but upon the name of Beelzebub," Mike said striding up the hill. He knelt down by the armor and patted it fondly. "Juarez. He's been with the battalion since before I took over Bravo Company. He used to be in Stewart's squad. Good NCO. Hell of a loss."

  Cutprice really looked at the armor for the first time; something, an HVM or a plasma cannon, had eaten the top of the armor. "How many did you lose, Major?"

  "Twenty-six," O'Neal said, standing up to look over the slight parapet. His appearance was apparently ignored for a moment then a hurricane of fire descended on him. "Most of 'em were newbies of course. They do the stupidest things."

  Cutprice and Wacleva ducked and huddled into their heavy body armor while Sunday cursed and crawled sideways to retrieve one of the railguns. The fifty-pound combination of motorized tripod and railgun had been hit by a stray round and tossed backwards. One glance determined that it was a goner.

  "Damnit, Colonel," the sergeant called. "You just got my gun shot up!"

  "Oh, sorry about that," O'Neal said. He sat down in the mud and reconfigured his visor to external view. "Cutprice, why are you hunkering down in the mud? Oh, never mind. Do you know if there are any more Barbies around? We need to get them out on the slope. They chop up the Posleen real fine; that will make it easier to move out when the time comes and besides it's fun as hell to watch."

  "Were you guys separated at birth or something?" Cutprice asked. "And we're huddling in here because the ricochets from your armor were just a tad unpleasant."

  Mike took off his helmet and looked over at him. "What are you talking about?"

  "You were just taking fire, hotshot," Wacleva said. "You did notice, right?"

  "No," Mike said simply. "I didn't. Sorry about that. I guess . . . it wasn't all that intense."

  "Maybe not for you," Wacleva said, pulling a spent 1mm railgun flechette out of his body armor. "Some people, however, aren't covered in plasteel."

  "And that's the problem of course," Cutprice said grumpily. "If we try going over that ridge, we'll be so much hamburger."

  "We need to break up this force some," Sunday said. "Nukes, nukes, nukie nukes."

  "That would be nice," Cutprice said. He was well aware that they barely had the Posleen force stopped, much less "backing up," which was the requirement. "Unfortunately, the President still says no. The artillery is getting into battery . . ."

  "Spanish Inquisition time?" O'Neal asked, opening up first one armored pouch then another. Finally he gave up. "Sergeant Major, I apologize most abjectly for causing you some temporary discomfort. Now, could I bum a smoke?"

  "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?"

  Horner was smiling. Which as practically everyone in the world knew at this point meant the fecal matter had really and truly hit the rotary air impeller. "You are to cross the Genesee River and go into direct support mode for the ACS and the Ten Thousand. They are pinned down on the ridge that parallels Mount Hope Avenue. Cross the river, climb the ridge and give them on call direct fire support."