Gust Front lota-2 Page 37

  “They’re just asleep, promise,” he said with an automatic grimace he probably thought was a grin. “It’s the Hiberzine that makes them look that way.”

  Shari skittered sideways and pulled Susie back to her as she stared wide-eyed around the apparent tomb.

  “Go feel a pulse, if you want,” said the fireman who had brought Billy down, carrying his burden to the front corner.

  She bent and felt at the neck of the nearest woman, a lady in her forties, well-dressed as if going to work at a bank. After a long and frightening moment when the vein in her neck remained flaccid, there was a single strong pulse then nothing.

  “It works,” said the firewoman who preceded her. She gently pulled the protesting Susie away and gracefully put her under; the motion was as automatic as breathing by this point. “Be glad for it.”

  “Carrie,” said the fireman at the door, holding out his arms.

  The firewoman wrapped her arms around her compatriot and slapped him on the back. “Sorry, man.”

  “Hey, just make more good babies, okay?”

  “Yeah. Do good.”

  “Yeah.” The fireman ducked through the low opening and was gone.

  Carrie repeated the pantomime with the other fireman, then a civilian in a hard hat propped up a steel plate and with a last spiteful burst of an arc welder, the two women were alone among the piled bodies.

  “Well,” the firewoman said, “it looks like you drew the short straw.”

  “What?” said Shari, looking for a place to lie down that was not on a body part.

  “They decided that there needed to be a few people awake on each level. You’re the last one in and I’ve got a ten-year-old somewhere back there.” She gestured towards the rear of the pile of bodies. “So we get the pleasure of waiting to see who finds us first.” Beyond the wall a sound like rain on a roof announced the first load of dirt that would bury them alive.

  * * *

  As a burst of fire came from just beyond the hill where the engineers’ command post was located, Wendy became aware of what Tommy was whistling under his breath. Then she recognized it as a current pop hit. The singer who had popularized the lyrics was considered to be going through a mid-life crisis and the song was a cool, subtle composition about her relationship with a man young enough to be her son.

  The diva was not particularly exhibitionistic so the lyrics were subtle double entendres. The substance of the aria was, however, clear.

  “Do you boys ever think of anything else?” she asked in exasperation.

  “There was a study done back when,” Tommy answered calmly, continuing to look towards the sound of distant fire, “where some psychologists determined that a teenage boy thinks about sex every fifteen seconds on average. The old joke is about two kids who hear about this and wonder what they are supposed to think of the other fourteen.”

  Wendy snorted in response.

  “Besides,” he continued, “violence and sex are inextricably linked, at least in men. Similar endorphins and hormones are released during violent confrontation and sex, they both use the same areas of the brain, and one has a tendency to trip the other. Tell me you’re not thinking about sex more today than normal.”

  “Okay,” she thought about it, “you’re right. So why?”

  “I don’t know, I suppose there are lots of theories. Survival reaction is what the Darwinists say, a counter-reaction to death say the philosophers. A joke by Mother Nature. Take your pick.” Another salvo of shells rumbled overhead. “Shit, I wish we could communicate with that battleship.”

  “Why?”

  “We could bring the fire in closer and really get the Posleen slowed down.” There was a sudden series of tremendous sonic booms. The room rocked and plaster fell from the damaged ceiling as firecrackers detonated in the distance, intermingled with the sound and glow of exploding aircraft.

  “I guess the fighters are back,” said Wendy, brushing plaster dust out of her hair.

  * * *

  “Peregrine squadron, Peregrine squadron, this is Tango Five Uniform Eight Two, over.”

  “Tigershark Five, go ahead Uniform,” gasped Captain Jones as his fighter rocketed across the Rappahanock on final. “Ground Control’s listenin’.”

  “Peregrine squadron. Drop everything you have on the intersection of Williams Street and Kenmore, say again Williams and Kenmore, over.”

  “Roger, that, Uniform.” Jones risked a quick glance at his terrain map, but was unable to find the designated intersection. “That’s gotta be for Showboat, we’re hot for the interchange.”

  “Roger, Peregrine… Good luck.”

  “Shark Five.”

  Luck would have no place in this mission if Jefferson Washington Jones had anything to say about it. He might have gotten his high school equivalent when most of the other fighter jocks had been out of college, but he had years of experience with the bad and ugly. Over the years he noticed that there was rarely such a thing as a no-win situation. Sometimes you had to really try, but he had never been in a situation he could not think his way out of and this one was no exception.

  The flight paths downloaded to the Peregrines all had the I-95/VA 3 intersection in common, but they continued on to varying other locations from there, as if everyone in the squadron was going to survive. When the mission was changed and the flight paths downloaded, he immediately set to reprogramming.

  While his flight path still went over the Posleen positions at the interstate, it deactivated the terrain-following gear and followed a manual profile that was much closer to the mapped terrain. As long as there were no unexpected obstacles the plane would probably not fly into the ground and the new flight path had far fewer sight angles than the standard terrain-following path would have taken.

  But the computer did not like it one bit.

  “Terminal flight path entered,” the cockpit voice system chirped. The sexy contralto was standard equipment on all the Rapier series. “Terminal flight path requires command override.”

  “Override.” It might look like suicide to the computer, but that was why there was still a person in the cockpit.

  “Confirm flight path data. Press set three times.”

  He did.

  “Last warning, terminal flight path entered. Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary situation. Are you sure you want this flight path? Press set three times if you do, otherwise press cancel.”

  He pressed set three more times. Since the cockpit system was not designed to get in the last word, it let him get away with it.

  “Like it ain’t a suicide mission already.”

  Passing over the old mill district, he pressed the bomb release button on the joystick. The system was set to “pickle at drop point” as long as the trigger was depressed, so all he had to do was hold on and pray. He thundered across Mary Washington Hospital, sparing a brief thought for the patients as lasers and plasma searched for him to either side and hung on for dear life as the fighter dove for the deck. As he came up on the interchange he suddenly realized that he had failed to compensate for the trees.

  The robust stealth plane survived the lurch as its underframe snapped off the last few oak tops surrounding the interchange and then dropped into the open. Around him, as far as he could see in the odd mixture of moonlight and ground fires, the ground bucked and heaved with wounded and dead Posleen.

  The centauroid bodies were a carpet of dead and dying, the ground soaked with their fluids. Thousands, tens of thousands of the centaurs had crossed the light-years only to find a final resting place under the hammer of sixteen-inch guns.

  “HOOOOWAH!” Kerman shouted over the squadron frequency, as other pilots cheered the sight of the carnage from the battleship’s fire.

  Jones’s fighter immediately performed its programmed hard bank to the north. As its wingtip dipped to within inches of the masses of alien flesh, the weapons bay popped open and deployed a totally unnecessary CBU-52. The cluster bomb opened out almost immediate
ly and scattered two hundred more bomblets across the decimated Posleen adding insult to the masses of injury.

  As the plane snapped through a programmed set of low-level evasion maneuvers, Jones could see other flashes to the south that told of squadron mates less fortunate. He finally cleared the treeline on the northeast side of the interchange — chased by a last spiteful burst of laser fire — and returned to terrain-following mode. Now all he had to do was survive the unknown dangers between here and Manassas and he would be home free. Until the next mission.

  CHAPTER 38

  The Potomac River, Near Potomac Creek

  United States of America, Sol III

  0548 EDT October 10th, 2004 ad

  Video from the side cameras of all the Peregrines was downloaded to the North Carolina along with the orders to fire on the intersection of Williams and Kenmore Streets. The captain ordered the video piped over the closed-circuit TV system, while the tactical officers huddled over their maps.

  “Okay, Williams is VA 3, but where in the hell is Kenmore?” asked the peeved S-2. Standard tactical maps never denoted street names. This was because calls for fire never used them as references. Except in real life.

  “Well, it has to be further into the city,” noted the chief gunnery officer. The lieutenant commander turned to his fire direction chief. “Pull the fire in some, and spread it out. Target all the major intersections on the way into town, one battery each.”

  “Aye, aye.” The warrant officer began punching commands into his computer as the officers went back to arguing. Suddenly one of the communications technicians jumped up from her station.

  “Sir,” she said, coming to attention next to the chief gunnery officer, “permission to speak, sir.”

  The officer rounded on her testily. “What?”

  “I’ve got a way to get a map of Fredericksburg, maybe, sir.”

  “How?”

  “Off the Internet. I’ve got a laptop in my locker. I can hook into the Internet and get it.”

  “Shit,” said the S-2, “good idea, why didn’t I think of it? Or maybe put in a priority call to the Defense Mapping Agency?” He caught the eye of the communications officer and gestured him over.

  “I think Expedia would be faster, sir,” said the tech, diffidently.

  “Can we still get Internet access?” asked the gunnery officer.

  “The Posleen have destroyed all the standard systems in the area around us,” said the communications officer, “but we might be able to punch through a short-wave transmission. What’s this all about?”

  “We desperately need a map,” said the gunnery officer. “Your tech here thinks she can get it off the Internet if she can get her laptop and connect to Milnet.”

  “Okay, girl, good work. Go get your laptop. If the Marines stop you, tell them to call me.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the tech and jogged out the door.

  “How are you going to get through?”

  “Patch a line to Norfolk. I’ll get one of my techs on it.”

  “Okay.”

  “You know, we’re going to have company before too long,” commented the S-2, poring over the updates to the dispositions map. He noted the red marks showing Posleen in close proximity. The Peregrines had come within five miles of the ship on their way out. “That should get interesting.”

  Like everyone else in the ship, he was becoming bored with the continuous main gun fire. After cheering the first few rounds it just got damn loud and monotonous. He could hardly imagine what it was like for the gunners.

  “Briefly,” laughed the fire control chief.

  “Yeah,” noted the gunnery officer, “if only they’d all come down to the water and get baptized.”

  “You wish,” said the S-2 with a grim chuckle. The Posleen were not going to like their reception from the North Carolina.

  * * *

  It was by far the most monotonous job on the ship. The Electrician Class Two was one of the close-approach lookouts, the eyes and ears of the ship. Since the environment the ship had been refitted for was projected to be extremely hostile, a duty that traditionally involved exposure to salt spray and fresh sea air was now performed in a crowded, air-conditioned compartment.

  And instead of hefting a pair of heavy binoculars and spotting the occasional leaping porpoise or diving bird, the technician ceaselessly scanned a bank of twenty monitors hooked to low-light cameras. Five across, four down, numbered sixty through seventy-nine, back and forth, top to bottom, bottom to top, every odd monitor, every even monitor, back and forth, top to bottom, for eight long hours.

  Then, after a rest period that seemed shorter and shorter all the time, it was back to scanning monitors, each of which now showed the same monotonous scene of a nighttime Potomac riverbank.

  When they first sailed up the river, civilians had poured out of the woods. Some had their own boats, but many just lined the bank hoping to be rescued. They had been picked up by boat parties or the Marines and now huddled in the forecastle awaiting a return to port. But since that first flurry of activity, the shoreline had been undisturbed.

  The tech had just picked up a Pepsi and taken a sip when a centaur appeared from the trees lining Marlboro Point Road and immediately opened fire with its shotgun.

  The light shot did not even reach the ship — which was moored nearly a mile out in the broad river — and was unnoticed in the next crash of the main guns, but the lookout lurched forward in his station chair and keyed a mike.

  “Posleen report, monitor sixty-eight, starboard abeam.”

  “Posleen report, monitor ninety, port forequarter,” sang the soprano of a seawoman handling the portside monitors. The hull rang as the first hypervelocity missile struck the case-hardened steel of the bridge.

  “PosRep monitor seventy-three, seventy-five, sixty-nine… PosRep all monitors.”

  “CIC, this is Lookout Control,” the chief petty officer managing the compartment called over the intercom, “we have a full court press.”

  * * *

  “Go to full auto on all Thermopylaes and Mark 49s, engage the zone defense system,” ordered the captain, panning his monitor along the shoreline suddenly packed with Posleen.

  The defensive systems officer flipped a cover up and inserted a key in a slot. With a twist of the wrist, the close-in defenses went to fully automatic mode.

  The original Close-in Weapons System, codename Phalanx, was developed in the 1970s as a defense against antiship missiles and other close air threats. A sophisticated radar guidance system was coupled with a rapid-firing Gatling gun. The guidance system was mounted atop the gun and the single housing looked for all the world like a little robot. The conical white weapons sprouting up on the decks of Navy ships all over were immediately dubbed “R2D2s.” With the transition from a stance of the Navy fighting humans to the Navy fighting Posleen, the weapons appeared, like most of the Navy, to have become obsolete.

  However, the same bright boys at Naval Sea Systems Command who pointed out the relative invulnerability of World War II battleships to Posleen ground weapons noted one other point about fighting the Posleen swarms. While the swarms might be difficult for weapons systems to distinguish when they were just moving or standing, once they fired it was a different story entirely. The conical white radome then disappeared, replaced by a heavy-action turret borrowed from the Abrams tank and a turret targeting system borrowed from the Hummer-25. Atop the turret was an infrared spike detector.

  As the Posleen God Kings in their saucer-shaped craft came down to the river, they immediately opened fire with their pintle-mounted heavy weapons. The lasers, hypervelocity missiles and plasma rifles scored deep ridges in the battleship’s plate, occasionally penetrating to the surface magazines of the vessel’s secondary weapons. When they did, thundering explosions would rupture forth from the embattled dreadnought. But with the turn of a key, the tides of war changed sides.

  The Thermopylae turrets — so christened for a famous defense in anc
ient Greece — swiveled outboard and the infrared spike detectors immediately found targets. It was the most robotic of actions, as each weapon noted spikes in their area of responsibility, double checked their safe systems, swiveled in two axes and fired.

  Every fifth tungsten ten-millimeter penetrator was a tracer, and the shells were so close together that the tracers seemed one continuous beam, a curved orange laser searching out the impudent fools who had dared to challenge the Navy’s battlewagon. The plasma cannons and lasers caused huge thermal blooms each time they fired and the signature was distinctive against the cold night background. Six CIWS on each side locked on to the targets in their area of responsibility and serviced them with the greatest of efficiency.

  Each thermal spike was fed back from the CIWS and noted by the onboard defensive computer. It, in turn, swiveled the five-inch secondary cannons outboard and loaded them with canister ammunition. Its algorithm called for a certain number of spikes over a certain vector. At that point there was a seventy-five percent certainty of hitting significant numbers of Posleen normals.

  The certainty levels reading was displayed on the defensive systems officer’s monitor while the captain was cross-feeding. Each waited for the heavy guns to engage, but the certainty level first rose, then started to fall as the heavy weapons of the God Kings were silenced one by one.

  “Turn the certainty to sixty-six percent,” said the captain, swinging back and forth in his command chair, arms crossed. He had never agreed with the standard setting on the defensive systems.

  “Aye, aye,” said a tech, and tapped in the command.

  Immediately twelve five-inch double turrets fired canister rounds filled with flechettes along the average bearing-to-target in their area. Then they started to sweep from side to side, pumping out a beehive round every second and a half.