Much of the battlefield was already obscured by the smoke and dust thrown up from the artillery when the first infantrymen looked over and through their defensive walls. But there was the occasional flash of a centaur, most of them reeling stunned through the hammer of the guns. Such were taken under fire with glee; everyone had seen the news from Fredericksburg and the news media had already started on the interviews of survivors and relatives. They engaged the yellow centaurs with a fiery rage.
The snipers, arrayed higher in the buildings with their tripod-mounted .50 caliber sniper rifles, were having a field day. The surviving God Kings throughout the mass were trying to rally their forces, trying to return fire, trying to retreat out of the sudden abattoir that Twelfth Corps had made out of Schockoe Bottom. But the snipers were having none of it. The occasional flash of a plasma cannon or HVM, the white light so different from the black-orange of the artillery or the orange-purple of the mortars, revealed them clearly. Then, disdaining their target zones, dozens of snipers from as far as a kilometer away would return fire. Any God King saucer pulling out of the maelstrom of dust and smoke in the valley of death was targeted immediately. The plunging fire of the .50 caliber rifles smashed the centaurs off their vehicles, smashed through their inertial drivers, smashed through their energy crystals and added their devastation to an afternoon of fire and smoke and death.
* * *
General Keeton's monitor had a battlefield schematic and four waterfall graphs. The graphs were controlled by the Galactic AID that had been supplied to each corps commander and higher. One graph tracked casualties among the human defenders, the actual soldiers with rifles in their hand, who would keep the Posleen from coming out of the Bottom. The second tracked live Posleen in the fire-sack. The third tracked total Posleen that had entered the fire-sack. The fourth tracked total Posleen numbers.
Despite the fact that human numbers were less than a hundredth of the Posleen, they were on the same scale. The number of defenders was limited, the Posleen seemingly unlimited. When he had taken too many casualties he intended to retreat across the James.
That, however, looked a long way off. The graph indicating Posleen in the sack had climbed and climbed and climbed. Then, when it was apparent that they were about to stage a breakout, the Corps scale ambush had opened up. Now, there was virtually nothing left alive in Schockoe Bottom and human casualties had been next to nothing. If he had lost two hundred troops, excepting that company erased by one idiot's actions, he would be surprised. His total losses to date, as far as had been reported, were two hundred fifty killed in action, four-twenty wounded in action. And the Posleen had lost better than forty thousand.
However, there were still darn near two million left to kill. And the portion of the host that had not entered the kill zone was spreading to either side, despite the caltrops and craters.
Couldn't have that.
«Send out the sally,» he whispered.
* * *
Lieutenant Colonel Walter Abrahamson wrapped a yellow silk scarf around his face and waved his hand overhead in a «wind-'em-up» signal. This was not, technically, the place for a cavalry battalion commander to be, in the hatch of an Abrams leading a do-or-die charge into the face of two million enemies. On the other hand, be damned to where he was supposed to be. The mission was to give the Posleen a sharp enough poke in the snout that they charged back into the fire-sack. He could have left it up to his company commanders. Should have. Had been ordered to. Sure. Like hell. Where else would a lifelong cavalry officer be?
«Stew, you better be damned sure those cannon-cockers have got the word, over,» he shouted into his intervehicle microphone. Despite the sound-proofed helmet the thunder of sixty jet-turbine driven main battle tanks revving their engines was an aural Vesuvius.
«No problem,» said his fellow battalion commander. The Second Battalion of the Twenty-Second Cavalry regiment had been relegated to defending the Libby Hill defenses and the other officer was bitterly envious of his comrade. «I'm in the fire control center now. They've got the word. They'll cease fire when the gates start to open. Even the mortars will be landed by the time you get through.
«Just in case, you might want to go through buttoned up, though,» he joked.
«Yea verily,» shouted Abrahamson. He waved to the civil engineers manning the gates. The hasty job done on the locking mechanism meant a hastier job done on the opening system. The gates, multiton concrete and steel behemoths, had been hooked to bulldozers to open them. The two structural engineers waved to the drivers and started moving them forward carefully. If the gates warped there might not be a way to get them closed again. And when the cavalry came back they were really going to want to be able to close the gates.
«Okay, tell 'em the gates are moving back,» he yelled and switched to intercom. «Move us up to the entrance,» he said as he hit the switch to drop him into the belly of the beast.
* * *
As the gates rolled back they revealed an alien world. The artillery still falling in the bottom churned an indescribable stew of yellow Posleen corpses blended indiscriminately with the shattered brick of the former buildings. There was no living thing in sight. The hammer of the artillery combined with the fire of the infantry had done what practically never happened in battles: the combination had killed all of the enemy. Even in the most intense battles of World Wars I and II there had been a few survivors. Not here. The slaughter of the Posleen in Schockoe Bottom had been efficient, remorseless and complete.
«Pull forward slowly a hundred meters,» he said over the intercom. «Then stop and wait for the squadron to get on line.»
«Yea, though I ride through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil,» said Private First-Class Mills, the tank's gunner.
«For I am the baddest motherfucker in the valley,» laughed the colonel, ending the military version of the psalm.
«Amen,» whispered Private Hulm, the driver. The young private was as stunned as everyone else by the grounds-eye view of the devastation, but he gunned the big tank and pulled it slowly forward into the devastation.
The surface of Fourteenth Street was coated in a layer of slime and the rubbercoated tracks of the behemoth threw up a fine spray that looked like orange mud. With the exception of the occasional shattered carcasses of God King saucers, there were no obstacles. The occasional nearly intact Posleen corpse was ground beneath the treads of the tank without notice or comment. The seventy-ton armored juggernaut didn't even lurch.
PFC Mills swung the turret to the side. «Target. Moving saucer.»
The colonel checked his repeater display by reflex. The saucer was skewed to one side, crabbing to the north and out of the firesack. As soon as it left the overwhelming haze it would be a target for the snipers dotting the towers, but it also could be a threat.
«Confirmed,» said the colonel. «Engage co-ax.»
«Roger, co-ax,» responded the gunner, switching to coaxial fire instead of main gun. «On the way.»
The M-1E was a modification of the venerable Abrams main battle tank. Designed for fighting the Posleen, it had improved frontal armor and thermal damping to make it more survivable when hit by hypervelocity missiles and plasma cannons. It also took a leaf out of the Russian Army's book.