* * *
«Three gun! Traverse flares. Preset five!» shouted Keren.
The gun crew startled awake and stumbled to the gun. When the remnants of the Corps were reassembled there were enough gun tracks to scatter them around. As a reasonably intact unit, Alpha Mortars had received two orphan tracks to replace their maintenance losses. They had also been offered an FDC track. Keren had demurred. The Suburban was much more comfortable.
At Keren's suggestion the platoon had left their mortars set up to support the company. Three gun's mission was to fire flares and all that they had to do was begin dropping rounds.
The assistant gunner, the person who actually fires the mortar, had actually slept curled around the cold metal of the weapon. At the cry from FDC she simply rolled upward with a round in her hand. Before she was fully awake she had the round in the tube and firing. It was a regular HE round instead of a flare, and the setting of the gun sent it flying almost a mile downrange, behind the charging Posleen. But it was the thought that counted.
The next round was a flare.
Lieutenant Leper ran forward towards the front-line CP. He was not only in charge of the mortars, but of the company as well. That being the case he had completely scrambled normal procedures. The mortars were well forward with his CP closer to them than the line. He had planned on straightening things out in the morning, but the Posleen hadn't given him the time.
As he reached the large hole scraped out of the Virginia loam, he got his first clear view of the enemy and despaired. The company was in no shape to face that mass; the Posleen must outnumber them a hundred to one. It looked like a full Posleen brigade was charging them at a gallop.
He dove into the hole and reached for the radio.
* * *
If there was one thing that Keren had learned along the way, it was that there was no such thing as too much information. Which was why he had one radio set to the company frequency, another on the fire control frequency and two «off the books» radios that he had picked up along the way set to battalion and brigade. So he was the first person in the company to hear the lieutenant condemn them to death.
«Papa One Five, this is November One Five, over.»
The distant crack of railguns and the hammer of machine guns was echoed in the transmission.
«November One Five, this is Papa One Five, over.»
«Papa One Five, we are in contact with approximately a regiment of Posleen. I do not estimate that we will be able to hold them off, over.»
«Roger, understood. ACS support is on the way. Over.»
«Papa, they are already here. I still don't estimate we'll hold. The Posleen look fresh and they are charging the line even as we're talking. The ACS is spread out and looks pretty confused. I don't intend to do the bug out boogie, but I don't see us stoppin' these guys, either. Tell corps to get ready to run. Over.»
«November One Five. All of corps's reserves are on the line. You are ordered to hold. Over.»
«You're dreamin', Papa. November out.»
* * *
«Tango Three Six, this is November One Five, over.»
There was a pause. The fire control center for the defense was busy; they were still scrambling to replace the central fire net.
«Calling unit say again callsign, over.»
«Tango three six, this is November One Five. Final protective fire call, designation One-One-Bravo. Posleen in close-contact. Final protective fire. Over.»
«November, be advised we are tapped out for artillery at this time. We are in final protective mode for the entire Ninth Corps, over.»
«Well, if we get overrun you're gonna have visitors pretty damn quick. So make up your mind. Out.»
* * *
«All guns!» yelled Keren, out the back of the Suburban. «Final Protective Fire! Continuous fire!»
* * *
Specialist Nick Warren crouched in his foxhole and tried to count kills. The foxhole had been built for interlocking fire, with a mound of earth in front of it and the firing slot angled out to the right at a forty-five degree angle. The idea was to fire at everything from the side and not be shot at by the horses you were shooting at. Which was fine except that the whole wall was being hammered by railgun and shotgun rounds. Dirt drifted around him in streams as the pounding fire tore apart the sandbags on the outer layer, then began to destroy the packed dirt of the fill.
His zone of fire was packed with horses. There were so many that he had stopped bothering to aim. If he missed one the bullet was sure to hit the one behind. He would run but he had done that once and knew what it brought. The horses could run you down faster than you could escape. There was nothing to do but kill them and keep killing them and hope it was enough. He had to keep them off the other holes and hope that there were enough guys left to keep the horses off his. He wished he'd saved some grenades, they'd be a treat. But he was out of gun grenades and the hand kind both.
His bolt flew back on an empty chamber and the plastic magazine dropped out. He was patting his ammo pouches trying to find another magazine when he heard a sound like a machete hitting a watermelon and looked over his shoulder.
The other soldier in the foxhole was down, half her face torn away by the railgun round that had finally punched through the wall of sandbags. He couldn't even remember her name, some chick from headquarters company. He had a moment of shame at his first thought, which was joy that he could see she had two magazines left. But he didn't have much time to dwell on the shame. There was a sudden shower of dirt, heavier than the earlier ones. He never even saw the blade that clove into the back of his head, slicing through the Kevlar helmet, bone and brain like butter.
* * *
There just wasn't enough concentrated firepower. Fighting Posleen had often been described as trying to stop an avalanche with a fire hose. It only works if you have enough fire hoses.
The Posleen were on a narrow front, crossing an open beaten zone. They were, in fact, a perfect target for a prepared veteran unit with backup or even an intact, dug in, green ACS unit. But without massive artillery fire, without an intact ACS battalion, without more troops and tangle-foot and barbwire and mines, Ardan'aath drove his forces forward in a wild charge that overwhelmed the defenders in bare minutes.
Bravo Company of the ACS was the first to fall, left exposed on the flank of the mechanized company. Their lines of silver lightning stretched out to the charging Posleen and tore them apart like paper. The same carnage would have shocked a human force into immobility. But there were over twelve thousand Posleen charging down the narrow front and dozens of God Kings. And Posleen just don't stop.
The Posleen focused on this danger first, striking the company with direct-fire. The armor was usually proof against anything but a plasma cannon or an HVM. But as the mass of fire pounded them, occasional three-millimeter rounds would find a weakness. And there were over six hundred HVM launchers and nine hundred heavy railguns in the force. Between those and the God Kings the exposed ACS company was eliminated without killing more than five or six hundred of the enemy.
The dug-in forces fared better, but not so much that it mattered. The first to be silenced was the partially dug-in Charlie Company as their grav-guns and Grim Reapers were picked out for special attention by the heavy weapons of the Posleen brigade. Charlie Company put up a hard fight but the whistling centaurs drove forward against the wall of fire, piling up windrows of their dead in an effort to close with the armored humans. It finally came down to hand-to-hand as the Posleen reached the foxholes of the unit and overwhelmed it in a charge with monomolecular blades.
In the meantime the lighter railguns and shotguns of the Posleen normals concentrated on the foxholes of the mechanized unit, in most cases hammering them so hard they were unable to respond. Anyone who jumped out of a hole and started to run was cut apart by massed fire. When the Posleen reached the firing line it was all over. The forlorn troopers were butchered in place like so many sheep. A few made it away in the confusion, but for all practical purpose the unit had ceased to exist.