«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 ancient 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.
«Lordy,» whispered the EL-2 lookout as the centaurs were slaughtered. The dead began to mound in heaps as the turrets swung from side to side, the weapons sweeping across the normals like huge brooms as the Thermopylaes picked off leader after leader.
As the certainty level dropped from lack of targets, each time a God King or one of the HVM-toting normals fired at the armored dreadnought it would be answered by a storm of fire. As trailing God Kings came up, they began to concentrate the fire of their companies on the secondary turrets that were decimating their ranks. However, the dead continued to mound as the Posleen swarmed to the sounds of the guns.
* * *
Althanara was only a scoutmaster, but he knew a losing situation when he saw one. The heavy fire from the direction of the water was bad enough, but the description he coaxed out of the net interface was worse. He gestured to his oolt and turned to the rear.
«Where are you going you coward!» shouted Stenarnatta, the battlemaster he had attached himself to. «The Net will cast you down as a Kenstain if you do not return NOW!»
«Kill yourself if you desire,» he snarled. «I'm going to attack that thing with a Po'osol!» He gestured at the shotguns that his oolt carried. «These abat –spit guns are useless.»
«Fine,» snarled the battlemaster, «run away. Kenstain!»
The scoutmaster turned his back on the soon-to-be-destroyed battlemaster and trotted his company to the rear.
* * *
«We're down twenty-five percent on monitors on the port, only fifteen percent to starboard,» noted the defensive systems officer. «And we're down twelve percent overall on secondary systems; we took a bunch of casualties in turret five. They're whittling us away and we're taking heavy fire from Fairview Beach since we can't bring the broadside to bear.»
«So far so good,» said the XO.
«Sir,» snapped the regional alert communications technician, «incoming alert from CONARC!»
* * *
Althanara double-checked the complicated controls of the ship. Normally the devices were left on automatic, although a few Kessentai did make a study of their use. He, however, was barely out of the nest, on his first conquest. Well, if the Net granted him the victory of this horrible battle then the debts for his entire company might be set aside. He might even be able to get a few decent weapons from this damn battlefield.
He entered the last command into the Alld'nt damned equipment and fluffed his crest. «May the demons grant me luck.»
* * *
High Knob Planetary Defense Center was as open as a strip mine. The plan of construction had all the PDCs opened in a cone from the top down, then the various equipment installed. Last the centers would be covered in concrete, steel and native rock.
But the plan had only gotten as far as installation. When the guns had not arrived in time, it had thrown everything behind. Thus the defense center, which was designed to be complete in another month, was wide open at the top and had only one of its slated nine guns installed.
Since they were relatively defenseless, they were under strict orders not to engage landings. What they were being held back for were the «airmobile» operations the Posleen initiated at seeming random that had repeatedly hammered human forces. It was hoped that engaging a lifting lander would not call down the devastation that had been wreaked on other defense centers around the globe.
Euro Fortress Command, a joint operations unit centered on France and Germany, had chosen to engage the initial landings. The massive European defenses had been created from the fortress lines that both countries had constructed as historical enemies. The line of fortresses, representing tens of millions of man-hours' effort, had been shredded by the first wave of the assault. Whereas during World War I and World War II the fortresses had been proof against days and days of conventional shelling, twenty-kiloton kinetic energy weapons had opened the forts like so many tin cans. Rebuilding the centers would require a miracle from a beneficent deity. China and India had also used their incomplete fortresses to engage the landings, with like results. In one day better than half of the planetary defense centers under construction had been totally destroyed. Only the United States and Japan of the «primary powers» had refrained from engagement.