Jake flipped down the bipod on the Barrett, flipped up the ladder sight and pushed an old Jack Daniel's bottle out of the way. The range to the saddle, actually to the upper edge of it where the trail was clear of obstructions, was just at eight hundred meters. Judging distance like that, downhill in the mountains, was usually tough. But Jake's AID just laid a hologram on the hill and marked various points with range markers.
What the AID could not judge quite so well was the wind. At that distance the bullet would tend to drift rather strongly, perhaps as much as six inches given the wind and its direction.
Fortunately, Posleen were big targets.
The sergeant major rolled Nichols' rucksack off his back and rummaged around in it. He'd lightened it up on the way up the hill by some judicious disposal of devices, but it was the first "down-time" he'd had all day and all he'd had to eat since the previous night was a handful of hickory nuts he'd picked up on Ochamp Mountain.
Mosovich pulled out four one-hundred-round boxes of .50 caliber BMG, a bag of peanut hard candy, two packs of Red Man, three packs of some sort of apparently homemade jerky, and three MREs. Apparently Nichols wasn't big on "pogie-bait." No Fritos, no Pringles, no soynuts, trailmix or cornnuts, not even a damned Ramen package. What the hell were they teaching these kids? The MREs were spaghetti and meatballs, tortellini and lasagna. Either Nicols had eaten everything else before these or he had packed out mostly Italian. Mosovich dove back in and rummaged for a while, but came up empty. Nothing else, but socks.
"Damn, no hot sauce. What kind of a soldier goes out on a mission without hot sauce?" He could stomach the Army's version of "Italian food" if it had enough hot sauce in it. Otherwise it was just south of fried salamander—which wasn't half bad really—in his personal view of military food. Somewhere way down from fried grasshopper and just above kimchee. After a few moments' thought he pulled out one of the pieces of jerky and sniffed at it. His brow rose and he took a bite.
"Where in the hell did Nichols get venison jerky?" he asked no one. "And how come he was holding out?" After a moment's thought and another bite he answered the second question for himself. "I'm gonna have to speak to that troop about his choice of rations."
The sergeant major leaned on the pack and listened to the artillery in the distance. As he did he realized that the position also gave the first clear view he'd had of Clarkesville. The town was darn near fourteen klicks off, but it was as close as the team had gotten and the day was clear.
Mosovich pulled out his binoculars as he masticated the jerky. The stuff had the consistency of shoe leather, but it tasted heavenly. Bit light on the spicing, but perfection exists only in the mind of Allah.
"Lessee," he murmured around the jerky. "There's 441 . . . And there's Demorest. Probably." The town was noticeable mostly for the cleared areas; there weren't many buildings standing.
The day was as clear as a bell, one of those beautiful fall days when it seemed that from a high hill you could see creation. In this case the NCO could easily see all the way to where Interstate 85 used to be and Clarkesville was more than a tad easier.
The Posleen had covered the area with a smoke curtain, but the smoke pots, hundreds of them, were located on hilltops and left a "side" view of the area only lightly obscured. There were thousands of figures moving in the area, but that was only to be expected. What he hadn't expected to see was a gaping hole in the side of one of the hills just to the north of Demorest.
"Damn, they're digging in."
The humans had observed that behavior before, but only on Earth. Although the God Kings invariably lived above ground, usually in large stone or metal pyramids—although there didn't seem to be any evidence of those here—most of their manufacturing facilities seemed to be underground.
Apparently this was a "late conquest" activity. After an area had been fully reduced and all the human evidence cleaned up the Posleen generally put in farms. They primarily grew local crops having, apparently, none of their own. While this was going on the local God King's pyramid was constructed and the multitude of items necessary for that and day-to-day existence was created from the "factories," mostly nannite "vat" production, on the ships. But as soon as an area reached a certain level of production, underground facilities started being built. And when they were complete, the ships were passed on to the next generation and took off for either another planet or another part of the same planet. And the local settlement started working on the next ship out of their surplus.
The evidence for this process was gleaned mostly from overhead imagery observing the digging process and what went into and out of the caverns. The process was probably going on on Barwhon as well, although there was no way to get overhead on that planet. On Diess, which the humans had mostly retaken, the Posleen had not dug in their facilities. But the entire arable area of the planet was covered in megalopoli so they had just occupied the Indowy megascrapers. Digging them out of them had been interesting.
Most of the Earth though was in Posleen hands and thousands, millions, of the manufacturing facilities were scattered across the planet at this point. When it came time to reclaim the world, digging the centaurs out of the holes would be tough. On the other hand, it was expected that most of the factories could be put back in commission so Earth was looking at a whole new world of productivity. Usually, though, such facilities were in well-settled areas outside the war zone and Clarkesville was inside the artillery envelope. So seeing them digging in like that was unusual.
And so was the column of Posleen pouring into the dugout.
"That's not a factory, then," he muttered, working a big wad of jerky into his cheek. He wondered just what those sneaky yellow bastards thought they were doing. The Posleen under certain conditions dug like gophers; they apparently had very good mining technology, along the lines of the Galactics' ionic miners. But they generally left their normals on the surface farming, strip mining and gathering.
Then he saw what was following the column into the cavern and nearly choked to death.
* * *
Ryan looked over at the fire control officer and tapped his monitor. "Send a sensor round in the next volley."
As the day had progressed more and more people had gotten in on the act but, by and large, that had been good. Controlling this many artillery batteries, and their care and feeding or at least resupply of rounds, was no job for a single engineer major. Among other things, dozens of intelligence specialists had gotten into the act, massaging every bit of data collected for hard evidence of the Posleen's intentions.
So far the information was ambiguous. There was no question that the Posleen seemed to be acting in a more "logical" fashion than they usually did. But that didn't mean they were a greater threat. With the exception of the EMP grenade, there had been no new weapons. And while there were some improved tactics, they had not notably improved as shown by their chase of Mosovich.
It had been quite a while since the sergeant major's last call for fire and they had been desultorily pounding the hilltop, with only one battery now, for the last two hours. But there had been lulls like it throughout the day and it was, judging from past experience, just about time for another call.
"Sensor round inbound, sir," the lieutenant said, shunting the data to his monitor.