Страница 45 из 93
"You will be taking your platoon to Indiantown Gap to ramp up to readiness. That will be your permanent post, of course. I guess you'll be joined by other troops there."
Shit. This platoon? thought Pappas, mentally categorizing the characters he had just become "Top" to. "Yes, sir. Are you continuing as CO?" No, no, no, no, no, no!
"No, I've been designated as critical here, dammit. God knows when I'll get a combat command," said the portly officer, tugging at his uniform nervously.
Never if the battalion commander has his way. "Will that be all?"
"Not quite. Ground Forces training command has decided to cut short the training cycle, so the cycle will be ending in two weeks instead of four and final testing has been canceled. The unit will start clearing post next week and you will join them. Transportation is being arranged but they don't know when you'll receive the rest of your NCO cadre. Of course, your officers should be waiting for you."
"Yes, sir, I understand," Pappas said, thinking ominously of the phrases "should" and "of course." "Will there be movement orders soon?"
"Well, right now I'm passing on verbal orders to prepare your platoon and the company as a whole to ship out. Get with the first sergeant to arrange the details."
"Yes, sir."
"Dismissed."
22
Orbit, Diess IV
2233 GMT April 23rd, 2002 AD
Diess was a hot dry world, proof to Lieutenant O'Neal that the Galactics had an overpopulation problem. It had three extremely large continents; about sixty percent of its surface was land, with coastlines that received a limited amount of rain, about as much as the Sahara, and vast mountainous inlands drier than Death Valley.
Although the ecology of the seas was extremely complex, the dominant family was vaguely polychaetan with a complex structurally resilient polymer replacing chitin. There was virtually no terrestrial ecology. Instead the shores were packed with Indowy and Darhel megalopoli, their fingers jutting inland from the life-giving sea. Galactic technology easily extracted pure water and edible food from the plankton-rich seawater. It was obvious that a little food, a little water and raw materials were all the Indowy needed for life.
Worlds like this were the factories of the peaceful, loving Galactic Federation. Billions of Indowy slaving away day in and out with the fraction of Darhel skimming the cream. The peaceful worlds of the democratic Galactic Federation filled with peaceful little boggles whose only need was to serve. Dem dakkies a singin' in the field and the Darhel masters they's a lubbin' evy one of 'em. Galactic politics made Mike want to puke; but not as hard as what the Posleen were doing.
Galactic technology, high reproductive rates and the minuscule wants of the Indowy had permitted a population of twelve billion and booming before the Posleen arrived. The population was now five billion and dropping. One continent was wholly lost; one continent was still unscathed. The third had been lost except for a pie-piece shaped wedge in the northwest corner; the Posleen were as uninterested in the interior as the Galactics.
Mike stood on a virtual ridge inland of that pie-piece watching the floor of the valley hump and ripple like wind-wracked canvas. The Posleen were coming and 2nd Battalion 325th Mobile Infantry Regiment was preparing to meet them.
The first unit to engage was the battalion scout platoon, popping up from a conveniently perpendicular gully and opening fire with grav rifles. As lines of silver lightning co
The scouts were difficult for Mike to see. By order of the battalion commander the armor had been spray painted a mottled brown to match the landscape. However, when Mike dialed his sensors to wavelengths visible to the Posleen, the chemicals in the off-the-shelf paint caused it to fluoresce under the energetic output of Diess' F-2 primary. He slugged this sensor adjustment to some of the other observers just as the Posleen returned fire.
Since the scouts had waited until the Posleen were under five hundred meters to engage, since they stood out like light bulbs in a dark room under UV-C, since they bounded completely into the open instead of firing from cover and since there were four thousand Posleen in the front rank firing at thirty targets it was a miracle of armor design that only nine scouts were killed in the first volley. The rest were thrown bodily backwards by the sheer mass of hypervelocity flechettes and flipped head over heels into the gully.
The fire thus suppressed, the Posleen rushed forward, as fast as lions for that short sprint, and were within two hundred meters before unconcerted fire resumed. At that range, despite full output from the few remaining functional scouts, the fire was beaten down and the position overrun in seconds.
Farther up the valley, Charlie company began long rifle and machine gun fire from over a thousand meters. Suit grenades and company 100mm mortars started to fall on the Posleen mass. The grenades and mortars would open wide holes like rainfall in a pond then the press of other Posleen would close over the fallen and the whole mass would press on. The lines of silver fire would drive two or three deep into the mass, but the pressure of the whole horde drove the horde forward against the fans of fire and spread it out to flank the extended company line. As the fire was redirected to engage the flankers it reduced the overall fire pressure and the horde drove forward at a swifter pace over windrows of its own dead. But the Posleen firmly believed in "waste not want not"; these bodies disappeared as the following ranks dismembered and processed them, rations for today and days to come.
Without a pause or waver the indefatigable enemy trotted towards the beleaguered company. Occasionally a mortar or grenade would, by chance, kill a God King. The mass around him would falter, momentarily, in its advance, then, as the individual normals of the fief shifted allegiance to other local God Kings, it would drive forward again.
Eventually the reduced mass, originally about three hundred thousand individuals, reached a range where their inaccurate fire began to affect the company. According to plan the company began to leapfrog back by platoon sections, two platoons maintaining cover fire as one withdrew. At this point another problem arose.
First, as a platoon stopped firing to withdraw, the retreat and reduced fire pressure caused the remaining mass to rush forward; the sight of the retreating platoon created a chase reaction in the normals and Posleen had apparently never heard of taking cover from fire. Second, the stop and bound nature of the maneuver was slow and difficult to coordinate. The combination caused 3rd platoon to be overrun in the second withdrawal as it made an out of position halt trying to cover 1st platoon.
At this point the original plan, a Ca