Gust Front

The island also now held the reserve—a brigade of the Sixtieth Infantry Division—that would respond to any breaches of the wall. It was anticipated that eventually the defenders of the wall would have to retreat, and the Mayo Island forces were also intended to establish a base of fire to enable a safe and secure escape route. The Mayo bridges, both to the north and the south of the island, were also mined and ready to drop.

On the east side of the city, all along the I-95 corridor through Richmond, road embankments had been joined and rubble had been piled creating a continuous wall that would be well-nigh impossible for the Posleen to climb. To make it even more difficult, angle iron welded with sharpened rebar, saw blades and anything else sharp and metal that came to hand had been piled in front of the embankments and laced with concertina wire.

Above these embankments temporary «Jersey» walls, easily recognized as the low temporary walls seen around highway construction, had been emplaced, creating a continuous barrier from behind which the infantry and armor of the Seventy-First Infantry Division could pour fire into the passing centaurs with relative impunity. While the three-millimeter railguns and HVMs of the Posleen would easily breach the wall, the majority 1mm and shotguns would bounce off. Although there would be casualties, the defenders had an excellent position.

With two brigades of the Seventy-First «up» and one back as reinforcement, any temporary breaches in the lines would be easy to fill. All along the route, the towering buildings overlooking the defenses held snipers, their .50 caliber rifles zeroed onto the interstate. Their job was to dispense with any God King that might try to overfly the defenses.

On the north side of the city the roads and buildings had been blockaded with a physical barrier of cross-piled Jersey walls and stacked cars. Thousands of personal automobiles had gone into creating virtually impenetrable multivehicle-deep barriers. Buildings had been sealed and faired over or had concrete slabs piled in front of them to prevent any entry by the Posleen on that side.

The Sixty-Fourth Infantry Division awaited the Posleen in this sector, bunkered into second-floor rooms with heavy sandbag emplacements.

The roads leading out of Schockoe Bottom had been blockaded using all of the previous methods and, in addition, engineers and armored fighting vehicles of the Forty-Eighth ID had dropped the James Monroe building across Broad and Franklin Streets. The multistory government building formed a massive barrier of mangled concrete and steel which was further laced with concertina barbed wire. The building demolition had not been the precision undertaking usually associated with such an endeavor. In fact, it had impacted against the Consolidated Laboratory building. If the city survived, that building might have to be replaced. But better to replace a building than a state.

Despite the obvious structural damage, the Lab building along with the Corporation Commission, the Ferguson building and the DOT a

Around the perimeter of Schockoe Bottom other tanks and engineers had been at work removing the construction efforts of the last few decades to create hasty fighting positions. The James Center, the First Union Bank, Riverside Plaza and even the Federal Reserve had given of their structures to create a wall of rubble around the heart of the city. Behind them, troops from the Seventy-Third Infantry Division held a long, light line, designed to pin the Posleen in place for destruction by the troops along the floodwall.

At Riverfront Plaza, the wall finally necked off, joining with the end of the floodwall. The «neck off» point of the defenses would probably come under heavy attack, so it was reinforced with tanks of the Seventy-Fifth Armored Division in the heaviest revetments possible to construct. Although the Posleen could spread onto Browns Island, all of the foot bridges but one had been removed. It was intended to act as a bleed off for their forces.

The main reserve for the defense, the majority of the Seventy-Fifth Armored, was laagered at the Ethyl Corporation building, overlooking the island. From those positions they could pound the Posleen with direct 120mm canister fire, effectively sweeping the area like a broom. The sole remaining footbridge led all the way across the James and was defended by a battalion of the Twenty-Second Cavalry. The idea was to lure the Posleen into thinking they were getting across the river, while simultaneously setting them up like ducks in a shooting gallery. The battalion had been issued extra manjacks, just to make sure.

In addition to their personal weapons, fighting vehicles and automatic weapons teams, every fire team in the various divisions had a Protean manjack. Accepted only the year before, the Proteans were the brainchild of Hester L. Jacobs, a man well-hated by Ground Force procurement officers everywhere.

Ground Forces had intended to field manjacks, automated infantry weapon systems, all along, but that was where the process had stymied. In the truest fashion of every light weapon developed by a committee, the procurement system finally developed specifications for the manjacks that transformed them from the original concept of a light, relatively simple automatic weapon on an automated tripod, into a virtual mini-tank.

Jacobs, on the other hand, already had developed a weapon system that met the original concept. Sure of his product, the former Marine gu

In a short time, from the point of view of hundreds of infantry lieutenants, captains, first sergeants, sergeant majors and colonels, he had perfected a battlefield weapon system.

With those testimonials, and presentations on the cost difference and what it meant to production numbers, between his system, already up and ru

But his arguments finally started to sink in and, in a rare burst of logic. The Congress overrode the military procurement bureaucracy and ordered them to accept the Jacobs Industries Protean Manjack as it was.

The manjacks were heavy, bulky and awkward to carry in their large formed-plastic cases, but they might be the weapon that turned this tide. Each manjack consisted of an M-60F machine gun, the newest version of the venerable platoon automatic weapon that had first seen service in Vietnam, and a removable automated firing system. The firing system contained a mechanized tripod and a simple autotarget system. Place the weapon on a vector, let it «read» the area—get a laser picture of the zone of fire—and if the «picture» changed, if anything broke the continuously sweeping infrared lasers, it would fire down the broken vector. The weapon could be produced for one-third the cost and in a fifth of the time of the first «correct» version to be fielded. Already, in less than a year's time, there were sufficient manjacks for all the forces and more were being installed in the fixed defenses.

Since the M-60F contained the latest in barrel technology, the barrels actively dissipated heat. Thus the weapons could continue to fire as long as the ammunition held out. To assist in that, each team had hooked the machine guns up to a «battlecase,» boxes preloaded at the factory with twenty-five-thousand rounds of 7.62mm ammunition. The boxes were backbreakingly heavy, one hundred rounds of M-60 ammunition weighs seven pounds, and awkward to maneuver into some of the manjack positions, but once in place they gave every team three times the throw weight of fire they could otherwise expect. In addition, the boxes could be ganged together, so that if one box ran dry, the weapon would be fed from a second. The joke went that if you used up two boxes, fifty thousand rounds of ammunition, you were officially having a bad hair day and could take the rest of the day off.