Gust Front

* * *

In the end it was all the same. The weapon fired twelve rounds and then jammed. The 7.62mm bullets, two of them tracer, drifted with apparent laziness through the air until they reached their point of aim and dug into the soil of Virginia. Since the manjack had never been boresighted, they did not even strike their erstwhile target, which continued on towards its objective oblivious of being fired at.

* * *

Specialist George Rendel had just thrown a three and snatched the dice back up. He rattled them a few times and prepared to throw again when the manjack across the room stuttered its twelve rounds. He froze, wide eyes echoed by everyone else in the game.

«We forgot . . .» someone said and the world fell in.

* * *

The Posleen were used to fighting enemies who were visible. Most of their opponents had no history of warfare and, therefore, had never heard of such items as camouflage, cover or concealment.

However, they had developed a process for dealing with humans' cowardly tendency to hide themselves while fighting. The God Kings' saucers possessed not only weapons, but excellent sensors. So, even if the position of a firing platform was not clear, the sensors could pinpoint it. When there were hundreds of positions firing they tended to become overloaded with information, but when there was a single target it was easy. And wherever the God King fired, there fired its company.

There were over twenty God Kings in sight of the manjack. All of them fired at the sensor point. And so did approximately eight thousand normals.

A storm of flechettes and missiles slammed into the side of the skyscraper. Since Posleen aim was weak at that range, the storm was diffused over two or three floors and half the side of the building. Hundreds of soldiers throughout the structure were killed and injured by the storm of fire. The only survivors of the laggard company were the company commander, downstairs in the battalion TOC, and the first sergeant and platoon sergeants in their poker game.

The plasma ca

Throughout the line, thousands of heads popped up to see why the storm of fire had occurred. Some individuals, more panicked, brave or foolish than their fellows, started to fire. However, in every case other, wiser, heads prevailed and soldiers were ordered, cajoled or wrestled to the floor to prevent creating another target. The single burst had proven the truth of the order and, despite the ongoing hammer from the Posleen, the check fire held.

With no further fire forthcoming, the Posleen resumed their interrupted advance towards their distant El Dorado.

CHAPTER 50

Richmond, VA, United States of America, Sol III

1417 EDT October 10th, 2004 ad

«This is scary,» said General Keeton, staring at the hundreds of monitors set up throughout the battle control room. The large meeting hall in the R.J. Reynolds facility was crammed with intelligence technicians and a few conscripted secretaries. The group was deciphering the data from the video cameras strung along the route of advance and keying it into the battlefield control system. General Keeton was left with the summarized version to work with. The twenty-four-inch monitor appropriated from the head of Reynolds' Management Information Systems department was indicating that the Posleen vanguard had just reached the floodwall and was spreading out to either side of the entrance.

He almost felt embarrassed by the appropriation. The company had been surprisingly enthusiastic in their support of the defense. The local vice president for facilities had organized most of the support and had rousted out the MIS head and dozens of technicians to cobble together the network Keeton was working from. Integrating the military system and the various PCs and Macintoshes that were being used would have taken a military contractor ten years and two hundred billion dollars. The Reynolds' MIS folks, told to just figure out a way, had jury-rigged a fully functional system in hours. It just showed what happened when you gave clear goals, plenty of resources and let competent people get on with the job.

The whole defense was like that. Once the plan was in place, he had barely been able to keep up. So many little details had been handled by people who realized there wasn't time to argue. From Keene, who had been a veritable whirlwind, directing projects here and there, to Sergeant Gleason from the SF team who had strong-armed half a dozen intransigent hospital administrators into providing impromptu MASH units.

There had been the other side as well. He had generated a simple order. If a situation came to the attention of a general officer in which an officer of captain's rank or above was slowing down the progress of the defense for political or bureaucratic reasons, that officer was to be relieved of commission and sent to the front to dig foxholes. He had fully twenty former field-grade officers and three flag officers wielding shovels. When the defense was all over he was going to have to sort it all out. The generals were likely to be a problem.

In the meantime he had a godlike view of the approaching enemy, a clear view of the thousands of them spreading through the kill-box and enough support in place to fight for days. And he'd only had to deal with three problems in the last hour. Remarkable.

But it was about time to give the signal to open fire. He suspected he was just about to be very, very busy.

He keyed the headset microphone that co

* * *

The technique was called time-on-target. Depending on the distance to the target and the type of weapon, it takes a certain amount of time for an artillery shell to reach its objective. Some artillery, like mortar, fires at a high angle. These projectiles describe a high arc and take a relatively long time to reach their target. Some artillery is fired on a flatter angle and takes less time to reach a target.

This phenomenon was known, but up until World War II no one had paid much attention to it. However, early on during that war a senior American artillery officer had determined that a better «punch» could be gotten if the initial salvo of an artillery barrage arrived more or less simultaneously.

After thinking about this for a relatively short time, he decided to try having guns fire at timed intervals. With proper pla

* * *

Arstenoss shot a spiteful plasma bolt at the towering wall. The lead Kessentai had loaded their tenars with heavy metal and retreated to the rear. The treasure could be bartered for prime genetic samples and fiefs, disdaining the necessity to fight for them. Now the host had reached this demon-bedamned wall, with the symbol of those thrice-damned and soul-chewed military technicians on it, and there seemed no way to follow the trinkets onward. The few God Kings that had floated their tenars above the wall had been removed from the Path. To make matters worse the trinkets had been getting larger and larger as the road progressed. Demons only knew what the eventual horde would look like. Faced with the potential for riches and the sudden blockage, tens of thousands of the host were packing into the valley, looking for more treasures or for the cowardly thresh to at least show themselves. A small bridge had been found to the east and many Kessentai were leaning that way, but it was both heavily defended and very small. It would take days for the host to cross the river and take the thresh from behind. Occasional blasts of fire out of frustration would drift up towards the dots of positions in the towers without eliciting response.