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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 ca
Each thermal spike was fed back from the CIWS and noted by the onboard defensive computer. It, in turn, swiveled the five-inch secondary ca
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.
The control was now going to be loosed. When Posleen landers engaged their antigravity systems, distinct emanations were detectable. The command center for the fortress, which, being on the ground floor, had been completed, detected the emanations of the rising lander immediately.
«Lifting lander, Westmoreland County, Virginia,» sang out a female technician, studying the readouts. The final box of the form blinked and cleared. «The box says it's a standard lander, not a command ship.»
«Roger,» said the operational commander, a bird colonel. He shunted the information to Continental Army Command along with a request to engage. The answer had already been fed into the computers and he got a nearly instantaneous response. «Weapons free. I say again, weapons free.»
The one-hundred-millimeter grav-gun was fully automated and required no crew. There was, however, a crew of three detailed to respond to mechanical malfunction or to man it if the central fire control failed. The procurement process had insisted on a backup «local» control system that seemed as useful to most of the perso
The weapon defied most conventional Air Defense Artillery concepts, as could only be expected of something designed to engage space cruisers and not lightly built aircraft. Instead of swiveling gears to track and aim it, the support struts flexed in a sinuous fashion that was mildly nauseating to watch. The struts also were only required to maintain its position against gravity; the grav-drive system had no recoil.