Mike spit a bit of dip into a pocket in the undergel. The icons for the Posleen on the heights indicated that they were starting to get their shit together. Among other things, there were signs of Kessentai going ground-mounted. If they were also smart enough to keep their crests down, the snipers across the river were going to have a damned hard time spotting them. Even if the snipers could pick them out it was a bad sign. It meant there was a God King who knew what he was doing and could command the obedience of others. Now was when the battalion was really going to earn its pay. Time to Dance.

* * *

Duncan hunched forward and wished he could get a Marlboro in the suit. He'd done it a couple of times before, but the suit had a hell of a time handling the fumes. The undergel acted . . . real strange for a couple of days afterwards. He didn't know if it was toxic shock from the smoke or if it had just gotten pissed off; the underlayers developed "personalities" after a while that were still something of a mystery. But whatever the reason, he finally decided it was a bad idea and gave it up.

Which left him trying to direct nearly a division of artillery while having a nicotine fit.

He was watching the same icons as the battalion commander and if he didn't have Mike's instincts for how the Posleen moved he could tell they were shaping up for an attack. He'd been calling for fire from the two battalions of 155 tasked for "on call" fire, but they were half useless. He'd finally switched to using the organic mortar elements of the waiting divisions and the Ten Thousand. There were quite a few of those that were not very responsive, or bloody inaccurate, but there were also nearly twice as many of them as the artillery. Coordinating all of them was a bastard; some of them wouldn't respond to electronic commands while others would . . . but incorrectly. It left his AID "faking" his voice all over the nets. But they were starting to get some good fire going on the Posleen assembly areas just as the main force began its push.

He took a look at the flow of the icons and wished he could scratch his head. His guess was that they were going to come down the sidestreets around PS 49. Most of them had been using West Brighton and Elmwood Avenues to move up to the flimsy crossing. If they followed the same route they'd be filing right into the "corner" of the battalion and cutting hard into Bravo company.

The problem was time of flight. The Posleen moved more or less like horses and just about as fast. So he had to decide where the majority of them were going to be in four or five minutes, the time it took to send the order and have it turned into fire commands then have the artillery or mortars fly, rather than where they were right then.

It was tricky. But that's why he got paid the big bucks and didn't have to be in the line anymore.

Now they seemed to be angling towards Elmwood Avenue and with a short plea for luck to anyone who was listening he concentrated all his available fire in and around PS 49.

* * *

Mike noted the shifting call-for-fire icons and nodded. It was a good call and that would probably catch a large percentage of the assault. But there were still going to be leakers, through the fire and around to the sides. That was up to Captain Slight to handle and it was time to move out; the walking barrage in front of them had already completed its timed halt and was preparing to move on.

* * *

Captain Slight relayed the order to move out and returned her attention to the north. The massive mortar barrage was just getting into swing and the Posleen were trying hard to get ahead of it. Somewhere around the hospital there was a God King or God Kings with sense and they were not only pushing "their" forces towards the humans, but pushing the undirected mass of normals who had lost God Kings ahead of them. This was just about like herding cats, since normals that were not immediately bonded after the death of their leader caste tended to get chaotic and grouchy. But in this case there was no place for the unbonded to go but straight into Bravo.

It started as the battalion moved out again. Most of the unbonded that were carrying heavy weapons had dropped them and most of the fire was from 1mm railguns and shotguns, neither of which was even noticeable by the suits. Unfortunately, buried in the mass of normals was the occasional one with a heavier 3mm railgun, that could penetrate a suit if the Posleen got lucky, or a hypervelocity missile launcher that could smash a suit like a walnut. And with all the bodies in the way it was hard for the AIDs to point them out for special attention.

There was also the problem that the company could not just ignore the huge mass to concentrate on the more dangerous companies behind it. Every one of those centauroids was carrying a monomolecular boma blade. Enough chops from one of those and the suit integrity would be gone; one of the greatest fears of any suit trooper was getting stampeded by the horses.

So as the avalanche of Posleen started down the narrow streets, dodging in and out of the rubble, the company took it under fire.

The Indowy-made grav-guns fired 3mm droplets of carbon-coated depleted uranium that were accelerated to a small fraction of the speed of light. The carbon coating was added after it was discovered the DU rounds tended to "melt" at about ten kilometers in standard air pressure, but the carbon didn't prevent them from creating their characteristic "silver lightning" of plasma discharge. In addition, because of the relativistic speed of the rounds, when they hit a solid object they converted most of their kinetic energy into a racking explosion.

Thus the wave of Posleen was met by nearly a hundred lines of actinic fire, reaching out to waves of racking explosions as the tiny "bullets" converted themselves into uranium backed fire. The first wave was shattered by the volley; any of the rounds that missed traveled on to hit succeeding aliens.

Fighting the Posleen in a situation like this was often likened to trying to stop an avalanche with fire hoses and that was precisely what was happening here. As long as Bravo kept the fire up, none of the Posleen could get a good shot off before being swept away in a tide of grav-gun fire. At the same time, the mortars and artillery were thrashing them in the pocket.

However, this was simply ground they had to cross to get to their objective. The battalion couldn't stop to wait for Bravo to kill all the Posleen around the hospital. Even if it was possible, and it probably wasn't, the mission was to take and hold the bridgehead then wait for the Ten Thousand in support.

Bravo simply had to move out. And when they did, it would open up their flank to fire.

Rochester, NY, United States, Sol III

0633 EDT Sunday September 13, 2009 ad

Mike glanced at his monitors and watched the movement without expression. The worst part about it was the ammunition counters. In that one brief engagement, Bravo had used up fifteen percent of their ammunition and there was no end to the Posleen in sight. The plan had been for an orderly advance to the objective, basically a horseshoe by the Genessee Bridge, but he was pretty sure that was out the airlock. The lack of a curtain barrage and the frantic and fragmented nature of the mortar fire that replaced it meant they were going to have to run for it.

This was exactly the situation that he had feared when he had had his confrontation with Horner. The battalion was strung out, in its most vulnerable possible position and still well short of its goal, the top of the ridge overlooking the river.

If they didn't have the ridge the Posleen could pour fire into the bridgehead, and the battalion, from above. There would be no way to effectively direct fire and there would be no way to reduce the Posleen numbers, much less break their spirit, from in the valley. But when the ACS finally got there, the battalion would come into the view of literally millions of Posleen, millions of still unbloodied Posleen. They needed all the artillery there to suppress the Posleen fire and for smoke missions so that the normals couldn't target the battalion. So far the majority of the battalion had been able to move with relative impunity because of the supporting fire from the "better" artillery battalions. If that went away the casualties would start to mount fast.