The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley (4 page)

When the Devil Dances

JOHN RINGO

“I
hate
these things,” Sergeant Buckley said. “There’s a billion things to go wrong.”

Sergeant Joseph Buckley had been fighting the Posleen almost since the beginning of the war. He had been in the first, experimental, ACS unit in the fighting in Diess. After Diess, he had been medically evacuated as a psychological casualty; after being caught in a fuel-air explosion, being stuck under a half a kilometer of rubble, having your hand blown off trying to cut your way out, getting swept away in a nuclear blast front and having half a space cruiser land on you, driving you back under a half kilometer of rubble, anyone could tend to go around the bend.

But desperate times called for desperate measures and in time even Joe Buckley was found fit for duty. As long as it wasn’t too stressful and had nothing to do with combat suits. It was his only insistence, and he was firm about it to the point of court-martial, that he would
not
have to put on a suit. The series of events on Diess had given him a permanent psychosis about combat suits and all peripheral equipment. In fact, he had come to the conclusion that the whole problem with the war was an emphasis on high technology over the tried and true.

“I tell you,” he said, ripping the plastic cover off of the recalcitrant M134 7.62 Gatling gun. “What we need up here is . . .”

“. . . water-cooled Browning machine guns,” said Corporal Wright. “I know, I know.”

“You think I’m joking,” he said, pulling out the jammed round and snarling at it. “This would never happen with a Browning. That’s the problem, everybody wants
more
firepower.”

* * *

Buckley nodded as the gun continued to fire and then frowned as it clanked to a halt with a shrill scream of disengaged torsion controller. “Shit.” The brass cartridge that had caused the latest jam was clearly evident, “stovepiped” in the ejector. “Shit, shit, shit,” he continued, reaching for the cartridge.

“Sarge, the gun’s hot,” Wright objected.

“Screw that,” Buckley said, waving Alejandro away from the breakers. “I want to get this over with before . . .”

The two specialists never found out what it was he wanted to get it over with before because the problem
was
a short, but not in the gun or even in the M27 mount. The problem was in the resistor that controlled power flow to the M27.

The resistor coil stepped down the power that was supplied to all the guns so that the voltage going to the mounts was at the proper level. But in the case of Mount B-146, the resistor was slightly flawed, and it was permitting a higher charge through.

This charge had been “bleeding over” to the gun, and since the gun was driven by an electrical motor it was causing the motor to run at a slightly higher rpm than it was strictly designed for. But since the gun was on a controlled ground, the full power of the flawed resistor had never been released.

When Sergeant Buckley grabbed the brass, though, the power, having found a conduit, went to work. And he was suddenly hit by 220 volts of AC power.

Buckley stood in place, shaking for a moment, until all the breakers for the sector blew out.

“Damn,” said Wright. “That’s gotta
hurt
. You didn’t have to blow him to hell to prove your point, Alejandro.”

“I didn’t,” the specialist replied, pulling an injector of Hiberzine out of the first aid case. “Call the medics while I start the CPR. Tell ’em Buckley’s having a bad day again.”

* * *

Sergeant Buckley had come to the conclusion that there were worse things than being in a suit.

After being electrocuted he had awakened in the hospital in the middle of the Posleen attack. Getting out, finding clothes, weapons and transportation had been interesting. Then, he had barely started on his long journey when a SheVa round had terminated a Posleen Lamprey less than two thousand meters away.

The good news was that the lander didn’t explode.

The bad news was that it fell in a sewage retention pond.

The next thing Buckley knew, the contents of the pond had been scattered over a wide, and in the future extremely fertile, area. An area that included the Humvee he was, with the occasional twitch, driving.

He had survived, but it wasn’t a pleasant experience. And, unfortunately, the next Lamprey that was hit blew up rather spectacularly.

He had come to lying in the Little Tennessee River. How he had gotten there was a mystery until he saw the Humvee lying sideways on a shattered tree. He was, however, cleaner. The rest of the retreat was a bit of blur. The Posleen actually got ahead of him at one point, but he managed to get a ride on a five-ton that snuck around them to the east. Then, in Dillsboro, they’d all been unloaded and segregated out.

Technically he was probably still a patient, but he didn’t make any fuss about being handed a rifle. They’d even given him a “squad.” All eight of the soldiers were clerks with an infantry military operational skill rating. The way that worked was that after going through training to be infantry, some desk jockey would grab them to push papers instead of carry a rifle. So the guys had been trained to be infantry, but only one of them had ever spent any time in the line.

He, and the one specialist with some line experience, made sure that all the clerks knew how to load and fire their weapons. Then he found some rations and they sat around waiting for somebody to get their thumb out of their butts. Hurry up and wait was all well and good, but the Posleen weren’t all that far back; if whoever was in charge of this cluster-fuck—it looked like a captain which was just crazy, there must have been a brigade’s worth of gear and personnel in the area he was looking at—didn’t get a move on, the Posleen were going to overrun the lot of them.

Then the rumor got around that the main exit had been cut off. He managed to get his guys to help quell the near riot that erupted, but it turned out it wasn’t just a rumor this time; the Posleen really
had
cut off their escape route.

Then they got the word that
most
of the personnel, and gear, was going to go out by the two alternate routes. Great. He was all for fighting, he’d been doing it for damn near ten years, but it helped to have a way
out
in case things went south. However, it turned out that “most” did not include the “combat arms” forces.

The next thing he knew he and his squad were in the back of a Bradley headed up the road to the pass the Posleen had taken.

Now, he wasn’t a coward by any stretch of the imagination. But he’d gotten a look at the map and taking that pass with the pitiful little force they had was just suicide.

They finally had a real meeting, where the lieutenant who was in charge of the Brads called all the squad leaders together and told them the plan, such as it was. The SheVa gun, probably the same one that had killed the Lamprey that blasted him into the drink, was going to fire a nuke into the pass. Then they would charge into the pass and clean up the survivors.

“It’ll be easy,” the lieutenant concluded. “All the Posties will be toasties from the nuke. We just have to secure it until the brigade on the other side makes it up the road.”

Sarge Buckley had been beating around the Army since before the Posleen had been heard of and he knew when somebody was lying. “The check is in the mail” is nothing compared to “the trucks are on the drop zone.” But the worst military cliché of them all had to be “the artillery is going to pound them flat then we’ll just go in and paint the lines.”

Buckley looked up as the radio in the track began to honk.

“NUKE WARNING. NUKE WARNING. TARGET COORDINATES: UTM 17 311384E 392292N. 100 K-T. THIRTY SECONDS!”

Life just got worse.

“FIFTEEN SECONDS. TEN . . .”

They were all gonna die.

* * *

This time Buckley heard the crack from the ridge before the Posleen opened fire. Their fire was also much less directed; they seemed to be firing in every direction. He hunkered down for a moment then used the disturbance to move again.

His vision wasn’t really back; he still had much of his field of view blocked out by a negative image of his hands. He’d heard about “knowing something like the back of your hands,” but he seemed to have the
inside
of his hands superimposed over everything.

But he could sort of see and he sort of knew where he was going so it was sort of time to move. He squatted down and duck-walked to the end of the chunk of granite and then paused. When he stuck his head out he would probably be looking at Posleen from less than ten
feet
away.

The question as usual was fast or slow. Finally he decided on fast. Pulling a grenade out of its pouch he pulled the pin and took a breath.

“Once the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is no longer your friend,” he whispered and leaned out.

Joe waited for the expected flurry of fire to subside then leaned around the concrete pylon and hammered off all five grenades in his AIW as fast as he could pull the trigger. The Posleen were firing before he even pulled back, but over the racket of the railguns—all the plasma gunners seemed to be gone—he could hear a Barrett punching out round after round. Pulling another grenade from his harness he tossed it in the general direction of the trench as he reloaded. One more burst should do it.

He jacked the first grenade into place and leaned around the concrete obstacle just as the HVM round hit it.

* * *

Sergeant Patrick Delf swept his AIW from side to side, using the night scope on it to look for targets. The area around the Blue Ridge overpass was a mass of heat signatures, but none of them were moving. Most of them were unrecognizable. He stepped forward carefully, his feet shuffling for good footing on the rubble-strewn road, and searching for threats or targets. But there wasn’t anything. Both spans, contrary to their intelligence, were down and down hard; clearing the road was going to be a bitch.

He moved closer, waving for the rest of his squad to spread to either side. The recon team opened out, each of them looking for Posleen and finding nothing.

Under the shadows of the bridge they found a trench filled with dead Posleen. Most of them were too fire-blackened to determine what had killed them, but several had had their lights punched out by a large caliber gun, probably a sniper.

The cental pylon was gone at the base. It looked like it had taken heavy fire, probably plasma or HVM, from the Posleen trench. Which didn’t make any sense unless one of them had gone completely ape-shit. There was a cooling smear at the base, but he wasn’t sure what that meant until he went to one knee, wiped at it and and sniffed his fingers. The odor of human blood, as opposed to Posleen, was distinct.

“Sir, this is Sergeant Delf,” the team leader called, touching his communicator. “The pass is clear. Some poor bastard got all the way up here and then got waxed by an HVM. But the HVM collapsed the bridge and blew plasma back on the Posleen; they’re gone.”

“Any other survivors?” the brigade commander asked.

“Not so far, sir,” the sergeant replied. “It doesn’t look good. We’re not on the other side of the bridge yet, but we can see some tracks; they got wasted, sir. I see three Abrams and two Brads from here and they’re all toast. The pass is blocked by the fallen bridges, it’s down all the way across. And the tracks are in the way. But no Posleen. The survivors kicked the shit out of them.”

“Roger,” the colonel said softly. “Is the area clear for aircraft?”

“I can’t guarantee that, sir. I don’t know what’s down the valley.”

“According to Eastern Command just a very pissed off SheVa. I’m sending a dustoff up for anyone you find, complete your sweep and get back to me. Be careful, though, it’s a long way to Rabun Gap.”