When the Devil Dances

The armor was a private gift to then-Captain O’Neal from the Indowy manufacturer and included all the “special” functions that he had requested when he was a member of the design group. Besides the additional firing ports on wrist and elbows for close range combat, it was powered by antimatter. This eliminated the worst handicap of powered armor, its relatively short combat range. Technically, standard armor was designed for three hundred miles of range or seventy-two hours of static combat. In practice it had turned out to be about half that. Several suit units had been caught when they simply “ran out of gas” and were destroyed by the Posleen.

The drain on suit power had just gotten worse with the ammunition shortage. Because it was impossible for any terrestrial factory to produce the standard ammunition, which had a dollop of antimatter at the base to power the gun, it had been necessary to substitute simple depleted-uranium teardrops. Thus the grav-gun, which should have been powering itself, was forced to “suck” power from the suits. Since the rounds were still accelerated to a fraction of lightspeed, and since that required enormous power, the “life” of the suit batteries had been cut to nearly nothing. It was getting close to a choice of shoot or move for most of the standard suits, the exception being O’Neal’s, which had almost unlimited power.

The flip side, of course, was that if anything ever penetrated to the antimatter reservoir, Major O’Neal and a sizable percentage of the landscape for a mile around would be vapor.

But all of those things were invisible. It was the “surface” that attracted attention; the suit gave the appearance of some sort of green and black alien demon, the mouth a fang-filled maw and the hands talons for ripping flesh. It was startling and barbaric and in some ways, for those who knew O’Neal, very on cue.

“It suits him,” said the colonel from long experience. The ACS went wherever it was hottest. And the Ten Thousand followed.

The Ten Thousand — or the Spartans as they were sometimes called — was an outgrowth of a smaller group called the Six Hundred. When the first Posleen landing occurred, early, by surprise and in overwhelming force, the green units sent into Northern Virginia to stop them were shattered in the first encounter. Many of them, especially rear echelons, escaped across the Potomac. A large number of these gathered in Washington so when the Posleen forced a crossing of the river, right on the Washington Mall, thousands of these soldiers who had been in the rout were directly in their path. All but a tiny handful fled. This tiny handful, six hundred and fifty-three to be exact, had decided that there were some things that were worth dying for in a pointless gesture. So they gathered on the mound of the Washington Monument for the purposes of a stupidly suicidal last stand.

As it turned out it was not, quite, a suicide. Their resistance, and the confusion among the Posleen crossing the bridge, slowed the enemy just enough for the armored combat suits to arrive. Between the ACS and artillery fire the Posleen pocket in Washington was first reduced, then eliminated.

A special medal was struck for those six hundred and fifty-three truck drivers and cooks, infantrymen and artillery, linemen and laundrymen, who had stood their ground and prepared to go to their God like soldiers. After a brief ceremony, they were to be spread throughout the Army with nothing to remember the encounter but the medal. The leader of the resistance, however, successfully argued that there should be a better use than dissemination. Thus the Ten Thousand was born. Most of the Six Hundred were given promotions and used as a nucleus of the force which was then armed from captured and converted Posleen weapons. Once completed, the Ground Forces commander had at his fingertips a fast, heavy and very elite unit.

But it did not assault swarming Posleen; only the ACS could survive that.

“Major,” General Horner said. The use of O’Neal’s rank was the only sign of reproof for his tardiness.

“Jack?” O’Neal answered.

Horner smiled coldly. The ACS was not an American unit; it belonged to the Fleet Strike, a part of the Galactic Federation military. Therefore it would only be common military courtesy, not regulation, that would require O’Neal to use the general’s rank. But the blank name was as much a rebuke as his use of a blank rank. In better times O’Neal had referred to him as ‘sir’ or ‘general’ and even ‘colonel.’ Calling him ‘Jack’ in public was as good as a slap.

“We have a situation,” the general continued.

“People keep saying that,” O’Neal snorted. “What we have is a Mongolian Cluster Fuck, sir. Is General ‘the ACS is an unnecessary expenditure of resources’ gone?”

“Gramms has already been replaced,” Cutprice interjected. “And Captain Keren is currently explaining to his staff the words ‘fire support’ and ‘responsive fire.’ ”