When the Devil Dances
by John Ringo
Call me not false, beloved,
If, from your scarce-known breast
So little time removed,
In other arms I rest.
For this more ancient bride,
Whom coldly I embrace,
Was constant at my side
Before I saw thy face.
Live, then, whom Life shall cure,
Almost, of Memory,
And leave us to endure
Its immortality.
— Rudyard Kipling
“The Bridegroom”
Epitaphs of the War
Dedicated to:
Thomas Burnett, 38, father of three, and all the other warriors of flight 93.
They died that others might live.
Posleen Invasion Timeline
October 9, 2004 — First Landing Five Globes: Landings: Fredericksburg, Central Africa, S.E. Asia, Uzbekistan.
July 28, 2005 — First Wave 62 Globes: Primary Landings: East Coast North America, Australia, India.
August 15, 2005 — Last Transmission: Australian Defense Command, Alice Springs.
April 12, 2006 — Second Wave 45 Globes: Primary Landings: China, South America, West Coast N.A., Middle East, S.E. Asia.
May 14, 2006 — Last Transmission: Chinese Red Army, Xianging.
May 28, 2006 — Last Transmission: Turkic Alliance, Jalalabad.
June 18, 2006 — Last Transmission: Combined Indochina Command, Angkor Wat.
December 19, 2006 — Last Transmission: Allies of the Book, Jerusalem.
January 23, 2007 — Battle of L3: Loss of Supermonitor Lexington, Task Fleet 4.2.
February 17, 2007 — Battle of Titan Base.
March 27, 2007 — Third Wave 73 Globes: Landings: Europe, North Africa, India II, South America II.
April 30, 2007 — Last Transmission: Islamic Defense Forces, Khartoum.
July 5, 2007 — Last Transmission: Indian Defense Force, Gujarrat.
August 25, 2007 — Last Transmission: Forces of Bolivar, Paraguay.
September 24, 2007 — First Battle of Irmansul: Loss of Supermonitor Enterprise, Yamato, Halsey, Lexington II, Kuznetsov, Victory, Bismarck. Task Fleets 77.1, 4.4, 11.
December 17, 2007 — Second Battle of Earth: Loss of Supermonitor Moscow, Honshu, Mao. Task Fleet 7.1, 4.1, 14.
December 18, 2007 — Fourth Wave 65 Globes: Primary Landings: China II, East Coast North America II, Europe II, India III.
March 14, 2008 — Last Transmission: European Union Forces, Innsbruck.
August 28, 2008 — Fifth Wave 64 Globes: Primary Landings: West Coast North America II, East Coast North America III, Russia, Central Asia, South Africa, South America III.
September 17, 2008 — Last Transmission: Grand African Alliance, Pietermaritzburg.
October 12, 2008 — Last Transmission: Red Army, Nizhny Novgorod.
October 21, 2008 — Official Determination: No coherent field forces outside of North America.
November 14, 2008 — Second Battle of Irmansul: Loss of Supermonitor Lexington III, Yamato II, Task Fleet 14.
December 1, 2008 — Senate Select Committee classified report: Earth Human Population Estimate 1.4 billion Posleen Population Estimate: In excess of 12 billion.
May 26, 2009 — Last operational Posleen force destroyed on Irmansul.
CHAPTER 1
Clayton, GA, United States, Sol III
2325 EDT Friday September 11, 2009 ad
The Commando’s Prayer
Give me, my God, what you still have;
give me what no one asks for.
I do not ask for wealth, nor success,
nor even health.
People ask you so often, God, for all that,
that you cannot have any left.
Give me, my God, what you still have.
Give me what people refuse to accept from you.
I want insecurity and disquietude;
I want turmoil and brawl.
And if you should give them to me,
my God, once and for all,
let me be sure to have them always,
for I will not always
have the courage to ask for them.
— Corporal Zirnheld
Special Air Service
1942
The night sky over the ruins of Clayton, Georgia, was rent by fire as a brigade’s worth of artillery filled the air with shrapnel. The purple-orange light of the variable time rounds revealed the skeleton of a shelled-out Burger King and the scurrying centauroid shapes of the Posleen invaders.
The crocodile-headed aliens scattered under the hammer of the guns and Sergeant Major Mosovich grinned at the metronomic firing of the team sniper. There had been three God Kings leading the Posleen battalion, what the invaders called an “oolt’ondar,” a unit over size varying from a human battalion to a division. Two of the three leader castes had been tossed from their saucer-shaped antigrav craft with two precisely targeted rounds before the last had increased the speed of his saucer-shaped craft and flown quickly out of sight. Once he was gone the sniper began working on the Posleen “normals.”
The rest of Long Range Reconnaissance Team Five held its fire. Unlike the sniper, with his match-grade .50 caliber rifle, the tracers from the rest of the team would be sure to give them away. And then it would be wheat against the scythe; even without their leaders, the battalion of semi-intelligent normals would be able to wipe a LRRP team off the map.
So they directed and corrected the artillery barrage until all of the remaining aliens had scattered out of sight.
“Good shoot,” Mueller said, quietly, glancing at the dozens of horse-sized bodies scattered on the roads. The big, blond master sergeant had been fighting or training to fight the Posleen since before most of the world knew they existed. Like Mosovich he had seen most of the bad, and what little good, there had been of the invasion.
When they first got orders to fire up any targets of opportunity while on patrols it did not seem to be a good idea. He’d been chased by the Posleen before and it was no fun. The aliens were faster and had more endurance than humans; getting them off your trail required incredible stealth or sufficient firepower.
However, the invaders never seemed to sustain any pursuit beyond certain zones, and the LRRPs
had sufficient firepower to wipe out most of their pursuers. So now they took every chance they could to “fire-up” the invaders. And, truth be told, they took a certain perverse satisfaction from a good artillery shoot.
“Took ’em long enough,” Sergeant Nichols groused. The E-5 was a recent transfer from the Ten Thousand. Like all the Spartans the sergeant was as hard as the barrel of his sniper rifle. But he had a lot to learn about being beyond the Wall.
“Arty’s usually late,” said Mueller, getting to his feet. Like the sniper, the team second, who always took point, was draped in a ghillie cloak. The dangling strips of cloth, designed to break up the human outline and make a soldier nearly invisible in the brush, were occasionally a pain. But it was manifestly useful in hiding the oversized master sergeant.
The lines along the Eastern seaboard had been stable for nearly two years. Each side had strengths and weaknesses and the combination had settled into stalemate.
The Posleen had extremely advanced weaponry, hundreds of generations better than the humans. Their light-weight hypervelocity missiles could open up a main battle tank or a bunker like a tin can and every tenth “normal” carried one. The plasma cannons and heavy railguns mounted on the God King’s saucers were nearly as effective and the sensor suite on each saucer swept the air clear of any aircraft or missile that crested the horizon.
In addition to their technological edge they outnumbered the human defenders. The five invasion waves that had hit Earth, and the numerous “minor” landings in between, had ended up dropping two billion Posleen on the beleaguered planet. And it only took two years for a Posleen to reach maturity. How many there were on Earth at this point was impossible to estimate.
Of course not all of those had landed on North America. Indeed, compared to the rest of the world the U.S. was relatively unscathed. Africa, with the exception of some guerrilla activity in central jungles and South African ranges, had been virtually wiped from the map as a “human” continent. Asia had suffered nearly as badly. The horselike Posleen were at a distinct disadvantage in mountainous and jungle terrain, so portions of Southeast Asia, especially the Himalayas, Burma and portions of Indochina, were still in active resistance. But China and India were practically Posleen provinces. It had taken the horses less than a month to cross China, repeating Mao’s “Long March” and, along the way, slaughtering a quarter of the Earth’s population. Most of Australia and the majority of South America, with the exception of the deep jungle and the Andes spine, had fallen as well.
