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When the Devil Dances
John Ringo
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
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
Clayton, GA, United States, Sol III
2325 EDT Friday September 11, 2009 ad
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.
Europe was a massive battleground. The Posleen did poorly in extreme cold, not
from the cold so much as an inability to forage, so both the Scandinavian peninsula and
the Russian interior had been ignored. But Posleen forces had taken all of France and
Germany except portions of Bavaria and swept around in an unstoppable tide to take all
the North German plain to the edge of the Urals. There they had stopped more from
distaste for the conditions than any military resistance.
At this point there was resistance throughout the Alps and down through the Balkans
and Eastern Europe but the beleaguered survivors remained low on food, manufacturing
resources and hope. The rest of Europe, all of the lowlands and the bulk of the
historically "central" zones, were in Posleen hands.
America, through a combination of luck, terrain and strategic ruthlessness had
managed to survive.
On both coasts there were plains which, except for specific cities, had been ceded to
the Posleen. But the north-south mountain ranges on both sides of the continent, along
with the Mississippi, had permitted the country to reconsolidate and even locally
counterattack.
In the West the vast bulk of the Rockies protected the interior, preventing a link-up
between the Posleen trapped in the narrow strip of land between the mountains and the
sea. That narrow strip of land, however, had once contained a sizable percentage of the
population of the U.S. and the effect of the dislocation and civilian loss there was
tremendous. In the end most of the residents of California, Washington and Oregon made
it to safe havens in the Rockies. Most of them found themselves in the still-building
underground cities, the "Sub-Urbs" recommended by the Galactics. There they sat,
working in underground factories to produce the materials the war needed and sending
forth their hale to defend the lines.
There were many untapped sources of materials in the Rockies and all of them were
being exploited, but what was missing was food production. Prior to the first landing all
holds had been released on agricultural production and the American agricultural
juggernaut had responded magnificently. But most of the spare food had ended up being
sent to the few fortified cities on the plains. They were scheduled to hold out for five
years and food was their overriding concern. So there was, elsewhere, a severe shortage
when the first massive landing occurred. Almost all the productive farmlands in the west,
with the exception of the Klamath Basin, had been captured by the Posleen. So most of
the food for the Western Sub-Urbs had to be provided over a long, thin link across the
Northern Plains following I-94 and the Santa Fe Railroad. Sever that link and eighty-five
million people would slowly starve to death.
In the east it was much the same. The Appalachian line stretched from New York to
Georgia and linked up with the Tennessee River to create an uncrossable barrier from the
St. Lawrence to the Mississippi. The Appalachians, however, were nothing compared to
the Rockies. Not only were they lower throughout, but they had passes that were nearly
as open as flatland. Thus the Posleen found numerous places to assault all along the line.
And the fighting at all of them, Roanoke, Rochester, Chattanooga and others, had been
intense and bloody. In all the gaps regular formations, mixed with Galactic Armored
Combat Suits and the elite Ten Thousand, battled day and night against seemingly
unending waves of Posleen. But the lines held. They held at times only because the
survivors of an assault were too tired to run, but they held. They bent from time to time
but nowhere had they ever been fully sundered.
The importance of the Appalachian defenses could not be overstated. With the loss
of the coastal plains, and much of the Great Plains, the sole remaining large areas for
food production were Central Canada, the Cumberland plateau and the Ohio Valley. And
although the Canadian plains were high quality grain production areas, their total
production per acre was low and they were effectively unable to produce a range of
products. In addition, while there was increasing industry throughout British Columbia
and Quebec, the logistical problems of a broad-based economy in nearly sub-Arctic
conditions that had always plagued Canada continued even in the face of the Posleen
threat. It was impossible to shoehorn the entire surviving population of the U.S. into

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