Two very big battles happening this chapter.
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The battle of Corpus Christi began almost as a complete surprise. Corporal John Figueroa idly watched from his foxhole, his eyes barely above ground level but still seeing the distant shapes of eye-guys dimly in the early morning light, visible mostly by the orange glare of their eyelights. The NCR's men were pressing closer every day, digging their foxholes and dugouts closer and closer to the Enclave lines. Sporadic bursts of plasma and laser fire, exchanges of mortar shells and mini-nukes, all were meeting in action night and day. The only problem was that the NCR had to let up at night; the Old World bastards were always getting the better of them in the darkness, when NCR soldiers couldn't fire on them without exposing their own positions. The PA and Ranger units, equipped with night vision gear at levels equal to the Enclave soldiers, were holding their own – but Figueroa was no powered soldier or Ranger.
That was when the shells started raining. They came roaring in from seawards, making bigger blasts even than the Old World vultures' nuke-launchers, dozens all at once. Corporal Figueroa held himself prone to the ground and pushed his hands tight to his ear, dirt covering the glasses of his gas-mask helmet – anything to stop the awful drumbeat of the battleship shells larger by far than the Enclave's heaviest land-bound guns, every shot loud as a thundercrack. Behind the lines, at NCR Army AA positions, depots, regimental HQs, everything just vanished in roaring waves of earth and fire, plasma and fusion shells mixed with thermobarics annihilating everything, turning metal to slag, earth to glass, and men to vapour. Then, the Marines' organic artillery added their voices to the choir – mixed Electric Ediths and dedicated Longbow vehicles, the latter sending multiple rounds at different speeds and ballistic arcs so that each hit at the same time – electronic fire control, autoloaders and elmag propulsion made each piece near-equal to a battery.
Figueroa chanced to look up, his ears in agony, barely able to hear as the distant boom of explosive blasts came from everywhere around him. Then he saw white streaks across the sky, moving so fast he could barely notice their presence, the roar of their passing coming only long after they'd already gone. A terrible sense of doom filled him as to what those white streaks meant.
