A Hymn Before Battle lota-1

by John Ringo

“For shame. Real fifties story. Aliens land and start to help the human race. Better nutrition, end war, population control. They all carry this little book, they say the title is To Serve Man. One of the characters is a linguist trying to translate their language. All he has to work with is one copy of the book. End of the story a fortunate few are invited to go to the aliens’ planet. Linguist finally translates the book. It’s a cookbook.”

  “Uck. Besides, what’s the point? I thought the Darhel were vegetarians.”

  “All our translations are through the AIDs, programmed by the Darhel. All the information we have from off planet is through the Darhel. All the important decisions I have been witness to are influenced by the Darhel. I suspect they are involved in virtually all decisions relating to how to fight the war, and some extremely poor decisions are being reached. I know, the way they avoid being photographed you’ve probably never gotten a good look at one. Trust me, they may only eat vegetables, but they are not designed as herbivores. The Darhel are intelligent and pragmatic, so, why the bad decisions?”

  “What kind of bad decisions?”

  “All sorts. Hell, the current choice for Joint Chiefs, the future ‘High Commander,’ is a weasel!”

  “Mike, gimme a break! The Darhel don’t choose the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.”

  “You would be amazed what the Darhel have influence over.”

  “Isn’t anyone, I don’t know, cross-checking the assumptions? Looking at the Darhel?”

  “Yeah, there’s a supposedly black project doing just that, but that’s another thing: with very few exceptions the guys I’ve met who are on that project couldn’t find their ass with both hands. Now a project that is arguably the most fundamental intelligence requirement we have should have the best and brightest, not the incompetent nincompoops that have been assigned.”

  “Are you being… well, you can be kind of over-critical… occasionally.”

  “I can be a class-A son of a bitch is what you mean. Honey, one of the guys asked whether we could just perform an amphibious invasion of Diess, I shit you not. He did not quite seem to grasp, among other things, that space is a vacuum, that lasers travel in a more or less straight line and that Earth is curved. Either David Hume, who is the project manager, is a great actor, or he is one of the most remarkably stupid persons on Earth.”

  * * *

  Lieutenant Commander David Hume twisted his Annapolis ring twice and scratched the back of his head. His chief linguist, Mark Jervic, arguing a minor note of Tchpth declension with his assistant, paid absolutely no attention. After a moment Jervic nodded his head vigorously to some point or another and waved his arms wildly as if including the whole universe in a unanimity of linguistic holism.

  After lunch at a local delicatessen, Commander Hume walked to the Washington Mall and turned towards the Capitol along Independence Avenue. A bitter north wind was blowing down the mall, whipping the skeletal branches of the cherry trees back and forth in a way that was frankly ominous. He watched them for a moment wondering why they bothered him so. Finally, he realized that they reminded him of a line from Dante’s Inferno. The shiver that swept over him then had little to do with the bitter Christmas cold.

  When he was opposite the reflecting pool he turned into the mall and walked over. A moment later he was joined by Doctor Jervic, and the two ambled along the path to the Vietnam Memorial, just two more lunchtime strollers walking off their pastrami.

  Commander Hume pulled a bulky package from his briefcase and punched a crudely affixed button on the roughly formed plastic case. A passing jogger cursed all things Japanese as the powerful electromagnetic pulse shut down his Walkman for all time.

  “What about laser?” asked Jervic when the deed was done.

  “Difficult at best under these circumstances, same with shotgun mikes, and the background noise is the same frequency as human voice.”

  “Lip reading.”

  “Keep moving your head around,” Hume said, turning to look across the pool as he sat. “Well?”

  Although eighty percent of the personnel in “Operation Deep Look” were, in fact, high-grade morons, neither the project leader, who was a very, very good actor, nor his actual chief assistant fell into that category.

  “Shouldn’t you have asked that before you crossed the Rubicon, so to speak?” Mark asked, gesturing languidly at the EMP generator. “They are watching us, you know.” The Mystic river accent flowed like its namesake.

  “Of course I know; with my information we were across the Rubicon anyway. What do you have to add?” Hume asked sharply. He was willing to act the fool for the mission, but sometimes Dr. Jervic seemed to forget it was an act. After the two of them had battled it out in Boston for six long years, Mark should know by now who the brains of the outfit was.

  “Well, the AID’s translation programs have some interesting subprotocols in them. Very interesting.” Jervic, the former Harvard professor, paused and cracked his knuckles.

  “Skip the damn dramatics,” Hume snarled, “there is precisely no time.”

  “Very well,” Jervic sighed, “the protocols are deliberately deceptive, primarily in areas related to genetics, biotechnics, programming and, strangely, socio-political analysis. The deception is more than mere switching of words, it has a thematic base. The programming side of it is out of my depth, but there is no question that the Darhel are deliberately causing us to move towards dead ends in those fields. I find the thematic approach in sociology to be both the strangest and the strongest. There are constant deliberate translation errors and modifications of data related to human sociology, prehistory and archetypes.”

  “Archetypes,” mused Commander Hume. He glanced at Washington’s monument and wondered what George would have made of all of this. Probably not much; he would have foisted such underhanded shenanigans off on Benjamin Franklin.

  “Any of several apparently innate images in the psyche, found throughout human…”

  “I know what a damn archetype is, Mark,” David interrupted, angrily, drawn from his reverie. “That was ‘Archetypes,’ with an unspoken ‘Damn’ attached in the subjunctive case. Not ‘Archetypes? What the hell are archetypes?’ It happened to fit in with my data. Okay, it’s time to see if we really do have presidential access,” he continued, standing up. “You would not believe what I found in a Sanskrit translation…”

  “Hey, man, you got a light?” One of the ubiquitous street people of the Washington Mall stumbled blearily towards them, fumbling a dog-end.

  “Sorry, soldier,” said Commander Hume, noting the field jacket and scars, respectful to even this fallen soldier at the last. “Don’t smoke.”

  “It don’ matter, man,” the unshaven bum muttered, “Don’ matter.” Four rapid huffs from a silenced .45 caliber Colt followed and the pair of scientists slumped into the reflecting pool staining the pure waters red. “Don’ matter,” the bum muttered again, as the screams began.

  15

  Camp McCall, NC Sol III

  1123 May 6th, 2002 ad

  “Move it! Move it! Get out! Off the bus! Move it!”

  The young men in gray piled off the Greyhound bus, some in their haste tumbling to the ground. These unfortunates were unceremoniously yanked to their feet and hurled towards the group now milling into a half-assed formation. The three brawny young men and one brawny young woman doing the shouting had, four months before, gotten off the same kind of bus. Despite the corporal’s chevrons on their sleeves they were recently graduated privates chosen for their size, strength or fierceness as much as their motivated attitude. They broke the formation into four ragged groups and moved them, overloaded with duffel bags, to their respective assembly areas. The new recruits were chivvied into rough lines comprising three sides of a quad and then they got their first experience of a real drill sergeant. In second platoon’s unfortunate case it was Gunnery Sergeant Pappas. He was standing at parade rest in the center of the formation, apparently doing nothing but rocking backwards a
nd forwards contemplating the pleasant spring day. What he was actually doing was applying his personal philosophy of life to a situation he found totally out of control.

  He and the group recalled with him had been told that, thank you, we have all the senior NCOs we need for the Line and Strike formations. They were instead parceled out to Guard and training units as a leavening of experienced personnel. This was intended to “stiffen up” the units to which they were assigned. Gunny Pappas often considered the old adage that you cannot stiffen a bucket of spit with a handful of buckshot.

  But he was a Marine (or whatever they wanted to call him this week) and when given an order said “aye, aye, sir,” or “yes, sir,” or whatever, and performed it to the best of his ability. So when told he was going to be a DI, he naturally requested Pendleton, since that was right by his home of record. Ground Force Personnel naturally sent him to Camp McCall, North Carolina, three thousand miles away.

  Being in McCall might have been for the best. The Galactics had started to come through on one of their promises and he was one of the first group offered rejuvenation. The rejuv program was being run on a matrix of age, rank and seniority. Since the military ran on a framework of both an officer Corp and an equivalent NCO Corp, senior NCOs were prioritized with “equivalent” officers. As one of the oldest NCOs in the second layer of enlisted rank, he had received rejuvenation ahead of many sergeant majors that were younger. Thus, after a month of truly unpleasant reaction and growth, he found himself a physical twenty-year-old with a sixty-year-old’s mind. He had forgotten what it was really like, the physical feeling of invincibility and energy, a coursing drive to do something, anything, all the time. Regular heavy-duty workouts were returning the musculature of his prime. They also served to occupy his other energies.

  He had been a Marine for thirty years, twenty-seven of those married. During those twenty-seven years he had never strayed from the marriage bed. Not for him the phrase “I’m not divorced, just TDY.” He never thought less of the other NCOs, or officers, who took advantage of deployments to pick up some action; as long as it did not affect their performance he could care less. But he had made a wedding vow to “cleave unto no other” and he believed in keeping a promise. It was the same as “ ’til death do us part.” Now, however, he had a twenty-year-old’s body, and drives, and was married to a fifty-something wife. He was experiencing some difficulties with the situation. Fortunately or unfortunately, the pace of training the recalls and then using the recalls to train the new enlistees was so fierce he had not been able to get back to San Diego. The rejuv program was eventually supposed to be distributed to dependents of the military but he would believe it when he saw it. There were already rumors that the rejuv materials were running low, so who knew what to expect long term. He was really sweating his first meeting with Prissy.

  Heaping insult on injury, since the most senior NCOs, like himself, were recalled first, there was currently a glut of E-8s and E-9s, the two most senior enlisted ranks. In the Navy they were referring to it as “too many Chiefs.” In addition, because the emphasis was on training, most of the senior NCOs and officers were being assigned to basic and advanced training facilities. Therefore, instead of being assigned as the senior NCO in a company, he was assigned a mere platoon of recruits.

  Thus he was not in the best of moods when he greeted the group of forty-five young men he was to make into Marines (or Strike troopers or soldiers or hoplites or whatever the FUCK you wanted to call them). Characteristically this made him smile at them. The less perceptive, seeing that the drill sergeant was not the sadistic cretin they had been warned of but a kindly smiling fellow, tentatively smiled back. The more perceptive suspected, correctly, that they were in serious trouble.

  “Good morning, ladies,” he said in a low, friendly tone. “My name is Gunnery Sergeant Pappas.” The tone forced them to strain to hear. “For the next four months I will, I am sorry to say, be your drill sergeant. This fine, fit young fellow,” he gestured at the attending drill corporal, “is Drill Corporal Adams. Think of us as your personal Marquis de Sade. Sort of an aerobics instructor gone horribly wrong.

  “To begin learning that thing called military courtesy you will refer to me as if I were an officer. You will call me ‘sir’ and salute when greeting me. Is that clear?”

  “Yeah.” “Okay.” “No problem.” “Yes, sir!”

  “Oh, I am sorry. I didn’t hear that. The correct response is ‘Clear, sir.’ ”

  “Clear, sir.”

  He inserted a finger in one ear and dug around. “Sorry. I’m a bit hard of hearing. All the screams of dying recruits. A bit louder if you please.”

  “Clear, sir!” they yelled.

  “I am apparently not making myself clear,” he said very slowly and distinctly. “Front leaning rest position, move. For those cretins, meaning all of you of course that are unfamiliar with the term, that command means turn slightly to the right and assume the pushup position.” A few of the recruits quickly dropped, some began, hesitantly, to follow the quietly given order but most continued to stand uncomprehending.

  “Get down! On your face! Move it! Move it!” he boomed, much louder and more forcefully than the corporal, louder than their whole group. “Bend your elbows! You! Off the ground! Get yer butts down you pansies! Hold that! Look directly forward, heads up, eyes focused in the distance. Now, when I give an instruction that you understand the response is ‘Clear, sir.’ I expect it to be readily audible on Mars! Clear?”

  “Clear, sir!”

  “Now, I have found this position to be remarkably centering of attention. But, I can see that at least one of you is a body builder.” He walked over to this unfortunate, a hulking youth with a build like Hercules and lank black hair and squatted down so that he could look him in the eye. “I suspect that this is little strain for you, big boy. Is it?”

  “No, sir!”

  “Ah, truth, very good.” Sergeant Pappas stood up and then stepped carefully on the recruit’s back, centered on the shoulder blades. The burly youth grunted when the two hundred fifty pound drill instructor stepped on, but he held. “In the next sixteen weeks, Get yer head up asshole! it will be my duty to turn you pussies into Strike troopers. Get yer butts down, faggots! Strike units will be deployed from their home bases as formed units Get yer butts up! You pussies! If this asshole can hold me up, you can stay up yourselves! as formed units to engage the Posleen whenever and wherever they are badly needed. That means that while Guard and Line units may see combat, You! I said get up off your belly, cocksucker! Corporal Adams!”

  “Yessir!”

  “That fat cocksucker in the second row! See how far he can run before he throws up and passes out!”

  “Yessir! On yer feet, asshole! Move it!” The drill corporal yanked the unfortunate recruit to his feet and trotted him off into the distance.

  “Where was I, oh yes… While Guard units may see combat, you will see combat. My mission is to make you pussies hard enough and fast enough that some of you may survive.” He stepped off the recruit. “On your feet! I am about to fall you out into the barracks. There is no bunk assignment or shakedown. Inside the barracks there are two red boxes. If you have any contraband, drugs, personal weapons, knives, anything you suspect you shouldn’t have, put them in the box. If you keep them I will find them. Then I will send you to a place that makes boot camp seem friendly and homelike. Everybody but this asshole,” he indicated his erstwhile soapbox, “Fallout!”

  As the recruits grabbed their gear and pounded into the barracks he looked the remaining recruit up and down, noting the high wide cheekbones.

  “What’s yer name, asshole?”

  “Private Michael Ampele, sir!”

  “Hawaiian?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Daddy a marine, howlee?”

  The recruit blanched at that insult, where the expected “asshole” had little effect. “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “Think that’s gonna make me easi
er on you, howlee?”

  “Sir, no, sir!”

  “Why not?”

  “Sir, the strongest steel comes from the hottest fire, sir!”

  “Horse shit. The strongest steel comes from a precise combination of temperature, materials and conditions including a nitrogen fuckin’ atmosphere. I’m gonna kick yer ass for two reasons. One, nobody’s gonna accuse me of favoritism and two, these mainland wahines need an example.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Okay, yer the platoon guide,” he decided. “You know what that means.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the private, his face slightly green. “They fuck up, I get my ass kicked, sir.”

  “Yerright,” said Pappas with a smile. He puffed his lips out and grinned. “We got no time to fuck around with training, you little yardbirds are gonna be driven harder and faster than any group in history. Comprende? You think you can handle that and the responsibility of a platoon guide?”

  “Si, sir,” agreed the private.

  “I’ll take it on faith, howlee. I think you’re full of shit. Fall out.”

  Pappas shook his head in resignation as the private followed the others into the barracks. They kept dropping the training time, pushing the pipeline to deliver the recruits no matter what. Well, he would train them, as well as anyone could expect in the time allowed. But he was glad he was not going to war with them. It was too chancy a business.

  16

  Ttckpt Province, Barwhon V

  0409 GMT, September 28th, 2001 ad

  The second objective of the Special Operations recon was a two-week hike through a killer swamp; more than half the time they were up to their necks in frigid water. Their brief halts at night were broken by involuntary shivering, and by the time they reached the objective area even Master Sergeant Tung was looking wan. The previous area’s foragers did not seem to be in evidence, but the team increased their caution as they neared the Tchpth town. Soon the regular buzz of an encampment could be heard through the sound-devouring mists, and Mosovich sent Trapp and Ellsworthy forward to investigate. The wait seemed interminable until the irrepressible SEAL suddenly appeared out of the muck in their midst. With a muddy grin he gestured them forward and led the way to the edge of the wetland.