A Hymn Before Battle lota-1

by John Ringo

  “Deese leettle pig went to market,” she whispered, targeting the Posleen sentry most likely to engage the diversion force first. Her task was to slow the pursuit without lowering the effectiveness of the diversion and without revealing her position. The nursery rhymes, set to a reggae beat, were a mnemonic to remember the order of fire. She had eleven rounds before reload and every round was plotted. “You know deese leettle piggy stayed home,” the first guard’s backup, “deese leettle piggy had roast beef,” a superior normal bent over its 3mm, “an deese leettle piggy had none,” its companion. The Posleen never seemed to be alone; they always moved in groups of two or more. “An deese leettle piggy went… ” a Posleen crouched by the entrance to one of the now-completed pyramids near the nestling pens. About then she expected the God Kings to start making their appearance. She figured on taking out at least two of the seven to ten before reloading.

  “Game,” the demo team was pulling back.

  “Set,” as Trapp reached contact position. She was glad it was him and not her. The quick little bastard was a master, whatever his technical ranking.

  “Match,” she whispered taking up slack on the trigger.

  “Initiate,” growled Master Sergeant Tung.

  She had barely seen Mueller and Ersin as they moved around the compound. Now their handiwork was evident. The two half-formed bunkers at the causeway were devoured in actinic silver fire as the C-9 atomic catalyst explosive did its job. Simultaneously the further line of bunkers was devoured in flames. Jets of plasma gouted from the palace on top of the farthest pyramid as a small antimatter charge detonated. Posleen began to pour from the huts like hornets from a hive as Ellsworthy serviced her targets and explosions continued to rock the compound.

  One little piggy did indeed go to market and one went home. With each shot the fifty caliber slammed into her shoulder like the kick of a horse, nearly unseating her from her perch in the tree. But when the two-ounce rounds punched through the Posleen’s centauroid chests the horse-sized creatures were hurled sideways, plate-sized exit holes and fountains of yellow ichor marking their end. Just as she reloaded, right on time, the first God King rushed into view, harness half slung. The leader caste was as easy meat as the rest and went up to the great smorgasbord in the sky, flattened across the deceased guard at its door.

  While the master sniper serviced her targets, Trapp had another job. As the Posleen sentry nearest the nestling pens turned to look at the violent silver flashes, an unnoticed black shadow detached itself from the ground. Not trusting the power of the silenced 9mm rounds against something with the mass of a small horse, Trapp put seven rounds into the sentry’s chest and three into its head in four seconds. The Posleen’s head exploded like a yellow melon and it joined its brethren in repose. Trapp cautiously tracked it to the ground then moved west to cover the left flank of the entry team.

  Richards moved directly into the compound and set up an M-60 light machine gun just beyond the pens as Master Sergeant Tung moved to the left with a medium laser. This left Mosovich and Martine to secure the objective.

  One problem with the Tchpth was that the team had no translation devices. Human-adapted AIDs had not been available before they left and the Himmit had been exceedingly reluctant to give up any of theirs. Thus Mosovich was forced to try pidgin Tchpth on the prisoners who looked for all the world to him like blue Alaskan King crabs. Martine had, so to speak, drawn the short straw and he had three sacks to fill up with nestling Posleen.

  Jake raced to the fence of the Tchpth compound and aspirated “TcKpth! !Klik! Tit! Tit!” which the Himmit had solemnly assured him meant “Friends here to help, move back, move back.”

  He was certain it would never work, but the instant the first word left his mouth, the remaining Tchpth jerked to the far side of the pen. He placed a sheet charge against the plastic slats and darted around the corner. The C-4 flashed white and a section of fence three feet across simply vanished. “Ikdee! Ikdee!” he shouted, gesturing for them to follow and ran for the jungle. He looked back and saw that none of them had moved. Each and every one remained in the pen. Cursing everything Galactic he ran back.

  In the meantime Staff Sergeant Martine had his own extraterrestrial problems. He had had the foresight to wear gloves, since the carnivorous Posleen had teeth like razors even as nestlings, but standard issue leather work gloves were never meant to deal with carnivore jaws and raptor talons. When he bent over the fence and reached in for the first specimen, as he had seen the God King reach in months before, he immediately discovered that there was a knack to grabbing nestlings.

  Like a snake, or a pissed-off cat, they were best grasped behind the neck. The blast of Mosovich’s charge drowned Martino’s bellow of pain and rage as the nestling snapped its tooth-filled maw onto his hand and whipped up to sink all six talons into his arm. But his imprecations could be heard clearly over the beginning sounds of battle in the distance.

  “F-f-f-f-co-co-cocksucker!” he managed to say in an intense stage whisper. He pounded the tenacious whelp against the fence several times until he could stun it enough to lever its saurian jaws apart and detach its talons.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” he cursed as he stuffed the unconscious pullet into the sack. He surveyed the remaining throng while shaking the blood from his hand. They in turn watched him. They obviously hoped he was supper. He thrust his hand in again and this time managed to snag the floppy skin on the back of one of the nestlings’ elongated necks. It let out a shriek and twisted in his grip, but he thrust the cat-sized extraterrestrial willy-nilly into the second sack.

  Mueller and Ersin had laid a series of trip-wire and command-detonated mines along the path the Posleen would take in pursuit and their flashes served to maintain the distraction, but one God King, at least, noticed the commotion by the pens and began to rally a counter attack. That notion was effectively quashed by a .50 caliber high velocity round, but the normals of that God King, and the others whose bonds had been released, were in a hyper-aggressive mood with the death of their masters. A group of them moved toward the disturbance at the pens and it was time to rock and roll.

  Richards opened the ball with direct fire from his M-60. The 7.62mm rounds tumbled Posleen to the ground, but the senseless carnivores totally ignored their losses and charged towards the source of the drifting tracers, few of them firing in return. Trapp and Ellsworthy added the weight of their fire, but until Tung added the power of his man-pack laser the tide was unstoppable. The combination managed to stop the first wave but the battle on the south side had drawn the attention of the main body away from the distraction, effectively negating its purpose.

  Mosovich gave up coaxing the crabs when the firing started. He leapt into the pen, through a forest of pincers, to the far side and began kicking them out through the opening. The Tchpth first turned towards their former homes, but seeing the raging battle to the north, they scattered southward towards the jungle, chittering in fear. By tracking back and forth waving his weapon, which had better uses at the moment in his opinion, he managed to drive them in the right general direction. He heard silvery laughter on the team net and looked up towards the trees.

  “Fuck you, Ellsworthy,” he snarled.

  She laughed again, preparing to meet the second wave. “Sorry, honey, but you look like a crab farmer with his flock.” Her laughter broke off in a flurry of directed fire at the trees and a gurgle. He saw a black shape detach itself from a branch and fall thirty meters to bone crushing stillness.

  “Incoming!” screamed Richards, as a God King saucer launched itself upwards. It swooped randomly up and left, as its heavy railgun tracked back and forth. Martine screamed and dropped as his legs were severed by the sheet of fire, and Master Sergeant Tung grunted and fell like a forest giant, blood pouring from his mouth.

  Jake turned away from his animal husbandry and charged towards the spot where the remains of Sandra Ellsworthy sprawled. Sweeping up her massive rifle he tracked onto the God King saucer an
d gave it a little lead. The recoil of the powerful weapon rocked him backwards as he fired “off hand.” The Posleen used an energy storage system similar to the Federation’s. A solid state module buried deep in the “battery” generated a field that permitted molecular bonds to be twisted far out of alignment. As energy was released, the bonds twisted back into their correct position, releasing their stored power. It was a mature technology that, while inherently dangerous, worked just fine as long as the stabilization module maintained integrity.

  The .50 caliber bullet punched through the light metal of the saucer and into its energy bottle. The round actually missed the stabilization module, but the dynamic shock wave of its passage transferred thousands of joules of energy through the matrix. Before the bullet had passed fully through the crystalline matrix the bonds had begun to shatter and release their massive energy in an uncontrolled explosion rivaling an antimatter charge.

  The blast flipped the saucer into the air and the mass of the God King saucer disappeared in the bright white flash. The shock wave slapped the sergeant major and Trapp to the ground, tossed Richards through the air like a flapjack and stunned or killed most of the front rank Posleen. It was followed by a searing wave of heat.

  After a moment Trapp and Mosovich stumbled to their feet, but Richards lay with his head flopped oddly to one side. Jake took one look at him, picked up Martine’s sacks and his Street Sweeper then ran for the jungle.

  20

  Planetary Transport Class Maruk,

  N-Space Transit Terra-Diess

  1147 GMT March 14th, 2002 ad

  Mike was lifting weights in a tiny gym tucked away between the number eighteen cargo hold and the gamma zone environmental spaces when his AID chirped, “You’re requested to report to General Houseman at your earliest convenience.”

  This request involved a number of problems. The first was their relative location. There were four troopships in the Expeditionary Force flotilla. One was occupied entirely by the Chinese divisions. Two had Allied Expeditionary Force, NATO units, U.S. III Corp, German, English, Dutch, Japanese and French. The last was filled with a mixed bag of Russian and Third World troops, southeast Asian, African and South American. With the exception of the NATO troops, the contingents were kept strictly segregated. Besides avoiding the cultural conflicts that would inevitably arise, this permitted the use of other nations’ forces when riots broke out within a force.

  For two months troops, mostly ill-prepared and trained, had been left in an interstellar limbo. There was ample horizontal room, but the low ceilings designed for Indowy and lack of wind, sun and space caused the troops to become stir-crazy even once the air, food and light problems were fixed. With no communication in or out while in fold space the units brooded into explosion. Once in the NATO ships and four times on the mixed ship, local arguments had gotten out of hand.

  The problem was that General Houseman, the III Corp and American contingent commander, spent time on both the Maruk, the ship Lieutenant O’Neal was on and the Sorduk, the other ship with NATO forces, as the ships dropped in and out of hyperspatial anomalies. His office and the bulk of III Corp were on the Maruk, but his commander, General Sir Walter Arnold, British Army, was on the Sorduk.

  “Where is the general?” he asked his AID, toweling off while stumping ponderously to the manual gravity controls.

  “General Houseman is in his office, Alpha Quad, ring five, deck A, right abaft NATO Senior Officers’ Quarters.”

  Made sense, the general wouldn’t expect him to come to the Sorduk without any warning. Second problem: when a Lieutenant General tells a First Lieutenant “at your earliest convenience” he means “right damn now.” But showing up in sweat-soaked PT uniform is Unacceptable Attire. Oh, well. He’d have to take time to change, but he was also about four kilometers away. This was going to be interesting.

  “Please send a message to the general that I am unavoidably detained and will not be able to reach his location for a minimum of… thirty minutes.”

  Third and insurmountable problem: He didn’t have the right uniform. All he brought were Fleet Strike uniforms and all the U.S. units were wearing regular Army uniforms: BDUs or Greens as appropriate. Therefore, he could show up in silks, daily work uniform, or blues, dress uniform.

  “What’s the uniform of the day for III Corp headquarters personnel?”

  “BDUs.” Battle dress uniform, regular camouflage. It would be replaced, had been in Mike’s case, by silks, but the two uniforms could not be more different. Therefore, blues might even be less conspicuous; it might be mistaken for some other country’s dress uniform.

  The Fleet Strike uniform design team had really thrown caution to the wind with the dress uniform. The color was a deep cobalt blue with, in officer’s case, thin piping at the seams in the color of the officer’s branch, in O’Neal’s case light blue for infantry. The piping was thermally activated and swirled with movement as the leg contacted the edge. The tunic was collarless without lapels and pressure sealed on the left side. It was a damn showy and conspicuous uniform, which militated against it. Silks it was.

  Twenty-seven minutes later First Lieutenant Michael O’Neal in gray silks and Terra blue beret, entered the outer office of the Commander, United States Ground Forces, Diess Expeditionary Force. Installed in the outer office, Cerberus at the gates, was a thick-set command sergeant major who looked as if he last smiled in 1968. Mike could have sworn he was fighting off a grin at Mike’s attire.

  Lieutenant O’Neal had traveled four kilometers, washed, shaved and changed in those twenty-seven minutes. It was only possible because he brought his suit to the gym. Instead of using normal hallways he had passed through a series of zero gee and unpressurized holds at speeds that still had him shaking. The suit’s semibiotic liner had scavenged his sweat and dirt and consumed the stubble on his face.

  When he got into his cabin it was only necessary to pop out of the suit and change. Unfortunately this last was severely inhibited by the suit. Although the suit was no more bulky than a fat man, and a short one at that, it had to be leaned against the wall and was immobile until he put it back on. To put on his trousers in the cramped cubicle it was necessary to straddle the suit’s leg and more or less bounce up and down. Once the process was done it left only an undignified rush through the junior officers’ quarters “up-country” to the senior levels.

  The sergeant major expressionlessly inspected the uniform then stood and walked to the inner door. He opened it without knocking. “Lieutenant O’Neal, sir.”

  “Send him in, Sergeant Major, by all means,” said an affable voice. O’Neal heard the distinct sound of a sheaf of papers hitting others, as when a folder is tossed onto an overloaded desk.

  The sergeant major stood aside, gestured for the lieutenant to enter and closed the door after him. Only with the door safely closed did he, without a change in expression, snort several times in laughter.

  The general had much in common, physically, with his sergeant major. Both had stocky builds of medium height, round florid faces and thinning gray-blond hair. All in all they looked not unlike a matched set of champion bulldogs. But, whereas the sergeant major wore a perpetual frown, the general’s face was creased in a smile and his mild blue eyes twinkled as Lieutenant O’Neal saluted.

  “Lieutenant O’Neal, reporting as ordered,” said Mike. Like all junior officers he was categorizing his sins and trying to decide which one had come to the general’s attention. However, unlike most he had ample experience with flag officers so he was less intimidated than many would have been.

  The general waved a hand at his forehead and said, “At ease, Lieutenant, as a matter of fact, grab a chair. Coffee?” The general grabbed his own mug and reached for a Westbend coffee maker hardwired into the wall.

  “Yes, sir, thank you.” Mike paused. “Did the Indowy wire that for you, sir?”

  “Indowy, hell.” The general snorted. “I had to get somebody from Corp maintenance to set up a portable
generator a couple of compartments over then drill through the damned wall. We’ve got mostly standard office equipment and we’re having a shitload of problems getting them integrated. Cream and sugar?” he continued graciously.

  “Much of both, thank you, sir. I could look into that for you, sir. I get along with Indowy pretty well, I think it’s because I’m their size.”

  “I understand that we already have you to thank for getting the damn lighting fixed. Not to mention finding the food we were supposed to be getting all along. Lots of time on your hands, Lieutenant?” The general handed Mike his coffee and took a sip of his own, peering at the lieutenant over the rim.

  “Sir?”

  “I had an interesting conversation with Oberst Kiel of the Bundeswehr the other day. I believe you know the Herr Oberst?”

  “Yes, sir. He was one of the GalTech Infantry Design team leaders for the NATO committee.”

  “He came through General Arnold, who asked me to talk to him on the subject of my ACS battalion. Do you have any idea what he said?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I understood that you were to advise the battalion on ACS techniques, is that correct?” asked the general, mildly.

  “Yes, sir,” said Mike. Now he knew where this was going. He was mildly surprised that the general was underinformed. The flag officer was in for a shock.

  “And how would you rate the battalion as an ACS unit?”

  “Low, sir,” said Mike, taking a sip of the coffee. He suppressed a grimace. Apparently the general was a Texan; you could have floated a horseshoe in the brew.

  “Thank you. Can I ask where you have been the last two months? Where you were today?” asked the general, anger building in his voice.

  “Under direct orders, until we made planet-fall, to keep to myself,” said Mike, forcing down another sip. Fortunately the way the conversation was going he was going to be able to put the cup down and avoid it soon.