A Hymn Before Battle lota-1

by John Ringo

  “No, dangit, I don’t want your dang report. I asked you where Captain Wright was.” The panting of the officer over the circuit was eerie, like an obscene phone call.

  “Captain Wright is irretrievable with what we have available, Major. He put me in command of the mobile survivors and put himself into hibernation.”

  “Well, the hell if any trumped up sergeant is going to lead my troops,” said the major, his voice cracking and ending on a high wavery note. “Where the hell are the rest of the officers?”

  “I am the only remaining officer, Major,” O’Neal said reasonably. “There are one sergeant first class, three staff sergeants and five sergeants, sir. I am the only officer on site.”

  “I do not have time for this,” spit the commander, “put me through to another officer.”

  “Sir, I just said that there are no other officers.”

  “Dangit, Lieutenant, get me Captain Wright and get him now or I’ll have you court-martialed!”

  “Sir,” Mike choked. He began to realize that Major Pauley was not tracking well. The position of the retreating ACS battalion should have prepared him somewhat, but nothing could have fully prepared him. “Sir…” he started again.

  “Dangit, Lieutenant, get those troops back here now! I need all the forces I can get! I don’t have time to eff around with this. Get me through to Captain Wright!”

  “Yes, sir,” Mike did not know what to do, but ending this conversation would be a start. “I’ll get the troops to your location as fast as I can and get Captain Wright to contact you as soon as possible.”

  “That’s better. And put him back in command, dang you. How dare you usurp command, you young puppy! I’ll have you court-martialed for this! Put yourself on report!”

  “Yes, sir, right away, sir. Out here. Michelle, cut transmission.” He thought for a moment. “Michelle, who is next in this rat-fuck chain of command?”

  “Brigadier General Marlatt is MIA. That makes it General Houseman.”

  “Okay, who is left in the battalion chain.”

  “Major Norton and Captain Brandon are still in action and collocated with the battalion.”

  “Put me through to Captain Brandon.”

  “Left, left! Bravo team, move back!” Captain Brandon was maneuvering the remaining troops in contact on an open channel, usually used for platoon maneuver. Since from the map Mike was scanning Brandon was in command of fewer than forty troopers, it fit the condition.

  “Captain Brandon.”

  “AID, partial privacy,” said the captain quickly. “O’Neal? Is that you? I figured you were dead under your pyramid.

  “Thanks for the cover,” Brandon continued sarcastically, “unfortunately most of my damn company didn’t quite make it out of the building!”

  “That explosion was not the demolition charges, although they were detonated sympathetically,” Mike began, lamely.

  “Fine, now come up with some miracle to get us out of this nightmare! Or give me my damn company back!” the captain ended angrily.

  “I have some of your troops down here, sir. We’re going to start E and Eing out of here as soon as the rest link up. But, I just tried to report to Major Pauley, and, well, he was…”

  “Babbling,” Brandon said, flatly.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We know, thank you. Anything else?”

  “Well,…”, go ahead, he thought, say it. “What the hell do I do, sir? I’m… I’m just…” he bit back what he was about to say, “… not sure what course to follow, sir.”

  “I don’t have time to hold your hand, O’Neal. Do whatever you think will do the most damage to the enemy until you can get back in contact. Take that as an order, if it helps.”

  “Yes, sir.” Deep breath. “Airborne, sir.”

  “O’Neal.”

  “Sir?”

  There was a short pause. “Fuck that shit about being a jumped up NCO, you saved our asses by dropping the buildings. Sorry about jumping your ass, it wasn’t right. So, good hunting. Pile ’em up like cordwood, Lieutenant. That’s an order.” The officer’s voice was firm and unwavering.

  “Yes, sir,” said Mike, unfelt conviction in every syllable. “Air-fucking-borne.” Vaya con Dios, Captain.

  “Now get off my damn freq; I got a war to run here. Alpha team! Position Five! Follow the ball! Move!”

  30

  Andata Province, Diess IV

  0626 GMT May 19th, 2002 ad

  As Mike whipped in the current, dangling like a lure on a trolling line, he really wished he had either been smarter, and had come up with a better plan, or stupider and had not thought of this one.

  Once the improvised air lock was in place and area flooded, the next problem was how to move through the water mains. Between ongoing use in unconquered areas and unsealed breaches, the flow rate was high. An unencumbered person who is a good swimmer can only swim against three to four knots of current. The water was flowing past their location at what Mike judged to be about seven knots.

  Mike had trained under water in battle armor, but never with a current. When he checked the flow going past at the first “T” intersection he experienced a sinking suspicion that his armor would not handle worth a damn, especially since the lack of power meant he could not “fly” the suit under impellers. He was still unsure what the mission plan would be, other than “to stack ’em up like cordwood” but he fully intended to see Diess’ fluorescent light again, and soon. That meant getting out from under the zone of total destruction and the only way out from under the buildings was through the water mains, current or no current. Since swimming the armor was out, that left “rappeling” down the current. He worked out a route that flowed with the currents and would come out under a building three blocks away from Qualtren. Since the first principle of leadership was that you never asked someone to do something you would not do, Mike elected, over the protests of his platoon sergeant, to scout the first bound.

  A line would be secured at the starting point by universal clamp and paid out with the scout, in this case O’Neal, dangling from it like a spider in the current. Waypoints had been determined, areas where there should be lower currents, and there personnel could be marshaled for the next bound. After the first bound, it had been agreed, other troops would take over the scouting duties. Once the line was emplaced the following troops would clip to the line and rappel to the waypoint.

  The winch and line were built-in features of the suits. The winch was a bulge the size of a pack of cigarettes on the back of the suit and the line was thinner than a pencil lead. Designed for microgravity work they were rated to reel in a fully loaded suit against three gravities. On the other hand although the reel system and the universal clamp, a “magnet” that acted on a proton-sharing technology, had been extensively tested for full immersion, neither had been tested under heavy strain while fully immersed.

  That lack of testing, since he had been the test pilot, was a personal indignity of the highest order. If there was any failure Mike had precisely no one else to blame. As he went bouncing off into the darkness he would be forced to curse only himself: designer, test pilot, user. Idiot.

  For it was inky darkness his suit lights barely penetrated. Silt from breaks swirled through the tube and as he twisted wildly in the raging current the light swung randomly, illuminating for a moment then being swallowed by the turbidity. A moment’s flash of wall, empty water, wall, opening, broken bits of plascrete from the shattered infrastructure, what was once an Indowy. The feeling of helplessness, swirling movement and flashing lights induced massive vertigo. He abruptly vomited, the ejecta captured and efficiently scavenged by the helmet systems.

  “Down,” he continued. “How much farther?” He would have looked, but he had to close his eyes for a moment. That made it worse so he opened them again and glued his eyes to the suit systems, checking the schematic just as the suit slammed into the wall. The heavy impact was more than absorbed by the suit systems and Mike hardly noticed.r />
  “Two hundred seventy-five meters to waypoint one,” answered the AID.

  “Increase rate of descent to five meters per second.”

  As the descent rate increased, the swirling lessened, the suit moving at approximately the rate of the current. He started stabilizing himself, fending himself away the next time he swung toward the wall.

  “Michelle, adjust the winch to maintain a tension of ten pounds regardless of rate of descent, up rate of descent to ten meters per second.”

  “Lieutenant O’Neal, if you strike a serious obstacle at ten meters per second, it could cause serious damage. Regulation maximum uncontrolled movement is seven meters per second.”

  “Michelle, I wrote that spec, and it’s a good spec, I like it. But there are times when you have to push the specifications a little. Let me put it this way, what was the maximum gravities sustained by a mobile survivor of the fuel-air explosion under Qualtren?”

  “Private Slattery sustained sixty-five gravities for five microseconds and over twenty for three seconds,” answered the AID.

  “Then I think I can take hitting concrete at an itty-bitty thirty or forty feet per second,” Mike answered with a smile.

  “Nonetheless, his suit systems indicate some internal bleeding,” protested the AID.

  “Is he still functioning?”

  “Barely.”

  “ ’Nuff said.”

  Her silence was as good as a sniff of derision to Mike after so much time in the suit. He had amassed over three thousand hours before this little adventure and he, the suit and the AID were now a smoothly running team. This was again proven when Michelle started flashing an unprompted warning as the waypoint appeared. Restrained by her programming, she could not override his rate setting but she could communicate the need to start slowing down quite pointedly. He sometimes wondered where she had picked up so much personality. Most of the other AIDs he dealt with tended to be flat. He decided to tweak her nose a bit and let the rate setting ride until the last moment. Playing chicken with an AID, what would he do next?

  As the waypoint loomed up through the haze he thumbed the manual winch control. The descent braked to a stop just as Michelle intoned “Ahhh, Mike?”

  “Gotcha,” he laughed. Again the lack of response was pointed. The braking maneuver immediately started him spinning near the far side of the three-meter tube. He let out a few more feet and tried to “fly” over to the opening by twisting his body into a position used in skydiving called a “delta track.” Essentially it forms the body into a self-directed arrow. Unfortunately, the external design of the suit did not lend itself to the maneuver and although he swung briefly toward the opening he just as swiftly swung back. He grasped the line and tried to swing toward the opening again, but the current and the geometry of the movement defeated him.

  He finally stopped the spin by the simple expedient of switching on his boot clamps, universal binders again, locking his feet onto the far wall, and studied the problem. He had to cross three meters of water with every bit of physics working against him. Wait, which way was gravity? Well, it was perpendicular to the direction of movement, so that was no help. He slowly paid out the line until he was perpendicular to the wall on which he stood facing into the current. He deliberately stopped thinking about gravity again, and stretched his arms as far as they would go. No way to reach, he was way too short. What to do, what to do?

  Suit boots. Damn. He released his right boot, stepped a foot sideways and reclamped it. Then the left boot. Step. Clamp.

  “Lieutenant O’Neal?” sounded a concerned Sergeant Green a few minutes later.

  “Yeah?” Mike puffed.

  “You okay, sir?”

  “Yeah,” Mike grunted, fighting the physics of the situation was like carrying a boulder up a hill and the suit almost made it worse; the pseudomusculature had never been designed to side step against current. My fault again. “I’m almost to the first waypoint,” he gasped. “Get the first team ready.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Now he was climbing up the side of the slippery tunnel. The boots refused to slide, a tribute to the Indowy makers he decided, not the idiot designer, but getting them to clamp was noticeably harder. Finally he got a boot over the sill and with his right hand he clamped a binder onto the waypoint wall. Switching grips on the binder he rolled into the still waters of the side tunnel with a final grunt.

  “No rest for the wicked,” he rasped, sucking in oxygen and pulling himself up the wall. “Michelle, increase the O2 percentage, please, before I panic.”

  “Say again sir?”

  “Nothing Sergeant,” Mike said, fighting a desire to tear off the armor and get a really deep breath. Of water. The increased O2 level started to help the oxygen starvation. “I’m down. Recheck those binders and I’ll clamp off on this end.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Send the next suck… ah, volunteer for the bound down first.” Mike said as he clamped the end of the line to the ceiling. He let out a few feet of slack and then clamped his line to the wall, belaying himself into the tunnel. “I definitely need to brief him. This is not as easy as I thought it would be.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Green, with a chuckle. “I will tell you that you just made me fifty bucks. The betting was five to one that you wouldn’t make it at all.”

  “Beg pardon. I designed these systems. I, at least, had total confidence in them.” In a pig’s eye. “It’s just the last part that’s hard.”

  “Ah, airborne, sir, whatever you say.”

  The rest of the move out of the zone of destruction was time consuming, but not dangerous. As the move progressed the line men discovered myriad techniques to overcome the flow. Notably, stopping before the occasional turn and walking through. After three more hours they reached a pump room four kilometers beyond Qualtren in the subbasement of another megascraper.

  Ensuring that there were no Posleen in the area, Mike put the AIDs on guard and ordered the troops to get some rest. He, on the other hand, had to keep going. His problem was that although he had fifty some odd troops who, as soon as they got some rest, would be ready to murder anything with more that two legs, they were effectively weaponless. Their external weapons had been swept away in the explosion and only the few gunners with sidearms still had projectile weapons. On the other hand they each were carrying several thousand rounds of ammunition that used antimatter as a power source so there had to be something they could do. First he had to catch up on “the big picture.”

  Mike felt too drained to use the voice systems so he called up a virtual desktop. His first query reported the current overall battlefield. The schematic was far worse. There was now a second green line in contact with the Posleen mass. The primary defensive line the mobile units were supposed to hold the Posleen back from for twenty-four hours had been reached at twelve.

  The mobile units, what was left of them, had been pushed to the sea and were encircled with their backs to it. Mike ran another query and watched as the perimeter withdrew, flickered and died. Eight hours. The same operational projection called for the primary defense line to break in eighteen to twenty-four.

  Next he located the remainder of the 325th in reserve of the primary defensive line. The ACS unit had been the only mobile unit able to retreat fast enough to avoid being encircled. He did not bother to determine his new chain of command, he assumed that Major Pauley was no longer in command and that would make the new commander Major Norton. That was no improvement from his point of view. It looked on the map like the American unit had been grouped with, possibly under, the German unit.

  The encircled perimeter of armor units consisted mainly of French, German and English units. The 17th Cav, farthest from the sea and with its right flank left vulnerable by the retreat of the 325th must have been rapidly eliminated. Shades of Little Bighorn. It didn’t have to happen this way. The primary Posleen assault through the sector had been decisively crushed, literally, by the demolition of Qualtren and
Qualtrev. With the reinforcement of the battalion, 7th Cav could have survived. If the oil had not detonated, shattering the battalion’s morale and killing Colonel Youngman. It would have worked… And it could work again, he thought. No weapons, but lots of explosives. We could break that encirclement. He started sketching out a battleplan.

  “Michelle, see if you can get either General Houseman or General Bridges. I think we can pull this rabbit out of the hat, yet.”

  * * *

  “Sir, First Lieutenant O’Neal, from the ACS unit is on the horn. He insists on talking to you.”

  Lucius Houseman was in no mood to talk to Lieutenant O’Neal at the moment. He could read maps just as well as the lieutenant and if he could not he had any number of staff officers ready to tell him what the morrow would bring. Once the mobile units trapped against the sea were finished off, the Posleen there would come after the primary defensive line in a serious way. It would be poorly defended without the support of the cavalry divisions destroyed by the retreat. He now had to agree with the lieutenant that the ACS unit had not been ready for combat, not that as a cavalryman he had ever had the liveliest faith in the damn airborne. But he also did not want to listen to O’Neal say “I told you so!” in any way shape or form.

  He also had heard some rumor that the destruction of the battalion before the combat was even fully joined was because of some cockamamie plan on the part of the “expert” he had been saddled with. He considered for a full minute whether to take the call. His thinking, after twenty hours of watching his forces being destroyed piecemeal, was getting sluggish. He took a sip of tepid water from a canteen and considered his options. I guess that is what I get for splitting my forces in the face of the enemy. We could go nuclear, he thought, it would give us a breather, push them back for a space. Finally he nodded and the aide handed him the receiver.

  “What do you want, O’Neal?” he snapped shortly.

  “I can pull this out, sir.”

  “What?”