A Hymn Before Battle lota-1

by John Ringo

  “Well, sir,” said Sergeant Green with upraised palms, “that Froggie general is a real pistol. He just rolled in and organized. I can see now why his troops think he walks on water. He wants to see you ASAP, sir.”

  “Okay, get me up to date then rack out.” Mike took another sip of mud and had Michelle replay all the sensor data since the battle at ten times speed. He was afraid he had missed stuff during his hallucinatory period. As the unit counters flickered on his screen he listened to Sergeant Green with half an ear.

  “First and fourth are up helping the Krauts through to the MLR, sir. They’re not having much difficulty, they’re using some good deception techniques and the scouts are flanking them through the buildings and taking out the God Kings ahead of them as we go. We lost Creyton, though. I think the God Kings’ targeting systems are learning about snipers. I told them to shoot and scoot since that.

  “The Frogs are securing the boulevard as they move and the MLR is going to sortie and hold the last intersection. The German ACS unit inserted a company behind the Posleen in their sector, using the tunnels, and are tearing them up on that end of the MLR. Generally, the Posleen assault is in disarray but Corp doesn’t expect that to last much longer.”

  He replayed some of the details at slower speed and confirmed a hunch. When he tagged the Posleen unit that had killed Specialist Creyton and ran it back, it was the Posleen battalion that just made it out of the nutcracker.

  “Nice briefing,” said Mike, following the movements of the particular battalion until all intelligence units lost contact with it.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Sergeant Green, pleased.

  “Where’d you get that information?” Mike raised his eyebrow at his energy levels then nodded at the reason. He the noticed the engineers were still ministering to the sleepers, but they had also started a sleep rotation.

  “Hey, I’ve been watching you for the last two days, sir. I told my AID to learn from yours and when I asked it for a briefing it told me most of it.”

  “Okay,” said O’Neal with an unseen smile. “On to the French general.”

  “General Crenaus. Organized as hell, real friendly bastard but don’t let his personality fool you, he’s a pistol. And apparently Sergeant Duncan played you up to him real big. The general wondered that you had to sleep; he said he’d heard you were made of steel and rubber.”

  “Hah! Right now I feel like I’m made out of jello and that stuff you find between your toes.” Mike finally popped his helmet and took a whiff. The stink of Posleen was noticeably faded. Sergeant Green noticed his expression.

  “When the engineers showed the Frogs how to get water, the general put some of his troops to work washing the Posleen out to sea, sir. For a while there it was getting pretty whiff out of the suits,” the NCO admitted.

  “Formidablè.”

  “Huh? Sorry. Huh, sir?”

  “Formidable.”

  “Yes, sir,” the staff sergeant admitted. “That’s General Crenaus in a word.”

  “And last but certainly not least, speaking of Sergeant Duncan?” Mike punched up Duncan’s location and frowned.

  “The Brits are just now reaching the Frog perimeter, sir. They’re just going to be shuttled through to the MLR.”

  “And the American unit?” asked Mike, scanning back and forth for eagle icons. They were damned few and far between and all represented small units.

  “There ain’t an American unit, sir,” said the sergeant, somberly.

  “What?”

  “Williams is reporting scattered survivors, quite a few of them, and they apparently were putting up a hell of a fight, but it’s a mishmash of platoon- and company-size units, none of them the original force. There are even a few senior officers, but they’re in command of companies and platoons made up of clerks. It’s really confused, sir.”

  “Bit of a dog’s breakfast. Okay, I’ll send in the rest of the squad in two-man teams to roust out as many of the survivors as possible. When they get back, we’ll pull out.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  “Hit the rack. What’s the schedule on the rest?”

  “Umm, when first and fourth get back, they take up the defense and third and fifth rest, sir”

  “Right, get some sleep.”

  “Yes, sir.” The NCO’s speech was starting to slur. He slumped on the block the lieutenant had vacated and was instantly asleep.

  Mike contacted second squad and told them they had thirty minutes to round up all the stragglers and get them moving back to the intersection. Then he went to find the “formidablè” French general.

  He found him in the former German command post, talking to Corp on the panzer’s transmitter. Mike stood aside as aides scurried in and out with reports and orders. Surrounded by the babble of a functioning command post he felt out of place in his smoke-stained battle armor. Despite the rigors of their combat most of the officers and men of the command post were well turned out in neat if not crisp fatigues. Next to them his armor seemed rather shabby.

  Yeah, but they’d be nestling fodder by now if it wasn’t for us.

  The general looked up and fixed him with a glance, “Lieutenant O’Neal?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. Sergeant Green said you wanted to see me.”

  “We’ve reports that the Posleen are massing. What’s the ETA on those other units.”

  “I told second squad thirty minutes then start falling back. As long after that as it takes, I suppose, sir.” Mike’s shrug went unnoticed inside the armor.

  “And your estimate is?”

  “One hour, total, sir. The American unit is shattered fragments. My men are going to have to go through with loudspeakers, effectively.”

  “Won’t that make them a target?” interjected one French staff officer.

  Mike flicked a switch and a hologram of a snarling panther’s head was superimposed on the helmet. “One less Posleen more or less is what that’ll mean, sir,” he said.

  General Crenaus laughed, “So, a product exactly as marketed! You are as fierce as your sergeant suggested, yes! Well, we need such in this hour! Come, let us talk.” He gestured for Mike to precede him deeper into the building.

  He stopped at a short distance from the command post. The area was near the deepest penetration of the Posleen in the panzer’s sector. The walls were bullet pocked and torched, large holes blasted through them by 120mm cannon and hypervelocity missiles. Mike’s feet ground drifts of shell casings under his thousand-pound armor. The general looked up at a gutted Marder AFV then turned and tapped Mike’s chest.

  “In here beats the heart of a warrior, Lieutenant O’Neal,” he said seriously. “But warrior and soldier are not always the same thing. Do you have the discipline of a soldier or only the fierceness of a warrior?”

  “I can take and give orders, sir,” said O’Neal after a moment’s consideration. “I consider myself a soldier. The aspect of the warrior is one that the current service tends to suppress, incorrectly in my opinion. Only a warrior can carry through when all around him are dead. There are many soldiers in the world, but battles hinge on the warriors.”

  “Then listen to this with your soldierly aspect, Lieutenant,” the general said with a grim expression. “If the Posleen come back in strength, we are going to pull out, whether the American unit is here or not.”

  It was much what he had expected but less than he hoped. “Did you talk to General Houseman about that?” asked the lieutenant, carefully.

  “It was his order. One that I fully concur with by the way. The main line needs my troops relatively intact. When the Posleen come back they will be here to stay; they won’t be frightened off again. The Corp needs my division in support of the line. We cannot stay here and sacrifice ourselves on the altar of courage. Do you understand?” The general looked at the blank face of the armor and wondered what the face inside was expressing.

  “Yes, sir. I understand.” Mike paused and tapped controls on his forearm. After a moment
he continued. “Sir, I and my platoon will remain here until I feel the position is untenable.”

  “Very well, I concur. I hope that the situation never comes to pass.”

  “Mon General!” one of the French staff officers shouted, gesturing with a radio microphone.

  General Crenaus walked back to the command post, trailed by Mike.

  “General, there is a transmission from one of the Medevac helicopters. They report a large vessel of some sort coming towards us over the city.”

  “Give it to me,” said the general, snatching the microphone from the staffer. “This is General Crenaus, who is this?”

  * * *

  CWO4 Charles Walker liked nothing better than flat out, low-level flying. Crank a Blackhawk or OH-58 and take it down to the deck on maximum overdrive. Pissed the hell out of maintenance personnel and commanders were never really happy about it, but when you came down to cases, it was the best place to be in combat. As the current situation proved.

  There was a small gap in the coverage by the Posleen and it was on the deck in a twisting course into the landing slot the ground-pounders had cleared out. There was insufficient room to turn around and go back out to sea, so to land the helicopter was required to spool up to the top of the building and swivel around and drop sharply down to a landing. Then the broken bodies of the armored cav troopers would be loaded and you went back out on the deck. There were over a hundred helicopters from the different contingents operating and the miracle was that no crashes had occurred. As Walker made the last low-level bank and turned into the climb up to the roof his right seat, a CWO1 he had never met before today, let out a gasp.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked gesturing with his chin.

  Warrant Officer Walker looked up and to the left. In the distance, it was hard to determine how far because the perspective was distorted, a gigantic multisided ship was rising. It echoed a tantalizing memory for a moment then it came to him. In his younger days he had watched a Dungeons and Dragons game going on in one of the junior officers’ rooms; the vessel raising itself up in the distance looked identical to one of the game’s oddly shaped dice. Black and pitted by… weapons. Oh, shit.

  “Get the Frogs on the horn,” he snapped. “I think they’re about to have company.” He poured power to the engines fighting into the climb as fast as he could. As his engine temperature started to increase he could only hope that his chopper would be too insignificant a target to matter.

  His right seater was gabbling in the radio as he decided not to take the chance. He jinked hard right then left. In the back, the crew chief was preparing to open the troop doors. The sudden bank threw him across the cargo area and into the far door with a “whuff” of expelled air. He grabbed his tether line and started to hand over hand to a seat. Walker continued a hard swerving, sliding climb toward the top of the building.

  Suddenly there was a wash of heat as a bolt of plasma passed through the space the helicopter had just occupied. Walker jerked the collective up and over and the Blackhawk was suddenly inverted and headed for the deck. His copilot yelled and tried to grab the controls as the abused crew chief in the back let out a scream but Walker flattened the bird back out practically on the deck. They had descended over a thousand feet in a pair of seconds.

  “Call the French,” shouted the concentrating warrant officer. “I am didee-mao! We can’t crest that building and live. And if we can’t crest the building we can’t pull the wounded out. Therefore we are outta here!”

  He felt like a shit to be leaving all those wounded behind but there was no way he would face whatever that was. He saw the other helicopters banking into the land, running for the cover of the seaside buildings, even if they had occupying Posleen. Better that than the battleship headed this way. In the distance those too far out to sea started to flare and die.

  He cursed fate but there was nothing he could do. Even if he was riding a slick there was nothing he could do; there was nothing in the armory that could attack that thing and live. But finesse it? He thought about the caverns between the buildings, he thought about good times he’d had, he thought about stupid pride and arrogance and he pulled the bird into a hard bank.

  “What the hell are you doing now?” asked his right seater. In the back the crew chief let out another “chuff” as he was swung on his line and slammed into a seat. This time he got a grip on it, climbed in and strapped down.

  “We can extract down the secured boulevard to the MLR. We’ll take fire briefly at the intersections but if we firewall it we might make it.”

  “Might is not a good answer!” shouted the copilot.

  “There are wounded and we are going in for them, Mister. That is all there is to it.”

  “Fuck.”

  “That’s ‘Fuck, sir!’ ”

  “Fuck, sir.”

  “You know the Coast Guard motto, boy?” asked the warrant officer after a moment.

  “ ‘Semper Paratus’?” the right-seater asked, confused.

  “Not that one, the unofficial one. ‘We gotta go out, we don’t have to come back.’ ”

  “Oh. Yeah.” The junior warrant nodded his head with a resigned expression. “Roger that, sir.”

  “Excuse me, sirs?” said the crew chief on the intercom.

  “Yes?”

  “Just what the hell was that?”

  * * *

  “That’s a command ship,” said Mike, into the silence after the transmission, “what’s called a C-Dec, a command dodecahedron. Holds about 1,200 of a Posleen brigade’s best troops, most of the brigade’s armor, heavy space weapons, interstellar drive, thrusters, foot-thick armor, the works.” He paused and looked around at the Gallic staff. “That, gentlemen, is what we Americans call the whole shootin’ match, meaning that the battle is effectively over. When it comes overhead we don’t have a thing to stop it.”

  The building shuddered as a plasma cannon struck its roof and a shower of massive debris fell in the street. A French trooper was crushed under a section of plascrete as the vehicles in the street were covered. In the distance Mike heard the flutter of a suicidally brave medevac pilot coming into the landing zone. Mike figured his chances of making the turn at the intersection alive to be about one in ten. If he wasn’t hit by debris he would be hit by the C-Dec’s guns as it came overhead.

  “I think this counts as overwhelming strength,” Mike said with a whimsical smile. “Start pulling out, General. We’ll help the Americans go to ground. We might make it for a while on the E and E. We’ll get by.”

  “Oui… Merde! Well, as they say: ‘Aucun plan de bataille ne survit contact avec l’ennemi.’ ”

  Mike laughed grimly to hear the quote coming from a French general. “And that is in the original Klingon, right?”

  “C’est qui?” asked a puzzled aide as the general laughed as well. The moment of levity was brief.

  “Second squad!” Mike said into his transmitter. “Sergeant Duncan!”

  “Yes, sir, we’ve gathered the survivors we can find. What the hell was that?”

  “That was the end of the world.” Mike looked around and snatched up a French backpack. Ignoring the protests of the owner he started dumping the contents out as he headed for the building entrance. He stopped by the entrance to the operations center and relieved a French guard of a piece of equipment. At the first angry protest, the general waved the guard to silence. Mike never even noticed.

  “Start taking the survivors downstairs. Get as deep as you can. We have a serious problem here, ask your AID about it, I don’t have time. Sergeant Green?”

  “Yes, sir,” came the sleep-slurred voice, “I’m up.”

  “We’ve got company.”

  “Yes, sir. What are we gonna do about it. And what is it?”

  “It’s a command ship, a C-Dec. You’re gonna take the platoon up on the roofs and play laser tag with it. Hopefully you can keep it off the MLR for a little while. Leave me one HVM launcher, no…” He thought for a moment. “
What did we do with that combat shuttle?”

  “It’s still there as far as I know,” said the sergeant in a puzzled voice.

  “Okay, get moving. Take two squads and head for the roofs. Spread out and move away from the MLR and away from the shuttle. Take the C-Dec under fire and shoot and scoot. Keep dodging. When you have lost twenty-five percent of the platoon, or the C-Dec is ignoring you, retreat. Although if we can’t stop it I don’t know what will.”

  “What about a nuke, sir?”

  “It’s able to destroy virtually any delivery system we have available,” said the officer as he stepped outside.

  “Okay. What are you gonna do?”

  “I’m headed for that shuttle,” said Mike as he engaged his anti-grav and shot straight upward.

  “What’s there, sir?” asked Sergeant Green as he organized the platoon into two teams.

  “A world of hurt.”

  Mike leapt across the roofs at full speed with his deception systems on maximum. Besides the camouflage hologram, now carefully mimicking the color and texture of the rooftop, a modification of the personal protection field warped radar and subspace detectors around him while a tiny subspace field reduced movement turbulence and sonic signature. The host of deceptions appeared to work like a charm; the C-Dec was content to concentrate its fire on the human-occupied building.

  The roof of the Dantren megascraper was now a twisted mass of slagged metal and plascrete while the fallen buildings to either side looked like a Salvador Dali painting. The beams of plasma were now blasting at the MLR and the retreating French unit. Mike saw the suicidally brave Dustoff blasted from the sky trying to make the turn at the intersection and he decided not to look back after that.

  The C-Dec had totally ignored the shuttle and when he reached it Mike found out why; the Posleen had been there and the interior was wrecked. The remaining weapons and ammunition were scattered or destroyed, craters in the building roof showing where the Posleen had detonated ammunition in their haste.