A Hymn Before Battle lota-1

by John Ringo

  Mike ignored the weapons and headed for the drive section. Lifting a deck plate he keyed in a code on an inconspicuous pad. A drawer opened with a susurrant whoosh and Mike lifted out the heavy canister within. He put it in the French backpack and started adding grenades from his suit, its cavernous ammunition storage disgorged two hundred and eighty-five. To this he added all of his magazines and all the ammo on the shuttle that was handy. He carefully duct taped his last grenade to the outside. In the end he had one hundred kilos total weight, at least .005 percent of which was pure antimatter.

  When he exited the shuttle he checked on the C-Dec. It had, indeed, reversed course and was pursuing the platoon, dropping lower for better targeting. Following orders, the platoon was heading away from the MLR with the squads widely spread. They were moving, uncamouflaged, across the surface of the roofs as fast as they could and keeping up good fire. The lines of silver lightning drifted across the face of the black cube and fire erupted behind them. All of their fire was scoring and he could see two weapons positions that were damaged. They looked like flies leading a horse with their stings. Mike checked for Sergeant Green’s beacon but it was gone. Next he checked the casualty graph and noted that the squads had already exceeded twenty-five percent loss, but they seemed content to continue to picador their massive bull. This was a win/lose proposition, the damage from a space weapon would rarely be wounding. C’est la guerre: you join the Army to die and it will send you where you can die.

  Mike checked his own energy levels, shrugged his shoulders and began chasing after the retreating C-Dec, backpack over his shoulder.

  He turned on the run adjustment and his legs began to blur. The massive cube filled the sky above him as he approached. With three final strides he bounded into the air and floated up under anti-grav. The weapons and detectors of the Posleen ship were designed to fight space weapons. There were lasers that could pick a hypervelocity missile out of the air. There were plasma cannons that could slag mountains. There were detection systems that could spot enemy ships at a light-hour. None of them were designed to spot a single armored combat suit.

  The cloaking holograms and subspace suppressors, the radar and lidar deceptors, carried him inside the space-designed defenses and to the very skin of the space cruiser. He clamped his gauntlet to the skin of the ship high on one facet and hand over handed upward to the nearest large weapon position.

  “Michelle, all-frequency override broadcast,” he said softly. He clamped the backpack to the skin and then double-clamped it for security. “Maximum priority. Nuclear detonation, thirty seconds. Slug current coordinates.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He swung outward on his clamp and hooked his finger through the pin of the old-fashioned grenade he had “borrowed” from the French guard. He was completely out of timers or, for that matter, detonators.

  “Michelle.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  “It’s been nice working with you,” he said, watching the timer creep downward.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Put that letter to my wife on the net, dump your guts to command, and please tell the platoon to seek shelter. Its work here is done.”

  “Already done, sir. Nuke warning protocols specify an immediate data dump. It has been nice working for you. May the Alldenata keep you.”

  “Thanks.” Suddenly he felt a series of detonations through the skin of the ship as a line of flechette ricochets moved towards him. His armor slammed into the skin of the ship and rattled like a pea in a pod. He felt the inertial damping system fail.

  “Michelle?” he shouted as the suit systems cut out without warning. Only a viselike grip prevented the metallic gauntlet on his right hand from slipping off the clamp handle. The ship began to drop sharply, turning the face he was attached to towards a mass of Posleen pouring onto the roofs below.

  “Warning, warning!” said a slurred metallic voice, faintly familiar, the suit entity, his own gestalt, “Suit failure imminent! Suit failure imminent! AI-D damage: one hundred percent, Environmental damage: one hundred percent, Power systems: Emergency backup. Power system failure twenty seconds!” Posleen rounds continued to erupt around him and he felt a tearing sensation in his abdomen as an HVM smashed into the ship only yards away. He knew it was now or never.

  “I love you, hon,” he said and let go of the clamp; the grenade pin went with him. As he swung out and down he manually overrode the suit systems and set the suit to maximum inertial protection. It was a long shot but what the hell.

  * * *

  Az’al’endai pounded the console and hooted in triumph.

  “These threshkreen burn beneath my talons!” he shouted, looking around toward Arttanalath, his castellaine. The diffident kessentai shook his sauroid head from side to side as the view-screens filled the room with the light of the descending primary.

  “You drive them too hard, Kenellai. These thresh are tricky as the Alld’nt.”

  “Nonsense,” snorted the brigade commander in derision. He fluttered his crest and shook his head. “You are an old toothless fool.” He triggered another blast from the plasma primaries at the dodging suits. It was like fighting fleas with a blow torch, but it got two of them.

  “Look how these metal-clad thresh burn! They are like stars in the night sky!” Most of the stations in the control room were empty but that was normal; the ships were designed to be run by no more than a single God King. The fact that the battle depended almost entirely on the decisions of quirkily programmed computers never crossed the mind of the kessentai. How the ship ran was how it ran. They no more understood it than a chimpanzee understands television. It works, I can change the channel. Voilà.

  “Az’al’endai!” came the cry from a side channel. It was that thrice-damned puppy, Tulo’stenaloor.

  “What do you want?” raged the commander. “First you kill my eson’antai, then you destroy my oolton’, then you flee, then you—”

  “Az’al’endai, shut up!” roared the impatient battalion commander. “You have a metal threshkreen on the side of the oolt’ Posleen! He must be up to no good. We are firing at him now!”

  “What?” shouted the suddenly confused ship commander. “Uut Fuscirto! Where are those detectors?” He hunted the panel in front of him, then realized that the control was at one of the other positions. But which one?

  “Cursed Alld’nt equipment!” he shouted, hurrying from position to position. At the third he recognized the symbols he sought and slammed his talons into the appropriate buttons. The readouts made him gasp. He slapped the communicator button at the detector station.

  “Tulo’stenaloor! Fire! Kill it! It has an antimatter bomb!”

  He ran back over to the primary controls, pushing the babbling castellaine aside, and began to turn the oolt’ Posleen toward Tulo’stenaloor’s oolt’ondai. As he did so another beacon began to squawk and at its cry of doom he slammed the course downward in a panicked reach for safety.

  * * *

  Lieutenant O’Neal’s suit was buffeted aside by the descending ship, the massive structure descending faster than the acceleration of Diess’ light gravity. The buffet was the last thing Mike felt, as the fragmentation grenade went off in near simultaneity.

  The grenade initially caused massive failures on the part of the grav-gun ammunition and the suit grenades. The rifle ammunition used a dollop of antimatter as its propellant charge. Under normal use a small energy field, similar in design to the personal protection field, would reach out and shatter the miniature stabilization field that prevented the antimatter from contacting regular matter. Another field held the antimatter away from the breech of the weapon so that it only contacted the depleted uranium teardrop. When the antimatter touched the uranium, the two types of matter were instantly converted into a massive outpouring of energy.

  This energy was captured in a very efficient manner and used to accelerate the uranium round down the barrel of the grav-gun.

  When the convention
al French grenade went off, it shattered a large number of the antimatter stabilization fields immediately around it. Each of these fields contained an antimatter charge equivalent to two hundred pounds of TNT. There were several hundred in the backpack.

  The rupturing of the rifle ammunition in turn smashed the antimatter grenades. The grenades actually held a smaller charge than the rifle rounds, but the casing provided much more in the way of shrapnel and that proved providential.

  The canister from the shuttle also contained antimatter. Quite a bit of it.

  The ubiquitous substance was the primary energy source for all high-energy systems in the Galactic Federation. In the case of the combat shuttles it was the source of choice because of its high mass-to-energy ratio. The shuttles not only had to have an energy source that could carry them for short interplanetary hops, but also one that could fuel their terawatt lasers.

  The canister, however, unlike the grenades and ammunition, was heavily shielded against damage. The possibility of penetrating damage that reached the bottle was anticipated by the designers. The bottle was not only made of a heavy plasteel similar to the armored combat suits, but also had a heavy-duty energy shield around it.

  When the first ammunition detonated, the rapid explosions, effectively one expanding nuclear fireball, were shrugged off. Likewise the initial explosions of the grenades; the explosive force simply was too weak to destroy the integrity of the well-designed antimatter containment system.

  However, the grenades were detonating practically in contact with the bottle, and their iridium casings were accelerating at nearly half the speed of light.

  The first few bits of molten forged iridium shrapnel plastered themselves to the outside and sublimated under the expanding fireball. But by a few microseconds after the explosion of the conventional grenade thousands of forged particles were bombarding the outside of the canister. Under the assault, first the outer shielding, then the plasteel armor, and finally the inner shielding failed.

  At which point nearly a quarter kilogram of antimatter detonated, with an explosion to rival the Big Bang.

  * * *

  The buffet of the suit occurred as the God King commander performed his last panicked course change. The course change placed Mike’s suit slightly around the corner from the antimatter limpet mine and above it when it detonated.

  The first few microseconds as the rifle ammunition and grenades detonated saw a number of occurrences. The ship was rocked backwards and up, slamming into the suit again. The wash of the initial explosion destroyed the plasma cannon that had been firing at the rapidly retreating suits permitting the last few survivors of the platoon to make good their escape. And the buffet of the explosion slapped the ship commander into the controls, taking him out of play.

  The second impact also slapped Mike into unconsciousness. At that action the biotic-gestalt reacted and injected him with Hiberzine; once the user was out of play the gestalt could make its own tactical judgments. It analyzed the situation:

  1. A nuclear weapon was detonating in close proximity to its ProtoPlasmic Intelligence System.

  2. The likelihood of the survival of its PPIS was low.

  3. Termination of the PPIS would result in the termination of the gestalt.

  This analysis was suboptimal. Immediate remedies for the analysis were in order.

  Thus, when the initial wash of energy swirled around the edge of the cruiser, it struck a set of armor that was rapidly becoming as insubstantial as a feather. The suit was nearly thirty meters away from the ship, nearly inertialess, being flooded with oxygen, and outward bound at high acceleration when the main packet detonated. Under the circumstances, it was the best the gestalt could do.

  The explosion tore the space cruiser in half, vaporizing the facet against which the material had been placed and blasting two separated pieces of ship away from each other. One was blasted sideways into the nearest megascraper, which was already coming apart from the nuclear wave front. It slammed into the top of the mile-cube building and smashed half of it to the ground, taking out two more buildings as well before it finally ground to a halt.

  The other section of the massive ship was blasted nearly straight up. It rose on the edge of the mushroom cloud, a black spot of malignance on the edge of the beautiful fireball, and finally curved back downward to smash into another Posleen-held megascraper.

  Mike’s suit was near the former section of ship. Initially shielded by the downward hurtling half of the space cruiser, it was soon caught on the edge of the main nuclear fireball and rapidly accelerated to over four thousand miles per hour. The suit skipped across two megascraper roofs, where the legs were scraped off, and finally through a seaside megascraper, where it lost one arm. The remnant cuirass and helmet came out of the megascraper on the back side of the wave front and skipped several times on the roiled ocean. Finally the bit of detritus slowed enough to enter the water and settled beneath the waves in two hundred feet of water.

  An armored combat suit cost nearly as much as a combat shuttle, and even the most damaged suit held some residual value. When the suit was settled in its watery grave, the final salvage beacon, installed at the absolute insistence of the Darhel bean counters, began its plaintive bleat.

  * * *

  Either the bureaucrats were prescient or they were idiots. The SEALs attached to the expeditionary force had yet to decide which. When they were ordered to Diess, at the last possible moment, no one could tell them why. Since SEALs are used for a variety of purposes besides covert strikes, it could have to do with virtually anything. They could be there for explosive ordnance disposal. They could be there for cross training foreign forces. They could be there to investigate the Posleen rear area by seaborne insertion.

  As it turned out, they were doing a booming business in salvage.

  The nuclear explosion the week before had blasted all sorts of things out to sea. Besides various bits of reusable Indowy equipment, the armored combat suits were the most ubiquitous, their beacons calling for pickup in a most depressing way. Of the fourteen that had been recovered, only four had survivors.

  This one was a sure write-off. The plasteel looked cooked, portions of the metal had turned blue from the nuclear blast. One arm and the legs were missing and a worm was struggling to fight its way past the biotic seal over a protruding bit of burnt brown flesh. About the only part that looked intact was the head, torso and abdomen.

  “Man,” said the team leader over the underwater communicator, “this guy got hammered. Check ’im out, Spock.” He brushed a questing siphonophore off his wet-skin, the delicate creature disappearing in a luminous cloud.

  The PO tech kicked over to the head of the suit and attached a lead. The hastily cobbled together device sent a pulse for update to the suit’s final distress center. The readout came back slowly.

  “This is that lieutenant they’ve been lookin’ for, sir,” said the petty officer to the background of bubbling air. He patiently waited for a condition update. “The AID is cooked, and most of the environmental. I don’t think they’re gonna get much… Holy shit!”

  40

  Andata Province, Diess IV

  1324 GMT June 24th, 2002 ad

  Mike swallowed, “A month?”

  “Yep,” said General Houseman, “you’ve been in the body and fender shop over a month and you’ll be here for a while yet. It took them two weeks to do a proper number on the radiation damage alone.”

  “What’s happened to the expeditionary force? On Diess?” My platoon? he wanted to say.

  “Well, the C-Dec blew up quite spectacularly and did a number on a large section of the city. We sortied in the aftermath. The Posleen weren’t able to move through Ground Zero and we used that terrain obstacle to our advantage. Then, holding those positions, we got the Indowy to build us an abattoir,” he smiled grimly. “Then we slaughtered those sorry bastards.”

  “Would you care to be more specific?”

  “Do you know what murde
r holes are?” asked the general, holding a cup of water with a straw up for the lieutenant to drink from. His newly grown arm was still weak.

  “Like in castles? Holes to pour oil in the entrances?”

  “Burning oil and stick spears through, yes. Towards the end of the castle period and into the twentieth century they used a different technique.

  “Just inside the main gates would be a field for sorties to form on. Occasionally the enemy got through the first gates. The walls on either side of the sortie field would be gun ports, hundreds of them. The enemy would pack onto this field and it would become a killing field; the origin of the term, by the way.

  “A First Division officer managed to develop a relationship with a high-ranking Indowy. With this Indowy’s help we converted the boulevards behind the MLR into killing fields, two buildings deep. Then we pulled back into them.

  “The Posleen came down the boulevards in their normal swarm and the Corp opened up from either side. The boulevards were plugged by ACS in concrete bunkers and there were thirty-foot-high walls on either side. Snipers with fifty calibers along the fifth story just to engage the God Kings. It was hell.

  “Hardly any of the Posleen made it to the ACS positions. We set up two boulevards that way and had all the others blocked and supported. The Posleen just kept coming and coming until there were hardly any left and those few leftovers turned tail. We sortied again and pushed them back to their landers where they boarded and left — those that survived the rout. We recovered over seven thousand landers, Lampreys and C-Decs that were left behind.”

  “You mean we won?”

  “Yep,” said the general, sadly. “As the poet said, it was a famous victory; we only lost the better part of seven divisions to achieve it,” he concluded, shaking his head angrily.