A Hymn Before Battle

14 Habersham County, GA Sol III 2025 December 24th, 2001 ad

By mutual agreement Mike and Sharon had decided not to move from their house in the Piedmont. The kids had gotten used to regular visits with his father up in Towns county and Sharon had her job as an engineer. Despite the recent call-ups the majority of the conscription would not begin for another year when the equipment construction really got on line. Mike was in a position to pull a few strings and they had that to talk over. The drive home gave him time to put his thoughts in order; it was going to be an odd week.

Pulling into the driveway of the old farmhouse he stopped and looked across the field at the sunset. One of the recent reports generated by some Beltway Bandit, one of the numerous consulting firms on Washington’s Beltway that provided specialized studies for the United States government, dealt with climatological changes. Mike knew just enough climatology to doubt that anyone could accurately predict what the climatological changes might be when the activities of the enemy were still unknown, but the least that was sure to happen was some kinetic or nuclear bombardment. How much the weather changed depended on the severity of the bombardment.

If there was a minimal spatial bombardment there would be a minimal drop in worldwide temperature. The converse was of course true. A minimal bombardment, sixty to seventy weapons scattered across Earth’s surface, targeted solely on the projected Planetary Defense Centers, would have the approximate climatological effect of the Mount Pinatubo eruption. That had caused a global temperature drop of nearly a degree and some spectacular sunsets, but otherwise weather was hardly changed.

However, as the number of weapons increased so did the relative severity. Two hundred kinetic energy weapons in the five to ten kiloton range would have the equivalent effect of the Mount Krakatoa explosion, which had plunged the world into a mini-ice age, causing year round frosts in the late eighteen hundreds. At over four hundred weapons it was projected that a real ice age would ensue, especially as the rate of carbon dioxide emission was projected to drop to nearly nothing over the next twelve years.

That particular datum called for the largest caveat in the entire report. The report tossed a bone to a theory that Earth was currently in the midst of an ice age and that the only thing holding it off was the current rate of CO₂ emission; in essence that the current scheduled ice age was held at bay by “greenhouse effect.” If the theory were true, and some climatologists were willing to admit it might be, ending the era of fossil fuels could coincidentally cause an ice age in and of itself.

If an ice age ensued from the war, win or lose, some of the most civilized regions of the world would become untenable. And the conditions projected for the war itself? Mike had seen the raw reports, the ones that so far had not leaked to the press. That knowledge and calling in a few favors owed him had created an awareness of a situation that no parent should ever have to face. With his mind on those thoughts he got out in the deepening twilight and walked into the kitchen of the holiday-festive house. There was a scent of the cedar Christmas tree cut from the family farm, and Sharon had been baking cookies.

“Hi, honey, I’m home!” The expression was trite, but the emotion behind it was heartfelt.

Sharon came into the room leading the youngest. Mike’s heart lurched when he realized Michelle was almost too large for her pink footie pajamas.

For the past long months Mike had spent between sixty and eighty hours a week at GalInf headquarters in Fort Benning or hopping from one military base to another. As one of the few experts on the new infantry systems, every time there was a snag he had to go troubleshoot. In most cases there were honest difficulties with assimilating new technology but on several occasions he had run into the technophobia mentioned in regards to the new ACS commander.

Eight months with almost no contact with his family and darn near no social contacts at all had left him drained. It was time, however short, for a break.

“Merry Christmas, sweetie,” he said to his daughter, opening his arms for a hug. “Do you have a hug for Daddy?”

“No!” She hugged her mother’s leg and buried her face in its protective warmth.

“Why not?”

“Not Daddy.”

“Am too!”

“Not!”

“Meanie! Pooh!” He blew on her hair and she giggled.

“ ’Top!”

“Meanie! Pooh!”

Giggle. “ ’Top!”

“Meanie!…”

“Pooh!” Giggle.

“Aggh! Got me! Hug?”

She wrapped her arms around him and, just for a moment, all was right with the world.

“Do you have the holiday off?” asked Sharon. End of moment.

“Actually I have the week and a bit. But there’s bad news to go with the good.”

“What?” There was another surprise here and she was getting tired of surprises. Coping as a single mother for the last eight months had not helped.

“I’m getting attached to the ACS unit deploying to Diess with the expeditionary force as an advisor,” he said, standing up with the pink bundle of his daughter in his arms. “You sure are getting heavy!”

“You’re going off planet?” Sharon asked, stunned.

“And how.” Mike nodded, dreading the coming argument.

“When?”

“Next week. This is the pre-deployment leave.”

“How come everyone else gets a couple of months’ warning?” Sharon demanded.

“Probably because everyone else has a normal job,” said Mike, reasonably.

“Well, dammit!”

“Honey,” Mike gestured that he was still holding Michelle. “Can we save this for a bit?”

“Sure. Since you’re home you can give Cally a bath.”

“Okay. Did I miss supper?”

“Yes, and if you hadn’t I’d have thrown it outside anyway.”

“Honey.”

“I know, but this is just a little bit hard to take, okay?” Sharon had tears in her eyes. “It’s kind of hard being a single mom all the time, okay? And it’s kind of hard knowing what’s coming. And I’ve just about had as much as I can take. The projects are piling up and I feel like every time I take time off for the family I’m letting our side down!”

Mike stood silent. This was one of those times when no words would help.

“Why is Mommy crying?” asked Michelle.

“Because Daddy has to go away for a while.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s Daddy’s job.”

“I don’t want you to go away!”

“I know, sweetie pie, but I have to go.”

“I don’t want you to!” In sympathetic reaction Michelle started to cry.

Shit. “I didn’t want to get into this, honey, but maybe we could go down to Florida for the week. Mom would love to see the kids, I’m sure.”

“Granma?”

“Yes, pumpkin, Granma.”

“We’re going to Granma’s house!”

“We’re going to Granma’s house?” asked Cally, arriving late from a potty break.

“Honey, I don’t know if I can get the time,” said Sharon, automatically. “We’re knee deep in modifying the F-22s.”

“If Lockheed won’t let you go under the circumstances, quit. It’s not like we’ll need the money and you could spend more time with the kids.”

“Let’s not talk about this now,” she said, shaking her head. “Let’s get Michelle and Cally to bed and then we’ll talk.”

“Okay.”

After the children were tucked away Mike and Sharon pulled out a bottle of “the good stuff” and talked; it was a good way to wait up for Santa. Sharon, curled on the couch, brandy snifter in hand, tried as best she could to bring him up-to-date on the children’s lives, all the little things that he had missed over the previous months. Mike, sitting on the floor, watching the lights of the Christmas tree blink, told her in greater detail about his work and about the overall preparation for the upcoming war. And, violating security, he finally told her about the full nature of the threat and what it meant.

“Everything?” asked Sharon, setting down her snifter.

“All the coastal plains. We just will not have the equipment to fight the Posleen by then. And that’s just in the United States. Don’t ask me about Third World countries.”

“Then why are we sending a suit unit to Diess and Barwhon?” asked Sharon in bewilderment, picking the snifter up and taking a deep slug. The warm burn of the cognac helped reestablish her hard-won calm.

“A battalion of ACS will not be a deciding factor, at least that is what the High Command thinks and I agree.”

“You mean the Joint Chiefs.”

“No, I mean the High Command. How they’re going to sell it, I don’t know, but that’s what the upper command echelon of the United States Defense Forces are going to be officially called. New service, new names. Like Line and Fleet and Strike Commands; out with the old, in with the new. The remainder of the Navy and Air Force that aren’t being transferred to Fleet are going to be rolled into the whole, with the High Commander being an Army general. The part that no one is talking about is that it takes a layer of civilian control out of the military. There are some constitutional issues that I don’t think are being fully explored.

“Anyway, we had hoped to earn enough funds from the units on Diess and Barwhon to equip multiple ACS units. But, because of procurement issues, the first equipment will go to the ACS units for the deployments to Barwhon and Diess. Only after their needs are satisfied will dedicated Terran Fleet Strike be supplied. But those Galactic-funded units are going to be parceled out to all the invaded planets, not just Earth. We need dedicated Ground Force ACS units, lots of them, and we probably won’t have any when the first wave arrives.

“Some forces might get un-powered suits just before the invasion. Might. We’ve been fighting for training time but I don’t think we’ll get much.” Mike sipped pale cognac and considered how to go on. There was so much he felt she should know, both as his partner and as a soon-to-be-recalled naval officer.

“We need a navy even more, but most naval units will still be under construction when the Posleen arrive. The battle wagons, the big guns that can go toe-to-toe with the globes, won’t be available until about a year after the first wave hits, but before the second wave, thank God.” Mike took a pause and looked particularly unhappy. “Which brings us to you.”

“Why?”

“A little-known caveat of all these activities won’t be little known for long. Fleet and Fleet Ground Strike personnel stationed off Terra will be given the option to have one relative per serviceman relocated to a non-threatened planet. I checked and you were going to be stationed stateside. Before the regulation becomes widely known I can pull a couple of strings and get you stationed off planet. That means that either Cally or Michelle could be relocated to a safe planet.”

“Who would raise them?” asked Sharon, eyes widening. Mike realized that he probably should have spread the shocks out, but they had just run out of time.

“Probably an upper-class Indowy family.”

“Would it be the planet I was stationed on?”

“Probably not. The guy who owes me a favor can get you off planet but not to a location of choice. It may be to the Terran Defense Task Force, or Titan Base, who knows. All I know is that I can get you off planet and I can’t do the same thing for myself right now.”

“Why?”

“That’s not my mission. I’m slated for the Diess force, but only as an advisor on temporary duty, not as a permanent change of station, so it doesn’t count as off planet. And, for that matter, the AEF personnel are not counted as being off-Terra since they’re only there temporarily. How temporarily is a good question, but it is not considered a change of station.”

“How long are they going to be there?” asked Sharon.

“Nobody knows, but you have to be in Fleet or Fleet Strike to be considered for off-planet duty and the AEF units are not considered Fleet Strike, yet. Effectively, your salary has to come straight from the Federation, rather than through a planetary or national formation.”

“So, I have to decide whether to have one of our children safe but separated from us both.” Her face twisted into an expression he couldn’t read.

“Not really. If you wish to blame me for arm twisting, feel free, but you had better take the position. I cannot guarantee that I will be back by the time of the invasion and I virtually guarantee that neither of us will be able to be with our children during the combat. That means that they will be without our protection and I’ve already told you how bad it will probably get. Let me be clear. We are going to lose the East and West Coast, all of it, all the way to the Appalachians in the east and the Rockies or Cascades in the west. We may lose the Great Plains, although I think we can contain or delay that loss significantly. Urban areas inside the defensive ring are going to take a pasting.

“Nowhere on Earth will be completely safe. There are going to be shelters for less than ten percent of the population unless a miracle happens and I don’t think, and this is a professional estimate, that the defenses for the shelters are going to work. Digging them underground is a waste of resources and, possibly, criminally stupid. If we leave the girls with family, we can leave them in Florida, which is going to be one vast abattoir, in northern California or in the Georgia mountains, on the back side of the continental divide. That’s the safest by far but it’s still too close to Atlanta.”

“I can’t believe that they would force me back into uniform given those conditions,” Sharon said, furiously.

“Believe it. No one is avoiding service this time, not if they are even marginally qualified. We will both have responsibilities to meet. Family hardship will not be considered a recognized reason for discharge.”

“Then I can’t believe you want to leave them with your father,” argued Sharon. She hated Mike when he was like this, he set up these logic juggernauts and just drove over everything in his path. Her own experience with lifer military, especially officers, had been less than pleasant.

“Dad’s a kook, but the right kind of kook for the conditions,” said Mike, trying to tack back towards a normal tone.

“Your father is not a kook, he is flat bughouse nuts. Round the bend. Bats in his belfry.” Sharon twisted her finger by the side of her head.

“Yeah, but what kind of bats? All his bats carry AKs. He’s just the kind of nut that might keep one of the kids alive.”

“Honey, he’s dangerous!” complained Sharon, losing the argument and knowing it.

“Not to kin.”

“Most murders involve relatives!” she rebutted.

“My father is far too professional to murder family. All of his murders are quick, discreet and untraceable to him.”

Mike shook his head in bafflement. “He is the perfect person to leave one of the kids with given the situation. What? You want to put them up with your parents? Mr. and Mrs. ‘White-Carpets, Don’t-Run-In-The-House, I-Can’t-Believe-This-It’s-All-Just-A-Government-Scare’? Or perhaps my mother? Who, while a wonderful person, has no capacity to defend herself much less one of our children? And who lives in California, home of a thousand and one great places for a Posleen to land. Or, put them with an ex-Ranger, ex-Green Beret, and ex-mercenary? Who stays in shape, maintains a wonderful and completely illegal weapons collection and has a farm in the mountains? Come on!”

“I don’t like his stories. I won’t have him feeding the children all that hogwash.” She was starting to be petulant and knew it. If Mike would just back off she might have time to consider, time to adjust. Instead he had to keep pushing.

“What hogwash? He’s got citations to go with most of his stories. And they all have some sort of moral to them. ‘Never pull a pin on a grenade unless you have somewhere to throw it.’ ‘Always remember to booby trap your ally’s positions. You can trust your enemy, but never trust a partner.’ It’s not like he was a heartless assassin; he insists he never killed somebody he liked.” Mike smiled. He agreed that his father was bughouse nuts. But he was perfectly adapted for the coming storm.

“Oh, Michael!” Sharon snapped.

“Oh, Sharon!” Mike replied.

“So, which one do we leave? Oh, God dammit honey! How do you make a choice like that?” Her face in the lamplight was pinched and suddenly very old.

“Fortunately that is one decision we don’t have to make. When the program was designed they decided that that was one decision not worth leaving to the affected personnel. Fleet will decide for us and the choice is not open for discussion. It shouldn’t affect either of our kids but if one of them had a genetic defect, no matter how the parents felt, that one would not be the one to go. Part of the purpose is to move a good quality human gene pool off Earth and to do so without there being real cause for argument. On the other hand — since the fleet is being drawn from the ranks of navies — it is heavily skewing the gene pool to northern Europeans. That was an item for discussion and still is. I don’t think that it is going to change, though, no matter how much the Chinese call it racist.”

“Is it?” Sharon was willing to digress. It was better than thinking about the situation.

“I don’t think so, although don’t ask me to analyze Darhel psychology. They are remarkably labyrinthine and I am altogether too blunt; I can’t even start to get a handle on them. I wish I could, because I think it’s the most important thing anyone could be doing right now, even more important than preparing for the Posleen.”

“Why is understanding the Darhel important, and how could it be more important than preparing for the Posleen? I mean, they’ve been pretty up front, letting us send delegations off world and giving material help, now even offering off-planet evacuation for dependents. I think they’ve been fairly nice. You can’t expect them to spend all their energy defending us.”

“Oh yes I can. We are, basically, the Darhel’s only option for pulling their irons out of the fire and they know it. So they should put Earth first in line for everything, to preserve the soldier pool if for no other reason, but they haven’t. Why? At the end of this war, by the best case scenarios I have seen, our available fighting force is going to be reduced by seventy to ninety percent. Those are the humans that the Darhel really depend on and they have not made every effort to preserve them.”

“Well, there’s more to the Federation than the Darhel. Politics can mess things up; maybe some of the Federation doesn’t agree with that analysis.”

“The Darhel, I am convinced, control everything in the Federation. Every time there is a discussion of intent, the Darhel send a representative. You can gauge whether a meeting is worth attending on the basis of whether the Darhel will be there or not. And, often, they subtly guide the meetings I’ve attended.

“So, if you have one group that is probably working off a game plan at all the meetings where decisions are made subtly guiding the meetings to the decisions that they want? You’d better know what their purpose is.

“And I question some of the basic premises that are used to arrive at the question of funding our defense. The Darhel keep talking about a free and equal federation among the stars, but it is always the Darhel talking, or occasionally a carefully chosen Tchpth. The Darhel control all the monetary transfers, all the loans. Among the Galactics there is no charity; if the Darhel call your loan, you’re doomed, and the Darhel are absolutely hierarchical. If you piss off one Darhel they pass it through the chain and you never get the chance to piss off another. These are the people we’ve been getting ninety percent of our information from, including the information about planetary defense funding, required allocation of Fleet resources and availability of off-planet manufacturing capacity.”

“I think you’re getting a little paranoid. The Galactics seem fine from my perspective,” Sharon disagreed.

“Maybe. Maybe my paranoia is hereditary. But Jack wanted me because I was a science fiction writer. Any good science fiction buff knows the story ‘To Serve Man.’ ”

“I don’t.”

“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.