A Hymn Before Battle

27 Andata Province, Diess IV 2208 GMT May 18th, 2002 ad

“Knock, knock, mind if I join you?” Lieutenant O’Neal used the local circuit. He knew there were troops from Charlie company in the next room, but he didn’t know who they were. The AID could tell him, but he’d been too busy to ask. Besides, there were few troopers in Charlie company that he knew personally. And given how keyed up everyone was, letting them know he was coming before barging through the door seemed like a good idea.

“Come ahead,” said Sergeant John Reese, looking over his shoulder. Through the double doors came a squat figure towing a grav sled loaded with weapons and ammunition. Among them was another M-300 and a tripod-mounted HVM. Reese recognized him as Lieutenant O’Neal; the silhouette was distinctive. Apparently the lieutenant believed in being prepared. “Can I help you, sir?” Reese jerked his head at the ammo bearer, Private Pat McPherson to go help with the load.

“Thanks. I figured I’d join the party if you don’t mind.” Mike’s suit flashed a heads-up-display of the names and ranks by the suited figures in the room. It was a heavy weapons team with the heavy weapons squad leader. Their own M-300 heavy grav gun was set up and bins of ammunition were ganged together ready to go. All three of the team were crouched against the outside wall, their force-screens covering the probable axis of approach. The descending F-1’s sunset glow had turned a weird violet that mottled the suits like purple haze.

“Hell no, sir. Every little bit helps,” said the assistant gunner, Spec-Four Sal Bennett.

“Was that by any chance a short joke, Specialist?” Mike asked with mock sternness.

“Oh, hell, sir. That wasn’t what I meant!”

“I know, I know, just a little levity, right? Little levity, get it?”

The squad laughed as Mike started tossing thirty-kilo ammo bins against the wall.

“Michelle, give me an RGB representation of Indowy, Posleen and humans in the nine-block sector.”

The AID flashed a three-D representation of the nine megascrapers, then began drawing in Posleen, human and Indowy concentrations in red, green and blue. The green was a solid core in the corners of Qualtren and Qualtrev with scattered others behind. The projected locations of Indowy were a heavy concentration in Saltren and Saltrev and blue flowing downward like an hourglass in Qualtren and Qualtrev; time was running out for the inhabitants of the megascrapers. On Sisalav Boulevard there was a solid band of color flowing out of sensor range, but just out of view, around the Daltren/Daltrev jog, the solid blue band abruptly became red.

“They’re almost in sight,” said Mike, taking a sip of water as he crouched behind the spurious shelter of the wall and set up the HVM to fire automatically.

“Orders are to wait for a signal from Captain Vero before we open fire. What are you looking at?”

“Michelle, slug hologram to squad view,” said Mike as he finished readying the missile launcher. It was set to track his fire and add its own weight offset ten meters. He started to set up the M-300 on the opposite side of the squad’s position. It would be set to do the same thing. Thus he would be controlling not only his own light grav gun but two other heavy weapons. It was not a hard technique to train for or to set up. But the battalion, of course, had not prepared for it.

“Huh,” Sergeant Reese said after a moment, “I didn’t know they could do that.”

“Yours can’t, not in any detail. Command suits have extra processing and data collection ability.” There was a moment of silence, then Mike said in a flat tone, “There they are.”

The words came as a surprise and Sergeant Reese popped his head up from hologram and peered down the darkening canyon. “AID,” he said, “Mag six, enhance and stabilize.” The view leapt forward and brightened.

The way the stabilization system worked, the world moving at a different rate than reality, always made him a little queasy. What Reese saw in his view-screen just made him sick. He broke out in a cold sweat and goose pimples as his sphincter tightened. He wanted badly to piss and his mouth was dry. When Pat started to vomit he was forced to join in. This caused a complete loss of control.

The Posleen had regained control of the front rank and the remorseless abattoir was in full swing. To either side they could see the late-moving Indowy pouring out of the megascrapers, trying to avoid the oncoming horde. It was easier to empathize with these Indowy, having watched movement within and among the megascrapers during their setup. The peaceful little boggles that the Posleen were slaughtering had become like neighbors and seeing them slaughtered was a terror.

They always told you it was okay to be afraid, but surely they didn’t mean this stark terror, this abject fear. The briefings had been clear. Although the suits were proof against many things, the Posleen palmate blades had mono-molecular edges; they could chop apart a suit like a housewife with a chicken. All Reese could think of as the Posleen advanced remorselessly on the fleeing Indowy was that those knives were headed for him and the whole world seemed to be filled with flashing steel.

He couldn’t understand it. He was one of the brave, the fearless Airborne. For five years he had jumped out of planes over fifty times, enduring the occasional injury, without the first qualm. He enjoyed the thrill that terrified others. He’d laughed, inside, at the guys who were white-faced and shaking, who closed their eyes and headed for the sound of the open door. He loved the sight of the chutes opening out the door, the earth, plane and sky tossed in a chaotic kaleidoscope for those first brief moments after you stepped out. The chute opening was almost a letdown and the landing no hassle, except when something broke. But no fear, ever. Now, he feared. He feared the Posleen and wondered why those white-faced troopers put up with this over and over again.

The cold-blooded rendering of the defenseless Indowy was almost more than Reese could take; with their tiny stature and love of bright colors they seemed almost like children to him. As the Posleen closed the distance he found himself pulling his M-232 tighter into his shoulder and rubbing the breech. “Come on. Come on.” As his eyes flicked to his ammunition level readouts he did not notice the tears running down his cheeks or the stink of an overloaded environmental system. His fear slowly began to be replaced with anger, a white hot rage at the evil yellow dog-men coming towards them. “Come on, you bastards.”

Mike drew his magazine again and actually looked at it this time. Yup, thar’s bullets init. He reseated it and touched the charging button. With an unnoticed whine the first teardrop-shaped bead of depleted uranium was lofted into place. He felt as though he were looking at the scene through deep water. He recognized it as a fear reaction and ignored it; his mind was going faster than it ever had in his life. He had thorough plans for virtually every contingency. He had prepared so hard for this moment that it seemed as though he had lived it before: a lethal déjà vu.

“ ‘It seems to me as though I’ve been upon this stage before,’ ” he quietly sang. The AID, correctly surmising that it was a personal moment, did not broadcast it. “ ‘And juggled away the night for the same old crowd…’ ”

“Charlie company, stand by.”

Mike snugged the butt into his shoulder. Talk about target-rich environment. “ ‘These harlequins you see with me, they too once held the floor…’ ”

“Fire!”

Over three hundred rifles and machine guns, the combined firepower of Charlie and Alpha companies, and four terawatt lasers, belched coherent light and metallic lightning at the Posleen horde. As if one animal, the whole phalanx was shocked, its front third vanishing in the silver fire of detonating relativistic projectiles.

Fuckin’ A! thought Mike. It fuckin’ works! We’re gonna get our asses kicked, ’cause there’s too damn many of ’em, but the hardware fuckin’ works! The HVM launcher began to spit kinetic missiles at the area designated as hostile and the M-300 followed.

Then the thousands of remaining Posleen in view raised their weapons at the source of the fire.

“For what we are about to receive…” whispered Mike, shifting fire to the rear body.

In the front phalanx there remained eight thousand normals and twenty God Kings. The combat suits were proof against the majority of the weapons, but there were still fifteen heavy lasers and five multiple HVM launchers with automatic targeting systems, nine hundred 3mm flechette guns and four hundred fifty handheld HVM launchers. As a storm of fire struck the battalion’s positions the battle descended into an orgy of mutual annihilation. In the first two minutes following the opening volley six thousand more Posleen died, but over sixty paratroopers died and twenty more were injured. In that moment the battle was lost; there was a finite number of paratroopers, but a steady stream of centaurs replaced Posleen dead. As the output from the battalion reduced the Posleen were able to advance, pouring like a yellow avalanche towards the source of the fire. And as they advanced they were able to search out the sources of fire more effectively.

A heavy laser, targeting on the Charlie company machine gun, scythed into the room housing Mike and the squad. Spec-Four Bennett would never see Trenton, New Jersey again. The laser cut sideways, exploding the wall inward and momentarily blinding the squad with debris. It narrowly missed Sergeant Reese, bubbling the hologram projectors on his helmet, and sliced diagonally across Spec-Four Bennett from left shoulder to below the right nipple unchecked by his force-screen or the immensely refractory armor.

The laser slashed through the front of his armor but was stopped by the combination of his mass and the rear armor from cutting all the way through. The tremendous heat of the coherent beam of light caused his torso to flash into steam and sublimed calcium. The armor held together, however, except a two-inch-wide strip blasted out of it, and Bennett’s pureed remains squirted out like cherry soda from a shaken bottle. This ejecta flipped him backwards across the room.

The laser served as an aiming point for the God King’s brigade of Posleen normals and a broadside of flechette and missile fire vomited at the hapless machine gun team. The missiles were wildly inaccurate at the seven-hundred-meter range of the current engagement. It would have been the greatest of bad luck to be hit by one, but Madam Chance knows no favorites.

Lieutenant O’Neal and Sergeant Reese were hurled backwards by the weight of metal. For a few moments O’Neal returned fire, riding the wave of rounds as he had practiced, and his heavier prototype armor was proof against the hail of fire. Private McPherson was less lucky. Two 3mm rounds penetrated his abdominal storage, setting off a cache of grenades and popping the blowout panels in a sea of actinic fire, then through his body armor. After that they were unable to exit and began bouncing around inside. McPherson’s suit began to hop and flip randomly through the air, arms and legs flailing to keep up as the two hypervelocity flechettes bled off their kinetic energy within the body of his suit. Two seconds later, when it finally, mercifully, stopped, the only evidence of damage were two tiny holes, one above the right hip and one almost centered on the navel. The storm of directed fire had died to a light shower and Sergeant Reese started towards him.

“Forget it,” said O’Neal, scanning a map of the area for a new firing position.

“He was having convulsions!” said Reese, surprised and angered to find the lieutenant interfering in first aid.

“He’s dead. Check his telemetry. Convulsions don’t…” he said as he turned to stop the trooper but it was too late. Sergeant Reese popped the seals on the helmet and a red mass, unpleasantly reminiscent of spaghetti sauce, poured out on the floor. Reese began to dry heave as McPherson’s head rolled out of the dead helmet and squished into what remained of his body. The underlayer gel, red tinged, oozed out behind it.

“… flip you backwards for a full gainer and a half twist through the air. Come on, Sergeant, time to scoot.” O’Neal popped the power cartridge out of the grav sled, laid a charge on the ammo, picked up two boxes and trotted to the door. “Come on. They’re dead, we’re not. Let’s keep it that way.”

The next thirty minutes were forever a blur for Sergeant Reese. He had forgotten his rank, his unit and even his name; all he could do was blindly follow Lieutenant O’Neal, firing when and how he was told. He vaguely remembered, as in a dream, the views from various windows and rapidly firing before moving to another location. He remembered the order from Lieutenant Browning, the XO, voice cracking in terror, to fall back to Saltren. He remembered inexplicable orders from Lieutenant O’Neal to shatter certain beams and arches, placing demolition charges, in low, brightly lit corridors down which he crouched while the shorter lieutenant floated with lethal, catlike grace. He returned to stark reality during their first close encounter with the Posleen.

They were in a subbasement headed he knew not where running down one wall of a mammoth warehouse. The shelves were filled with green drums, like rubber oil barrels. As the lieutenant passed one of the aisles, both their AIDs screamed a belated warning. A group of fifty or so Posleen, accompanied by a God King, opened fire on Lieutenant O’Neal with everything they had.

There were six high-density inertial compensators along the spine of the suit. They had been placed there to prevent severe inertial damage to the most vital portions of the user. Lieutenant O’Neal launched himself into the air and away from the threat, an instinct of hundreds of hours of simulations, while his AID dialed the inertial compensators as low as they would go. This had several effects, good and bad, but the net effect was to make it less likely that the flechettes would penetrate his armor as they had the private’s; at this range their penetration ability was vastly improved.

The lack of inertia permitted the suit to move aside or be pushed away as if no more substantial than a hummingbird. Combined with the strength of the armor it successfully shed the first sleet of rounds, but it made him as unstable as a Ping-Pong ball in a hurricane. He was picked up by the impacts, flipped repeatedly end for end, struck the warehouse wall and blown sideways.

Sergeant Reese screamed and fired on the target vector flashing in his display. The Posleen were masked by the barrels, but he figured with the power of the grav rifle he could saw through the barrels quickly and take the Posleen under direct fire.

As it happened, actually hitting the Posleen became unnecessary. The barrels throughout the entire warehouse were filled with an oil processed from algae. It was used by the Indowy in cooking. It was as ubiquitous as corn oil, and the five million Indowy of Qualtren used so much they needed a half-kilometer square warehouse. Like corn oil, it had a fairly high flash point but given certain conditions it could burn, even explode.

The depleted uranium pellets of the grav guns traveled at a noticeable fraction of the speed of light. The designers had carefully balanced maximum kinetic effect against the problem of relativistic ionization and its accompanying radiation. The result was a tiny teardrop that went so fast it defied description. It made any bullet ever made seem to stand still. Far faster than any meteor, rounds that did not impact left the planet’s orbit to become a spatial navigation hazard. It punched a hole through the atmosphere so fierce that it stripped the electrons from the atoms of gas and turned them into ions. The energy bled in its travel was so high it created a shock front of electromagnetic pulse. Then, after it passed, the atoms and electrons recombined in a spectacular display of chemistry and physics. Photons of light were discharged, heat was released and free radicals, ozone and Bucky balls were produced. The major by-product was the tunnel of energetic ions indistinguishable from lightning. Just as hot, and just as energetic. A natural spark plug.

In two seconds a thousand of these supremely destructive teardrops punched through fifty drums of fish oil. One pellet was enough to finely distribute a drum of oil over two to three thousand cubic meters of air. The following rounds found only vapor, and these excess pellets, following the immutable laws of physics, set out to find other drums to divide. The oil from thousands of drums suddenly flash blasted into gas then ignited from compression, rather like a diesel piston. The net effect was a fuel-air bomb, the next best thing to a nuclear weapon in Terran technology, and the basement warehouse became a gigantic diesel cylinder. For Sergeant Reese, in an instant the world flashed to fire.

The warehouse was two levels below ground. It had six levels below it and was three hundred fifty meters from Sisalav Boulevard, a hundred fifty meters from Avenue Qual. The fuel-air explosion blasted a two-hundred-meter diameter crater down to bedrock, gutted the building for a kilometer upward and set off all the charges planted for Plan Jericho. The shock wave smashed structural members all the way to Sisalav and Qual and spit many of the remaining troopers on the ground floor out of the building like watermelon seeds. It killed every unarmored being in the mile cube structure: three hundred twenty-six thousand Indowy and eight thousand particularly quick and greedy Posleen. The Jericho charges worked as planned, shattering a hundred and twenty critical monocrystalline support members. With surprising grace, the mile-high edifice leaned to the northwest and slowly, as if reverently kneeling, fell into Daltrev, blocking Sisalav and Qual and smashing the southeast quadrant of Daltrev. It crushed more Posleen and completely blocked an enemy advance from the massif to Qualtrev.

Following a predetermined plan, when the last shaken but mobile survivors of Alpha and Bravo quit Qualtrev five minutes later, that structure’s charges detonated as well. The building settled across Avenue Anosimo and the rest of Daltrev, blocking Posleen advances through both the battalion’s sector and the primary axis of advance into the 7^th Cav sector. With the Posleen advances blocked, the remnant of the battalion was free to support the Cav. If it could be reconstituted.

Mike moaned and opened his eyes. At least he thought he did but the world was as black as before and he suffered from vertigo. Either there was something wrong with his inner ear, or he was basically upside down and on his back.

“Lieutenant O’Neal,” said his AID in her most soothing voice, “you’re not blind, there just is no light.”

“Suit lights,” muttered Mike, dazedly.

“First let me tell you where you are. What do you remember?”

“Headache.”

The AID correctly interpreted this as a medication request and chose three items from the pharmacope.

“Whew,” said Mike after a minute or two of shutting his eyes against the soul-drinking darkness, “that’s better. Now, where am I? And turn on the damn helmet.”

“What do you remember?” the AID temporized.

“Entering a warehouse in the basement of Qualtren.”

“Do you remember what happened in the basement?”

“No.”

“Do you remember Sergeant Reese?”

“Yeah. Is he alive?”

“Barely. You encountered some Posleen. In firing on them Sergeant Reese struck several bladders of oil with kinetic pellets. This caused a fuel-air explosion which in turn detonated the Jericho charges…”

“I’m under Qualtren,” said Mike in sudden horrified realization.

“Yes, sir. You are. You are under approximately one hundred twenty-six meters of rubble.”