A Hymn Before Battle

39 Andata Province, Diess IV 1037 GMT May 19th, 2002 ad

Az’al’endai, First Order Lord of the Po’oslena’ar, clenched his fists and gnashed his teeth as he fought a rising tide of te’aalan. His finest genetic product dead and his oolt’ondai, including that thrice-damned puppy Tulo’stenaloor, in full retreat! If these threshkreen thought to triumph they were sorely mistaken!

“All security oolt’ondai to the command ship,” he barked into the communications grid as the oolt’os of his bodyguard looked on with adoring eyes. “The command ship lifts in five tar!” Let them try to face his just wrath as he swooped upon them in his oolt’ Posleen. He stewed as the scattered battalions and their vehicles, including the Posleen tanks used for ship security, were reloaded into the vast dodecahedron. Thousands of normals and their God Kings filed into the cavernous holds packed with cold sleep capsules and all the machinery necessary to set up a Posleen civilization.

“I shall have the get of my enemies as thresh!” he snarled, switching from screen to hateful screen. “And the structures of my enemies shall burn beneath my claws. I shall reap the blood and sear the bone. They will burn and burn until the burning sends word to the demons of the sky that none shall oppose the A’al Po’oslena’ar!” The scattered lampreys, trapezoidal craft that attached to the facets of the command craft in space flight, were left with their own small security detachments as the vast ship lifted under anti-grav and ponderously thundered towards the fragile human lines.

Something painful was waiting beyond the veil that surrounded him and Michael O’Neal refused to face it. It waited with hungry mouths to devour him and he fled down endless brightly colored metal corridors ahead of it. Wherever he turned it was there and it called to him with a seductive voice. Michael, wake up. Lieutenant O’Neal, wake up. Wake up, wake up, wake up. I’m sorry Sergeant, I can’t get him to wake up… All right. A sudden searing pain jerked him into wakefulness and was as quickly gone.

“What the hell was that?” he mumbled blearily.

“I applied direct pain stimulation to your nervous system,” the AID answered nervously.

“Well, next time try shaking the suit or something, okay? That hurt like hell.” He checked the time and shook his head. It would just have to do.

“Yes, sir.”

He tried to rub his face and was balked by the suit. He almost popped the helmet and then thought better of it. The last time he had the helmet off the smell had hit him like a blowtorch. He could only imagine what it would be like after an hour in the hot Diess sun. He took a sip of liquid and Michelle substituted coffee. Unfortunately, it was the one thing the suits absolutely could not get right. It tasted like coffee-laced mud.

“Thanks,” he muttered and sipped his mud; the caffeine was less strenuous to the system than the wake-ups would be. He did not want another hallucinatory experience right now. He stared around bemusedly at the scene of normal human activity. “You’ve been busy, Sergeant.”

“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.

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 conventional 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!”