John Ringo: A Hymn Before Battle

“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.’ ”