John Ringo: A Hymn Before Battle

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.