John Ringo: A Hymn Before Battle

“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.