John Ringo: A Hymn Before Battle

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! ”

Mike swallowed, “A month?”

“Yep,” said General Houseman, “you’ve been in the body and fender shop over a month and you’ll be here for a while yet. It took them two weeks to do a proper number on the radiation damage alone.”

“What’s happened to the expeditionary force? On Diess?” My platoon? he wanted to say .

“Well, the C-Dec blew up quite spectacularly and did a number on a large section of the city. We sortied in the aftermath. The Posleen weren’t able to move through Ground Zero and we used that terrain obstacle to our advantage. Then, holding those positions, we got the Indowy to build us an abattoir,” he smiled grimly. “Then we slaughtered those sorry bastards.”

“Would you care to be more specific?”

“Do you know what murder holes are?” asked the general, holding a cup of water with a straw up for the lieutenant to drink from. His newly grown arm was still weak.

“Like in castles? Holes to pour oil in the entrances?”

“Burning oil and stick spears through, yes. Towards the end of the castle period and into the twentieth century they used a different technique.

“Just inside the main gates would be a field for sorties to form on. Occasionally the enemy got through the first gates. The walls on either side of the sortie field would be gun ports, hundreds of them. The enemy would pack onto this field and it would become a killing field; the origin of the term, by the way.

“A First Division officer managed to develop a relationship with a high-ranking Indowy. With this Indowy’s help we converted the boulevards behind the MLR into killing fields, two buildings deep. Then we pulled back into them.

“The Posleen came down the boulevards in their normal swarm and the Corp opened up from either side. The boulevards were plugged by ACS in concrete bunkers and there were thirty-foot-high walls on either side. Snipers with fifty calibers along the fifth story just to engage the God Kings. It was hell.

“Hardly any of the Posleen made it to the ACS positions. We set up two boulevards that way and had all the others blocked and supported. The Posleen just kept coming and coming until there were hardly any left and those few leftovers turned tail. We sortied again and pushed them back to their landers where they boarded and left — those that survived the rout. We recovered over seven thousand landers, Lampreys and C-Decs that were left behind.”

“You mean we won?”

“Yep,” said the general, sadly. “As the poet said, it was a famous victory; we only lost the better part of seven divisions to achieve it,” he concluded, shaking his head angrily.

“But, there is general agreement that the turning point was the extraction of the armored divisions and the destruction of the C-Dec. You have a few ‘colored pieces of ribbon’ coming your way.” He slid a blue box across the covers. “That’s the first to be approved, besides the purple hearts; it’s a theater decoration at my discretion. Congratulations, your first Silver Star, wear it in good health.

“That’s just for rallying the survivors of the battalion; I can imagine what they’re going to come up with for the other stuff. By the way, the rest of the personnel under Qualtren have been recovered — which was quite a job — and Captain Wright says, ‘Hello.’ ”

Mike solemnly picked up the box. “Wiznowski?” he said and looked up.

The general nodded his head. “I’ll take care of him and Sergeant Green.”

“Thank you, sir. Can I have another AID? And is Michelle’s personality center available for download?”

“There’s a new AID issue in your drawer.” The general paused and looked slightly awkward. “The data dumps when the nuke warning went out meant that a lot of data was lost. I’m afraid that most of… well, the Darhel say that the personality programs couldn’t be saved.”

Mike looked stunned. “I told her to back up,” he insisted.

The general had been briefed about this by a psychiatrist that he thought was frankly quackers. As it turned out the shrink was right; the officer who had sustained the word that he lost most of his platoon and three limbs in the battle was misting up over a goddamn computer program. Were all these Fleet Strike johnnies nuts, or what?

“The Darhel liaison told me that there was just too much lost in the scramble to back everything up. ‘Non-vital’ data was the last to be saved. By the time they got to backing up all the AID personalities the damage was already done.” The general paused. By the shattered look on the lieutenant’s face, something else needed to be said. “The Darhel worked for nearly a week before they gave up. I’m sorry.”