A Hymn Before Battle

13 Ttckpt Province, Barwhon V 0205 GMT, June 27th, 2001 ad

“Man,” growled Richards over the team net, “does it ever stop raining here?”

“Well,” answered Mueller, subvocally, “if you consider this admittedly heavy mist to be rain, no.”

“Can it,” snapped Mosovich as he slithered over a fallen Griffin tree, “we don’t know what’s around.”

Barwhon, like the Pacific Northwest, was a land of incessant mists and rain. And, as soldier after soldier has discovered, although Gortex deals well with rain, mist slices right to the bone. The constant cold and damp would have sapped the energy of a normal group of soldiers, would be a major handicap to the expeditionary force, but Mosovich and Ersin had chosen well. The team of special operations veterans had long before become totally inured to cold and wet; but that never stopped a soldier from bitching. The air currently had the texture of cold, wet velvet and the mist was slowly turning to rain. Their footfalls on the sodden purple humus were muffled; between the slightly reduced air pressure and the mist the sound barely carried to their own ears. Unfortunately, since they knew there was a Posleen outpost somewhere out there, it also meant they would be less likely to hear the Posleen.

They had been traveling for two days through the damp forest without incident and Mueller and Trapp had made up a game of naming the different kinds of trees. They were up to three hundred and eighty-five different species and almost all of them were larger than terrestrial rain-forest giants. The most common, nominated as a Griffin tree by Trapp, averaged over a hundred seventy-five meters high, more than three times as high as the tallest terrestrial rain-forest king. The “wood” was incredibly tough, as it had to be to support such a structure even under Barwhon’s slightly reduced gravity, and degraded slowly under the influence of Barwhonian saprophytes and the ubiquitous beetles. Massive limbs, lianas and ferns snarled the forest floor and the triple canopy devoured the light.

Through the amethyst mire the team moved like ghosts. The insectoid animal life would stop as they passed, analyze them in their animal fashion, then get on with the serious business of survival. The team could have been the only sentients on the planet until Trapp suddenly froze and held up a clenched left fist.

The team slowly sank down into the bog on their haunches as Trapp extended his hand twice, then held up two fingers. He made the sign for random movement and enemy. Just out of sight a dozen Posleen were doing something not in the hand signal lexicon. Considering that the team was there to figure out what the Posleen did on a day-to-day basis, that wasn’t very surprising.

Mosovich crept forward and slid his head slowly around the liana shielding Trapp from view. An even dozen Posleen, normals from what he had learned of their anatomy, were slowly moving across the clearing, picking feathery leaves and purple berries.

The aliens were Arabian-horse-sized centauroids. Long arms ending in four-digit talons, three “fingers” and a broad, clawed thumb, protruded from a complex double shoulder. The legs, ending in elongated talons, were longer than a horse’s, and sprung on a reverse double knee that seemed arachnoid. The design of the knees caused them to move with an oddly sinuous bouncing gate, like oversized jumping spiders. Their long necks were topped with a blunt crocodilian snout. The necks of the squad wove a complex pavane, sauroid mouths opening and closing in a constant low atonal hiss that was almost a chant. The neck movement was hypnotic and sinister, speaking to the lizard brain of fanged hunters in the dark.

Ten of the Posleen were in a line, with two more following. Each of them wore a harness to which was attached their primary weapon. Four carried 1mm railguns, long gray rifles that looked misshapen to humans, six carried shotguns with bulbous ammunition storage; one of the trailers toted a hypervelocity missile launcher and the other sported a 3mm railgun. The missile launcher was a small weapon, not much more than a yard long, but the bulbous rear housing carried six missiles with onboard grav-drives that could accelerate them to a large fraction of the speed of light in less than twenty meters. The damage when one hit a solid object was catastrophic.

Occasionally one of the pickers would take a sample back to the trailers and give it to the one with the HVM. It, in turn, would slip the sample into a complex construction carried over one shoulder. There were no significant vocalizations until a beetle the size of a rabbit was startled out of cover by the skirmish line.

The skirmisher that startled it let out an odd warbling cry and darted in pursuit. When the Posleen caught the unfortunate hemipteroid it popped the beetle into its maw. The trailer with the 3mm let out a high-pitched bellow, whipped up its 3mm and butt stroked the skirmisher on the back of the head. The beetle popped out relatively unscathed and tried to crawl away, but the chastened Posleen picked it up and handed it to the technician.

Mosovich tapped Trapp on the arm and pointed for him to stay in place. He motioned for Ersin and, after a moment’s hesitation almost too faint to notice, Mueller. Master Sergeant Tung, in the meantime, had gotten the team cautiously dispersed. Mosovich suddenly realized that Ellsworthy had disappeared, which was just fine by him. It meant that if it dropped in the pot, the wrath of God would suddenly descend on the Posleen.

With a silence that Mosovich found completely acceptable, Mueller moved into a position to overlook the Posleen and began filming them with a microcam. Ersin just looked, getting a feel for the enemy. As they watched, another small beetle was driven up and the Posleen went through the same little skit of attempted consumption. Despite being on a recently conquered planet, the Posleen did not have any security out; the Posleen with the 3mm seemed to be more of a subleader than security. They would have been remarkably easy to ambush.

After his two intel NCOs had gotten a good look, Mosovich motioned them backwards. He signed for Trapp to lead the team wide around the foragers to the left and pulled back. The team pulled out, and swung wide. Ellsworthy appeared as silently as she had disappeared, pulling a small piece of rotting vegetation off of her ghilly suit as she reentered the perimeter. She held it at arm’s length by two sculptured fingernails for inspection then tossed it aside with a grimace. Mueller snorted quietly and shook his head as Tung rolled his eyes toward the heavens. After the little by-play she hefted her “Tennessee 5-0” .50 caliber sniper rifle and silently moved out. The ease with which she handled the massive weapon belied its thirty-pound weight.

Throughout the rest of the day they continued to bump into rummaging Posleen with greater and greater frequency. Their objective was an “upland” area where a Tchpth colony city had formerly resided, but as they neared the objective the density of Posleen had increased to the point that Mosovich pulled them back as darkness fell and called a council of war.

At the stop Ellsworthy finally demonstrated where she had been hiding each time by slinging her thirty-pound rifle, slipping on fingerless, spiked “tiger” gloves and swarming thirty meters up a Griffin tree. The movement was so fast and silent that it was surreal, like something from a horror movie, the petite marine moving more like a spider than a human. The highly trained and physically fit special operations NCOs watched the action and, with the exception of Trapp, knew that there was no way they could replicate it. Trapp just nodded his head, noting a few things about the eccentric little marine falling into place. In the velvet darkness above, her ghilly suit blended her into invisibility.

“Okay,” Mosovich subvocalized over the team net as the other NCOs sat down to munch MREs, “we’re running into more and more Posleen. We might be able to sneak through them, but we will probably run afoul of at least one party. I am accepting input, junior first. Martine.”

“P-p-p-pull back. Iss-iss-iss a recon, na a raid.”

“Mueller?”

“This is our first penetration. Let’s hold back and observe the parties for a while then pull out to the second area. This area is getting established; it only got overrun about five weeks ago. Maybe a more established area will have fewer skirmishers.”

“Trapp?”

The SEAL just nodded his head.

“Does anybody want to go deeper?”

“Ah’ always lahk it deeper, Sergeant Major,” whispered Ellsworthy from her perch.

There was muted laughter as Mosovich shook his head. “Ersin, dammit, I told you she’d be trouble!”

“Me? It was your idea!” the intel sergeant protested.

“Yeah, but I still told you she’d be trouble.”

“That’s mah middle name, Sarn’t Major. And speakin’ a trouble, there’s some Posleen headed this way right now.” She bent over her scope. “Another of them rat packs, about fifteen.”

“Okay, fall back to pickup. Trapp, take it slow and cautious. Martine, signal for pickup two days from now, site A.”

“R-r-r… You know.”