A silly story about a sharp shower of short soldiers.
This is how the S.C.A.R.F.I.S.T. Special Division of the Orbital Drop Dire Emergency Shock Troopers was born. My deep gratitude to the greatly missed Terry Pratchett for all his wonderful stories. I've borrowed the Nac Mac Feegle for a bit. No doubt they'll find their way home again. Copyright Terry Cornall 2022
"No! It has to be against all the conventions, I tell you. Worse than plague, worse than nano-gobblers, probably worse even than planet-busters or nova-bombs. You simply can't be serious!" The older man abruptly stood up behind his desk in the Admiralty HQ, Earth Sector, and slammed his hand on the work-surface for emphasis, causing his AI assistant's face to wince on the display. "There is no way you'll get the Joint Council to agree. It is simply too horrible to contemplate anyway. What are you thinking?" He glared at the younger man in the marine's uniform with the six shiny stars of a top general. This war was promoting men up the chain rapidly, too rapidly obviously, if they were all monsters like this one. It was all that 'lead from the front' nonsense. If the grounders would just be sensible and stay behind the lines they wouldn't go through generals so fast.
The general waited for the admiral's fury to subside from red-hot to merely boiling, before continuing in a soft, dead voice. Like a man who has made up his mind to do his worst and now just has to carry out the grim task. "We are losing this war, Thomas, and it's a war of absolutes. Total war. No surrender, no parley. If we lose, we die. All of us, not just us soldiers, everyone. Civilians, non-sapients, plants, everyone and everything, all the way down to the bedrock." He sighed regretfully.
"Besides, council has already agreed. I just thought I should tell you in person that they decided to over-rule you. Sorry. It's desperate times, Thomas, desperate measures are needed." The general bowed a shallow courtesy, and then turned to leave.
"But dropping a spaceship-full of Nac Mac Feegle onto an inhabited planet, man!" shouted the admiral at the too-stiff back of his departing visitor. "Have you no sense of decency?"
....
"Think of them like they are a kind of munition, Claire. Like really stupid smart weapons. Too stupid to know when to stop fighting and they are ditch cunning and vicious with it. A few thousand could clear a continent in mere weeks. The bugs'll be surrendering in droves within a month, I guarantee it. They'll run a light-year at the sound of a 'Crivens!'."
A terrible idea struck the general as he was explaining to his aide. He'd just thought of the one thing that might foil this last-ditch chance for victory. He cast a stricken look at Claire and asked in a whisper, "The bugs, they don't make whisky, do they?"
...
"So, what weapons do they want?" asked the general with some trepidation. "Battle lasers? Obliviators? Molecular disintegrators? Drones with nukes?
"We offered them the Mk IV battle rifles and micro grenades, sir," replied the captain wearily. " Their Big Man called me a spavie scuggan and suggested I stick my guns and bombs up my trakkan. All they need are their fists and their boots, he said. And offered to prove it to me, 'pon my person." The captain paused for a moment and then added, "He did suggest some medicinal whisky, for the emergency use of." The general blanched. The captain re-assured him. "It's alright, I said no."
.....
"Wheee!" screamed the speakers in the Orbital Drop Operations room onboard the warship formerly known as An Excess of Gravitas. It had hastily re-named itself The Crivens to try to disassociate itself the whole endeavor. It orbited hundreds of kilometres above the test-planet's surface, which was in a remote part of the Galaxy, somewhere well away from civilization, just in case. And the ship's mind refused to talk to anybody.
"Maintain radio-silence, Tartan Leader," snapped the captain in charge of the drop training.
"Oop yer kilt, yer spavie Bigjob!" came the gleeful reply from Big Small Jock. "This is fun. How far have I got ter go afore I hit atmosphere? And what happens then? And what does this button doo, anyway?"
The captain cast a panicked look at his staff. "Don't touch that ..."
"Too late, sir," the signals officer pointed grimly at a flashing red panel on his workstation. He gave a resigned sigh as he took off his headphones and turned down the volume on the comm's external speakers. There was nothing anyone could do now, and nobody wanted to hear the screams of a drop gone horribly wrong.
"The shell opened well out of atmo. Diagnostics say that he'll burn up on re-entry."
"Damn!" swore the captain softly. "I told him not to use the over-ride unless the autos failed and certainly not until well after re-entry. We'll have to lock that button out, next time." He fell back in his chair and wiped a weary hand over his face. "How in God's name are we going to train a whole division of these little buggers?"
There was a terrified silence as the staff contemplated the ghastly concept of being responsible for a thousand Nac Mac Feegles aboard the warship. Or even being near the same planet. In the same universe, even.
The faint radio static gave an angry little hissy-spit, like a mouse shouting terrible swearwords at the top of its voice. The signals officer frowned, and turned up the volume again.
"I said, are ya there, yer mucky mudlins? What am I supposed ter do after all the flames have stopped? And yer owe me a new kilt, yer scuggans. Come on, let's get on wi it! It's great fun an' all, but I'm boggin' fer a pint and isn't there some war wi alien bug-uglies we're supposed ter be on aboot?"
....
"Now, men", the general paused and surveyed the chaotic ranks of Mac Feegles, most of whom were paying him no attention. In fact there was a game of craps being shot immediately in front of him. A small female paused in shaking the dice and glared at him. He shook his head and continued, marching slowly down the ranks along with his hands behind his back as if he were the only one on parade. Which was true.
"We've tried reason. We've tried diplomacy. We sent them ambassadors. They ate them. And they seemed miffed when we wouldn't eat theirs. Sending back those pupae and the barbecue sauce that the bugs sent to us was apparently a huge insult. They swarmed out and attacked every one of our planets and stations within hundreds of light years of the borders of their empire. We don't understand them and they apparently do not understand us. The mere concepts of limited warfare and parley and surrender are foreign to them."
He searched the throng for any sign of their chief, the Big Man. Big Small Jock popped up at his feet.
"Are you sure your people know what the mission is?" he asked with trepidation.
"Oooh aye, we ken. We are to go down there and kick the shite out of them, in a restrained manner and to teach them aboot parlay an' surrender, yer majesty." Big Small Jock answered laconically whilst probing a nostril. "Thoo why ye need them to know aboot betting is beyond me, ye' ken?" He considered his fingertip for a moment and added, "And what does re-strained mean? Is it like squeezing the mash a second time with moonshine?"
The general thought about the reply for moment, then shook his head. If the Feegle wanted to teach them about betting, that was his business as long as the idea about surrender got across. "Close enough," he muttered. "Good luck. There's a bottle of the best McAbre waiting for your return. And restrained means try not to kill anybody too badly." He saluted them, and was promptly knocked aside as the troops fell to fighting to be first into the drop capsules. Soonest gone, soonest returned for the whisky.
The drop zone was chosen as the most lightly defended area on one of the bug's border planets, as it was mostly desert. The first wave of drop pods came blazing through the atmosphere going "Wheeeee! and "WaHoo! and "Look oot buggies, weere comin for ye!" The whole chaotic mess was accompanied by the screeing of mousepipes played by the Gonnagle, their battle poet. Suddenly, the sandy wastes were punctuated by tall vertical stalks of guns and bug gunners erupting out of the dunes. The hundreds of shock troopers in the first wave were shot down with pin-point accuracy in a stunning blaze of light and sound. Which made them so angry that after they dug themselves out of their craters and put out the fires in their sporrans, they swarmed the stalks and kicked the shite out of the defenders.
The small soldiers spread out from there like a plague. Everywhere they went smoke and destruction followed, lights went out, traffic stopped, radio and electrical systems silence fell. It was mere days before the planet was palled in silence, darkness and smoke. The silence went on for a week despite the people on the warship Crivens stridently demanding a response from the leadership of the bugs or even from their own shock troopers .
....
"You don't think they've killed them all, do you?" whispered the captain to the general. "Is it genocide that we've done? I'd hope not to be among the first in the Human Diaspora to gain that badge of shame."
....
Finally, "Captain, we've got a signal. They're asking about surrender! And where to place a bet." The signals officer took of his headphones and looked at them as if wondering if he had misheard.
"But they don't know what parley means! Nor surrender!"
A tiny angry voice came from the headphones, "Aye, well, we taught 'em all aboot surrender, yken? An' how to parlay a bet too, thoo God knows why." It sounded a little slurred, but that might have been atmospheric. "Send us doon one of yer shuttley-boots an' we'll bring up the Big Buggie for a nice chat. He asks if yerv got any moore of those diplo-mats in the pantry. Better'n lawyers, he reckons"
...
"So you want to surrender?" The general addressed the biggest bug in the room through a translator.
"Puzzlement," it expressed, and bent an eyestalk to its small advisor sitting on its shoulder.
"Noo, laddie, they wanna accept yoors," Big Small Jock explained slowly to the general. "We taught them all aboot surrender, y'ken? After we taught 'em about how to make whusky, so that we'd not be soo thirsty that we'd have to kill 'em all. Aboot how when the other bloke shouts Uncle, yer s'posed to stoop kickin' him?"
"But why should we surrender?" the stunned general sputtered. "We outnumber them hundreds to one!"
"Aye, we taught them aboot that too, how when yoor ootnumbered, it makes it easier to win."
"What!"
"Aye, when there's moor o' the enemy to hit, it makes it easier."
The general sputtered again for a moment. "But still, why should we surrender to them?"
"So that the fightin' can stop and we can all go down to the pub and get drunk? Some more?" explained Big Small Jock as if to an idiot. He rolled his eyes at the Big Bug and it rotated its eyestalks in response. Slow Humans, they shared the thought.
The absurdity of the situation derailed the general's thoughts. "They drink whisky?"
"Nay, some kinda mucky methanol, I reckon. Six o' one and six point oh two by ten the twenty three o' the other to me. Tastes like shite, but hey, any old port in a storm. Ye got any? Port, I mean? An where's that McAbre ye promised us?"
The general looked around at his people. They variously shrugged, raised their eyebrows or shook their heads. Claire nodded slightly. The captain just hid behind her.
"OK, then we surrender?" the general managed to make a question of it.
"Cheers," said the Big Bug in a chittering voice. "Yoor shout, y'ken?"