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  “Anyway, you construct your plan and really internalize it, but you also construct alternative plans in case that one goes awry. If your primary plan is internalized, but not really expected to succeed perfectly, you can devise changes on the fly. And then you construct your GOTH Plan.”

  “A Goth Plan?” asked Keene again, shaking his head at the pessimistic outlook of soldiers. “What? As in getting overrun by Goths?”

  “Not ‘Goth’ as in ‘Hun,’ ‘GOTH’ as in G-O-T-H. Your Go-To-Hell plan. Your plan when all your other plans have gone to hell and the wolf is at the door. Your, ‘They died with their boots on’ plan.”

  “Oh.”

  “So what’s the GOTH plan?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Keene, musing on the landscape below. “I don’t plan for failure very well.”

  “Then somebody fucked up saying you’re a defense expert. ‘Expect success, plan for failure’ is right up there with ‘on dangerous ground maneuver, on deadly ground fight’ as a military axiom.”

  “The only military axioms I was aware of before the Planetary Defense Center program were ‘never volunteer for anything’ and ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia.’ ”

  “Well, now you know,” Mueller fiddled his fingers and wrinkled his brow with a grin, “um, three more.”

  Keene chuckled as Mueller’s AID chirped.

  “Sergeant Mueller.”

  “Yes, AID?” Mueller said with a smile.

  “Five Posleen globes have just exited hyperspace in near-Earth orbit. TERDEF analysis calls for landings in approximately three hours.” The voice was so toneless that the facts took a moment to sink in.

  “What?” Mueller’s eyes momentarily went round and his skin flushed with a cold sweat. He involuntarily looked up, then shook himself thinking the action was futile. Even as he mentally started to berate himself there was a sudden flash of light in the cloudless sky. The detonation of an antimatter reactor was clear even in bright sunlight.

  “Five Posleen globes have just exited hyperspace in near-Earth orbit. TERDEF analysis calls for landings in approximately three hours.”

  Mueller looked at Keene who had continued to look out over the cityscape.

  Uh, oh. “AID.”

  “Yes, Sergeant Mueller?”

  “Contact Sergeant Major Mosovich. Tell him to get the corps commander to stall on the defense plan. I think we have a winner.”

  “Well,” said Keene turning back to the sergeant. “I see what you mean about plans now. I suppose I’d better get started on that GOTH plan.”

  CHAPTER 31

  The Pentagon, VA, United States of America, Sol III

  1820 EDT October 9th, 2004 ad

  “Have you been getting everything you needed?” asked General Horner as he strode into the conference room. It had been billed as a press conference but, in a rare burst of sanity, the news media agreed to simply have one representative of each major media “type” in the Continental Army Center.

  Until the Blue Mountain Planetary Defense Center was completed, the nerve center for the defense of the United States was in the Pentagon. The indefensible building gave Jack Horner the uncomfortable feeling of swinging in the breeze. Being on the front line did not bother him — he had been there and done that — but it was no place to command a continental-scale battle.

  His AID would help, but even with it he needed an undistracted staff and that was not going to happen if the Posleen were breathing down their necks. And the latest information made that look pretty likely.

  “Well, sir, we really haven’t been given any access since the first warning,” answered Argent, as the unofficial spokesperson. Although the other representatives were all “Pentagon Hands” none of them had Argent’s depth of experience or name recognition. His cameraman, another old Pentagon hand, subtly directed his camera towards the general. Although the press conference had not officially been “started” all was fair in a fluid situation like this.

  “So I understand,” said Horner with a bleak smile of anger. It was not how he had told the Pentagon Public Information Office to handle information flow. As he had just explained to the chief of information’s replacement.

  “To change that, I’m going to assign you Lieutenant Colonel Tremont, my senior aide.” He gestured to the slim, dark lieutenant colonel accompanying him. “He can cut through any red tape you may encounter. We so far have no indication that the Posleen use battlefield intelligence. I’ve already cut half of the red tape out and decided you can report on just about anything you generate while you’re in here. I’m giving you one hundred percent access to my areas of responsibility. You basically have Top Secret clearance and assumed Need-To-Know on anything related to this invasion. If anyone has any questions about that they can direct them to me after they have answered your questions.”

  Argent looked momentarily stunned. “Thank you, sir. Are you sure about that?”

  “This was the original plan, believe it or not. I have to communicate effectively not only to my troops, but to the citizens of the United States. It is my job, my duty, to protect them and keep them informed of dangers to the best of my ability. The best way to do that is through you,” he gestured at the TV crew, “and your radio friends.” He gestured at the representatives from ABC Radio.

  “Pardon me,” he continued, turning to the print journalists and photographers, “but you guys come last.” That got a laugh.

  “So, shall we start?” asked Bob.

  “What, we haven’t already?” Jack said with another cold smile.

  “Well…” Argent temporized. He hadn’t dealt much with the Continental Army commander but he recognized the smile as a bad sign.

  “Hasn’t your cameraman been filming the whole thing?” asked Horner, shortly. “And unless I’m an idiot, everybody is taking notes.”

  “Okay,” admitted Argent. “In that case: General Horner, it has been an hour since the Posleen came out of hyperspace. What’s happening?” The cameraman lifted the minicam to his shoulder to get a steadier shot.

  “There’ve been some space battles between the fighter patrols and the converted frigates that were on station, but this incursion has been outside all the expected parameters,” responded Horner formally. “The Posleen are here in greater strength than we anticipated, they are more bunched than we were expecting not only on the basis of Galactic reports but on the basis of our own experience on Barwhon and Diess. Last but not least, they came out unusually close to the Earth; dangerously close in fact.

  “Because of all of this the Fleet has been unable to engage them with any sort of strength. They are coming down more or less untouched, while we have lost quite a few of the fighters and frigates that engaged them. I have to say this, those Fleet people did a hell of a job given the disparity of the forces they faced. Their efforts were just outstanding.”

  “Can we get a look at some video?” asked one of the radio personalities.

  “We’ll get some of that in from the Operations center in a moment. Having said the other, about total access, I want you to understand that we have a job to do and we need to do it to the best of our ability. Understand?”

  “Yes,” replied the reporters, wondering when the hammer was going to fall.

  “I don’t have time to draw any of my people off their duties; so we’re going to go into the CIC to meet the players. They are all very busy trying to save our country, so be polite. This is a very quiet, serene place where people concentrate very hard: no disruptions. Think of it like a war library. No shouts for a quote, no flash photography, no camera lights.” He fixed them with a blue, basilisk stare until all of them had nodded in compliance. “If any of you do any of those things in CIC, I’ll have you thrown out of this building by a suit of combat armor. He will have orders to shot-put you into the Potomac.” The river was nearly a mile away. The reporters were fairly sure it was hyperbole, but looking at the grim-faced, cold-eyed general, they were not absolutely sure.
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br />   “After the CIC, I’ll hook you up with a couple of our technical people who will try to integrate our systems with yours. I want you guys to know where the landings are going to be as fast as I do. But no disruptions. The American people cannot afford them. Your families cannot afford them. Clear?”

  “Clear,” answered the sobered journalists. Never had a situation like this occurred, where the people they were interviewing were in charge of saving not only their lives, but the lives of their families and loved ones. In real time. Usually, rattling a subject or throwing an unanswerable question at them was the best way to get a really juicy quote. Those techniques suddenly seemed like a bad idea. Rattled would be bad. Argent looked around and saw the other reporters coming to the same sobering conclusion.

  Horner and his aide led them down a short corridor and over to an MP-guarded door. On the far side was a small antechamber and beyond a large, darkened room filled with a mixture of Terran and Galactic technology. On the far side of the room was a giant Mercator projection showing a number of orbit lines in green, blue and red and five large ovals designating possible landing areas. The outside of the ovals, where they were discrete, was yellow and they shaded inward through orange to red. One was centered on the Atlantic, another on the Pacific, a third on Southeast Asia to India, one on Central Asia and one on Africa. The TV cameramen started filming, not sure if the screens would show well enough to broadcast. The quiet atmosphere reminded him of a surgery, everyone concentrating on their individual tasks for an overall good.

  The possible areas for Posleen landings were still vast; the Atlantic oval spread from Chicago to Berlin. The Africa oval overlapped the Southeast Asia oval. The very edge of the Pacific oval overlapped the Southeast Asia oval near the Philippines. In all they nearly circumnavigated the northern hemisphere.

  “Full house spread,” whispered a reporter from the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

  “This screen used to be covered with satellite tracks,” pointed out Lieutenant Colonel Tremont in a whisper. “The remaining military satellites and facilities are the green tracks, while the blue tracks are remaining commercial facilities.”

  “Yeah,” whispered the CNN producer in return. “We’re mainly going out on dedicated landlines to cable operators and on the Internet. Cell, pagers and phones are mostly down.”

  “This screen is, obviously, not used for tactical operations,” Colonel Tremont explained. “But it is useful for getting an overall picture.”

  “Colonel,” Argent asked quietly, putting on his reporter face, “is the loss of the satellites going to degrade the quality of your artillery fire and command and control? I understand that most development in those areas has concentrated on global positioning satellites.”

  “It would, yes, except for the extraordinary work over the last three years of the United States Geological Survey Service. Using a mixture of military, civilian and volunteer personnel, they have put in survey markers across the country, in most areas no more than a kilometer apart. In turn, the location and elevation of the markers have been put into a universal target database. Now, whenever an artillery unit gets into place, they just find the distance and elevation to the nearest UTD point and input that data. That gives them their location to the millimeter. Other units use a similar although slightly less accurate system. So, yes, it will be a pain, but with the UTD we have effectively replaced GPS.”

  “What about targeting the enemy? Didn’t that depend on the GPS as well?”

  “Same thing, only backwards. The forward observer determines his distance and elevation to the nearest UTD and his distance and elevation to the target and sends the raw data to the targeting computers. It all can be done with a special laser range-finding system. The targeting computer crunches the numbers and assigns the fire to the appropriate guns. It’s incredibly automatic.”

  “Will it work?” asked the Journal Constitution reporter.

  “Ah, well that is the question isn’t it?”

  “You said something about connecting our equipment up, General,” interjected the producer.

  “Of course, let me introduce Major George Nix.” General Horner gestured for one of the hovering officers and the slight, bespectacled major hurried over from one of the displays.

  “Major Nix came out of Space Command and is our tactical systems officer. The TacSO is the officer in charge of making sure all the systems integrate and are maintained, as opposed to the tactical actions officer, Colonel Ford. Colonel Ford — we call him the TacCO — is in charge of making the moment-to-moment tactical decisions.

  “Major Nix, can you get these journalists a feeder screen and somehow hook their cameras up? I want to make sure that everyone in the United States has up-to-the-minute access to all the data we are generating.”

  “Yes, sir, we anticipated this.” He turned to one of the video technicians. “Come with me.”

  Nix led the tech out of the room, the reporters following and quietly making notes about the intense atmosphere in the room. He led them down the corridor and into a well-lit chamber where two specialists and a slightly overweight staff sergeant were arguing at a display.

  “Sergeant Folsom, ‘One If By Land.’ And do it fast.”

  “Yes, sir.” The two specialists hurried out of the room as the sergeant went around configuring displays. As he worked he talked. “Gentlemen, we had anticipated this, so you will get more functionality than you would expect, but less than you are used to. I’m setting up two displays for the print and radio guys, and we’ll feed you to your headquarters, ABC, over RealAudio, so you can do your radio thing over the Net. The Net is busy right now, but the usage is not as high as a normal business day so you should have good connectivity.

  “The consoles use a simple graphic user interface. Right-click on an area of the map and it will zoom down to a fineness of about six hundred miles on a side. It’s not a political map. It’s drawn from satellite imagery, so somebody had better be up on their geography.”

  “Sergeant,” asked the CNN producer, appropriating one of the consoles, “is there any way to run a second audio feed back to CNN?”

  “Sure, if somebody there has Interphone or NetMeeting.”

  “Where?”

  The sergeant walked over and tapped at the next console. “What’s their URL?”

  Within minutes the sergeants and the specialists, returned from rerouting Internet T-3 lines to increase the room’s available bandwidth, had configured all of the backup CIC consoles to support the media effort. The reporters were practically speechless.

  “Sergeant,” said the CNN producer, as she finished preparing the headquarters’ team for the next round of reports, “when this is all over, if you ever need a job, come see me.”

  “I’ll think about it, when this is all over.” The question of when it would be over and whether any of them would be around to see it was unspoken.

  “Well, now all we do is wait,” said Argent, watching the ovals of probable landing areas reduce on his monitor.

  “What about reporting on the personnel being called back to duty?” asked the video technician, watching the feed on his own monitor to ensure the “take” was working.

  “That’s being reported on in Atlanta.”

  “Poor bastards.”

  * * *

  “Bye, honey,” said Mike, shrugging into his silks top.

  “Bye, Daddy,” said Cally, looking up at him with round eyes.

  “You listen to Grandpa, all right? And be a good girl.”

  “I will, Daddy. When the Posleen come we get a few, then run and hide. Stop, drop and roll, right?”

  Unless they’re right on top of you.

  “And then I’ll come dig you out,” he promised.

  “Right,” she said, face twisting as she tried not to cry.

  “Take care, son,” said his father, proffering a Mason jar for the road.

  “Too right, the last time in the body and fender shop was enough. Getting shot smart
s.”

  “Long drive.”

  “Too long. They’ll be down before I’m in South Carolina.” He looked at the Mason jar, shrugged and took a hit. The fiery liquor felt good going down. He sealed it and tossed it in his bag.

  “How you going?”

  “Want to know if I’m going to be in a landing path?”

  “Something like that. The Twenty-Fourth Tennessee Volunteers are right up the road as the Tennessee Divide reserve and the whole Fifty-Third Infantry is holding Rabun Gap. So we’re probably going to be fine. You, on the other hand, are driving up to Pennsylvania. So, are you taking the plains or the mountains?”

  “I’m still trying to decide. The plains would be faster, even with the interstates doglegging away from the Gap. But, that is a possible landing area according to Shelly, so…”

  “So. Which way?”

  “Mountains,” Mike decided. “Up Interstate 81. Better to be caught in traffic jams than in a landing.”

  “Want a piece?” A Glock 9mm appeared by legerdemain in the old man’s hand.

  “No, I’m packed. Speaking of which.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a finely carved wooden box. The wood was an odd shade of lavender-brown Mike Senior had never seen before. Mike Junior handed it to Cally. “I was going to leave this with your Grandpa as a birthday present, but I think now would be a good time to give it to you.”

  She was puzzled by the latch, a circular pattern similar in appearance to a maze, with no obvious buttons. Pulling on the sections caused them to lift, and they could be twisted on their axes but none of the actions seemed to open the box.

  “It’s an Indowy puzzle box, which I don’t, unfortunately, have time to let you work through. Watch.” He lifted three sections and twisted them until the sections joined together to form a pattern reminiscent of a multiheaded dragon. When slid back into place, the latch released and the top opened as the serpent seemed to writhe off the box and into a circuitous dance. The fire-breathing hologram danced above the open box as Cally gasped at the contents.