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  Colonel Hanson looked at him quizzically as he dropped the last plaque into the box. “Pourquois?”

  Mike suddenly looked grim as he held up the cigar with his own querying expression. At a nod he lit it with a Zippo emblazoned with a black panther on a rock. Drawing in a series of puffs he said, “Well, sir…” puff, “the Airborne has a tradition,” puff, puff, “of in and out. Wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am.” Puff. “Also, the Airborne tradition is, practically, for hit and run.” Deep draw, puff. “Hmmm, El Sol Imperials. Damn hard to find, what with the shortages.” He dropped the affectation with a sudden intensity, stabbing the cigar as if to drive in the points.

  “This situation is much more like the Marine tradition, especially the tradition of World War II and Korea. Take a hard objective. Hold it against all comers, against human-wave attacks with critical shortages and damn little support. Hold at all cost and die to the last stinking soldier if necessary, killing as many as humanly possible the whole time. No retreat, no surrender, no quarter. Sir.”

  Mike had a sudden vision of a narrow clay street with towering skyscrapers to either side. The street was packed with yellow centaurs, the horse-sized invaders in a bayonet to boma-blade battle with a beleaguered German panzer grenadier division. The bodies of the Posleen and Germans were piled in mounds, blocking his way. Their red and yellow bloods had commingled and an orange river was flowing into the alien sea.

  He tilted his head down and fiddled for a moment with his cigar as he struggled to throw off the flashback. “Damn, it went out.”

  Colonel Hanson dropped into his swivel chair as Mike pulled the Zippo back out. He reached into his breast pocket and produced a pack of Marlboro Reds. It had taken him years to break the habit, but the Galactics had a pill to do that now and besides they had eliminated cancer, heart disease and emphysema for military personnel so… “You okay, Captain?” he asked as he tapped out a coffin nail.

  “Yes, sir. I am just peachy-keen,” said Mike, meeting his eye steadily.

  “I… we cannot afford a shell-shocked commander.”

  “Sir, I’m not shell-shocked,” disagreed O’Neal, against the cacophony of internal voices. “What I am is one of the damn few people you are going to meet short of Barwhon or Diess who is prepared, mentally, for this invasion. I had gamed it for thousands of hours, before Diess. Diess was, so to speak, just the icing on the cake. When you get your AID you can cross-check me on it.” He took a pull on the cigar. Since Diess he had been hitting both tobacco and alcohol kind of hard. One of these days it was gonna catch up with him. “This war is going to be a form of hell, sir, for every single American. The shit just doesn’t get any deeper than this.”

  Colonel Hanson nodded thoughtfully. That made a lot of sense. “Which brings us to the here and now. Now that I have that obnoxious oaf cleared out of my headquarters, what’s the situation? The G-1 didn’t even know the players and he had no ideas about ACS equipment, but he did say the supply situation is as confused as could be expected. Who are the acting staff? And since this headquarters seems to be absolutely empty, where the fuck are they?” he concluded.

  “Major Stidwell was acting as his own G-3, sir, since that was his slot anyway. Actually, he was doubling up on everything except the -4.”

  “Maybe I should have given him the benefit of the doubt if he was that overwhelmed,” the colonel mused.

  “Actually, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, sir. The only reason there is an S-4 is that we got sent a supply officer, a mustang L-T, to the assistant -4 slot. Otherwise, Major My-Lot-In-Life-Is-To-Micromanage Stidwell would undoubtedly have taken that slot as well.”

  “Oh,” said the colonel with a grimace.

  “We also have a full set of captains as company commanders, sir, any of whom could have taken a second hat if Stidwell was overwhelmed. We’re better off than the Line and Guard units from the point of view of company-grade officers.

  “However, if he made the decisions he could be absolutely sure that they were the right decisions,” the captain said with a snort. “God knows what decisions might have been made by mere captains that did not have his years of experience. They might have, oh, ‘taken excessive initiative with the training schedule,’ or, God forbid, ‘begun ACS training before all the meetings about how to implement it were completed.’ ”

  “If I remember my recent history, you have been there and done that as well, haven’t you?” said the colonel neutrally.

  “Yes, sir, I have,” said O’Neal with instant seriousness. “As a matter of fact, he was trying very hard to have me court-martialed for insubordination.”

  “Were you insubordinate?” asked the new commander, wondering what sort of answer he would get. He shouldn’t have wondered.

  “Sir, I disobeyed not one direct order, but so many I can’t begin to count,” O’Neal stated definitively.

  “Why?”

  “I did not think anyone would dare court-martial me, sir, and if it was disobey them or have my company die in combat it was a no-brainer.”

  “Why would they have died?” asked Hanson.

  “Sir, he was starting training exactly as they did with the Two Falcon on Diess. Yes, sir, I have been there and done that before and I was not going to do it again; that was an oath I swore on the souls of my dead. We had, have, a critical suit shortage, the unit has not received its issue and only a few of the troops, ones transferred from other ACS units, have them. So he wanted everyone to memorize all the parts to the suits, do Posleen flash cards, and all the rest of that. In other words, bore them to death. What I tried to explain to him was that I obtained a shit-load of Milspecs, VR glasses for training, through… some secondary channels.” Mike cleared his throat and took a puff of his cigar.

  Colonel Hanson smiled. He had to remember that although this officer had extensive experience with suits and even suit combat, he did not have extensive experience as an officer. Needs must when devils drive. Since time immemorial, units that were not properly supplied had found ways of obtaining the equipment they needed. As long as it was kept to a minimum and under control it was not a problem.

  “We could have been training in the field simulating eighty percent reality combat weeks ago,” Mike continued after determining that the colonel was not going to question him on the source of the Milspecs. Mike was prepared to back his personnel, but it had surprised him as much as the losing company when second squad showed up with a truck full of GalTech equipment. Since then, of course, he had learned all about Sergeant Stewart and “The Squad From Hell.” Now nothing surprised him.

  “But that wasn’t by the book — which is not my fault, I wanted to include it — so he wouldn’t buy it. Then we started having problems with shit being stolen out of the barracks, rioters, vandalism, and all the other fun stuff that has been going down around here. I broke out the ‘nail-guns’ and got rounds for them from the ammo dump out of the training budget. Forget the rants about extremism; I thought, still do, that it made sense to at least put the weapons in the troop’s hands, give them a feel for those big bastards and get in some physical training that made more sense than long slow distance runs. But he wasn’t worried about the image or whatever, he was most upset that the rounds couldn’t be returned to the dump and were going to be charged against his training budget before he was ready to use them for training.”

  “Well, I can empathize,” said the colonel with a frown. “Live-fire training is expensive.”

  “Oh, Jesus, sir, not you too!” Mike could feel the iron bite of anger on his tongue and tried to keep under control. The last two months with Stidwell had strained his already damaged patience to the limits. This colonel was an entirely different kettle of fish, though. All he had to do was keep in control and present the situation rationally. Right. And then maybe the dreams would stop?

  “Captain, training budgets are just that, budgets. You have to stay in them, especially when everybody is having to make sacrifices for this goddamn war.”
r />   “Sir, what we will actually spend for training this year can come out of my pay,” Mike answered reasonably.

  “What? How much do you make?” asked Hanson, surprised.

  “Well, in case you haven’t noticed, Fleet makes a hell of a lot more, rank per rank, than the Army, sir, but what I meant was: What is included in a training budget?”

  “Well, vehicle fuel, expended rounds, consumable expenditures, food, special field equipment, that sort of thing.”

  “Yes, sir. The first thing to remember is that the Army had no idea what training budgets for an ACS unit would be, so they kept the budgets that they would have had as Airborne, Marines, whatever. What wasn’t considered is that the suits are fueled off a dedicated fusion plant at company level that is rated for forty years use with on-board fuels. The cost is part of our capital budget including the fuel, just like suits. Suit food is cheap, a basic supply comes with the suit and recycles itself so the cost of the whole battalion’s food for the year, if we stayed in suits, would come out of my pay, easy. No field toilet paper, no MREs, no vehicle fuel, no disposable plastics, the suits take care of it all, garbage in garbage out. For that matter, food comes out of the general battalion expenditure. And no ammunition costs.”

  “What do you mean, no ammo costs?” Colonel Hanson replied, still trying to assimilate all his other assumptions about training costs being stood on their ear.

  “When we start suit training, or even VR training, you’ll see, sir. The suits are absolutely awesome training vehicles; there is virtually, pun intended, no point in having a live-fire. So, we are so far overbudgeted that we could all buy Cadillacs out of the ammo budget and leave plenty to go around. So, anyway,” he concluded, “the big problem is not that we don’t have equipment, it’s that we haven’t received all of our personnel.”

  “I wasn’t aware that, except for senior officers and NCOs, there was a personnel shortage. It sounds like you’re talking about troops or company-grade officers.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. We’re still waiting on twenty percent of our junior personnel consisting of females and recalled enlisted and current training cadre.”

  “You did say females? Females?”

  “It was recently decided to open the Combat Arms to females,” O’Neal answered with another puff. He was tempted to chuckle, since the colonel had gotten quite red faced at the concept of females in his battalion. But he finally decided that discretion was called for. “We are expecting four female junior officers, that I am aware of, two transfer first lieutenants from other arms and two butter bars; hell, I am getting two of them. We’re also getting a slew of privates and rejuv or current-service NCOs including one of my platoon sergeants. All the girls are going through infantry training at the moment. The others are either going through retraining if they’re recalled or still at their units.”

  “Oh, joy.”

  “Yes, sir. Better now than when we were having the riots; I hate to think of what would have happened then. And then when they get here we have to retrain in ACS. There is still no ACS training center.”

  “Right, well I do not intend to wear myself ragged trying to be my entire staff. Until there is a qualified replacement, you are the acting G-3. Get the other company commanders up here one at a time. I am taking them all on sufferance given the condition of the battalion.”

  “It’s only partially their fault, sir. In many cases conditions resulted from direct orders of Major Stidwell.”

  “Well, we’ll see if I agree. Okay, who is senior?”

  “Captain Wolf, Charlie Company.”

  “Get him up here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then get started on revising the training schedule. We don’t have any duties to interfere and I believe in training. As soon as the new chums arrive, I want us out in the field, twenty-four/seven until Momma makes us come in from the rain. Create a training schedule beyond your wildest dreams.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “And in your planning, keep one thing in mind. Our job is to put ourselves between the Posleen and civilians. The mission is to save our people. And we will not fail.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Atlanta, GA, United States of America, Sol III

  1025 EST January 15th, 2004 ad

  Said England unto Pharaoh, “I must make a man of you,

  That will stand upon his feet and play the game;

  That will Maxim his oppressor as a Christian ought to do,”

  And she sent old Pharaoh Sergeant Whatisname.

  It was not a Duke nor Earl, nor yet a Viscount —

  It was not a big brass General that came;

  But a man in khaki kit who could handle men a bit,

  With his bedding labeled Sergeant Whatisname.

  — “Pharaoh and the Sergeant”

  Rudyard Kipling, 1897

  “My name is Sergeant Major Jake Mosovich.” The lights of the hall glinted from the silver badge on his green beret.

  It was, Jake had decided, a singularly inappropriate environment. But the reception hall of the First American All Episcopal United African Church was packed to overflowing with a mixture of the very old, the very young, and women. All of them were gathered at tables piled with an odd assortment of weapons, household items and general bric-a-brac. The new Special Forces team, with a few old faces, was scattered throughout the room prepared to train or intervene, whichever seemed necessary. There was a jarring note to the room; there were no young men. Virtually every male of military age in the United States was already inducted into the military and if any of the local teens had gone AWOL, they certainly were not going to turn up at a Special Forces local defense training clinic. Even if it did mean a hot meal on a cold day.

  “I am a twenty-five-year veteran of the United States Army Special Forces: We’re called The Green Berets. We are one of the special operations units your tax dollars have supported for years, so now you get to get some of your own back.” As usual that was good for a small laugh.

  “The mission of the Special Forces is to train indigenous forces in irregular tactics. What that means is that we are supposed to go into countries and teach guerillas that are friendly to the United States how to be better guerillas. Officially, we have never performed our stated mission.” He smiled grimly and there was another chuckle. Some of them got it.

  “But it is what we are trained to do. And guerillas, in general, do not have access to regular weapons or equipment. They have to make do with what’s around. And they don’t work with huge supply systems, the ‘tail’ as we military folks call it.”

  His face turned grim. Combined with the scars it made him look like something from a nightmare. “We all know what’s coming,” he said, gesturing at the ceiling and by extension into space. “And we all know that the Fleet won’t be ready when it hits. The ships are taking a long time to build. And unless they are all ready, throwing the few that are ready at the attacks would not help us at all and would set the plans back for years.

  “And the politicians have finally admitted that there won’t be much of a chance of defending the coastal plains.” He chuckled grimly at the simple term. “In case any of you are not aware, that includes Atlanta. And Washington and L.A. and Baltimore and Philly and just about every other major city in America.” He didn’t completely agree, and he wondered who thought that it wasn’t political suicide. But the decision had been made.

  He shook his head again. “And I know that most won’t be leaving.” He looked around the room at the assembled faces. Old women and men, boys and girls. A smattering of women between twenty and fifty. Two men in the same range, one with both legs missing and the other showing signs of palsy. “At least not right up until the invasion. I’ve seen more wars than most of you have seen movies and don’t nobody leave until right up to the last minute. Then there’s always a mad scramble. Something always gets left or forgotten. Somebody is always at the back of the line.” He shook his h
ead again, face gray and grim.

  “So, we are here to teach you all we can about how to survive at the back of the line. How to live and fight without much in the way of support or regular weapons. We’re hoping that it will give you an edge if it comes time that you are at the wall. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.” He he tapped his camouflage-clad chest, looking at one little girl. “That is right in here.

  “We will also be teaching you about how to spread mayhem with regular equipment in case you get access to it,” he continued, returning to parade rest.

  “Let me say this, I hope I don’t have to but we are required to by our orders, what we are teaching you is absolutely and strictly illegal to use outside of time of war. We are going to be at the First American for five days, by the grace of Pastor Williams, and when we get done you are going to know how to make weapons that make Oklahoma City look like a firecracker. But so help me God — and I say that without taking the Lord in vain, this is an oath before Our Lord — if so much as one of you uses this against another American citizen I will hunt you down if it takes the rest of my life.” He looked around the room and his scarred face was molded granite.

  “You will not use my teaching against your fellow man. You must swear that now, on the Ever-loving God, before we will teach the first lesson. Do you swear?”

  There was a sober muttering of general assent. He thought it would be enough. The pastor seemed to understand his flock and most of those present were his congregation.

  The training actually served two purposes. It was not expected — and this lesson would be drummed in over the next few days — that these people could hold their neighborhoods. Shelters were being constructed that should be able to hold most of the displaced population. But as he had said, it was human nature to leave it until just a little too late. In addition to teaching a few techniques that might help some of these citizens against the enemy, they would, together with the pastor, designate locals to be official evacuation coordinators. Evac coordinators would hold a semiofficial position, analogous to World War II Air Raid Wardens. In the event of a Posleen landing, they would direct their neighbors towards the most efficient evacuation routes and, if necessary, organize local defenses.