She couldn’t afford to spend time focusing on each note. She had to let it flow out of her, her hands on the bow and strings creating each sound before her mind could even imagine them. To describe it another way, Nora had to be ‘in the zone’, with her mind and body working in complete harmony. There could be no disconnect between the two. That’s how she played, and that’s what would take her the distance.
The room filled with the sound of music. Nora felt herself sinking deeper and deeper into the song. It was almost like diving into an ocean, becoming completely consumed by the piece. All she had to do was swim and enjoy the view.
She continued playing, getting lost within the suite…
And then she messed up.
“Crap,” Nora muttered under her breath as she stopped playing.
She still couldn’t find the proper balance. Nora could play the piece when she was completely concentrating, and she could make other songs flow when she let herself get lost in the music, but why couldn’t she find the middle ground here? Either she played in a completely mechanical fashion, or she couldn’t get all the notes right.
This piece was well and truly her nemesis.
Nora was about to resume playing when she heard her phone go off on the end table. She gently set down her instrument and walked over to retrieve it.
Meeting at 7, the message from Liz read.
Nora took a glance at the time. 3:00 PM. Plenty of time until she needed to be online.
Until then, she would continue to practice.
* * *
They had a lot of unhappy faces, Nora thought to herself as she looked around the meeting room. Most of Ghost Battalion’s high ranking officers had gathered at Waukegan to go over the events of the previous evening. Of course, they weren’t going to be pleasant.
Ragnarok had achieved complete surprise with their counterattack, hitting the assault force when they were most vulnerable and inflicting heavy casualties. Even worse, Hydra had been forced to retreat several blocks, including giving up their portion of the waterfront. Now they lacked the necessary facilities to unload anything larger than a river craft. They couldn’t use their patrol ships for transport, which would exacerbate their supply situation.
“What’s the situation inside the city?” Danny asked. He and Blake had come along to represent the Ghost units deployed to the west.
“Ugly, truth be told,” Anna said, “We lost a quarter of the battalion in the fighting, and they’re not going to be back at full strength until they’ve had some more combat experience.”
At least they could retain some of their previous experience. The sync system allowed players to select three skills as their specialization, which kept the skill level from being reset if they were killed in battle. That let players have a head start on their progress with a new life, while also keeping the prospect of death as a very real threat.
But that only covered specialist skills like battlefield medicine, explosives and agility. Combat techniques like weapons proficiency couldn’t be selected, meaning a newly revived player had to start all over from the bottom. A more advanced clone body could help, but the number of skills they could save was still very limited. And even though the drop-off wasn’t extremely severe, it was still noticeable.
It almost mirrored a real world war, in a way. They always had reinforcements, but they had to replace veteran, experienced troops with raw recruits. Even if they knew what they were doing from their previous lives, they still weren’t up to par until they gained experience.
And that fact could hurt them badly. Even if they had relatively parity in regard to numbers, losing their most veteran soldiers hurt Hydra badly, probably more than it did Ragnarok.
Hydra relied on small groups of experienced, veteran troops to hold the line. That was all well and good, but under the current system if they were killed then they were extremely hard to replace. Ragnarok had plenty elite units of their own, but they relied more on their rank and file. While they might not quite had the skills of the elite forces, they were still formidable, and they could replace their losses far more easily.
Zach continued. “We also lost several blocks along the entire front. Luckily we managed to consolidate another line further back, but we lost a considerable amount of our gains up to now.”
“Dang,” Danny said. “Guess they’re not fooling around.”
“Not at all.”
“This isn’t some random chance, either,” Neil said. “The timing was way too precise for that. The rockets landed right on target, right as we were coming out of cover. That’s no coincidence.”
“How’d you manage to make it out of the initial bombardment without any casualties?” Karen asked. “The amount of explosives landing at once was ridiculous.”
“Dumb luck,” Neil shrugged. “We had a pretty tall building in front of us that took most of the force of the blasts. It almost collapsed on us too, but fortunately it managed to stay together until we pulled back.”
“So, Ragnarok certainly planned this,” Robbie said.
Liz nodded. “Of course. They had plenty of time to recon our positions and figure out where we were hiding. As soon as the bombardment started they probably figured an attack was coming and then timed the rocket artillery counter fire to hit right after it stopped.”
“What I don’t get is where they got all the rockets from,” Danny said. “We’ve been interdicting them for weeks, and we’ve blown up several supply convoys. They’ve had to clear the roads looking for mines and IEDs, and they were expending ammunition against the garrison. Shouldn’t they be running low by now?”
“Maybe they used them all as a last ditch effort,” Robbie said.
“If they were doing that, then I’d think they’d use them in a defensive manner,” Blake said. “Not to launch a major counterattack. My guess is that they have a lot more of them than we originally thought.”
“Do they have another way they can get supplies from Madison to Milwaukee?” Nora asked.
“Well, there’s other routes between the two cities, but the roads are smaller and aren’t well maintained,” Robbie said. “Besides, we’ve been keeping an eye on them from the air and haven’t seen anything.”
“You haven’t run into Ragnarok air cover?”
“It’s surprising how much you can sneak around in a small helicopter if you don’t bring attention to yourself.”
“Good to know,” Neil commented.
Nora frowned. “You’ve been observing, but have you patrolled all the time? What about at night?”
“We haven’t,” Robbie said. He frowned as well. “Do you think they’ve been running supplies along the secondary routes at night?”
“I think that’s definitely possible,” Nora said.
“And difficult to stop,” Zach pointed out. “Most people are asleep at that time. We’re not going to be able to drum up enough troops for an interdiction mission that isn’t during the weekend.”
“Putting that aside for a moment, we have a much bigger problem,” Anna said. “It’s obvious that we can’t completely cut their supply lines, and their troops in Milwaukee are going to get what they need to continue the fight. The bigger question is, what are we going to do against them?”
“Fight?” Robbie shrugged.
“We’ve already lost one battle,” Neil said.
“I think we have to go over what happened during that loss,” Karen said. “They hit us with a bunch of stuff at once, and it all came crashing down around us.”
Nora shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “The rocket artillery attack was bad, and the counterattack right afterward didn’t help matters. But losing our radio communications in the middle of the fight? That’s probably the biggest takeaway.”
“What does it mean, though?” Danny asked. “Do they have some secret weapon?”
Zach spoke up. “Probably.”
Every person in the room turned to hear him speak. With his knowledge of the communications systems
, he’d be the one in the know.
“Any light you can shed on this?” Liz asked.
Zach nodded and opened up his wrist menu. “I took a note of the times when the radio went down and when it came back up. According to my notes, the radio went dead at 9:37 PM central time and came back up at 10:07.”
“Down for thirty minutes,” Anna mused. “Does that mean they’re using something with a time limit?”
“Oh, that’s definitely the case,” Zach agreed. “When they were implementing counters to the radio and communications systems they experimented with a bunch of different limits for balance purposes. They tried power limits or resources, but those were too easy to overcome, so they finally settled on time limits.”
“And you think they have a jamming device,” Liz said.
“You know how many schematics we found in Central City?” Zach said. “I’m willing to bet they found something similar in Madison.”
And that could spell real trouble for them, Nora mused. Hephaestus Company was working night and day to bring new equipment online and into the hands of the fighting companies, but their resources and manpower were finite. They couldn’t do everything for everyone at once, so any technological progression would be hindered by those obstacles. Ragnarok had the same problems, but at the same time, they could still match Hydra’s technological prowess. They had already played one trump card out of the blue. Who knew what else they might have hiding up their sleeve?
“So if they had it all this time, why didn’t they use it before?” Danny said. “That would have been useful in a number of spots.”
“Maybe they didn’t have it until recently?” Anna suggested. “That’s the most obvious reason.”
Nora agreed. Using it at the Battle of Green Bay would have been completely crippling. Not only would Ghost Battalion have lost, but Ragnarok would have likely crushed them.
“They probably held it in reserve so it would have the most shock value when they finally used it,” Blake pointed out. “You only get surprise like that once.”
“Still, it’s really going to hurt us when they use it next time,” Liz said.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine that would be fun,” Blake agreed. “But now we know it might be coming, and I’m guessing you’ll have countermeasures in place.”
“We will,” Anna confirmed. “We were able to salvage the situation on the fly pretty well, all things considered.
It was a testament to their cohesion and improvisational skills that they were able to come up with a working plan in short order. Without any direct from command, every single company had sent runners to the neighboring units to reestablish the lines of communication. Meanwhile, Anna had directed all her staff at HQ to the front lines, using ATVs to quickly relay orders and form a solid front to repel the enemy.
Still, Ragnarok had pushed them back, inflicting heavy casualties in the process. Hydra still had a considerable presence within the district, but taking it had become all the more daunting.
“Still,” Danny spoke up, “I wonder why they chose to deploy their secret weapon now. What did that gain them? A few blocks?”
“I have a feeling they wanted more,” Neil said. “They hit us pretty aggressively.”
“I think they wanted to drive us out of the district completely. They probably wanted to kill as many troops as possible too,” Liz said. “If they landed something like that it would be a crippling blow for us in the north.”
Blake frowned. “Even so, you have two battalions stationed within the district with a considerable amount of artillery support. Even if they could hurt you badly, would they really be able to drive you out just like that? I don’t think so, and I’m guessing their commanders don’t either.”
“I wonder,” Danny said.
“You have an idea?” Anna asked.
Danny gave a thoughtful look, then spoke. “What if they’re just trying to prolong the battle in the city?”
“For what reason? They’ll have to simultaneously fight us and the NPC garrison. Plus they have to worry about Magic Battalion and Ronin’s alliance,” Karen said.
“Do they?” Danny asked pointedly. “They’re smart, and they can read situations. They know we’re committed to the attack on Milwaukee right now. Magic’s nothing more than an annoyance without reinforcements, and where are they coming from?”
“But Ronin is still a problem.”
“No, they aren’t,” Danny said. “It’s not a big secret that they’ve committed most of their forces toward Davenport. They know we have a wide front to cover and limited forces to do it with. By now they know most of our troops are concentrated at Milwaukee.”
Nora got the gist of what he was saying. “You’re thinking that they’re using the city to sucker us in,” she said.
Danny shrugged. “I think it’s quite possible.”
“To what end?” Robbie asked.
“If they can pin down a large number of our troops in Milwaukee that means there’s more of them not protecting other parts of the front. And if they want to launch a counterstrike they’d have plenty of options.”
That last statement unsettled her greatly. Hydra had the initiative for the moment, but one properly timed counterattack could shatter that in an instant. And if they committed too many troops to the city, they could very well become cut off if Ragnarok scythed through their flank.
“So, Ragnarok lures us in, forces us into a grinding battle of attrition, then launches a counterattack somewhere in the west to cut us off and then completely annihilate us?” Zach said. “That sounds distressingly plausible.”
“More than that, it’ll be a disaster if they managed to pull it off,” Blake added. “This situation? It’s like a historical battle.”
“Which one.”
“Stalingrad.”
The word hung in the air for a moment that seemed to last too long. Nora tried not to grimace. They wouldn’t permanently lose their troops, but the losses of supplies and equipment could prove devastating. Hephaestus Company could produce at a considerable speed, but they weren’t miracle workers.
All their gains could be wiped out in a single stroke.
“OK, so that’s probably something we need to be very aware of,” Liz said. “Let’s get back to one of the other problems at hand. When they use the jammer, what are we going to use to counter it? Runners? Couriers on ATVs?”
“Those worked pretty well in the last fight,” Karen said.
“Don’t they also sell phones in Old Chicago?” Robbie asked.
Zach nodded. “They do. Along with the phone cable needed to connect them. No one ever buys them because everyone has the cybernetic radio.”
“Well, now we know why they sell them,” Danny said. “Pretty convenient.”
“That’s because they’re only second best, by a long shot,” Zach told him. “They only work if the cable stays connected. One stray shell or a sabotage team and the phone is a useless hunk of junk.”
“Still, it’s better than nothing,” Anna said. “We should look into it. At the very least we can connect the front lines to HQ and the artillery batteries.”
That made a thought pop into Nora’s head. “I wonder if Ragnarok figured that out and installed lines like that. That way they’d be able to communicate while the jamming was active.”
“Definitely a possibility,” Anna agreed.
“Next question,” Blake said. “Ragnarok’s supply lines. I know it’s impossible to stop the flow completely, but we should at least try to disrupt them a bit.”
“Problem is, we don’t exactly have enough forces to do it,” Liz said.
“Maybe we do,” Danny said. All eyes in the room turned toward him.
“Do you have some secret army that we’re not aware of?” Nora asked. She couldn’t imagine what the heck he was talking about.
Danny gave her his trademark grin. “Probably not. But I do have an idea.”
16
WORLD SEED
Presiden
t Starvos stood up and offered his hand as Zach entered the room. “Thank you for coming today at my request, Mr. Wofford.”
“I’m glad to be here,” Zach told him as he returned the handshake.
“Have a seat, please,” Starvos said, beckoning to one of the chairs in front of him.
Zach settled into the seat, a plush black leather chair, taking in his surroundings as he did so. Apparently they were in one of the smaller company meeting rooms, reserved for small gatherings between the higher-ups of Elysium Visions and other companies. Everything screamed opulence, from the thick red carpet to the black marble walls.
President Starvos sat down in the chair across from him and made a gesture to the low table between them. “Care for a drink? There’s coffee in the pot.”
“I will, thank you,” Zach said as he poured himself a cup, less because he wanted it and more to break up some of the awkward tension he was feeling. What had he been called here for? Was this all part of the recruitment pitch to get him on the development team?
Starvos poured himself a cup before continuing. “You’re probably wondering why I called you here today. Cliché, I know, but also likely, given the circumstances.”
“Yes, I am,” Zach admitted. He paused for a moment before voicing the question swirling around in his mind. “Is this part of my recruitment?”
President Starvos laughed. “And what would make you think that?”
“I’m the only one being called to these kinds of meetings,” Zach pointed out. “As far as I know, I’m the only one being offered a job. Logical deduction ties the two together.”
“And so it does,” Starvos replied with an easy smile. “It may be forward of me to say so, but I hope you take my efforts to recruit you into account. I hold your skills in the highest regard, and I’d like to do whatever it takes to get them on board. Within reason, of course.”
Deception City: A World at War Novel (World at War Online Book 5) Page 17