by Jay Allan
There was a moment of silence before Number One spoke. This time he forgot to catch himself, and he turned to face the hologram. "And against better adversaries?"
The image coughed twice before speaking. Wherever the real Number Four was, he had a dry throat. "If they faced a Marine assault force or Caliphate front line units they'd get cut to pieces unless they had a substantial numerical advantage."
"How substantial?" The hologram turned around. The question had come from Alex, who asked it mostly because she knew that's what Number One wanted to know. It never hurt to remind him what a good team they made.
"At least three to one. More if they are facing real combat veterans. Their unit tactics are simply not good enough to go up against elite troops. But the worst problem is the lack of any blooded veterans in the organization. Not the non-coms, not the officers. We don't have anyone at all in the formations with combat experience. We're recruiting cogs as footsoldiers and pulling the non-coms and officers from the terrestrial army, but these guys haven't fought a war in a century. They're glorified internal security."
"Thank you, Number Four." Stark spoke up more quickly this time, before Number Six could say anything else. He enjoyed Alex's games...to a point. But he had to get moving, so it was time to wrap things up. "I want the training program ramped up now so we're moving six battalions through at a time. Number Five, I want you to consult with Number Four on how to improve our training program. In five years, seven outside, these troops are going to have to be able to take on any enemy - the CAC, Caliphate, even our existing Marines if they resist demobilization."
Number Five was going to argue, but he decided against it. "Yes, sir."
"Number Six, I will be in London until tomorrow. I have a mission for you after you finish on EE-4. Let's discuss tomorrow night before you leave." He looked out over the table. "If there's nothing else..." He knew there wouldn't be; he'd already signaled the meeting was over. "Thank you ladies and gentlemen. I will see you all in a month."
Chapter 4
Control Center
AS Pendragon
In orbit around Columbia - Eta Cassiopeiae II
Cain wasn't sure what he thought of the new Gordon II landers. They were bigger, which not only allowed one craft to carry a whole squad instead of just a fire team; it also increased the storage space available. Remembering back to his squad leader days, he was sure he would have liked having all his men with him during an assault. As an officer, however, he wondered if it wasn't better to have a squad combat loaded on two separate craft. In a pinch, a team could fill in for a squad, at least for a while, but if you lost the entire unit you had a hole in your line.
But battles had gotten bigger. The first time Erik Cain stepped into the launch bay of a troopship, he was part of an assault with two companies. His most recent battle had seen 18,500 troops hit the ground, 1,400 under his direct command. Larger landers helped get more troops planetside, and the enhanced storage capacity was useful for the sustained campaigns that were becoming the norm.
The escalation in the scale of war was everywhere. Erik's early drops were made from the AS Guadalcanal, a fast troopship that carried a single company and about 60 sailors. During Operation Sherman, his regiment had been billeted on the Pendragon and two of her sister ships, massive kilometer-long transports, each carrying a full battalion with heavy weapons and an atmospheric fighter squadron, plus 280 naval crew and supplies for a protracted campaign.
He smiled wistfully as he thought of the Guadalcanal. He'd served on a lot of ships since then, but he still had a soft spot for his first posting. She'd been blown to plasma in the final stages of Operation Achilles, the worst military disaster in Alliance history, but she'd gone down fighting and taken a couple enemy ships with her.
He was standing in the control center staring at a bank of monitors, watching the activity in the bays of the Pendragon and the other five transports holding his brigade. His first wave was about to launch. As always, it made him uneasy not being bolted into one of those landers, but he'd been told in no uncertain terms that a colonel did not go down in the first assault. He didn't suppose it was any different now that he was filling in as an acting brigadier general. He obeyed General Holm's orders, but it still pissed him off to be standing there when his men were going into battle. Even simulated battle.
At least that political officer was leaving him alone. Cain did his best to do as General Holm had asked, and he'd actually managed to get along with Captain Warren or, more accurately, he pretended to get along with him. Warren was full of suggestions on how to better handle the troops day to day, but he seemed willing to step aside when they were actually fighting...or pretend fighting at least.
Cain sighed. These were only wargames, but men and women would die anyway. You didn't land 3,600 troops from space under combat conditions - even simulated combat conditions - without taking losses. Accidents and mechanical failures would claim their toll. He knew this training session would save lives later, when his troops were attacking enemies that fired back with real weapons. He knew it intellectually, but that wasn't going to make it any easier when he got the first fatality report. Erik Cain had led thousands of troops, but he still had trouble dealing with the ghosts of those who didn't come back. Sleep was a sporadic thing for Cain, and it was at night he usually hosted his old comrades. They held a place for him in Valhalla; he knew that. One day, brothers, he thought grimly. One day when there is less work to do.
His eyes were fixed on the monitors, but he needn't have bothered - he knew by heart what was happening in those bays. First, the troops would stand there, armor deactivated, the crushing weight held up only by the locking bolt attached to the lander. That's when the claustrophobia is the worst. Even those who aren't bothered by tight spaces are uncomfortable encased in several tons of Osmium-Iridium polymer hanging there like dead weight.
Then the nanotech nuclear plants that energized the armor would come alive, and power would flow into the various circuits and systems of the suit. The Marine was still bolted in, but now the servo-mechanicals were working, and the crushing feeling of weight around you was gone. Armor looks bulky and cumbersome but, the truth is, a well-trained Marine is fairly comfortable in his suit.
The bolted in Marines would be getting updates from the ship's battle computer. In Cain's early days this voice was mechanical, electronic. But the newer ships had human-sounding AIs, just like the Marine armor itself. Erik wasn't sure he didn't prefer the old electronic voice to the new human-sounding ones - either in the bay or from his own wisecracking AI, Hector.
Just before the bay depressurized and the doors opened, the Marines bolted into the Gordons would be pressure coated with heat-resistant foam specially designed to protect against the high temperatures of atmospheric landings. Cain was watching it all unfold right in front of him, but his mind was eons away, in other launch bays with long-dead Marines.
The last update was given by the ship's captain, a tradition Cain was glad had survived the escalation of the war. Alliance skippers always wished the strike force good luck and, soldiers being superstitious, it was considered a bad omen if some mechanical problem prevented the captain's message from being relayed to the troops.
Cain watched the bay doors open and then heard the whining hum as the catapults powered up and launched the landers out into the upper atmosphere of Columbia. This "real" simulated attack had been preceded by a completely fake bombardment that had inflicted considerable phantom losses on the defenders. Cain's target selection had been brilliant and unorthodox. He was attacking an entrenched enemy with no numerical advantage, a no-win scenario. The point of the exercise wasn't for Cain's forces to win, but rather to see how far they could get. But Erik Cain wasn't wired that way. If he was going in, he was going in to win.
He watched the initial wave descending to the surface, taking simulated losses from hidden ground-based weapons. His theoretical warships scanned the surface aggressively, targeting any emp
lacement that fired on the landers and blasting it immediately. He had two full simulated battlegroups supporting the landing.
They won't know what to make of it, he thought with wry amusement. General Holm, maybe, but nobody in 2nd Brigade. His landing was as unorthodox as his bombardment, and he was sure it would give Brigadier Slavin fits which, of course, was just what he wanted.
It looked like everything was going according to plan, so he turned away from the monitors and headed down to the launch bay to suit up. The general had forbidden him from landing in the first wave, but he hadn't said anything about the second...
Cain's command post was a beehive of activity. Communications were coming in from all over the field. Slavin's forces, which were supposed to be defending, had been maneuvered into counter-attacking, and they were throwing themselves against Cain's hastily dug trenches.
His first wave had been small, and he'd landed them in an unexpected area, beyond the ridge north and east of the capital city of Weston. Erik knew those canyons well. The last time he'd led troops on Columbia he'd eaten a nuke just a few klicks east of the LZ. He'd survived by the thinnest of margins and spent a year in the hospital recovering.
The second wave he held back for a long time, and when he finally launched, he landed them right in the broad plain in front of Weston, a glaringly obvious point of attack, and the one the CAC had used eight years before when Cain was a sergeant and Elias Holm a colonel in command of the last ditch defense of the planet.
But Erik didn't attack. He ordered his forces to establish a defensive line stretching between the northern and southern ridgelines, and he began to dig in. He set up every heavy weapon he had and started to return the fire the enemy had been dishing out since the landing.
The defenders had been deployed almost entirely in front of the city, and when Cain's first wave hit the ground on the other side of the steep ridgeline, General Slavin sent a battalion through the pass and then back west to meet them. But Cain's main landing had cut them off in the canyon, and he sent a force to hit them from behind. Pinned between his two groups of attackers, they were cut to pieces.
Several of Cain's landers in the first wave had suffered apparent guidance errors, and a number of ships went off course, landing in seemingly random locations as far as 5 klicks from the designated zone.
The defenders disregarded them, assuming they were just the victims of malfunctions, but Cain had sent his elite company with the first wave, and out of the errant landers climbed squad after squad of his specially trained infiltration unit. In small groups they followed their tactical plan, making their way over the mountainous ridge and into the city itself, unnoticed by the defenders.
The third wave of attackers landed behind the south ridgeline, opposite the LZ of the first group. Cain now had the defending position bracketed, his main force hastily entrenched in front of them, and flanking forces advancing over the ridgelines on both sides. Worse, General Slavin started getting communications from Weston; Cain's special action teams had infiltrated the city. There were armored Marines standing around in front of power stations, data centers, and every other vital facility. No one had anticipated any attacking units reaching Weston, and the parameters provided to the AI running the wargame had not included directives for this eventuality.
Along the ridgelines, Cain's flanking forces set up positions to fire down upon the defenders, who were now attacking the main invasion force in the plain attempting to break out of the trap. Cain's troops along the ridges raked the flanks of the enemy, and simulated casualties mounted quickly. All through Slavin's forces, Marines were told by their AIs that they were casualties. The armor of the "dead" Marines initiated a partial shutdown, leaving them lying motionless to await the end of the battle.
General Holm had been watching the action unfold from his headquarters, and he tried to stifle a laugh. Cain was his protégé, and everyone knew it, but it wouldn't do for the commanding general to appear to be taking sides. Still, he couldn't help but be amused as he watched Erik's forces run circles around Slavin's defenders. Holm had given permission for Cain to create the special action teams from his veterans, but even he had never thought about how effectively they could be utilized.
Simulated losses were less than 550 for Cain's attackers, while the defenders had lost 1,700, almost half their number. Holm was going to put a stop to the exercise, but he figured he'd wait for the AI to call it. When that happened a few minutes later, Holm got on the comlink and addressed all of the participating troops.
"To all personnel participating in the exercise, this is General Holm. The strategy AI has called the battle, awarding a decisive victory to the attacking force." Decisive indeed, he thought with a small laugh. How about a rout? "I want to congratulate and thank everyone who participated. Those who have been immobilized as casualties should have suit power restored within five minutes. At that time, battalion commanders are to direct the return of troops to billets. Command personnel from battalion level up, we will have a briefing tomorrow at 1000 hours and review the exercise. Holm out."
Holm switched his com to a direct link to Cain. "Erik, did you have to smack them around so badly?" He laughed again. "Seriously, that was an outstanding performance."
"Thank you, sir." Cain sounded tired
"Come see me after you stow your gear and grab a shower. I want to discuss a few things, including your special action teams. We can have some dinner sent in. No rush, though. I'll be here late, so take your time."
"Yes sir."
Holm flipped off the comlink, still trying to suppress his smile.
Cain walked across the quad toward the general's HQ. He was freshly showered and dressed in a clean pair of fatigues. It was dark already, maybe 2300 local time. He was starting to get used to the 27 hour local day. He'd just gotten the casualty figures - the real ones, not the simulated ones. Three dead from accidents during the exercise, another two seriously wounded. The fact that all three were from General Slavin's group didn't make him feel any better.
Lieutenant Raynor was expecting him. Cain smiled and wondered, does this kid ever sleep? Holm's orderly led Erik back to the general's office, and with a quick salute he ducked out into the hall, closing the door behind him.
Cain gave the general his own salute, which was actually a pretty good one for a change. Holm was talking into a small comlink, but he waved over toward the small table in the back corner, which was laid out with a light dinner. Erik nodded and walked over, taking one of the seats.
A few seconds later, Holm finished his call and walked to the table. Erik started to get up, but the general motioned for him to sit. "So what did Lieutenant Raynor scrounge up for dinner?" He reached over and pulled the top off of one of the trays as he sat down. It was filled with some sort of grilled fish. The Columbian seafood was excellent, and the general loved fish. There were also plates of vegetables as well as a local growth that resembled Earth mushrooms. "I told him light. I figured he'd go find some sandwiches."
Erik smiled. "I'm trying to remember if I was ever that young and earnest."
"Oh, you were. I remember a very young and memorable sergeant I ran across some years back." Holm smiled and speared a large chunk of fish, dropping it on his plate. "And you, my friend, are still every bit as earnest as anyone in this corps."
Erik laughed softly, taking a piece of fish for himself, smaller than the one the general had picked. "So am I in trouble for exceeding mission parameters? I'll have you know that there was nothing in the mission book that precluded an infiltration of Weston."
Holm snorted just as he was taking a drink. "Under a different commander, you'd be in trouble on a semi-permanent basis." He wiped his mouth with his napkin. "I, being a glutton for punishment, wish I had five of you." He took another bite, swallowing before he continued. "Erik, your special action teams looked great out there. I'm glad you badgered me into letting you train them."
"I was happy with them as well. I felt I had a range of op
tions for using them." His eyes narrowed as he looked at the general. "Especially when I'm given an exercise I'm supposed to lose."
"You should know more than anyone, not every situation is a fair or reasonable one. God knows, you've been in a few hopeless fights yourself, yet here you are."
Erik looked wistful. "Yes, here I am. But a lot of the guys who were there with me aren't."
The general sighed. "Erik, we talked about this before. You can't carry the guilt for every soldier that gets killed under your command. Have you ever thought about how many of them you've pulled through a tough fight? They'd be at war with or without you. But I suspect a lot more of them would be dead on some desolate planet if they hadn't had you." He stared over at Cain, trying to stress his point. "Anyway, we'll discuss this further another day. For now, I want to fill you in on some intel I just received."
Cain stopped chewing and looked up at the general. "New intel?"
"Yes. I finally have some idea why we haven't had to deal with the South Americans yet. Apparently, Alliance Intelligence managed to get a double agent inside their command structure and really mess up their logistics. The agent's been compromised, but Intel estimates a minimum of six month's prep time before the empire can launch any major offensive."
"Well that's good news." Cain put his hand up and rubbed his mouth. "I just wish we weren't sitting here playing games while we have this window. We could finish Sherman in less than six months if we had the naval support."
Holm smiled broadly. "I have one more bit of news." Cain looked over expectantly. "I am going to make an announcement tomorrow, but I'll let you in on it early. The Caliphate and CAC launched a massive attack on Gliese 250."