Posleen FanFic

by Leigh Kimmel

  "'Typical'? Based on what?" snorted the battalion XO, Major Li.

  "Based on observations of humans classed as 'American' by this equipment on Barwhon and Diess," replied the computer, using the third person 'this equipment' to indicate any of a number of AIDs that it had been in contact with. That said, the AID had obviously failed to take into account that the humans on Barwhon and Diess were highly trained soldiers from the best military forces on earth, and that using them as 'typical' values when modeling civilian reactions was like using 'cornered female warthog w/piglets' when trying to model the behavior of mice.

  The commander looked over at SFC Weaver. "Sergeant?"

  "I believe the work I did on the civilian refugee streams will take that into account, Sir, but I will look into it specifically."

  "Ok, I can live with that. Anything else?"

  When no one answered, Tom looked over at the battalion commander. At the man's nod, he said "AID? Roll it."

  Almost immediately, actinic washes of plasma flame burned in from the East, coming in from beyond the edge of the simulation, taking out any aircraft that happened to be up in the sky at that point. Eventually, the culprits resolved themselves into the ships making up several battle globes, which appeared in the air over the ocean and moved eastward towards the coast, in line with Monterey and moving northwards. The ships split up as they intersected the coastline; four landers appeared in the sky "overhead" to be heading inland. Quickly they began their final descent towards the landing area. Any light aircraft trying to hug the terrain in the valley, behind the shadow of the coastal ranges, were engaged and destroyed at that point.

  Outside the building, a battery of howitzers in training fired a salvo at a distant target; the concussions rattled the walls of the warehouse. Inside the building, several of the witnesses to the simulation jerked at the noise and then looked around in embarrassment, taken in by the quality of the sim.

  "AID, simulation, freeze," ordered LTC Kuzio. "How much information would we have about their approach? Would be able to get any civilian aircraft down?"

  There was a pause while Major McKinney looked, panic-stricken, at Tom, who answered the question when no-one else seemed prepared to. "It would really depend on when we got notification, and would be handled elsewhere. You might bring that up to Brigade, Sir." Tom stepped out of the bleachers and walked down onto the floor, "into" the simulation. After a quick study of the landers, he nodded. "It looks like they are headed for Turlock, Sir. I'll add your question to the list of start-condition variables, Sir"

  Kuzio nodded. "Yep. Ok, what happens next. I'm glad to see that you are on the ball, Sergeant Weaver. Remind us of the overall plan." Most of the ears in the room failed to hear any undue stress on any part of the colonels comments. Specifically, the majority were listening for, but didn't hear, any stress on 'you'. Tom, however, might have noticed a hint of stress on "sergeant", and wondered if he was just being oversensitive.

  "Yes, Sir," he said, nodding sharply. "The city of Sacramento has been designated as one of the cities to be fortified, and work is ongoing. There isn't really any natural terrain there to hide behind, or within, aside from the few rivers, but even those are passable with minimal effort. Any significant rush by the horses will take the place.

  "Consequently, the way to defend it is to prevent the significant rushes from happening. This can be accomplished by either destroying en masse any conglomeration of the pozzies that shows itself, or alternately, in detail by letting them bounce up against a prepared obstacle that is deep enough to take the recoil. Our operational position, ladies and gentlemen, is of the second sort. We will be providing the defensive overwatch on the obstacle that is known as the Sierra Foothills. We entice the invaders to turn towards the mountains, where we allow them to break their pointy little heads against us ... ably assisted by the gazillion-year-old basalt and granite mountains at our rear.

  "According to our intelligence from the Barwhon and Diess campaigns, the horses have a tendency to move to where the shooting is. This means we should be able to get their attention pretty easily, get them to turn into the foothills ... and then kill each and every one of the goobers."

  Tom looked back up from the simulation and at the group of watching officers and non-coms. "And to your front, here, you have our first exercise in this simulation tank," he said, pointing at the holo-field. "At this point, the pozzies are landing here, and it is up to us to prevent them from getting to the incomplete defenses at Sacto. Any simulation that we play in this building will be done using real-time data gathered by any platforms that happen to be handy. The only difference will be when the word 'go' is added, then any level of Posleen invasion will be added. Feel free to suggest stuff that we should sim." Tom turned back to the battalion commander. "Sir," he stated, formally. "I recommend that we go with defense Alpha-Tree-Echo, based on the expected landing area around Turlock. According to the Corps' G3, civilian defense authority will have been notified of the imminent landing and refugee streams can be assumed to be forming shortly. This is an 'Alpha' scenario, so there will be no further landings from this group. The civs in the non-directly effected areas should be going to ground and evading where necessary, not refuge-seeking in the mountains yet. That said, I've programmed in a 20% variance factor on the civilians, so we can expect to see a larger refugee stream up highway 4 than what is planned for."

  "Thank you Sergeant Weaver. Excellent cover of the high points of the plan." LTC Kuzio looked at the frozen simulation again, then sighed and nodded one more time. "With Sergeant Weaver's information, we know where we are, where the enemy is. S2? How long before initial contact?"

  Captain Rodriquez looked down at her notes, then at the display to check that they agreed. "Sir, assuming landing in or around Turlock, initial contact with scattered and unprepared forces will be taken on by units of the First of the 167th Mechanized Infantry plus assorted support. They will have mostly organic arty support, however. There is a single battery of self-propelled M155 howitzers in Modesto." As the S2 continued, her AID helpfully highlighted the assets as she described them. "There is no point in cratering the freeways, as the land around wouldn't cause them any undue trouble. The first East/West feature of any tactical value is the Tuolumne River. In order to make it usable as a defensive line, the flood gates at the San Joaquin fork are shut, and simultaneously the dams on several of the smaller reservoirs in the foothills are opened to create a flood condition in the river bed. Meanwhile, Corps engineer assets are tasked to blow the bridges over it, however they have to get there first.

  "The engineer assets will be coming from the Modesto barracks, so will no doubt start with the Modesto bridges, then work there way downstream to the Tuolumne/San Joaquin fork, then return to Modesto and work their way upstream. The reason for this is that we want the horses moving generally due North, or East if we can help it. We certainly don't want them moving West towards the coast, or South, away from the party that we've laid on for them. This means that we leave them an out that way, if they can get to it before the river floods. By shoving them due North and by preference East, they come up against the Sierra foothills, bringing them into the range of the pre-placed artillery along their axis of advance.

  "As they get around one river, we use the next the same way, atritting them as they come. Eventually they get to us, and we are the first real resistance that they will see. The plan is for us to pull back and around in line with Phase Line Nickel, then pull even further back to Copper." On the simulation, a pair of colored lines, one silvery nickel, the other an orangeish copper, pulsed briefly, the copper one centered on the ridgeline running NW-SE, just to the west of the small town called Copperopolis, from which the phase lines had got their names.

  At that point, we put the vehicles into their pre-prepared hull-downs, and that's as far as we go. Additional assets will move into place at Phase Line Zinc, passing through our lines if necessary. The purpose of 1-149 Armor, however, is to stop the Poslee
n advance at Copper, and failing that, DRT. Questions?"

  Second Lieutenant Nott, the youngest officer in the battalion, asked "DRT, Sir?"

  "'Die Right There', son," said the battalion commander. "Anyone else? No? AID? Roll the sim."

  * * *

  The piles of paperwork in her inboxes stared at her reproachfully as she got up to leave for the day. Stretching, Kay regarded the piles, sighed, and grinned almost sadly before giving them the typical British two-fingered salute. There was so much to do and coming into the office in the morning was so much easier when she knew she could bury herself in the work that would be waiting for her. The President of the Commission was coming out for a visit with the President of Ukraine, and Protocol, Kay's bailiwick inside the political section, was working long hours to make sure that it all went off without a hitch. It was what she was good at, and she enjoyed doing it.

  Then, of course there were those NATO advisors coming, and the US Embassy had requested assistance from the Commission's Delegation (i.e., her friend Carol had called her up, and begged some help off of her), and then so on and so forth.

  In the back of her mind, she knew she was stalling. She'd worked hard to get this post, accepting postings to other, less prestigious delegations so that she could gain the seniority to start getting what she wanted rather than what was left over. She couldn't see why she should give it up to move to California, where her university degrees and skills and languages would have little or no value, except within some marketing or public affairs company, for which she held absolutely no interest. She was a governmental flunky, and damn proud of it. And she'd have to give up her friends in the various embassies in Kiev, and the kids would have to leave the school and all of their friends, there, too.

  Of course, that'd be true once her current posting was up anyway, but she was skillfully avoiding thinking about that, since it wasn't until the end of the year. And then they'd be back in Brussels for a turn, before being sent back out to another delegation someplace. Maybe she could swing her acquired seniority in peoples' faces and coerce a posting to Washington DC or New York out of the powers that be. While thinking along these mental pathways, meanwhile, Kay carefully missed realizing that California to Washington DC was the same distance as from London to Moscow, and would still mean living apart from her husband for long, lonely periods. But she couldn't give up her job and become a military spouse. There was no way.

  Over the past decade, they had watched one flair-up in the world after another, each involving a certain amount of US Army blood to extinguish. Both halves of the Gulf war, Bosnia, Afghanistan, the names rolled off her tongue one after another. Whenever another news report rolled in about another accident on a training base, or a friendly fire incident, or even, on those very, very rare occasions, casualties from enemy action, and how many soldiers had been killed, they would look at each other and they would joke "I'm glad you're not a soldier anymore ... ."

  And yet.

  She knew that Tom was haunted by how it had all finished up, there at the end. Occasionally she'd get him drunk enough to talk about it, because she knew he needed the release mechanism that talking about it had built in. And she knew also that without the alcohol, it was buried and wouldn't come out, except in his dreams. She could tell when he was dreaming about the Army ... sleeping at the position of attention she called it. Afterwards, he would only claim to remember shivering, standing at attention, waiting for something to happen. He might remember more, but without the alcohol acting as a lubricant, the brakes just dug in and he'd say "Sorry, don't remember", and roll over and fake going back to sleep.

  But all that didn't change the fact that Kay was competitive. She treated everything she had accomplished in her life as the steps in a grand game, and couldn't step away from that contest even for a moment. Kay could come up with hundreds of reasons to explain why she hadn't packed up her children and moved to California. The only one that was really insurmountable, of course, was that she couldn't let Tom win.

  Of course, Tom did know the one thing she wouldn't miss in all the world, and so had cheated. The tickets had arrived in the last dip-pouch, sealed into a frilly envelope that was sealed with a sticker in the form a big red pair of lips. The kind of lips that you'd find, with the letters 'SWAK'. Or possibly, the kind of lips that you would expect to see, just before seeing a pair of tickets to a Stones concert at the Warfield theater, in San Francisco.

  So she and the kids would fly out to California, no doubt have a great time, and then fly back. In fact, she could drop the kids off at Mums on the way back, and they could stay there until she had closed up shop in Kiev and found a place to live in Brussels. All the better. And what could go wrong? It was six months or so away, so she had time to convince her mother, book the holiday, and get the airplane tickets and all. And with the kids out of the way, she could ship everything to Brussels ahead of time and move in with Carol for the last couple of months.

  The more she thought about it, the better it sounded. In fact, the less it bothered her, so she decided to stop whinging about it and just go. Besides, Carol would be sooo jealous! The Stones!

  And hell, once the current crop of visiting dignitaries had crawled back under their rocks, it would be an empty plate straight through to next year, and that would be Somebody Else's Problem.

  Kay nodded, stood up and headed for the office of the assistant head of delegation. Better do it now, before something comes up to change my mind, she thought. Stop off at home, see Mum ... have a curry, she thought, now grinning evilly. That'll show him! Sit on the beach at Santa Cruz, visit the cabin in the Sierras, See the Stones in a 2300 seat venue ... .

  All in all, she decided, this sounds like it's going to be one of those holidays, after which you need to book a holiday to recover.

  * * *

  "Tom, Dude! What's up? You look like you didn't get any sleep last night."

  "Didn't. I woke up at three thirty this morning, craving a curry."

  "A what?"

  "A curry. I could have murdered a vindaloo."

  "A vindaloo? Your crazy, Tom. I had one of those once ... I was TDY to a British base in Germany, back in the day. I still wake up screaming, it was that hot."

  "Nah. The vindaloo's aren't hot, unless you request it that way. Someone must have been playing a trick on you ... What you want to watch out for are the phal. Anyone tries to offer you one of those? Shoot him."

  * * *

  "British Air nine-five-two heavy come to two-two-oh at angels three two thousand, over."

  "British Air nine-five-two dropping to angels three two at two two oh, ta. Traffic, over?" The plane banked as Captain Richard Danter pushed the yoke forward and brought the nose around to the new heading. He had been flying for British Airways for years, and had made the run from Heathrow to San Francisco hundreds of times. The occasional seemingly random diversion was just another thing to help him stay awake while the giant Airbus skimmed across the sky. He looked out through his half of the cockpit windows, saw nothing, double checked his co-pilot's view as she did the same. Nothing about this one seemed out of the ordinary, probably just the ATC kids having some fun.

  "Negative traffic, nine-five-two, g'day. United Air seven-three-three, come to angel two-five thousand, new heading two-two-five."

  "Now that's odd," said Lieutenant Emma Gibson as the ATC voice in her earphone continued to 'push tin'. It got odder as it continued, more and more planes were being diverted to new headings. "What do you think?"

  "Cor. Sounds like 9/11 all over again. Sounds like everyone is being diver-"

  "British Air nine-five-two heavy, contact Churchill Field ATC on nine-seven-six-comma-five."

  "British nine-five-two, nine-seven-six-point-five, have a good one." The co-pilot reached for her dash with an index finger and changed the radio frequency. "Churchill ATC this is British Airways nine-five-two LHR to SFO, instructions, over".

  "British nine-five-two, squawk ident on one-two-zero-zero."
There was some movement by the navigator as he punched something into his own board, and then grunted to indicate that he had heard and complied.

  After a pause, ATC continued. "Roger, nine-five-two. I see you ... ok, Airbus 370 heavy? right ... ok ... too big for us. Wait, over."

  "This doesn't look-" started the captain.

  "British nine-five-two, divert to military airfield at Thompson, Manitoba. Come to new heading one-nine-zero, new altitude two-two-thousand. Be advised VFR traffic will be at your twelve, twelve-thirty, indicating nine thousand at range fifteen miles."

  "British nine-five-two going one-nine-zero at two-two-kilo, diverting, roger, searching for VFR traffic." repeated the co-pilot as the Captain again banked the plane.

  * * *

  The plane banked again, and this time her head rolling from one side to the other woke her up. Kay had fallen asleep someplace over Scotland, after firmly telling the kids, the flight attendants and the little old lady in the seat across the aisle, that if anyone woke her up, they could expect to be walking the rest of the way.

  The threat was to prove prophetic.

  "Mum?" Edward was curled up into a small ball onto his seat, but Allison was sitting up and had her in-flight headphones pressed to her ears.

  "Yes, luv?"

  In response, Allison only handed over the earphones. Kay blinked and put them on. At first, it took her a moment to realize what it was she was listening to, but then it dawned on her. Her daughter had the entertainment program set to the ATC chatter-channel, and was listening in to the pilots' conversations with the ATC centers as they passed over. Kay's own father had been a pilot, and she had toyed with that career also when in her teens, and now her own daughter was showing an interest.

  The standard vocabulary of the ATC communications protocols was evident, and from what she heard, it didn't sound good. Kay quickly brought up her own in-flight entertainment system and set it to the map that showed their flight plan and current position. The little airplane that should have been following the dotted line, had turned drastically south and was dropping quickly through the atmosphere towards a big, open space in Manitoba. At the moment, the pilots were still receiving corrections from some Canadian ATC center, so Kay wasn't too nervous. Still ...