“A landing craft. Umm, space weaponry, like… uh, plasma cannons and shit. Some antipersonnel stuff, really nasty shit. Oh, sweeps for artillery, so, like, no call for fire if you’re around one.”
“Yawhol. Anything else, like, how many troops it carries? Shit like that?”
“Oh, about four, five hundred? Yeah, like, one of their companies. And one or two God Kings.”
“Right. Okay, how do you identify one?”
“If it looks like a skyscraper but it fuckin’ moves, it’s a fuckin’ Lamprey,” said Sergeant Brecker, laconically.
“Ek-fuckin’-zactly,” noted Duncan, neatly flipping the flash card into the trash. “If you are unable to identify a Lamprey, you desperately need your eyes examined. Next on our daily prescribed training of Posleen equipment identification, is this big mother-fucker,” he held up the flash card. “Bittan?”
“C-Dec, Command Dodecahedron. Core unit of a B-Dec or Battle Dodecahedron. Twelve-faceted cube. Random mix of interstellar weaponry on eleven facets. Antipersonnel secondaries. Interstellar drive. Umm, about 1600 personnel nominal, buncha God Kings, some light armor. Locks on twelve Lampreys to form a B-Dec which is the central fighting unit of the Posleen.”
“Very good. Excellent, even. How do you identify one?”
“It looks like a B-Dec, except smaller and the B-Decs have noticeable gaps between the attached Lampreys.”
“Close. The correct answer is: if you want to piss your shorts and run it’s either a B-Dec or a C-Dec and it don’t really matter much which.”
“How much longer we gotta put up with this shit?” asked Sergeant Brecker, rhetorically. The training schedule, by order of the battalion commander, had been read to each company during morning formation. Authorized ACS training, a total of thirty-five hours for this week alone, was currently “Identification of Known Posleen Vehicles and Equipment.” There were twenty-five items. The following week there was “Know Your Combat Suit,” an in-depth list of all the items on the suits. That, too, would have to be out of a book; there weren’t any suits to study.
Bittan fished the Lamprey flash card out of the trash. “I’d really like to keep this,” he said diffidently.
Duncan looked chagrined. “I’m sorry, man, I shouldn’t let my attitude fuck the rest of you up.”
“Don’ mean nothin’,” said Sergeant Brecker. “I mean, as bad as those fuckin’ grass drills were, at least we felt like we were learnin’ somethin’. It ain’t your fault battalion’s got it stuck so far up their fourth point of contact they couldn’t find light with a nuke.”
“F-U-C… K-E-D… ” Stewart began to intone.
“Attention on deck!” snapped a specialist halfway down the barracks.
“At ease, rest even,” called Captain Brandon. “Get the troops from next door and wake everybody up, I got newwws!”
“Whass happ’nin’ sir?” asked one of the mortar troops.
“Wait’ll we’re all here. I don’t want to have to go over this twice.” He grinned. “How are you liking the training?”
Feet shuffled for a moment, then the mortar specialist answered. “It fuckin’ sucks, sir.”
“Glad to hear that the first sergeant and I aren’t the only ones with that opinion.” The gathered troopers got a real chuckle from that.
Troops were trickling into both ends of the barracks. As the trickle fell off and the group pressed forward Captain Brandon hopped up and sat on one of the upper bunks. He looked around at the sea of black, white and brown faces to make sure that most of the troops were present.
“Okay, here’s the deal. We’ve been scheduled to lift day after tomorrow.” There was a muttered and confused chorus. “Yeah, is that good or bad? Well, we’ll be out of C-LOC, but we’ll be even more imprisoned. However, battalion has indicated that we might get access to our equipment once we’re on board ship. In the meantime I want you guys to bone up on all the ACS lore you can. We’re not going to get much work with the equipment before we’re engaged, so I want you guys to read the fuckin’ book! I understand that there’s only one per squad, so read aloud or share the reading. Read it in your spare time, read from it between deals! It’s the only damn card we’ve got to play! So study like you never did in school. Williams,” he pointed at a Second Platoon NCO, “maximum effective range of the M-403 suit grenade launcher?”
“Uh, a klick, sir?”
“Twelve hundred meters, close but no cigar, Sarn’t. If you don’t know it, I know your troops don’t. Duncan, maximum effective range of the M-300 grav rifle?”
“Maximum effective range of the targeting system, sir.”
“Explain.”
“The grav rifle has the ability to leave Earth’s orbit, sir. It will hit something as far away as you can aim.”
“Right. Private Bittan, what is a Lamprey and how do you identify it?”
Bittan glanced at Sergeant Brecker and got a nod. “Umm, it’s the lander portion of the B-Dec, the outer layer that surrounds the Command Dec. An’… if it looks like a skyscraper, but its flyin’, it’s a Lamprey, sir.”
Captain Brandon laughed. “Good answer, troop…”
“Complement of four hundred normals, nominal, with one to two God Kings. Single random anti-ship weapon on its vertical axis. Normal space lift and drives…”
“Thanks, Bittan, that’s the idea. You all need to get up to snuff on this stuff. Weapons, tactics, enemy equipment. Let’s hope we get to use the equipment once we’re on board, but in the meantime, study, study, study. We move to embarkation at 1030 hours day after tomorrow. That’s all.”
“Sir,” said Schrenker, “are we gonna get to call our families?”
“No.” Captain Brandon did not look happy to pass on that news. “We’ve been ordered locked down and that’s the way it’s gonna stay. Once we’re on board we’ll have the ability to send mail to our families, but not until we’re in space.”
There was a disgruntled mutter at that, but no more. “Yes, sir.”
“All right men, get back to it. And?”
“Study,” they chorused.
He waved and walked out as the company broke up into buzzing groups.
13
Ttckpt Province, Barwhon V
0205 GMT, June 27th, 2001 ad
“Man,” growled Richards over the team net, “does it ever stop raining here?”
“Well,” answered Mueller, subvocally, “if you consider this admittedly heavy mist to be rain, no.”
“Can it,” snapped Mosovich as he slithered over a fallen Griffin tree, “we don’t know what’s around.”
Barwhon, like the Pacific Northwest, was a land of incessant mists and rain. And, as soldier after soldier has discovered, although Gortex deals well with rain, mist slices right to the bone. The constant cold and damp would have sapped the energy of a normal group of soldiers, would be a major handicap to the expeditionary force, but Mosovich and Ersin had chosen well. The team of special operations veterans had long before become totally inured to cold and wet; but that never stopped a soldier from bitching. The air currently had the texture of cold, wet velvet and the mist was slowly turning to rain. Their footfalls on the sodden purple humus were muffled; between the slightly reduced air pressure and the mist the sound barely carried to their own ears. Unfortunately, since they knew there was a Posleen outpost somewhere out there, it also meant they would be less likely to hear the Posleen.
They had been traveling for two days through the damp forest without incident and Mueller and Trapp had made up a game of naming the different kinds of trees. They were up to three hundred and eighty-five different species and almost all of them were larger than terrestrial rain-forest giants. The most common, nominated as a Griffin tree by Trapp, averaged over a hundred seventy-five meters high, more than three times as high as the tallest terrestrial rain-forest king. The “wood” was incredibly tough, as it had to be to support such a structure even under Barwhon’s slightly reduced gravity, and degraded slowly under the influence of Barwhonian saprophytes and the ubiquitous beetles. Massive limbs, lianas and ferns snarled the forest floor and the triple canopy devoured the light.