Jake consulted his notes and hoped that his selected professionally paranoid individuals were listening; he could almost taste the unease in the air. They mostly seemed to be scoping out the walls trying to find the invisible Himmit. Having been through the same exercise several times, he was fairly sure they would fail. Ellsworthy had surprised him again by spotting the alien at all.
"Our mission is to proceed with Himmit Rigas to a Posleen-held continent on one of the planets that is about to get our close personal human attention in the form of the First MarDiv and sundry other units. There we will conduct order of battle and doctrine intelligence gathering on the Posleen. We will ramp up here on Earth, spend about four months on a ship and then perform a covert insertion.
"If we insert undetected we'll be able to use the Himmit ship for extraction and movement. If not, we can wait until another Himmit ship is scheduled for pickup four months after landing. If we miss that pickup we are SOL folks; the next boat is the expeditionary force and it ain't expected for a couple of years." He paused and considered the rough notes he and Ersin had sketched out. They were not in detail; with a team like this one you solicited input as the training and preparation proceeded.
"A couple of notes. We'll be loading heavy. The food on the planet will not be edible but we'll have personal processors to convert the plant and animal matter if we have to forage." He smiled at the various grimaces on the team members' faces. Every one of them at one time or another had dealt with "foraging" on the run, and it was not a pleasant experience. Ellsworthy wrinkled her nose as if she smelled something awful. "If we can work from the Himmit stealth ship as a base it won't come to that."
"Nonetheless, on each insertion we'll have to carry certain items that the science types tell us are unconvertible like vitamins and specific amino acid combinations along with our converters. And although those don't sound very heavy, they are when you're carrying a five months' supply. Second, we don't want to have any contact at all if possible, but we're not going to plan that way. You're all big boys and girls, so decide what you want to pack as we prepare. Think heavy: an M-16 will not cut the mustard with these things.
"That's it for now, we'll be meeting tomorrow morning to start training and issue. See Ersin for billeting and training schedule." With that he simply stood up and walked out of the room. They could stay and try to figure out if the frog was still watching.
* * *
5
Ft. McPherson, GA Sol III
1115 EDT March 18th, 2001 AD
As the buzzing mass of uniforms and their civilian cohorts stood up to exit the auditorium, General Horner waved Mike back into his chair. He waited until the babbling crowd cleared out of the large room and looked around. Several other team chiefs had pigeonholed members of their teams for hasty conferences and he grinned internally. The flag officers one and all, himself included, found themselves out of their depth to an unpleasant degree. Prepared as they were to battle humans, none of them had ever seriously contemplated fighting nonterrestrial forces. The very concept was absurd, or so they had thought, an outdated scenario sitting on a shelf in the Pentagon, dreamed up by a wild-eyed Cold War brain-trust weenie.
But now they had to learn, had to dust off that ludicrous scenario, and he was uncomfortably aware of the adage about an old dog. The science fiction nuts like the troglodyte he had called upon might be pie-in-the-sky dreamers, but they had at least thought about this type of emergency to some degree and were suddenly worth their weight in gold.
He only saw two team chiefs talking to military personnel—the others were talking with civilians, so at least most of them knew where the meat was going to come from.
When he was sure they had a comfortable privacy zone he turned to the former NCO. Mike had been flipping through the issued briefing papers. The clean white incandescent lights on the high ceiling glinted off the laminated pages' images, bringing out the TOP SECRET stamps liberally imprinted on the pages.
"Well?" The general gestured with his chin at the papers. "What do you think? I want to get a feel for your impressions before we meet the rest of the team."
"Off the top of my head?" asked Mike, examining the schematic of some type of vehicle.
"Yes."
"We're fucked." The former NCO slapped the notebook closed and met the general's humorless smile with a somber gaze. He looked slightly more upset than normal, which the general knew from past experience could mean nothing or everything.
"Would you care to be more specific?" Horner asked, smiling tightly and steepling his fingers.
Mike shifted sideways in his seat, the better to meet the general's eye, and tapped the briefing papers for emphasis. "According to this, we can expect five invasion waves spaced about six months apart with additional scattered landings before, during and after the main waves. The first full wave will arrive in about five years. Each wave will consist of between fifty and seventy large colonial combat globes, each of those comprised of about five or six hundred combat landing craft. Each of these landing craft will have the Posleen equivalent of a division of troops, although we are calling it a brigade. Am I right? Five or six hundred divisions?"
"Correct. Very short, maybe pocket, divisions. I prefer the brigade designation." Horner had opened his own briefing papers and was checking the numbers.
"But each globe will have approximately four million troops of all types. Correct?" Mike pursued.
"Correct."
"That means each wave will drop two hundred and forty million heavily armed alien soldiers." The accusation was quiet but fierce.
"Right."
"Five times. Each drop, apropos of nothing whatsoever, exceeds the last estimate I had of total personnel under arms worldwide. And each of the Posleen is an actual fighter, not the one in ten ratio in modern armies."
"Unfortunately." Horner gave Mike the benefit of another of his humorless smiles.
"Do you see a problem with this?" asked Mike quietly, his hands clenching and unclenching rhythmically.
"I'm waiting for you to get it off your chest," Horner admitted.
"Fair enough. Now, these . . . Posleen use companies of about four hundred. Each company has one `God King' leader-type in command with a vehicle-mounted heavy weapon." He paused and thought for a moment about the force structure. Something about it was nagging at him but he could not for the life of him bring it to the fore. Then he thought of it and smiled quirkily.
"What?" asked Horner, watching him closely.
"You know what this reminds me of?"
"What?"
"The force structure in Sun Tzu's day." He looked up and noticed the general's puzzled expression. "One heavy chariot to ten infantry," he prompted.
Jack thought about it for a moment and nodded. "So what does that tell us?"