“In the meantime, we have four tactical exercises without troops next week. The first will be an open-field skirmish as a lone company, the second will be integrated with the other companies in a larger open-field encounter, the third a company defense with good to fair terrain and light opposition, and the last will be my personal favorite, the Spartan scenario. Since there’s been a shakeup at battalion, that means I can take the aggressor. Nightingale, you’ll run the company, you need to learn the ropes; Arnold, brief Nightingale on what that entails.”
“Brief Nightingale on the playbook.”
“Right.” Mike looked at the newly arrived officers. “Combat against the Posleen requires swift fluidity and total concentration. So we’re stealing a page from football and soccer and using ‘plays’ at the squad and platoon level. This serves two purposes.
“The first purpose is to reduce the time it takes to give orders. A series of simple two-part commands covers the vast majority of instructions given in combat.
“The second purpose is to overcome ‘combat lock.’ I want our troops so conditioned that when the time comes every single one of them opens fire without hesitation. Stopping a Posleen charge is like stopping an avalanche with fire hoses; you can do it, but it takes all the water in the world. We need every single son of a bitch firing.”
“Most of that will be up to the NCOs. I want the officers to remain as hands-off as possible unless we are in active company or platoon-level training. If there is an issue with one of your platoons’ readiness, bring it up with First Sergeant Pappas or myself.”
“Get your shit squared away this afternoon, because as of tomorrow there aren’t enough hours in the day. We have a Tactical Exercise Without Troops scheduled for tomorrow and sixteen hours per day of training from here on out until our Fleet Strike Readiness Evaluation Series. So you’d better get cracking.
“Dismissed.”
CHAPTER 5
Rabun County, GA, United States of America, Sol III
1723 EST February 3rd, 2004 ad
As the car dropped over the ridge into the pocket valley in the Georgia hills, Sharon O’Neal almost turned around.
She had never understood her reaction to Mike’s father. A gruff but fair man, he occasionally called her “Lieutenant” and treated her like a chief would a junior officer, courteous if occasionally salty. At her request, he refrained from relating war stories to the children and rarely did so around her, but she had heard enough over the years to understand him somewhat.
Perhaps it related to her Navy experience, where she felt so exceedingly rejected by the “old-boy” establishment. Mike Senior would drop without a ripple into a group of Navy chiefs, without much of a ripple into a group of Navy officers, especially a group of surface-warfare types. He would be indistinguishable from a group of SEALs. Whether it was real or not, she always felt a trace of contempt or perhaps superiority emanating from the old war-horse.
After a long career related to the unfortunate brevity of human life and the means to arrange for reducing it, Michael O’Neal, Sr., returned to the family farm to raise crops like generations before him, and to raise his family. Since then, with the exception of collecting weapons, some of them illegal, and a group of retirees with a similar bent, he appeared to have put that earlier phase of his life behind him. She knew he had left the Army under somewhat mysterious circumstances — the failure to be recalled along with all his buddies was confirmation of that — and that he had spent some time overseas doing things of a military nature, but what really bothered her was the old-boy feeling. Now he seemed tailor-made for her needs and she was going to have a hard time looking him in the eye and saying that.
She glanced at Cally beside her. If she had to choose which of her children might survive on a world consumed by war, she would have chosen Cally. Usually the older child is more reserved and prissy, but with her children it was reversed. If Michelle scratched her finger, she broke into paroxysms of tears; if Cally ran into a wall, she stood up, wiped the blood off her nose and kept running. But she was still only seven, would only be nine when the Posleen landed, and her mommy and daddy were both going to be far away.
Michelle was already gone, consumed by a colony ship packed with dependents headed for safety. That program had come under fire, both in the United States and overseas. Called racist, supremacist and every other -ist anyone could come up with, it still made too much sense to stop. If a human gene pool was going to be moved off-planet (and given the situation, it made sense to create such a backup), it made sense to choose from the gene pool that represented the necessary skills. Right now, the Federation did not need scientists and it did not need politicians and it did not need engineers; what it needed was soldiers. It might not be nice, it might not be politically correct, but it made sense and that was all the Federation cared about.
The house was stone, unusual in this part of the mountains, and dated to well before the Civil War. The O’Neals were among the first settlers in the area after the Cherokee were forcibly relocated, and the house was designed to protect against the understandably angry stragglers. The first O’Neal was an Irish immigrant who mined gold for a few years then decided that there was more money to be made selling food to the miners than mining. He marked out a stake, broke the ground and built the farmhouse with the occasional help of his fellow miners.
It presided regally over a small valley so filled with good things that it seemed that God had touched it. On the south-facing slope was an orchard of apples and below that an orchard of pecans. The fields were broken into tillage and pasture with hay in portions. It was a tidy and productive six hundred acres that satisfied the financial and nutritional needs of the O’Neal family even in these hard times.
The government was gathering all the foodstuffs it could and caching them in hardened shelters throughout the Rockies and Appalachians. The survivors of America might be on the run, but the United States government was determined that they be well-fed runners. Unfortunately, even with new ground being broken, genetically modified crops and the modern American agricultural engine getting into high gear for the first time, that meant shortages. Shortages were something that happened to other people, not Americans.
When Americans walk into a grocery store, they expect cheerful, smiling bag boys and fresh produce. Now the bag boys were all in uniform and the produce fields were producing wheat and corn crops that were going into holes in the mountains. America’s wheat yield the previous year had been twenty-five percent higher than at any time in history but there was a bread shortage.
Even small farmers such as Papa O’Neal were required to report their production and adhere to crop rotas, but the government did not expect or desire to control every acre. The O’Neal garden had kept the family in fresh vegetables throughout the long summer as Sharon awaited her summons to uniform and Mike sat through endless speeches and parades.
The simple numbers meant that one of them would not be coming back, probably Mike, and that Cally’s chances were less than good. As a mechanical engineer specializing in maintenance support requirements, Sharon fully expected a glorified clerk’s position on Titan Base. Her chances were better than fair. Unfortunately she could take neither her husband nor her eldest daughter with her.