“Yes,” Mike snapped. “Next question.”
“No question,” she said with an honest smile. “I just wanted to thank you. My brother is in the Seventh Cavalry. He made it back to the Dantren Perimeter, but he never would have made it out without your platoon arriving when it did. Thank you.”
Well, that was an entirely different matter. “Damn, I’m glad to hear that! You know, the armored forces hardly ever get any mention in all the fuss. They stacked the damn Posleen up like cordwood even before we got there and nobody ever gives them any credit. How’s he doing? I admit I haven’t kept up with the units on Diess.”
“They returned his division to the States. He’s down with the Texas Guard units, getting ready for The Day.”
“Well, when you talk to him, wish him well from me,” Mike said with a smile.
“Okay, I’ll do that. He’ll be happy I stopped.”
“Good luck yourself.”
“Well, we’re from Missouri. From what they’re saying on the news, we should be hit lightly. I hope so, but I’m sorry for all the people on the coasts.”
“Yeah, most of my people are in the coastal plains. But no place is going to be completely safe, so get yourself a weapon. If they’re swarming, you might not even be able to take one with you,” he said bluntly. “But if they’ve been whittled down, it might save your life. I recommend a twelve-gauge riot gun. They’ve got a kick like a mule, but it’s hard to miss with a shotgun at close range and double-ought will take down a Posleen just fine. You may be in the safest spot there is and have the bad luck of a globe landing on you. So get a weapon.”
“Okay, I will. Thanks again.”
“Take care.”
As the stewardess walked away, the Fleet captain looked up from her papers.
“I thought it was you, but I wasn’t going to be impolite and ask,” she said with a strong English accent. Mike, who had a fair ear for accents and had spent time with the British while developing the ACS program, placed it as Midlands.
“Yeah, well, I’m me, ma’am. I’ve never been anything else.”
“You’re going to Washington?”
“Yes, ma’am, apparently General Taylor wants some advice on how to run the war.”
“Well, I can’t think of a better source for Combat Suit advice. Might I ask you what is causing you to be so caustic, young man?”
Mike let out a sigh, much of his formless anger blowing out with it. The problems he was dealing with weren’t the captain’s fault. Nor was his own lack of confidence. “Well, Captain, my company is going through an Operational Readiness Inspection and an inspection by the Inspector General’s office at the moment and I would much rather be there than giving dog and pony shows in D.C. I gave a bunch of them last year and nobody gave a shit, pardon my French, so I don’t know that it’ll be any different this time.”
“So you’re really going to be telling General Taylor how to run the war?” she said with a chuckle.
“I suspect I might be, ma’am, at least from an ACS standpoint. The CONARC commander and I have a long-term acquaintance. The orders came from CONARC at Fort Myer, but I’m supposed to report directly to the Pentagon. Go figure.”
“I think you should be happy about a chance for input,” she said, puzzled.
“Well, ma’am, the other problem is the difference between tactical and strategic. Although I will admit to being one of the experts at tactical employment of ACS, I won’t bet dollars to donuts about strategic employment.”
“Just remember,” she said, “ ‘an Army travels on its stomach.’ Strategic and operational art are better than eighty percent logistics. Approach it from a logistical standpoint and you’ll have them eating out of your hands.”
“Logistics.”
“Logistics.”
“Okay, thanks, ma’am,” he said with a smile.
“Don’t mention it.” She laughed.
“Captain Michael O’Neal,” said Mike holding out his hand, “Fleet Strike.”
“Captain April Weston,” said the gray-haired battleaxe, “Fleet Line. Command.” The period was easy to hear.
“Oh, you have a ship?” asked Mike, interested. Very few of the ships being built for the defense were on-line or would be before the first few waves of the invasion. It was what would make the coming years such a difficult prospect.
“If you can call it that,” she said, with a sour grimace. “It’s a converted Galactic frigate.”
“Ouch,” said Mike, with a grimace of his own. “I saw the specs when I was at GalTech. No armor…”
“Light weapons…”
“No redundant systems…”
“Limited targeting ability…”
“Well,” said Mike, with another grimace, “at least you’ll have Combat Environment space suits.”
“Great,” she said with a snort. “I spend a career fighting my way up through bloody-mindedness and knowledge of the sea, and now I have to learn to breathe vacuum.”
“You’re a regular?” Mike said, surprised.
“Actually, I was Royal Navy reserve until I made captain when they finally succumbed to the bloody inevitable and switched me to regular. My last command was the Sea Sprite, which, for your general fund of knowledge, is a cruiser. Now I’m off to the boundless depths of space and classes in astrogation. At my age,” she concluded, throwing up her hands.
“Well,” Mike smiled, “good luck.”
“Yes, we’ll all need it.”
CHAPTER 13
Washington, DC, United States of America, Sol III
2317 EDT September 5th, 2004 ad
Except for the profusion of uniforms, the nation’s capital was virtually unchanged. Mike had taken the shuttle bus from Washington National and it went all over town before heading to the relatively nearby Pentagon. He caught brief glimpses of the Mall, and the streets of Georgetown were surprisingly crowded with partyers. Mike finally saw males out of uniform, persons with jobs so vital that they could not be spared as cannon fodder for the war effort. From their suits, age and haircuts, they were mostly attorneys or congressional aides. Probably for the best, thought Mike. God knows what they would be like in uniform.
In the previous year, while on tour after the Diess victories, Mike had had his fill of politicians, political aides, political military officers and everything else spin-related. Diess had given him such a clear and uncompromising view of the coming storm that he sometimes felt like the one-eyed man in the country of the blind. There had also been much more exposure to the upper echelons of the military than he had been used to and it had not been a successful exposure.
Mike’s idea of subtle was to not tell the person, word for word, that they could not find their ass with both hands. Nonetheless the message came across. When a lieutenant, as he had been then, even a lieutenant with The Medal, takes an attitude like that towards officers thirty or more years his senior the lieutenant comes out of the contest the loser.
The problem, from O’Neal’s point of view, was that although many of the senior military officers he had met were quite prepared for and capable of, even brilliant at, fighting humans, they still could not get their minds around the Posleen. Despite the ongoing stalemate on Barwhon and the horrendous daily losses it inflicted, they insisted on thinking of the Posleen as simply suicidal humans, something like the Japanese in World War II. And the numbers were not real to them. They thought in terms of weapons systems, tanks and armored personnel carriers, then troops, because waves of humans simply could not stand up to a modern army.