“Roger, welcome to the net,” the commander said. “It will take me at least ten minutes to get those troops prepared to move. Where do you want to go?”
“There’s a saddle on the ridge, directly across from the Savannah Baptist Church. UTM looks to be… North 391111 East 293868.”
Mitchell no longer considered the odd nature of reply. Grid coordinates worked off of imaginary “lines” on maps and depending on the number of digits used, the accuracy of the location got higher and higher. At eight digits the accuracy of the location was less than a meter. So what he had just done was give a location that was accurate to the millimeter. For a “tank” that was a hundred meters wide.
Often he got asked about it. Normally in the military, when someone was just reading a map, they would use, at most, six digits for a location coordinate. So when he gave locations in twelve digit coordinates, it occasioned comment. His answer was fairly simple: The location tracker in the SheVa guns read out in twelve-digit coordinates.
He didn’t know why it did; maybe he ought to ask Kilzer. But it gave twelve numbers. When faced with the numbers, he had one of two choices. He could figure out how to round them off to a six-digit coordinate, which would be normal, or he could just read them off the screen. Rounding them off wasn’t hard, it just took a few seconds, was prone to error and distracted you, often in the middle of a fire-fight. Abstract thought in combat was a good way to end up a hole in the ground and so was taking a few seconds on a nonessential task. So he just read the damned things off the screen.
“Understood, SheVa,” the commander replied after a moment. “I’ll call you when the movement is approved, do not make the movement until I call.”
“Roger, be aware that it is my intention after firing from that position to move backwards and then do a movement out of this zone of control. I prefer not to discuss that over open channels. Please advise the appropriate people. Over.”
“Concur. After your fire, we’ll do lunch.”
“Roger, Grizzly.”
“Grizzly Six, out.”
“Whew,” Mitchell said. “Anybody know if that was the battalion commander or what?”
“The unit in this area is the 147th Infantry Division,” Kilzer replied not looking up from where he was doodling in his notebook. “Its logo is a grizzly bear.”
“Oh, shit,” Mitchell moaned. “That was the division commander?”
Arkady Simosin was learning about second chances.
Not many corps commanders that lost eighty percent of their corps got a second chance. Most of them never commanded so much as a mess-kit repair company. So he supposed he should be happy.
After First Washington he had been relieved and demoted to colonel. The only reason he hadn’t been kicked out of the Army entirely was that the board of inquiry noted that the hacking of his corps artillery system had been impossible to anticipate or prevent and that there was a critical shortage of officers trained in modern techniques. So he found himself a colonel, again, working in the Third Army Group J-3 office of Plans and Training.
In time he had even stood for brigadier, again. Three times. The first two had been blackballs; one or more members of the flag officer promotion board had felt him unacceptable as a general officer. The third time, though, he had been passed. In the old days you only had one pass at flag rank, but with the war continuing and even generals occasionally becoming Posleen fodder, the rules had been loosened. Slightly.
He’d stayed in Army J-3 then transferred to the Asheville Corps when it became obvious the only “plans” they had were survival.
Asheville was a tough case. The five divisions in its Line had all sustained hundreds of days of combat. With the exception of some of the fortress cities on the plains, Asheville had probably had the toughest fight of all. There were at least three “easy” approaches to the city and the Posleen had hit it, hard, after each of the main landing waves. Landers, C-Decs and Lampreys, had managed to brave the Planetary Defense Center and even land inside the defenses. Probing attacks, really just the odd God King that either didn’t know any better or got a scale up its butt, were a constant problem.
So the units that were actually in the line, usually three of the five divisions, got very little rest and virtually no training. And the two divisions that were out of the line tended to take that fact as permission to just fuck off. That was part of the rationale for replacement and two thirds of the time away from the line was specifically designated as “refit and refresh.” But what they were supposed to do with the rest of their time was train. Improve the individual skills of the personnel, run the officers through “tactical exercises without troops” and do small unit tactical training.
What they did, instead, all of the divisions, was fill in the blocks on their paperwork and let their units fuck off.
This had become obvious at least a year before when a small Posleen force had taken a position on Butler Mountain and used it for intermittent harassing fire on the support forces. First a battalion, then a brigade, and finally an entire division of the “rest and refit” units had been sent forward to try to dislodge the Posleen force that was not much larger than a company. The God King in charge was tenacious and smart, to the point of rebuilding the defense positions and occupying them, but it shouldn’t have taken a division to dislodge him. And if any of the other Posleen in the area had conceived of reinforcing him, Asheville might have fallen.
The problem was that the Line units had become specialists at running their automated guns and had forgotten everything else. Or never been taught it.
The Corps G-3 and commander were relieved and the incoming G-3 had asked for Arkady. So he had found himself in charge of “evaluating” individual unit training.
What he’d found was even worse than anticipated. There were entire units that had never even zeroed their individual weapons or boresighted their heavy weapons. There was an armor storage site with sufficient tracks for two brigades, but none of the brigades had trained on them in three years.
The first thing that he did was cut the “rest and refit” to one third of the “rear area” period. He knew it wasn’t enough time, that units would go back into the line insufficiently rested, but until they learned how to be soldiers again rest would have to wait.
Then, with the concurrence of the G-3, he began finding out which of the blocks were “real” and which ones were in the imagination of the unit commanders. There were a few of those who were relieved and others whose feelings were going to be hurt for a long time. Oh. Well. It was about making sure the soldiers were ready to fight, not just sit in their positions and let the Posleen impale themselves on their weapons.
Physical training, weapons training, tactical training, small unit tactics and mechanized infantry, all of it was crammed in. Along with testing to ensure proficiency on their basic job of, yes, maintaining the automated weapons of the Wall.
Slowly, by cajoling and checking and running around at least eighteen hours per day for the better part of a year and a half, he got some of the units to the point that they could find their ass with two hands. One of the ones that couldn’t was the 147th.
It was never their fault, of course. It seemed that every time they fell back for refit, they had taken massive casualties on the Wall. Where other units would sustain five or ten percent wounded and killed in a mass attack, the 147th ended up taking thirty, forty even fifty percent casualties. So they had a constant need for new recruits. And the recruits always arrived half trained.