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"You look upset, Lieutenant."
"I do, sir?" Mike asked. Despite this jerk showing his importance by having Mike cool his heels for ten minutes, Mike was sure his expression had not changed.
"You have looked pissed off since you came in the door. Actually, you look like you could bite the ass out of a lion." The colonel's face had assumed a disapproving pucker.
"Oh, that, sir," said Mike, no longer surprised. The mistake was made all the time. "That expression's a fixture. It's from lifting weights."
"A `lifter,' hmm? I find that lifters are generally poor ru
"I pass, sir." I usually about max it, sir, he thought with a note of wry humor. And if you think "lifters" are poor ru
"Passing is not enough! I expect maximum physical performance out of my officers and, while you are not actually assigned to this unit, I expect you to be an example as well. There are absolutely no fit areas on this ship to run, but when we reach the planetary objective I expect to see you `leading the way' in daily fitness. Do I make myself clear?" The colonel attempted to wither him with a glare. After years of experiencing icy Jack Horner dressing downs at the slightest mistake, the glare slid off Mike like water off diamond.
"Airborne, sir," Mike snapped, with apparent perfect seriousness.
"Hmm. That brings us to your mission. As I understand it, you are to `advise' me and my staff on the functions and uses of these combat suits. Is that correct?"
"Sir," Mike paused and launched into his carefully prepared spiel. "As part of the GalTech Infantry Team, I have an intimate knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of armored combat suits. The team also specified the requirements for operational readiness. The pressure of circumstances have made it imperative to deploy your battalion before it met all training parameters and before anyone, the GalTech team, GF TRADOC or Fleet Strike Forces, felt it was fully ready. So I was assigned to help. Sir, you know all about light infantry tactics, probably heavy infantry too, but I know suits and suit tactics. I've got more time in them than anybody in the Fleet," he concluded, not without pride. Mike paused, not sure how to go on.
"Are you saying, Lieutenant, that you don't think we're fully trained, fully prepared to fight?" asked the colonel, quietly.
Mike looked shocked. "No, sir, not even close. You're no more prepared than the Marines were to invade Guadalcanal but you're being deployed for much the same reason."
"Well, Lieutenant," said the colonel, smiling like a cat with a canary, "I hate to disagree, but your vaunted suits are not that hard to use. I got used to mine very quickly. They'll be a real bonus on the Air-Land Battlefield but I don't see how they'll change tactics significantly. And learning how to use one is a cinch, so, as far as I can see your main purpose is to look over my shoulder."
What "Air-Land Battlefield"? Taking to the air around Posleen is a short ride to carbondom. "Sir, part of my function is to evaluate the performance of this battalion, but, sir, with all due respect, my main function is advisory. A standard suit has two hundred thirty-eight discrete functions that can be combined in a near infinite number of permutations. For full ability, a soldier has to be able to multitask at least three in a combat environment. I mean, you can get by with just one or two, but three to five is `run, jump and shoot' infantry. A command suit has four hundred eighty-two discrete functions. Its primary problems, almost faults, are information overload and function difficulty," Mike paused and looked up, remaining at a Parade Rest position. He wished he could light up a cigar, but this officer was obviously not a smoker.
"Unless you have an AID that is really attuned to your needs you risk overload of C3I"—command, communication, control and intelligence—"flow. You either overload on information or filter out too much, either of which is dangerous. As to purely suit functions, a command suit has so many special functions designed to permit the commander to keep up with multiple highly mobile units and keep him alive, that you again risk either overload or suit drain.
"Sir, the TRADOC requirement is a minimum of two hundred hours training time for the standard suits and three hundred hours for the command suits. Records show that only E-4s and below have in excess of one hundred hours. Sir, I have three thousand hours and I feel like a novice. Among other difficulties with limited suit time, the autonomic systems grow with the user and go through periods of instability. They've never been tested in actual battle and their instability is marked below a hundred hours." Mike paused, wondering if the commander understood his total horror at the nearly inexcusable lack of preparation of the battalion. He knew from the tenor of his briefing that Fleet TRADOC had the same reservations.
"Son, I understand what you mean about overload, I ran into it early on. I did what any good commander would do, I delegated and set up a communications net. As to using the suits, you're right, they're too complicated and that autonomic nervous system is a piece of shit. That's in my report. You see," he lifted one of the papers, "I make reports too. And I kind of expect that the reports of a battalion commander with over twenty years in this man's Army will carry a little bit more weight than a damn lieutenant's.
"Now, I don't care what you think your mission is, or who you think you are. What I want you to do is go to your cabin and stay there for the rest of the trip. You're not confined to quarters or anything but I decide how my battalion is run, how it trains, what its tactics are. Not any former E-5 with a shiny silver bar that thinks he's hot shit. If I find you in the battalion area without my direct permission, in the training areas, or talking to my officers about tactics or training I will personally hang you up, shake you out and strip you of commission, rank, honor and possibly life. Do I make myself clear?" concluded the battalion commander, the words dropping into the quiet like iron ingots.
"Yes, sir," said Mike, eyes fixed on a point six inches above the commander's head.
"And when we get home, if you've been a good little boy, I'll send along a nice neutral report instead of one that uses `arrogant' and `insolent' as adjectives. Clear?" The officer smiled thinly.
"Yes, sir."
"Dismissed."
Lieutenant O'Neal came to the position of attention, did a precise about-face and marched out the door.
* * *
When the cabin door opened, Mike was lying on his bunk wearing battle silks and a set of issue Virtual Reality sunglasses nicknamed Milspecs. Battle silks—officially, Uniform, Utility, Ground Forces—was the uniform developed for day to day use by CES and ACS infantry. It was not designed for combat and since it was developed by a GalTech team, they had rammed through a uniform based on comfort and style. Light gray in color, it looked something like a hooded kimono. The material, cotton treated through an Indowy process to "improve" it, was smooth as silk, lightweight, and temperature reactive. With a few twists to close or open throat and cuffs it was comfortable from one hundred to zero degrees Fahrenheit. Mike was conspicuous in them because, despite the fact that they had been issued to the ACS unit, everyone besides him wore BDU camouflage.
It had been a month since his abortive meeting with the battalion commander and he occasionally reflected that he was in the best shape of his life. Since he could not perform his secondary missions, training and advisement, he spent his time in evaluating the battalion's readiness (low), working out, and improving his own readiness. Despite the colonel's pronouncement that there were no areas large enough for ru