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«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 5 th, 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 ca
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 perso
But the Posleen not only boasted incredible masses of troops so fanatical they would happily take any ordered loss to achieve any ordered objective, they also had weapons capable of negating the utility of tanks and armored perso
But all that senior officers heard was «wave charges» and «unaimed weaponry» and they assumed it would be like fighting Napoleonic-era human troops. It might even have been true were it not for the God Kings and their systems. It seemed to those senior commanders as if a modern, well-trained and equipped force should be able to slaughter them.
On that point Michael agreed; the Posleen were going to be slaughtered. What he could not get across to the senior leadership was that the Posleen couldn't care less how many they lost. They came in such masses that reducing their numbers by ninety percent often left them still outnumbering defenders, and with superior weaponry. Well, the powers-that-be would discover the error of their ways soon enough. Unfortunately Mike expected blood baths aplenty in the near future.
The bus finally pulled up to the side entrance of the Pentagon, disgorged a mass of uniformed perso
«Their contribution to the war effort, I guess,» he muttered as he stomped wearily over to the MP-guarded entrance. His day had begun at 3 a.m. and had included a prepared attack, a hasty defense and a prepared defense. He had fought three virtual «murthering great battles» and it was, in his opinion, getting nigh on to bedtime.