Gust Front

«Take a handful. I'll get a box sent over to your company next trip.»

« 'He said to the captain, just before the axe fell,' « said Mike.

«What gives you that impression?» asked Horner.

«Well, both of you gentlemen are nice guys, but there has to be a reason you're up until after midnight plying me with tobacco,» Mike said with a smile.

«Not really,» said General Taylor, chuckling as he lit one of the long, black cigars. «We were going to be up anyway and now was as good a time as any to brief you on your temporary mission.»

«Which is?» asked Mike as he extracted his Zippo and began to puff.

«Mike,» started General Horner, «as you know, as everyone knows, the defense plan that everyone was calling 'The Mountain Plan' has been scrapped. The President and the Congress will not stand for the Armed Forces not defending the coastal plains, especially the coastal plain cities. The President accepts that we ca

«Airborne,» said Mike, carefully judging the flame on the end of the cigar. When it was drawing just right he took a deep puff. Good cigar, he thought. «Okay, boss, it's a given: The cities will be fought for. Does the President realize that that will probably inflict more damage than if we can come back in two–three years' time with full Fleet backing and kick them out?»

«Yes,» said Taylor.

«Oh.»

«That has actually been the subject of a series of news magazine reports,» said General Taylor, dryly. «I gather you haven't been keeping up with current events.»

«No, sir, I haven't,» said Mike. «Not even Net news. I've been getting my company as ready as it can be.»

«Apparently you succeeded,» said General Taylor, chuckling. «I got a rather snippy e-mail to the effect that there must be a bug in the software for your engagement. You were able to score one hundred percent on a no-win situation. There is some question whether you diddled the software.»

«I don't think so, sir,» said O'Neal with a smile. «It is a well-known fact that only SFers cheat. We happened to luck out and the God King assigned by the software on the final engagement was a wuss and routed. But mostly, it helps to have done the same exercise a couple of hundred times in VR and Tactical Exercises Without Troops. I play those scenarios in my spare time for recreation, sir, something that other leaders need to learn to do. I mean, most of them don't even play Mario Brothers with their kids.»

«Are you saying they need to play video games more?» asked the High Commander, surprised at the frivolous approach.

«Basically, sir,» said Mike, peering at the cigar blearily. The fatigue from the long day and the days of preparation beforehand had him saying more than he intended at a first meeting with the generals. He still was not too sure of himself.

Preparing his company was at a level he understood. This «strategic» level was something else. But if being in the game had taught him one thing, it was never lose the image of confidence. Sometimes rep was the only thing that would carry your men through. And sometimes the definition of «your men» could get awfully broad.

«This gear creates a video game environment and the wargames are based on a number of video game archetypes,» Mike continued. «If they would spend less time doing the work of their first sergeants and pushing hardcopy and more time in the VR environment they would do better in notional battles.»

«Well,» said General Horner, «we, and by that I mean General Taylor and myself and to a lesser extent you, need to decide what that battle is going to be and how it is going to be fought. I am going to outline for you, in broad strokes, what the strategic and operational mission of the ACS should be and, over the next two weeks, you suggest how we should do it, in as much detail as possible given the time. Got it?»

«Got it,» answered Mike, leaning back in the chair. After a moment he leaned forward again. The comfortable armchair was a surefire way to put him to sleep. If he was going to keep from making an ass of himself in front of these officers, he was going to have to stay on his toes.

«Okay.» General Horner looked up at the ceiling as if drawing thoughts from the pooling cigar smoke. «We are required, by order, to do as much as humanly possible not to lose the cities to the Posleen. First we have to define what a city is. We have arbitrarily decided to defend only the city core, because, quite frankly, we don't see any way to defend into suburbs. Oh, we'll have some depth, and some outer defenders, besides the parasite forts I'll talk about in a minute, but basically we're just going to try to hold 'downtown,' the part with the skyscrapers that Posleen shy away from landing on anyway.

«Outside the cities, near the beltway that is around most of them, now, we are going to construct modern fortresses. They won't be 'state-of-the-art' like the planetary defense centers, but they'll have some sort of curtain wall and moat system along with massive conventional firepower. We are going to give the fort commanders pretty wide leeway on how they want to arm their walls. The idea of these forts, and the central city fortifications, is to catch the Posleen between two fires. We call the outer forts 'coral forts' because they are like a spreading coral.

«The cities and the coral forts will have enough supplies to hold out for five years, if necessary. Each of them will also be just out of line of sight of a planetary defense center; that was already in the PDC plans, so we don't have to worry overmuch about them being directly assaulted by landers or command ships. If landers or command ships take to the air less than en masse, the planetary defense centers should be able to sweep them out of the sky.

«If the situation becomes completely untenable for a city's forces, they may attempt to flee to refuge. For the purely coastal cities, we are coming up with plans to evacuate them by sea.»

«How, sir?» Mike interrupted. If he had one weakness it was sleep. Without regular doses his brain turned to mush. It had pretty much gone south sometime around the landing in D.C. He was currently well beyond playing guessing games. He took another hit of the nicotine hoping it would clear some cobwebs.

«Partially by subs. We're reactivating a bunch of the nuclear launch boats, boomers, that haven't been scrapped. We're ripping out all the weaponry and upgrading the environmental systems. We figure we can pack nearly a battalion into the missile section alone, more in the torpedo rooms, and so on. We're substituting the nuclear kettle with power crystals to appease the environmentalists.»

«Like there's going to be an environment left,» snorted General Taylor. He walked over to a sideboard and poured a measure of scotch. «Anyone care to join me in a snort?»

«I'll take a vodka, straight,» said General Horner.

«Bourbon on ice, sir, thank you, sir. Much ice, sir.»

«Don't be so uptight, Captain. We're all old soldiers here,» said the High Commander.

«Yes, sir,» Mike answered with a wink. He would rather have asked for coffee, but when the High Commander offers drinks you don't refuse.

General Horner snorted and went on. «The Navy is also reactivating all the battleships that haven't been turned into razor blades. Since there were a bunch of them that have become museums and since there were howls of protest over scrapping the last two of the Iowa class that weren't, it turns out we have eight.»

«I heard about that, sir,» said Mike. «Can they stand up to Posleen weapons?»

«Well, their belt—that is, the portion of their hull that is above the waterline, and most of their bridge armor—is twelve to fourteen inches of homogenous steel. That would normally be light to stand up to plasma ca