After the second time the 147th came through the rest, train and refit cycle, Arkady took a trip up to the Wall when they were returned. The unit had left the rear-area training cycle with, as he well knew, the recruits barely familiar with maintaining and rearming their weapons. But instead of starting a vigorous training series up on the Wall, the division had proceeded to squat in place like so many units of slugs. The few recruits that he talked to all knew they didn’t know how to fight the Posleen even from such heavily fortified positions. But their officers and NCOs rebuffed their requests for advanced training. And in the case of the “veterans” the opinion seemed to be that it was pointless training newbies. Most of them were going to get killed in the first attack, anyway. Why bother?
Of course it was never their fault.
One of the few military aphorisms that Arkady firmly believed was inviolable was “there are no bad regiments, just bad officers.” His brief was specifically for rear area retrain and refit but a word in the G-3’s ear was enough for the “ongoing training” officer to start paying special attention to the 147th’s methods, just in time for the next attack.
If anyone had figured out how to read the Posleen mind, it surely wasn’t the Asheville Corps G-2. Marshall was a decent guy but the Posleen were just beyond him, or his analysts. Arkady had been in the daily “dog and pony show,” to watch his briefer deliver their daily sermon. He turned up from time to time, just to make sure “his” major didn’t decide to start speaking in tongues or anything. “Trust but verify” was a decent statement for leadership as well as nuclear diplomacy.
The young lieutenant colonel from G-2 — they all looked like kids these days with rejuv but you could tell this guy was a kid, no more than thirty five, maybe forty — had just finished his presentation, in which he had concluded that “only two out of thirty-five indices call for a major Posleen attack in the next week.” In other words, everybody could kick back and relax. Just finished, and the Corps Arty guy was about halfway through his daily delivery of Valium in the form of innumerable columns of more or less incomprehensible numbers:
“Average tube wear rate per battery per day has been trending downward for the last month and a half while consumption versus resupply of standard ammunition types has, happily, been trending upwards. Based upon G-2 analysis of probable future Posleen intentions it is likely that we can begin getting ahead of the tube-wear power curve in no more than three more months. The last quarter has seen significant increases in trunnion stress analysis training among the second-tier maintenance personnel.” All delivered in a deadly dry monotone. It was always the same briefer from Corps Arty and it was one reason that the daily dog and pony show was a must avoid for most of the senior officers that might otherwise attend.
Arkady had just started to drift off, the previous day had been another long one, when the Corps chief of staff, who had to attend this thing every day, it was a wonder the man hadn’t shot the red-leg by now, stood up and, with a decidedly ambiguous expression, stopped the presentation.
“Thanks, Jack, that was just great, as usual, but the 193rd is reporting a heavy attack on the I-40 Wall. I think we all need to get back to our sections and earn our pay.”
A serious Posleen attack would mean thousands of casualties by nightfall and if it was tough enough it might mean hell and blood for days on end or, if they did their jobs wrong, the fall of the city and millions of civilian casualties. Serious attacks in the past had come close. But it was pretty clear that everyone else in the room was trying to stop themselves from cheering. They’d managed to avoid the rest of the Corps Artillery presentation! Hooray!
The 193rd got hit in the first attack and then the second attack hit the 147th. Which promptly, for all practical purposes, went away. It sustained over fifty percent casualties in the assault and if it hadn’t been for one of the reserve divisions relieving it the Wall would have fallen.
Which meant that something had to be done.
As soon as it was recruited back up to strength, Arkady had scrapped the original training schedule, which emphasized a range of skills, and concentrated on getting the recruits up to proficiency in their basic combat duties. The division commander had protested that the training regime was contrary to Ground Force policy and he was right. But the choice seemed to be an entirely unprepared division or one that could at least survive in a fixed position.
He had been in the midst of the retraining program when the Posleen assault on Rabun Gap, and another major assault on Asheville, had hit.
The assault had immediately forced the 193rd, which was also in its rest phase, to be moved into the Line. And the 147th would have followed. But then the Posleen took Rabun Gap and started charging up the back hallway to Asheville.
With Posleen at both doors, and more coming knocking through the undefended back, the corps commander had no choice but to deploy the 147th to try to stop the Posleen coming up from Rabun. The Rabun Corps had been well and truly trashed by the unexpected nature of the assault and several nuclear detonations from a trashed SheVa gun and some landers its mate had potted on the retreat. The simple fact was that the entire unit would have to be either replaced or rebuilt.
In the meantime the Asheville Corps was, “in addition to its other duties” to start pushing the Posleen back out of the bottle. Pushing them back through narrow mountain valleys and passes. Pushing nearly a million of them out of the valley and away from the narrow lifeline of I-40 that was the only thing keeping Asheville alive.
A tall order for any force. And the 147th got the job.
It was a job for the Ten Thousand, for the Armored Combat suits. It was a job for an elite mechanized infantry unit with heavy artillery backing.
And the 147th got the job.
The division had been incredibly slow to get off the stick. So slow that a Posleen mobile force had taken the critical Balsam Pass and cut off not only the vast majority of the Rabun Corps, but the only SheVa left that could support the counterattack.
Eventually the 147th had tried to assault the pass. And tried. And tried. It wasn’t taking many casualties in trying and yet it was still taking too many for the results.
Since, with the withdrawal of the last refit unit, Arkady didn’t have much to do, the corps commander sent him up to figure out what was going on. And it was pretty much what he expected. Highway 74 up to Balsam Pass was a long line of vehicles, just stopped, with troops marching up the side of the road in a double line. None of the vehicles were in defensive perimeters. None of the soldiers seemed to know what they were doing, where they were going, or much to care. They were all sullen and unhappy at having been pulled out of their comfortable barracks. And none of them seemed to have a clue how to do their job in a mobile combat situation.
The division headquarters was worse. He remembered reading a description of the British Expeditionary Force in the first battle of France. Something about “generals wandering around the headquarters tent looking for string.” He’d thought it was a joke until he saw the division commander of the 147th wandering around asking everyone if they had a sharpened pencil. The man had a pen sticking out of his pocket.