Understood sir.
How are you coming with the cloaking hack countermeasure?
I know the signal is there because there is more energy overall in the bandwidth than should be there. But without the encryption sequence I can't find it. The dictionary code breaking search is still running but could take years. Any suggestions? Abigail asked.
Yeah, keep at it. Moore was ready for something to go their way, but so far his plans had been falling apart on him. Perhaps he should have listened to those two idiots at the adventure shop and just stayed put there.
"You want another beer?" Rod Taylor finished off his Mons Light and then crushed the can against his forehead. "Reckon those idiots made it to the top of the dome?"
"I'll take one," Vincent Peterson belched and then took out a pack of cigarettes and started to light it up. "Who knows. Hate he had to take that little girl along with them. They're liable to get her killed. Idiots."
"Hey man, this ain't a smoking section of the dome." Rod smiled and handed his young friend another light beer. "Yeah, poor kid."
"Uh, Rod. Look outside that freakin' window."
"Yeah? What about it?" Rod shrugged his shoulders and reached into the red and white cooler they had liberated from the beverage store down the street for another beer himself.
"I don't think with all those Seppy bastards out there anybody's gonna give a flying shit if I have a smoke." Vince pointed at the armored trucks convoying down the street and shook his head.
"Well, it just ain't considerate is all—" Rod started but was interrupted by a group of Separatist troops in e-suits that had begun to unass outside the door of the shop and two of the men came through the door with two behind them in standard two-on-two coverage formation.
"What's up?" Vincent looked up at the Seppy railgun barrel lowered at him and lit his cigarette. "We're closed."
Lieutenant Commander Jack Boland sat in the middle of a row of ten simulation consoles in the Battle Operations and Scenario Simulation Room, the BOSS as it was known. The low level lighting of the room was accentuated only by the flickering of changing scenes on flat panel computer displays and cast a dim blue hue over the overcrowded computer battle lab. The display screens were mainly for secondary data acquisition and list display as most of the simulation was done through DTM link.
Jack's AIC was connected hardwire for maximum data rate to the BOSS wargaming, logistics, tactics, and strategy computer system. The BOSS main computer ran trillions of calculations per second to help squadron commanders plan and simulate upcoming operations. The BOSS implemented state-of-the-art AI software and genetic algorithms to predict the outcome of multiple coupled dynamical systems and perform calculations that consisted of thousands of differential equations all tangled up and connected in some way to each other.
The prediction requirements were orders of magnitude more complicated than those of the Navier-Stokes equations defining the chaotic realm of weather prediction. In fact, weather prediction and even chaotic phenomena injection was a subroutine implanted within the BOSS architecture and a small one at that compared to the detailed wargame models and logistics support simulations. It had been taught at war college for centuries that wars were lost and won due to the military handling of logistics implementation. The BOSS was designed to ensure a win.
The BOSS was the culmination of four hundred years of mathematically modeling warfare and it indeed was the boss when it came to wargaming and mathematical game theory and understanding the minutia of every piece of hardware, software, order, plan, tactic, strategy, and logistics effort was within its capability. The simulation was downloaded through the AIC link DTM simply because there was more information to be transferred between the BOSS and the user than could be displayed via any other means known to man. To be a certified BOSS user actually took several months of training, and to understand the system and truly implement it as a battle planning tool took years of experience or a natural knack for the complex DTM modeling and simulation environment. Fortunately, Lieutenant Commander Jack Boland had both.
The Mons City recapture battle plan was nonstandard in that there was a problem with the collateral damage. In previous battles involving the Separatist Reservation or guerilla training camps they were always over target zones with little infrastructure that was important to America. Well, that is, except for those two civilian terraformer domes Jack had so efficiently disposed of a few months back. But Jack had decided then that the domes were worth giving up if the U.S. Navy forces were able to take out the entire insurgent cell that was using them for cover. There were some politicians who hadn't agreed and when the images of the two domes pouring fire and black smoke into the Martian atmosphere hit MNN Jack was busted from CAG and the talks of getting a full third pip on his collar had ceased almost immediately following the incident.
Imagine what they'd do if we took out a major dome at Mons City, he thought to Candis.
At that point, if you didn't go to prison, I would recommend retirement, Candis chuckled.
Funny.
Jack straightened himself in his chair and reached out into the virtual dogfighting and bombing runs swarming in his head. Through the DTM interface, of course, he was the only person that could see the simulation around him. The other battle planners and logistics experts sitting at the row of consoles had similar simulations or perhaps were merely moving equipment from point A to point B, but the effect was the same. The BOSS Room was filled with men and women in Navy uniform swatting about their heads at nonexistent pests. The simulation room had long been coined as the "Looney Bin."
Jack reached out with his right hand toward his virtual squadron of Ares fighters that were strafing virtual Seppy drop mecha around the Mons City domes. Long-wavelength infrared laser imaging detection and ranging (LIDAR) equipment located above his console detected the movement of his hand and the exact positioning of it to within a millionth of a meter was determined and fed back into the simulation computer system. In turn, his AIC detected that Jack intended to move the objects in front of him by hand and fed this information to the same computer. The simulation environment calculated new positions and then fed this into the wargaming models and moved the little virtual Martian red camo fighter planes around the virtual Marsscape accordingly.
The DTM interconnect downloaded and updated the simulation changes into Jack's head continuously and real-time faster than human reflex lag, so the interface was immediate as far as Jack could tell. Of course, Jack had planned hundreds, maybe thousands, of operations before and it had been since Navy Officer Battle Ops Simulation Training Course that he had even thought about how the BOSS system worked, so all of this was transparent to him. He just moved an object, and it moved. In the very old days of naval warfare the flag officers would use real models and marker boards. They would push model airplanes around on a two-dimensional mockup of the battle decks called a "Ouija Board." The Looney Bin with the DTM technology had made the Ouija Board a thing of ancient history.
The simulation was looking good and he was planning on using the Gods of War to lead the insertion into the occupied territory for the VIP extraction. The simulations showed heavy casualties in his squadron and a serious amount of collateral damage to the local city infrastructure. It couldn't be helped. And this simulation was based on the sketchy intelligence data of the Mons City insurgency and occupation forces. Jack knew that a simulation was only as good as the model and the data it was based on and there was no way of knowing just how accurate the data on the Seppy forces was.