Suarez wasn’t confused; he was infuriated. The orders emanating from Cortez’s headquarters were confusing, to be sure. “Go here… no, wait… no, go there… no, come back… no, go forward… detach a battalion to secure X… no, no, concentrate to attack Y.” But Suarez, rather than being confused, understood completely.
The fucking moron is simply too scared shitless to have a coherent thought.
Right now Suarez’s mechanized regiment was about half scattered around the northern part of the Province of Herrera and the western portion of Veraguas. He had radio communication with most of them, most of the time, but the communication was unreliable at best. Entire battalions would be unreachable for anywhere from minutes to hours. Even in a place that screwed with radio communication naturally, Suarez thought that more than a little suspicious.
As the lead regiment of the division, Suarez had, or was supposed to have, operational control of the company of Yankee ACS attached to the 1st Division. Unfortunately, Cortez interfered, or attempted to interfere, with the gringos even more than he did with his own force. Fortunately, the gringos, like Suarez himself, had learned very quickly to ignore most of what the division commander had to say.
Even more fortunately, the commander of the ACS, the gringo captain named Connors, had an understanding with Suarez. It was the understanding of two soldiers, differing greatly in rank, who recognized a common bond of dedication to the profession and a common bond in being placed under the command of idiots often enough for it to be more usual than not.
“This is not the way to use an armored combat suit formation,” Connors complained to Suarez. “Little penny packets, scattered about, with no oomph and no punch. We should be like armor, concentrated for the decisive blow. Except that we’re better than armor because we can go anywhere and fight anywhere. We should not be used like assault guns, supporting slower moving and less powerful forces. It’s a violation of Principle of War — mass.”
“You’re pulling in your detachments?” Suarez queried.
“Yes, sir,” Connors agreed, nodding unseen inside his suit. “As I can.”
“Well, Captain, while I agree with your assessment of the role of ACS, we’ve got another problem that might make it a little wiser to do some splitting up. How are your internal communications?”
“Good, sir. We’re not having the commo problems your forces are.”
Connors reached up with both hands and removed his suit’s helmet, placing it under one suited arm. Silvery goop retreated from his head and hair, forming an icicle on his chin. The goop reached out a tendril seeking the helmet. When it had found it, it flowed from the chin straight down. As before, Suarez found the image and, worse, the image of what it must be like when in the helmet and surrounded by goop, to be most unsettling.
Suarez shook his head to clear the thought. Blech.
“I think our commo problems are not natural, Captain, even though they seem to be random. Instead, I think someone is… feeling us out, getting a picture of how we work. Maybe it would be better to say that they’ve already done that and have now graduated to the early stage of deliberately fucking with us.”
Connors’ mouth formed a moue. He was a veteran of the early fights. He knew that someone or something often targeted human communications. He was also pretty sure that those doing the targeting were not stupid crocodilian centauroids.
“They’ll blanket you at the worst possible time,” Connors announced. “I’ve seen it before.”
“I agree,” said Suarez. “Which is why I am going to ask you to do something very tactically unsound.”
“You want me to leave a man or two with each of your battalions for backup communications, don’t you, sir?”
Suarez smiled. “Pretty sharp for a gringo, aren’t you?”
“There’s something else too, Colonel,” Connors began. “I have a really bad feeling. We aren’t killing enough Posleen to make a difference. They’re fighting, and running, and fighting, and running. Almost like humans would. It’s unsettling, sir, you know?”
Taking a deep breath and exhaling, Suarez agreed. “Scares me too, son. And I don’t know what to do about it. The division commander’s no help…”
“Well, sir, I have an idea. If I break up one squad for backup communications I still have two squads from one platoon I’ll have shorted. I’d like to send them out as flankers, north and south, in buddy teams. That’ll still leave me two line platoons and a weapons platoon under my control for when things go totally to shit.”
“Do it,” Suarez ordered. “Do you need any backup from my regiment?”
Connors hesitated, thinking about that. After a few moments he answered, “No, sir. If I were you I’d start pulling in my troops and at least getting ready to form a perimeter. If my guess is right then the best thing you can do for my flankers is give them a solid place to run to. ’Cause, sir, sure as God didn’t make little green apples, we’ve got our dicks in the garbage disposal and someone, or some thing, has his finger on the power switch.”
The Rinn Fain’s clawed finger rested lightly on the blinking green button. He contemplated that claw. What a sad state. We were a warrior people; a people of fierce pride. A people made by evolution to be naturally what the divine intended us to be. And then the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned Aldenata had to meddle, reducing us to meddlers ourselves. The Rinn Fain nearly wept with the sadness of the fate inflicted by the Aldenata on his people. Damn them, and damn those earlier Darhel who acquiesced.
“All is in readiness, my lord,” the slave Indowy prodded. “It will be perfection, now. If you hesitate, the humans may be prepared to counter.”
Smiling through needle sharp teeth at the slave, the Rinn Fain answered, “I am not hesitating, insect. I am savoring the moment. So much perfect destruction to be unleashed, and no violence inherent in it to trigger lintatai. Moments like this are rare, wretch, and must be appreciated to the fullest.”
Even so, the Rinn Fain pressed the button, which went from blinking green to solid red.
In theory an ACS could simply beat its way through the rain forest, hardly slowing even for the largest trees. In practice, not only did the felled trees tend to build up to the point where they became nearly impenetrable even for one of the suits, the noise had a nasty tendency to attract the attention of ill-mannered strangers.
Thus, Corporal Finnegan and Private Chin wove their way through the trees as quietly as the suits would permit. This took time in the short run, and delayed any information their two-man recon team might uncover. On the other hand, dead troopers relayed no information at all, beyond the sheer fact of their deaths, recorded in blinking black on their squad leader’s heads-up display.
“This is bullshit, Corporal, purest bullshit,” observed Chin, never the least outspoken of the squad’s privates, possibly because, out of his suit, he was the shortest of the lot.
“You’re bitching just for the sake of bitching. Shut up, Private,” answered Finnegan succinctly.
Chin was not, however, considered the loudest mouth of the squad without reason. He continued his bitching, more quietly but nonstop, right up until popping his head over a ridge overlooking a small, river-fed valley below.