Chapter 4: Preparations

I started meeting with the Fourth Regiment’s staff, particularly the S2 (Intelligence) officer, Captain Jerry Sparks. ‘Sparky,’ as he was universally known, was one of the good guys. He was a former U.S. Marine with experience in some of the same hot spots (South America, Africa, etc.) as me.

We compared notes and realized that, back on Earth, we had been involved in two military actions together. Once within twenty-five clicks of each other’s position. We swapped

“can you top this” stories (do you know the difference between a fairy tale and an old war story? One begins,

“Once upon a time...” and the other begins,

“This is no shit...

“) We ruefully noted that nothing ever seemed to really get solved back on Earth in those last forty years or so. Troops would just be shuffled from one hot spot to another, decade after decade. Not that we sighed in longing for the total devastation that was WW2, but we both agreed, at least, that WW2 had eventually stopped.

The stand-up fight that that I assumed to be in the works for Metek’at was too simple, of course. Marine though he was, Sparky knew that stopping the Swarm’s galactic advance would be the Navy’s job. Interdiction and ship-to-ship warfare were tasks that had been on the mission statements of Earth’s Navies since before the Napoleonic era. The vessels had changed, the maps had exponentially expanded, but the tasks were right in the Navy’s wheelhouse.

But that all went out the window when it came to Earth. The Navy was not going to be strong enough, quickly enough to stop the Swam from an Earth landing. And the human military WOULD NOT stand for a sterilizing planetary bombardment of Earth with dinosaur-killer-sized asteroids. Though kinetic strikes from orbital positions were going to be an integral part of the fight, the end game on Earth was going to be an ugly, down-in-the-mud, slugfest with entrenched Swarm. That kind of fight was in the Marine’s wheelhouse.

“Isn’t it early days to be working out a strategy for re-taking Earth?” I asked.

“From the projections I’ve seen, the best-case scenario has us strong enough to push back into Earth’at space no sooner than 20 years from now.”

Jerry shrugged.

“You’ve been in the Service long enough to know that not every intel mission makes optimal sense to the people on the pointy end of the spear. But we do know that this kind of exercise is something we are going to have to do many times before we can even start planning on re-taking Earth. So, I really don’t know if this is Roff’s smart advance planning or plain fucking stupid; I just have to implement my portion of the plan.”

I nodded my agreement.

“Now that I’m a full-fledged spook myself, I guess I’ll have to spoon out that horse shit, but man, I remember the taste.”

Jerry nodded.

“We’ve got to do it sometime,” he said,

“And nobody thinks that we are going to be able to come up with the best tactics on our first try. This is just the first of a series of live-fire experiments to see what works and what doesn’t. The Navy,” he nodded his head at me,

“has assured us that they have monitoring outposts in the Metek’at system’s asteroid belt. At D-day minus one, they will clear the system of any and all Swarm ships and interdict the system. Whatever we try on the planetary surface, succeed or fail, will not be passed along to the rest of the Swarm.”

“We’re going to be trying several tactics at several locations on the planet. Each test location is isolated by an ocean or sea from the others. We know that the Sa’arm will be able to communicate with each of the other test sites, but the water should keep them from rushing in immediate support. The Confederacy won’t allow us to use planet-killers so, after we’re done and have pulled out, the fleet quarantines the system. Nothing the Metek gestalt learns will be known to other gestalts.”

Jerry used our shared viewpoint as former grunts to brief me on our role in the upcoming mission’s planning and objectives. It was shop talk between two professionals. We didn’t have anything to prove to each other, nor did we have to explain the effect that the shock of combat has on green troops.

“Fighting the Sa’arm seems to be an exercise in ‘shoot and scoot,’” Jerry said,

“The only alternative was to bring overwhelming force to any particular encounter. This situation presents two problems. First, on-planet the Sa’arm seemed to crank out materiel like organic Turing Machines, using resources to build their machines faster than could be believed. We have always been running around like the little Dutch boy, trying to plug one leak after another.”

“What’s the other problem?” I asked.

“We are trying to devise a strategy that can be used by a force that doesn’t have a space-based evac capability. They can scoot only so far.”

“So, what’s our team’s strategy?” I asked. The Marines had been trying different strategies and tactics to see which ones worked, and which worked the best.

Jerry smiled.

“Our team, Bravo 7, is going to be a test of a new tactic that we’re calling ‘Overloading the Network.’ You know how a robust communication network routes traffic around a damaged node? Well, there is a theoretical limit as to how many nodes you can take out before the network traffic is brought down. We aim to find out what that limit is.”

Individual Sa’arm didn’t seem to be intelligent. Hell, individual Sa’arm seemed to be only marginally sentient. But groups of Sa’arm started exhibiting ‘emergent’ behaviors that mimicked intelligence. The Sa’arm were connected to each other by an organic network. The other species of the Confederacy had, as yet been unable to figure out how that data communication was taking place, its bandwidth, or how to jam it.

So, we humans stepped in and said,

“Let us bang it against a rock and see how it breaks.” Observing the breakdown of the network would give the scientist-types clues to the network’s operation, capacity, and robustness. The other species flinched and turned their heads. We proceeded with choosing the proper rocks, which in this case would be Bravo 7.

Jerry really seemed to know his onions about the research. (That was characteristic of Jerry. He researched the hell out of anything that could give his guys an advantage.) He explained the way that the Confederacy had been modeling the Sa’arm neural network by observing the behavior of individual captured Sa’arm and small groups of captured Sa’arm. Their idea was to place small teams of shooters at distance from a group of Sa’arm, then start systematically ‘removing’ nodes by sniping selected Sa’arm. We knew that when a Sa’arm is killed, there is a

“hole” in network traffic routing that alerts nearby Sa’arm to investigate the problem. These Sa’arm notify other Sa’arm of the problem’s perceived location, dispatching them to the problem area, causing a network traffic spike. The plan was to repeatedly snipe more nodes until those traffic spikes drove their neural network into an overload.

“My concern with this Ops plan is that it looks at the Sa’arm as laboratory rats, running through the mazes we set in front of them. What happens if they decide they don’t like the maze?”

Jerry shook his head.

“It’s up to us to come up with fallback plans.”

“What do the AIs think of the plan’s success?” I asked, my uneasiness returning.

Jerry’s grin grew rueful.

“The AIs are being pretty closed-mouthed about this whole thing. I think that they either don’t see it working, or they see it being a little too close to the bone of their own networks.”

Just fucking great.

My stomach started trying to start on an ulcer, but the nanites wouldn’t let it.

Fucking nanites.

For our many sins, Jerry and I had the questionable pleasure of writing up a tactical plan for our small portion of the upcoming fight.

The Navy AI’s were a great help (at least) with that task. Tables of organization and equipment were generated instantly (Woo hoo! No Excel!). Training schedules were generated. Gant charts were created to arrange training schedules and schedule output from the replicators for material needed. We received overhead imagery of our assigned target.

During this time, we participated in weekly ‘virtual’ meetings with the ten other two-man teams that were creating operations plans for the other drop zones. Because I was the only Navy slug, I was ‘voluntold’ that I was the liaison with the Navy. I meshed our planning with the Third Fleet, making sure that the ships and support vessels would be ready in 10 months.

We started referring to the date of the mission as ‘D-day,’ with the ‘D’ standing for ‘drop,’ as in combat drop.

I don’t recall how far along we had gotten with our planning when it became growingly obvious that I was not going simply as a ride-along who would stay in orbit. but that I was making the drop with the troops. I didn’t volunteer, it was just developing as a necessity from our planning. I didn’t report this aspect to the girls. They would only fret needlessly.

A month into our working relationship, D-day minus nine months, Jerry invited me home after work.

“You’ve been stressing out lately. Let’s take a break.”

I left a message with Alfred for the family that I would be out late and to not wait up.

Jerry’s home was a year older and closer to the Township center than mine. You could see its age in the creeping vine that shaded the front entrance and the native ground cover that covered what, on the Stewart’s property, was mostly bare dirt. We were met at the door by Jerry’s four concubines. Two of them, Tina and Natalie, were what I had started referring to, mentally, as GFBH, ‘Girls from Back Home.’ They were obviously two girls from Jerry’s Earth life that Jerry knew before and had brought with him on pick-up.