Koban: The Mark of Koban (15 page)

“You gave away
my own
command to the stinking PU?”
blasted Nabarone, in red-faced outrage, oblivious to the pun he’d made. “When
does this happen?” he shouted in full betrayal mode.

“As soon as the local commander I nominated is prepared to
accept his commission in the Planetary Union Army,” answered Boldovic, with a
smirk.

“Local? Local?” repeated Nabarone, sputtering. “Who?”

“I believe I told them it was General…, uh, Nabarone.” The
Governor finished. He enjoyed Hank’s strangled expression. The former Colonel
had to swallow his next verbal explosion undetonated.

“I, uh.., I mean…,” he stammered.

“I believe you mean, ‘Thank you Governor Boldovic, I’m honored
to accept, Governor Boldovic,’” supplied Boldovic, enjoying his strongly
opinionated friend’s discomfort.

There was nothing else to say. “Yes, I accept,” agreed
Nabarone. “But only for you and Poldark.”

Then the reality of the moment struck him, and his
predicament. “Fuck it Mike, I’ll be in Stanford’s chain of command! She’ll be
my ultimate boss.”

“Oh, I’d not worry so much about her. Think of the layers of
Hub Generals she’s creating above you, mostly a bunch of Ladies that have no
ground pounder experience
what so ever
. Not that there are many men with
experience either.” He smirked.

“Oh, damn you Mike,” Nabarone warned with a wry smile, “I’ll
find some way to get even for this.”

“What? Nominate me for the Senate and send me to Earth?” he
countered with his own grin. “I decline.”

Nabarone did some quick thinking. “Some of my militia cadre
will still be needed to help run TB-85. I want you to apply leverage to allow
me to select the best recruits they recommend for the permanent Poldark force.
As you mentioned, out here we are a high-risk Krall target.”

He nodded agreement. “Hank, I know you have seen the media interviews
with some of the commanders appointed on other worlds. They all seem to want
tanks, heavy weapons, aircraft, fortifications, automated drones, and orbital
defense platforms. I’m sure I didn’t catch all of their recommendations, but I
know you were paying attention. What do you think we should do?”

“Mike, we know they have single ships that we can’t match,
which have Trap drives in a small package that can out accelerate anything we
thought possible with a living being aboard. Those ships have displayed
evasiveness and reflective shields our lasers and plasma beams couldn’t
penetrate, and I’m positive we haven’t seen all of their technology. They can
Jump directly to orbital levels at will. We can’t
keep
them off our
planets, and I don’t think the defensive strategies being considered will work
very well.”

“I assumed you might have some ideas of your own. Thad
Greeves was a good teacher, and you were a good student. What would you
suggest?” Boldovic asked.

“I studied the Nook recordings in great detail,” Nabarone
told him. “I noted that even when the Krall operated as teams of eight that their
warriors; I use that term deliberately, fought usually as individuals. We will
train
soldiers
to face
warriors
, which in large force engagements
can work to our advantage to offset their hugely superior physical capability.
However, I don’t know if we will see armies against armies.”

“You confused me Hank. Warrior or soldier, same thing aren’t
they?”

Shaking his head, he told him, “Common mistake Mike. A
warrior fights to protect a family or clan, for personal wealth, notoriety, or
glory. Warriors stay in a battle so long as they are achieving what they wanted. 
They may quit the fight for a time, if they win the bounty they wanted. The
Krall left the Nook after two days. I think they got what they wanted, and
left. We sure didn’t drive them away.”

Nabarone continued, “A soldier isn’t concerned with self-enrichment
or personal glory. I don’t mean a soldier can’t win glory, but he or she submits
to the orders of the State, or to those that represent the State to defend an
idea, to fight for their fellows. Guided by honor and loyalty, the soldier
serves not themselves, family or clan, but their nation, planet, or society.
They act in concert to achieve the larger goal, which does not lead to personal
gain, and in fact requires sacrifice.”

Shrugging, Boldovic accepted the difference, but asked, “Why
might that suggest to you they won’t fight us like the other new generals think
they will?”

“Thad prepared us for possible
guerrilla warfare,” answered Nabarone. “Where our
small militia would become the guerrilla’s. He knew we couldn’t prevent a
large-scale invasion from the Hub, if they ever turned aggressive.
Nevertheless, we could fight them effectively using asymmetric warfare. I think
that type of warfare will appeal more to the Krall’s style of fighting, their
personal preference if you will, to conduct raids where a smaller number of
warriors wreak havoc for personal glory or to prove themselves.”

“How would that affect your strategy?”  Queried Boldovic.

“I think we need to create mobile fast reaction small units
to intercept raiders. We can structure them so that we can send as many as the
raid size dictates we need. We can reach any place on Poldark quickly if we
preposition our units close to probable targets, which on Nook were population
centers. The Krall like killing humans, they don’t want the real estate or our
property. We know when confronted that they are relentless in their attacks. 
We should sucker them into ambushes and traps. In the field, they haven’t
seemed very bright so far, despite spectacular capability as a warrior slash
fighter. Those miners on Nook, with no training at all, pulled one group into
two different traps.”

Boldovic wasn’t entirely comfortable, “I’m certainly no
expert, Hank, but if the Krall doesn’t attack us like you expect, and comes at
us in force, we can lose a lot of people before you pull in your fast reaction
units. Those units won’t have training in large force operations. We won’t have
logistics in place to supply them. I’m worried about spreading out all of our
forces.”

Nabarone shrugged, “Mike, we will have a hundred thousand
recruits at TB-85, being processed in four staggered training cycles. About three
quarters of them at any time will have received basic weapons training at a
minimum
.
As training cycles pass midpoint, half will have received the latest in fitted,
powered, active camouflage armor.

“The most advanced one quarter of the trainees will have started
heavy weapons training and will have war games practice. This isn’t an ideal
force, obviously, but they will be better equipped than any of our civilians
will be. If we maintain transports at the Training Base, we can move them if we
have a larger force to face. We can’t post large units all over the planet
anyway, we won’t have that many.”

“Hank, you just gave me an idea. Our civilians are unarmed
because there never have been any legal arms they could buy, none even
produced. I know, you told me earlier we could get them if we paid enough. I
think Civil Defense is something we should look into. Our citizens are a bit
rougher around the edges than the ‘fluffs’ of the Hub worlds. They’ll like
owning guns. Hell, I want one myself.” He grinned. 

Nabarone clapped him on the shoulder. “Expert or not, you
just came up with an obvious idea that our ultra-safe Hub driven culture kept
me from even considering. Arms manufacturing is going to explode, pardon the
pun. I think you should offer guns to people that have clean records, and will
accept firearms training and gun registration. I think most will pay for their
own weapons.”

“Hank, I’ll pass the word to the new Central Command on
Earth that you are Poldark’s choice for commander of our Planetary Defense
Force. I assume they will be sending a commander for the training base, but if
you want to sponsor anyone on your staff for that position, I’ll forward your recommendation.
I’ll also broach the subject of arming civilians. However, I can initiate that on
Poldark even if they won’t furnish the guns free. The Emergency Powers act just
passed gives me latitude in that respect, although I doubt their civilized minds
even gave that application a thought.”

****

Ortega’s Airland subcommittee had gained four new members,
but by rule, the junior Senator retained his position of Chairman for this
session of Parliament. He’d been the committee’s only member when he acquired
that “lofty” position.

The subcommittee had gained considerably more influence as
the government moved to place humanity on a wartime footing after three hundred
years of peace. However, the full Armed Forces Committee wielded the real power
and final say on major decisions, which mostly concerned expanding the Navy.

The ten million-man army was a concession to public demand
and to Ortega’s “Remember the Nook” rally cry. Every world wanted a ground
force for defense against a Krall invasion. However, effectively defending the
entire surface of a world with just ten thousand troops on each was nearly
impossible. That’s why the full committee shunted the Governor of Poldark’s
request to Ortega’s subcommittee for consideration.

“What
is
Poldark’s population?” asked Lady Haruko
Takahashi, a junior Senator from cold Yuki Matsuri, a Japanese Old Colony
commonly called just “Snow” by Standard speakers, rather than Festival of Snow.

Ortega checked the AI’s terminal. “Three hundred twenty four
million at the last census, taken just before the referendum to join the
Union,” he supplied.

“Do we even
have
that many weapons to ship to them?”
she asked incredulously. “The automated factories have just converted to
produce those weapons.”

“Governor Boldovic did not ask for one per person,” Ortega
pointed out. “He wanted a weapon for each household, which would be roughly one
fifth of the population. That’s perhaps sixty five million guns. Which, to
answer your next question, we also do not have available as of yet, nor the
ammunition for that many automatic rifles.”

“Then how do we respond to the full committee?” asked Lady
Chaudance Kessington, another junior Senator, from the Old Colony of New
Glasgow. Ortega was out “femmed” by the four female Junior Senators that had joined
his subcommittee, and they were unaccustomed to deferring to a male, in
government or otherwise.

She added, “They expect a recommendation for furnishing New
Colony worlds with means for their own defense until we have a trained Army.
I’d hate my first committee assignment to end with an apology, telling them in
a publically televised session that we have no ideas.”

“Gracious Ladies, I didn’t say we have no options,” Ortega
was pleased to announce. “We simply don’t have any weapons to send, as of yet.
However, we can send them something else sooner, and shift the burden of
production and shipping from the Hub worlds, to their own systems.”

“How can we build them factories there faster than we can
build and ship them weapons from here?” Takahashi wanted to know.

He told them confidently of his solution, “I did a search,
and learned there are several hundred mothballed orbital factories that were no
longer modern enough to produce contemporary consumer products, and which have
outdated automation control systems. They have been sitting airless and
preserved in orbits around moons of dozens of Hub and Old Colony worlds, hardly
worth the value to cut up for scrap. We can return them to operational status
in weeks per factory. They were built Jump capable, to reach their production
worlds from where they were built. All of them will need new fusion bottles and
newer AI software, and their computer directed machine shops can be reprogramed
to make human portable weapon systems.”

In a scornful tone, Lady Kessington asked, “If they can’t
make modern consumer products how are they going to make modern weapons?”

Ortega smiled patiently in reply to her skepticism. “We
don’t need them to make
modern
weapons, Dear Lady, such as laser rifles,
smart guns and self-directed ammunition, pulse or microwave cannons, or super
Jazzers. The projectile weapons in use three hundred years ago for the Clone
Wars are at least a match for the weapons the Krall used on the Nook, and some
of the old weapons are even superior. Instead of making bicycles, gyro cars,
exercise equipment, and so forth, they can produce rifles, pistols, machine
guns, mortars, and ammunition.” He glanced around the table in triumph.

The Ladies were not done. “If the Krall start using better
weapons than that, then what do we do? Their technology base is more advanced
than ours,” supplied a smug Lady Eldridge, Senator from the Canadian Republic, a (barely) New Colony that dated from just before the Collapse.

“They don’t
want
to overwhelm us immediately Gracious
Lady. They say they plan to fight us for generations,” he reminded her.

“Tell that to Greater West Africa,” she sneered at the
upstart male.

Even the other Ladies saw she had made a boneheaded
argument. Takahashi was the first to break ranks. “The Krall needed a base of
operations within our sphere of influence, and that colony was apparently
convenient and suitably isolated. It wasn’t a slow conquest because they needed
to wipe them all out to take possession. The early broadcasts, while they
lasted, proved that the alien warriors used the same weapons as they did on the
Nook. However, there were at least a million of them, and they never left and
never quit killing. I’m sure those poor people wished they had weapons.”

A unanimous subcommittee sent Ortega’s recommendation up to
be presented to the Armed Services Committee, where it was not only approved
(by a slender margin), but it was expanded to send many operational orbital factories
to as many outer worlds as possible for arms production. It occurred to enough
of the Ladies on the committee that luxury consumer products were going to be a
bit less important than survival to their voters.