Chapter Twenty-Three
Spin One
Bowden looked around the bulkheads of the compartment with a skeptical look on his face. “You think this is going to work?”
Dave Fiezel shrugged. “It’s the best I could do in the time I had with the tools and technology I had available.”
“Well, we’ll do what we can with it,” Bowden said with a wince. “It’s not like I was expecting a full-motion, surround-sound experience.”
“A what?”
“Never mind.” Bowden smiled. “I wasn’t talking about the tech in the first place; I was talking about this.” He swept a hand toward the seated men and women. One half—the group on the left—was wearing gray coveralls, and the other half was wearing black. A line of empty seats separated the two groups. “What is this? Kindergarten?”
“Naw. Then it would have been the boys separated from the girls,” Fiezel said. “Here it’s the Jets separated from the Sharks.” When Bowden’s eyebrows knit, he added, “West Side Story? Didn’t you ever see it?”
Bowden shook his head. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Fiezel laughed. “And they say the Air Force has no class.”
Bowden turned and walked to the front of the room, then he signaled for everyone’s attention. “Thanks for coming,” he said once the group was quiet. “Look around. What do you see?”
“SpinDogs and RockHounds,” a man wearing gray coveralls said.
“RockHounds and SpinDogs,” a man in black coveralls replied.
“You’re both wrong,” Bowden said loudly when it looked like the two groups were on the verge of calling each other names. “What you see is the team of people who are here for a common cause—to defeat the Kulsian force that is coming for us.”
Some muttering broke out, and Bowden spoke over it. “It doesn’t matter why they’re coming, or who’s done what to whom in the past. You can blame me and the rest of the Terrans if you want, and I’m fine with that. We’re not going to bicker or argue over it. Nothing in the past is changeable, so it doesn’t matter how we got to where we are. The only thing that matters now is that the Kulsians are coming, and they’re going to kill any of us they can find.”
Bowden smiled. “Some would say, we should run and hide from them. That’s what you’ve always done before, and it’s worked for you in the past.”
Several people, especially those wearing black, muttered in the affirmative.
“That’s not good enough anymore. What right do the Kulsians have to take your things? To rape your women and children, and to steal all the medicinals of the planet below? A friend of mine—Major Mara Lee—needs some of those to safely have children. Should we suffer because the Kulsians think they can simply take them from us? How long has this gone on? The Kulsians stealing from you?
“I think that it should end, and that it should end right now. And, more importantly, that’s what your leaders—the heads of both the SpinDog and RockHound Families—think, and they have chosen to fight this time. We are going to meet and defeat the Kulsians in battle. Best of all, we have a onetime opportunity. We know they’re coming, but they don’t know we exist. Not yet, anyway. They know that something’s happened to their reavers, but never in a million of their nightmares would they expect what they’re about to run into. Us—SpinDogs and RockHounds—working together to kick their asses.
“I know that you have not traditionally always been the best of friends”—several in the front row, of both sides, voiced their agreement—“but it is time to put those things aside, because the only way that we beat the Kulsians—the only way we can beat the Kulsians—is to work together. As you’re well aware, we are currently building a fleet of ships to meet the Kulsians in battle. They will be the best-armed ships you will ever have seen, and a number of them are going to have new technology you may be uncomfortable with. If that is the case, you either need to find a different ship or learn to like it.
“Make no mistake, though, we need the new technology. We know the Kulsians are coming and that they will outnumber us. But as I said, we will have surprise on our side, and we will have technology that is better than theirs. We also will do something else they won’t—we will operate together, which will give us a synergy they don’t have.”
“‘Synergy’? Is that a new type of weapon?” a man in black asked.
“No, synergy is what it’s called when the interaction of two or more things produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate parts.”
“The Terran means jashgaz,” a SpinDog translated wearily.
“Then why didn’t he say so?” grunted the RockHound.
Bowden raised his voice. “It means combining what you SpinDogs”—he waved at the gray half of the audience—”and you RockHounds”—a wave toward the men and women in black—”with everything the Lost Soldiers bring to the table. Put all that—and all of us—together, and that’s going to result in a lot of dead Kulsians.”
He directed a hard stare slowly around the now-attentive faces. “But that is all based on one thing: You need to listen to what I’m telling you and follow my instructions. The Families put me in charge for a reason—I am familiar with how to use the new technology I am going to show you. If you follow my lead, we will be victorious.”
“You are going to be on the ships with us?” a man in black asked.
“When I used to fly back on my planet, we had a man called the CAG who was in charge of our group. Doesn’t matter what that stands for; it’s only important to know that CAG was the leader of our air wing. Whenever there was a big flight—a dangerous one going up against our enemies—you could count on the fact that CAG was going to be in one of the first planes to face the enemy.” Bowden nodded to the man in black. “And you can count on me to be there, too.”
The man nodded and sat back, obviously satisfied.
“Now, we don’t have a lot of time before they get here,” Bowden said, “and we don’t have all our ships finished in any event, so some of the training is going to have to be done with a thing we call simulators.”
Bowden motioned toward the screens set up around the room. “We have these screens set up here and in other rooms nearby, where you will operate as if you are operating your ship.”
“They don’t look like the displays in our ships, though,” a man in gray said, turning up his nose.
Bowden smiled. “No, they don’t, as I mentioned to our head network guy, Captain Dave Fiezel.” Bowden nodded to Fiezel in the back. “They do have two things going for them, though.”
“What’s that?”
“We have them here, and we have them now,” Bowden said with a smile. “We can’t use them to simulate everything I’d like to teach you, but between the lectures I’m going to give you and what we can do with them, we will practice the maneuvers that we’ll use to defeat the Kulsians. Yes, it will be a little different in your own ships as you work with your crews, and we will have the fog of war, but this will give us a baseline ability to coordinate our actions. And, best of all, the Kulsians can’t see us practicing on the simulators.”
“Go back a second,” the man in black said. “What is this ‘fog of war’ you mentioned?”
Bowden forced himself not to sigh. Like I told Murphy, I knew that one of the two major issues was going to be training them to be warriors. The indigs of R’Bak were mentally equipped to take the fight to the enemy. The Hound-Dogs? They’ve spent centuries hiding from the Kulsians. But going out to meet them in battle is as foreign a concept as going to a drive-in to watch Star Wars. There was so much military thought that he needed to teach them—human history was replete with warrior-sages’ advice from Sun Tzu to Carl von Clausewitz—if he only had the time. Maybe given a few years . . .
“The fog of war,” Bowden finally said, “is the inability to know what’s going on around you once battle is joined. If you had all the information, you could make perfect decisions. On the battlefield, though—or in space, where we’ll be fighting—it is impossible to know everything. The Kulsians will try to hide their motives and capabilities from us, for a start. Comms will not work periodically, which is something that always happens even with the best technology. And—as hard as it is to know what the enemy is doing—sometimes you won’t know what your allies are doing, either, which makes it hard to predict—and coordinate—everyone’s actions.”
Bowden smiled. “And that’s why we’re going to use the simulators to the greatest extent possible. If we can all figure out what we’re supposed to do in a given situation, and how we’re going to operate together, that will give us some clarity. Knowing you can count on your friends to act a certain way will help remove some of the fog of war.” His eyes roamed the crowd. “So who’s ready to give it a shot?”
The crowd mumbled and muttered, with nothing like the enthusiasm he’d hoped to garner from them. “Okay, take five minutes to get a drink or whatever else you need, then we’ll make some selections and get started.”
Swallowing his sigh, again, he walked to the back of the room.
“What did I miss?” he asked his staff. “I hoped to get them all excited, but I failed . . . pretty miserably, it seemed.”
Burg laughed. “On the whole, I thought it went pretty well.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely,” Raptis replied. “There were no challenges for duels, no fistfights, and the only one I heard called any names was you.”
“What names?”
“It doesn’t matter, but the general consensus seems that they’re at least willing to try, which is more than I expected,” Burg said. “The Families must have leaned heavily on them, and the Primae have given you their support.”
“They have?” Bowden asked. “I didn’t feel very well supported.”
That’s because you are an outsider,” Raptis said. “The man in black who asked all the questions? That was Reetan Taregon, son of one of the leading Legates and probably the person most acknowledged as the best pilot in the RockHounds. Most RockHounds believe that they are individually the best pilot they know, but most will agree that—if it isn’t themselves—it is Reetan.”
“The man in the gray asking questions?” Burg asked. “That was Targ J’axon, who is the son of one of the leading SpinDog Families. With a Taregon and a J’axon here, they have implicitly shown their support for you.”
“And it’s not just them,” Raptis said. “There were a number of other leading Families represented.”
“There was also a nephew of Primus Anseker in the back of the room,” Burg said.
“There was?” Bowden asked. “Teseler?”
“No, it was the other brother’s son. You’ve been seen with Teseler, so sending one from another line of the Family implies complete faith in you.”
“Which one is he?”
“His name is Stendil, but he isn’t here any longer,” Burg said. “He left when you called for the break, probably to go report back to the primus on who was here and how the first meeting went. You may not have noticed him, but all the SpinDogs will have, and most of the RockHounds, too. If they know Primus Anseker is watching—even through one of his relatives—they will do their best for you.”
“You have their attention,” Raptis added. “Just make sure you don’t lose it.”