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Stargate the strategy now known as rats-in-the-walls. And there might be
other exceptions out there among the stars as well.
Humankind had so far avoided destruction thanks to a combination of luck and
the fact that the Xul appeared to respond to threats in a cumbersome and
unwieldy manner; the sheer size and scope of their
Galaxy-wide presence worked against them.
But that unwieldiness now would be working against the Marine MIEF.
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General Austin is correct, Alexander said. Basic strategy 101: use the
enemy s weaknesses against him. Xul weaknesses, at least in so far as we ve
been able to determine over the past few centuries, include their xenophobia
and their glacial slowness in responding or adapting to threats. The
xenophobia makes them predictable, after a fashion. Their slow response time
gives us a chance to hit them multiple times before they land on us with their
full weight.
But we do need to identify those systems that will make them sit up and take
notice if we hit them.
Ideas?
Starwall, a major in the 55th MARS intelligence group said after a moment.
We know it s a major Xul transport nexus, and we know the intel they took
from the Argo is there. Option B, going into Republic
Space and through the Puller gate to Starwall is our best option.
And with that, the discussion was off and running, with various members of the
planning staff contributing thoughts and suggestions, others offering
objections and criticisms. Alexander stepped back mentally, listening to the
debate. After a few moments, he assigned Cara the job of monitoring the
discussion, while he focused on the far more boring topic of Expeditionary
Force logistics.
Gorgon represented a God-awful mess when it came to supply. An MIEF was an
enormous and sprawling organization, so intricate and complex that dozens of
specialist AIs were required simply to maintain internal communications,
logistics, and routine administration. It was a joint-service unit, comprised
of some 52,000 Marine and Navy personnel and eighty ships. The Marine
component included a full Marine division 16,000 men and women plus a Marine
Aerospace Wing and a force service support group.
Currently, 1MIEF drew on 1MarDiv for personnel and support, but ever since the
Commonwealth
Senate s vote to accept Alexander s operational proposal, both units had been
heavily reinforced, both by drawing personnel and assets from other Marine
divisions, and from newly graduating classes out of the recruit training
centers, both on Mars and at Earth/Luna. When 1MIEF departed for the stars the
date of embarkation was now tentatively scheduled for mid-January, eight weeks
hence it would be fully staffed independently of 1MarDiv, which would remain
in the Sol System as part of the standing defense against a possible Xul
strike.
The sheer logistical complexity of Operation Gorgon meant that a small army of
planners were needed to work out each detail before embarkation. Vast
quantities of expendables were already being routed to the Deimos Yards over
Mars most of them in the form of water ice, methane, and ammonia, with lesser
amounts of trace elements. The ice would serve both as shielding and as a
water supply; nanoassemblers would pull carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen
from the raw materials and rearrange them as needed to create air and food.
Resupply during the mission would be accomplished by mining outer-system
worlds and asteroids each time they entered another star system. The supply
lines back to Sol would be
too long and tenuous to permit cargo ships to keep the fleet supplied.
But even if the MIEF was able to live off the land, as some wag had put it
already meaning picking up all necessary elements in other star systems for
reassembly as needed the Expeditionary Fleet needed to have robot miners and
transports enough to collect the raw materials, storage tankers to hold them,
and mobile processing plants to convert and distribute the finished
consumables. Besides that, there were critical decisions to be made concerning
mechanical spares and replacement parts, especially for complex electronic
components that couldn t be batch grown in the fleet s repair ships.
And there were the weapons, the Mark 660 battlesuits, the ammunition, the
power cores and converters& the list seemed endless, the storage space for it
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all sharply limited. Alexander and his planning staff were still hard at work
determining if the thing was even possible. It wasn t enough simply to add an
extra few AKs, ANs, and AEs to the fleet roster, because each of those
vessels cargo ships, nanufactory transports, and ammunition ships in turn
needed their own small mountains of spare parts and extra equipment.
Where 1MIEF was going was a long, long way out into the dark, and resupply was
going to be a bitch.
The situation was made even tougher by the fact that Alexander couldn t even
begin to guess how long
1MIEF would be deployed starside.
No! a voice in his mind called, rising above the others. You young rock! We
do that and we leave our lines of retreat wide open and vulnerable! Doing that
would be tantamount to suicide!
Judging from the acrimony of the debate going on within the staff planning
group, it might be a while before the MIEF could depart in the first place.
Rock was an old, old Corps epithet for a particularly dumb Marine as in dumb
as a rock.
With respect& sir, another voice came back, biting. How the hell are we
going to maintain our lines of retreat across twenty thousand light-years? The
EF will be cut off as soon as it goes through the first
Gate!
People! Alexander cut in. Let s keep it civil. A webwork of varicolored
lines and brightly lit stars now stretched across the Galaxy map, showing
alternate routes and objectives, known Stargate links, and known Xul bases.
Cara had been tagging and color-coding each idea as it was presented,
attaching to each lists of pros and cons.
As Alexander looked at the tangle, a new surety began to make itself felt.
Leadership styles differed, of course, from officer to officer, and since the
beginning of his career Alexander had tried to be democratic in his approach,
soliciting the ideas and opinions of his subordinates and giving each due
consideration.
But in the final analyses, the Marine Corps was not a democracy, any more than
was the chain of command on board a Navy warship. One voice was needed to give
the orders; one mind was required to make the necessary decisions.
He wanted their input, but ultimately, this decision was his, and his alone.
Okay, people, he said, speaking into the hard, new silence. It s clear that
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