A bit of analysis: Posleen War

[CaptainChewbacca]

Yes, but given the ability of Posleen to target active missiles when they breached the horizon, the Chinese were forced to use their nuclear weapons at low elevations WHICH PRODUCES FALLOUT. They were using tactical nukes at 20 miles, not ICBMs at 2000.

[phongn]

Yes, but given the ability of Posleen to target active missiles when they breached the horizon, the Chinese were forced to use their nuclear weapons at low elevations WHICH PRODUCES FALLOUT. They were using tactical nukes at 20 miles, not ICBMs at 2000.

It's not like the Chinese lack for conventional artillery.

[Sea Skimmer]

You really completely missed the point Chewbacca; why do you think Shep was talking about a 1kt warhead and very low heights of burst in the first place? The only tactical weapons which would be expected to be very dirty are nuclear demolition charges. Though, even with ICBMs its plausible to have a single warhead missile that releases the warhead before it would cross the horizon of a long range target. The whole 'Posleen only target missiles/aircraft' thing is painfully convoluted.

[MKSheppard]

Yes, but given the ability of Posleen to target active missiles when they breached the horizon, the Chinese were forced to use their nuclear weapons at low elevations WHICH PRODUCES FALLOUT. They were using tactical nukes at 20 miles, not ICBMs at 2000.

Re-read my post again.

5 kilotons (a bit on the high side for a tactical artillery shell) ceases to produce prompt fallout at heights of burst greater than 260 to 450 feet (80-136m).

Calculations show that the optimum height of burst to cover the largest area with either 50 PSI airblast or 10,000 rads of Ionizing radiation is between 560 and 780 feet (170-239m).

Q.E.D; the Chinese can pelt the Posleen with a hail of 5 kiloton nuclear devices fired from artillery without serious fallout dangers.

It's stated quite explictly that the Posleen can only intercept powered, manouvering things...things that fly a ballistic trajectory get through.

Things like AFAPs (Artillery Fired Atomic Projectiles).

Of course, it gets worse for the Posleen as modern tactical nuclear shells are in the 0.1 to 0.5 kiloton range; and are designed to emit the majority of their energy as ionizing radiation; allowing a 0.1-0.5 kiloton nuclear shell to have the ionizing radiation punch of a 10 kiloton device, making fallout practically not an issue.

Why the hell do you think John Paul II awarded the designer of the NEUTRON BOMB a peace prize for inventing it?

[Coalition]

China was punished far more directly. During the second wave, the Darhel manipulated the chinese defense network into authorizing excessive use of tactical nuclear weapons at sub-optimal locations. The resulting fallout contaminated the entire Yangtzee Basin and left a huge chunk of the country uninhabitable.

This was the price exacted for a group of Chinese bureaucrats analyzing the initial force contract treaties with earth and discovering the prices the Darhel were offering were only about 10% of what they would be willing to pay, and then negotiating for the higher price.

I wonder if the Darhel were able to hack the Posleen network so they didn't engage the missiles, or the missiles were targeted too close to the Chinese positions (similar to the artillery in the United States)? From there, change the detonation altitude from meters to feet, and you've got a recipe for lots of dead Chinese soldiers and ruined country.

[Sea Skimmer]

Changing a detonation height from feet to meters is pretty implausible, particularly for low yield battlefield nuclear weapons which normally do not have proximity fuses and are hardly going to have some little option menu to do so. They work off timed fuses until you start getting into relatively large missiles that can fit much larger and much more advanced VT units. Small VT fuses like those used on artillery cannot be adjusted in the field. In the US Army for example they come preset at 7m and 21m. The timed fuse calculations for tactical use of nuclear weapons would be calculated by multiple people at multiple levels of command by hand and computer, nobody is going to screw that up in a large scale. You don’t network together specific artillery fire control functions into some grand system; even the US Army doesn’t have anything like that and until very recently it was literally several decades ahead of the PLA. It just wouldn’t make any sense to have that integrated a command system which would be so obviously vulnerable and inflexible for tactical nuclear warfare. The PLA has a long track record of being highly conservative in any case, and when it reforms it tends to only do so by copying proven methods of other military services.

Nuke shells would be expected to have contact fuses as backups; a massive failure of the timed fuses could cause a lot of ground bursts and thus wide are contamination but, as bad as Chinese quality control might be for mass production stuff that's a real stretch for nuclear weapons. The whole situation would be much easier to explain in a rational manner if the author hadn't ruled out nuclear bomber use. You send up a nuclear bomber with a high yield bomb and might bigger screw ups become much more plausible. Just one big bomb dropped in the wrong location and ground bursting somehow could really mess up the area.

Worth noting that since Ringo was a specialist in the enlisted ranks he would have never had any nuclear training unlike a commissioned officer in the US Army up until tactical nuclear weapons were withdrawn in 1992.

[Ahriman238]

Oh, and I forgot that in Yellow EYes it turns out there is one bit of chemistry that affects the Posleen the same as humans, namely alchohol.

Well, supposedly it's not the booze itself that gets the Posleen drunk but certain impurities present in only the cheapest, homemade rotgut. The Posleen have no personal or cultural history of intoxication it seems (they mention keeping a few humans around, just to distill the stuff,) and their lifestyle and childhood (growing up in pits eating each other when the scant food dropped in isn't enough) doesn't really teach one the virtues of moderation or restraint.

Makes me wonder if they couldn't try dropping some of that behind the lines, see what happens.

[phongn]

Well, supposedly it's not the booze itself that gets the Posleen drunk but certain impurities present in only the cheapest, homemade rotgut.

Seriously? We couldn't, I don't know, use this as a starting attempt to design chemical weapons?

[MKSheppard]

So I was downloading stuff off of DTIC, looking for fragmentation damage of Artillery Shells for creation of my own rough wargame rules; and I found a very interesting document titled:

When Non-Standard Missions Become Standard: Employing Field Artillery Brigades on the AirLand Battle – Future Battlefield by Major Donald C. McGraw Jr. circa December 1990.

What was interesting was how it mentioned that the US Army General Board after World War II proposed...Artillery Divisions.

They recommended that each Corps in the Army be authorized an Artillery Division of thirteen Field Artillery Battalions; with the composition of each Artillery Division varying according to the Corps it was assigned to.

Despite senior artillery commanders agitating for it, it wasn't approved, due to the post-war army being too small to support this level of organization, and because some other commanders felt that by adopting the Regiment as the baseline unit; the tactical and administrative problems that the US Field Artillery encountered in WWII would be solved/ameliorated.

The idea went away, but didn't die; for it was revived in a 1968 study by the US Army Combat Developments Command (CDC) titled Artillery-75, which looked into the needs of Field Artillery support in the 1970-1980 timeframe.

In that conceptualization; the Field Artillery Division grew to twenty Field Artillery Battalions, with it's own integral:

Security Battalion
Engineering Battalion
Air Defense Battalion
Aviation Company
Etc

One of the big rationales for this was to clean things up administratively, as cited by Klein in Field Artillery Journal in 1974:

In World War II, administrative problems had a deleterious effect on the morale of the separate artillery battalions, and administrative problems arose in the areas of mail delivery, loss of promotions, inadequate replacements, few decorations and awards, and fewer passes and furloughs for these units.

Many of these same problems continue to plague corps artillery battalions. Problems were encountered in Vietnam in the areas of pay records, R&R, and promotions because these areas were administered by field artillery group headquarters that were neither equipped nor manned for such operations.

Another major area of concern is the handling of court-martials. So long as the senior artillery officer is only a brigadier general, he does not possess general court-martial authority for the 14,000 men under his command. This authority is retained at the higher command level.

Each of these problems can be solved by the formation of an artillery division that will provide the artillery commander with the necessary support units, the personnel services, and the finance companies of a division support command (DISCOM). Having such units under the control of the artillery commander will preclude the field artilleryman from feeling like a "bastard child," a common feeling among non-divisional artillerymen today.

But enough talking...

...imagine this in Posleen-verse.

The US Army has reorganized itself into a gun-heavy artillery force, since MLRS can be intercepted by enemy defenses; and adopted the following scheme:

FA Battalion (Medium): 12 Guns/Weapons
FA Battalion (Heavy): 6 Guns/Weapons

[In the 1980s, you had Divisional 155mm SPH Battalions having 24 guns, while Corps 155mm SPH Battalions had 18 guns; and Corps 8 Inch SPH Battalions could have 12 or 18 guns.

This is kind of crazy to do when you are expanding massively with lots of 'shake-n-bake troops'.]

So the Posleen have landed at Fredericksburg at 7:50 PM on 9 October 2004.

First Army based at Fort Meyer, VA begins to issue orders to it's component units to counter the Posleen; namely:

The 666th Artillery Brigade which is attached to First Army as Army-level Artillery, gets the order to leave it's kasernes and roll down I-95 to a firing point about 30 miles north of Fredericksburg with it's eighteen guns. The Brigade is composed of three 280mm FA Battalions and one Security Battalion.

IX and X Corps recieve orders for movement, setting into motion the four Infantry Divisions and two Artillery Divisions around Washington DC.

There's now somewhere between 504 and 672 M2001 Crusaders now moving across the roads and highways of the Washington DC area (192 in the Divisional Artillery -- four battalions per division. For Corps Artillery, if we go by thirteen battalions per corps like the 1946 suggestion, we get 312 Crusaders. If we go by twenty battalions per corps, like the 1968 study, we get 480 Crusaders.)

At 2:30 AM on 10 October 2004; when the Posleen are still milling around in Fredericksburg [they do not break out until 10:30 AM that morning]; the 666th Artillery Brigade fires its first high explosive ranging shots, which burst at a height of
700 feet above Fredericksburg.

Ten minutes later, the 666th fires it's first WARSHOTS.

In keeping with the high standards of it's precedessor units in the 1950ies; their shots land only 60 feet off from their aimpoints.

The area around Fredericksburg is swept by intense sleets of hard radiation from the 280mm Neutron Shells; which immediately begin to incapacitate the Posleen out in the open; while the human survivors in Fredericksburg are safe in the standardized fallout shelters that have been built in every house; which reduce the radiation they receive to acceptable levels.

[If we can somehow get suburbanites to have a very powerful bomb placed into their home to suicide, then we can easily do a fallout shelter programme]

This by the way, was why the inventor of the NEUTRON BOMB got a peace medal from Pope John Paul II.

You can easily and cheaply defend yourself against the mighty NEUTRON BOMB by packing lots of dirt and shielding around you; like in a fallout shelter or a basement that's been prepared.

Meanwhile, attacking troops are at a severe disadvantage, as in order to attack, they must expose themselves.

Even a tank really can't take that much neutron shielding; as it poses weight/volume tradeoffs that could go to regular armor instead.

Back to Posleenland!

At this point, quite a lot of the Posleen around Fredericksburg have been lethally irradated, though due to them being so much tougher than baseline humans; the 'walking ghost' phase where they can still eat/kill people will last much longer than with humans.

As the 666th displaces for security reasons and to avoid any possible counterbattery fire; the conventional forces move in.

Between 3:00 AM and 3:45 AM; IX and X Corps units fire off the following amounts of rounds:

45,000 Shells (If we use the 13-battalion 1946 Proposal)
or
60,480 Shells (If we use the 20-battalion 1968 Proposal)

To put this in some context:

43,500 rounds were fired by all 155mm Howitzers used by US Forces in Operation Desert Storm in 1991.

65,261 rounds were fired by US XVI Corps in 60 minutes from 1,025 weapons as part of the preparatory fires for Operation FLASHPOINT which was the crossing of the Rhine River by US Ninth Army on 24 March 1945.

By sunrise at 7:15 AM, the Posleen around Fredericksburg have neutralized, with only scattered survivors holding out in heavily wooded areas that cause DPICM bomblets to hang up; forcing the use of unitary rounds to dig them out.

During the Fredericksburg Campaign, the average infantryman fired his rifle 300 times, with 295 of these shots being fired as part of the UXO disposal campaign to clear out unexploded bomblets, which were painted a bright fluoroscent pink color to aid in clearance.

Much the same results were obtained by Ninth Army around Atlanta, Georgia, though the Posleen there landed in a much more built up area by accident and were protected more from Neutron Shells and DPICM by structures; requiring a longer clean up phase, which resulted in damage to 30% of all housing units in the Atlanta metropolitan area.

Lawsuits between the State of Georgia and the Federal Government over this 'unnecessary destruction' are still pending as of 2029; with the major recent development being the dismissal of lawsuits against Ninth Army's commander -- General 'Mayabird' as she was executing her duties under direction from the National Command Authority and thus not liable for any destruction her forces caused.

But hey, this isn't as sexy as ACS suits firing grav guns like lasers into onrushing Posleen hordes like the SPARTANS AT THERMOPYLAE, so it wasn't written.

It's a shame too; because you could handle it quite neatly.

You don't need to do a BART BLADE Posleenmagaddon? that details the crushing of the Fredericksburg landing in detail.

Just do a few scenes of interest from that night, then switch to Mighty Mike arriving from Off-World and being given a tour of the battlefield; similar to the Kasserine Pass opening in Patton the Movie.

While US Army Decontamination units are clearing the area of UXOs, Posleen Corpses, digging up any small local fallout hotspots, and tossing neutron-activated metals into GalTech MagiTech furnaces that eliminate radiation, Mighty Mike gets the low-down on what's going on and future military campaigns that he'll be part of.

Seems that in the Contract the US signed with the Darheel to get all sorts of GalTech stuff and pay for interstellar transportation costs, we agreed to clear out some ex-Darheel worlds that fell to the Posleen fairly recently (like in the last 48 months).

In the fine print of the Contract, the Darheel inserted clauses that say basically:

A.) No Indiscriminate Mass Bombardment

B.) A limit of Fifty (50) Kilotons of Fission/Fusion/Antimatter Devices that can be lit off on each world.

So we can't just bomb it from orbit; or land artillery units that just keep firing DPICM -- the Darheel are quite insistent on that. They don't like the idea of a little Darheel kidling skipping through a park twenty years after liberation, and then stepping onto a toe-popper.

Oh, and these worlds are heavily built up -- 200 story mega skyscrapers are the norm; so you can't use heavy manouver units like tanks or self propelled guns easily.

There, I've come up with a logical rationale for production of the ACS units within the context of the Posleenverse, why humanity would use them heavily instead of more conventional weapons, all without making humanity dumber than a sack of rocks or using massive authorial fiat.

We still get to see Mighty Mite and his ACS suits do brave last minute holdout stands on foreign worlds and get all sorts of fun things like the Red October Factory at Stalingrad, but in a 200 story skyscraper with Posleen at danger-close ranges.

If only.

EDIT: Oh, and since Earth isn't totally wrecked; you now have a whole breadth of possible stories that can use it as a setting, like...

Detective Fiction!

A Darheel negotiator who was working on the next round of Contracts with the US for delivery of GalTech is found murdered face down in the Potomac River. Who did it? Why?

This is how you can show State Department's general tendency to put other countries' interests ahead of the US' own interests without going into cartoon supervillian OH HO HO HO LULBERAL BARRY HUSSEIN SHROOMBAMA land.

[Simon_Jester]

I like it. Especially the artillery divisions.

[Sea Skimmer]

FA Battalion (Medium): 12 Guns/Weapons
FA Battalion (Heavy): 6 Guns/Weapons

[In the 1980s, you had Divisional 155mm SPH Battalions having 24 guns, while Corps 155mm SPH Battalions had 18 guns; and Corps 8 Inch SPH Battalions could have 12 or 18 guns.

This is kind of crazy to do when you are expanding massively with lots of 'shake-n-bake troops'.]

No, it'd only make sense to have more weapons per battalion because then you can control them all with only one battalion level fire direction center full of skilled personal. Likewise bigger batteries put more weapons under the control of fewer battery fire direction centers. If anything this might lead to battalions with 36 weapons. This is the whole reason why the US made its 80s battalions so big. The Army didn't have a shortage of skilled personal, but it did have a total cap on personal numbers in the budget. Adding more guns to the existing units meant firepower increased much quicker then total personal as each extra fire direction center needed as many men as several artillery gun crews. An artillery battery can have unlimited guns firing accurately as long as they can all see a common aiming stake or stakes driven into the ground by the fire control men.

[jollyreaper]

We still get to see Mighty Mite and his ACS suits do brave last minute holdout stands on foreign worlds and get all sorts of fun things like the Red October Factory at Stalingrad, but in a 200 story skyscraper with Posleen at danger-close ranges.

If only.

It's kind of funny what Ringo did here. He's a bad writer who hit upon a compelling scenario that keeps people chewing at it, trying to find a way to do it right. I like your scenario here.

Also, the bomb house thing always struck me as a bit nuts. That's our master plan, put bombs in the house so you can suicide when the space gators show up? Seems a bit dumb.

Frankly, I would have liked the story more with less of the whole space elves sabotage thing and just left it at the Posleen being tough opponents to fight.

[Mr Bean]

It's kind of funny what Ringo did here. He's a bad writer who hit upon a compelling scenario that keeps people chewing at it, trying to find a way to do it right. I like your scenario here.

Also, the bomb house thing always struck me as a bit nuts. That's our master plan, put bombs in the house so you can suicide when the space gators show up? Seems a bit dumb.

If I was old and infirm and wanted to make sure I'd not get eaten alive I'd consider installing the self destruction. Note however they were designed not just as a suicide weapon but also area denial as they were installed in dozens of empty homes and only go off if Posleen are detected. They are the mixed chemical variety so no worries about them going off early assuming the automation is mostly foolproof and not easy to spoof.

[Ahriman238]

Well, supposedly it's not the booze itself that gets the Posleen drunk but certain impurities present in only the cheapest, homemade rotgut.

Seriously? We couldn't, I don't know, use this as a starting attempt to design chemical weapons?

Possibly, there a lot of unknown variables. What are the impurities, and how do they get the Posleen drunk when the actual, y'know, alchohol doesn't? If it has to be ingested, a poison will almost never be more useful than simply shooting/blowing them up. With the sheer body mass of the Posleen it probably takes a lot to get them drunk, especially if these impurities are scarcer then the actual alchohol in the drink.

I do think it sounds mildly hilarious to use artillery-scattered kegs to slow the alien advance to a halt while they drink themselves into a stupor, and wake in the morning to hangovers, curtain barrages, and ACS reinforcements.

[shizuo23]

I seem to remember it's not just the impurites in rotgut that get them high,VX nerve gas does it too. Might have to look elsewhere for chemical weapons ideas.

[Nerem]

A little late but damn does Kratman have an obsession with Panama.

[Ahriman238]

A little late but damn does Kratman have an obsession with Panama.

???

Anywho, read the "sample chapters" online for Tuloriad. Wasn't expecting to find much of use, but I did find some interesting tidbits about the rebuilding after the War, Posleen culture, a weakness of theirs that had not previously occured to me, and one thing I've been looking for for a while, quantification of the Posleen breeding cycle. Enjoy.

Rome had changed. The hills were there, of course; the Posleen showed generally little interest in remaking natural geography. The bridges stood still; the Posleen had no skill whatsoever in building them and found them useful enough to preserve where possible (especially so, as Posleen could not swim at all). The foundations, if nothing else, of the Forum Romanorum could be found. They could even be seen from many of the seven hills. And why not? There was absolutely nothing else high enough to block the view. Old Rome had survived the incursion of the Posleen better than had New only in that there were, at least, some traces of Old Rome left.

That said, the Flavian Amphiteater? Gone. The arches of Constantine, Titus, and Septimius Severus? Gone. Column of Trajan? Gone. The three remaining columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux? Gone. Pantheon? Gone. No wonder Dwyer felt the need for a drink.

On the south edge of the city the pyramidal tomb of Caius Cestius was not merely gone, the Posleen had hit it with a large enough KEW, or Kinetic Energy Weapon, to destroy it and leave a rather large and deep crater in its place. The crater had, in time, become a small lake.
And that's what hurt the remaining Romans the most, even more than the destruction of the Vatican, the loss of the ancient heritage that had proclaimed, "Once we were the greatest." To the extent that real rebuilding was ongoing, Rome was being reconstructed as the Rome of the Caesars, not the Rome of the popes, of Garibaldi, or of Mussolini.

This was not particularly uncommon across the Earth, as people who had lost all sense of normality labored to recreate the world that had been mostly erased by the Posleen. And if the Italians had lost more than most, what better reason was needed to recreate a world even more ancient than the one they had recently known?

So the Posleen leveled Rome, which is now being rebuilt in more of a classical/ancient fashion. Apparently this is a global theme of reconstruction after the Posleen War. Again, the Posleen leave roads and bridges intact but rip apart everything else for construction materials.

The Vatican was not among even the foundations of the ruins remaining. The very rocks that had made up the Basilica of Saint Peter had been taken down, crushed, reformed and vitrified to produce one or another of the pyramidal structures favored by the aliens. These, in turn, now swarmed with jackhammer wielding workers, cutting the rock free to rebuild human structures. In the interim, Mother Church, as it had sometimes in the very early days, once again operated from tents and caves. The Society of Jesus was no better off.

Scavenging materials from the God-king pyramids, themselves built with materials salvaged from the city. Recycling!

Somewhere in an interior pocket of the priest's uniform tunic rested a copy of the latest Papal Bull, De Propagatione Fidei, which translated as, "Concerning the Propagation of the Faith." The language of the thing was Latin, of course. What it meant, in practice, was, "We've taken it in the shorts. Go ye forth and multiply. Yes, Father, yes, Sister, THIS MEANS YOU. Oh, and while you're at it, work on getting us some converts, too. And, no, you are not freed of the responsibility of getting married before you propagate."

Nor was that all the Bull did. One result of the Posleen invasion, and the learned preference for expending men and preserving women—coldly put, the factories for the next generation of plasma cannon and rail gun fodder—was that the imbalance between the sexes of the human race was close to five to two, female. For Catholics, for whatever reason, it was more like three to one. After consultation with some learned Moslems and Mormons, the Pope had seen fit to authorize and encourage polygamy, along with a vigorous castigation of celibacy, and a side sneer at homosexuality, for a set period of seventy-five years. For some Catholic women, the reaction was something like, "Crap, you mean I can't have one of my own?" From others it was, "I just knew there was a merciful God. Thank Christ that I won't have to do all the coddling myself." For men, reactions varied from the common, "Yayyyy!" to the almost as common, "Shit; one woman is difficult enough. You're telling me I have a duty to deal with up to four of them?"

Of course it was never that simple. It couldn't be that simple. We're talking about the Roman Catholic Church here. There were forms to fill out, questions to answer, interviews to be sat, shrieks to be endured.

Tradition: It's what's for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and Holy Communion.

The Holy, Roman, and Most Catholic Church’s response to the global depopulating is to lift the ban on celibacy for 75 years, and follow a program of encouraging polygamy to deal with the female/male split. Be interesting times when the 75 years run out.

He stopped by the passing Swiss Guardsman Sally had pointed to, a member of the Legio Pedestris Helvetiorum a Sacra Custodia Pontificis, to ask for directions. The "Legio" had once been "Cohors," back when the guard had been considerably smaller. Now, with nearly thirteen thousand members, there was some call for upping the title from Legio to Exercitus. The Swiss Guard was not only the army of the Vatican, it had also become the police force for the city of Rome . . . such as remained.

The Swiss Guard, now 13,000 men strong is the de facto police force of Rome. I imagine there's an interesting story in how they seem to be the only intact army in Italy, but that may just be how it appears to me from this snippet.

"It's hardly the only thing that's been lost," Sally observed. "What are a few columns and some tons of rock and mortar compared to five billion people?"

The number of dead from the Posleen War.

One might have expected that, given the rate of Posleen reproduction, the next major wave would have simply moved north unopposed. There never was, however, another major wave. The first, before it was crushed, had denuded the area along the border and deep past it of nearly everything edible. Subsequent waves, of which there were several, never made it very far into the United States before starving. After a while, when many had gone north only to disappear, the rest of the Posleen stopped trying. Their legends contained many stories of which the moral was something between "Curiosity killed the cat" and "Danger, Will Robinson."

That Posleen-made barrier, however, didn't stop them from breeding. Pressure within Mexico, therefore, continued to build.

As things turned to shit for the Posleen in the American southwest and Mexico, pressure had built on some weaker clans by those more powerful, driving those weak ones to find someplace else, anyplace else, to live. That was generally southward and eastward. As Central America narrowed toward the south and east, these fleeing clans were forced into closer and closer proximity, greater and greater competition for food, and more frequent and bloodier interclan battle.

Fortunately, from some points of view, the Posleen could eat each other. And, of course, they did. Yet as clans were shattered and reformed, as new chiefs arose from the carnage, there came a time when there was only one clan, and that composed of the remnants of dozens of others, left in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, only one place for that composite clan to go, and only one good route to get there.

The Posleen actually create problems for themselves, in that previous waves ate up all the foraging, making heading north from Mexico into the US almost impossible. Guess the only thing left to try is south through Panama.

There were slits, many of them, carved into the tunnels at varying heights. These, Dwyer suspected, were firing ports. He stopped at one doorway, its thick steel door hanging open, and followed a very narrow—too narrow for a Posleen—corridor to a room. There, in the Indowy-made light, he saw about what he'd expected to see, a firing slit and step, a quarter cylinder of galactic metal armor, a simplified range card, a crucifix, and a field telephone.

Yep; no wonder the Posleen never penetrated the catacombs very deeply.

Not much for tunnel fighting, the Posleen.

Ahead, yet another of the countless millions of spinning Posleen bodies that littered space seemed destined to smash directly onto the Surreptitious Stalker. All eyes—all those, at least, that faced forward—saw it and braced for an unpleasant impact. Closer and closer the body came. By bits, it seemed to dissolve as it reached a certain distance from the Himmit ship. A restless muttering from behind them caused Tulo, Brasingala, and Goloswin to turn their heads. Yes, there behind them, still spinning, the same corpsicle twisted away.

"I wonder how they do that." Goloswin said.

"We all wonder how they do half the things they do," said Aelool. "A very strange species, the Himmit, and there is more to them then they'll ever let you see."

"Yes," agreed Goloswin. "But instantaneous transmission of matter? That's something special."

"It appears they can only do it over very short distances," Aelool said. "That, or they're only willing to let us see them transmit matter over very short distances. As I said, there's more to the Himmit than they'll ever let on."

A Himmit system that lets bits of stellar debris pass “through” the ship via some sort of teleport-like system, thus the debris can’t bounce and reveal the presence of something there.

"I claim edas," Aelool began. Edas was the Posleen word for debt or obligation. It was their practical high level currency. "I claim edas for your lives I have saved, for your people I have rescued from extinction, and for your civilization, the kernel of which I have shielded. Do you accept this?"

I knew this was coming, thought Tulo'stenaloor. Anything too good to be true, just like the thing the humans call a "free lunch," isn't.

It was the Rememberer who answered for the group. "We accept edas, alien, as it shall be computed and allocated by the net, accounting for your lawful preferences. This is the law," the Rememberer added, glaring around the circle for any that might gainsay him. He didn't mention that the net was, until they could reacquire some artificial sentiences, quite defunct.

There were no takers to the Rememberer's challenge in any case. Ravenous, murderous, genocidal, homicidal maniacs the Posleen, as a race, might have been. Yet, still, the law was the law and they would obey it.

Posleen respect for their laws and traditions. As their savior, Aelool is entitled to make any request of them that is not illegal. As an aside, the Posleen AS devices are burnt out from the Casta Gun’s EMP, but in Dance the Posleen hardware was impervious to EMP. Then again, there is probably a world of difference between the EMP grenade from Dance and the Casta Gun.

"I claim then, first, that both my person and my people shall be inviolable by you and yours and your descendants to the last flickering of the final star."

"We accept," answered the Rememberer, for all kessentai present. "Let the net so record. Let it also be recorded that we cannot speak for, nor owe obligation to pay edas for, any of the People of the Ships not present in this ship."

"Understood," Aelool agreed. "I claim second, that if I or any of my people should call for you to come to our aid, this you must do, you and your descendants until the last star flickers out."

"We accept."

"Lastly, I require of you that you must forego revenge against the humans who, after all, did no more than you yourselves were trying to do, to survive."

At this condition the Rememberer froze, its crocodilian lips drawn back from clenched teeth. Nor was it the only one to balk. The others—except for Binastarion—made similar grimaces, or reached for boma blades, or reached forth claws as if to rend the Indowy into little bits.

"WE ACCEPT!" thundered Tulo'stenaloor, his iron voice freezing the rest in place. "With the proviso that we may still defend ourselves from any humans who come hunting for us."

"This," agreed Aelool, "is fair." If the humans should ever learn to track you, where you're going . . . and how you're getting there.

Aelool’s terms, to which Tulo and all his people shall be bound “until the last flickering of the final star.”

The Surreptitious Stalker neither glided between the stars as did Indowy and Darhel ships, nor tunneled quite as did the ships of the Posleen. Rather, in the parlance, it "skipped." That is to say, it made a series of relatively small jumps between points, often using what the Himmit called the 'Hidden Path,' none of them so long and thus energy intensive as to be likely to be noticed. This was often a fairly slow method. Its big advantage was that it was relatively stealthy. Only in the short interruptions while preparing a new jump were the ships of the Stalker's class detectible, and then only for so long as it took to begin the new jump or end one. Even then, the odds of there being another ship nearby when they materialized were exceedingly poor, especially given that the Hidden Path did not use normal ley lines between major stars.

Of course, the doctrine for Himmit scout-smugglers called for them to make only random progress towards their destination, appearing first here, then there, then somewhere else not all that noticeably closer to their target. Thus, the journey to the system of Diess, the fourth planet of which had been the scene of the first truly major engagement between Posleen and human forces, took months as the humans measured time. When the ship emerged into normal space after its final jump, no one expected it, nor could have expected it.

Himmit utilize a THIRD form of FTL, which per their particular idiom, is exceptionally stealthy.

Tulo reached up one claw to scratch his muzzle. "They did, if they cared to draw the analogy. Among our own people, it's not something generally known, but if one searches out the histories and the three disciplines, and consults some of the scrolls of the Rememberers, one cannot avoid the conclusion that we knew the humans eons ago. There is no other species that matches both the physical, the intellectual and the moral descriptions. For their bizarre reproductive behavior alone they would stand out as unique."

"Might I read of these in the disciplines, the histories, and the scrolls, Lord?" Brasingala asked.

The Posleen history dimly recalls that they were once friends to humanity.

Tulo rotated his head one hundred and eighty degrees to his rear to look. "Ancestors!" he exclaimed.

This is one of many times Tulo twists his head to look exactly behind him, a quirk of Posleen anatomy that was never previously mentioned.

There were rumors that the Darhel had deliberately, on orders from the very highest levels, begun preparing to shut down every AID under human control lest those, too, be granted citizenship somewhere. Whether that was the primary motivation—or some other factor was; with the Darhel there were always layers within layers, motivations within motivations—Boyd had made it clear that any attempt on the life or health of a citizen of the Republic of Panama would be treated as an act of war. Since Sally was not only immune to Darhel cybernetic manipulations, but had frightful firepower and was executrix for Daisy's not particularly small estate, to boot, this was not a threat to be taken lightly.

Dictator Boyd from Yellow Eyes granted the only independent AIDs full citizenship in the Republic of Panama (awkward, with both of them being US warships) This is without precedent in Galactic Law, but isn’t specifically forbidden, and now the Darhel get to worrying what other AIs we wacky humans will recognize as sentient beings.

Far more interesting, at least to McNair and Daisy Mae, was a much smaller, yellow skinned group, sitting by the edge of the pier with no human within fifty yards. Two of the three Posleen—the largest and the smallest—had fishing poles thrust out over the edge, the lines running down to the murky water below. The second largest one sat between them, its head resting on the shoulder of the largest. The pole of the largest was held in a kind of frame, while the creature itself appeared to be whittling on some wood with a small carving knife.

The local waters were still badly polluted, but a little diesel taste in the fish was all spice to the Posleen.

"What the . . . ?"

Boyd laughed. McNair's shock and Daisy's wide eyes were everything he'd hoped for. "That, my friends, is the Reverend Doctor Guanamarioch de Po'osleenar, his . . . umm . . . wife, and their one child. They, too, are citizens of the Republic, and loyal to their new home."

"Reverend? Doctor?" McNair asked.

"Guano went to divinity school . . . ordained Baptist, I believe, though it might be Episcopal. You should hear him rail sometime about the 'Whore of Rome.' I understand he gives a helluva sermon. Only through his artificial sentience, of course."

"Is it too late to go back into the tank until the world stops being weird?" McNair asked. "And how is it that a couple of Posleen only have one child? They drop eggs about every two weeks and . . ."

"I asked Guano about that once," Boyd answered. "He says they put 'em, individually, in a pen. After a few weeks it becomes obvious that the nestling either will or won't become sentient. Only about one in four hundred does. As for the others . . . they eat the little bastards. Would you like to meet them?"

Guano’s done quite well for himself, going to theology school, becoming a Minister and raising a family. Still fishes too, and doesn’t mind if the fish tastes like diesel. The truly interesting thing is learning that the ratio of God-kings to normals (1:400) is the biological ratio and not a cultural thing. He’s also independently invented the final form of Tulo’s Posleen culture, eating the normals and raising the God-kings as his own sons.

And we finally, finally get a specific rate for Posleen “pregnancy” which is a fortnight (14 days.) Considering they’re apparently screwing all the time, recover almost immediately from laying, and are hermaprhodites, a single 400-strong oolt will, over the course of a year, lay almost ten thousand eggs (checks figures) yep, 9,600 with 24 God-kings in there to lead them. 2 years to maturity, during which time another 19,200 will be born, discounting casulties from insuffcient food supply and fighting in the nstling pits, and now the breeding population just grew by more than 2000%...

Valen, they must have been killing the Posleen in the tens of millions, more, if the global population only increased by 500% in 5 years. I wonder how long it would take take them to overpopulate the world and nuke each other off at that rate.

"You really ought to give him a chance, though," Boyd said. "Guano's all right. Especially since he gave up snorting VX."

Pretty sure that’s just a joke. Pretty sure.

[Ahriman238]

It was a surreal scene. The Stalker was nearly wrapped in the battered hulks of a Posleen ghost fleet, the fleet having been towed into a position of stable orbit pending recovery and scrapping. On every side of the cargo compartment, the view screens showed images of battered and cracked hulls. Unlike the wrecks floating around the Earth, these ships neither glowed, nor sparked, nor burned, nor spilled out the dying husks of Posleen crew.

These wrecks were dead and had been for years. In human terms, this was a boneyard. Nonetheless, it was not an entirely dead boneyard. The anti-matter containment units were still active. Normally this should not have been true; anti-matter was simply too valuable to have been left ungathered. On the other hand, if you're the Darhel, the galaxy's lawyers, beaurocrats, and corporate sharks, and you've cornered the market on anti-matter, and suddenly there's just a vast quantity of anti-matter that threatens to undercut the entire galactic market, then you, too, might decide that a little visited corner of the Federation was just the place to dump that anti-matter for a while until you could figure out how to put it into the system without upsetting that system.

Darhel fuckery continues as they delay salvaging Posleen antimatter until they can figure out how to do so without seriously disrupting their carefully controlled market for antimatter.

The Stalker had been stuck in orbit about Diess IV for over a month, as humans measured time and had been en route for two months more. In all that time there had been nothing to do but stare at the screens, eat, flip food balls, and stare at the screens some more. Practice fighting was out; it was too likely to turn into a free for all. Fucking was out; as Tulo'stenaloor said, "Just what we need; a couple of hundred little damned, ravenous nestlings underfoot and no pen to keep them in. You want to wake up with nestlings gnawing on your reproductive members?" Besides, Kessentai didn't really care for screwing each other, as a general rule, feeling the practice was somewhat perverse.

God-kings consider it perverse to have sex with each other. No biological reason they can’t.

"The Stalker can extrude a sort of metallic tunnel," the Indowy answered, pointing at a view screen where a stubby, silvery-sheened cylinder protruded into space. "We not sure quite how it's done, but it can be done. And it's perfectly capable of linking itself to a Posleen air lock. Any airlock, actually; this metal has some very odd attributes. Unfortunately, we didn't realize that every ship here would be airless."

Himmit technology, a “smart” metal somehow related to sohon, yet not.

"I suppose not. Damn! If we could just get one kessentai safely into one of the hulks, I'm sure he could find a suit bay that's more or less unscathed.

Posleen ships have Posleen shaped space-suits, in the event they need EVA. Not something I’d considered before, since Ringo goes to so much trouble to show the Posleen as not really understanding space.

"What the fuck is that?" Tulo asked.

Goloswin didn't answer immediately, but just stared down a rectangular lump of silvery metal, about the size of a human loaf of bread, or a construction worker's lunchbox, sitting on the deck of the cargo compartment and doing precisely nothing. The tinkerer shook his head and said, "I wish I knew. Here, let me show you."

Taking out his boma blade, Golo set it carefully edge down atop the lump and pressed down. Nothing happened, a fact that caused Tulo's yellow eyes to widen.

"Now watch this," Golo said. He turned the blade on its side and pressed. The weapon passed through the lump easily. Then he put the blade away and placed his hand atop the lump. It immediately began to flow around the hand until the tinkerer withdrew it. Even as the hand was withdrawn, the lump tried to extend itself to wrap around it.

"It's a bit like what our Sohon masters do with nanotech," Aelool
offered. "But it doesn't require or respond to Sohon."

Sohon was the mental discipline by which the Indowy manipulated energy and matter. It was especially useful in manipulating nanites to act upon other matter.

Himmit smart metal.

"What is that crap?" Tulo asked.

"Basically . . . long chain molecules, with peculiar additional protons and electrons, in various isotopes. Basically . . . too . . . material that 'wants' to be or become something, that can only be or become what it is designed, at a subatomic level, to be or become. Though one can play with that . . . intent. It was fascinating stuff to work with. I'm not at all sure I really understand it. Rather, I'm sure that I don't understand it . . . not yet, anyway."

"Well . . . it seems to work . . ."

At that time, the cosslain, somewhat unused to the helmet and surrounding material, bumped into Brasingala, who lashed out immediately and mindlessly with his boma blade.

Which bounced off. Which caused the kessentai guard to strike again. Which strike also bounced off.

Which caused Goloswin to gape and Tulo'stenaloor to exclaim, "Fuscirto!"—demon shit!—"That stuff's armor!"

Himmit smart metal again. Now it’s used to make a space suit that also turns boma blades, something even the ACS armor couldn’t do.

Thus Golo found himself traipsing the unpleasantly yielding tunnel between the Surreptitious Stalker and a Posleen hulk bearing the name, Beatific Bearer of Breakfastime Bounty in High Posleen. An alternate translation, in low Posleen, might have been something like, Vengeful Ripper of Skulls and Devourer of Brains. It really depended on whose dictionary was being used; Posleen was an odd language that way.

High and low versions of the Posleen language, and that’s quite a departure in meaning for the same phrase in two related tounges.

Golo hadn't a clue why the hatchway was open. The ship appeared to have been hulled in space. The hatch in question was not a normal route for egress, less still for emergency evacuation. There were no scorch marks or gouges around it. Another mystery. One I shall probably never solve.

In fact, human salvage crews had deliberately opened the ships to space on the odd chance that a Posleen might someday emerge from a hibernation chamber set on automatic. If that were to happen, so the humans had decided, best to give that Posleen one final, big surprise.

Fun. Not an unreasonable precaution, there are thousands of slumbering Posleen in these hulls, but the idea of waking up to hard vacuum is chilling.

The suits were fine, once Golo had managed to move the bodies and crank open the door. They were just general things, large enough to fit the largest Posleen and simple enough for even a normal to use safely, provided a skilled cosslain or a kessentai dressed them.

The largest Posleen are God-kings, but I’m curious that they apparently let normals suit up and go EVA?

"Well . . . to be fair, Golo, the humans couldn't eat our dead. We carry a disease that's harmless to us but eventually deadly to them. And they couldn't let us have them, either, because that was fuel for our war machine."

Funny, in the main books Posleen are not inedible to mankind, we simply derive no useful nutrition from eating Posleen, and are never going to be eating them for the flavor. Oh well, another day, another contradiction in continuity.

"What can you tell me of this ship?" he asked.

"Standard B-Dec, C-Dec and twelve landers," the AS answered. "There should be a mix of just about seven thousand of the people down in hibernation. There were that many when we were hulled but I have no information of how many penetrations we ultimately took after the artificial sentiences agreed in council to shut down."

B-Dec should carry about 6,400. Maybe this one was overcrewed, but it seems odd then, that the ASes would choose to shut down while the ship had a full complement.

Binastarion, the one-eyed and -armed and half a dozen cosslain, all of them suited but without helmets, stood in a half circle around an about to be unfrozen Kessentai in a small area walled off and provided with air and heat. Four of the cosslain carried shotguns, or the Posleen equivalent of them, anyway. In human terms they might have been called "half-gauge" or perhaps "two pounders" since a lead sphere sufficient to fill the bore would have weighed roughly two pounds. Two more cosslain held boma blades poised over the prostrate form. They'd been careful to remove any weapons the hibernating kessentai had had.

Half-gauge? That’s a very big gun. As in, not man-portable. But as far as we know, they only use them to fire 1mm railgun darts and the EMP grenade from Dance.

The first sign of life was a trembling in the clawed legs. This was followed by twitching along the flanks as nerves long dormant came to life again. Breathing was next, and coughing as the kessentai's lungs fought to remove the inevitable build up of crud that came with the last moments of going under. Lastly, the eyes opened and the head moved.

"This is an intelligence test," Binastarion's AS announced. "Question One: By the ancestors and the Net, do you swear fealty to our lord, Tulo'stenaloor?"

The just awakened kessentai snarled and automatically tried to rise while reaching for the boma blade that should have been at his side. Just as automatically, all four shotgun-bearing cosslain opened fire, blasting the God-king's head and a goodly chunk of his torso to yellow mist and ruin, even while the two boma blades descended to chop the corpse into three sections.

"Tsk," said Binastarion's AS to the ichor-leaking corpse. "How truly sad. You failed the test."

About half of the reawakened kessentai passed Binastarion's intelligence test. This worked out to be roughly one thousand of them. Even so, that meant no more than fifty to one hundred who would actually be a good fit in Tulo'stenaloor's hand-picked oolt. Of the rest, yes, they were brighter than the Posleen norm. This didn't necessarily mean they were all that bright.

This is probably how a lot of God-kings find a new boss. But points for style.

Tulo let the question hang for a moment, before continuing. "We lost . . . friends . . . because we are neither bright enough, nor generalistic enough, to match the humans. They are almost as clever as the crabs, almost as brave as ourselves, almost as sneaky as the Himmit, almost as ruthless as—or maybe more ruthless than—the Darhel, and almost as industrious as the Indowy. They are generalists and because of that, they are generally better than we are."

Also, we had rednecks who whip up antimatter superweapons in their spare time. For fun. That may have contributed somewhat to the Glorious Victory of Indomitable Man!

And yet what can I do about it? wondered the recently awakened Finba'anaga, as he fitted a plate to an interior bulkhead and spread a tube of paste around the edges of the plate. Since I awakened and found myself staring into four wide-muzzled hand cannon, my fate has not been my own. The kessentai shivered with suppressed rage and hate. It's wrong, against the ways of the ancestors and the spirits, to have kessentai doing such work. And the plans this failure of a war leader, Tulo'stenaloor has for us? Abomination!

And worse, I can't even go to our fellows to denounce this abomination. Finba'anaga looked down at the Artificial Sentience hang about his neck and against his chest. If I so much as utter a disloyal syllable this spy-in-a-box will denounce me. And the penalty for that, spacing without possibility of harvesting, is too much to be borne. We're not even allowed to take the blasted things off, either.

This had happened once, when a newcomer kessentai, and not necessarily one of the stupidest, had approached another with the prospect of seizing the ship. Within moments, a party of four of Tulo'stenaloor's closest had descended upon that kessentai, slashed off his limbs, then dragged the corpse to an airlock and shoved it out. Finba'anaga had seen the whole, frightening thing.

Cold, I like it. Tulo requires the newly-recruited God-kings to wear their AS at all times, and has charged the AS to pass on any mutinous talk.

The ship—renamed now the Arganaza'al, or the Holy Rescuer, in High Posleen, Run For Your Lives, in Low—thrummed again with life, as matter and anti-matter destroyed themselves deep below to bring it power. The view on the bridge changed, too, as the ship began to cruise a safe distance from the local world for a jump.

If these guys got any stranger with dual-tongue naming conventions they’d have to join the Culture.

"In any case, the People do not make new music. Ever. And yet that is a song of the People, and of the People's flight and plight, in the People's language. Oh, yes, the words are old. Some are obsolete. Yet it is the language of the People of the Ships. And there are other songs, also all old, old. Who wrote it, do you suppose? Who wrote those others. And why? And why, having created music, did the People lose it . . . abandon creating it? Or, on the other claw, why was it taken from them?"

Posleen don’t write new music, but they do sing the songs of their ancestors. Weird.

Drinking helped. Not that alcohol had the slightest effect on the Posleen. Rather, the impurities of the very worst, most vile and disgusting rot gut had an effect very similar to that of alcohol on humans. Any added formaldehyde was especially good. In the long run, too, those impurities had about as bad an effect on a Posleen body as alcohol, taken in huge quantities, had on a human. The God-king hadn't started puking blood yet, but the morning hangover had become an old friend.

He'd tried to kill himself, once. Boyd, when dictator, had been unwilling to simply write off chemical warfare. He'd acquired a certain amount from the Russians of sundry nerve agents, as well as a few more esoteric types of shell filling. Once, in a fit of despair, Guano had broken into the stockpile and choked down enough VX to kill a thousand humans. It hadn't worked as intended, though at that dosage it had had an effect. Indeed, the problem with using chemicals on the Posleen, other than incendiaries to burn up oxygen, was that the dosage required to get an effect, basically hallucinations, was in practice uneconomical to deliver.

Money wasn't a problem. Not only had Boyd freed the God-king from slavery, he made sure the Posleen was paid—and at generous Fleet Strike rates, too—for the intel he provided. And then there were the royalties from ancient Posleen songs that Guano received from the so far largely untouched Republic of Ireland. (For there was something in those songs of premature, glorious and, above all, violent death that touched something in the Hibernian soul.) In all, the God-king was borderline wealthy, enough so that he could arrange for his own deliveries of VX and GB. And did.

Huh, so formaldehyde and ‘impurities’ get Posleen drunk, but VX, GB and other toxic gases, in sufficient concentration get them high. That seems like a good starting point, even if you’d probably have to get into looney tunes level of ridiculous quantities to actually kill one.

And if ever a human male had a wife who was less trouble and more help, Guano didn't know of it. And if she couldn't talk, well, that also meant she couldn't nag. And even there, they had their own little language of whistles and grunts and touches. No, it wasn't good for anything too complex but it was perfectly capable of expressing the important thing: "I love you." And if Querida loved Guanamarioch in goodly part because he exuded the pheromones of a kessentai? How many human women selected their mates on similar grounds?

So, the adoration and obedience of the normals is pheromone-based?

There should have been six light cruisers and a heavy in the squadron. That strength, however, had been allowed to atrophy down to the three light cruisers remaining. As for the rest . . . well, the admiral in charge had expenses. The four missing crews and mothballed ships for which he received funding, and not at mothball rates, without having the distasteful need to pay any of that funding forward, helped cover those expenses. And the Darhel, the fox-faced, treacherous lords of the Galactic Federation, were more than willing to overlook the admiral's cupidity. After all, they owned the admiral as, indeed, they owned the Federation and the Fleet, all except for that portion that had effectively mutinied to relieve the siege of Earth. And the Darhel were working on that little issue.

With the Posleen menace subdued, it was to the Darhels' interest—their vital interest—that humanity have considerably less power than it might have had. The monkey-boys and -girls were simply too dangerous to allow to be free.

Still, the war wasn't really entirely over. And there were protocols, standing orders, worst of all a news media that occasionally was less tractable than the Darhel—or people like the admiral—might have wished. Many a sensor had picked up the Posleen ship, coming seemingly from nowhere to blast its way into interstellar space. It wouldn't do to simply let it go.

Still, the individual crews were in as wretched a shape as the squadron was, indeed as wretched as the entire fleet—except for that portion in mutiny—was fast becoming. One of the ways the admiral commanding maintained control on three quarters pay and bad food (for even the spurious costs of four ships were not quite enough to cover those damnable "expenses") was to allow the crew simply to slack off. He always had the threat of transfer to the still Bristol Fashion, Euro and American commanded ships, should anyone complain.

The price for that was a sluggish response to the call "battle stations." Many a crewman, and woman, was drunk or, at least, hungover. Still others had to detangle themselves from legs, the detangling made worse by cramped bunks. In all, it was long minutes before even a skeleton staff was assembled on the bridge. At that, since the admiral highly discouraged individual initiative, the ships waited further minutes for the admiral to appear, receive the report, and give the order to pursue.

Darhel-encouraged mismanagement and graft in the Fleet. I hope they never actually need a military again for some reason.

A bright red and orange and yellow cloud of Hell-in-space appeared behind the Posleen escape ship. Esstwo, manning the defensive gunnery station, snarled his satisfaction at destroying one of the accursed humans' anti-matter weapons. These were more deadly than the kinetics, if they managed to hit or even get close. However, they were easier to keep from hitting or getting close by destroying prematurely the containment fields that kept their anti-matter from joining with normal matter and becoming a cosmic catastrophe before it was intended to.

Despite that success, Esstwo's claws worked furiously, trying to stave off and defeat the swarm of human missiles, a mix of anti-matter and kinetics, that pursued the ship relentlessly. Of the two classes of targets, the KEW were the more to be feared. They gave little trace, hardly showed up on the sensors until it was almost too late, and were not particularly vulnerable to countermeasures.

Antimatter missiles are more likely to get kills, even near-misses can be deadly. However, they also light up sensors and make tempting targets for point defense. KEWs are harder to detect.

"Your contract shall be voided!" Panggabean hissed, kicking the prostrate XO in the ribs. "You shall be court-martialed, disgraced and spaced!" he added, stomping on the unfortunate creature's head. Pending over, no mean feat for so weighty a man, Panggabean applied his riding crop—which was not, after all, functionless—to the XO's neck and shoulders. "Your children shall be sold as back passage whores, the girls and the boys!"

The CruRon had pursued the Posleen ship to and through the distortion caused by its jump, all the time flinging missiles forward. The Admiral fretted over the expense, of course. The cost of the ordnance would come from funds he considered his own. But to be cheated of his prize by the incompetence of the exec—never mind that Panggabean had spaced the XO's predecessor for excessive zeal and initiative . . . it was simply intolerable. Nor would it be tolerated.

Hell of a way to run a railroad.

Posleen, be they normals or cosslain or kessentai, were born with certain skills, the result of serious genetic tinkering sometime in the lost past. These, particularly among the normals and cosslain, usually manifested themselves in some form without prompting. A normal born to be a farmer, for example, and finding itself on a new planet, would automatically start gathering seeds from the local plants, even as it began preparing fields for more usual Posleen crops. Miner-born Posleen would begin prospecting for useful ores without the need ever to tell them to. A builder normal, or more usually a group of them, would begin constructing a pyramidal palace for their god-king at the first sign of sufficient security to justify the effort. Indeed, it was generally necessary to tell them not to, if there was some other task requiring their attention.

Kessentai were a bit different. For them, their skill sets rarely manifested themselves until there was a need.

"I don't really know," Finba answered. "I've got all the usual things a kessentai should have, I think. I can use a boma blade, drive a tenar, aim a railgun or shotgun or high velocity missile or plasma cannon. I can tell my normals and cosslain to follow me."

"Not very useful, under the circumstances," Goloswin observed, drily. "Let's try this: what doesn't interest you in the slightest?"

Finba thought upon that. "Well . . . this ship. I've no urge to understand how to sail it. I've been curious what drives it, though. But, of course, I haven't been allowed anywhere near the engines."

"We can fix that. What else, that you're either interested in or oblivious to?"

"I'm curious how the forges work," Finba answered.

"That will have to wait until we land. We took nothing from any of the other ghost ships that wasn't already processed. And the forge is in storage. It would be very inconvenient to dig it out. What else?"

The new kessentai blew recycled air through his lips, causing them to ripple. "Ummm . . . I don't care about building pyramids . . . or any building, actually. I'm interested in breeding with normals—"

"We're all interested in that, young Finba," Golo said with a smile. "Keep going."

"I'm interested in the net, and how it resolves questions of edas, and hierarchy, and prioritization. I'm not particularly interested in history . . . well, just a bit.

"That's all that comes the mind, for now, Lord."

Golo nodded deeply. "It's a start. The rest we'll figure out as time passes and opportunity comes. So . . . let us take ourselves to the engine room. Perhaps we may learn something there."

Posleen genetic memory and inherited skills. Interesting that the normals manifest them unconsciously, while the God-kings do so only when there’s an urgent need. Nice to see how it works.

[CaptainChewbacca]

Darhel-encouraged mismanagement and graft in the Fleet. I hope they never actually need a military again for some reason.

You should read 'Eye of the Storm'.

The Swiss Guard, now 13,000 men strong is the de facto police force of Rome. I imagine there's an interesting story in how they seem to be the only intact army in Italy, but that may just be how it appears to me from this snippet.

This was explained in the errata somewhere. The Swiss Guard helped evacuate the Pope, the cardinals, and a lot of the relics and then headed into the Alps. They're the only intact army in Italy because they didn't stay to defend it. They protect the 'soul' of the church, not the body.

[Ahriman238]

Darhel-encouraged mismanagement and graft in the Fleet. I hope they never actually need a military again for some reason.

You should read 'Eye of the Storm'.

I have. Hence the sarcasm. Honestly, the Posleen, Indowy and in once case Darhel have hinted several times that the Aldenata were destroyed because of their obsessive-compulsive need to control everything. It seems the Darhel are incapable of learning from history.

The Swiss Guard, now 13,000 men strong is the de facto police force of Rome. I imagine there's an interesting story in how they seem to be the only intact army in Italy, but that may just be how it appears to me from this snippet.

This was explained in the errata somewhere. The Swiss Guard helped evacuate the Pope, the cardinals, and a lot of the relics and then headed into the Alps. They're the only intact army in Italy because they didn't stay to defend it. They protect the 'soul' of the church, not the body.

That would handily explain it. Of course, I believe the employing of Swiss pikemen is still technically a war crime...

[ChaserGrey]

Oh man, the Posleen. I remember my fanfic idea for a nuclear-powered battleship (because it could stay out for years, and for some reason the Posleen ignore things on water as well as shells in the air) that finally drove into Posleen-occupied Galveston and blew the top off her reactor, creating the world's biggest dirty bomb and killing millions of horsies in a true Ringo self-sacrificing Gotterdammerung. In my defense, I was about 16 at the time.

Now, though, I have ze solution! All we have to do is build an array of Gerald Bull style superguns- array because you probably can't point the damn things, so you'll want 8 or so in a circle, built someplace central like Nebraska or underneath a suitably large mountain in Colorado. Arm them with guided shells working off terrain recognition with optical sensors (don't want to emit, or depend on satellites when the Horsies are around) and using some kind of passive guidance system like vanes in the base of the shell. And then tip the shells with neutron bombs. Buy plutonium from the Darhel, which is probably cheaper than antimatter.

And then...and then...

When the Horsies land, you sit in your bunker, getting reports of landing C-Decs, and dispatching nuclear shells from the depths of your complex to wipe them out after they land. The Earth will shake with the firing of your glorious guns, and you can play Beethoven's Ninth while you're doing it. Or bagpipes.

Yeah, definitely bagpipes.

And then we RULE THE WORLD!

[Simon_Jester]

So...

Ringoverse/Ace Combat crossover then?



Stonehenge!

[ChaserGrey]

Hey, makes more sense than trying to take on the Horsies with SP 16" guns and combat suits.

Besides, I like the idea of such a...civilized way to fight a war. Snug underneath your mountain, climate controlled, doubtless with a choice of mess halls, a movie theater to entertain the troops, and a pretty assistant to bring you tea while you're indexing your supergun around. Beats slogging around in the mud, donchaknow.

[MKSheppard]

Woo. Voodoo resurrection, but I wandered back into this thread after finding one of my random posts about the REAGAN MILITARY BUILDUP in here; and I skimmed through the thread again.

Following exchange by Ahriman caught my eye:

It takes a sohon master either a month or 6 (conflicting numbers again) to make a suit, and there are only about 1,000 sohon masters in the entire galaxy.

EDIT: Whoops I fucked up maths -- edited to fix

So yearly production of ACS suits is between 6,000 and 12,000 units, if we assume every single sohon master is making the damn things.

This...is not a good weapon to base your entire plan on, particularly since an ACS battalion would need 900 to 1,000 suits to be operational; and combat losses would mean hundreds of suits are lost per year minimal.

It takes at least 100 hours in a suit to synch up with it enough to move when you want and stop when you want and not make the world spin around when you try and look to the side.

So basically ten days of full time training 7 AM to 5 PM, with all your attention devoted to that one issue just to go beyond baby steps in the suit?

This is considered practical for anything beyond special forces?

By contrast, here are some historical training schedules for the US Marine Corps (MAREEEEENS) from WWII, courtesy of this website

Seven Week Training Schedule (March 1942-Early 1944)

138 Hours of Weapons Training
14 Hours of Fitness Training
62 Hours of Garrison Instruction
57 Hours of Field Training
(271 Hours In Total)

Eight Week Training Schedule (Early 1944-1945)

195 Hours of Weapons Training (In July 1944, HQ Marine Corps added 36 more hours)
39 Hours of Fitness Training
89 Hours of Garrison Instruction
98 Hours of Field Training
(421 Hours In Total)

[Simon_Jester]

Lost ACS suits can be reclaimed for scrap metal. Since the biggest obstacle in making the damn things is that the armor has to be fabricated atom by atom by a psychic, this saves a lot of time.

And, no, not really viable except for special forces.

How long does it take a tank crew or fighter pilot to stop screwing up, in training? Granted we can do it in simulators, but they still have to put in the hours.