Within was still an orderly chaos. The essential buildings had gone in first: revetments for air defense, bunkers, shelters. Dug-in armories, the generators, stores, roofed with steel beams and sandbags. This HQ building, Officers’ and NCOs’ mess, kitchens, all of the same adobe bricks and rammed earth stabilized with plastic and roofed with utilitarian asbestos cement. Married quarters were just going up in a separate section in the southeast corner, and there were peg-and-string outlines for barracks.
Many dependents, most of the troopers, and all the continuous inflow of recruits were still in tents. They had made the tents, under the direction of the veterans of the Fifth, each maniple of five issued canvas and rope; learning to cook and clean for themselves, to work as a unit. Not that they spent much time in the tents; the recruits lived in their leather and cotton-drill uniforms, out in the field in all weathers with nothing but their greatcloaks for protection. Two weeks of conditioning and close order drill and basic military courtesy, then they learned to make their battle-armor of nemourlon and live in that, night and day. Small arms training, maintenance work, unarmed combat; field problems, live fire exercises. The recruit formations shrank under the brutally demanding training, but more flowed in. Street toughs just off the CoDo shuttles, fresh-faced Citizen farmboys from the Valley. . . .
All done quickly, and done well. Peter nodded in satisfaction. Then he caught the Sergeant Major’s faint grin. Owensford swung into the jeep. “Let’s go,” he said.
* * *
“Again, I’m rather impressed,” King Alexander said, returning Peter Owensford’s salute and nodding toward the bustle about them.
He had come by helicopter, and was dressed in the uniform of a General in the Royal Spartan Army, which meant minimal ceremony. It was a new uniform, since Sparta had nothing but the Brotherhood militias and a company-sized Royal Guard until the Legion landed. Melissa had designed it; there was a high-collared tunic and trousers of a dark sand-gray, pipped along the seams in silver, with Sam Browne belt and boots, and a peaked cap. Owensford rather liked it; less showy than the Legion’s blue and gold, but sharp, and men needed to feel like soldiers in garrison situations where battledress and weapons were ridiculous.
“Thank you, sir. We’ve been turning adversity to advantage. I’ll fill you in at the briefing. If you’ll come this way?” The Spartan monarch was looking older, and much more tired; his skin seemed to have coarsened in the weeks since he had greeted the Legion.
General Desjardins of the RSMP was with him, and some of his officers; a few civilians, including Melissa von Alderheim. I suppose she thinks Lysander could get back to the city more often, Owensford thought, a little wistfully. In his thirty-sixth year he was growing more than a little envious of his married comrades. . . . Although I suppose any marriage a prince makes will be more a matter of duty. At least there aren’t any more stories about the Prince and Cornet Gordon.
The main landing field was outside the kilometer-square perimeter of the base, but not outside its circle of activity. A company-sized group of young men in uniform trousers and T-shirts jogged by down a newly made dirt track behind a standard-bearer with a pennant, their booted feet striking the gravel in crunching unison. Their heads were cropped close, and sweat ran down their faces, made the cotton singlets cling to their muscled chests despite the cool wind from the water. The man with the pennant was at least forty, or possibly half again that with regeneration treatment, but he showed no strain at keeping up with youngsters raised in this gravity.
“Heaow, sound off!” he barked.
A hundred strong young voices broke into a song that was half-chant:
“Kiss me good night, Sergeant Major
Tuck me in my little feather-bed,
Kiss me good night, Sergeant Major—
Sergeant Major, be a mother to meeee!”
The king smiled. There was a good deal else going on. A regular crack . . . crack . . . came from a firing range further inland. In the middle distance mortar teams were drilling, schoomp as the rounds left the barrels, pumpf as they burst several thousand meters to the west. Officers and noncoms in Legion uniforms stood nearby to supervise mortar crews. Fatigue parties in gray overalls were at work, digging or repairing heavy equipment. A column of armored vehicles was leaguered in a square to one side of the roadway. There were six-wheeled battle cars, with turrets mounting a 15mm gatling machine gun, or a single-barreled model and a grenade launcher or mortar. Turretless versions were parked within the leaguer; hatches and rear ramps showed they were intended as personnel carriers.
“From the von Alderheim works?” Alexander said, as he climbed into Owensford’s jeep. It was a safe bet; the AFVs had locally made spun-alloy wheels, and the armor was welded steel rather than composites. “Quick work.”
“Yes, sir,” Owensford said. “Miss von Alderheim has been most helpful.”
Melissa blushed as the two men turned to look at her. “Well, it’s the all-terrain truck chassis and engine,” she said. “You know, Uncle Alexander, I trained on the CAD-CAM computer Father brought in for the University?” Not really needed, when most of what Sparta’s major vehicle company turned out was standard models built to obsolete designs. And there was a waiting list for them. “I just . . . ran up something. The machine does most of it, really.”
“Which reminds me,” Peter said. “Until we get the aircraft construction going, I’ll need another way to loft Thoth missiles. Dumb solid rockets should do. Not quite in the von Alderheim line, but shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“Thoth missiles?”
“Well, that’s the code word. Small smart missiles. Usually rolled out of a cargo aircraft just over the horizon from the target, but that’s a bit hard to do here without airplanes. A rocket booster system would be trickier, but the Alanas think they can do it.”
“I’ll get someone on that,” Melissa said.
“No point in spreading this around,” Peter said. “Who knows, we might surprise someone.”
The jeep swept past the gate, as guards in the blue and gold of the Legion and the gray of Sparta brought their rifles to salute. I’m a damned tour guide, Owensford thought, as he pointed out the important features. Here too there were endless groups of marching men, most in mottled camouflage fatigues and bulky nemourlon armor. One group of such were double-timing with their rifles over their heads; lead weights were fastened all over their battle harness.
“Punishment detail,” Owensford explained. “When you’re working men as hard as we are, you have to come up with something a little more severe to act as a deterrent.”
* * *
The rest of the command group were waiting at the Headquarters building. There was a flurry of salutes and handshakes before they moved into the staff conference room.
Peter Owensford felt an almost eerie sense of déjà vu as he took his seat at the head of the table. The room was a long rectangle, one wall dominated by maps, the other by a computer display screen; the officers were in the standard places for a staff meeting. Enlisted stewards brought coffee, then retired behind the guarded door. A Royal Army corporal-stenographer sat in one corner, her hands poised over the keyboard.
“Ten’ ‘hut!” Battalion Sergeant Guiterrez said.
“At ease, gentlemen, ladies,” Owensford said. Odd. How often have I seen Christian Johnny do this? “General Collins is here as a participant observer.” Hence not in the chain of command, and seated to his right. “We’ll begin with the readiness report. If you please, Captain Barton?”
“Sir.” He nodded to the “general.” “The Fifth and its noncombatants are now fully settled. Expansion and training is proceeding as follows.”
He touched the controls and an organizational chart sprang out on the computer display screen to the left of the table.
“We’ve received approximately thirty-seven hundred recruits, of which four hundred and eight have proven unsuitable. An unusually low ratio, considering that we’re training the cadre for larger units.
“We’ve shifted the least physically fit members of the Fifth into four training companies, configured as cadre units to handle basic training, and a technician’s course largely manned by pensioners and noncombatants. That hasn’t presented a major difficulty in unit continuity, because they wouldn’t be in combat units to begin with. Four additional rifle and one heavy-weapons company have been formed, using many of our remaining enlisted cadre and local recruits; we’ve concentrated the, ah, less socially desirable individuals into the new Legion formations.”
“Your appraisal?”
“The five new companies are now combat-ready. There’s not as much unit cohesion as we’d like, but they’ll shake down. The new personnel have received the full basic training except for space assault and non-terrestrial environment practice. We’ve got the nucleus of a good combat force here.”