Chapter 1

The successful blockade of the Tulakat system gave the Confederacy an isolated tactics laboratory from which to work; Admiral Charteris moved a task force into the fringes of the system to cover all inbound and outbound Sa'arm traffic coming from any direction, posting small picket ships and interceptor carriers. From what we could tell, the Sa'arm on Tulak had no idea as of yet that they were isolated. Of course, we could be dead wrong and they could be talking with any or all of their occupied planets by some faster than light means that we knew nothing about...

Once the Navy had picked their spots, the Marines moved in to set up shop. The Eighth Regiment -- specifically, the Second Battalion of the Eighth Regiment -- established forward observation posts along the limb of Tulak's inner moon and prepared to get down to business.

To support this activity, we occupied a planetoid in a neighboring system, setting up a Naval yard and Marine base. The planetoid was a bit larger than Earth's moon, and generated twenty percent of an Earth G, which made field amplification over wide areas more practical than trying to put in full artificial gravity from an energy expenditure point of view, even though it was limited to point eight G -- so surface installations ran a bit light, with the exception of gyms and tracks and exercise fields, which DID employ full artificial gravity at one point two Gs in order to intensify workouts. Standard Marine Corps nanobot augmentation left the average soldier well toned anyway, but PT -- physical training -- promoted teamwork and gave the troops an appreciation for what they had.

The planetoid started out with just a designation number, but someone made the joke 'The Sa'arm stop here!' and it stuck, so the planetoid ended up with the name Truman. Truman was never seen as a permanent site -- and therefore, facilities were all designed for quick evacuation. Buildings -- including quarters -- were specially modified pods, smaller and more durable than normal permanent-installation units. Four of them were permanently fixed to the ends of a short tube intersection with a set of entrance hatches, above and below, making a cross of four structures. Special transports lifted the four-pod units -- called quads -- and mounted them to a central core one atop another, connected via the central hatchways for transport -- and this procedure was practiced weekly in evacuation drills involving random quads to keep everyone proficient. The quads sported adjustable landing jacks suitable for long-term use, rather than the antigrav setup used on standard pods until permanent foundations could be created -- one of the first things construction bots did -- and only extended to the sides as much as a typical mobile home would, rather than the area covered by the more expansive standard pod. Still, they were home to the soldiers and spacemen of the Truman Naval Yard and Marine Base -- and, more importantly, to their families.

Confederacy troops virtually all had families of concubines -- and a secondary mission to produce children -- so deploying them great distances from their concubines made little sense over the long haul. Transportation between 'the front' and some theoretically safe colony world several dozen light years away took time -- and that was a precious commodity, so it was decided to move the concubines to the staging area and let them deal with the hardships that 'military wives' had always dealt with.

That ground action against the Swarm was a seriously dangerous proposition was a given; when your enemy has instantaneous communications and a fully integrated command and control structure, you could NOT count on the usual confusion of battle to assist you. Tactics were carefully planned and even more carefully executed, since the only side prone to the SNAFU (an acronym meaning Situation Normal -- All Fucked Up) was the Confederacy -- and the troops involved were likely to end up dead.

One of the first things we discovered that worked to our advantage was that the Sa'arm have no use for water -- at least, not for commerce or recreation or as a food source. Apparently, they considered it a fine place to dump pollutants, but that was about it. Experts theorized that water was a problem in their underground construction efforts and may have been a threat to them, early on -- but that they had never sailed the seas of their homeworld -- or if they had, they'd given it up as soon as air travel was available. This provided a fine opportunity for operations staging; we could put troops into underwater bases built up from existing Tulaki installations via the transporter network, then field them in elements larger than delivery from orbit allowed. To help support this, we shut down the transporter network except for whatever pieces we were utilizing at the time in an attempt to keep the Sa'arm from discovering the technology. Terminuses were monitored around the clock -- any detected undue attention at one saw the delivery of a surprise package that detonated on arrival. No one knows what the Sa'arm THOUGH the terminuses were, but they learned to avoid them. Humans would have worked through it, eventually, but the Sa'arm decided that they just weren't worth the collateral damage that investigating the apparently unstable technology involved -- and no doubt the 500-pound bombs contributed to that...

Oddly, the tactic of deliberately triggering a detonation never occurred to them, either -- probably, once again, due to the amount of collateral damage involved...

A favorite early tactic was to deliver a squad-sized ambush to a site to have them destroy the target, then turn their attention outward to the attracted response. Once surrounded and decisively engaged, they would transport out, leaving buzz-saw mines as a calling card. The mines -- a bounding type that included a powerful spinning laser -- would decimate anything within a hundred feet, then blow up the transport terminus. Later versions of the mine WERE the terminus -- which simplified installation.

But the Sa'arm got wise, eventually -- sort of...

We had no good method of preventing underground expansion, even in areas that we could deny them on the surface -- that was being worked on. But we regularly sent teams to clear the invaders away from key installations, and that's where we discovered the Sa'arm first pass at an answer to buzz-saws...

CPL Ned Petersen's squad got the call to drop in around power station Mike Thirteen to keep the Swarm from tampering with it -- again. This was the fourth time a team had dropped into the vicinity to clean the dickheads out of there. Not only were we trying to deny them the use of the facility, we wanted it running to power local nodes and support a platoon that we had on the surface nearby doing reconnaissance in force operations. (The simplest description of recon in force is 'Send a decent sized unit -- have it find the enemy. If the enemy force is small enough, engage and destroy -- otherwise bug out, hopefully drawing the enemy force into an ambush from your main force'). The platoon was 'mushroom-harvesting' to the east, trying to goad the Sa'arm into chasing them into a nasty little pre-selected ambush site -- and having reasonable success -- but many of the surprises at the ambush site required power...

Usually, the Sa'arm either left infrastructure installations alone or replaced them; replacements probably occurred eventually everywhere, but early on it was easier to use what was in place -- and that's what they did. That didn't keep them from being nosy, however, and that was apparently what was happening here. CPL Petersen and his fire team transported in to a site halfway up a hillside to the north, and SGT Baker's other team popped in ninety meters south; all of them took cover and settled in to make some initial observations.

When it became apparent that the dickheads were pulling equipment out of the building, SGT Baker gave the word and the ten of them closed on the station. Dickheads were a bitch to sneak up on, since they literally had an eye in the back of their heads, but if you stayed off to the flanks you had a shot. The team was carrying silenced sniper rifles (the new plasma lasers did a fine job in open combat, but you saw the flash; a bullet moved too fast and generally left little idea of its direction of travel if fired properly) so they got in close enough to ensure accuracy and took cover again.

The next dickhead to hit the door got about four steps before Marco Lezynski drilled out an eyeball; it slumped over, lifeless, and the power station door closed -- obviously, the others planned to hole up in the station and await reinforcements. That wasn't really what was desired, so SGT Baker had the team close on the station, staying out of sight of the windows.

Next on the agenda was clearing the building -- preferably without being seen. The team on the north side got the call to draw attention to a certain window; when the dickheads wandered over to investigate, they discovered -- the hard way -- that bullets go through glass. Marco got three before they cleared out of the office -- and their abandonment of it allowed CPL Petersen and two others to climb through the window and occupy the office. SGT Baker and his team did the same from the south.

The Tulaki used something with even less structural integrity than sheetrock for walls -- both bullets and advanced sensors penetrated them readily -- so the teams picked off the remaining dickheads right through the walls, managing not to damage the installation itself other than cosmetically. A quick assessment of the equipment being removed revealed that nothing critical had been shut down, so the squad got the Hell out of there and regrouped on their original positions to await the response.

It wasn't long in coming; the tracking satellite and the sensor drone both caught sight of the platoon of dickheads dashing in from the east in short order -- right up the valley like lambs to the slaughter. The squad waited until the dickheads were well into the kill zone and caught them in a silenced crossfire, starting with the rear of the formation deliberately so as to confuse the hive mind as to the direction from which the attack was coming.

In about ten minutes it became apparent that a second, larger force was coming in from the west, so the teams rapidly set up claymores in the tree lines using laser tripwires and remote detonators. The dickheads stayed in the open, briefly examining the carnage in the power station, then cautiously (well, slowly, anyway) approaching the ambush site. SGT Baker's squad triggered half of the claymores in a 'V' behind the dickhead formation, killing most of the flankers; the dickheads would not advance through the previous ambush site but tried to escape back to the west, which occasioned another sleet of little steel balls. After that, the dickheads stayed flat -- which didn't really help, since the squad was above them on the hillsides. After about thirty seconds, though, one single unit stood and began deploying a disk atop a rod...

There was a nasty buzzing sound -- one all too familiar to anyone who'd seen previous after-action reviews. SGT Baker yelled, "DOWN!" and everyone took cover.

The thing was modeled on a captured buzz-saw, apparently -- but the Sa'arm seemed to think it was a good idea to put it on a stick, rather than having it bound into the air. That was all well and good, maybe, but the dickhead holding it discovered in short order that the device didn't care who it sliced into bologna. When he fell over, it toppled, too, tilting backward -- which, initially, appeared to be fortunate, as it tended to decimate the rest of the Sa'arm formation despite their prone positions.

The thing didn't explode, either -- it just shut off after about five hectic seconds. When all was quiet, the squad members looked up from their hide positions to see what the damage was.

Locally, things were a mess; there were a couple of dickheads moving, but most looked like victims of a meat slicer. SGT Baker gave the order to take out the survivors, and the south side team did the dirty work solo -- which caused Ned to wonder what the fuck had happened to Marco...

Marco was in two pieces -- and bleeding like mad. The nannites were trying to help, but his legs weren't getting any blood and his heart was pumping it out of him faster than they could possibly close the holes. The wall Marco had been hiding behind offered fine cover, but no protection, and the buzz-saw laser had whizzed right through both it and him. Ned rushed to Marco's side; if they could have popped him into a stasis pod, they might have saved him -- but they didn't have any, and Marco's lights were already fading when Ned got to him. Marco grabbed Ned by the forearms and gusted, "Take my girls!" then expired.

"Transfer noted," the platoon AI intoned, and Ned found himself two concubines up...

Marco wasn't the only unlucky one -- Jimmy Taggart lost a foot. Given the losses, SGT Baker had the squad evacuate the position immediately, then had the drone circle the area transporting in antipersonnel mines in a ring around the power station about three hundred meters out. Ned and a pair of his squad mates wrapped Marco's halves in their chameleon ponchos and hauled him and his gear out of there, leaving a ring of three white phosphorus grenades on a timer around his bloodstain to eradicate it as best they could. Jimmy carried his foot himself -- the nannites and the medics, working in concert, would make it as good as new in a couple of days.

The AAR covered the mission extensively; they went through every action from all angles. Marco had been unlucky -- but the dickheads had done their job for them. The platoon on the ground was warned, but nobody expected the Sa'arm to make the same mistake twice -- no doubt the buzz-saw was going back to the drawing board...

Forty hours later, the marauding platoon was extracted and debriefed and it was time to rotate out -- and Ned's platoon went home, too. The biggest delay in such things was in the low-energy departure; if you rubbed the Sa'arm's noses in the fact that you were operating powered vessels in the vicinity, they came out to investigate, so they moved ships off the moon's surface as gently as they could and stayed masked as much as possible while under power, then -- when out of the plane of the ecliptic and some distance out -- they would power up the transport and shift gently away. All in all, it took about a day to reach a point where they could think about engaging the hyperdrive in relative safety -- usually in the shadow of Tulakat.

After that, though, it was only a half day to Truman. The good news was that by the time they'd arrived, the weapons were all cleaned and everything was ready to turn in to the armory -- even dirty battledress uniforms were cleaned and pressed. They could go straight from the armory home, as a usual case. Ned wasn't that lucky -- but then, he was in no hurry, anyway, given the way things had gone...

The news filtered down the chain of command until it hit SGT Baker, who told Ned, "The Captain wants to see you."

"Crap! What about, Sarge?" Ned asked.

"Marco, probably," SGT Baker opined.

"Great... Maybe HE wants 'em..."

"You own those women, Bud. The AI was VERY clear about it." SGT Baker eyed him. "What's the problem?"

"Judy is gonna shit!" Ned vented.

"You need to get a handle on her, Man," SGT Baker told him. "I know she was your wife and all that, but..."

"Yeah, I know -- it's a new day," Ned grunted.

"You shouldn't have let her think she still had any pull -- THAT's where you fucked up," SGT Baker advised. "But you can fix that at any time..."

"Well..."

"It's for her own good. It's for YOUR own good!" SGT Baker pressed. "You have a different relationship than you did back when. If she refuses to recognize it, you need to rub her nose in it -- or she's gonna get snippy with someone else and you're gonna have to deal with THAT!"

Ned nodded. He'd heard it all before -- and hadn't done shit. They'd been together when they'd made pickup, and Judy -- who had ALWAYS henpecked him -- had been royally pissed when Ned had taken on Ellie, too. Actually, things went back before that; Ned had taken a Hispanic chick named Dolores on pickup -- and Judy had basically pushed her out of the nest, twisting Ned's arm until he swapped her for Ellie, who was pretty mousy. Judy was, well, maybe strident was descriptive. He'd married her because she wanted him to, more than anything else -- back then, before the Swarm, if a woman set her cap for you and spread her legs a few times, you tended to get the idea that permanence was a good thing -- or, at least, you did if you were tall and lanky and freckled and had dirty-looking brown hair and slightly buck teeth... Ned hadn't been a prize package at the time, and even though Judy was kind of scrawny, scrawny pussy was a LOT better than NO pussy!

Now, of course, after augmentation, he was bigger, faster -- maybe even a bit more handsome. He was DEFINITELY more marketable. Judy hadn't accepted much in the way of upgrades -- just clearing up her acne, apparently, and maybe widening her hips just a smidge; Ned had let her tell the AI what she wanted and had left it at that after a fight about 'putting balloons on her chest'. She was still skinny, and still had small, low-slung titties -- and she wasn't pregnant. Maybe he ought to look into that...

These musings got him to the First Sergeant's office. "Top, SGT Baker says the Captain wants to see me."

Top Whittier eyed him. "Wait outside. I'll check." Ned grunted and backed out of the office, thinking, 'Like he has to get up or something, rather than just keying his implant...' The shit you had to put up with, sometimes, to let everyone play their power games...

Top stuck his head out his door and nodded at the Captain's. "Knock, wait until called and report properly."

'Shit, am I in for a court martial or something?' Ned worried, knocking.

"Enter!"

Ned entered, snapped to, and saluted. "Corporal Petersen reports!"

"At ease, Petersen." The Captain waved him into a chair. "So, the AI says you got Lezynski's women. Are they going to fit in?"

Ned wrinkled his nose. "Probably not, Sir."

"And why would that be?"

"Um, I figure I'm gonna have trouble with the existing order, Sir."

"I do, too, Son," Captain Mackay sat back. "But you're stuck. I'm not going to take them off your hands. Do you want to know why?"

Ned frowned. "Yessir."

"Because neither of your current concubines is pregnant, and Lezynski's are. Frankly, I think you ought to toss your current set."

"Uh, gee, Sir -- that's kind of cold..."

"Son, do you ever expect to make Sergeant?" CPT Mackay leaned forward to ask.

"Yessir," Ned nodded, "Eventually."

"You're not going to at the current rate, Son. Do you want to know why?"

'Uh oh...' 'Yessir."

"You don't wear the pants in your pod, son. How can you lead men if you can't lead your concubines?" Mackay asked. "Do you know why your women aren't pregnant?"

"Nossir."

"Ask." Mackay sat back.

Ned grimaced and shifted access to the AI. "Why aren't my women pregnant?"

"The one designated as Judy ordered Medical to temporarily sterilize both of them -- on your blanket authority," the AI replied.

Mackay eyed Ned, his eyebrow crooked. "You weren't aware?"

"Nossir." Ned replied.

"You need to get your house in order, Son. If you can't put up with her noise, stop it."

"But -- we were married! I can't just space her!" Ned protested.

"Did you ever think of having the nanobots, um, reduce her volume?" CPT Mackay eyed his manicure. "Son, you handle it however you are going to, but I want to hear that your four women are pregnant and living in harmony -- if you have to replace two of them! Do you understand me?"

"Aye, Sir!"

"Dismissed!" Ned stood, saluted, and got the Hell out of there.