The simulated ziggurat held just over a hundred Swarm meaning with his skills and a low level squad Elias could clear the whole thing. The first step to commanding others was to realise that as soon as he tried to take part in the fight itself, he lost the ability to overview the rest of his men. It was a steep learning curve truly learning to take command of a mission, he quickly came to respect the reluctance of company managers to allow him a command position without prior experience.

On his first run through the simulation he started by checking through the base skills of his recruits. only to have one try a pot shot at a Harvester in the distance drawing out the first wave of Swarm before he was ready. So the first half-hour he had spent in sim was wasted. Rather than carry on with the scenario, Elias reset and this time started with a no-fire order before checking over his troops.

The next attempt found a rogue Swarm scouting out and killing a couple of his recruits due to the no-fire order before he remembered to recind the order. Another hour wasted in sim.

Attempt three Elias moved a quarter of his men to form a defensive screen and only fire in defence. This gave him the time to review all his troops and recognise why commanders almost always moved new recruits straight into formation. They had no active skills, so there was no way to tell who would be best placed in the front line and which in the back. Sim was realistic enough that he could ask the individual recruits for their basic training records and percentage hit rates but the whole process took too long. Increasing attacks from the Swarm in response to the defensive fire drew his attention away from this detail before he had fully reviewed. He reset once more.

A few more resets later Elias was a little bitter that he had resorted back to a single offensive line. All the recruits were spread single file in front of him facing the enemy. Any attempt to learn more about the recruits as individuals took too much effort and had limited impact on the outcome of the first wave. Instead treating the group as a unit and giving clear instructions to them all was overwhelmingly the most effective tactic.

"Rifles only; do not use defensive boosts. Move forward only on my instruction." Elias called to the group, trusting his voice to come through clearly over the internal comms.

"Three paces forward." Said Elias. Watching as the group moved as a whole; not due to the robotic override of the neural link but naturally as they followed the command. He smiled in delight as his dream of commanding a great army took its first step into reality.

The next hour went by in a blink as Elias concentrated on each of the individuals in the line. He shouted encouragement at some; insults at others and found himself immersed in watching each of the individual recruits. He had to stop some in the line moving too fast and others breaking under pressure and running off. He soon found trying to work on the individuals was exhausting and instead concentrated on using the neural link instead of verbal commands. As they pushed forward towards the ziggurat he started to learn which scenarios leant themselves to one approach or the other. He paused the group at the edge of the Crust to rest rather than push on and complete the scenario.

Even though he had been proud of his perceived leadership skills so far he now recognised that commanding a greater number was a different skill. He was only through the first phase of clearing a low level ziggurat and ready for a break. Rather than push on Elias reset the sim back to his imaginary ranch and set up a couple of screens to rewatch the last run through as he had some lunch.

Elias spent the last two days in cryo sim enjoying the benefits of the simulated ship and digesting all he had learnt. The rest of the time had flown by as he developed a grudging respect for the reasons commanders used the tactics they did. He also recognised mistakes and worked hard to correct them. A key example of this was after he became used to seeing simulated recruits dying, it made him forget that in real life a death was still a death. Remembering this he recalled his first death in basic training, it had taken hours to get over. By the tenth death in basic, you just bounced back to the scenario determined to complete it. Others might be more skilled in basic and only die a couple of times, retaining the fear of what would happen when they die. When he applied his recollection to command sims, it explained why some of the recruits would extend themselves too far and others baulked at the first confrontation.

He ran sims with classic tactics like those Macon had employed and learnt that it was not just command that had been at fault there. In the sim he noticed the elite squad help make adjustments to the line of recruits automatically, using their experience to help communicate with the front line. Having been instructed to just plug the gaps, Elias had not thought to help in this way, using verbal commands rather than rely on the neural comms. It had been a dark day after that realisation. He had been angry at Macon for disregarding the lives of the recruits but had only actually taken responsibility himself when given direct command. Along with that frustration was the realisation that he had been promised he could directly command those that survived and had blamed Macon for lowering this number.

Each scenario helped him learn. Assaulting a ziggurat; planning patrols around a base; defending a dome; attacking another dome and protecting a convoy. He learnt the limitation of his abilities, his neural link only allowing direct command of twenty-five at his level. Then he learnt how he could command greater numbers indirectly or by using others in chain of command to pass on orders. He practiced acting as a battlefield commander; controlling troops as he fought. Then he worked remotely; using only drones and a neural relay to command from afar. He found out the hard limits of his skills. What distance he could use his neural link over and that even indirectly he could only command fifty at his level. He got distracted by the skills of his troops and played with those he didn't recognise until he could integrate them into his mission plans.

Where Elias felt he adapted best was the ability to call on his experience as a recruit and then standard trooper before moving into the squad leader position. He knew how those on the ground might react. He integrated this knowledge in to the scenarios he ran through in sim and found different solutions to some challenges than those found in his manuals. Most commanders were selected from a different social class; paying their own way through the training and then negotiating a contract directly with a company rather than a standard contract like the recruits. In many ways the private security forces of the companies that protected the colonies was like a military with conscripted and officer ranks. Mix that with the concept of player-trades in a major sport and the competitive draw of certain companies and you started to piece together how and why the unranked grunts were treated as fodder.

He knew he wasn't unique in his thoughts and he had spent many hours in the evening after a day of simulations trawling through articles and forums on the infonetworks that he could access for free. The information available was of limited help without the copyrighted command modules to refer to but since he had access to both Elias learnt and simulated tactics that weren't in the manuals. By linking the two together, along with his previous experience he found a style of command that started to play to his strengths. At the beginning Elias had wondered what he would do for four months and wondered what the point of such expense was. By the end, on the approach to Carus, he had been wishing for more time.