Date: 7163-10-5, Location: Terra

“Fuck, incoming tank!”

“We have no anti-tank ammo left! Lets retreat!”

“Understood.”, chorused other members of the twelve man squad which was mostly here as a symbolic gesture. Killing those damn lizards was a bonus, but explicitly not the job. Surviving was. Yeah, sometimes, especially in times like these, where they were running out of ammunition and certainly being herded somewhere, it was bad to be essentially a propaganda exercise, showing the population of the UE that one was not beaten and Terra would hold. But not always.

And one of those good times would come soon, if they had anything to say about it. It was great to be capable to attack the enemy form all sides out of essentially nothing. Somewhere in the UE there must be a Gate at the correct position, surely? It was, after all, just statistics after a certain point.

Yes, many earths had fixed points in relation to another, a lot of points were incredibly common, but not all worlds followed that stratagem, for one reason or another. And that was ignoring the fact that the military essentially claimed a huge amount of unused earths, just to build usable Gate networks.

The enemy was hounding them, the commander of the team thought. One would think that they must have learned by know about the Gates and what abilities they granted to the humans. He surmised that some attacks were successful, for one reason or another, but those destroyed the team quickly and did not hound it. He muttered under his breath: “Idiots. All of them.”, right as a Gate opened directly in front of the soldiers following the age old strategy of fleeing, no, tactically retreating. The enemy did not have time to see their prey disappear, considering that Gates opened up all around them.

Only the weapons were pointed through the Gates, when the first lizard tanks died.

Soon after, the entire hunting group, consisting of three tanks and 68 soldiers, was dead. In exchange one human soldier had fallen, who had died in the first ambush.

That casualty would have been preventable if the humans had more anti tank ammunition left before that ambush. Considering the mobility and logistics advantages of the UE, this meant that for the current campaign on Terra a new rule of the minimum ammunition stocks for continuing a mission was implemented.

The humans were learning on the job. And they were good at it.

Elsewhere on Terra

“Hinking is fun, hiking is great. And that is what you do in the army, the recruiter told me. What he conveniently forgot to mention was that you might be shot at during your hikes. Hey, Luke, were the heck is our Gate?”

“Three hundred meters left. Sadly, they will not be able to ambush our enthusiastic followers, manpower issues.”

“Well, you two, instead of banter I suggest running quicker in this case!”, another added.

A few minutes later, on the other side of the Gate, a fourth asked: “Why do these missions always devolve into running away?”

“Simple. Because they are not meant to accomplish anything but show our presence. I hope that we soon can go on the offensive and throw the damn Lizards of from our planet!”

“Because we are still missing heavy equipment, you mean. Which is a bit questionable. I want a freaking tank! That cannot be that difficult to procure, considering I know we used them in the past.”

“Well, if you want to use one from five thousand years past, I know who can build one. With authentic ammunition.”

“Good news. First tank battalions have been officially formed and equipped. Bad news. They have no training at all, and we have no one who actually has a clue of how to use the damn things. Which means we can wait for them to be used until first the historians found the old manuals, second our current experts have adapted them to todays situation and lastly, until the newly crowned tank crews have actually studied them and trained with them.”, an official that greeted them said.

“So, you mean that we will see them at the earliest in six months?”

“That would be impressive, considering we are currently using one thousand year old tanks. Most only want to field them when we have a modern design in mass production. The capability will be there in six months, but the will not. Try a year, at the very least.”, the same official answered: “But onto other matters. Did you see anything interesting out there?”

“Not really. I do not think they like us, but otherwise, no. They are building those spaceports up a bit, but they did not add new ones. At least not that we have seen. So, basically the same as always. They seem to get more desperate at catching us, but that would need multiple groups to confirm. We might simply had a case of bad luck and interrupted something important, embarrassed an official or killed the wrong person. In which case, I guess, we did our job well?”, the leader of the squad answered.

“You are correct. Well, go to the debriefing, and relax a bit. You might need to become trainers or go out there soon enough again. But that is currently in flux, mostly because we need to juggle the logistics between this rather important propaganda exercise and military realities, like the fact that we are running out of trainers, and we are doing that quickly.”

Elsewhere

General Arasim said: “The training situation spirals out of control. We have to many volunteers. Not enough, not yet at least, to fulfill our goals, but something like three times as many as we can hope to deal with in our most ambitious training plans. We knew of the problem beforehand, but we did not think it was that bad. We are already doing what we can, pulling trainers from nations with currently standing military, involving the police, because they have at least some of the necessary training, although parts of theirs is actively harmful to our purpose, and massively oversizing the courses. While a physical classroom is not needed anymore for most things, having the trainers be capable of overlooking everyone is helpful. Helping someone who is struggling, showing someone who is acing everything where he should go to further him or herself, all that is necessary. And our current measures are making this very difficult. Madam President, I need more trainers. The only remaining source are the soldiers actively fighting. Can we at least reduce operations?”

The president thought for a moment and answered: “Well, if Ms. Scruff has nothing against it, I also have nothing against it. It is, after all, directly concerning her area of expertise. I will need to ask, and you will have the answer before the end of the day. But expect that while a reduction might be possible, it is unlikely to be that major. And I guess a slow reduction over the course of a year would not help that much?”

He laughed: “No, not really. In a year, we can send so many green soldiers that we will be capable of pulling all veterans back. We will not like it, mind you, considering that one wants experienced soldiers among the raw recruits, but it will still be possible. We will see then. To prevent this from recurring in all the other branches of the military, which we are currently building mostly from scratch, we have already begun building the training cadre. Be it through simulations or the closest to the real equipment we can get our hands on, we are doing it. Historians are unearthing old combat manuals, which will be useful in figuring out what worked in earlier times. If they can also figure out why that worked, then we get a huge head start at creating our doctrine. But those are technical matters that should not be in your purview. Lets go to the next part of our military, the one that will almost certainly play a vital role in the conflict to come. The space force or however we end up calling it in the end. How goes the construction of that space elevator on Therion?”

“Relatively well. The plan to have it finished in a single year will sadly not work, but we can have it finished in fourteen months.”, answered Mrs. Potash.

They talked about more details, but the important part was concluded with that statement.