John Ringo - There Will Be Dragons

Gunny did not turn towards the barracks, as he thought of them, but towards the house on the hill. There was a group of guards on the road up, if you could call them guards. A bunch of reenactor punks with rusty halberds was another way to describe them.

He was polite, though, and determined from them that Edmund was not at the house but probably in town at the town hall.

The town hall was another new building with another set of useless guards. They were both leaning on their spears when he walked up and asked to speak to Mr. Talbot.

“He’s busy,” the guard on the left growled. “Too busy for any old reenactor to just barge in on him.”

“I am not surprised that he is busy,” Gunny said coldly. “What are your standing orders in the event that someone states that they are a close personal friend and have business with him?”

“What?” the guard on the right asked.

“Okay,” Gunny growled as patiently as he possibly could. “What are any of your standing orders?”

“We just got told to keep people out that don’t have business in here,” the intellectual on the left said uneasily. “I don’t know about any standing orders.”

“Right, get me the sergeant of the guard,” Gunny snapped, losing patience.

“Who’s that?”

“WHO’S THAT?” he shouted. “YOU WILL STAND AT ATTENTION WHEN YOU ADDRESS ME YOU PIMPLE ON A REAL GUARD’S ASS! OTHERWISE I’LL TAKE THAT PIG-STICKER AWAY FROM YOU AND SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS SIDEWAYS! LOOK AT THIS THING!” he continued, snatching the spear out of the surprised guard’s hands and submitting it to a minute inspection. “IS THIS DRY ROT THAT I SEE ON THIS SHAFT? THIS THING IS A PIECE OF CRAP EVEN WORSE THAN YOU.” He broke the spear, which was in fact in lousy shape, across his knee and threw half of it on the ground, using the other half as a pointer to emphasize his words. “YOU TWO ARE, WITHOUT A DOUBT THE LOUSIEST EXAMPLE OF GUARDS IT HAS EVER BEEN MY DISPLEASURE TO SEE IN ALL MY BORN DAYS AND I HAVE SEEN PLENTY OF SHIT ASS GUARDS IN MY DAY !”

Edmund looked up from his paperwork and gave Myron a relieved glance.

“Ah, unless I’m much mistaken Gunny has arrived.”

“I’ve been busy with other things,” Edmund said with a shrug. The two guards had been relieved to go clean their weapons up, and to get their shattered nerves back together if truth be told, and Edmund had brought Gunny into his office, where he was explaining some of the facts of life. “I haven’t been able to train the troops the way they need to be. Not the way that I know they should be and you know they should be. We’re back in the bad and the scary, Miles.”

“You’re the king,” Gunny growled. “That’s not your job.”

“I’m not the king,” Edmund stated. “I have no plan to be the king. If nominated, I will not run, if elected I will not serve. Monarchy is a great place to play in but you wouldn’t want to build a society on it. I’m going to turn this place into a constitutional democracy if it breaks my heart.”

The NCO nodded and gestured out the window with his chin. “So what do you want me to do?”

“Train ’em.”

“Who? How? What technique?”

“I was thinking pike.”

“Legions.”

“Gunny, we’ve had this argument before…”

“Pike’s nothing but phalanx without the armor. Legion beat phalanx. They will if they have any control of the terrain at all. On perfectly flat, level ground, phalanx might beat legion. But, there, you can beat phalanx with chariots. Legions can beat them both.”

“Projectile weapons?” Edmund asked.

“Bow. Crossbow or self, take your pick. Lightweight spears for the legionnaires, what else. Find somebody else to train the bow-pussies. And they’d better be able to maneuver with us.”

“I will. It will be longbow. There are trainers available and if they’re not in town we’ll find them.”

“Legionnaires. Again. Can’t wait.” After a moment, though, he sighed tiredly.

“What?”

“I’m not sure it’s possible,” the NCO admitted. “There’s a… belief system that these guys ain’t got. The Romans, the Norau Marines, the Britic Redcoats, all of them came from a society that understood the concept of discipline. These young pukes…”

“The Gaels made damned good redcoats,” Edmund pointed out. “They built the Britic empire.”

“The Gaels were more disciplined than they were made out to be,” Gunny growled. “And they trusted the Gaels that fought by their side. They might be from a different clan, but they were all Gaels . You can’t teach something like that; it’s learned with the mother’s milk!”

“We’ve had this discussion before,” Edmund added dryly. “The point is that it has to be done.”

“It’s all in the heart, boss,” Gunny said after a long pause. “It’s all in the soul. We have to come up with something that will give these boys the intestinal fortitude to stick it out when the shit hits the fan. Until the Fall, they never cared about nothing in life except nanadrugs, women and going to parties. They’ll need something to keep them going when everyone is dying around them. So that they will give their lives, carefully, precisely and creating the maximum possible honor guard, but so that they will not turn and run from anything . That comes down to leadership, yeah, but it also comes down to tradition. Keeping true to your comrades and true to your salt. And we ain’t got no tradition.

“With a little polishing they’ll make decent legionnaires on the surface. But the legions fought for the people and the Senate of Rome. And anything that we wave at them will have exactly the same gut message as saying that they’re fighting for Rome. They need something, something… special. And special just ain’t my meteor.”

“I think I have an idea,” Edmund said after a few moment’s musing. “At least, something that will help. We’re going to need good troops, Gunny. The best. Better than ever. This is going to be a long, big war. We need Rome built in a day.”

“The difficult we do immediately…” Gunny said with a grimace.

“The impossible takes a little longer. I’ll give you six months.”

“Aye, aye,” the NCO said, moving his shoulders as if settling a weight. “We’ll just do that little thing, my lord.”

The world seemed to swirl around her as Sheida studied the energy flow diagram. She had finally taken Edmund’s advice and started thinking strategically, letting her sentient avatars drift out to handle the moment-to-moment crises that were cropping up everywhere.

But here was the crux of the Freedom Coalition’s problem; there wasn’t enough energy. Each side had about the same “base” energy due to their seizure of power plants. But the New Destiny Alliance was finding more from somewhere.

Since they hadn’t been able to even determine where the “somewhere” was, thus making it impossible to attack, the Coalition had to find some way of either raising more power or hobbling their enemy’s use. Ishtar and Ungphakorn were working on the issue of finding new sources, she and Aikawa were working on ways of hobbling the enemy. There didn’t seem to be much chance directly. Paul was using the energy flows from his plants efficiently and they were mainly going to hold down the Coalition’s power use. The “extra” seemed to be coming from nowhere and it was that he was using, abusing in her opinion, for all his other attacks and… uses.

More information had come, this time through refugees, about the changes that Paul was making and she had to admit that if those were his worldwide plans, this was the ultimate “just” war.