Chapter 11: The Unknown
Commander Ramirez looked over the map shown on the glass top video table. The map was a highly detailed image of everything within 100 km (62 miles). She was circling important points. Around her were gathered the military members in the colony – all retired. Of the dozen people in the room half had been in their countries' special forces for at least part of their careers. The others had been in other high risk jobs, such as parachuting, test piloting, and explosive ordinance disposal. Commander Mia Ramirez herself was a retired U.S. Army colonel.
She said, "So, if I was going to march a force into our area to assault the colony, then I would have to bring them through one of these two gaps. The problem here is that we do not know if these particular robots are ones which we can expect to use standard infantry tactics. For all we know they could come right over the hills and not bother with the more level passes."
Cuthbert "Bert" Walker, a retired captain in the British Special Air Service (SAS), commented, "The first analysis of the parts found in the crash indicate that we are looking at some variant of the Chinese Model 26 Mark 16 Groundfighter. Those beasties were devils in a fight, but their joint motors didn't have enough torque to climb anything. Unless they have replaced those with more capable motors, I am certain that they will have to use the passes. I guess we will know more when we get the parts from crash back here."
"The problem is the longer we wait the less time we have to prepare," Ramirez stated.
Anton Vaslov, a retired major in the Russian Spetsnaz, spoke up. "We need to get aerial reconnaissance ASAP. We don't know if there are other ships which landed successfully, where they landed, or how many landed. Furthermore, we do not know the distance from our colony to these ships. Knowing these things will give us time to prepare a 'welcome' for them."
"Commander," said the man with the short beard standing just slightly away from the group huddled around the glass table. "I think I have some parameters which will speed our search."
"Go ahead, Erwin," Commander Ramirez responded. "I'm all ears."
General Erwin Rommel, retired from the German Army, was a skilled tactician. He was also known for taking risks. On top of that he had a doctorate in history from the University of Heidelberg and his papers on military battles were widely published in prestigious history journals. His father, also a career German officer, had named him after the famed German general from the second world war. To the best of his knowledge they were not related in any way. "Let's look at this another way. Consider first that the timing of the crash is no coincidence. One of two things is at play here. Either there are multiple landings timed for roughly the same moment and are further time coordinated to attack us and that one just happened to crash, or that unit was meant to crash as a diversion to draw our attention away from the other landings and deployment of forces."
Ramirez stood up and looked at him, "Go on," she said.
He continued, "It has been about 3 days since the crash. It is notable that we have not yet been attacked. If there are other craft and they wanted to attack right away, then we would have been attacked. So I have to conclude that the landings are far enough away from our colony that it takes a measured amount of time for the forces to get here. This would have been done to further avoid detection."
"So far so good," Ramirez remarked.
"In 36 hours from now we will enter a window of about three days when communication with Earth is completely impossible due to the conjunction. Even the relay satellites will be incommunicado. This would be the perfect time for an assault. The enemy can count on a quick victory, since we have no weapons. By the time communications with Earth are again possible the colony would be completely in the hands of the enemy and no one could do anything about it. With the battle over I dare say our sponsors would simply hand us over to whomever wants this place. How is it you say in America? Oh yes, we would be 'under new management.' Probably management we would not like. Fortunately for us it appears that not everything has gone as planned for our enemy."
"So how does this affect our strategy?" Ramirez asked.
Rommel replied, "Here is what I think. The enemy robots will reveal themselves in 36 hours. Until then they will be moving from their landing sites to the nearest spot invisible to the colony. They will then have a day or so to subdue us and at the end of the conjunction they will report back to their masters. We need to determine places where they could hide out of sight and send aerial drones to look for them. They may already be in place. If they are not, then we send the drones to look at approaches for each of those sites out to maybe 500 km (310 miles) – since that is where the one known craft went down. We must assume it crashed near its intended location."
Vaslov looked at Rommel and said, "Nice theory. Why not just march in and take over? Why wait?"
Rommel looked back and said slowly, "Because there won't be any consequences. If they started a fight, but had not yet taken over before the conjunction, then there would be diplomatic consequences on Earth. There might even be a way of blocking them. Once they have us, then the situation is fundamentally changed and they can do as they want. There will be screaming and fits, but the outcome will have already been decided."
"Very well," Ramirez said. "Erwin, I want some unmanned drones in the air within the hour. We need to find these machines. Second, Vaslov and Walker, I want someone to design some weapons we can use right away. We may get ammo from the downed ship, but we will need something to use it with and even then it may not be the right device. See what you can figure out and get fabrication on it. Let's get to it. We don't have much time."