The Fire and The Storm - The Nexus of Kellaran #2 novel Chapter 160

Part 24

“The true purpose of the exercise was not to complete the objectives, it was to train your fighters to wage war as a cohesive force and to prepare them for the horrors of the warfare we will face. In that respect, we all failed today, both we who organized and operated the exercise, and you who commanded. Almost all of your fighters did no more than supply power and spectate over your Command Link, and the experience was of little value to them as training.”

He paused as he glowered about the gathering, seeming to meet every eye, then continued. “The joint Triax-Kellarani training exercise scheduled for two days from now has been postponed. The gods of The Triax and a few of their people have been coming to Kellaran quite often recently, so it sometimes seems that they are nearly here already. Their sixteen world-craft are approaching us at tremendous speed, but the fact remains they are still very far away, and that it would still require almost six more years before they would arrive within the moon system of Kellaran. That is where they feel they need to be for their mortals to truly assist in the defense of Kellaran.

“Soon after we began working together, we of the Pantheon of Kellaran suggested that they might Translocate their entire force here. Their gods say that they had never considered Translocating so much so far. They are capable of it, but such a feat would leave them dangerously drained and vulnerable for days until they recovered. We of Kellaran have proposed to assist them with this, but they are nervous about such a co-operative effort, particularly their mortals. This is understandable, for if any of their world-craft are rendered unusable, there is not enough room for its complement aboard their other craft, and their nearest survivable habitat is a Triax outpost in a star-system very distant from here. If they lose a mother-ship, they lose almost everyone aboard her. The operation has been repeatedly postponed, until all of them and all of us can be completely certain of its safety.

“Thus, the joint exercise with them has also been postponed for at least a week.

“You can make good use of the time. Bring the other nations of Kellaran up to pace with yours, and be prepared to have them participate in the next exercise.

“Until we have a method of testing you that trains all of your forces at once, instead of merely training most of them to be nothing more than batteries, fighters with combat effectiveness scores greater than five thousand will not fight in exercises with the rest of your forces, nor will power-sharing or remote-combat be allowed.

“Those of you with scores greater than five thousand can participate in the next general exercise as commanders, but not as combatants. Those high-scoring fighters, Strike Wizards, and those who can fight remotely with Simulacrums and other methods, will be tested in separate exercises.

“Those with scores greater than one million will be invited to train with the gods.

“Know that when all further exercises are held, the individual behavior of the simulated demons you will face will be run by the gods of The Triax, and they will co-operate with us in commanding them. In our war with the demons we fought them for more than fifty years, but the Triax have been at it for eons. We have to grant that they know a long stride more than we do about how demons fight, and their knowledge of the subject is some seven million years more up-to-date than ours. Their assessment of our efforts is that our simulated demons show the same offensive capability as real demons, and they’ve helped us be more accurate in that respect, but they maintain that our simulations don’t fight like real demons. In particular, we’re not duplicating the unpredictable, vicious, and cunning nature of the demons.

“This is understandable. Ours are orderly military minds, and are therefore almost diametrically opposite to the orientation of the demons. Those who will guide your enemies in the joint exercise will give you a far more accurate depiction of true battle with demons, so I warn you to guard against complacency.

“Another difference in the next exercises is that they will have no time limit. They will continue to complete victory, or to complete defeat. You can be sure that all of you and all of your forces will be tested to your utmost.

“After the first joint exercise, we will have another, then another, then another, until it is time to begin the true war. Each exercise will be more difficult than the last.