Camp Bosler Nafziger
The third oldest deep-space colony, Pastor Luneburger's World began as an agrarian religious settlement. Over the centuries, its original Mennonite doctrines had blurred and weakened, but low-tech agrarianism persisted. About fifty percent of its people still lived on farms, about thirty percent in rural hamlets, and twenty percent in market and industrial towns. The only colleges were seminaries. Trades and professions were learned by apprenticeship, with professional and trade associations providing optional certification.
Technological introductions were further hampered by disinterest in products. Nonetheless, over recent centuries, technology on Luneburger's had gradually, and more or less unintentionally, been upgraded. The slowness was largely a matter of cultural inertia, rather than Luddism. "Burgers" tended to like things as they were, and new things, to be successful, had to fit into the system. This was something the benign elected government considered very important in granting import licenses, especially the importation of technology.
On Luneburger's World, railroads were thought of as "new." Actually they'd been used there for centuries, but only during the past eighty years had they spread beyond the mining regions. While "trucks"-steam-driven rigs that burned coal or wood-were a phenomenon of recent decades, filling the newly felt need for hauling heavy freight to the expanding railroads.
Most Burgers with serious interest in technology migrated to the Sol, Epsilon Indi, or Epsilon Eridani systems. The Luneburgian government had established a small trust to help finance their offworld education. (A trust quietly supplemented by the Commonwealth.) On Luneburger's, this was considered Christian Kindness, not a means of developing a cadre of technicians and scientists. In fact, the expatriates were not encouraged to return.
Some did of course. Luneburger's had a number of engineers who'd trained offworld, or apprenticed under someone who had.
Given the circumstances, Luneburgian farmers and craftsmen, especially in frontier areas, tended to be innovatively practical with the materials at hand. They could drain a swamp, or build a house from scratch. A small crew of farm boys, using hand tools and a workhorse, could bridge a deeply-cut creek in an hour, and drive a loaded wagon over it. While those exposed to machinery quickly became decent jackleg mechanics. Thus given a handful of trained officers of whatever origin, Burgers were proving to make excellent engineering troops.
The threat of alien conquest had already brought changes. Most new military training camps, Camp Stenders for example, consisted of buildings whose prefabricated sections and modules were assembled on site by local entrepreneurs. Such practices would not have been accepted earlier. But in warmer climates, military camps were primarily tent camps. Administrative buildings and lecture sheds were prefab, but living accommodations consisted of acres of squad tents on raised wooden floors.
Camp Bosler Nafziger was sited in a region where winters were mild enough to live year-round in tents. The Luneburgian government had condemned nearly 40 square miles of rural land there for military use, including a village which was left intact. The Commonwealth had compensated the landowners liberally, and leased an additional 440 square miles of adjacent forest.
When the Jerries finished their advanced training, they were sent to Camp Nafziger for twelve weeks of unit training: combat exercises on battalion, regimental-even divisional-scale. These were to be carried out in conjunction with the Indi 3rd Armored Regiment, camped six miles down the Bachelor River. The Luneburgian 4th Infantry Division, camped ten miles upstream, would provide opposition forces in conjunction with its own unit training.
Major General Pyong Pak Singh had arrived by floater several days ahead of his division. He'd spent four days inspecting the camp and its facilities, getting acquainted with the Luneburgian staff in charge of maintenance and other services, being briefed on the military reservation itself, and finally reviewing the training plan with his general staff, and the Masadan commander and staff of the Indi 3rd Armored Regiment.
They were four gray, chilly days, with sporadic, wind-driven showers. His division arrived on the third, fourth, and fifth days, mostly by rail. On the fifth afternoon and evening, Pak inspected each regiment separately in a cold drenching rain.
The Indi 3rd Armored, with its Masadan cadre, had also traveled mostly by rail. He'd inspected them, too, at their own encampment.
The sixth morning had dawned gratefully clear, with a temperature of 45deg., and a predicted high of 63deg.-much warmer than the Jerries had been having at Stenders. At 0815, he started off in an open command car, gloved, jacketed, and capped, with a map book on his lap, and a driver behind the wheel beside him. Pak had developed his trip itinerary in consultation with a Captain Hippe, a Luneburgian engineering officer. Hippe had assigned the driver, and Pak had given the man his itinerary.
As they drove through the encampment, Pak gave his attention to the infantry companies standing in ranks on their mustering grounds. Shortly they'd march to lecture sheds for a two-hour orientation on the Camp Nafziger military reservation-a video lecture with large-scale topographic/vegetation maps and aerial photos. That would be followed by a two-hour talk on unit training, with an upfront caveat that the specifics might be changed.
Just now Nafziger's roads were puddled and muddy, but the car rode an AG cushion at the default height of four inches-enough to buffer it against irregularities in the surface. There was no splashing, and of course no rutting. And at the camp speed limit of 25 mph, even the puddles were little disturbed by the vehicle's air wake. Another main road crossed the one they'd been on, and the driver turned south, passing a cluster of prefab buildings-a regimental headquarters.
Ahead, the Bachelor River flowed through a stepped, steep-sided channel, its terrace forest jutting winter-bare treetops above the terrain break. Moments later the car crossed the break and skimmed down the forest-bordered road to the terrace, and thence to the wooded floodplain.
The river itself was about two hundred feet wide, crossed by a timbered bridge whose stone piers jutted from murky swirling water. On the other side, the car crossed the same levels in reverse order, until both road and forest spilled over the rim onto the plain above. Pak examined the open map book, checking road designations, and watched to be sure his driver turned west at the first crossroads. Corporal Muller was unfamiliar to him-a Burger assigned from the camp's driver pool, and supposedly familiar with the reservation's roads.
The river was like a boundary. The south side was mostly forest, the farms in small clusters, their buildings abandoned intact. A mile or so to the south, high hills rose, with forest shown as unbroken, except by occasional wet meadows. The car took them past several junctions, with rutted spur roads leading southward at half-mile intervals. According to the map, the spurs didn't reach the hills. Then they came to another road, this one graded. Muller turned onto it. When they reached the first ridge, the road angled up its long slope.
Stumps, most of them large and old, were scattered throughout the thick forest. Many of the remaining trees were quite large. Obviously the people here logged lightly, entering the forest now and then to harvest trees that met certain criteria, probably of species, size and condition. Here and there along the road were small openings, some overgrown by saplings, others with little more than coarse weeds matted down by winter's rains.
"What are the openings?" he asked the driver.
"Landings, sir."
"Landings?"
"Places where logs were decked, sir. Dragged out of the woods and piled. They load the logs on trucks there, and haul them to the railroad."
That, Pak thought, helps explain the railroad coming here. "Couldn't they float them down the river?" he asked.
"Most logs are sinkers, too heavy to float."
The forest changed little for several miles, then the road doubled back eastward. The driver surprised him by turning onto another spur road that went south, and the general unfolded another map.
"Where are we going now?" he asked.
"To the edge of the virgin reserves," said the corporal. "Captain Hippe said you'd ought to see it."
Hippe, Pak recalled, would be briefing officers today.
Half a mile later, the spur ended in a loop, a turnaround. The driver stopped, and they got out. "Everything south from here," Muller said, "is the reserve. That there," he added pointing, "is the boundary."
"That there" was an east-west line of blazes hacked on trees, apparently with an ax. South of it the forest had many large old trees. Slowly the two men strolled into it a short distance, their eyes exploring. It would, Pak thought, be beautiful in summer: green with foliage, and no doubt bright with birdsong.
"The number of people keeps growing," the corporal told him, "and the need for wood along with them." He gestured at the surrounding forest. "When it's needed, the government'll open it up for cutting, but for now it's wild; no farms, no roads, nothing but woods from here on. Folks hunt in here, of course, as much to keep down the wolves and lions and bears as for game." His right hand slapped his sidearm. "And boars; they're worser'n mean if you come across one. They can gut a man in a minute."
He pointed to a tree whose otherwise smooth bark was vertically scarred to about seven feet above the ground, as if by large claws. "That there is bear sign; made about two years back, judging by the callus. Some he-bear marked it to warn off others. Lions mark by spraying piss on things. Hasn't been a lion reported north of the river for ten, fifteen years; they don't much tolerate people. But they're in here. Folks hear one screech from time to time."
Wolves. Bears. Lions. Boar. Pak wondered what manner of beasts the Burgers applied those labels to. Nothing trivial, he supposed. He was surprised he hadn't been shown pictures of them. He'd have to correct that when they got back to camp.
"Hunting helps keep predators leery of folks," the young man went on, "and out of the livestock. It's rare that one of them jumps a person, but now and then they do raise Cain in a pasture or sheep pen, or paddock."
He grinned at the general. "Your Jerries need to be ready to switch their blasters to hard fire."
It occurred to Pak to wonder if Muller would dare pull a general's leg. It seemed unlikely. "Are you from around here?" he asked.
"Yessir, General. My family's steading was just about where division headquarters stands now."
"Ah. It must have hurt to have your land condemned for a military reservation."
The corporal shrugged big shoulders. "There's some folks sour over it. But if the Wyzhnyny get this far, we'll lose it anyway, and worse. As it is, Terra paid us good money for it, more'n anyone else would've. And when the war is won, if it gets won, we get it back for free."
The young man had seemed to turn inward as he talked. Now his eyes met the general's again. "Pastor Luneburger told us to care for the land, the planet, and treat it with respect. Not abuse it like our long-ago forefathers did on Terra." He shook his head. "But he never foretold any alien invasion."
Pak nodded. "Few did," he said. "Few did."
They walked back to the car in silence and continued the tour, getting back to camp for lunch. Pak realized more fully now how suitable a range of conditions Camp Bosler Nafziger provided: forest, open farmland, rugged hills, small and large streams, even swamps and marshes in the north. And a sizeable section that was essentially virgin. All in all, it resembled conditions described for New Jerusalem.