stands between us and total defeat, I’ll say yes.”
Vaas’s aide appeared. “General, the staff meeting?” he said.
“Yeah, sorry, Major,” Vaas said. “I’ll be there in a second. Michael, I have to go.”
“Thanks for everything, General. I know how busy you are.”
“No problem. Now, I was talking about coincidences, so I think you’ll enjoy this.” Vaas tossed a small packet to Michael. “One last thing: The next time I see you, I want you in NRA uniform. Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
Tucked away in a corner of the staff canteen with a fresh mug of coffee, Michael opened the packet and spilled the contents onto the table: a handwritten note and a gold sunburst on a thin chain.
He picked up the note.
Michael rolled the sunburst between his fingers. “Oh, yes, Colonel Hartspring,” he said under his breath, “your day will come, and that’s my promise to you.” The pain and suffering the man had promised Anna drove a wave of white-hot anger through his body; fists clenched, he drove his fingers into his palms so hard that the nails drew blood. He took a deep breath to steady himself as he put the sunburst onto the chain and around his neck.
He finished his coffee and set off to find Shinoda to tell her that that he would not be going with her to join the 120th.
The conference room was set with rows of seats arrayed in half circles around a small table and, off to one side, a lectern. As usual, Michael arrived early and slipped unnoticed into a seat at the back.
Slowly the place filled up. Michael checked the face of each new arrival, looking for anyone he knew. But every face was a stranger’s except that of Major Davoodi, Vaas’s aide, and they’d met that morning for the first time. He’d expected to see Captain Adrissa and the rest of the Fed spacers on her staff, but they were nowhere to be seen.
Two minutes after the flow of arrivals had slowed to a trickle and then stopped, Davoodi called the gathering to attention as Vaas bustled in, followed by his new chief of staff and two more officers, one of whom he did recognize: Colonel, no, make that Brigadier General Pedersen, Vaas’s intelligence chief. As the rest of the brass took their seats at the table, Vaas remained standing, his eyes scanning the room.
Michael’s heart sank as he spotted Major Davoodi cutting a path right to him.
“The general would like you down front, Lieutenant,” Davoodi whispered.
Michael stood there, baffled.
Vaas turned to look at the assembled officers. “In a moment,” he said, “we will start the briefing for what I sincerely hope will be the final battle sim for the NRA’s operations in support of Juggernaut. But before we do, I have a presentation to make. All of you here know this man-” To Michael’s acute embarrassment, Vaas put his arm around his shoulders. “-if only by reputation. Now, the lieutenant will be pleased to know that I will not prolong his agony much longer, but I do have to say that the Revivalist movement and its military arm, the New Revolutionary Army, owe him an enormous debt of gratitude, a debt we will never be able to repay. But what we can do is make some small recognition of the contribution he has made to our cause, a contribution made in the face of great risk and suffering.” Vaas nodded to Davoodi, who stepped forward and handed the general a small box.
“Michael Wallace Helfort,” Vaas went on, lifting his voice to fill the room. “By order of the Resistance Council, you are hereby promoted to the rank of colonel in the New Revolutionary Army, effective immediately.”
Michael’s mouth sagged open as Vaas pinned the eagles to the lapels of his shipsuit and shook his hand. “Congratulations,” he said; he leaned forward, and his voice dropped to a whisper. “Call me a misogynistic old Hammer, but we can’t have a man outranked by his wife, can we?”
“Er, no,” Michael mumbled, more embarrassed than he had ever been, “and thank you, sir.”
“Nothing to thank me for,” Vaas said. “You earned those eagles.” He turned to the crowd. “Colonel Helfort, NRA,” he declared, and the room erupted in a storm of applause and cheers that rapidly settled into a rhythmic chant of “N-R-A, N-R-A, N-R-A …”
Vaas let things run for a minute, then lifted his arms to call a halt. “Now, go back to your seat,” he said to Michael. “I want you to say nothing and do less. Just listen and watch. I’ll hear what you think once the sim is over, okay?”
“Sir.”
Vaas turned to address the room. “Time to get down to business,” he continued, “but before I do, let me just say one thing. Operation Juggernaut is our last and best chance to take the fight to McNair City, and it is up to each one of you to do whatever it takes to make the operation the success it has to be even if that means sacrificing your life, because we cannot live under the Hammer of Kraa any longer.”
A murmur ran through the room; angry or excited, Michael could not say. Whatever it was, he knew Vaas would get what he was asking for.
“Now,” Vaas went on, “General Pedersen will run us through the latest intelligence. Once she’s done, we’ll start.”
The disembodied voice of one of the umpires triggered a flood of noise as the ENCOMM staff in command of the NRA forces for the exercise stood down. “End of exercise,” he said.
Michael stretched to try to ease the kinks out of his back. He was exhausted. And he had to go talk with Vaas once the hot wash-up was over; that could take hours. He knew Vaas. The man could be up half the night. He sighed. Vaas might be able to get by on four hours of sleep a night, but he couldn’t.
“… all of which are relatively minor issues, General, and therefore easily fixed. The only significant weakness I can see is your ability to talk to the task force commander as the operation progresses. As things stand, you will have to rely on the brevity codes I brought in, and even though they are pretty comprehensive, Murphy’s Law says one of you will want to say something that’s not in the code book.”
Vaas nodded. “Anything more we can we do?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Michael said. “Not as long as the Hammers dominate nearspace. As fast as you put microsats up, they will hack them down. They’re soft targets, and there’ll be no shortage of Hammer ships to deal with them.”
Vaas sighed. “You’re right, of course. We’ve looked at the problem every which way, and we’ve end up chasing our tails. We’ll have to live with it, I’m afraid.”
“I think so, General … though I do have an idea.”
“Oh?”
“It’ll be chaos out there-”
“That is the general idea,” Vaas said with a smile.
“-so can we exploit that to get close to the Hammer brass? We know from experience that they are very
