She washed and dressed quickly, inspecting her appearance in the reflector field before she left the suite. Her white uniform was neatly pressed, her medals and her golden hair shone in the light . . . but there was a tired look in her eyes she knew she should lose. She was depressed and she knew it, and she really should talk to the shrinks, but training and experience told her that the psychologists were not to be trusted. None of them had commanded ships in battle, or made life-or-death decisions, or done anything that might qualify them to pass judgment on a spacer’s life.
She took a long breath, gathering herself as she strapped a pistol to her belt, then walked through the door and down the corridor. The two marine guards at the far end of the corridor saluted her. She returned the gesture as the hatch opened in front of her.
They built the place to resemble a starship, she thought dourly. It had been amusing, once, to contemplate the mind-set of whoever had thought it was a good idea. Were they trying to remind everyone that, one day, the Commonwealth would leave Ahura Mazda? Or did they just want to pretend, for a few hours, that they were designing starships? But they forgot to include a command deck.
She drew herself up as she stepped through the next hatch, into the meeting room. It was large and ornate, although she’d managed to clear out the worst of the luxury. She didn’t want people to get too comfortable in meeting rooms. Thankfully, most of her senior staff had genuine experience, either in combat or repairing and rejuvenating shattered planetary infrastructures. The war had created far too many opportunities to practice.
And I don’t have many chairwarmers, she reminded herself as her staff stood to welcome her. It could be worse.
“Thank you for coming,” she said once she’d taken her chair. “Be seated.”
She cast her eye around the table as her staffers sat down. General Timothy Winters, Commonwealth Marines; Colonel Christopher Whitehall, Royal Engineering Corps; Major Shawna Callable, Commonwealth Refugee Commission; Captain Janice Wilson, Office of Naval Intelligence; Lieutenant Kitty Patterson, Kat’s personal aide. It was a diverse group, she told herself firmly. And the absence of wallflowers, from junior staffers to senior staffers, allowed everyone to talk freely.
“I was woken this morning by a rocket attack,” she said as a server poured tea and coffee. “I assume there was no reason to be alarmed?”
“No, Admiral,” Winters said. He was a big, beefy man with a bald head and scarred cheekbones. “It was merely another random attack. The people behind it scarpered before we could catch them.”
Because we can’t fire shells back into the city, Kat reminded herself sharply. The insurgents would claim we’d killed civilians, even if we hadn’t.
She felt a flash of hatred deeper than anything she’d ever felt for enemy spacers. She’d never seen her opponents in space, not face-to-face. It had been easy to believe that they weren’t that different from her, that they weren’t monsters. But here, on the ground, she couldn’t avoid the simple fact that the insurgents were monsters. They killed anyone who supported the provisional government, raped and mutilated women they caught out of doors, sited heavy weapons emplacements in inhabited homes, used children to carry bombs towards the enemy . . . Kat wanted them all dead. Ahura Mazda would have no hope of becoming a decent place to live as long as those monsters stalked the streets. But tracking them all down was a long and difficult task.
“At least no one was killed,” Major Shawna Callable said. “Admiral, we need more resources for the women’s shelters. We’re running short of just about everything.”
“And they also need more guards,” Winters told her. “The last attack nearly broke the perimeter before it was beaten back.”
“Draw them from the reserves,” Kat ordered. She didn’t like deploying her reserves, not when she was all too aware of how badly her forces were overstretched, but she had no choice. The women in the shelters would be assaulted and murdered if one of their compounds was overrun. “And see what we can find in the way of additional supplies.”
If we can find anything, her thoughts added. Ahura Mazda produced nothing these days, as far as she could tell. The infrastructure had been literally torn to shreds. Putting the farms back into production was turning into a long, hard slog. Shawna had been right. We’re running short on just about everything.
She looked at Winters. “Is there anything we can do to make it harder for the insurgents to get to them?”
“Only moving the refugees a long way away,” Winters said. “Personally, I’d recommend one of the islands. We could set up a proper security net there and vaporize anything heading in without the right security codes.”
“We barely have the resources to keep the cities alive,” Colonel Christopher Whitehall said, curtly. He was short, with black skin and penetrating eyes. His record stated that he’d been a marine before he’d been wounded and transferred to the Royal Engineers. “Right now, Admiral, I’m honestly expecting a disaster at any moment.”
“So train up some locals and put them to work,” Winters snapped. He thumped the table to underline the suggestion. “It’s their bloody city. And their people who will die of thirst if we lose the pumping stations completely.”
“The training programs are going slowly,” Whitehall snapped back. The frustration in his voice was all too clear. “Half the idiots on this wretched ball of mud think that trying to fix a broken piece of machinery is sinful, while the other half can’t count to twenty-one without taking off their trousers. We’ve got a few women who might be good at it, if they were given a chance, but we can’t send them out on repair jobs.”
“It’s their schooling,” Shawna told them. “They weren’t encouraged to actually learn.”
Kat nodded in grim understanding. The Theocracy’s educational
