I just wished there was somewhere I could get a drink.
The mess hall was nearly empty at this time of night, well after dinner, but I had nothing else to do and didn’t want to go back to the company area right now for fear someone would want to talk. That was all I’d done from the time I got back from Brigade, tell the same story over and over, first to Captain Covington and Top, then to Bang-Bang, and finally at dinner that night with the rest of the platoon leaders from Delta, who seemed to think I was like a celebrity now because I’d been arrested. I didn’t have the heart to tell them it was far from the first time.
So, I sat alone at a table meant for a platoon and picked at leftover dessert. I never really liked chocolate that much, but they’d gone to so much trouble to bring it along on the ship that I thought I should give it a go. I was trying to decide if I had been hasty in my childhood judgment of the confection or if maybe I was just desperate enough for anything not made of soy and algae and the boredom was making it taste better when Freddy Kodjoe walked into the mess and interrupted my train of thought.
He stared at me for a long moment, silent, and I stared right back. I didn’t know what to say to the man. We’d been best buds at OCS, and if anyone had asked me, I would have said we’d be friends for life, but now I felt like we’d become strangers in the few months since we’d left, and perhaps worse in just the last few days.
“Why’d you do it, Cam?” he asked me, stepping closer. He was tense, the muscles in his shoulders bunched like he was barely controlling himself. “Why would you do that to me?”
“I didn’t do anything to you, Freddy,” I said, setting the remnants of a brownie back on the plate. “I was trying to keep you from doing something you’d regret later.” I shook my head and leaned back in my chair, suddenly feeling very tired. “Look, it’s been like four days since it happened and I spent most of the last ten hours at the Provost Marshal’s office. How the hell did you even know I was here?”
“One of the squad leaders told me. And I’d like to know how you managed to avoid getting sent straight back to Inferno for a court-martial.” His lips skinned away from his teeth. “Because God knows, you deserve it.”
I felt a muscle twitch in my cheek.
“If anyone was going to get court-martialed over this, it was you.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he demanded, getting more combative with every second.
“Freddy, the JAG Corps can access our helmet recordings. They saw you order your Marines to kill those children. Cronje can claim he didn’t hear me warning him about the civilians, that he didn’t know what was going on, but you can’t.”
“I was following orders!” he insisted, rocking back like I’d punched him.
“That’s not a defense against a war crime. You were following an illegal order, and your company commander might not have known that, but you did.”
“If you’d just done what you were told, no one would have gotten in trouble!”
Okay, he was doubling down on the whole following orders thing, and I didn’t think I was going to be able to reason with him. Time to just bail out.
“No one is in trouble,” I told him. “It’s all over with, as long as Captain Cronje agrees to drop it.”
“So, you’re going to use that to try to get out of the shit?” he accused, nodding slowly, as if he’d figured me out. “Blackmail him by saying I’ll be charged if he goes through with it?”
“Brigade is telling him to drop it.” I stood and carried my tray to the recycler. “I’m not doing a damned thing except getting out of here and going to bed.”
Freddy stopped me with a hand against my chest.
“I won’t forget this,” he warned me. “Neither will anyone in my company. You better hope you don’t need any of us to save your ass out here, because we might just have better things to do.”
I smacked his hand away and stepped past him, not even bothering to respond. He was angry, and angry people say stupid things. It probably wasn’t worth the effort to let him know just making a threat like that was a court-martial offense.
I stalked out into the night. At least I didn’t need a jacket here, not like Hachiman. The Tahni tended to prefer warmer, more humid planets, and Port Harcourt was no exception. It wasn’t Inferno levels of humid, though, and at night, it was fairly temperate, and my field utility fatigues felt pretty comfortable.
Usually. But I was sweating, my face burning, whether from embarrassment or rage, I couldn’t tell. Freddy had been my friend. One judgement call, one decision about what was wrong and what was right, and suddenly, he didn’t care if I lived or died.
Was this what being an officer was all about? Why the hell had I ever agreed to go to OCS?
I was so wrapped up in my thoughts, I didn’t even realize how far I’d walked. The mess hall was near Battalion Headquarters, and the route back to the barracks led through several blocks of industrial buildings destroyed in the battle. Rubble had been bulldozed into piles and marked off with bright, yellow warning tape to keep us from tripping over it, but there was no street lighting. Whatever the Tahni had used had been ripped out by the violence
