“That fucking moron,” she spat, fists balling up as if she wanted to get into a fight herself. “Now I wish I’d actually gone ahead and given him that letter of reprimand.” She blew a heavy breath out through her nose. “Well, hell, I find myself kind of envying you your job, where you can just blow your enemies away with a plasma gun.”
“Not all of them,” I told her. I offered her a hand. “Thanks for everything you did, Commander. I appreciate it.”
She took my hand and grasped it in a tight, dry grip for a moment, but then let it slip out, as if the air was going out of her.
“I feel like I didn’t do much. I certainly didn’t do my job. I just swept things under the rug.”
“Ma’am, our job is to win the war. And if keeping Captain Cronje as Alpha Company commander wins the war, I guess you’re doing your job.”
She smiled thinly, obviously not accepting the excuse but grateful for the attempt.
“Good luck, Lieutenant. I have a feeling in a few weeks, you’re going to look back on this as the easy part.”
I laughed long and hard at that, an honest, open laugh.
“Commander,” I told her, shaking my head, “we’re Marines. The only easy day was yesterday.”
9
“You’re probably wondering why,” Colonel Voss said, “we’re having this briefing on board ship, in this very uncomfortable place, instead of back on Port Harcourt.”
I was, in fact. And it was definitely uncomfortable as shit. There was a whole battalion of us jammed into the hangar bay of the Iwo Jima, and it was a tight squeeze, because there were also a bunch of drop-ships, assault shuttles, loading equipment and cargo pallets competing for the space. And we were in Transition, which meant the artificial gravity was activated, so space in this case meant deck space, which cut down on the possibilities even more. But it was the largest compartment on the ship and the only one where all of us could conceivably fit.
“The answer is operational security,” Voss told us. She was standing on a makeshift platform at our center, constructed by the simple expedience of stacking four cargo pallets atop one another and then lifting her up on the hydraulic forks of a loading jack. “As unlikely as it is that we would miss a signal going out of Port Harcourt, the truth is, it was possible. And our next mission is simply too sensitive to let it leak to the enemy.”
“And why couldn’t we just get the op order sent to us in our company area?” Francis Kovacs whined from beside me, just the slightest bit too loud to be subtle, which was exactly Kovacs’s style.
“Because this is how the Marines do it, Lt. Kovacs,” Captain Covington admonished, a looming presence behind us for all that Kovacs was actually taller than him. “Though if you have that strong an opinion on how battalion mission briefs should be delivered, I’m sure I’d like to see a comprehensive multimedia presentation from you on the subject by the close of business today.” He smiled thinly. “On my ‘link, of course, so we do it efficiently and don’t waste time.”
“Yes, sir,” Kovacs said, gulping the words out. Poor son of a bitch couldn’t take a piss without stepping on his dick.
Voss pointed her ‘link at the overhead, which in the case of the ship’s hangar bay was way overhead, and a holographic projector mounted up there lit up the space just above her position with the image of a solar system. It was generic enough that I found myself agreeing with Kovacs that this was all a huge waste of time, but I kept my mouth shut.
Intelligence, my mother had once said, was learning from your mistakes, while wisdom was learning from the mistakes of others, and I hoped I was, at least, wiser than Francis Kovacs.
“This,” Voss went on, “is the last occupied system along the Transition Line between Port Harcourt and Tahn-Skyyiah. It’s the last steppingstone on our journey to defeating the enemy and bringing this war to an end, once and for all. The Tahni name for it is irrelevant, because once we move in and take it, we’ll be using our name for it and theirs will only matter to the history books.”
Well, that was probably hubris, but I had to give it to her, it made even my cynical soul stir with a bit of ooh-rah.
“We call it Point Barber.”
Red icons jumped out at us from the inner system, clustered around a habitable world, the second out from the primary star. It had twin moons, captured asteroids by the size and look of them, and each had yet more of the glowing red, which I knew meant weapons emplacements.
“As you can see, the whole system is heavily defended, both with fixed weapons platforms and the largest fleet we are likely to see in any battle of this conflict, larger than what we’ll find at the Tahni homeworld. Because the enemy knows the same thing we do: we have to take Point Barber to win this war. Their numbers and type of their ground defenses are unknown as of yet, but we expect them to be at least as bad as what we found on Port Harcourt, and probably worse.”
Another touch on her ‘link and a wave of blue appeared on top of the red.
“Which is why the Commonwealth is holding nothing back.”
I saw the largest of the blue icons and my hand shot up, almost of its own accord. I don’t know how she saw it, but she did.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” Her voice was cold, as if she really hadn’t wanted to be interrupted and least of all by me.
“Ma’am, are there eight cruisers on that display?” I asked.
“There are, Lt. Alvarez.” She smiled, and a bit of the chill went out of her tone.
“I thought we only had five!”
“That’s probably what the Tahni think, as well, Lt.
