“It’s war, child,” she told me, her voice quiet, her tone weary and showing, for once, her age. “You can roll sixes all day long, but you still have just as good a shot at snake-eyes with every toss.”
“He didn’t toss snake-eyes,” I said. “He made a choice.”
“The mission, the men and you. The mission always comes first.”
The words were automatic, a rote recital for all that they were true. She was putting off the real truth with the platitude, but it was coming. She pushed away from the display table, leaving troop dispositions to some baby-faced first lieutenant in Fleet Intelligence blacks, and leaned heavily against a support pole, a muscle twitching in her cheek.
“He knew what was coming,” she told me, finally. “He knew we were getting close to the end. This had been his life for so long. I wonder if he didn’t want to see the end of his usefulness.”
“If he was looking for a dramatic way to go out,” I said, “he sure as hell got it.”
“You should talk, boy,” she snapped, and I could see the few seconds of vulnerability had ended and she was back to being Top again. “You took that mecha on by yourself. It might not have been as blatantly suicidal as overloading your own reactor, but it’s right up there.”
“If I’d run,” I reminded her, “he would have come after the rest of the company, and they needed to deal with the High Guard.” I shrugged. “I was the one whose plan put us in that position, I wasn’t going to let anyone else pay for it.”
She laughed, harsh and barking.
“You sound just like him.” She checked the display on her ‘link. “Meeting starts in twenty mikes. You want to go find a seat?”
It was just another tent, of course. All we’d have for the next couple days would be tents, and maybe a few Tahni buildings we took over. I’d heard scuttlebutt that we were trying to avoid that because command was afraid the Tahni might have left IED’s in the buildings that could be command detonated from sleepers they’d left among the civilian population, but rumors were like venereal disease in wartime—everyone had one and was doing their best to spread it.
They’d found chairs, somewhere. Guess that shows military priorities. We’d been on the planet less than two full days, at least one of our troop transports had been blown up, but we still managed to bring down office supplies in one of the first shipments.
The men and women under cover of the tent looked grateful for the chance to sit down, and if we’d set up showers already, they hadn’t had the chance to use them, or their cots. I felt guilty for having slept, even if it had been inside the auto-doc and under sedation. I recognized the weariness and fatigue in the faces, but I didn’t recognize the faces themselves. I had a passing familiarity with the staffs from the other battalions in the brigade, at least the ones who attended the briefings to which the Skipper had dragged me along, but I knew none of these Marines.
The significance of that sent a chill up my back.
Muted conversations buzzed around us, but I didn’t take part in them, just sat down beside Top and listened, catching snippets of the talk.
“…fucking wouldn’t surrender,” someone was saying. “Just wouldn’t surrender, even when they were down to their last soldier. Made us kill them all.”
“I don’t trust the so-called civilians,” a woman’s voice declared. “Too damned many of them look like retired military. I think we need to put all the males in some sort of detention center. Not that the females can’t be just as bad…”
“…couldn’t do a damned thing about it. Major Bray was there one second, then the next, she was gone. Not even an explosion. Never saw her again.”
I’d had enough of listening and began trying to shut the conversations out, but I was rescued by the rest of Fourth Battalion’s company commanders filing into the tent with Geiger at their lead. Her company XO was there as well, and I figured he must have taken over the company for her since she stepped into the battalion commander’s shoes.
The plastic chair creaked under my weight as I pushed out of it and stood to meet them.
“Alvarez,” Geiger said, nodding a greeting. “Glad to see you up and around. That was some damned epic shit back at the spaceport. I don’t know if you heard, but that pretty much turned the battle for us, taking out the reactor. It freed up the spaceport for landers to come in and drop support for the Vigilantes.” She snorted a laugh. “It was also crazy as hell going up against a mecha by yourself, but it was damned epic shit.”
I didn’t sigh with frustration, but it was a fight.
Then I discovered I was wrong. Not all of Fourth’s company commanders had come in with Geiger. Cronje pushed through the flap door of the tent while I was still letting out the breath I’d been holding. His piggy little eyes darted between Geiger and me, tongue darting across his lips like a lizard.
“Always a surprise to see you, Captain Cronje,” Geiger sneered, squaring off with the man as if she were ready to fight him. “I don’t suppose you’d care to share with me where you and your company were while we were trying to take the spaceport.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “That was our battalion rally point after initial objectives were accomplished, or did I misread the Op Order?”
“We got cut off,” he said, and I wondered if the excuse sounded as weak in his ears
