“And I’m sure your armor camera footage will confirm that,” she snapped.
“I’m sure his armor footage would confirm all sorts of shit.” I’d meant to say it under my breath, but the anger and frustration that had built up a day at a time over the last few months had reached overload and there was no holding it back. “Like how he left Captain Covington to die.”
“You watch your fucking mouth, Lieutenant!” Cronje exploded, surging toward me.
I set my feet and waited. This was what I’d been wanting for weeks and if he wanted to do it in front of Brigade and everyone, then fuck it. But of course, someone stepped in the way, because it was in front of Brigade and everyone, and when you get a bunch of officers together, there’s going to be at least one do-gooder. This time, there were three, and they grabbed Cronje by the shoulders and held him back.
People were staring, I noted, but not commenting, not interfering. After what all of us had seen these last couple days, no one cared that much. I saw Top’s lip curled in something between a sneer and the feral smile of a wolf.
“Calm the fuck down, Greg,” Geiger told him. “You don’t have any friends here and Colonel Voss is dead, so don’t expect your connections with her staff to protect your ass anymore.”
Cronje reacted as if she’d slapped him, then he blinked and I saw in those dark little eyes the realization that she was acting battalion commander and he was pushing very close to the line. He pulled away from the captains holding him back and fell into one of the chairs, arms crossed over his chest, looking away from the rest of us.
“Brigade!” a woman’s voice rang out from the tent flap. “Attention!”
Cronje looked ridiculous having to jump back up two seconds after sitting down, which made me smile. I didn’t recognize the major who had called us to attention, but I did know General Terrence McCauley. The brigade commander was short, almost ridiculously short in a day when such things could be adjusted genetically before birth, and his upper body was massive, his arms long enough I thought his knuckles might hang down past his knees if he let his shoulders sag. He looked rough and ready, as if he’d walked into the tent straight off the battlefield. He hadn’t, of course. Generals didn’t suit up and drop from four hundred meters, they landed in secure LZ’s long after the real fighting was over. But he had that fucking look down.
“At ease,” he growled. “Have a seat.”
It wasn’t that he was angry, he was just maintaining an image. Gruff, hard-edged general who hadn’t forgotten what it was like to be a combat Marine. I didn’t know if he had ever seen combat, but if he had, it hadn’t been in this war.
I sat down beside Top, with Geiger next to me and the whole battalion a row back from Cronje, as if the man had the scabies and everyone else was afraid of catching it from him.
McCauley stepped up behind a folding table that was standing in for a podium in these primitive staff conditions and leaned against it. The table creaked with the pressure and I half-expected the man to go crashing forward when it collapsed. God might have a sense of humor, but apparently it didn’t run to slapstick, because the table held.
“One Hundred and Eight Seventh Armored,” McCauley said, “your planet, your people, your government has asked much of you, perhaps more of you than has been required of anyone in this whole war, and you have answered the call. I can swear before Heaven that I have never been as proud of any Marines as I am of you.”
Jesus Christ, my head hurt from trying to keep my eyes from rolling.
“You may think I’m exaggerating,” the general said, as if he were reading my mind. “You may think this is general-speak, the sort of speech I’d give to the politicians—and I may repeat it to them, eventually. But I swear to you, it’s the God’s honest truth.” He shook his head. “Some of you may not know the details of what happened in the Battle for Point Barber, so let me tell you. No fancy holographic presentations, no charts, just my words to you.”
I settled back and decided to rein in my natural cynicism and give the man a chance.
“Before we even reached the planet, we lost two Fleet cruisers, the Salamis and the Actium.”
“Fuck,” someone muttered somewhere behind me, and I couldn’t help but agree.
I’d seen the Salamis go up, but the Actium too…
“The Leyte Gulf took major damage, but she’s still spaceworthy and repairs are already underway in orbit. Some of you are already aware that the Iwo Jima was destroyed in the middle of launching drop-ships, but we also suffered the loss of the Tripoli after she launched. The remaining troop ships were able to Transition back to the edge of the system, but it was a near thing.” He let his head hang over the table as if in prayer. “I don’t have a count for the number of missile cutters and assault shuttles downed, but the numbers run into the hundreds. Drop-ships…into the dozens. But I can tell you how many Marines have died. I’ll never forget the number. I’ll see it in nightmares for the rest of my life.”
His eyes came up and scanned across the room, meeting each of ours, the eyes of every officer and NCO in the room.
“843 Force Recon,” he declared, “and 1,096 Drop-Troopers.”
I grunted, the pain spearing through my chest a phantom remnant of my broken ribs. That was over a battalion’s worth of us, gone in a matter of hours. And if fewer Force Recon straight-legs had died, it was only
