“Thank you, sir,” I said, blowing a soft breath out through my teeth.
He raised an eyebrow, the corner of his mouth turning up.
“That will make, unless I’ve lost count, two silver stars and a bronze on your chest, Lieutenant, every one of them with a V for valor.”
“I’ve been lucky enough,” I said carefully, “to serve under some incredible leaders, sir, Captain Covington chief among them.”
“And he will get his recognition as well, I assure you,” McCauley told me, nodding as if he knew where I was going next. “But I wanted to talk to you about your future, Cameron.”
Oh, boy. It’s Cameron now.
“Where do you see yourself when this war ends, son?”
When the war ends? Shit, I had a problem even seeing the war ending, period.
“I thought I’d take my Resettlement Bonus, sir,” I confessed. “Find a nice colony and set up a homestead there.”
“And likely someone who joined the Marines to get out of the Trans-Angeles Underground would find that appealing,” McCauley admitted. “For a while. But you’re going to live a long time. Do you think you could settle for the life of a yeoman farmer for the next two or three centuries?”
“What did you have in mind, sir?” I asked, knowing he was going to get to it eventually and wanting to get it out of the way now instead of dragging it out.
“There seems to be a general belief,” he told me, “that once this war is over and won, the military will be cut back to nothing. I am here to tell you, that is not the case. If we beat the Tahni at Tahn-Skyyiah, which I believe we will, the Fleet and the Marines will still be needed to enforce the peace.” He shrugged. “And just because the Tahni are the only other intelligent life we’ve discovered so far doesn’t mean they’re the only ones in the galaxy. We’ll still have a sizable military, and the problem in my estimation, will be a shortage of available officers.” He pointed across the desk at me with a computer stylus. “With your record, son, you could be sitting in my chair in another ten years. You could be Commandant of the Marine Corps in twenty, if you’re any good at schmoozing with politicians.”
I rocked back just a centimeter, trying to imagine myself as a general. Hell, I was having trouble picturing myself as a company commander and I’d already done that. I had to admit, it was appealing—not the part about being a general, but the idea of a home, of something that would still be there for me after the war.
But isn’t Brigantia a home? Isn’t Vicky a home?
They were…but they weren’t something I knew, at least not yet. I’d never been married, never lived with a girl for more than a few days. And I certainly had no idea how to be a fucking farmer. I knew how to be a Marine, and I knew I could learn to be a company commander or whatever came next, in that framework.
“You don’t have to make up your mind now,” McCauley told me. “Even if things go perfectly—and they never do—we’ll be stationed here for weeks, possibly months. And God alone knows how long it will take to secure the Tahni home system. But I did want you to start thinking about it.”
“Yes, sir,” I told him, meaning it. “I will.”
“Very good, Lieutenant.” He made a dismissive gesture. “There are a lot of administrative duties that go with your new position, but I’m sure Major Geiger will go over those with you when you meet with her later this morning.”
“Sir,” I said, swallowing hard before I could force the words out, “there is one other thing. Captain Cronje, sir. I wonder if you’ve reviewed the recordings of his actions at the power plant.”
McCauley’s expression darkened, and I thought, perhaps, I had really stepped in the shit this time.
“I have,” he said. “It was disturbing and shameful, but….” He tossed his head. “It’s no longer something with which we need to concern ourselves.”
That, I thought, was an odd phrasing.
“What do you mean, sir?”
He regarded me with eyes gone cold, and looking into them I decided maybe the man did have combat experience, after all.
“Captain Gregory Cronje,” he told me, “walked to the edge of the perimeter fence at 0235 this morning, put the barrel of a service pistol into his mouth and pulled the trigger.”
22
Aside from the general’s digs, one of the first things the engineers set up in Deltaville was the Officers’ Club. There has to be some deep, philosophical statement about the military in there somewhere, but since I was an officer now, I didn’t try to find it, just went to have a drink.
It was the first night off I’d had in a week, every night where I wasn’t leading the company on a combat patrol, I was devoted to planning sessions the pacification of nearby cities. Deltaville wasn’t the only city on this world, of course, though it was where the Tahni had shot their load and concentrated all their defenses. It was a difference in psychology, I suppose, putting all their eggs in one basket and chancing everything to one, huge battle rather than distributing them evenly and forcing us to root them out a bit at a time. It was tough to say which strategy would have killed more humans, but the one they’d chosen had left the other cities nearly defenseless, which had worked out pretty well for me, personally, because I hadn’t looked forward to riding one COP to another. And the difference between a Forward Operating Base and a Combat Outpost is stark.
As things stood now, we were launching airmobile raids out of Deltaville, Force Recon troops mainly with Drop-Troopers on the outskirts for a rapid response force. The
