“Delta,” Captain Covington ordered, “press the attack, put their backs against those deflector dishes. First and Second, circle around to their right flank and try to force them away from the industrial park and out into the open landing field. Fourth, stay a kilometer back in reserve. Third, you’re the tip of the spear. Drive it into their hearts.”
I chuckled in the privacy of my helmet. Here we were in the most advanced pieces of technological hardware in the history of human warfare, yet the commands we gave wouldn’t have seemed alien to Alexander’s troops marching across Eurasia nearly three thousand years ago.
“Third Platoon.” I passed the command down the line, “pursue and maintain volley fire. First squad, you’re on point.”
Which meant Private Delp was on point. An image of his pale, thin, death’s-head of a face floated through my vision, agitated, annoyed, sweating, the way I’d seen him that last day on Silvanus.
“Close it behind you, Delp,” I said, some of the impatience I felt leaching into the abrupt flick of my finger toward the ancient, oak door in its hand-worked frame.
We were in what had been the offices of some shipping firm before the invasion. If the owners were still alive, they hadn’t objected to us taking over their old business. There wouldn’t be any commercial shipping until after the war, most likely, and I hoped the residents were turning all their energy to construction. Or reconstruction, rather.
Delp pushed the door shut a bit too hard and it closed with an echoing bang. I speared the younger man with a glare I’d learned from the best, Captain Covington, and his already-pale face lightened a shade.
“Sorry, sir,” he said, and it sounded as if he meant it.
I considered bracing him, making him stand at attention while I yelled at him, the NCO instinct I hadn’t yet shaken off despite OCS and a few months in rank, but decided against it. He seemed stressed and annoyed, but not at me, I thought.
“Sit down, Delp.”
I fell into my chair behind the desk, a larger and more opulent one than I would ever have back on Inferno. Hell, back on Inferno, my office would have been a closet. But I’d never seen it, since I’d gone directly from OCS into the field. And I likely never would. This one would do. Though I’d had to take the former occupant’s photos off the wall and put them respectfully in the desk drawer, because I hadn’t felt comfortable with her husband and kids staring down at me.
Delp folded his skinny frame into the mismatched, plastic folding chair across from the desk and let his hands hang at his sides, finger fidgeting with his existential discomfort at being here.
“What the hell is bothering you lately, Vince?” I asked him. Using his first name was, I admit, a tactic. I was trying to disarm him, bring down his barriers and get the truth out of him. “You’re a hell of a Marine…in the field. Then we get to Vistula and you got into a dust-up with that local….”
“He was asking for trouble, sir!” Delp insisted, leaning forward in his seat like he was about to jump up and argue his case. “He thought he was hot shit because he’d taken a potshot at the Tahni during the occupation, like he could have kicked them out without our help.”
“Those people were living in a nightmare for months,” I reminded him. “Think how pissed off and humiliated you’d be if that happened to you.” He squirmed in his seat as if really considering the notion for the first time.
“Yes, sir. I guess you’re right. But I was pretty drunk at the time and so was he.”
“And you were drunk last night, too.” I sat back, folding my hands over my chest ,and regarded him down my nose, another tactical trick I’d learned, not in OCS but from Top. “You were drunk when you started dancing with that girl—that seventeen-year-old girl, by the way.”
He winced.
“I didn’t know they’d let girls that young into that kind of place, sir.”
“You’re not that much older yourself,” I observed. “You’re from Earth, Greater Boston. I know you’d be too young to drink if you were back home.”
Not that it had stopped me. In the Underground, you could always find someone willing to sell you liquor…or whatever. But I’d read Delp’s file and he’d been something of a straight-arrow, at least as far as his juvenile record knew. No apparent gang affiliation, no detentions, no reformatory sentences. Just a kid who wanted out of the rat maze.
“I never drank before Vistula,” he confessed. He’d been meeting my eyes, but now his gaze went to something far away, a ghost of a memory.
“Yeah.” I didn’t elaborate. It wasn’t something I could talk about.
We’d caught the last of the Tahni element on the colony right after they’d executed their hostages. They’d tried to surrender, and Delp and Joanna Carson had burned them down where they stood. I hadn’t taken part, but I’d done nothing to stop it. I hadn’t told anyone what had happened, and I wasn’t going to talk about it now. I’d thought it was done and over.
“Do you need to talk to a therapist, Vince?”
He glanced up sharply, seeming as shocked as if I’d suggested he marry his sister.
“I went to see one, after,” I confessed, and I think he may have been even more shocked at that. “She helped. It could help you, too.”
“I don’t know if I could talk to someone who wasn’t a Drop-Trooper, sir.” He shook his head. “They wouldn’t understand.”
“Private Delp,” I said, putting an edge to my voice, “I would rather not make it an order.” I tilted my head to the side and regarded him. “You broke that guy’s arm and busted up the bar in the process. You’ve been arrested by the MP’s on both of the last two colony worlds we’ve liberated. You can either seek behavioral
