“One other thing. I signed over my military insurance and my colony-world stake to Vicky. I’d like to give her one other thing in case I don’t make it. I’m gonna send her to you. She wants her own life away from Earth, some land to call her own, a chance to forget all this. I’d like you to help her with that. I’d like you to do for her what you did for me, give her a home. If you could do that, it’d mean a lot to me.”
I touched the button and the recording ended. From there, it was a complicated series of menus to scroll through to set up an automatic send at the first opportunity and still give myself the option to cancel it.
There. I’d done what I could for Vicky if I didn’t make it. I turned the light off and slumped back on my rack. Five days and a wake-up and we’d be there. For me, one way or another, this war was going to end.
24
I was drowning in data.
As a platoon leader, I’d been overwhelmed by the available tactical information available to me in battle, and had to relearn how to stay on top of it. We were still ten light-seconds out from Tahni-Skyyiah and I was already lost in the incredible flood of information the helmet’s HUD was throwing at me.
I squinted and angled my head to the side and tried to focus on just one part of it and the best I could tell was that we were winning. Sort of.
The Fleet tactical channels were open to my probing and I tried listening to them, but the captains, helm officers, and tactical officers spoke their own language and I hadn’t had the opportunity to learn it.
“I read four deltas at point oh-nine, pulling three gravities. Targeting with Alphas. Bravo Three, run interference for me.”
“Copy that, Trafalgar, Bravo Three will pave the road.”
And the visual accompaniment to that multimedia military poem was a starfield of blue icons heading inward toward the green and blue of a living planet, our path headed not through particles of red opposition but a cloud, a nebula of red stretched across the space between.
I thought I knew what the words meant, though I was mostly filling in the details through guesswork. Deltas might mean destroyers. Alphas, I thought, had to be Ship-Buster missiles and I thought the Bravos were the missile cutters. The Trafalgar was launching Ship-Busters at the destroyers, but the missiles were vulnerable to active and passive defenses and the Tahni would send their corvettes to try to destroy them en route, hopping in and out of Transition Space to take shots at them. The Attack Command missile cutters would run interference for the Ship-Busters, taking out corvettes and enemy anti-missile missiles and hoping like hell one of the damned things would make it through.
Fleet warfare was a game of patience, and thank God someone else was in charge of it because I didn’t have any. I wanted to scream, already tired of the three-gravity boost crushing me into the cushioning inside my suit, ready to be off this ship, thinking about the last troop ship I’d been on, about the way it had come apart around us. And the only distraction I had was Major Geiger asking for status reports every ten minutes, as if somehow Delta Company’s status had changed while we were sitting in our drop racks.
Oh, and the Frag-O’s. If I’d thought Frag-O’s were bad when I’d been a squad leader and one filtered down through the platoon a couple times before a launch….
“Alvarez,” Geiger’s voice crackled in my earphones for the twentieth time since we’d loaded in the drop-ships. I’d counted. “We have a fragmentary order coming through from Brigade. Change to Situation: Weather. Current orbital probe drones indicate a possible tropical storm forming in the gulf outside Tahn-Khandranda.” Jeez, that was a tongue-twister. Every other Tahni planet and city, we used our own designators, but the command insisted on using the Tahni language names for this world and its cities, just to show us how momentous it all was. As if we couldn’t figure that out for ourselves. “The approach pattern for the drop-ships has been adjusted to the northwest to compensate. The targeted drop zone remains the same, but be aware if there’s an early abort, you’ll be three kilometers farther northwest of the target.”
“Copy that, ma’am,” I told her as the same data scrolled down the lower left portion of my helmet’s HUD. Then I noticed something. “Ma’am, that’s going to put our early abort smack in the middle of Assault Squadron Four’s air support targeting pattern.”
“Shit,” she spat. “Goddamnit, wait one.”
I rolled my eyes, grateful she couldn’t see the exasperation on my face. The suits were nice and private. I couldn’t imagine working on the bridge of a Fleet cruiser, where everyone could see every disgusted expression I made. Years in the Vigilante had, I was sure, made me a shitty poker player.
“Sir? Are you busy?” That was Sarrat, right on cue. I’d learned she was absolutely dependable. I could count on her to come to me with something she should have been able to figure out on her own at least once an hour. Unless we were in combat, and then it would be three times an
