By the time my senses operated fully, I’d figured out I was aboard Dominus, and that we were parked in orbit in what was still considered a hot warzone. This surprised me somewhat, as I’d figured it was all over after we’d knocked out Claver’s little depot. That should have put an end to the rebellion he was supplying—right?
I hit my unit’s module first but found it empty. My own unit had moved on. I figured they’d probably made Leeson the acting CO. That was worth a shudder, right there. The man wasn’t bad at his job, but he lacked the imagination and determination it took to run a unit in this legion, in my humble opinion.
“McGill?”
My tapper was talking to me. I stopped marching around the passages, and I stared down at it. The caller had to be one of my direct superiors, or they wouldn’t have had the super-user permissions it took to break into someone else’s tapper at will.
“Uh… Primus Graves?”
“What’s wrong? Are you drunk or something?”
“No sir. There hasn’t been time for that yet.”
His face peered up at me, and he looked a little disgusted with what he saw. “You seem sickly.”
This set off alarm bells in my thick skull. If there was one thing you didn’t want to admit to around Graves, it was any form of illness or disability.
“No sir!” I said. “The bio told me they were using some recycled stuff in the revival chamber, but I feel right as rain.”
“All right, all right. Save it. Get to the briefing room on Gold Deck. I’ll give you ninety seconds to get here. Graves out.”
Cursing, I accelerated into a shambling run. I needed some food, or better yet some booze. Unfortunately, I had the sneaking suspicion I wasn’t going to see either one for hours. I was probably going to have to listen to some self-important tool giving us the day’s play-by-play after-action analysis. Being an officer wasn’t always the better deal in the legions.
When I reached my destination, I found a seat in the back and almost plopped my butt into it—but then I noticed a snack buffet just left of the main door.
Some primus with the bony hands of an undertaker was standing up there, droning on and on. He had a big display of the planet behind him, with the island battle playing out in real time. As I recently died in the middle of the depicted action, I couldn’t care less.
My eyes drifted to the snacks over and over. Without asking, I got up and walked over there. As fast as I could, I filled up a tiny plate with whatever I could balance on one over-sized palm. There were little cheeses, some baked crackers, and some multilayered bean-dip. I ignored the fruit and veggie tray, as that wasn’t going to fill the void in my gut. I took a double-helping of the bean-dip instead. Once I had a plateful, I slipped back to my chair and dug in.
The whole mess was gone inside of two minutes. I heaved a sigh of relief. The food was just what I needed, and it was hitting me right—but that’s when I heard my name mentioned at the front of the room.
“McGill?” Graves called out. “Centurion, come up here and finish the briefing.”
I froze. At this point, I’d been in the room for several long minutes, but I hadn’t heard a word that had been spoken.
“Uh… yessir.”
Setting down my plate and rubbing the crumbs from my hands, I walked up to the front of the room with a confident air.
The undertaker-looking primus offered me his pointer, so I took it and began to draw on the big display. After pausing it, I scrolled around to look for the area where I’d died. “That’s it, that beach. You see that crashed aircraft? That’s the weirdest kind of copter I’ve ever been on. I managed to hotwire it and take off, but not before our fighters got to the island. Unfortunately, I was taken out and died in the waves, right about… here.”
I made a red circle on the frozen image, and turned around to grin at the audience.
Everyone in sight looked confused, even baffled. Everyone but Graves, that was. He looked pissed.
“That’s not very helpful, McGill. We want to know what you learned on that island. Where are the other bases the enemy has placed in strategic locations?”
“Uh… how’s that again? Who said they had other bases?”
Graves eyed me unhappily. A few of the audience members snickered. “Maybe you came in too late for that part of the briefing. Primus Gilbert, here, has discovered with forensic analysis that this base was linked to others. Several gateway posts were setup, but they were destroyed during the attack.”
“That’s a crying shame, sir! We’ll probably never be able to puzzle out where they linked to.”
“Are you telling me, McGill, that you spent the better part of the week living at this encampment, and you have no idea where the other rebel facilities are?”
“Well sir, I actually spent most of that time in a cell, see. I did have a barred window and a nice view of the beach, but those the monkey-dog guys, well… they kind of used it as a latrine.”
People were laughing, but not Graves. “Skip all that. Your body was found in the immediate vicinity of Abigail Claver, a wanted criminal. Are you claiming that you weren’t romantically involved with her?”
“Uh… are we talking, like, recently?”
Another wave of amusement swept the room. I flashed Manfred and some of my other friends a grin.
“Yes,
