Requiem

[Jane Hartman]

Herbert Beeler Naval Hospital, City of Medford, Los Angeles

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+173 Days Since Planetfall.

They let her watch the news now. Under careful supervision, of course.

None of it was good. Hartman shifted against the chair, slid her back up another few inches against the cushions, and thumbed the datapad closed. The viewscreen on the wall traced the lazy passage of the midday sun across the wire and plastic furniture of the hospital yard. The clock on the screen said one thirty, but the display may as well have been written in German. Her head was a hive of dates and events that had about as much meaning to her as an entertainment vid. Without the time lag between them, they were just words on a screen, as fleeting and illusionary as the pixels that formed them.

Royal Flush had failed. The aftermath had devolved into a political slaughterhouse back home, and an army of media-sponsored armchair generals had dissected and publicly critiqued every poor decision that had contributed to the campaign’s failure long before the last of Davies’ warships limped back into friendly space. Naturally, that list of errors had included the DoD’s choice of fleet commanders. They were calling it the worst military defeat since the Eighty Years War. Of the five fleets that had set out for Leeds, the ships that came back were enough to field maybe two. Casualties were still being tallied, but the estimates were in the hundreds of thousands. Hartman was almost relieved when they didn’t let her view the names.

The government had copped the worst of the public backlash, but some of the resentment had trickled down to the fleet. Liberty had been fighting in space since before she was born, but no-one had fought an honest-to-God ground war since the colonies were founded. Certainly, the houses had planned for one – every major power still maintained a sizeable land army – but they were deterrents. The big guard dog you kept in full view, just to make sure the neighbour didn’t think about jumping the fence. No-one had actually expected to use them. But they had, and suddenly there were a hell of a lot of injured veterans who needed someplace to go.

Naval hospitals hadn’t coped with the tide of wounded, and a handful of civilian installations had been nationalised to deal with the overflow. Civilians without the cash to hold a place got kicked out of beds and to the back of waiting lists. A swarm of unlicensed clinics had sprung up on the borders to suck credits from the resulting tide of desperate evictees. By the time law enforcement came knocking they were gone again, swallowed by the churn. Maybe some were genuinely trying to do the right thing, but a hell of a lot were just happy empty their patient’s accounts, medical care be damned. A lot of dead people, and not all of them wearing uniforms.

The blame had shifted to the navy. There had been three retaliatory attacks on servicemen on the streets of Houston. One vet dead, two muggers with broken bones and brain damage. Public outcry was inevitable, and the LPI had come down hard. The Gallic counteroffensive, when it came, was almost a relief.

The assault on San Diego border station hadn’t been much more than a probing attack compared to the Leeds offensive. Three dreadnoughts and supporting ships, up against the ragged remnants of Davies’ First Fleet. The fleet’d lost that one too, but the incursion had galvanised public support in a way Royal Flush had failed too. The enemy was in Libertonian space now, and just because they hadn’t pushed the advance yet didn’t mean it wasn’t going to happen. The protests had quietly died off and, when the dust had finally settled, the old man was still in the chair.

Academically, she knew all of that. It still didn’t make it feel real.

”How have you been sleeping?" The psychiatrist was a fatherly commander in grey and white BDUs, a lattice of wrinkles under his eyes that put him somewhere north of sixty. He wore the trappings of age well, testament to a life lived rather than one on the brink of decline. Apparently he’d been some bigwig back in Fort Bragg, before he’d been shipped out to Medford to help deal with all the wounds the hospital staff couldn’t. The weekly evaluations were just another part of her routine now. Each was a stepping stone towards active duty, so she smiled and tolerated the recycled questions and professional platitudes.

”Same as last week, Commander." Hartman tried for a shrug. Draper’s eyes narrowed fractionally at the use of rank. The psych liked his interviews informal, Hartman preferred hers with the comforting insulation offered by the chain of command. She was the Admiral, so they used rank. Small victories. ”More than I’d like and less than the doctors say I need to."

”I see." A stylus scratched across a pad. ”Are you having any strange dreams?"

”The usual nightmare." Hartman’s lip curled in distaste. The questions were just a formality. She was wired in to medical monitoring equipment twelve hours a day. There wasn’t a lie she could have told that wouldn’t have been outed by her own traitorous physiology. ”Dark room, lot of casualties. Kinetics bouncing off the walls. Can’t see a thing except muzzle flash. I’m suited up, but the power’s dead and there ain’t a damned thing I can do except stand there listening to the screams and waiting for my turn to die."

”Okay." The stylus touched the pad again. A checkbox, maybe. There was nothing in Draper’s voice except gentle understanding. ”And how long have you been having these nightmares for?"

”Almost since I enlisted." Hartman said. She’d had this conversation before. ”Fourteen, fifteen years now."

”Have you ever been prescribed medication for them?" Draper glanced down at his pad. He already knew. The Navy didn’t forget things like that, but he wanted to know if she had. If she was the sort of person who’d lie to preserve her career. Just like every other psychologist in the fleet. Here they were, different dancers skating through the same old routine.

”I was issued pills after the incident. Stayed on them for the full course, maybe two years. Regular psych evaluation, physical rehab, I did the whole treatment. Most of us did." It should have been a long time ago. Practically, it was a long time ago. Still, it felt more recent than the events in the newsfeeds. ”Got the all clear from the Corps before I rotated out."

”Which incident would that be?"

”We’re not doing this again, Commander. It’s on record." Hartman’s fingers drummed an impatient beat on the bed’s railing. Draper looked up at her expectantly, an eternity passed, and Hartman caved to the inevitable. ”]Black Rock."

Draper nodded, made a note, and set the pad down. They were back in familiar territory now, and he knew it. Can you tell me about any other nightmares?"

”No. It was always the same one. Still is."

”The nightmares were still troubling you when you discharged." Draper gave a vague wave towards the hospital ”Why did you re-enlist?"

”Met a few old friends. They convinced me it was where I needed to be." Remus Sius, now on indefinite psych leave. Jimmy Patterson, now missing in action. Old friends that had slipped out of her life so quietly she’d never noticed them fading until they were gone.

”The Fleet’s family, and a lot of folk got a lot worse out of Black Rock than bad dreams. I was lucky, for me it never got worse than the dreams." She didn’t meet Draper’s eyes. ”I’m not about to kill myself, if that’s what you’re getting at. I’ve been managing it for fifteen years. I’ll keep managing it, Commander. "

Draper said nothing, but he picked up his pad and scratched another line.

*

High Planetary Orbit, Leeds System

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+14 Days Since Planetfall.

”Enemy forces have launched counterattacks at Beggar’s Ridge, here," A pale red dot flashed into existence on the map suspended over Hartman’s desk in time with the General’s voice. ”And Point Channel, here."

Glendale’s fleet briefing room was tiny, a square of floor space that Hartman honestly suspected had been a closet before the transport had been militarised. The room was barely adequate to fit her desk and chair, and leaving meant carefully tucking in the chair and either squeezing herself against the desk until her ribs ached or clambering atop it to get enough clearance to swing the hatch open. Neither was a particularly dignified position for a flag officer. It didn’t help that, with the briefing software powered down, the room had no lights of its own. Some software safeguard had stalwartly refused to let her use the room’s floor-to-ceiling projectors for light until she closed the exterior hatch; so, not only did she have to climb over furniture to attend a briefing, but she had to do it in pitch darkness. Not for the first time, Hartman wished she’d had the sense to turn down the transfer to logistics.

It wasn’t so bad once she was in place. The room’s systems linked into Glendale’s subspace relay, and it let her converse with the other fleet commanders aboard their own relay-equipped flagships in a fashion that bore some passing resemblance to a real-time conversation. Projectors hidden in the roof above her painted an unerringly accurate picture of the fleet brass, stretching out her tiny desk until it seemed to span several feet in either direction, eight linked desks, each occupied by another senior officer. Provided she resisted the urge to stretch out her legs and ignored the half-second lag between asking a question and the flash of recognition, the illusion of a real-world conference was flawless.

”Captain Britton’s company repulsed two attacks on Beggar’s Ridge, at 0300 and 1300 hours, and enemy fire has been strictly indirect since the last assault. Our spotters expect to have co-ordinates for anti-battery fire from Cloverfield within the hour." Brigadier General Amos Mandela stood behind his desk, arms locked at ease behind him and voice steady. Mandela was the only marine hooked into the meeting, and the only officer without the privilege of a subspace relay. This early in the campaign, a relay on the surface wasn’t much more than a massive ranging point for hostile indirect. Instead, his transmissions had to make the long climb up the gravity well at lightspeed, and from there to her where they could piggyback onto Glendale’s systems. ”We lost contact with the Channel garrison at 1425, last report indicated they’d been engaged by enemy infantry in platoon strength. B Company has been dispatched to retake the Point, with 2 Squadron providing CAS. I have every confidence that our forces will be back in control by this time tomorrow, sir."

Mandela nodded to the Fleet Admiral. Like everything else about the General it was sharp, professional, and dog-tired. Mandela’s marines were two weeks in to fighting a war against an entrenched enemy on a world where prolonged exposure to the air alone was enough to kill you. It said something about the environments the marines expected to operate in that the Corps database classified a smog ball like Leeds as ‘hospitable.’

”However; if we’re unable to retake the Point, I’d prefer to see it a pile of rubble than in Gallic hands. The Bowex offices in Wilkinson were housed in a skyscraper that’s still holding together." Mandela paused, as though the implication was obvious. He received blank stares from a roomful of flag officers. The marine didn’t quite sigh, but it was in his eyes. ”Short of deploying AOPs, that building’s the best spotter’s nest in the city. Without their satellites in orbit, the Gauls need the altitude to maintain communications. It’s a bigger loss to them than it is to us, sir."

”Thank you, General." Davies nodded, Fleet Admiral’s stars glinting on his collar. ”Admiral Hartman, can your people take care of that?"

”Yes, sir." Hartman jerked her attention away from the strategic map, Wilkinson city stretching out in a dozen shades of grey. Lewis was down there somewhere. She pushed the thought from her mind almost as soon as it occurred. ”I’ll have Cloverfield in position to drop rocks when the General makes his attack."

”Outstanding. I trust that will be satisfactory, General?" Davies statement wasn’t really a question, and Mandela knew it. The marine nodded his assent and returned to his seat, fatigue usurping interest in his eyes. He’d done his part. Anything else the fleet did was outside of his control and, as long as they controlled approaches to Leeds, irrelevant to the ground war. Hartman envied him that focus. Davies’ attention slid to the next officer in line. ”Now, Admiral Tobias, regarding those interceptors…"

Two hours passed in that cramped little room before Davies called an end to the briefing, and Hartman returned to her stateroom with cramps in her legs and enough work to make a fully-fledged shipyard weep. Mercifully, she’d missed the watch change, and she passed through Glendale’s rough-cut corridors with a minimum of startled salutes and accompanying ‘ma’am’s. She slumped to a seat in front of her terminal, closed the system’s borderline sadistic declaration that she had forty eight new messages, and set to work wading through the sea of reports and requests.

Two of the Third’s siege cruisers had suffered damage to their dampeners in engagements with Gallic screening patrols and were requesting assistance with the repairs. She assigned them both orbits alongside the landing pickets and sent notifications to the Bison’s commanding officers to prepare working parties. Jacobi’s CO was reporting a shortage of torpedoes for his bombers, Plymouth Rock was burning more than the system’s projected fuel allotment, and no fewer than four companies dirtside were requesting supply drops. Hartman sent materials where she could, ETAs where she couldn’t, and filed another half-dozen resupply requests with command that, by her reckoning, had about an eighty percent chance of arriving before her own stores ran low enough to limit manoeuvres.

Under ordinary circumstances keeping the fleets supplied would have been just about possible, but the enemies’ cloaking commerce raiders were wrecking merry havoc with her supply chains. Despite the best efforts of Lieutenant Seller’s intelligence section, their prisoner had kept his stony silence, and the enemy carrier had remained as invisible as it was deadly. She’d detached a flight of gunboats to escort transports from Magellan, but they couldn’t be everywhere, and every ship she pulled away from Leeds orbit increased the time it took to respond to fire support requests from the surface.

She could make do with the supplies coming in on the transports for now, but once the task force met real resistance and started chewing through munitions she’d have no choice but to send the refineries into the clouds deeper in-system, closer to contested space, if she wanted to keep the fleets operational. Which meant creating even bigger holes in the Leeds grid to escort them, which meant exposing the troops on the ground, and if Mandela’s force got blasted off the surface it wouldn’t matter how well supplied the ships in orbit were. They could all sit there with full magazines, link hands, and watch Troy burn together.

Hartman crinked her neck and tried to ignore the headache pulsing somewhere behind her eyes. Amber rows of figures continued their taunting dance across her stateroom terminal. The problem was simple enough. Davies had assembled the biggest fleet the Navy had ever seen and, for all its tremendous power, the fleet’s resupply network had never been designed to deal with that many ships that far from home simultaneously. It hadn’t needed to. The Liberty Navy was a defensive force, not an invasion fleet, and the idea of sustaining month-long multi-fleet manoeuvres without the support of local infrastructure simply hadn’t been a consideration until Gallia had shown up. Fleet command had press-ganged merchant haulers like Glendale left and right to fill the holes, but it wasn’t a long-term solution. If the fleet got involved in proper, consistent combat, instead of the probing attacks both sides were sticking to now, Hartman would only be able to plaster over the cracks for so long before the underlying rot showed through.

Largest fleet in recent history, and Hartman’s problem was that she didn’t have enough ships to feed it. Impossible was the word that came to mind, but that didn’t do a thing to change the fact it needed to be done. Impossible was what Admirals were for, and damned if she didn’t have her orders. She gave a humourless smile and returned her attention to the display. She was still there when Sellers’s voice crackled from datapad.

”I need to talk to you, ma’am. In private." There was no mistaking the strain in the intelligence officer’s voice. ”It’s about Brighton."

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