sense of alarm growing as he rose up out of his chair. “Sergeant! What are you going to do? Sergeant! Damn it, Sor! Answer me!”
By the time he got untangled from his workstation and around the desk to the still-open hatch, however, she was long gone. Jason Gibbons groaned and leaned his head against the metal, resisting the urge to bang it like he was in some stupid comedy.
“Please, God, don’t let her kill anyone,” he moaned. “At least not any superior officers.”
*****
Sorilla whistled tunelessly as she navigated the military decks, knowing her way around by heart. She’d been assigned to more than one Discoverer class ship turned tether station, and the layout was always identical.
The chat with Jace had been enough to give her an idea of the current attitude that was prevailing in the military circles here in Hayden. That didn’t mean that everyone felt that way, probably even the local commander didn’t feel that way, but that was the way the wind was blowing from Solari Command and specifically from the United States and Great Britain member nations of the Solari Organization.
Sorilla knew that she had something of a personal investment in the situation, her time on Hayden had left an impression on her. She liked the people, enjoyed the jungle more than most, and felt a bit of a kinship to the idea of Hayden. A frontier world was a romantic illusion in reality, but Hayden was as close as you got as the farthest colony from Earth, located quite close to where the Orion arm rejoined the central galactic cluster.
By nature, jump points trended to follow higher density regions of the galaxy, so moving from Hayden out into the galaxy resulted in a sudden logarithmic increase in jump point lanes. Going the other direction from Earth was the opposite. There were several large clusters of stars that were probably entirely cut off from the rest of the galaxy because the intervening stellar density was too low to provide a jump lane to any star within the cluster.
That meant that Earth’s presence had expanded more toward the inner galactic core than back along the Orion arm, right until here at Hayden. Beyond Hayden, Sorilla knew that there had been quite a few scout runs, but there were few enough worlds of immediate interest and so many star lanes to choose from that humanity had settled into a consolidation phase after its brief but exciting expansion push into the stars.
None of that mattered at the moment, of course, not to her at least. Certainly to some high level strategist it was probably part and parcel of their plotting, but Sorilla was more concerned with Hayden itself. She knew the station commander personally—he’d been in charge of the ground forces on Hayden when she returned with Valkyrie two years past—and wasn’t surprised by his adoption of the current ‘turtle’ strategy.
Brigadier Kane wasn’t particularly fond of Operators; he was a tank commander from way back and part of the army that didn’t want to admit that tanks were obsolete and had been for longer than he’d been alive. In fact, in her own opinion, tanks stopped being significant after the killing fields of World War II finally fell silent, though there was a certain weight to the argument that they served as additional deterrence during the Cold War.
Certainly, tanks could smash through enemy defenses with ease, but the world had moved past that. Small arms ruled the world, shotguns and rifles and pistols. Tanks couldn’t go where men could, and you had to follow the men if you wanted to really control the territory you were holding. In the end, controlling territory could only be accomplished with the consent of those who lived there. If you didn’t get face to face with them, you had no chance at all.
Now they’d given up Hayden’s jungles to the aliens, which meant that they were, for all practical purposes, the locals.
Sorilla unconsciously cracked her knuckles as she made her way through the halls.
By the time he got untangled from his workstation and around the desk to the still-open hatch, however, she was long gone. Jason Gibbons groaned and leaned his head against the metal, resisting the urge to bang it like he was in some stupid comedy.
“Please, God, don’t let her kill anyone,” he moaned. “At least not any superior officers.”
*****
Sorilla whistled tunelessly as she navigated the military decks, knowing her way around by heart. She’d been assigned to more than one Discoverer class ship turned tether station, and the layout was always identical.
The chat with Jace had been enough to give her an idea of the current attitude that was prevailing in the military circles here in Hayden. That didn’t mean that everyone felt that way, probably even the local commander didn’t feel that way, but that was the way the wind was blowing from Solari Command and specifically from the United States and Great Britain member nations of the Solari Organization.
Sorilla knew that she had something of a personal investment in the situation, her time on Hayden had left an impression on her. She liked the people, enjoyed the jungle more than most, and felt a bit of a kinship to the idea of Hayden. A frontier world was a romantic illusion in reality, but Hayden was as close as you got as the farthest colony from Earth, located quite close to where the Orion arm rejoined the central galactic cluster.
By nature, jump points trended to follow higher density regions of the galaxy, so moving from Hayden out into the galaxy resulted in a sudden logarithmic increase in jump point lanes. Going the other direction from Earth was the opposite. There were several large clusters of stars that were probably entirely cut off from the rest of the galaxy because the intervening stellar density was too low to provide a jump lane to any star within the cluster.
That meant that Earth’s presence had expanded more toward the inner galactic core than back along the Orion arm, right until here at Hayden. Beyond Hayden, Sorilla knew that there had been quite a few scout runs, but there were few enough worlds of immediate interest and so many star lanes to choose from that humanity had settled into a consolidation phase after its brief but exciting expansion push into the stars.
None of that mattered at the moment, of course, not to her at least. Certainly to some high level strategist it was probably part and parcel of their plotting, but Sorilla was more concerned with Hayden itself. She knew the station commander personally—he’d been in charge of the ground forces on Hayden when she returned with Valkyrie two years past—and wasn’t surprised by his adoption of the current ‘turtle’ strategy.
Brigadier Kane wasn’t particularly fond of Operators; he was a tank commander from way back and part of the army that didn’t want to admit that tanks were obsolete and had been for longer than he’d been alive. In fact, in her own opinion, tanks stopped being significant after the killing fields of World War II finally fell silent, though there was a certain weight to the argument that they served as additional deterrence during the Cold War.
Certainly, tanks could smash through enemy defenses with ease, but the world had moved past that. Small arms ruled the world, shotguns and rifles and pistols. Tanks couldn’t go where men could, and you had to follow the men if you wanted to really control the territory you were holding. In the end, controlling territory could only be accomplished with the consent of those who lived there. If you didn’t get face to face with them, you had no chance at all.
Now they’d given up Hayden’s jungles to the aliens, which meant that they were, for all practical purposes, the locals.
Sorilla unconsciously cracked her knuckles as she made her way through the halls.
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