“Thank you,” Mike replied, waving a hand at his head.
“General Wesley has you blocked out for an hour starting, well, now, General,” the colonel said. “But he said if you’re fatigued from your travels…”
“I’ve been sitting on ships for five months,” Mike said, gesturing toward the front entrance. “It’s not hard work.”
“Yes, sir,” the colonel said. “It’s this—”
“I know where the Chief of Staff’s office is, Colonel,” Mike said, putting an edge on his tone. “Just go.”
“Lieutenant Colonel Timmons looked a bit put out,” General Wesley said as Mike grabbed a chair.
“He’s so perfectly polished I’m surprised you noticed,” Mike said.
“I’m pushing eighty and he’s been my aide for five years,” Tam said. “I can read him like a book if not the other way around, no matter what he thinks.”
“I guess he’s used to generals being ‘fatigued by their travels,’ ” Mike said. “Which I am but mostly I want to know why in the hell I was yanked out of command like I’d screwed the Tir Dol Ron’s daughter or something. So, with all due respect, if you could get right to the point, whatever it is.”
“You’re promoted, Lieutenant General,” Tam said. “You’re getting Eleventh Corps. That’s the basic. You need some expansion. Veritable teams of people will fully expand, but that’s the basic.”
“I don’t want Corps,” Mike said. “I really really don’t want Corps. I don’t want Corps, I don’t want your job and I don’t want FS command or I’d have worked to get any of the three and probably gotten them. We’ve discussed this.”
“Corps is going to be division sized and move as one unit,” Tam said. “I said it was only the basics.”
Mike set down his AID, which had been displaying the provisional TOE for the new “unified” Eleventh Corps and shrugged.
“You know, you can give me the rank and you can call this a corps but it’s more like a full division again,” Mike said. “Putting a lieutenant general in charge of this, not to mention major generals in these ‘divisions,’ is just paying extra salaries. And what’s General Michie going to do?”
“He’s less than thrilled by the new TOE,” Tam said. “And uninterested in roaming around the Blight digging out Posleen. So he’ll retire shortly after you assume command. He likes his current job. I felt like a heel when I told him it was going away.”
“So… why is it going away?” Mike asked. “There’s work to be done out there. We need more bodies, not fewer.”
“You and I both know that’s not true,” Tam said. “So don’t try to play that line. I’d have kept the numbers up, anyway. I’ve been keeping them up as much as I can manage. But reality and politics, especially some really goofy stuff, is making it impossible. Some of this you’re going to get in your briefings. Some of it’s too closely held for those. You ready? Or are you ‘fatigued by your travels’?”
“Go,” Mike said, pulling out a can of dip and holding it up. “If you don’t mind, General, sir?”
“I’ve known you for fifty years,” Tam said, sighing. “If you don’t dip, bad things happen. Okay, Item One, which will be covered in some of the briefings. Getting the funding for more suits out of the Darhel has become flat impossible. But not just because they’re cheap, which is what the briefings will cover. There’s other stuff.”
“And the other stuff is… ?”
“Remember when General Stewart was killed in the shuttle accident?” Tam asked.
“Seven years or so ago,” Mike said. “Time differentials are killer, but about that…”
“Well, let’s back up a little from there,” Tam said, his jaw working. “The question is always what to leave in and what to leave out.”
“Start at the beginning…” Mike said, frowning. “What does James have to do with not getting funding?”
“The beginning…” Tam said. “The problem is, we don’t know the beginning.”
“If you’re talking about the Darhel,” Mike said. “I’d go with first contact.”
“Which was when?” Tam said, raising an eyebrow. “I’ll start with that, though. When it became apparent that the Darhel knew a lot more about us than we knew about them, the U.S. military formed a small group to try to penetrate their information systems and figure out exactly what their background was in regards to humans. And, hell, just stuff about what the Darhel and the other Galactics were. They’ve always been less than forthcoming about their history and background.”
“Hume,” Mike said, frowning. “Why does that name stand out? Standard academic type one each. Crazy hair, head in the clouds. I was less than impressed.”
“Which was the intent, from the information I’ve gotten,” Tam said. “And it didn’t work. He was assassinated along with his top xeno guy about the time you shipped out for Diess.”
“Assassinated?” Mike said, frowning. “You sure?”
“There was a lot of that for a while,” Tam said. “DoD ended up losing over six teams of investigators over the period of the war.”
“To whom?” Mike asked angrily. “That’s insane.”
“The Darhel tried to pin it on another group, which I’ll get to,” Tam said. “But it was the Darhel. They really don’t like us prying into their background. But then we sort of called a truce. Have you ever heard of the Protocol?”
“Plenty of protocols,” Mike said. “But that has a capital on it, doesn’t it?”
“Big one,” Tam agreed. “I know you remember when General Taylor was assassinated.”
“Clear as day,” Mike said. “Despite the fact that I was in the middle of a murthering great battle. And I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist but I never bought that it was Free Earth. He told me he’d been investigating the hack during the battle of Daleville and then he’s taken out. I put it on Cyber, frankly.”
“Backwards, again,” Tam said. “Here’s the truth as far as anyone can determine without lie detectors. The Darhel arranged the hack. Taylor had come to the same conclusion. The Darhel assassinated him, or rather had him assassinated. Cyber, in retaliation, took out five major Darhel on Earth along with some of the Darhel assassin groups. Cyber was assisted by still another group called the Bane Sidhe. When it was all over the Darhel agreed to not attack human military personnel nor interfere in a direct fashion in military affairs. The Cybers and Bane Sidhe agreed to not assassinate any more Darhel. And we agreed to stop investigating the background of the Federation.”
“That is insane!” Mike said.
“More like xenic,” Tam said, frowning. “It actually made the Darhel rather happy. We were acting like Darhel.”
“That’s sort of what I mean,” Mike said. “Why the hell are we dealing with these bastards?”
“Oh, it’s worse than that,” Wes said. “The Darhel worked very hard to make sure we nearly lost the war. They’re afraid of us, Mike. Very afraid. And they should be. They can’t fight. So they have tried very hard to neuter us militarily just like they neutered the Indowy politically. They’ve completely coopted the Fleet. Fleet Strike is the only remaining really functional military unit. They can’t get rid of us completely. The Posleen remain a threat, even if a much reduced one. They need us to keep making sure they don’t reconstruct. But they don’t want us to be a real power. Humans in general and Fleet Strike in particular.”
“That’s why they’re cutting back on the ACS,” Mike said. “Well, they’d better. Because if I had my druthers I’d wipe them the fuck out. For Daleville if nothing else.”
“So would I,” Wesley said. “But we can’t and you know it. They’re the nerve system of the Federation. Take them out and it would become total chaos. So we have to live with them. They don’t assassinate our military personnel, including most particularly generals, and humans don’t declare open war on the Darhel. At which point that group I mentioned, the Bane Sidhe, become of rather greater importance.”