“Executive Third Class Gozen,” she said, standing at attention and saluting.
Drakon returned the salute with enough care to show that he respected the person who had rendered it. “You look like hell,” Drakon said.
Gozen had put aside her battle armor, its surface scarred from the recent fighting, and stood in her working uniform, which was considerably the worse for the days it had been worn under armor and through combat. She had smudges on visible skin, and her short hair was grimy and matted from being continuously under a battle armor helmet for days. Her eyes were shaded by fatigue and her lips badly chapped.
She looked surprised at his words, then grinned. “I feel like hell, sir. I don’t want you to think I’m hiding anything.”
“Let’s walk.” Drakon strode alongside Gozen as she led him through the nearest portions of the ruined buildings that had been part of the Syndicate positions. The buildings were packed with surrendered Syndicate soldiers who gazed back at him with sullenness, or resignation, or hope, or curiosity. He stopped to talk to some of them, getting a feeling for their mood that couldn’t be conveyed by reading reports or watching vids.
Drakon stopped before one old soldier who was sitting hunched over, staring at nothing. “Weren’t you at Chandrahas?”
Startled, the soldier looked up, then leaped to his feet as he realized who Drakon was. “Devon Dupree, Combat Systems Worker First Class, Heavy Weapons, Fifth Company—”
He broke off as Drakon made a chopping gesture. “You don’t need to recite that. Were you at Chandrahas? About ten years ago?”
“Yes, honored CEO,” the soldier replied, rigidly at attention, looking straight ahead.
“Sit down,” Drakon ordered. The man sat. “Now, relax. You were with the… Three Hundred Seventh Division then, weren’t you? You were one of the soldiers who held a position for six hours against heavy Alliance attacks.”
The old soldier blinked at Drakon in surprise. “Yes, honored—”
“I’m not a CEO. Not anymore. Damn,” Drakon continued in an admiring tone. “You guys did an amazing job. I thought you were being given early discharge and retirement as a reward for the heroism.”
“Yes, they told us that,” the soldier said, looking at Drakon in dawning wonder. “And then a month later, when we got out of the hospital and the news vid crews had left, they told us we had done such good jobs that we were too valuable to lose. We were sent back to our unit. You’re CEO Drakon?”
“I used to be CEO Drakon.”
“You’d just taken over the Hundred Sixteenth Division back then, hadn’t you?”
“That’s right.” Drakon waved back toward the base. “That’s who you were fighting, two brigades of what was the Hundred Sixteenth.”
“Well, damn, no wonder we got beat.” Dupree shook his head. “That’s weird. I don’t feel so bad now, knowing who we were fighting.”
Drakon sat down next to the old soldier, aware of all of the nearby soldiers watching and listening. “What are your plans?”
“Try to survive, I guess,” the old soldier answered. “The usual.”
“Ulindi can use someone like you. So can I.”
“That’s for real? Why?”
“Because I got sick of seeing soldiers like you treated the way you were.”
Specialist Dupree nodded back at Drakon, his eyes serious and searching. “Your workers always fought really hard for you. I can’t stay at Ulindi, though. It’s got some rough memories now. And the Syndicate is out even if I wanted to go to a star they still controlled. I killed two snakes myself. Young fools who didn’t think an old worker like me was anyone to worry about. You’re going back to Midway? I’ve never been there.”
“There’s a lot of water,” Drakon said.
“Good beer?”
“We’re a major trading junction because of the hypernet gate and all of our jump points. We get a lot of good beer.”
The old soldier smiled broadly and sat straight. “If you’ve got any interest, uh…”
“General,” Drakon said. “I dropped the CEO as fast as I could.”
“Yes, sir. General. If you’d take me, I’ll join you.”
Drakon reached out and clapped the man on the shoulder. “One of the soldiers who held the point at Chandrahas? I’ll always have room for the likes of you. And, heavy weapons, you said? We could use a veteran heavy-weapons specialist.” He stood up, looking around at the crowd watching silently. “You’ve been told the choice is yours, and it is. This isn’t the sort of trick the Syndicate pulled. Just before I met Executive Gozen, I was told that our mobile forces have captured the troop transports that brought you here. We’ll use one or more of those transports to take anyone who wants to a star where they can get a lift back to Syndicate space. Or you can stay here and see what kind of star system can be built at Ulindi free of the Syndicate. Or you can ride those transports with my people and join us at Midway. It’s your call.”
He spent another hour that he couldn’t really spare walking among the defeated Syndicate soldiers, then back into the open area where the fighting had raged. “Give us some room,” Drakon told his two guards, who had not been needed and now faded back until they were ten meters away. He turned to face Gozen. “What about you, Executive Gozen?”
Chapter Fifteen
Instead of answering his question, Executive Gozen looked steadily at him before asking her own. “Did you really know that guy from Chandrahas?”
“Yeah.” Drakon smiled crookedly. “He’s a bit older now, but so am I.”
“But remembering his face? After ten years?”
Drakon shook his head, looking down at the scarred pavement. “He should have been dead. All of them should have. But six of them survived and held out until we got to them. You don’t forget the face of someone who does something like that.” He looked back up at her. “You’ve got some good soldiers there. Right now, they’re beaten. Give them a week, and I wouldn’t want to tangle with them again.”
She bent one corner of her mouth up. “Thank you.”
“Yeah. Good soldiers. But—I hope you won’t take this wrong,” Drakon said. “But I expected the Syndicate to send ground forces against us who were considered absolutely reliable.”
Gozen smiled without any trace of humor. “We were absolutely reliable. By which I mean as reliable as any ground forces except for vipers,” she said, naming the fanatical snake special forces. “We had a lot of people who believed in the Syndicate and wanted to help save it.”
“You weren’t one of those people,” Drakon said, making it a statement, not a question.
“No, sir.” Gozen looked to one side, her expression somber. “No, sir,” she repeated. “I wasn’t one of the hard-core loyalists. We had a good number of them, though. But they sent us against your positions, head-on assault after head-on assault. Shots and shrapnel don’t care what anybody’s politics are, but the enthusiastic workers and execs, the ones who really believed and really wanted to win another one for the Syndicate, they pushed to the front during the attacks and they pushed farther forward during the attacks and they took longer to fall back during the attacks. That would have been great if you guys had cracked. They would have been the ones forming the penetrator while the rest of us provided the mass behind them. But you didn’t break anywhere. You had too many people at each point and too much firepower and you were dug in at the base and you were just plain tough. So instead, the enthusiastic ones died a lot faster than the people who were less enthusiastic.”
Gozen looked outward to where the largest craters marred the open field. “Of course, the rocks your mobile forces dropped didn’t care who they killed, either, and they cut the units in that attack off at the knees. But that left the enthusiastic people isolated in front of your positions, so that bunch got wiped out. Bottom line, after enough attacks, what was left weren’t very hard-core.”