“Evans,” came the bark in the space station’s corridor.
Major Lindsay Evans couldn’t have stopped the automatic turn on her heel to respond if she’d tried. Not after three tours working for the same gruff general. He might be a pain, but she knew his quirks—and his skills at war were, she hoped, learnable to a close observer paying attention.
“Sir,” she responded politely, and waited, fingers hovering over datapad and thankful they were in a no-hat, no salute zone. General Farrokh tended to dive right into the weeds and skip over protocol, which was fine when it was the two of them in his office and otherwise awkward as she held the salute until he noticed. Usually with a deep sigh of exasperation, but he was the senior officer; it wasn’t like she had a choice.
His lack of pretentiousness was why she liked the old bat, even if it was partially for the sheer entertainment value of seeing his other subordinates squirm with discomfort. He—and now she—took great pleasure in ensuring things got done, with just enough politics to sneak past official censure.
“What’s the count?”
She tilted her head at his office door, then followed him into the entryway and his inner sanctum. Closing the door, she kept her voice soft. “Forty thousand, Sir.”
He sank into his chair and growled. A wave of his hand indicated she should sit.
Yes, she thought, he did fit the old photos of leaders with cigars. A shame they weren’t permitted on station thanks to all the air filters and fire risks, but someday, planetside, she was getting a photograph. It’d be a retirement gift, whenever the day came. Whenever the war was over.
“Forty thousand,” he rumbled. “Damn.”
Lindsay straightened. “Sir, I’m afraid I wasn’t clear.” She cleared her throat, punched her datapad, and mirrored the display to the aged screen with a fingerprint dent in the lower right hand corner. “The past week has been rather disastrous, boss. There’s no denying it was a complete Charlie Foxtrot.”
“Forty thousand men and women every day.” His hands covered his eyes in momentary denial. “Every. Damn. Day.”
She sat in silence, staring at the screen’s undeniable data.
“There’s little enough that can be done from a position of power,” Farrokh rumbled finally. He leaned back, tugged a battered locker door open, and from inside the vast depths pulled a bottle filled with amber liquid. “You learn that, when you’re in power. You protect who you can. You fight losing battles to protect those you can’t. You do what you believe, long as you can.”
He poured two glasses. “The thing I hate, and have the least amount of patience with, is the backroom dealing that breaks a good plan into something untenable. Politics that don’t understand reality.” He nudged a tumbler toward her, as quietly furious as she’d ever seen him. “The need to always take one more step up before you can actually fix things, only to find out that you’ll likely never reach the heights you need, because the system tends to win over any one individual.”
The glass was cold in her hands, the bourbon smoky with a hint of stone fruits. She held it in trembling hands, worried her numb fingers would let the treasure slip.
“To our honored dead.” General Farrokh saluted her and drained his glass. He faced the data, stoic.
She did the same, savoring the burn.
“This loss was preventable,” came the whisper, and she realized that he was crying, a single tear that symbolized terrible resolve. “This — this, I can fix. This, I have the power to do. I can’t save the dead, Evans. But I can keep it from happening again.”
***
This week’s prompt was from Parrish Baker, who is now responsible for everyone’s Blue Oyster Cult earworm (which is exactly as it should be, as that song is an epic classic): 40,000 men and women every day.
My prompt went to TA Leederman: It had been a firefly moon, and that meant…
