“I believe you, Lieutenant,” Pritchard said wearily. “But that’s not the only problem.” He rubbed the palms of his hands together firmly. “Hold one,” he repeated as he got up from the console.
Colonel Alois Hammer sat down in Pritchard’s place.
The hologram was as clear as if Hammer were in the TOC with Ranson. The Colonel was madder than hell; so mad that his hand kept stabbing upward to brush away the tic at the corner of his left eye.
“Captain . . .” Hammer said. He fumbled with the latches of his clamshell armor to give himself time to form words—or at least to delay the point at which he had to speak them.
He glared at June Ranson. “We kicked the Consies up one side and down the other. The National Army had problems.”
“That’s why they hired us, sir,” Ranson said. She was very calm. Thick glass was beginning to form between her and the image of the regimental commander.
“Yeah, that’s why they did, all right,” Hammer said. He ground at his left eye.
He lowered his hand. “Captain, you saw what happened to the structure of Camp Progress during the attack?”
“What structure?” Cooter muttered bitterly.
Ranson shivered. The glass wall shivered also, falling away as shards of color that coalesced into Hammer’s face.
“Sir, the Consies were only a battalion,” Ranson said. “They could’ve done a lot of damage—they did. But it was just a spoiling attack, they couldn’t ‘ve captured the base in the strength they were.”
“They can capture Kohang, Captain,” Hammer said. “And if they capture a district capital, the National Government is gone. The people who pay us.”
Ranson blinked, trying to assimilate the information.
It didn’t make any sense. The Consies were beat—beaten good. Multiply what her teams had done at Camp Progress by the full weight of the Regiment—with artillery and perfect artillery targets for a change—and the Conservative Action Movement on Prosperity didn’t have enough living members to bury its dead. . . .
“Nobody was expecting it, Captain Ranson,” Hammer said. The whiskers on his chin and jowls were white, though the close-cropped hair on the colonel’s head was still a sandy brown. “The National Government wasn’t, we weren’t. It’d been so quiet the past three months that we—”
His eye twitched. “Via!” he cursed. “I thought, and if anybody’d told me different I’d ‘ve laughed at them. I thought the Consies were about to pack it in. And instead they were getting ready for the biggest attack of the war.”
“But Colonel,” Cooter said. His voice sounded desperate. “They lost. They got their butts kicked.”
“Tell that to a bunch of civilians,” Hammer said bitterly. “Tell that to your Colonel Banyussuf—the bloody fool!”
Somebody at Central must have spoken to Hammer from out of pick-up range, because the colonel half-turned and snarled, “Then deal with it! Shoot ’em all in the neck if you want!”
He faced around again. For an instant, Ranson stared into eyes as bleak and merciless as the scarp of a glacier. Then Hammer blinked, and the expression was gone; replaced with one of anger and concern. Human emotions, not forces of nature.
“Captain Ranson,” he resumed with a formality that would have been frightening to the junior officer were she not drifting again into glassy isolation. “In a week, it’ll all be over for the Consies. They’ll have to make their peace on any terms they can get—even if that means surrendering for internment by the National Government. But if a district capital falls, there won’t be a National Government in a week. All they see—”
Hammer’s left hand reached for his eye and clenched into a fist instead. “All they see,” he repeated in a voice that trembled between a whisper and a snarl, “is what’s been lost, what’s been destroyed, what’s been disrupted. You and I—”
His hand brushed out in a slighting gesture. “We’ve expended some ammo, we’ve lost some equipment. We’ve lost some people. Objectives cost. Winning costs.”
Sergeant Wylde nodded. Blood was seeping from cracks in the Sprayseal which replaced the skin burned from his left shoulder.
“But the politicians and—and what passes for an army, here, they’re in a panic. One more push and they’ll fold. The people who pay us will fold.”