Free Orphan Brigade by Henry V. O'Neil Page B

waiting for such an event for a very long time, Olech Mortas now needed to view the entire conflict with fresh eyes. His palms rested on the wide, flat arms of the boxy chair, and the fingers of his right hand touched a control panel that he now activated. The room’s dim light vanished, leaving him in darkness, and the voice of a trusted technician spoke through the void.
    â€œReady, sir?”
    â€œGo ahead.” Olech wondered if Jan’s telepathic experience with the alien had been like that, a disembodied voice coming at his psyche from out of nowhere, but the room came alive and he refocused his thoughts. Light flickered across the blackness, and the chair began to move. A single lifting cylinder slowly slid upward, raising him to the very center of the space.
    And that was exactly what the room was. Space. The chair itself vanished, giving Olech the illusion that he was free-­floating. The light waves finished their work, and Earth blossomed out of the darkness as if he were viewing its creation. Blue water, brown terrain, and white cloud that blocked his vision as if he were orbiting the home planet in a space suit.
    The projected imagery combined decades’ worth of charting and outright simulation, but it was the only way that Olech Mortas could keep the vast array of vital information in perspective. Using the chair’s control panel or, more commonly, directing the technicians by voice, he could figuratively travel anywhere in the mapped regions of the cosmos.
    â€œTake me to the construction zone.”
    The Earth receded swiftly, giving the impression that he had turned away from it. The chair itself could rotate a full revolution, but usually the projected imagery performed the movements. Olech could have asked to start out at the construction zone, the belts of space stations cranking out the ships and weapons and engines of the war, but it was more fun to take the ride.
    The construction zone was nowhere near the war zone, but it was a great distance away from any of the inhabited planets and so he flashed through an enormous amount of space in just a few moments. No rocket could travel that fast, and no one could get to either zone without the aid of the Step, but all the same Olech liked to imagine he was strapped to the nose of a racing ship spearing its way through the void. Boiling dust and bizarre arrays of light were the most common sights when he moved like this, and Olech was always struck by just how dirty it all seemed. Like diving into even the clearest ocean water and being surprised by the particles and the seaweed and the undifferentiated fragments that drifted in constant suspension.
    A hair-­thin line of white resolved itself into the construction zone a moment later, and he felt vertigo when the projection slowed, then stopped. The titanic rigs were everywhere, maximizing the advantage of zero gravity to create the machines of combat and send them forward without having to break free from the surfaces and atmospheres of the grasping planets. Shuttles and drone robots passed between and among the stations, and various ships of war stood perpetual guard.
    Clicking on a button brought up a small arrow of light that he maneuvered using sensors in the chair’s arm. Stopping the arrow on a station caused a status to appear next to it, reflecting its current productivity and supply levels. Large teams of technicians and analysts monitored these statistics for him, but Olech had his own reasons to review them personally in this format. The stations in the construction zone had been paid for by the alliance, but they were run by interplanetary corporations that often followed agendas tangential to his own.
    Despite the army-­sized staff that supported him, Olech was able to memorize and collate vast amounts of data in his head. More importantly, he knew what was significant and how it all came together, which was one of the primary purposes of this room. The war zone