Free Lieutenant by Phil Geusz Page B

officers—who can say? But they just… Gave up! Quit, folded, allowed every last one of their men to die for nothing. What kind of intellectually bankrupt leader can’t do any better than that ? Then the Imperials said practically nothing about it, to encourage us to sink yet more credits that should’ve gone to warships into rebuilding and re-garrisoning the place even stronger than before. It was a huge sucker trap! That’s why they always let us keep Zombie at the peace talks and don’t circulate videos to make propaganda of the fact that our men committed suicide—it’s because they know they can deal with the place any time they like, and that because our officers are so crappy it’ll cost them far less to smash it than it did for us to rebuild it! We’re that predictably incompetent!”
    Which of course begged the question of how I would’ve defended Zombie Station, once the main guns were silenced. I spent almost three hours roughing out a series of ideas. While the Station would always fall in the end without relief—the chief was right about that—by the time I was done I was quite certain that with a little creativity and genuine leadership the place could’ve remained a deep thorn in the Imperial side for weeks if not months, instead of the few days it’d actually lasted. Which would’ve translated into huge logistics problems for the Imperial Navy as a whole, since their supply ships would’ve all had to take longer routings. At least one or two planetary invasions would’ve had to have been shelved, and the Imperials could never have raided as deeply as they actually had. Which in turn would’ve meant that our Fleet could’ve remained more concentrated and…
    My god! , I suddenly realized, putting down my pen in wonder. We might even have actually won the war!
     

14
    By the time we worked our way to the main mess deck and found the situation there to be exactly as predicted by the chief, I was already lower than I’d ever been before in my life. Lieutenant Jeffries had found another way to force more of his work upon me by claiming he was too busy with the half of his paperwork that I wasn’t already doing for him to go inspect the Station’s damaged turrets, and since it wasn’t work that even our best-trained Rabbits could handle I was compelled to take on the task personally. By this time we had all the main airlocks up and working, so it was easiest for me to take a one-man sled and flit around outside the Station rather than make my way up and down the endless miles of corridors inside. Having the sled made it easy for me to snap my documentary photos of the many Imperial blaster-hits, and then it only took me a few minutes to lock on, take more photos from the inside, and download the error-log from the control gear. These logs made interesting reading, actually; they served as brief histories of the fighting. It’d taken direct battleship hits to knock out the turrets, and in many cases more than one. The far-aft mounting had through sheer luck absorbed no less than five before succumbing, and even then the final blow had come via close-assault by a demolition team. This explained nicely the Imperial midshipman we’d found dead with his sidearm wired to a heavy charge, and also the corpses of a few others armed with hand-launched armor-piercing missiles. One was even carrying a live tactical nuke!
    As anticipated, it proved most sensible to relocate our body-processing efforts to the Station proper, especially after we encountered so many dead together in that one single spot. After the captain swore me to silence (what was I going to do? Refuse a perfectly legal order?) I spent most of my days there supervising and helping with the ongoing cleanup, doing everything from rendering the nastiest weapons (like the tactical nuke) safe to manning a scrub-brush. The Rabbits seemed terribly grateful for the help—they were working as long and hard as I was, and the strain was telling