“Vatueil? Captain Vatueil?”
They were talking to him again.
We’re losing, he thought, reviewing the latest schematics. You hardly needed the schematics; just step back far enough from the whole thing, replay what had happened since the war had broken out and you could see it writing itself out in front of you.
They’d had some early disasters, then successes, then they’d been beaten back consistently, then they’d consolidated and subsequently seemed to achieve the upper hand across almost every front, making steady progress everywhere … then found that the fronts were not true fronts, the fronts – or at least the places where his side was strongest and was prevailing – were like stubborn tatters of a balloon that it turned out had already burst some time ago; there just hadn’t been time to hear the Bang. They were making forward progress the way the torn strips of the exploded balloon made forward progress: flailing hopelessly, uselessly outwards like soft shrapnel.
He sat – or floated or whatever you wanted to call it – in the Primary Strategic Situation Overview Space as it was rather grandly called, surrounded by the other members of the Grand War Council. The council was mostly composed of people who were his comrades, friends, colleagues and respected rivals. There was only the barest minimum of contrarians, awkwardistas and outright defeatists, and even they argued their points well and arguably contributed to the working consensus. Human, alien, whatever, he knew all of them about as well as was possible by now, and yet still he felt quite alone.
He looked round them.
There was no perfect Real analogy for the situation he and the rest were currently in: it was as though they all hovered around some modest spherical space maybe a handful of metres across. From the outside the sphere’s surface appeared solid and opaque, but you could stick your head through it from the outside if you had the right clearance and a sufficient degree of military seniority.
You stuck your head through and there you were; one bodiless head sticking through protruding into this dimly lit spherical space with lots of other bodiless heads – only a minority of them in any sense human.
Usually a spherical display hovered in the centre of the space. Right now the display was showing some detail of the general battle space; an antique faux-Real volume in which small rocket ships armed with nuclear missiles, particle beam guns and CREWs went skating around a few billion asteroids spread in a ring round a sun, blasting and zapping each other. He had seen such battle environments many times before. Versions of him had invested the simmed humans fighting in these, or invested the machines.
Most of his colleagues seemed to be discussing some pseudo-strategic detail of this particular environment that had long since ceased to interest him. He left them to it, retreating to his own musings and internalised visualisation.
We’re losing, he thought again. There is a war in heaven and we are losing it.
The war was amongst the Heavens, between the Afterlives, if you wanted to be pedantic about it. And it was over the Hells.
“Vatueil? Captain Vatueil?”
That was his name, but he wasn’t going to say anything back to them because he’d been told not to. He’d been ordered not to, and orders meant you had to do what you were told.
“Can you hear me?”
Yes, he could, but he still wouldn’t say anything.
“Vatueil! Report! That’s a direct order!”
That made him feel strange. If that was an order then he had to obey it. But then he had been ordered not to do anything that somebody else told him, not for now, not until A Superior got here who had the right codes. So that meant that what he had just heard wasn’t really an order at all. It was confusing.
He wanted just not to listen to what they said. He could do that, he could shut off comms, but he needed to listen so he could track where they were. The confusion made a sort of hurt in him.
He made the thing that he was in check its weapons again, counting rounds, measuring battery status, listening to the energy cells’ steady, reassuring hum and doing a systems-readiness check. That was better. Doing these things made him feel better. Doing these things made him feel good.
“He can’t hear you.” That was a different voice, saying that.
“The techs say he probably can. And he can probably hear you too, so watch what you say.”
“Can’t we private channel?” (The different voice.)
“No. We have to assume he can access them all too, so unless you want to bump helmets or use two cups and a string or something, watch what you say.”
“Sheesh.” (The different voice.)
He did not know what “Sheesh” meant.