The Last Charge by Jason M. Hardy

Author:Jason M. Hardy [Hardy, Jason M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780451461834
Google: XIwKGQAACAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 1660127
Publisher: Roc
Published: 2007-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

16

Marik Palace

New Edinburgh, Stewart

Marik-Stewart Commonwealth

12 May 3138

Cole Daggert only appeared to walk slowly.

He was taller than most of the people he passed in the halls of the palace, and most of his height was in his legs. His motions were smooth but his strides were long, and he covered a lot of ground while looking unhurried.

People talked about it all the time, making the kind of small talk people make when all they know about a person is his appearance. They wondered how he could deal with Anson Marik in the middle of a losing war, suffering setback after setback, and remain calm and unhurried.

His reply was always the same. “What you see is my way of hurrying.” People would laugh as if it were a joke, but it was nothing more or less than the direct truth.

He was now hurrying to a briefing with the captain-general and most of the ranking military officers on the planet. He was going to be late to the meeting, delayed by a conversation with someone who had just arrived on-planet. The assembled commanders, especially the captain-general, would not be happy at his late arrival, but they would understand once he told them what he was doing. Then they would be even unhappier.

The palace on Stewart was an architectural mishmash, an uninspired appropriation of the major design movements of the Stewart Commonality and the early days of the Free Worlds League. This particular hallway mimicked the New Braddockism of the late twenty-third century, with its emphasis on nontraditional geometric forms. Designed as a black hexagon with ridges along its top three sides, its walls bowed outward, which, as far as Daggert was concerned, did nothing but waste space and make it difficult to design the adjacent rooms. The fact that those rooms tended to ape styles like Diaspora Revivalism and Crooked Classicism made the whole building look thrown together, a Frankenstein ensemble with no attempt to stitch the parts together.

He hadn’t worried about the appearance of the building much, of course, since he had arrived on Stewart. One possible benefit of the current situation was that Daggert had too much on his mind to worry about niceties like architecture.

The black floor of the hallway was dark and shiny, and he could see his dim reflection moving underneath him. That was when he realized he had been walking with his head down.

He lifted it just in time to pass the first security checkpoint. Then the second. Then he went through the third and was in the situation room.

It didn’t seem to matter what building they were in; situation rooms throughout the Inner Sphere—at least the ones Daggert had been in—all looked about the same. A large, austere table, chairs you could never quite get comfortable in, and displays. Lots and lots of displays, on the walls, set into the table, occasionally suspended from the ceiling. Troop statistics, news feeds and maps, maps, maps. Daggert found it a little sad that walking into a room like this felt more like coming home than walking into his own quarters or even his house.

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