Now my fireteam had a new sergeant, and they were stationed at battalion HQ, wondering if they’d done anything wrong. Nobody believed the bullshit story that our EOT had been pulled out of Teskor because the mission was over; stupid UNEF HQ hadn’t even been smart enough to rotate in another EOT, they simply abandoned Teskor. Sure, that didn’t look suspicious at all, EOTs were still in place all over the sector, except for the one village where I’d been meeting with the burgermeister. Here’s how thin UNEF’s cover story was: the crew chief on the Dumbo that I flew to the Launcher, a guy I’d never met in my life, asked me what I’d done that UNEF had to pull our EOT out of Teskor. There were rumors of a scandal, rumors so juicy that they had flown around the planet at the speed of light. All the infosec measures implemented by UNEF could be defeated by two guys sharing a rumor over their zPhones.

CHAPTER SIX    FORT ARROW

At the Launcher complex, I reported to a Captain Price in the admin building, a structure UNEF had taken over from the Ruhar who had managed the Launcher operations. Coming in from the airfield, I saw a whole lot of Ruhar outside the fence line of the base UNEF called Fort Arrow. Since humans didn't know how to operate or maintain the giant Launcher railgun that shot cargo into orbit, the biggest change had been which flag flew over the base, hamsters still ran the reactor and the rest of the Launcher complex. UNEF had carved Fort Arrow out of the workers' town that grew up next to the fusion reactor, taking over the existing buildings and putting minimal effort to repurpose them for military use. It made sense, UNEF wasn't planning to stay on Paradise long enough to invest in infrastructure. There was a semi-secure corridor between the airfield and Fort Arrow, on either side of the corridor were hamsters going on about their lives.

Captain Price's aide kept me waiting almost an hour, while I sat and watched the door to Price's office. He was in there, I could hear him talking on the phone, and long silences. It wasn't like he was so busy that he couldn't take a few minutes to welcome me aboard. They hadn't served breakfast on the Dodo, I was hungry and wanted to scrounge up some food before the dining facility shut down. Finally, Price stepped into his doorway, looked at me in a distinctly unfriendly manner, and grunted when I got to my feet and saluted him. "Bishop." It wasn't a greeting so much as a statement.

"Yes, sir, Sergeant Bishop reporting." There were no order papers for me to hand to him, everything was on our phones or tablets. In his office, he didn't tell me to sit, I stood at semi-attention to the right of the doorway.