Orphan Brigade by Henry V. O'Neil Page A

Force officers and more as representatives of their home worlds, and their different power plays were a constant source of friction. Their greed knew no bounds, to the extent that Olech had put an end to an earlier practice by which the Force would claim an entire planet as a military base by giving it the designation MC, for Military-­Controlled Planet.
    Over the years Olech had become skilled at thwarting these land grabs, but he was never free of the nagging doubt that the war was simply too large to be managed.
    Which was another reason for his special room. He knew that some of his critics referred to the boxy chair as Olech Mortas’s throne, and that they mocked it as nothing more than a high-­technology amusement park ride. In the privacy of his own thoughts, he sometimes agreed with that notion.
    Somewhere out there, in this limitless battlefield with so many uncontrollable variables and so many ways to be fatally wrong, waited an opponent whose very existence was doubted by some of his alliance partners. An opponent so advanced that it was able to create the Sims and use them to wage a proxy war without ever showing itself. The appearance of the alien—­whatever it had been—­was additional proof that the void contained entities that were simply beyond human comprehension. Just thinking of the shape-­shifting being that Jan had encountered was enough to drive him to distraction. As he always had in the past, Olech Mortas forced his mind from the things he could not control to the things he could.
    â€œOkay, that’s enough. Turn on the lights.” He allowed himself a rueful chuckle. “Bring me down to Earth.”
    In the seconds before his command was obeyed, the chairman glanced around in the blankness and imagined a tiny dot of light, carrying his only son back to the war.

 
    CHAPTER THREE
    â€œW elcome to First Brigade, Lieutenant. Please have a seat.” Colonel Jonah Watt returned Mortas’s salute from behind a large metal desk. The brigade’s headquarters stood on a wooded hill, and Watt’s office occupied one of its corners. Broad windows allowed him to observe the lower ground where the brigade’s three battalions were situated. Military-­Controlled Planet 1932, MC-­1932, had been wrested from the Sims early in the war. The Orphan Brigade was not the first unit to have occupied this ground, nor was it the brigade’s first home.
    Mortas sat down on an old couch facing the desk. The long trip to the war zone had ended the day before, but he still felt a sense of private accomplishment. Sealed in his transit tube and awaiting the loss of consciousness that would allow him to make the multi-­Step journey, he’d remembered a different tube and his first attempt to reach a fighting unit. Knowing how that other trip had ended, Mortas had been genuinely relieved when he awoke to find himself on the warship that would deliver him to the Orphan Brigade. He’d been even happier when his stiff gray uniform had been replaced by a set of weathered fatigues bearing the green, black, and brown of woodland camouflage. Every soldier he’d seen so far had been dressed the same way, and the slightly beat-­up appearance of his new clothes helped him to fit in.
    â€œI expect you’ve read the unit précis you were furnished.” Watt was stocky and in his midforties, with dark hair cut very close to his dark skin. His voice was calm and instructive. “So you already know that this brigade has a lineage that dates almost to the beginning of the war. What you don’t know, and what nobody knows, is exactly how this came to be an independent brigade.
    â€œThe records are quite spotty, not surprising given the chaos in the early years of this conflict, but I personally suspect we started out as the remnants of a decimated division or larger. It’s my understanding that casualty figures were so extreme at war’s start