Spaceside
Authors: Michael MammayNarrator: R.C. Bray
Duration: 7h 58m
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐🌑🌑
Tags: sci-fi - detective - action
Like previous book (which wa boring for the last 30-90 minutes), this one is for the first 30-90.
I’m not sure why it takes so long to build up tension/plot, but it was boring as hell.
There was close to nothing to do on the planet this time.
Good action close to the end and some plot twists, lots of great quotes. But lots of places where I was bored…
Quotes:
Everyone playing the game was intelligent—leaders in their field—but they’d stepped into my world. They saw individual moves, where I saw combinations. They thought sequentially, while I thought simultaneously. It wasn’t their fault. I had a lifetime of practice, and for all the complexity of Battlesim!™, it was still a game, and simple compared to real combat.
My office had clear walls, which on a good day gave me a measure of privacy in a mostly open-floor-plan building. On bad days it reminded me of a fishbowl, where people could view the mass murderer behind the glass from a safe distance.
I didn’t respond for a few seconds, hoping that the awkward silence would prompt him to say more. A lot of people can’t handle silence.
Taking charge and moving forward always beat sitting still and waiting for others to act. When others acted, I had to react, which immediately put me behind.
Some part of me — a big part — wanted to figure things out. I wanted to take all the coincidences and break them to my will, shape them into an answer. It made me feel somehow more alive. It made me feel relevant again - and in charge of my own fate.
Nothing had changed with what I had done, or what he had done, but the shared experience somehow spread the weight of it, made it not quite so heavy.
He landed in a dead-end job where he’d be in charge of some things that didn’t matter much and ran mostly on their own, and he’d serve out the rest of his time in obscurity. Unlike me, it would eat Stirling up from the inside. He didn’t have the personality to handle that sort of thing.
The last thing she needed was to waste an hour of a busy day babysitting a retired colonel. That fit my needs as well. If I found something of interest today, it would make it up the chain almost immediately. But I had a better chance of controlling the spread of information with the sergeant than I did with the major.
She’d done the impossible for me, and I owed her. I put her on my long mental list of great people who did things they’d never get credit for.
That was one benefit to taking action in the civilian world over the military. In the army, I’d have had a lot of people helping me, following my orders. There’s good and bad to that. It puts a ton of pressure on a leader to get it right. Make a mistake and people who trust you end up getting killed. Sometimes even when you didn’t make a mistake, people who trusted you got killed. I’d made decisions in my career that I still played back in my head over and over, and I couldn’t find anything I’d have done differently. But sometimes they still turned to shit. In the civilian world, if I made a mistake, it only affected me. I could live with that. Not being responsible for the lives of others made it easier to try something that might or might not work.
In the civilian world, if I made a mistake, it only affected me. I could live with that. Not being responsible for the lives of others made it easier to try something that might or might not work.
Part of me wanted to hug her, but the smarter part of me wanted to smack her. … She didn’t see the danger, wrapped as she was in the imaginary, invincible armor of youth.
I’d played a stupid game where I didn’t understand the stakes, and now that they had become fully apparent, I found myself three moves behind.
Hate is an emotion for someone who has the luxury of better options.
I was a few centimeters taller, but her commanding presence made her height irrelevant.
It’s always nice to know you’re working with professionals, even if it doesn’t work in your favor at the moment.
I’d known the answer before I asked, but I wanted him to say no out loud so that it weighed on him the next time I asked for something.
A wise man once told me that hope is not a great planning tool.
But he had to pretend he knew, because nothing would destroy a unit like thinking their commander didn’t know.
The anxiety had sloughed off the soldiers now that they had a purpose. In the air, we had no control; whatever happened, we were strapped in the back and along for the ride. Here, with our feet on the ground, we could at least shoot back. That made all the difference in the world to infantry.
The destruction of fourth platoon could have been a single actor with the right weapon system. But the soldiers wouldn’t see it that way. Their friends died, and they might want to lash out, regardless of if they had the right target.
I found that it took too much of my attention away from the things happening around me, and though the local platoon leader would lead that fight, I liked to remain aware. The distant leaders could break in and talk to me as they needed.
They’d see me humping alongside them, sharing the same hardships, not taking any privileges. That would earn me some points. Points that I might need to cash in at some time in the future if somebody decided to kill me. Soldiers are funny like that. An enemy or an outsider, and they could turn off emotion and do what they needed to do. One of their own? Not so much. I needed to be one of their own.
Changing leadership during a mission was a standard procedure, but one that never went one hundred percent smoothly.
Soldiers did things for leaders for reasons that reached beyond the understanding of outsiders. So many intangible factors played into loyalty that to try to make sense of it . . . I couldn’t. I didn’t know the relationships.
Information overload could be a real problem for a leader. Lieutenants could get so focused on all the systems feeding into their helmets that they missed basic things going on around them. Everybody drew the line in a different place, depending on their own capability and experience.
It was a weird feeling, rooting for the people who had forced me into this difficult situation, but that’s where I found myself. The Cappans weren’t really my enemy, and the Omicron soldiers weren’t really my friends, but those things became less relevant when the shooting started. The soldiers around me did what they had to do to survive, and I couldn’t fault them for that. All the subtleties and politics stopped mattering when you hit the ground humping a rifle.
Distantly, I think I recognized the flaw in that thinking, but that sort of self-analysis is better saved for outside of the war zone.
“I guess we deserved it, though. Picked up a lot of paychecks on easy missions in the past. The bill always comes due though, right”
With our five the total number stood at twenty-two out of an original hundred and sixty. That put us right around an eighty-five percent casualty rate, which well exceeded what any unit could expect to take and still function. But here we were, continuing. If we had been the good guys, people would call it heroic. We weren’t the good guys.
The simpler the answer, the easier it is to lie. … I said, cutting him off before he could finish his question. I said it slowly, in a tone combat veterans would recognize. The tone that accompanied the thousand-kilometer stare of a man who had seen too much.
People always wanted to believe in heroes, though the truth of the stories rarely lived up to the myth. Somewhere somebody would know that she and I didn’t get along, so my positive report about her would hold even more credibility.