Retreat Hell Read Online Free Page B

promoted based on their connections, rather than their actual competence.  But Avalon needed experienced officers more than it needed to adhere to a strict promotion timetable and Jasmine had been promoted – faster, perhaps, than was wise.
    She looked over at Colonel Stalker, standing on his own in the rain, and wondered how he managed to seem so impassive.  Didn't the deaths bother him?  He’d been in the Marines since before Jasmine had even entered Boot Camp, let alone the Slaughterhouse; hell, she rather suspected he’d been in the Marines long before Jasmine had even heard about them for the first time.  Was he simply too experienced to truly feel each and every death?  Or was he merely hiding his feelings and concentrating on the living?
    Jasmine had known people died from a very early age, ever since her aunt had been killed in an accident on her homeworld.  She’d served beside Marines who’d been killed in the line of fire, leaving their former comrades to mourn their deaths and move on as best as they could.  But she hadn’t had anyone die under her command until she’d been promoted for the first time.  And yet, losing the young men and women of Avalon hurt worse than losing fellow Marines.
    She puzzled over it as the preacher assured his audience, once again, that the dead had gone to a better place.  Jasmine didn't doubt it.  Lieutenant Travis had been a good officer, one of many young men to enter the army after the old Council had been sidelined ... and his promotion had been well-deserved.  Jasmine vaguely recalled meeting him once, during a review of the CEF’s infantry companies.  In hindsight, she rather wished she’d paid more attention to the young man.  She’d had to look at his file to remember his face, before she’d even come to the funeral.  The picture someone had placed on the coffin, before the pallbearers had lowered it into the ground, had been of the Lieutenant as a young child, smiling happily as he ran through the field.  There had been endless promise in his smile, something that had made her start to tear up before she pulled herself firmly under control.  Somehow, the picture hadn't been him .
    He wasn't just young , she thought.  He was uncommitted .
    Maybe it wasn't fair, but Marines were committed in a way that few soldiers and civilians could grasp.  She’d left her homeworld, spent seven months in Boot Camp and another two years at the Slaughterhouse, then signed up for a ten-year hitch as a Marine Rifleman.  She had left her previous life behind, knowing that when she returned to her homeworld she would have nothing in common with her brothers and sisters.  Hell, the Marines were her brothers and sisters now.  But Lieutenant Travis could have gone home any time he liked – and no one would have looked at him as a potential monster in human clothing.
    She shook her head, running her fingers through her short dark hair, cropped close to her skull.  The Empire had had barely a percentage point of a percentage point of its vast population in uniform, even counting the vast number of uniformed bureaucrats and REMFs who added nothing to the military’s ability to fight, but detracted from it at every conceivable opportunity.  It was unusual for anyone on Earth to know someone who served or had served in the military personally, a pattern that was duplicated on most of the Core Worlds.  Few of them had any real idea what the military was like, allowing themselves to be influenced by entertainment movies rather than reality.  It had given them a skewed idea of what it was like to defend the Empire.
    But on Avalon, almost everyone had served in the military, various local defence forces or knew someone who had served.  There was little dispute over the value of the military ... or the need to keep a formidable force at the ready.  And yet ... she couldn't help thinking that Councillor Travis was likely to cause real problems.  What would it mean for