Jack of Harts

Me and Louis Mattioli had a lot of disagreements over the years, but there was one that always stuck in his craw. One he could never forgive me for. I tried to steal his cyber. I didn’t. He was dead, but I can see his point of view. I talked Natalie into fighting on rather than shutting down. I got her to stay with me for a while. I think she was coming around to the idea of staying permanently when she got news he was alive. Not that she told me. It was classified. But it’s where she went when she left. To be with the man she’d been born to protect. But her time with me changed her. Not much, you understand, but it was enough that he noticed. And he she didn’t erase the parts of her that changed when she linked back up with him. She kept the parts of her that had grown. Their relationship was just a little bit different after that, and the fact that it was festered in him.

Epsilon Reticuli was supposed to be the finale of our Russian Campaign. We sent what was possibly our most powerful fleet to crush their largest fleet base, and Aneerin sent six of us Cowboys to support the assault. To protect the fleet. He had a bad feeling about the whole thing, you understand, and he told the Alliance they shouldn’t do it. They didn’t listen, so he trusted me to help the fleet if things fell through. Well, we walked into a trap, and I got everybody out that I could. It might have been the largest fleet battle I’d seen at the time. We could practically walk across the missile volleys. Louis Mattioli didn’t manage it. One moment he was guarding one of our best cruisers, the next he and the cruiser was an expanding fireball. We lost a lot of good men and women that day. And a lot of good ships. Though not all of them stayed dead. And some of their deaths were greatly exaggerated. But that is another story.

Procyon was the key to our first offensive campaign of The War. The Russians had decided to involve themselves in The War with the Shang and their Chinese puppets, and so the Western Alliance decided to show them how bad an idea that was. Louis Mattioli was right there at my side through most of that offensive. We argued about everything from politics to religion. Star Trek or Star Wars. Whether a proper sky was blue or red. You name it, we argued about it. But when it came to shooting Russians, we were always in sync. And one of the things he’d picked up on Mars was a fluency in Russian that was impressive. He could pass for a native speaker, and he used that more than once to confuse the enemy. Can’t tell you how many times he got onto their command channels and ordered some poor Ivan out of position before taking advantage of the momentary confusion. The man was an artist at confusing our foes, and it was a pleasure to watch him work.