Jack of Harts

The Hyades Cluster was something we’d never seen before. It was the most densely populated region of space short of the Solar System, and the Chinese owned it all, lock stock and barrel. They’d wiped out nearly every colony within a hundred lightyears, and we had to go in and root them out. We had to break them and take them, in the place they’d spent decades fortifying for just this kind threat. Well, as usual, Charles had a plan. Several plans, if we want to be precise. One was to send us Cowboys, and all the other hypercapable starfighter squadrons we had by then, out on raiding missions to hit their flanks. He really loved flank attacks. Hit the enemy where they didn’t expect to get hit. He could quote the Art of War frontwards and backwards. He used it all and more against the Chinese and the Shang.

You have to understand that Charles was never just about the grandiose plans. Oh, he had them in spades. Your toes would curl if I told you all of them. Heck, my toes curled more than once when he told me. But he also had the small bits of competence. The small plans. The backups. The fallbacks when the backups failed. He was always five moves ahead of you before you realized the game had even started. And that was on a slow day. He believed in being prepared for every single eventuality he could possibly think of. And he was always quick to ask other people what problems we thought might crop up. He was also ready for every single one of his plans to fail. He never froze when it happened. He just moved on and kept going. Never give up. Never surrender. And yes, he was a fan of classics.

Charles had a lot of plans when I met him. One he’d been working on for a good century before we met. He didn’t tell me about it until we’d worked with each other long enough that I actually trusted and respected him. I guess the feeling was mutual, because he laid the whole thing out for me. I loved it. The chance to frak both the self-appointed Great Families and the Shang at the same time? You could totally count me in on that. And the fact that it actually was a good idea? Seriously. It was a win-win-win. Building a new colony, deep in big A Alien space, further out than any of them thought we had any right to be, in the middle of the greatest war our part of the galaxy had seen in thousands of years? It was grandiose. And it had a real chance of changing everything for all of us if it worked. The Wolfenheim Project was worth the gamble.