Jack of Harts

Charles had a real problem in the Hyades Cluster. The Chinese owned it and everybody in it. The planetary managers and landowners were Chinese. But the majority of the people who lived out there were Tibetan, Korean, Japanese, or any of the other dozens of populations the Chinese conquered on Earth. They got sent out to the stars so the Chinese would have some more breathing room on Earth. And us handing administration over to the Free Chinese didn’t help. The locals considered them just another batch of racist Chinese bastards. So they didn’t cooperate with us. Charles thought that if he dressed up in a business suit and treated them as equals, he could bring them over to our cause. He walked the streets without nametags, ranks, or visible weapons, and just talked to them. Visited their businesses. Bought their products. Made friends. That changed everything.

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.