Jack of Harts

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.

Charles is one of the reasons we won the Battle of Fort Wichita. Not saying I couldn’t have led us to success, you know. But he did a good job stepping up when our squadron commander and second got killed. That victory brought us closer to the Peloran. The Peloran volunteered to take one squadron from each Western Alliance nation after the battle, to fly them off their warships. Integral to that offer was that each squadron would be fully upgraded with top line Peloran tech, and that we could transmit everything we learned while working with the Peloran back home. Including insights on making their tech work with our tech. The Peloran picked our squadron to represent America. That made Charles the commander of the most advanced American fighter squadron in space overnight. It was a mighty fine feather in his cap. Others wanted that feather, and never forgave him for getting it.