The office has been shifted slightly, with desks pressed together to form a large rectangle in front of the door. Cyryl is sitting on one of the two longer sides, and Tymon across from him. All the paperwork for every resource is stacked on the table, and they’re going through them one by one. To Cyryl’s right and Tymon’s left is the uncompleted paperwork, and on the other side of the long, combined table is the finished work. It’s not in a peldak’s nature to waste food, so set between the two men are a dozen cups of coffee, long since cooled, with about half the cups finished. Neither are coffee drinkers, so the caffeine has left both men jittery, but it left their minds able to focus on the work in front of them. Though both are bouncing their legs or rapidly shaking their hands when not in use.
Neither of them turned the telenel on.
“Why are you here, again?” Tymon asks as he reads through one of the cargo manifests. Unlike normal days, there’s less than a tenth of the normal volume of strategic resources, as most trains aren’t carrying anything.
“I’m helping you,” Cyryl says, tapping his feet under the table.
“Why?”
“I planned to work all day anyway, so I might as well.”
“Usually convicts don’t willingly add to their sentence.”
“Usually bureaucrats shut up when someone takes some of their work load.”
The pair continue to work, mostly in silence. Pencils scratch the papers, they gulp down coffee, the paper cups gently tap against the table, and there’s the slight ruffling of clothes that accompany each small movement.
“Hey,” Tymon says.
“What?”
Tymon takes a little time to gather his words. “You… were recently in the military.”
“Yep.”
“You were deployed to the new worlds?”
“Yeah, in the airship corps.”
“Did… you fight in the first war? The one that destroyed the Leonid Empire?”
“No,” Cyryl says, looking at a cargo manifest but not reading any of the words. “I enlisted after peace was established. Everyone was upset about how much we bled for basically nothing, so a lot of guys signed up then, knowing there’d be a second war.”
Tymon nods, looking at his cargo manifest and actually continuing his work. “Ah. Then you trained, got ready for the next war, then went all out on the states that popped up after the empire was dismantled.”
“That’s about right, yeah.”
“Did you… talk to a lot of people who did participate in the first war?”
“Yeah, of course. They were all itching for revenge, so most of those guys stayed in the service, and swore they wouldn’t leave until the Protectorate controlled every inch of ground on all nine worlds.”
Tymon nods, continuing his work.
Cyryl looks up from the manifest, “why do you ask?”
Tymon taps his pencil on the desk. “How bad was it? That first war, I mean. I-I heard the news reports, and all that, but I never… asked anyone who was there.”
Cyryl sighs, leans back in his chair, crosses his arms, and looks to the ceiling. “Everyone painted a pretty bad picture. Terrible, undeveloped terrain on every world. The weather was garbage no matter where you went. There were no roads, or large ports, or big cities. At first, we just fought the Leonid Empire, and they were a pain, but it was manageable. But apparently a load of their subjects, or, basically everyone they ruled, hated them and saw our war as a chance to rise up. So we were fighting the Leonid military, and then we fought all these uprisings, and it was chaos. I heard stories about how one day we’d be working with the savages to fight against the Leonid, but then the next day, they’d go insane and start trying to kill us too. Ambushes every day, traps, raids, terrible diseases that’d make you bedridden for weeks. Plus, with our convoys being raided, and the lack of infrastructure, we couldn’t sustain much of an advance inland. We built ports along the coast, and had good control over the surrounding area, but too far in the jungles, or the deserts, or the plains or mountains, and it was basically impossible to keep our advances together. So,” Cyryl gestures with his hands, “we’d fight and bleed to push a hundred miles outside our territory, and it was pretty easy to defeat any army in our way. Then we’d fight to build a base and some outposts. If it weren’t the Leonid, then it was the locals who’d take up arms and start attacking our convoys. Then the far-out bases would start to starve, or run out of ammo, and then they have to be pulled back. Since,” he shrugged, “what were they supposed to do? Slaughter all the locals to make the raids stop? The combatants would blend in with the civilians, and if we ever tried to talk to them, they’d just shoot our messengers.”
Cyryl leans forward, his arms crossed on the table.
“The only way we could fight was with patrols, right?” Cyryl continues. “Send a squad or two out into the wilderness, wait until they get shot, and then kill anyone attacking them. Sometimes the locals would just watch us from a distance, but not attack, but not attack, so it wasn’t even a guaranteed strategy. It’s not like we could burn down villages and slaughter every one we saw. But the worst part, so I heard, was that sometimes those locals were armed with Leonid weapons, rather than sticks and rocks and bows. See, the Leonid Empire didn’t let the natives have guns, so most of them weren’t armed with anything too dangerous. But as the war went on, they started getting armed. We’d go on patrol and randomly get shot up. Some of the ambushes were intense, with artillery, or even some tanks buried up to their turrets, or our airships would get blown up if we tried to use them. What this all meant was, sometimes… a peldak would fall and their patrol would have to leave the body behind. You’ve heard about the grievous casualties we took in the fighting, and most came from that. Couldn’t bring them back to heal or revive them, so our soldiers were left to rot. This went on for like a decade.”
“Did we have trouble with the Leonid’s military?”
“Ehh,” Cyryl rocks his head back and forth to think. “Not in a straight fight, of course, but… You know, they weren’t stupid, so they stopped engaging in straight fights after the first few months. They had controlled these worlds for centuries, or so I heard, and knew the terrain better than we did. They had all these tricks up their sleeves, and the guys I talked to swore they worked with the locals more often than not.”
Tymon nods a few times, “good. Good, it was just tricks. Tricks from the Leonid, and the locals were hiding behind civilians.”
“That’s the long and short of it, from what I heard. Plus, we were fighting the planet as much as the people. Heh, when I first landed, I got bit by a bug and spent a week puking my guts out. It was just a lot of compounding failures that lead to what a shitty time it was.”
Tymon’s ears perk, and he looks up from his work. “But the Protectorate… did end up redeeming itself? In the second war?”
“Hah! Absolutely. That second war flew by like a dream! The opposition crushed, scores of territory annexed, hundreds of genocides stopped in their tracks.” With a smile, Cyryl returns to his work, “now the Protectorate is there to stay.”
“Good.” Tymon continues his work, “that’s good.”
Cyryl sets his pencil down, “oh right, but we didn’t conquer everyone. There were tons of smaller tribes, some with just a few thousand members, and some that were even smaller, who willingly accepted our rule.”
“Smart of them,” Tymon says with a rare smile.
“I remember walking into a few villages where they hailed us as heroes. They threw flowers at us, or gave us weird animal bone idols. It was the thought that counted, and they thanked us from saving them from some other tribe or other nation.”
Tymon snorts, “you didn’t accept a wife from one of the tribes?”
“Ha! Come on, you know that’s illegal. Plus those aliens are too short-“ his voice trails off, but the word choice doesn’t bother Tymon.
“Hmh,” Tymon pushes away from the desk. “I’m done with my list; I’m head down to reception to see if the couriers brought any more manifests.”
“Grab the coffee I left as well, no point in wasting it.”
Tymon casually raises his hand as he opens the door to leave.
It’s not a large thing, and Cyryl barely notices it himself as he gets back to work, but he decides to be a little nicer to Tymon going forward. Tymon may be far too short and much too weak to join the illustrious legions of the peldak war machine… but that doesn’t mean he isn’t a peldak. He’s doing the best he can here in the bureaucracy, going above and beyond what anyone could expect a man to do in a job that requires paperwork.
Plus, he is interested in the affairs of the military.
Tymon was embarrassed by the Protectorate’s showing in the first war, just like everyone else was. But unlike Cyryl, Tymon wasn’t able to jump on a ship and fly over to fix the mistakes himself. He had to stay home and wait for good news. He was relieved to hear that the second war fixed all the mistakes of the first, just like everyone else.