Daniels studied her for a moment, his mind momentarily dwelling on the pleasures no doubt to come later tonight, his eyes equally dwelling on the chief sources of those pleasures. She was wearing earrings and a few subtle but highly effective touches of make-up - cosmetics were officially frowned upon by Milli-com Command, not that anyone seemed to be willing to take any notice of such minor infringements. She seemed to have selected a dress uniform that was a size too small for her slender frame, the dark material of her tightly buttoned and belted trousers and tunic emphasising the contours of her hips and breasts, giving Daniels a deeply pleasing preview of those assets that had first drawn his attention to her in the first place.
Checking the details of his own uniform, the gleaming colonel's stars on his epaulettes, the row of polished decorations and service awards on his tunic breast, he stepped forward to greet her, his most charming and dashing senior officer class smile fixed on his lips. She was turning her head in his direction and he increased the pace of his dashing stride towards her, drawing in his slight paunch an extra vital inch or so. He forced himself to undergo weekly sessions in the officers' gym, but it was a constant battle against the temptations of the hospitality on offer in the senior officers' mess, and-
"Damn fine show, eh, Daniels? And what about this champers? Damn good stuff. It's a '72 vintage, if I'm not much mistaken."
Daniels turned, his heart sinking as soon as he had felt the first insistent tug on his elbow. Major Xavier Sisca-Morgan was a notorious ass and an idiot of the highest order. He was, however, also unfortunately the nephew of Field Marshal Sisca-Morgan, commander of the Karthage campaign being waged from another deck twenty-two levels below. If Major Sisca-Morgan realised that people were only willing to give him even the time of day purely on account of who his uncle was, then the braying fool certainly gave no indication of it.
Daniels did his best to keep his smile fixed on his face while he forced himself to respond to this most unwelcome of interruptions to the night's pleasures.
"I'm sorry, major, l don't think I quite follow..."
Daniels watched, his anger growing, as the grossly corpulent Sisca-Morgan took a slurp from his champagne glass and noisily swilled its contents around inside his mouth. Daniels felt it was definitely to Sisca-Morgan's advantage that only the Milli-com security personnel were allowed to go armed on the strategy bridge. If Daniels had had his regulation sidearm on him, he wasn't certain he couldn't be held responsible for his actions, no matter who the uncle of his would-be victim might have been.
"Yes, definitely the '72," concluded Sisca-Morgan, swilling down the rest of what had clearly been only one of many glasses of the night. "Such a fine vintage, and so rare too, ever since those damned Norts attacked the vineyard worlds in the Grenoble system. Such barbarity! I tell you, Daniels, it takes things like that to remind you what it is we're fighting this war for!"
Sometimes Daniels managed to ask himself if his years of working in Milli-com, far removed from the real horrors of the actual warzones, hadn't perhaps made him callous or at least flippant to the realities of the carnage of the war they were all engaged in. At such times, it was almost reassuring to encounter fools like Sisca-Morgan, if only to remind himself of just how far he still had to fall before he became a complete officer class horse's arse.
"Indeed, my dear Sisca-Morgan," he managed to say with only the barest veneer of politeness. "Why, just imagine how much less the tragedy would have been if those damn Norts had decided to lay waste to something that really mattered, like say, a major centre of population in one of the core systems, instead of a few miserable and thinly populated agricultural planets. We might have lost a few billion people, but at least we would still have the benefit of this year's latest grape crop to aid the war effort. Now, excuse me, major, but I've just seen General Vallo and I really must have a word with him about the latest intelligence reports."
With that, he was gone, leaving behind him a Major Sisca-Morgan whose facial expression was set in a perfect "O" of astonishment. Daniels's thoughts were on the main prize of the night. That foxy, curvaceous signals lieutenant from Deck 375. For the moment, at least, all thoughts of the damage he might have just inflicted on his command staff career were temporarily forgotten. Tonight belonged to the pursuit of more immediate and pressing concerns.
He couldn't see the girl, but he didn't think it would take him long to track her down. After that, there would be a few drinks, some jokes and maybe a few only slightly exaggerated tales about the important role he had played in the planning of Operation Hammerfall, the event they were all here to celebrate tonight. Then, after that, back to his private quarters, hopefully, where he already had a bottle of champagne on ice. And then, after that...
"Ah, Major Daniels. Just the man I was hoping to bump into."
Daniels turned, ready to give short shrift to this latest obstacle in the path of tonight's pleasures. He stopped short, the brush off excuse dying on his lips as soon as he saw the colour of the uniform of the officer beside him. Strategy & Planning personnel like Daniels wore dark green. Communications & Signals staffers like his intended sleeping partner for the night wore dark blue. There were hundreds of people in the room wearing both kinds of uniforms. The man beside him was different, however. He wore the neutral grey of the Southern Security Service. The much-feared S-Three; guardians of the Souther military's precious hoard of secrets and black bag intelligence operations, the less of which Daniels knew about the better, in his opinion.
As was customary with S-Three officers, the man's tunic bore no name tag or identifying insignia other than the rank stars on his shoulder epaulettes, but Daniels didn't need to see any name tag to know the identity of the man now talking to him.
"Colonel Marckand," he stammered, taking a gulp of champagne in a desperately unsuccessful attempt to disguise his obvious unhappiness. No conversation with any S-Three office was ever that welcome, particularly if the S-Three operative was one of Marckand's notably grim reputation.
"Excuse me, colonel," continued Daniels, "but I really must have a word with General Vallo about the latest intelligence reports. Perhaps, later we can talk, when I've finished my urgent business with the general?"
Marckand smiled. The change in expression didn't improve the look of his features, not with those three, long raw-edged parallel scars that scored through the skin of one side of his face, running all the way from his jaw and up into his hairline.
"General Vallo left fifteen minutes ago, Daniels, so I'm afraid your conversation will have to wait. As will your other urgent business with that attractive young thing from Deck 375."
Daniels gulped down more champagne in panic. Goddamn S-Three, snooping into everything! Keeping tabs on everyone! Wasn't there anything that happened here on Milli-com that they didn't know about?
"What is it I can do for you, colonel?"
Again Marckand smiled. "Operation Hammerfall. An audacious scheme. Some might say controversial, even. Others might even say ruthless and cold-blooded. You're certain of its chances of success?"
Daniels relaxed somewhat now, feeling himself to be on safer ground. They had spent months planning this operation and he was intimately familiar with every detail of it. Dozens of senior officer careers, Daniels's included, depended on its outcome, and all involved were supremely confident that medals and promotions would be coming their way once it was all over.
"We certainly think so, colonel, and so does Grand Marshal Cohen. If you want to discuss the matter with him, I'm sure he'll be amenable to keeping our colleagues in S-Three fully informed of the situation."
Almost on cue, there was a burst of laughter from the far side of the room. Daniels followed the intelligence officer's cold gaze, seeing the grand marshal standing there with a group of his cronies, few of them below the rank of two-star general. Even the man standing attentively behind the grand marshal and responsible for keeping his cognac glass topped up was a full-blown colonel. The figure beside the grand marshal was tall, beautiful and blue-skinned.
One of the so-called GI Dolls. Officially, she was designated as the grand marshal's aide and bodyguard, but while the diaphanous evening gown she wore left little to the imagination, Daniels couldn't see any sign that she was wearing any kind of hidden sidearm beneath the clinging, transparent material of the garment. Or indeed, that she was really wearing anything else at all. The grand marshal stood with his cognac in one hand and his other hand blatantly pawing at the buttocks of his female GI companion while he laughed and joked with his cronies. Perhaps that's what he's doing, Daniels pondered somewhat bitterly; searching her for hidden weapons, to assure himself that his bodyguard was indeed armed in readiness to protect him. If the esteemed grand marshal remained true to form on these occasions, then a few cognacs later the public body search he was currently conducting of his bodyguard's figure would soon move onto even more intimate areas.
"Oh, I don't think we need interrupt the grand marshal, especially when he seems to have other pressing business in hand at the moment," commented Marckand, with the hint of a knowing smirk on his scarred features.
Daniels found his glass suddenly empty. Before he had fully registered the fact, Marckand had plucked it out of his hand and replaced it with another full one from the tray of a passing orderly. And now they were moving, the S-Three man laying an arm round his shoulders and leading them off to a quieter part of the room. The crowd parted before them, highly decorated staff officers instinctively shrinking away from the presence of the grey-uniformed intelligence man. Daniels risked a helpless glance behind him, searching desperately for his lieutenant from Deck 375, but it was too late. He was already in the clutches of the man from S-Three.
"No, Daniels, I was wondering about the security implications of Operation Hammerfall. It must have been quite a feat to plan such a huge operation and not allow any hint of it to leak out. Surely our old friends in Nordland must have some hint of what's going on?"
One part of Daniels - the part that hadn't already consumed half a dozen glasses of champagne and a few pep pills to give him the courage to dazzle that foxy little signals thing with his wit and charm - knew that he shouldn't be talking about this. Another, even more sober, part wondered if the S-Three man hadn't slipped something into that last glass of champagne, some devious substance brewed up by the S-Three chemists to loosen the tongues of interrogation subjects. But it was too late, and Daniels found his pride in what they had accomplished in planning this momentous operation all too willing to come surging to the surface.
"Oh, they know we're planning something in Nordstadt, but they've got completely the wrong idea about what it is. That's the genius of what we've been cooking up all these months, misdirecting the enemy as to our true intentions."
A questioning, silently encouraging look from Marckand was all it took to bring the rest of it to spill out.
"Of course, it's been impossible to hide the depletion of manpower in the Nordstadt sector, but the Norts have no idea of the true situation. We think that they believe we still have over two hundred thousand troops on the ground in Nordstadt. In fact, the real figure is almost less than half that."
"And how has this been achieved? The Norts haven't noticed any evidence of an evacuation operation in Nordstadt?"
Daniels allowed himself a brief smile of smug pride. "They haven't noticed it because there hasn't been one. We've done it all through natural wastage. Our wounded and KIAs are airlifted out of the battle zone as normal, but the supply shuttles are running mostly empty on the return journey, with only the barest minimum in reinforcements being brought back into the warzone. Our killed and wounded casualty rates run at about six thousand a week in Nordstadt. It hasn't taken that long to run our strength down to our current levels just by letting the war take its natural toll."
"And the Norts still haven't realised this?"
Another smug smile from Daniels. "We have dozens of signals units in place, sending communications back and forth between non-existent forward combat units and equally non-existent command centres. If the Norts are listening into our communications, and of course they are, then the amount of standard radio traffic they're intercepting tells them we're still there in force."
"And the Norts have taken the bait?"
This elicited an even greater smile of satisfaction from the strategy officer.
"Absolutely. Hook, line and sinker. They know we're in a weakened state in Nordstadt, but they don't know nearly the full extent of it. They've been moving in reinforcements for months now in the build-up to their next full assault. They're obsessed with Nordstadt. It's like some kind of Holy Grail to them and they'll do anything to drive us out of the place for good. That's the whole linchpin to Hammerfall, the realisation that the Norts have such a massive strategic blind spot when it comes to anything to do with the place. Say what you want about old Cohen, but he was the first one to see the opportunity and have the courage to seize it. If we'd only launched Hammerfall years ago, then God knows how many lives we could have-"
"Exactly how many enemy troops are we talking about?"
Daniels's lips went dry at the question. Just thinking about the enormity of what was about to happen was still staggering when you stepped back to contemplate it. He eagerly accepted the full champagne glass that Marckand pressed into his hand.
"According to the latest intelligence reports? Roughly one million, two hundred thousand Norts, most of them sitting hidden in reserve positions all round the perimeter of the Nordstadt crucible, and all of them waiting for the final assault order. That figure includes a confirmed count of sixteen entire divisions of their finest Kashar and Kashan Legion stormtroopers and four divisions of their Nordska Guard armoured elite. They've been building up their assault forces for months now, ever since they first detected our slowdown in feeding fresh reinforcements into the city. They think we're suffering a failure of confidence in continuing to hold Nordstadt and now they're taking full advantage of that fact. Of course, that's exactly what we want them to think and the more troops they think we've got there, the more of their own troops they're willing to commit to take the city."