Chapter 83

Will,

Erica is in the brig! That fucktard Major Lynch has ordered her court martialed! Worse, right now I can do nothing to help her!

It's completely unfair. Both that Erica has been arrested, and the reasons for it. Fucking idiot Colonel Yarnway and his lackey Lynch. I so want to see Lynch hanging from a tree, not that there were any on Darling Downs, but I'm writing this from a cabin on Freya. The last of the Wadi troops were pulled off Darling Downs this morning. Erica isn't with me. She's being taken to Borneo on one of the corvettes. Our tank as well as Horace's tank are in a transport pod attached to the Peterbilt, a stagecoach class freighter that Freya escorted to Darling Downs so they could get the last equipment off before they abandon the planet. All that's left is to teleport the last few troops out.

And that's going to be tricky. The Sa'arm found the main base. It was pretty inevitable since they had been putting pressure on the entire front and Colonel Yarnway refused to allow any diversionary raids or tactics. It was as if he wanted to wave a huge flag for the Sa'arm saying, "Look here! There is a reason you keep running into trouble when you come this way."

The Sa'arm might be stupid, but it was like waving a red cape for a bull. (Or at least that's what Tanya noted when I asked her about it, I have no idea what that means.) [Oh, Tanya is Captain Tanya Walker. She commands Freya. I'll tell you more about her later in the letter. I first want to write about what happened to Erica.

So what happened was that once the Sa'arm found our base, they began sending waves of troops in our direction. Worse, it was clear that they were tunneling toward our position. The fact that the volcano we were in was starting to show signs of activity had Major Lynch swearing that any tunneling attempts would fail.

Erica didn't believe that. I didn't believe that, heck Gunny Mann and Gunny Wright didn't believe it, but Colonel Yarnway and Major Lynch insisted that we only had to defend the main entrance since the Sa'arm show no interest in building any air capable attack vehicles. They tried to set up a layered defense at the entrance. Major Lynch bragged that we'd kill so many Sa'arm they would be forced to retreat. That was a complete joke. Will, we only had the two tanks. The infantry had been similarly decimated. I think we officially had six companies, but in truth we only had just over two hundred effective warriors.

Will, the Sa'arm still had hundreds of thousands of warriors. I could say how many, but the initial landing was of more than one million warriors, and they had been reproducing since they first landed. Sure we were killing them in huge numbers in every fight, but that was mostly thanks to the use of mines and the fact that the Sa'arm approached in such large numbers that mortars could still wipe out huge numbers despite the inaccuracy caused by the wind.

Honestly, the tanks couldn't help much. At least not in a static defense. If we could have maneuvered, gotten behind the Sa'arm lines and used our cannon to break up their formations we might have had an opportunity to make a difference, but...

Damn Major Lynch. He had no imagination when it came to using the tanks. They are for offense and for aggressive defenses, not the bullshit he forced on everyone. Every tank we lost was motionless when it was hit. Against the Sa'arm our ability to move is our greatest asset, and this idiot refused to allow us to move and fight.

As you can imagine, while Fabio was there, he kept it from being a complete disaster, but once he and Jase were both sent back to Wadi, Major Lynch tried to exercise more control. Fabio made sure to exercise as much leeway as he could in interpreting our orders. We never dug in and buried the front of the tanks, even though Major Lynch almost always ordered that. I never understood that one. The Sa'arm can definitely detect the vibrations a tank engine gives out. In fact that was how Derek got taken down. That was after Lynch tried to take over. He ordered us to dig in, and put his command vehicle close to our position. We couldn't retreat even when we knew the Sa'arm were tunneling toward us. Derek's tank was swallowed by a sinkhole created by the Sa'arm. The crew felt the ground start to give way and abandoned the tank, but the truth was that the order that they not move was a direct cause of the loss of the tank.