Chapter 97: Recuperation
“Shouldn’t you be in the infirmary?”
Hunt looked up at the door to her office, belatedly identifying the speaker as being Admiral Miyazaki.
“According to Dr. Severide, and I quote, ‘if that damn fool stunt didn’t kill you, then neither will the aftereffects.’ And I can’t sit around doing nothing right now.”
She gave him “the look.” There were many orders and admonishments people in her place eventually learned to convey at a glance. For example, this one was best summed up as “if you’re in a position to worry about me, you’re in a position to get back to work, right the hell now.”
The fleet had lost more people in an hour than over the entire course of its existence, and the debacle over Venus had lost them more than the rest of the solar system combined.
And, a small, traitorous part of her mind whispered, perhaps it was a good thing that the biggest idiots of the disaster there had gotten themselves killed, leaving a straightforward path to proceed, not bogging down the fleet in a swamp of court-martials at the worst possible time.
But the losses had been heavy. Thirty-three battleships, nineteen battlecruisers, sixty-one heavy cruisers, a hundred and seven light cruisers and almost two hundred destroyers, though the estimate on the last group heavily depended on how many would ultimately be declared write-offs.
And yet … as the consequences of someone ramming two hundred and fifty battleships into the teeth of the heaviest defenses in the known galaxy, that was barely anything.
The fact that the enemy had done it anyway, not retreating even when the futility of their attempts had been made abundantly clear … there was something fundamentally wrong with this picture. Not to mention that they had only found bodies so far. Not a single survivor, just a whole lot of corpses, some of which seemed to have succumbed not to human fire, but suicide. Which would already be frustrating enough if it weren’t for the fact that, seemingly, the very [System] was on the enemy’s side, judging by the complete lack of kill notifications and kill XP.