TGoaW-55

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==Chapter 55 - The Glow of a Worm inside a Child's Eye==
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Blackjack School of Violence - Blackjack, Lyran Commonwealth - August 3050
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The whipsaw effect...
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...of being in the process of losing a ground fight, only to have the enemy surrender? well, It could hardly have been harder on the surviving cadets, than it was on their opponents.
"Okay, explain this to me again?"
"Your little sister threatened to orbom (Orbital Bombardment) the Falcon landing zones-after destroying their battlecruiser and crippling the escorting dropships." Cadet Hauptmann Mark Harris explained, "I wish I had a little sister with a fleet in her back pocket."
"My sister is thirteen." Henry observed.
"Yah, scary ain' it?" Shelby Hoffstein joined the boys at the mess table. "How's your mum, Mark?"
"Shaken up pretty bad." Mark admitted, "the fighting got REAL close to our house before...y'know?"
"Yeah. Hank, I knew you were filthy rich, but this? this is ******' ridiculous. What the hell landed you at Blackjack and not The Nagelring with the rest of the Noble Scions?" Mark really wanted to know.
"GPA of Two-point-five." Henry said, "I'm the dummy in the family, I couldn't qualify for Nagelring, hell, I didn't even pass the boards for CMA."
"Wait...you're like a pile of textbooks with legs!" Here Mark was making his observation based on...observation. "I mean, when you're not kicking three kinds of crap out of everyone in spars, anyhow."
"Yeeaaahh...about that...After getting my rejections from three major academies, I realized that wherever I managed to get in I needed to stop ****** off and be serious about it." Henry explained, "Hence spending freshman year asking every dumb question that hit me, and getting real familiar with the library. I decided I didn't want to end up dead because I didn't know my ass from a hole in the ground."
This made Mark and Shelby laugh. "No, seriously, where did your sister find a Lola?" Shelby pressed.
"She's the baroness Spider Moon, she's got the whole outer system as her fief...probably one of the rockjack families found one that could be salvaged." Henry speculated out loud. He knew the answer, and this was close enough to the truth to serve.
"Yeah...that's not the whole story. YOU have a TELL, Henry Ngo." Shelby teased.
"Then let's say it's not my secret to share and leave it there." he suggested.
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