TGoaW-116

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==Chapter 116 - The Glow of a Worm inside a Child's Eye==
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"We can thank god..
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...that was a closed hearing." Victor observed. "How's she doing, Pat?"
"Corpman Wei says she's sedated and sleeping." Patrick responded, "I'm not sure what set her off. What are you going to do about the Board?"
Victor made a sour face, "Housecleaning...but Christ, Pat, your sister's sixteen. She should be-oh hell, I don't know, dreaming about prom dates. Not remembering...that, even if it's not terribly far from our own era or the era of our parents."
"Further you get from the capital, the more it happens, Vic." Patrick mused, watching the traffic on the avenues below the palace. "My family are pretty privileged, and Kowloon as a system doesn't get raided much...but there's kids on Hood IV who've had to fight and watched people die in their damned back-yards. People who've had family members stepped on by 'Mechs-right in front of them, and it still happens so often it's not worth more than a couple lines in a report and gets almost no press at all."
"I'm going to do better." Victor stated.
"Can't do it alone." Patrick observed.
"I know. I'm going to make some replacements, once I'm coronated, it's not going to be popular. There may be...no, there will be pushback. We've got a deadline of thirty-sixty-seven, and reform is hard."
"Yes it is." Patrick observed. "but that sounds like you're making a play now."
"I am. I'll need support to fix this mess. I just watched a traumatized sixteen year old school men who've been in service several times longer than she's been alive."
"Hank would've been even rougher." Pat commented.
"Henry's at least legally an adult. When you reorganized the Kowloon Militia, how bad was it?"
"Not terribly bad, Stonecipher at least knew how to promote and retain based on competency for the Ground forces, and Cartwright was a Rockjack and understood space operations, so is Li, The main issues I had to deal with, were supply chain and pilferage problems-and those were minor compared to the mess we saw during the Forties in the Regulars. I had it pretty easy. I only had to relieve, like, two hundred people out of an organization in the thousands and three fourths of that were civilian contractors or Mercenaries."
"You didn't 'ding' Green when you refused to renew him."
"Green was clean." Patrick observed, "He was just too expensive to keep on the payroll."
"Dad used to say the good mercs usually were. Grandmother made the same comment, only she was complaining about how hard it is to keep good officers from going merc."
"We're going to need to do something different." Pat mused. "I have to get Lizzie home in time for her doctors to arrive. You got a plan for your reforms?"
"I have an idea, I need help with the actual Plan."
"Well, it's a start. Who do you have in mind?"
"I'm considering Morgan Kell."
"That's a good choice. I take it your Great Aunt is off the table?"
"Yes. I love her to death, but I also paid attention to the barracks-talk when the OCs and instructors didn't think I could hear it, and did a little checking. She's not the kind of officer we need at that level. After I get the crown, I'll be asking her to step down and retire. But the AFFC has a major problem and it's not just integration of the two states."
"Purges?"
"It looks like it." Victor said tiredly, "We're going to need to purge, and we're going to need to restructure whole bloody branches of the service."
"So that's why your sock puppet wanted my sister in front of that board."
"Yeah. I want to start with the Navy. I want to borrow some of your 'rockjacks'."
Pat nodded, "I'll cut the transfer orders when I get back to the Apartments, do you have a list of names?"
"A few." Victor nodded, "You'll have the list before you leave the government complex tonight. A problem's been revealed, we get ahead of it."
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