And he had lost anyway.
A cold emptiness like the void of space between galaxies opened up in his stomach and it went all the way down. He was empty, physically empty so that a slight wind could have come along and blown him away. The weariness in his arms and legs turned to paralysis and the buzzing in his head, the grinding, whining buzzsaw headache he always felt during combat operations unfolded into an entire machine shop of torment. Every moment of the battle for Denver waited there, separated and dissected, awaiting his careful analysis. He would spend the rest of his life, he knew, going over these factoids, these isolated decisions from the fray. Just as he continued to think through and re-think every battle he'd ever participated in. Most of them he had won, with relatively little loss of life. Those were easy, just logistics reports, lists of numbers and names, so many bullets fired here, so much materiel consumed there. The ones he had lost were the same except the lists of names had ghosts paper-clipped to them.
Something other than a ghost came with this action. The girl. The blonde girl who had to be the key to the Epidemic. She had escaped while he was busy with the WOFTAM of trying to defend a doomed city.
Clark had never believed in something so strongly before, but he believed that the girl was the answer he sought. The answer to why this was happening, and the answer to how to stop it. She was the one piece of the puzzle that didn't seem to fit, the one person who was neither on this side nor that, which meant she had to be more significant that she appeared. She had never been farther away from him.
Vikram stood before the desk, looking anxious but smiling. Always smiling. Clark had not heard his friend come in, did not know how long he had been standing there. Vikram was a veteran, though. He would understand the intensely personal malaise one fell into following a bad action.
Clark stared at the bracelet on his friend's wrist. The current calamity had driven Vikram closer to his deity. 'You've never doubted the existence of God for a moment, have you?' he asked, the words swimming out of him as if he were at the bottom of a cold, dark lake.
Vikram straightened up to a considerable height'he'd already been at attention but he found some more backbone somewhere. 'The teachings of my faith require me to never have dealings with one who has no faith in some manner of god,' Vikram said in a proper, clipped tone. 'This could prove difficult in our line of work. What should I do if my commanding officer was an atheist? I have asked myself this question many times. In the end I have chosen to follow a strict policy where it comes to religion. Don't ask, don't tell.'
Clark grinned and it felt very, very good. He didn't examine why he wanted to laugh so much, he just gladly accepted it. He'd been doing this for decades and he knew when you were down in that hole and a rope appeared, you grabbed it. 'I'm way outside of my jurisdiction, here. This has become a joint duty assignment. Because of my special position as a, a policy expert,' he couldn't bring himself to use the Civilian's term: wonk, 'I've been prevailing on your good counsel despite the fact that you outrank me. If you want to jump ship now you'd be well within your rights.'
'Not until the hurly-burly's done, my friend,' Vikram said. 'Let me rephrase: not until it is done, sir.' And that was that. 'I have a situation report all in preparedness, should you care to hear it.'