“Thank you,” Mike replied, waving a hand at his head.

“General Wesley has you blocked out for an hour starting, well, now, General,” the colonel said. “But he said if you’re fatigued from your travels…”

“I’ve been sitting on ships for five months,” Mike said, gesturing toward the front entrance. “It’s not hard work.”

“Yes, sir,” the colonel said. “It’s this—”

“I know where the Chief of Staff’s office is, Colonel,” Mike said, putting an edge on his tone. “Just go.”

“Lieutenant Colonel Timmons looked a bit put out,” General Wesley said as Mike grabbed a chair.

“He’s so perfectly polished I’m surprised you noticed,” Mike said.

“I’m pushing eighty and he’s been my aide for five years,” Tam said. “I can read him like a book if not the other way around, no matter what he thinks.”

“I guess he’s used to generals being ‘fatigued by their travels,’ ” Mike said. “Which I am but mostly I want to know why in the hell I was yanked out of command like I’d screwed the Tir Dol Ron’s daughter or something. So, with all due respect, if you could get right to the point, whatever it is.”

“You’re promoted, Lieutenant General,” Tam said. “You’re getting Eleventh Corps. That’s the basic. You need some expansion. Veritable teams of people will fully expand, but that’s the basic.”

“I don’t want Corps,” Mike said. “I really really don’t want Corps. I don’t want Corps, I don’t want your job and I don’t want FS command or I’d have worked to get any of the three and probably gotten them. We’ve discussed this.”

“Corps is going to be division sized and move as one unit,” Tam said. “I said it was only the basics.”

Mike set down his AID, which had been displaying the provisional TOE for the new “unified” Eleventh Corps and shrugged.