Major General Mike O’Neal rolled his AID, then slapped it onto his wrist forming a band. Slapped it on hard.

“Hey,” Shelly said. “Don’t take this out on me!”

“Sorry,” Mike said grumpily.

He was intensely bored. Bored of gaming, bored of reading newsfeeds, bored of reading, period. Bored of watching movies, TV and every other form of video broadcast. Porn just wasn’t his style but he’d even watched some of that. And found it very boring indeed.

In part it was his own fault. When he’d been recalled to Earth and boarded his first Fleet vessel he had treated the Fleet officers with even more disdain than usual. Fleet had, year by year, sunk lower and lower in his opinion. The officers were slovenly and corrupt, the sailors were abysmal and the only reason the ships operated at all was that they were Indowy made and damned hard to break. He’d never been the diplomatic type and his dislike of Fleet was displayed by saying he’d be in his cabin. An orderly, or whatever you called it in the Fleet, brought his meals, he made trips to the tiny gym and that was that. For the last five months the only time he’d spoken to a living soul was at starports.

The rest of it wasn’t on him. First of all there was the fact of five months on board ships. That was just insane. These weren’t even the bulk transports they’d used in the first part of the war. These were Fleet vessels, the fastest in the universe. But between having to hunt from star system to star system and tween-jump transits, not to mention jump transits, it just took forever to get to Earth from out on the edge of the Blight.