Personal Log
Noemi Laporte
UED Solaris

I can barely remember the dream. I remember it was terrifying, and somehow exhilarating too. I remember...him.

They cleared me for flight. They cleared me. I can't be schizophrenic. They wouldn't have missed it. 

And yet there's no question that this war has awakened parts of me I never knew were there.

I'm a combat junkie. Who would have believed it? Meek and mild-mannered Noemi, a killer of men. The aura of danger might stick better if I didn't turn into a gibbering, undisciplined wreck after every sortie. When I was on the com with that Martian captain after the Meridian attack, I felt...drunk with power. Almost maniacally so. So many dead at my hands, and I loved it. I loved it.

The assault on the Meridian wasn't the biggest fight of the war. But with the flak cooking off and the big bruisers tangling, it felt like Hell itself. We expended more megatonnage of ordinance out there than every war on Earth up to the twentieth century combined. The GTVA warships are grim and gritty, ships built to kill and fully expecting to die. What the Shivans did to these peoples' psyche astounds me. Every time we lose a frigate, we get cut to the bone, but the Tevs can bleed corvettes left and right and still stand strong. They expect it. They know how to die.

We hurt them out there. And yet, as good as it felt when we heard the Meridian was pulling out, it means nothing. In a week or a month a new destroyer will come in, just like when Third Fleet ambushed the Requiem last year. The Tev war machine has contingencies for everything.

Looking around me, at the other pilots and crew aboard the Solaris, even at the rest of First Fleet, I feel as if that sense of futility has started to pervade everything here. Admiral Byrne tells us again and again that this war will not be won by force of arms. That we must stand by the values of Ubuntu.

Apparently that means we simply sit in Earth orbit and play Gandhi, parrying their strikes but never hitting back.

I don't know what I'm fighting for. In spite of Uncle Manuel's war cries, you can't 'fight for Ubuntu'. That's like euthanising for longevity! I think the ennui on the Solaris comes from the belief that our beautiful, ascendant culture has given us nothing to fight this war...that every time we pull the trigger, we are destroying ourselves just as surely as the GTVA might.

There has to be something we can fight for. Some reason to continue. Some way we can hit back without giving up what we are. I just have to find it.