I THINK IT HELPED TO TALK

[DeJaVu]

26 January 3073 FSN is pleased to publish this fifteen-part excerpt of a journal recently unearthed on Kentares, dating from the Kentares Massacre itself. In these dark times, the knowledge that we have always fought against the darkness is comforting as we fight against the encroaching zealotry of the Word of Blake.
Richie made it.
He was real thin, and I gave him most of my food after I found him. The dysentery had hit him hard but he’d made it through. He listened to me talk. Didn’t say much, just listened. Agreed with me when I asked something. I got the feeling he’d done it before. He was a soldier, after all. A MechWarrior. He’d fought in real wars.
Real wars. As if this wasn’t as real as anything else.
When I stopped talking he started. I hadn’t realized how hard it was for him to be hiding while the fighting was going on. He had a ’Mech, he kept telling me. He should be doing something. All those Drac infantry patrols I’d seen, there was nothing they could do against his Javelin. He could be killing every Drac within sixty kilometers if he got started.
I didn’t tell him I knew his ’Mech was out of missiles, and that we didn’t have any to reload it with. I didn’t tell him there were four or five Drac ’Mech regiments on Kentares, and it’d only take a lance from one of them to destroy his ’Mech like a flea. I didn’t tell him these things.
He’d told me those things before I started talking. He already knew. Just like I’d already known about the things I’d seen.
I think it helped to talk.