Just as Augustus was preparing to contact Lieutenant Reagan, commander of Third Platoon, Reagan's order suddenly came over the platoon command channel: "All squads, assemble at the place where we disembarked immediately."
"Did we find the Kel-Morians?" a squad leader asked.
"We found them, right beside Fort Howe," Reagan said. "Brothers, the Kel-Morians caught us with our pants down. Less than a minute ago, Fort Howe's command center sent out a distress signal to every unit within fifteen hundred miles. An unknown number of Kel-Morian troops are attacking the fort."
"Which Kel-Morian unit is the enemy?" Augustus wanted to verify Graven Hill's intelligence. Though the information was already outdated and had offered Augustus little help—the warning and valuable preparation time it might have provided were already gone—it could still prove that the mercenary's intelligence was trustworthy.
Augustus had not cared about that stack of credits at all. Before he left Korhal, his mother had given him three Covington Bank accounts in Tarsonis in addition to sixty thousand credits. Every month, his personal accounts received another five hundred thousand to roughly one million credits.
In the longer term, there was no harm in getting to know a future mercenary tycoon.
Over the past few months, the portions of Augustus's letters to his mother concerning the politics of Korhal IV and his father's cause had steadily grown longer. In the end, Augustus convinced his mother that her son was worried about his father's revolutionary cause and Korhal's future fate.
And Augustus was almost certain that although his father, Angus, would not read every letter from his son, he would always ask about their contents.
Last week, in a triple-encrypted Email that concealed both the sending address and sender information, his mother relayed Angus's words to Augustus.
Angus's stance on Augustus's concerns was