"Lights?" Lobo said.
"No. We're not done." The boys had learned to function as a unit in what I suspected was a very short period. "Is there a timestamp on either recording?"
"No," Lobo said, "but my analysis of the faces suggests that very little time passed between the two."
I nodded my head. "It doesn't take long. You can train soldiers very quickly, particularly if they're malleable and if you don't care how much damage you do to them or if you lose a few of them in the process."
Lobo said nothing. What was there to say? He'd seen combat. He knew. I wasn't even sure why I was talking; perhaps because conversation was normal, safe, comforting.
"How long until we jump?" I said.
"All non-government ships in the queue are on hold due to a large set of priority Expansion Coalition ships entering the system. The stationmaster AI is advertising a delay of half an hour, but I cannot know for certain if that's accurate."
"There's still another recording, right?"
"Correct."
I wondered if any of the children I'd just watched were still alive, still in the jungle fighting. "Can you tell when Lim left this message?"
"Yes. She made no attempt to conceal that fact. It was seventeen days ago."
Add the time for Lim to obtain the recording and dispatch it on ships to planets many jumps away, and the holos I was watching could easily have been a month or more old. That much time was an eternity in combat. Whether you were suffering the terrified boredom of creeping through dense growth half hoping to find an enemy and half praying you never did, or the utter exhaustion of constant fighting, the days swirled together and ran away from you like blood and rain flowing down dirt banks into rivers.
"How many jumps from Macken are we?"
"Best path or the one we should take to make sure no one is tracking us?"
"Best path," I said. "Lim would have had no reason to assume anyone was monitoring the teams she sent to plant the recordings."
"Four."
Not bad. If she'd received the originals quickly and immediately acted on them, we might be within a month of when those holos were recorded. Those boys might still be alive.
If. Might.
I shook my head to clear it. I was reacting, not thinking, letting my feelings and my past lead me into poor analysis. I had no data, and making assumptions instead of finding the truth and planning accordingly was more likely to do harm than good. When you don't have a clue, don't make up the facts; observe and gather evidence. However hard the truth is, it's ultimately more useful than your imaginings.
"Show me the final attachment."
"There's very little to it," Lobo said, "and essentially no new information."
"Run it."