With your platoon assigned to support duty, you have no direct responsibilities to attend to once you've written and submitted your interrogation report. You wander down to the strike deck to see if you can be of any help, but Sergeant Shah has everything under control and politely suggests that you would be more useful elsewhere. Amori is busy with the other troopers as they transfer the vaccine packs from bulk crates into portable medikits and distribute them among the drop ships. Karim's platoon has just finished their simulator training at the forward end of the strike deck, you can see, and Sanvicente's are prepping to go in. You notice Halliday working on your drop ship with her mechanics, fresh armor panels being bolted over recent impact damage. Commander Celi, you know, is in a briefing with the Colonel and other troop commanders, due to conclude in fifteen minutes.
You stand by yourself for a long moment, a still-point in the flow of activity around you. This is your world, the Astral Corps, and your people are preparing to do, once again, what they do. Any College ideas about what service in the Corps might be like have been shattered by the last few weeks. You are a combat veteran in the mightiest force in human history. Even if you were to never drop again, no-one can take that away from you.
And yet, as you stand surrounded by your comrades in arms, you suddenly feel very alone. You don't know what, but you know that something is wrong. It's a feeling which has been growing in you ever since the last mission, and Zhang's final words have stuck to you. You've tried to push the feeling down, tried to remain the cool, professional officer that you're supposed to be. You've always been taught that intellect must override emotion. But looking around you can see Amori, Halliday, and Karim doing their jobs well, and you know that all of them embrace emotion and use it. Even Commander Celi, for all her command presence, clearly invites emotion into her decision-making.
Whatever it is on your heart, you can't continue like this. You need to talk to somebody, to get yourself sorted before tomorrow's mission.