Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show by Edmund R. Schubert

immediately figure out how to fake having them, and they’d be right back where they started, with the best bureaucrats at the top of every military hierarchy, and all the genuinely brilliant leaders either discharged or demoralized.
    The way I was demoralized, piloting a barely-armed supply ship in the rear echelons of our formation.
    Which was in itself a mark of the stupidity of our commanders—the fact that they thought there could be such a thing as a “rear echelon” during a war in three-dimensional space.
    There might have been dozens of men who could have seen what I saw—the point of vulnerability in the Formics’ formation—but they had long since left the service. The only reason I was there was because I couldn’t afford to quit before vesting in my pension. So I put up with spiteful commanders who would punish me for being a better officer than they would ever be. I took the abuse, the contempt, and so there I was piloting a ship with only two weapons—slow missiles at that.
    Turned out I only needed one.
    But who could have predicted that I’d be there, that I’d see what I saw, and that I’d commit career suicide by firing my missiles against orders—and then I’d turn out to be right? What process can test for that ? Might as well resort to prayer—either God is looking out for the human race or he doesn’t care. If he cares, then we’ll go on surviving despite our stupidity. If he doesn’t, then we won’t.
    In a universe that works like that, any attempt to identify in advance the traits of great commanders is utterly wasted.
    “Incoming visuals,” said the computer.
    Mazer looked down at his desk screen, where he had jotted
     
    Desperation
    Intuition (test for that, sucker!)
    Tolerance for the orders of fools
    Borderline -insane sense of personal mission
     
    Yeah, that’s the list Graff’s hoping I’ll send him.
    And now the boy was sending him visuals. Who approved that ?
    But the head that flickered in the holospace above his desk wasn’t an eagerbeaver young lieutenant. It was a young woman with light-colored hair like her mother’s and only a few traces of her father’s part-Maori appearance. Still, the traces were there, and she was beautiful.
    “Stop,” said Mazer.
    “I am required to show you—”
    “This is personal. This is an intrusion .”
    “—all ansible communications.”
    “Later.”
    “This is a visual and therefore has high priority. Sufficient ansible bandwidth for full-motion visuals will only be used for communications of the—”
    Mazer gave up. “Just play it.”
    “Father,” said the young woman in the holospace.
    Mazer looked away from her, reflexively hiding his face, though of course she couldn’t see him anyway. His daughter, Pai Mahutanga. When he last saw her, she was a tree-climbing five-year-old. She used to have nightmares, but with her father always on duty with the fleet, there was no one to drive away the bad dreams.
    “I brought your grandchildren with me,” she was saying. “Pahu Rangi hasn’t found a woman yet who will let him reproduce.” She grinned wickedly at someone out of frame. Her brother. Mazer’s son. Just a baby, conceived on his last leave before the final battle.
    “We’ve told the children all about you. I know you can’t see them all at once, but if they each come into frame with me for just a few moments—it’s so generous of them to let me—
    “But he said that you might not be happy to see me. Even if that’s true, Father, I know you’ll want to see your grandchildren. They’ll still be alive when you return. I might even be. Please don’t hide from us. We know that when you divorced Mother it was for her sake, and ours. We know that you never stopped loving us. See? Here’s Kahui Kura. And Pao Pao Te Rangi. They also have English names, Mirth and Glad, but they’re proud to be children of the Maori. Through you. But your grandson Mazer Taka Aho Howarth insists on using the name you went…