“Really?”
“Yes. Under the new circumstances, we can find you a place in the Corps. Only thing is, this isn’t an ordinary enlistment; you’d be joining a classified government program. I can’t tell you any more until you agree, I’m afraid. To be honest, I don’t know very much about it myself. Except that it won’t be an easy berth. Or a safe one.”
It didn’t sound like a difficult choice. He would have to talk to Pops first, but Jason already knew what he was going to do.
He nodded again.
Two
Conway-Two, 197 AFC
“This stick’s empty,” the bartender said, letting the credit stick drop to the floor.
“It’s all good, brah,” Russell Edison said, reaching into his pocket. He had three or four sticks on his person, each containing a portion of his life savings; he didn’t believe in bank accounts. Unfortunately, all the cred sticks together didn’t amount to much. He was nearly broke.
To add insult to injury, Russell had owned this very establishment not too long ago. This asshole hadn’t been around then, though; to him, Russell was just another drunk without enough cash to his name to pay for his drinks. The thought almost got him angry enough to do something about it, but he forced himself to grin at the bartender.
“Here ya go,” he told the unfriendly-looking fuck behind the bar and handed him another cred stick.
The bartender accessed it with his imp and frowned. “That’s just enough to square you up. Not counting a tip.”
Russell was about to tell the bartender where he could shove the tip when a woman sat down next to him. “Put it on my tab,” she said, defusing the bar fight before it started. “And give yourself twenty bucks for your troubles.”
The bartender relaxed. “You got it.”
Russell recognized the newcomer as soon as he turned his head and got a good look at her. The shock of short silver hair over the elfin face was unmistakable. So was the thin-lipped grin she always had on her face.
“Whitey McAllister,” Russell said. “Been awhile.”
“Been twenty-two years, Russet,” the short, wiry woman said. Her grin was as mean as the rest of her. “Last time I saw you was when you mustered out and swore you were done with our beloved Corps.”
“Like I said, awhile,” he told his fellow Marine.
McAllister had been an LAV gunner way back then. Her fighting vehicle platoon had been attached to the 101st MEU, Russell’s unit, during the last big war. She’d gotten her ride blown up at Parthenon-Three but gotten fixed up in time to join in the fun of the last campaign. Russell had dealt with her a few times, helping liberate bits of loot that the assholes in charge didn’t need to know about. They’d put money in each other’s pockets and neither had tried to screw the other, literally or figuratively. About as good as it got. They weren’t friends, but they’d been out there together, killing E.T.s and blowing up their stuff. That made her family, sort of.
Russell’s mood was improving; before Whitey showed up, he’d been considering grabbing both the bartender’s ears and using them for leverage to smash the asshole face-first into the bar. He always got his dander up when a business deal fell through and his cash reserves began to dip to dangerous levels. Russell wasn’t an angry drunk, not usually, but his life had been on a nasty downward trend for a few years.
All that work in the Corps, wasted. Fifty years of being on the wrong end of assorted alien weapon systems, everything from bronze-tipped spears to telepathic death beams. Seven combat deployments, plus two that weren’t supposed to involve combat but turned into desperate fights to the death. Keeping his nose clean during his last five years in service, long enough to make it to E-5 – sergeant, the first time he’d risen so high – and staying clean so he didn’t get busted down, which had happened to him every time he’d made corporal.
That had been the worst part, those five mind-rotting, boring years when he hadn’t even cheated at cards so he could retire with a good twenty-fifty-year pension package at E-5 rank. About the only fun he’d had during that time had been the rare visits from the girl of his dreams. Finally, twenty-five years and nine months ago, he’d turned in his gear, done all the required paperwork, and walked out of Parris Planet a civvie and a free man.
Problem was, he’d sunk all his savings into this bar on Conway-One and run the place into the ground in less than ten years. The whole thing had disappointed him so much he’d spent the rest of his pension time drinking himself into a stupor, doing shady deals that turned into shit more often than not, and generally missing the good old times. He didn’t miss the danger, the stupid regulations, or all that crap. In fact, most of the stuff in the Corps he didn’t miss at all. But things had made some sort of sense back then. Do this, and that happens; one could get used to that.
In civvie life, you rarely knew how things would turn out. Kind of like combat, but without the payoff of seeing the bastards on the other side die for their country. Well, most of the time. A few times his shady deals had ended with Russell standing over a bleeding and weeping bastard. Twice, they’d ended with a dead body. That had been almost like coming home again.
With one big difference. As a Marine, he could rely on the people in his platoon, his company, even Battalion, mostly. People had his back, and he had theirs. Someone might hate your guts but when the chips were down they’d drag your half-dead ass to cover because they knew you’d do the same thing for them. Civvies didn’t work that way. He couldn’t trust anybody and nobody had his back. That made him miss his old life a lot.
Worst part was, when he’d tried to reenlist, the Corps had turned him down.
Russell downed his drink. It’d be the last one of the night, since there was business to attend to.
“What brings you to this shithole, Whitey?”
“You, Sergeant.”
Russell snorted. “You ain’t pretty enough to be a recruitment officer.”
Not to mention that recruiters didn’t make house calls, or that he’d been rejected already. The Corps was being downsized. Gutted was closer to the truth. There was no room in it for the likes of him.
“This isn’t a regular recruiting drive, Russet.”
“Step into my office, then,” Russell told Whitey and headed for a booth. As they sat down, he engaged a special app on his imp that would garble their conversation for anybody more than a foot away from them. He didn’t know if what Whitey wanted was illegal, but few deals had gotten screwed because of too much secrecy. Best to keep stuff on the down-low.
Whitey noticed his security measures and grinned again. “Still cagey, I see. I got my own privacy suite, though. Military grade. Nobody’s going to listen in or record this meeting.”
“Good to know.”
“This is the deal,” she said, getting right to business. “I’m part of a new unit. As an E-7, as a matter of fact.”
That got Russell’s eyebrows up. LAV drivers didn’t become Gunnies, not unless they switched specialties and spent some years earning their rank the hard way.
“Not much else I can tell you, though,” Whitey said. “Not until you pass the eval. Covert.”
“MARSOC?”
The Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command was where the Corps’ top dogs went to do the real manly stuff, at least according to their groupies. There were some problems that couldn’t be solved by blasting them with artillery and direct fire, and MARSOC’s job was to handle them. When it came to small-unit combat, they were the best of the best, and they trained in a bunch of other stuff normal grunts could barely understand. Or so it was said.
“More or less,” Whitey said. “Are you interested?”
Russell thought about it. Special Ops types had always struck him as glory hounds who got more money and attention than they deserved. Sure, they might be a little better than ordinary grunts, but drop a plasma shell on them and they died just like anyone else. He’d never been tempted to try out for the Raiders or FORECON or any other ‘spe
cial’ units; besides. The extra grand a month wasn’t worth the extra work and danger. Even if he had, he’d racked up enough non-judicial punishments during his career that he probably wouldn’t have qualified.
Whitey’s offer didn’t smell right, either. Spec-Op units got new personnel from active duty idiots who tried out for the job. Having someone approach him in a bar wasn’t how this sort of thing got done. His first guess had been Whitey wanted to hire him as a civilian contractor. A merc, in other words. He’d been wrong about that.
“This is a black project,” Whitey – he’d better get used to calling her Gunny McAllister – said, answering his unasked question. “Lots of extra training and probably quite a bit of action. And that’s more than I should be telling you, except that I’m pretty sure you’re going to say yes.”
Pension was gone. Savings, too. He had a couple irons in the fire but they were risky enterprises. If anything went wrong with any of them, he might end up dead or in jail, and jail meant kissing off the Corps forever. Alien propaganda to the contrary, the Marines didn’t let felons in. Didn’t hurt that he’d get the full rejuvenation package when he signed up. Getting old sucked if you didn’t make enough money to pay for the increasingly expensive anti-aging treatments.
And, if he was honest with himself, he’d been bored to death ever since he turned in his gear and walked out a civilian. Damned if he understood why, but he’d never felt so alive as when some tango had been trying to kill him and he was returning the favor. And in Spec-Ops, his chances of not being bored would go through the roof, even in peacetime. In this fallen universe, someone always needed killing, and when you didn’t want open war you sent the Raiders or other ‘black’ units to do the job, all sneaky-like. He could do sneaky.
Chances were that he’d regret doing it; the first time he found himself getting shelled while cowering in some muddy hole in a god-forsaken part of the galaxy, probably. But he nodded anyway.
“All right, Whitey. Gunny. You got me to volunteer. Where do I go for my eval?”
She looked at him for a long moment and he felt something like an itch inside of his head. It wasn’t a completely unfamiliar feeling, although it definitely wasn’t something he’d expected or wanted to feel again.
“Oh, shit,” he said, already beginning to regret his decision. “You’re a warp witch.”
Whitey shrugged. “The official term is ‘tachyon-wave sensitive,’ Edison. Or adept, if you prefer.”
Warp travel exposed the mind of sophonts to a lot of weird stuff. Most aliens couldn’t handle it at all; only a small percentage of them could travel via FTL at all. Humans did a lot better, but people who had too much exposure – people like navigators, fighter pilots and Marines who did too many combat warp jumps – ended up with weird abilities. The kind of stuff people used to call magic or telepathy.
“You’re a t-adept as well, by the way,” Whitey told him.
“Me? But I never…” Russell stopped himself from blurting out an easily-caught lie; after all, he could still see and talk to his dead girlfriend. And he knew it wasn’t a hallucination, because hallucinations didn’t provide him with actionable intelligence. Deborah’s ghost had saved his life twice since he’d left the Corps. If she hung around him more often, he would be a lot happier. Unfortunately, even while traveling through warp, the ghost only showed up once in a long while.
Whitey went on: “When you mustered out, you got a full physical. There were some unusual things in your brain scans. Twenty-five years ago, those readings didn’t mean anything, but we’ve learned some stuff since then.”
“I thought they’d canned all that witchy stuff since the war.”
“They mostly did,” she agreed. “Except for warp travel drugs and the fighter program. Top brass didn’t like the idea of letting everybody read minds and see the future. Not to mention the risk of summoning demons and shit. They didn’t think humanity could handle that stuff. But they couldn’t shut it all down. For one, the Medusas are still a potential threat.”
“Fucking Jellies,” Russell said, using the more common nickname for the boneless ammonia-breathing aliens. Telepathic aliens. He’d been among the first humans to make contact with them, although he’d mostly seen them through the sights of his gun, and only for as long as it took to send them to hell. His opinion of them hadn’t changed one bit in the ensuing decades.
“Yeah. Because of them, and a few other reasons, they kept a few programs around to study t-wave abilities. One of them is part of MARSOC.”
“And they want me.”
“Among others. People like you or me are pretty rare.”
“So did you read my mind?” he asked her. There was enough dirt in his memories to get him in serious trouble.
“Nah. Just did a surface scan and found plenty of t-wave activity. You qualify for entry in the unit. We can get you reenlisted at your previous rank, pay you a nice bonus for the privilege, and you’ll get to play with some nifty toys.”
“And then we’ll go to other planets and blow shit up.”
The Gunnery Sergeant’s grin got a little wider. “Well, it is a Marine program.”
Yeah, there would be plenty of regrets. But instead of bitching about it, he ordered another drink and signed on the dotted line.
His ass belonged to the Corps once again.
Three
New Parris, 197 AFC
A hypervelocity missile tore through the Land Assault Vehicle’s force field and made its hull ring like the mother of all bells.
USWMC Private First Class Matthew Fromm – First Platoon, Bravo Company, 192nd Marine Expeditionary Unit – gritted his teeth at both the painful sound and the knowledge of what would have happened if the dense-alloy arrow had penetrated the vehicle’s armor. Fragments bouncing around the troop compartment at escape velocity would have churned everyone inside into tomato soup. The image made him gag for a second; he cast a furtive look to see if anyone had noticed before remembering his face was hidden behind the featureless helmet of his Mark-17 battlesuit.
A junior noncom across Matthew’s bench turned his head towards one of his buddies. It was a private communication, but from their body language it was clear the men were laughing at something. Probably at the boots who still had no clue how things worked. Boots like Matthew, in other words.
The LAV shuddered again, this time because it was shooting back with the 65mm autocannon on its top turret. Each time the gun accelerated a piece of depleted uranium to relativistic speeds, it made the entire sixty-ton vehicle shake a little, despite the inertial dampeners built into its hull. Whoever was on the receiving end would hurt a lot worse, of course. A single hit with one of those mothers was guaranteed to gut most alien main battle tanks.
“Time to unass,” Staff Sergeant Kinston said. “By the numbers, go, go, go!”
The ramp on the rear of the LAV dropped and the twelve-man squad ran out in a well-coordinated maneuver. Matthew took the time to make sure his Iwo (short for Infantry Weapon) Mark Five was locked and loaded. Nobody shot at him when he stepped on the grass-covered ground; most of the tall stalks around the LAV hadn’t been disturbed by the vehicle’s passage, so he couldn’t see much as he followed his imp’s instructions and reached a slight rise that the squad was using for cover. Laser pulses struck the area force field protecting the Marines in a dizzying array of colors. Nothing got through it, though.
Lance Corporal Brock returned fire with his Squad Automatic Weapon; the steady three-pulse bursts painted lines of blackness as they sent graviton packets downrange. A burst tore through an enemy energy shield and hit something vital. Just as Matthew’s weapon sights framed the enemy fighting hole, the ground swelled up and burst open about five hundred meters from their position; the aliens’ dug-up entrenchment vanished in a flash of fire and a pillar of smoke. Matthew swung his weapon leftward, looking for fresh targets within his fire sector. He spotted movement behind some scrawny shrubs and sent a short pulse burst towards it. There was
a colorful flash of light and the shrubbery and whatever was behind it went up in smoke. The explosion’s thunder reached him a moment later. Scratch one tango.
Further downrange, an enemy artillery emplacement was visible only as a flashing light. The Iwo’s sights automatically magnified the image until he saw the stubby laser cannon firing from the slit of a dug-in bunker. The soap-bubble shimmer around it indicated a heavy force field protected the weapon emplacement. Without missing a beat, Matthew dialed up his gun’s energy yield and fired. The continuous graviton beam wiped out the force field and cracked the bunker open. As an even larger explosion made the ground tremble under him, the Iwo ejected the spent power pack it’d burned through. Without waiting to reload, Matthew followed up with three plasma grenades; the high-speed explosives left the lower barrel of his weapon before he felt the recoil. The ruptured bunker vanished in a cloud of superheated gas. As he jammed a new power pack and grenade clip into his Iwo, his mind pictured the tangos inside the bunker he’d vaporized; he shrugged and kept looking for new targets. It would have been quick, at least.
His personal shield crackled and flared, becoming visible as it shed energy in a multicolor display. Someone was shooting at him and the area force field must be down. Matthew ducked behind cover as more laser bursts tore through the rocky outcropping. He rolled off to one side and raised the Iwo above his head, looking through its sights. He spotted a Gimp fireteam firing from a hill eight hundred meters out. Before he could do anything about it, the company’s weapons platoon took the enemy under fire. The Americans’ heavy grav cannons and anti-personnel missiles shredded the top of the hill. Nothing short of a dug-in tank could have survived that storm of fire.
“Move out!” Staff Sergeant Kinston ordered as the shooting died out.
The holographic display in Matthew’s helmet showed him where to go. He followed the directions while also keeping an eye out on the actual terrain: sometimes the system screwed up and if you followed it blindly you might run into a tree – or off a cliff. He and the rest of the squad dashed forward, darting from one piece of cover to the next and pausing long enough to cover the advance of the squad behind them. No more Imperials rose up to challenge them; the American infantry and support vehicles had wiped out most of the enemy firing positions, if not all.
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