He shook his head and read the rest of the email; whatever joy he’d been feeling at hearing from Heather was gone, replaced with a dull, bleak numbness. The flashbacks had a way of ruining his mood.
The rest of the email became just words on his field of vision, the warmth they usually stirred in him gone. Even the news that former Ambassador Llewellyn was getting his just desserts failed to cheer him up. Llewellyn, whose incompetence had helped precipitate the crisis that killed dozens of Americans at Jasper-Five, was currently serving a four-year sentence in Venus, assigned to the terraforming project there. Working on the second planet from the sun was nobody’s idea of fun; the convicts would be trapped in small subterranean habitats, doing hard labor while surrounded by a lethal atmosphere with an average temperature in the hundreds of degrees even after fifty years of artificial cooling. With a war on, on the other hand, hard time in Venus might be considered a lucky break; convicts could be inducted into penal battalions and used as cannon fodder, but that was rarely done. Fromm doubted Llewellyn would count himself lucky; the fact that his family connections hadn’t saved him from his fate also meant he’d been finally cut off from their support. The ‘rat might even have to figure out how to work for a living after his sentence was over, assuming he didn’t piss someone off and end up the victim of an ‘unfortunate accident.’ Those were easy to come by in Venus.
Other people’s suffering, even when well-deserved, had never pleased him very much, and in his current mood the news mostly irritated him. He skimmed over Heather’s parting words – she wasn’t one for effusive endearments anyway – and went over the dutiful message from his sister. Lucinda Fromm-Bertucci and her husband ran a catering service for the rich and famous in Windsor. She hadn’t had any contact with the military after doing her four years’ Obligatory Service, spent largely in Logistics, and she acted as if her very survival had nothing to do with the efforts of men and women in uniform fighting and dying light years away from home. Her email didn’t mention the war at all, except to note that business was down because there were ‘hardly any receptions or parties being thrown in the city.’ She concluded her email with a terse ‘Take care.’ That only deepened his dark mood.
Sometimes he wondered why he did any of this. Whether anything mattered at all. He remembered the day he’d chosen life in the Corps, when such things had mattered very much, but the memories seemed distant, like someone else’s story.
Windsor, New Michigan, 153 AFC
“You can’t be serious.”
Peter Fromm shrugged and looked away from his friends, savoring the view from the high-rise where they were throwing the End of Ob-Serv party. The open balcony looked upon the lake where the city of Detroit and much of the original site of Windsor, Canada had once stood. His imp provided a pre-Contact image of the cityscape that the Snakes had burned into slag, creating a miles-wide crater that Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River had quickly filled. He didn’t need video replays to remind him of the screaming and dying of its inhabitants. The restless ghosts of the dead still called out to him, a hundred and fifty years after the fact. The doomed people of Detroit-Windsor had left hundreds of hours of audiovisual records of their demise, and Fromm had watched most of them, obsessively going over the worst ones.
“Pete? Hello? Anybody home?”
He turned his gaze back to the inside of the luxury apartment where a bunch of other twenty-something Freebirds were cavorting; he’d missed something June or Brad had said. It’d be easy enough to have his imp play back the tape and find out what they’d told him, but he didn’t bother. His friends would be happy to repeat themselves.
“Sorry,” he said.
“You’re not even drunk or stoned,” June Gillespie said accusingly. “And you don’t get to drop that bombshell and then ignore us. What’s your excuse? We just got out and you’re ready to go back in? After you almost got killed?”
A brief image flashed through his mind – the hulking shapes of Horde pirates, plasma rounds detonating uselessly on their heavy force fields as they advanced towards him and the rest of his squad. He repressed a shudder and turned it into a shrug.
“I’m staying in, that’s all. It’s a good deal, and I’ll be going to college, same as you.”
“New Annapolis,” Brad said in the same tones he would have used for ‘the Seventh Circle of Hell.’ “How about NIT? What happened to the plan?”
“Now you sound like my father.” Fromm’s parents had been elated when the acceptance e-package from the Nebraska Institute of Technology had arrived. Getting a degree from the premiere school in the nation was a golden ticket, a stepping stone to wealth and glory. Brad and June had also been accepted; their plan had been to all go there once they were free and clear.
Had. Plans changed.
He’d thought about showing up to the party in his dress blues, but that wouldn’t have gone over well. Telling his best friends that he had just signed for a full ten years in the Corps was turning out badly enough. Almost as badly as telling his family had been, earlier that day.
“Well, your old man is right, Pete. It’s a waste, man. A total waste. We already did our time in uniform. Time to get on with real life. To have a life without being told when to sleep, wake up, eat, take a dump. Seriously. Did you enjoy that shit so much you’re going back for a big heap of seconds? You did your duty. You even got to fight. Just what you get when you do your last two years in the freaking Corps. That thing at Galileo-Nine should have gotten all that hero crap out of your system.”
The pirate was eight feet tall and almost as wide. He swung the heavy particle-beam projector and played the ongoing energy pulses like a hose. Two of Fromm’s squaddies screamed briefly before their shields failed and they were torn apart. Fromm’s Iwo cycled empty; he closed his eyes, unaware he’d been screaming as well until First Sergeant Bolton shook him and slammed him into a bulkhead, shutting him up. When he dared to look, he saw the massive alien’s body sprawled three feet in front of him, smoke pouring from the exit wounds on his back.
Everybody in his squad but him was dead.
“You got ‘im, Fromm,” the NCO said. “Not bad for a Foxtrot-November, even if you punked out at the end. Now quit yer crying and get on your feet, Marine! We ain’t done clearing out the station.”
He blinked rapidly for a few seconds, slowly realizing he’d almost punched Brad. The sudden motion, which he’d arrested just in time, was completely lost on his friends.
“Take it easy, Brad,” June broke in. The look in her face made it clear she knew Brad’s badgering wasn’t going to help matters. Her boyfriend ignored her, too angry to stop his tirade. Brad and Peter had grown up together, had been as close as brothers. Fromm could see his anger was mostly out of concern. But there was also an element of pique involved: Brad didn’t like surprises, or changes in plans, and he took them personally.
“What’s with your obsession with the Marines, for Christ’s sake? At least in the Navy you can actually make a career.”
“Brad!”
“All right, Junes. Sorry, Pete, but I just can’t believe you’re doing this. We’re having this party to celebrate being done with the whole yes-sir, no-sir, three-bags-full-sir crap. Why are you doing this?”
Fromm looked back out and gestured towards the flat expanse that used to be Detroit. It took them a second to get it.
“Jesus. First Contact? Ancient history, Pete. You aren’t a Golden Oldie. You didn’t live through it. Might as well get upset about the Japanese killing General Custer.”
“The ETs are still out there,” Fromm said. “There’s fighting going on right now, over at Xon System.”
Brad sighed. “That’s just a police action. A skirmish here or there, or a little conflict whenever someone’s worked up the nerve to ask President Hewer if he’s ever going to retire and he starts something to distract everyone. We killed off the Snakes over a century ago, man. It’s over. The other Starfarers may push us around the edges, but they ar
en’t going to risk an existential war with us.”
“That’s not what I hear.”
“You’re taking that Galactic Studies crap too seriously. It’s scaremongering, plain and simple, to keep us on an eternal war footing.”
“Not really, but never mind that,” June said, always the voice of reason. “Okay, forget about Brad and his lack of knowledge about anything that doesn’t involve nanotech…”
“Hey!”
“And I quote: ‘the Japanese killing General Custer.’ Give me a break.”
“Didn’t they? Or was it the Soviets? Something like that. Who cares?”
“Woogle it.” June turned back to Fromm. “Yes, the other Starfarers pose a potential threat. But the fact is, we’ve got enough soldiers and spacers already. You could be an engineer, a designer, and accomplish a lot more using that brain of yours for something constructive. Why waste all that talent to become a killer?”
“I…” Fromm struggled for words. He didn’t know how to explain the incident at Galileo-Nine, the terror he’d felt, and the way he’d set that terror aside and done what he’d had to. He couldn’t just say that he’d never felt so alive as during those insane moments in the pirated mining complex. The memories haunted him, but the thought of never going back bothered him more.
I am a killer. He couldn’t say that, though; they’d never understand.
And then there were the Detroit Archives. Ancient history, perhaps, but unlike Brad, Fromm felt certain history could easily repeat itself. Starfarer species weren’t exterminated routinely, but it happened: three times in the last century and a half, as a matter of fact. Humans had been responsible for one of those extinctions and played a role in the second. To think it couldn’t happen to the US, to Earth, was idiotic. Only an over-privileged kid could indulge in that sort of illusion, and not for long.
“Well?” June asked.
“It’s what I want to do now,” Fromm finally said. “Maybe in ten years I’ll change my mind and do something else, but this is what I’m doing now.”
Brad started to say something else again, but June shushed him.
“I hope you don’t regret this,” she said. “But I fear you will.”
New Parris, Star System Musik, 164 AFC
“As you may have guessed, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve got our new marching orders,” Fromm told the assembled company officers, platoon commanders and senior NCOs. The non-coms were the oldest people present, all veterans with no less than twenty years in the service, people who had been involved in at least one of the many wars, police actions or low intensity conflicts the USA could not seem to escape as it carved its own place in the galaxy. Charlie Company’s commissioned officers ranged in age from their late twenties to early sixties; the older officers had found their niche and were unlikely to rise in rank but were damn good at their job. The dynamics of the Corps often led to senior officers commanding people old enough to be their fathers or grandfathers, resulting in numerous leadership challenges. Young Second Lieutenants were expected to lean heavily on their NCOs, but by the time they got their silver bar, they’d better have learned to do their own thinking, doubly so for those who made it to O-3 rank. Fromm’s service record was decent enough that people respected him despite being on the young side.
“We will be deploying in twenty-one days,” he continued. It’d been a month since the FTX, and while he wasn’t a hundred percent satisfied with the company’s progress, the higher-ups had decided they were ready to dance and he was willing to lead them.
“’bout fucken time,” First Lieutenant Ivan Guerrero of Second Platoon muttered under his breath. One of the older breed, Charlie-Two’s commander had been driving his people hard ever since the FTX; that platoon was the fittest unit under Fromm’s command. Which meant it was going to get the toughest assignments. Guerrero knew that, and he was willing and able, full of gung-ho oorah attitude. Maybe to a fault.
“It is what it is. There hasn’t been much need for ground-pounders since the war started,” Fromm said, and nobody could argue the point. After the Days of Infamy had kicked off the conflict, the ensuing fighting had consisted solely of space actions, and most of those hadn’t involved any Marine boarding parties. Warp insertions had been a most unwelcome surprise to other Starfarers in the early days of America’s entry into the galactic community, but now just about every alien warship carried a large contingent of troops aboard, making warp raids insanely risky. On the other hand, being forced to carry large security contingents meant enemy ships had less space for weapons, shields and other important systems, so in a sense Marine Assault Ships served an important purpose even when they weren’t used. In any case, the one-way teleportation trips had become as rare as massive paratroop operations back in pre-Contact days. Word was that a lot of Marine Assault Ships were being pulled off the line to be reconfigured, although nobody was sure into what.
Fromm agreed with Guerrero’s sentiment, but he hadn’t minded the quiet time, either. He’d spent the previous months making sure his company was as ready as it could be for the hard days ahead. And he knew only too well that there were going to be plenty of those. He’d been on the front lines during the Days of Infamy and come back from that deployment with three replacement limbs and a large selection of bad memories.
And a handful of good ones, mostly involving a certain female spook he hadn’t seen in half a year, but that wasn’t important now.
“So here’s the deal,” he continued. “The 101st Marine Expeditionary Unit has been assigned to the USS Mattis as part of Landing Squadron Three.” A Landing Squadron consisted of three Marine assault ships like the Mattis, a four-frigate escort, and three logistics vessels. “All part of Expeditionary Strike Group Fourteen. We will sail off to reinforce Sixth Fleet at New Jakarta.”
More nods, and several somber expressions. New Jakarta was a Pan-Asian colony and warp junction; its location made it a possible target for the Vipers. In theory, the system was shielded from direct invasion by the fact that all its warp lines led to neutral or friendly star systems, but Melendez System had been in a similar position, and the enemy had simply pushed through neutral space, daring the local Starfarers to make an issue out of it. So far, nobody had objected. Some, as in the case of the Lizards, had actually abandoned any pretense of neutrality and welcomed the Tripartite Alliance. Sixth Fleet, plus whatever forces the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere could put together, would make sure any attacks there were met head-on.
“We have a week to implement any changes and fix anything that needs fixing,” Fromm said. He glanced at the company’s senior NCO.
“We’ll be ready, sir,” First Sergeant Markus Goldberg said confidently. Privately, Goldberg still harbored doubts about Third Platoon’s Lieutenant O’Malley. The officer’s slow reaction time and tendency to rely too much on his sergeant had become apparent during the FTX. A counseling session had ended with multiple assurances things would change. Fromm had fought off the urge to meddle, and now he was worried he might have overcompensated and left the unit in the hands of a subpar commander.
“I know everyone will be ready,” he said in a confident tone.
* * *
“Why don’t we all take a breath?” Lance Corporal Russell ‘Russet’ Edwin said in what he thought was a reasonable tone. He was the only asshole without a weapon and when you’re outgunned, your best option is to be reasonable.
The hooker’s crib was much too small to fit four people. A bed and a small dresser filled most of the space; the only other piece of furniture, a nightstand, was currently being wielded by the hooker in question, a plump and pretty girl by the name of Francesca, formerly from the People’s Republic of Sicily, here on a guest worker’s visa earning a living the old fashioned way. She was crouched on the bed, naked as the day she’d been born, ready to start swinging with her improvised club. Blood was dribbling from a cut on her lip, and the left side of her face was already beginning to bruise. Her eyes were bright with mur
derous rage.
Standing next to the bed was Russell’s fellow Marine, PFC Hiram ‘Nacle’ Hamlin, a lanky kid straight from New Deseret, currently holding a set of brass knuckles that Russell had given him for Christmas. There was blood on the business end of the weapon, but Russell was certain none of it belonged to Francesca but rather to the other bleeder in the room, a fat Navy asshole who was half-propped against the opposite corner, his nose spurting red and glaring out of the one eye that hadn’t been punched shut. His injuries wouldn’t stop him from using the holdout beamer he was clutching in a trembling hand, though. The little pistol’s power pack only had enough power for six shots, but each of them would cook twenty or thirty pounds of flesh and organs with a direct hit, or burn right through an arm or a leg. The bubblehead had been nerving himself to shoot Nacle, Francesca or likely both of them when Russell walked into the room and interrupted the ongoing drama.
Just seconds ago, he’d been enjoying the amorous attentions of another lady of the night, a sweet little thing from the Canary Islands whose name he couldn’t recall at the moment. Shouted curses and the sounds of a scuffle next door wouldn’t have drawn him away from what’s-her-name, not usually, but he’d recognized Nacle’s voice, and the cursing had gotten his attention. Nacle only cursed when the shit had well and truly hit the fan. So he’d rushed towards the noise and walked into this Charlie-Foxtrot.
The bubblehead turned his beamer on him. Three pounds of trigger pressure and Russell would be seeing Jesus or the guy downstairs, more likely the latter, or even more likely he’d be seeing nothing at all. It was times like these when Russell wished he could believe in something.
“Easy there,” he told the Navy guy. “Chief Petty Officer Murphy, right?” He’d seen the bubblehead around, mostly in low-rent whorehouses like this one. Murphy had a bad rep; he was an asshole, the kind who liked to get rough with the girls, ignoring safe-words and house rules; he’d been banned from a lot of establishments in and around Pendleton as a result.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 36
