“Edison,” Murphy said, or rather lisped; a thin spray of blood and spittle accompanied the name, and Russell caught a glimpse of jagged broken teeth. Nacle had been going to town on the fucker before the beamer came into play.
“That’s me; Lance Corporal Edison,” Russell said cheerfully, as if he’d run into the guy at a party.
“Your cock-sucker buddy just tried to kill me.”
“She told you never to lay hands on her,” Nacle said through clenched teeth. “She told you.”
Shit. The kid was sweet on Francesca. He didn’t play with whores all that much, and when he did he got all romantic on them. Stupid.
“Stow it, Nacle,” Russell hissed at him before turning back to Murphy. “Hey, Murph. Let’s be reasonable. There’s been no real harm done…”
“No harm?”
The beamer wavered between Russell and Nacle.
“The med techs will fix your mouth, Murph. No fuss no muss. You just tripped and fell, that’s all. That shit happens all the time. But you pull that trigger and it’s all over, brah. For whoever you shoot, and for you.”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck me? Murph, you pull that trigger, you’ll be fucking yourself.”
The asshole was drunk, in pain and pissed off, so there was no telling what he was going to do. Russell waited, wondering if this was the way he was going to step out. The sad thing about all this wasn’t that he’d been this close to death a bunch of times before, but that he’d been this close to death in a whorehouse a bunch of times before. This was supposed to be the kind of place you went to forget about all the close calls that happened when you were on duty. But Russell had always been a frugal shopper, and bad things often happened at discount brothels.
Nacle tensed up, about to do something stupid.
Stop! Russell texted him via his imp’s tactical channel. The kid froze.
Out loud: “Whaddayasay, Murph? Can we work things out?”
Murphy looked like he was trying to think about it but finding it a bit of a chore. Concussion, maybe.
“Va fanculo!” Francesca screamed all of a sudden and threw the nightstand at the bubblehead.
If she’d tried that boneheaded move on a Marine, she would have gotten blasted, and everyone else as well. Murphy didn’t have those killer instincts, though. He flinched and threw up his arms to protect his already battered face, and Nacle and Russell lunged at him before he could bring the weapon back into line.
The beamer went off, but Russell had already grabbed Murphy’s hand at the wrist, and the charged-particle bolt made a hole in the ceiling. Nacle had the asshole pressed against the wall and was delivering a series of brutal underhand jabs, the brass knuckles making a wet smacking sound every time they hit flesh. Murphy whimpered, then screamed when Russell got enough leverage to break the man’s wrist. The little pistol dropped to the floor. Francesca started to make a grab for it, but Russell kicked it under the bed before things went from bad to unsalvageable.
The Navy puke sagged down, barely conscious. “You fucking asshole,” Russell said in a mild voice. “You pull a gun on me, you better have a plot saved up.”
“He was hitting her,” Nacle said, punching him one more time. Murphy went limp and they let him flop to the floor like a bag of meat. “She called me on my imp. I was kind of okay if all they did was have sex, you know? It’s her job. But he didn’t have to hit her.”
“I know.” Russell turned to Francesca, who was beginning to get the shakes. “Where’s Ronnie?”
She shook her head. “Dunno.”
Ronnie was the whorehouse’s bouncer, a massive guy with heavy-worlder muscle enhancements. He must be drunk or stoned, or Murphy had paid him off to look the other way while he had his fun. Either way, he wasn’t going to be much help.
“Grab his shit. All of it,” Russell ordered Nacle while he knelt down and groped under the bed until he found the beamer.
“He pay you?” he asked Francesca while his buddy gathered the bubblehead’s clothes and personal items.
“No.”
“Okay. Put the stuff on the bed, Nacle.” He rummaged around until he found a couple of credit sticks among Murphy’s things, the kind of device you used to pay for stuff you didn’t want showing up in your financial statements. Prostitution was technically illegal in New Parris, although nobody had ever been arrested for it unless there’d been another crime involved. Francesca’s work card listed her as an ‘entertainer.’ Russell checked the credit sticks’ balances and handed her one of them, about three hundred bucks’ worth, three times her going rate for a full evening. “That should cover your time. This never happened, got it?”
She nodded. Russell wouldn’t expect her to hold out if the cops leaned on her, but hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
“Give us the room. We need to take care of this.”
“Molto bene.” She hugged Nacle and whispered something in his ear before she threw a bathrobe on and left. Hopefully the guy would get a discount for his next date. Least he should get for almost getting their asses killed.
Russell considered his options. He could call Gonzo and a couple of other close friends, the ones who’d help you move a body, and make Chief Petty Officer Murphy disappear. He’d done it before, but never on New Parris. There was shit you could pull off on deployment in far foreign that just wouldn’t fly at home, and the Marine Corps’ main base was as close to home as it got. Too many cameras, too many people with their imps recording everything they saw. If the asshole went missing, there would be an investigation, and even though Murphy clearly didn’t have many friends, the chances of their getting away with killing the bastard weren’t great.
If it came down to it, he’d do what he had to, but there were alternatives.
* * *
“You shoulda wasted the fucker,” Gonzo commented when Russell told the story over a card game a couple weeks later, on their last liberty before they sailed off on the Mattis.
“More trouble than it was worth. I took care of it.”
“How?”
“Well, turns out Murph had a whole system going. He liked to beat on women; guess that was the only way he could get it up. He bribed the bouncer to look the other way and brought a couple doses of memory-wipe drugs and a full set of nano-meds to his dates. He’d have his fun, then heal up the girl and make sure she didn’t remember anything. He’d been doing it for a while. So we used his own drugs on him, made sure his imp wasn’t recording, which it wasn’t, and when he woke up the next day he had no idea what’d happened to him, other than he was missing a bunch of teeth; the nano-meds he’d brought fixed his insides and the broken wrist, but not his mouth.”
“That it? All he got was a beatdown he doesn’t remember?” Gonzo said. “He pulled a gun on you and Nacle. That don’t seem fair.”
“No, that wasn’t it. I figured that kind of hobby costs a lot more money than a Chief Petty Officer makes. I did a little digging that night and found out he’d been skimming supplies off his ship and selling them on the side to pay for his fun. He was at the Med Center trying to get new teeth fabbed when the MPs picked him up. He’ll get a good fifty years’ hard labor; some of those supplies were pretty important, the kind of stuff that gets people killed if they run out at the wrong time.”
“What an asshole.”
“Chances are he won’t live through those fifty years. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”
“How about the bouncer?”
“He’s MIA. A lot of people weren’t happy with him after it all came out, and nobody’s going to miss him.”
Everybody at the table nodded. The local cathouses enforced their own brand of justice, and they could play very rough. Ronnie’s over-muscled body would never be found, and he was sure the bouncer hadn’t gone gently into the night, either. Russell wouldn’t be surprised if someone invested some money into making sure former CPO Murphy didn’t make it out of prison in one piece. He wouldn’t be surprised at all.
<
br /> “Well, that’s that, then,” Gonzo said.
“Yeah. Nacle should be all right now.”
“Well, he won’t end up on the wrong end of a court martial, but that don’t mean he’ll be all right. He’s sweet on that girl, isn’t he?” Gonzo grinned; he was clearly planning to give the Mormon kid a hard time about it. Russell reminded himself to make sure things didn’t go too far; he’d seen how Nacle reacted when he got his dander up.
“He’s a romantic. He’ll get over it. It’s not like he was going to marry her and bring her to Mama and Papa over at New Deseret. It don’t matter none anyways. We’re off to kill us some ETs. That will cheer him up.”
“True that.”
Two
Earth, Sol System, 164 AFC
“Let’s be blunt, Commander,” the Marine Major said. “Your career in the Navy is ruined. You know that.”
“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Lisbeth Zhang agreed, trying not to squirm in her seat. The jarhead was simply stating the facts, but she didn’t enjoy being reminded of them.
Even in wartime, you didn’t go very far after losing a ship, let alone both vessels in the task unit you were commanding. If you did, you’d better go down with said ship. You most certainly weren’t supposed to be the sole survivor of such a disaster. Whatever the circumstances, at first glance it looked as if she’d abandoned her command and left everyone in it to die, and too often a first glance was all you ever got. Her subsequent actions on Jasper-Five had not been enough to redeem herself in the merciless eyes of the Bureau of Navy Personnel. As far as BUPERS was concerned, Lisbeth had been tried and found wanting. She’d been cleared of any actual wrongdoing, but that didn’t mean she was going to be in a starship bridge any time soon.
Lisbeth had spent the last few months on the beach, stranded on Earth while waiting for new orders. Nobody seemed to know what to do with her, or want to spend much thought on the matter. Even with the massive mobilization going on, there were more available officers than hulls, so she’d probably be stuck on some non-combat assignment when they finally decided to make her earn her munificent pay. It would be decades, if ever, before she went into the dark, and then it’d be somewhere in Logistics, probably as the XO of a supply scow, not anywhere near a combat vessel. If she spent a century doing her best, maybe that would change, or maybe not. A service ruled by near-immortals had a long memory, both institutional and personal.
“Your record shows a great deal of potential, however,” the jarhead officer went on. “Among other things, you are a superb small-craft pilot. Aced all your shuttle qualifiers as a cadet, and your handling of that escape pod when it came apart over Jasper-Five was impressive.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, suppressing a snort. Yeah, she could handle a shuttle. Which had as much to do with commanding a warship as her skills in hand to hand combat, or in basket weaving for that matter. She already regretted agreeing to this interview, but she’d been advised not to miss it by her few remaining friends in the service. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“And you have a Warp Rating of 3,” the major added. “The Corps is prepared to offer you a position in a new program. A black program, which limits what I can tell you about it, among other things because I don’t need to know very much about it. You won’t be briefed any further until after you accept the offer. Until you are at your new post, to be exact. You would transfer to the Corps, and the move would entail a loss in grade, but I’m told that you will pick up rank rather rapidly. The assignment will involve a remote deployment, mostly out of contact, for an undetermined length of time.”
Lisbeth’s eyes widened as the Marine officer spoke. The questions and the statement about her warp rating pointed towards something that had long been rejected as impossible. Could it be...? It was the only thing that fit. She fought to keep her face impassive as the leatherneck finished his spiel.
“Where do I sign up?” she said as soon as he was done.
Groom Base, Star System 3490, 164 AFC
USWMC Captain Lisbeth Zhang watched the screens as the transport ship made its final approach and waited to see if her guess had been more than a wild-eyed fantasy.
Fantasy or not, there she was, at the ass end of the galaxy, some gigabytes’ worth of paperwork later, wearing her brand-new Marine uniform. She’d made Captain at last, although a Marine Captain was a mere O-3, three ranks below a Navy Captain and one rank below her previous pay grade. It sucked, but at least she had a career path of sorts ahead of her. The jarheads would value her ground combat experience a lot more than the Navy, that was for sure. And if she was right about this black project, she might be going into space combat a lot sooner than she’d ever hoped to.
The transport ship’s viewing room was crowded; most of the passengers were volunteers who knew very little about their mission and who’d rushed to take a gander at their destination as soon as the ship emerged from warp. Lisbeth traded glances with her fellow recruits; her imp revealed the public details of their records, popping up in her field of vision when she focused on any of them. They were all officers. The Marines were mostly 75s – their Military Occupation Specialties were focused on shuttle piloting. There was also a smattering of former Navy personnel, all recent transfers to the Corps, all with high scores in small craft handling. Lisbeth was the only one who had commanded a warship, which made her feel all kinds of special. Not.
Everyone, Navy or gyrene, had a high warp rating. You needed a WR-2 to serve on the bridge of a starship or be launched from a warp catapult with a reasonable expectation you’d come out the other side. The indispensable and rather strange warp navigators, the men and women who actually willed a ship to come out the other end of a warp point, were rated at 3 or higher. A large percentage of WR-2s ended up in the Corps just so the jarheads could send them to their near-certain deaths, something she found incredibly wasteful. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a near-certain death, but it wasn’t exactly safe.
All the volunteers in the transport ship had the silver or gold spiral symbol on their profiles that denoted a WR-3 or -4. Even considering that over fifty percent of humanity was warp-rated, about five times the ratio of the next most FTL-adept species in the known galaxy, this group was pretty unusual.
Everyone in the transport had pointedly kept their thoughts about the project to themselves, but most of them must suspect the exact same thing she did. Just cross-checking their public records was enough. All her life, she’d grown up reading, watching movies and playing games involving a fighting platform that Starfarers didn’t use, that everyone said just couldn’t be effectively deployed in combat. But humans had been breaking all kinds of rules since First Contact. What was one more?
Star System 3490 didn’t even rate a name and didn’t look all that impressive on the data and viewing screens. It was a red dwarf, and a warp dead end, connected to a minor American colony by a single ley line. The closest thing to an inhabitable world in the system was a Mars-like planet with an unbreathably-thin atmosphere and average temperatures in the twenty-degree Fahrenheit range; its only saving graces were its near-Earth gravity and its Class Two microbiology, which had released some oxygen into the air, even if not in enough concentration to support humans.
Someone had been spending a lot of time and energy on the planet: there was a ground installation large enough to fit in a good ten, twenty-thousand people, and an orbital starship yard busily at work on a number of vessels Lisbeth quickly identified as assault ships, the troop carriers that could conduct shuttle and warp-catapult deployments and which, while officially Navy property, were largely manned by the Corps. Just the sort of ships the senior service might consider expendable enough to lend to this black project.
“Holy shit,” one of her fellow Marines said, glancing at another part of the viewing screen.
Lisbeth had seen plenty of warp emergences before, even at this close range, mere kilometers away. The sight was no longer awe-inspiring, although it was never something you e
ver got fully used to. People described it as a shimmering glow followed by a display of colors not unlike the aurora borealis on Earth. The glowing colors had a depth to them, though; they inspired the feeling of peering into a vast chasm with no bottom in sight. Everyone felt a brief thrill of vertigo when looking into a warp breach; a few of the spectators in the viewing room wobbled on their feet.
Twelve tears in the fabric of space-time appeared at the same time, clustered closely together. Twelve tiny ships emerged from them. Her imp provided her with a size estimate: about the same length of a standard combat shuttle, but with a narrower profile. They weren’t pretty. Lisbeth magnified the image, focusing on one of the vessels, and saw what looked like a capital ship’s energy cannon with several graviton thrusters, warp generators and other systems welded all around it. Shimmering warp shields in the front and rear made it hard to pick up details. But the fact that it had warp shields was impressive enough. Nothing that size should be able to mount warp generators.
The squadron kept station with the transport ship for several seconds. Nobody spoke until they dropped back into warp and disappeared from sight.
“Warp fighters,” another Marine officer said, wonder in her voice. “They fucking did it. Warp fighters!”
The common room erupted in cheers.
Lisbeth cheered along. She’d guessed right, and her life was never going to be the same.
* * *
The first briefing was thrilling and sobering at the same time.
“You’re probably wondering why I’ve gathered you here,” the brigadier general giving the dog-and-pony show said, drawing a few chuckles from the crowd. There were over two hundred of them in the auditorium, about one-third of them female, which made sense, since shuttlecraft pilot was one of the few combat career paths more or less open to women. The physical requirements weren’t quite as harsh, and few females wanted to undergo the costly and painful muscle-and-bone treatments needed to lug a hundred pounds on your back for extended periods of time.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 37
