by Richard Fox
“Admiral Valdar, the Breitenfeld could jump to the lost Dotari fleet, construct the mini-Crucible on site, then we can all be home in no time. We can cure the phage if we but have the courage to go and grab it!”
“That doesn’t answer my question, Lo’thar.”
“It does!”
“Calm down, friend. I am neither confirming nor denying anything we’ve talked about.”
Lo’thar stepped back, expanding his chest and drawing his hair quills back slightly. “You are offering me bovine leavings!”
Valdar looked down just long enough to avoid making an open challenge to the prickly Dotari code of honor. A second later, he met his friend’s level gaze.
“The Dotari diplomatic corps will make an official request to the Terran government in a few hours to utilize the Grinder program. If you, Valdar of the Breitenfeld, of the motion picture Last Stand on Takeni, takes an interest and volunteers for the mission, it should go easy with President Garret. Yes?”
“My volunteering is no guarantee,” Valdar said.
“Also,” a rustle went through Lo’thar’s quills, “we will release a press statement on New Bastion making our request public to the rest of the—”
“Stop,” Valdar said. “You’d tell the rest of the galaxy about our top-secret project. A tool of great strategic value.”
“Our survival is at stake. If our plea is not enough, then perhaps the rest of New Bastion could compensate the Terran Union for the great costs incurred,” Lo’thar said.
“Bovine leavings, Lo’thar. Bovine leavings.”
“But if the Terran Union agrees to do so right away, then there would be no need for a press release.”
“And I thought the Dotari were poor negotiators,” Valdar said. “What makes you think we’d say no?”
“You kept the Grinder development hidden from us. We would’ve helped.”
“I made that case to the brass at Camelback,” Valdar said.
“But if you, hero of Takeni, commander of the final assault on the Xaros, receiver of the Medal of Honor, and—”
“I’ll do it,” Valdar said. “You think I want to sit around resting on my laurels? Attend staff functions, make small talk, and drink crap coffee? This sort of mission is too important for me to leave to anyone else.”
Lo’thar lunged forward and hugged Valdar, pinning his arms to his side.
“I…forgot your Dotari attitudes about personal space,” he said.
Lo’thar stepped back. “I forgot you are an important desk worker now,” the Dotari said, eyes dancing with excitement and quills puffing up slightly. “I knew I was right to come to you.”
“Lucky me,” Valdar said, squaring his shoulders to the Dotari and smoothing his uniform.
“You have—how do you say it—clout. Wasta. Influence. Grand Poo Bah. You are the big man on campus. Huge swinging—”
“I get it,” Valdar said.
“All I need from you, Admiral, is to make public statements about helping the Dotari. We will get tons of support. Like the movie!”
“No public statements and don’t remind me about the movie,” Valdar said, looking past his old friend to watch the rings of Saturn on the oversized wall screen. He considered everything he’d learned and studied Lo’thar’s expressive behavior. “One message to President Garret should be all it takes. How bad is it, Lo’thar? What’s our timeline? I’m not a fan of rushing to failure. There remains testing to be done, strategy and politics to contend with.”
Lo’thar looked down. The quills on his head drooped. When he raised his eyes to Valdar, they were damp with restrained tears. “Is there time for my people and my home world?” He shrugged unconvincingly. “Maybe there is time, maybe not. More die every day. All I know is there is not time enough for my daughter. She has months if she is lucky.”
Valdar felt as though someone had stabbed him in the gut.
“We have our objectives,” Valdar said. “Get to the Golden Fleet. Find a Dotari with the immunities you need, build the Grinder and jump back to your home world. Too easy. Unless the Grinder fails and we’re stuck in deep space until we die of old age.”
“The Breitenfeld is the blessed ship, is it not? This is where the human magic happens.”
Valdar patted Lo’thar on the shoulder. “You served on this ship during the war. Did it feel like things were ‘magical’?”
“No. It felt like we were lucky to survive by the skin of our beaks,” Lo’thar said.
“Nothing’s changed. But the old girl needs to stretch her legs. Thanks for the chance.”
Chapter 5
Corporal Max dropped to a squat and kicked his feet back, situating him in the much-loved position commonly referred to in the Corps as the top of a push-up. Did he hold it? No, that would suggest he was near the end of the lesson. Gunnery Sergeant King would never shortchange him with an easy lesson. Many, many times he had promised to make Max push the floor until he died.
This was one such occasion.
Max yanked his feet back under him and jumped into the air. “Thirty-seven!”
“Keep it tight, Marine! Stop swinging my gear around! You gonna pay for that armor when you break it?” King shouted.
Max dropped, kicked back, tucked in, jumped into the air. “Thirty-eight.” His unpowered Strike Marine armor felt unsecure, sliding this way and that with each change of direction as though it were too big for him.
“Thirty-nine!” He snarled the number like a curse as the loose armor reminded him of being the fat kid in high school football practice.
“Forty!” He screamed the words, not wanting to remember being the coach’s kid who was slinging around an extra fifty pounds.
“Were those burpees or interpretive dance?” King grunted. “I thought you were a hot-shit Strike Marine. Peter, Paul, and Mary, will you look at that.”
Sucking air into his lungs, he avoided looking at the team on the Terran Strike Marine virtual range. Holographic projectors gave the place the feel of an outdoor firing lane, complete with a wind sock on the berm and a safety tower at the east end of the line. Max wished it was just an underground bunker. Reality could be nice…if the hardest-assed squad boss in military history hadn’t just busted you.
Standing at attention, sweat running down his back…and front…and everywhere to pool in the unpowered armor, Max waited for King to get creative—maybe tell him to start over or something clever like that.
As his chest rose and fell and he waited for the force of nature that was Gunney King to decide his fate, Max watched Booker and Duke. Sergeant Booker was outstanding, the best medic Max had ever worked with. She lay prone, facing the virtual firing range with her feet spread wider than her shoulders, a sniper rifle pulled in hard against her shoulder. In this position, she was compact, stable, and made the smallest target possible for counter snipers to aim at…or hopefully not aim at.
Duke, the team sniper, lay next to her, serving as her spotter and holding the position like he was born to it. Max could believe he was. Duke had three basic skill sets—killing things, chasing tail, and brutal honesty only a salty grunt could manage.
Booker and Duke glanced at him from the firing lane. She smiled and shook her head before returning to her rifle. Duke stared a moment longer.
Max thought the man must be refining his plan to kill everyone in the room, although the scary old bastard was good to have in a fight. Everyone treated him like a living legend, but he creeped Max out.
King paced back and forth between Max and the firing line. He was thinking, deciding, and muttering under his breath.
Max waited.
“Give me ten more, Marine,” King said levelly. “Don’t count ‘em. Just remember why we’re here.”
Max sprang into the air at the top of each burpee as fire burned through his legs. Oxygen and all that other stuff that made Earth’s atmosphere so nice to breathe whistled in and out of his lungs. Sweat soaked the body-glove uniform between his skin and the unpowere
d armor.
“Family,” he grunted inside his helmet.
Another rep.
“Corps.”
Another rep.
“God.”
Maybe that was the wrong order, maybe not.
“You about done over there?” Booker said as she logged a shot in her book.
“You want to join him?” King asked.
****
Sergeant Madilyn Booker adjusted her firing position, trying to find the sweet spot between stability and comfort when firing a weapon with the kick of a gauss sniper rifle. She pulled the weapon firmly into her shoulder and exhaled as she looked through the scope at a VR target downrange. “I could have been a sniper. This is easy.”
“Focus, Doc,” Duke said.
She felt his presence like a bad day about to happen, which strangely reassured her. Duke was Duke, even if he was one of those guys who never really seemed to accept women in the armed forces. He didn’t say it, but a girl could tell.
“I’m about to kill this 1500-meter shot,” she said. The legendary sniper was prone next to her, his rifle tucked up close to him like a girlfriend.
She fired. The virtual round kicked up virtual dust next to the itty-bitty target in the distance.
“Clear miss,” Duke said.
She dropped her forehead against her rifle.
“Your breath control is off,” Duke said as he slipped a tin of chewing tobacco into his back pocket.
“Whatever.”
“This is simple stuff, Booker. Did you skip basic marksmanship training or something? Is that what medics do these days?”
“I drew this rifle straight from the arms room. It isn’t zeroed,” she said.
“It is.”
“No, Duke, it isn’t. How could it be zeroed?”
He exhaled, looking down the scope of his rifle as though bored with this conversation. “This is a VR range. They come zeroed.”
“You trust the arms room?”
“Your problem,” he said, “is your breath control.”
She looked at his rifle, noting scrapes and scuffs that had been buffed over then refinished for proper camouflage. Blood, sweat, and tears seemed embedded in the stock and fore grip…not that the omnium-crafted weapon could absorb such trivial fluids. “I could drill it with your rifle.”
He slapped the back of her hand hard, striking right where the bony part was the most sensitive. “Were you about to touch Buffy?”
She pulled her hand back. “Sorry.”
“Don’t you ever touch my Buffy without asking! In fact, never touch her. Don’t even look at her like you’re going to touch her.”
Booker pulled her hand back and looked down the firing lane, smiling as soon as she peered into her scope. “Sorry, Duke. Didn’t know you were the jealous type. But you know it’s not my breath control. This thing from the arms room is crap.”
“Try again,” he said.
She aimed, pulled the weapon into her shoulder, and exhaled. Everything looked good through her optics. The computer-assisted reticule promised a solid hit. She pulled the trigger.
“Miss.”
“What the hell?”
“Try again.”
Repeating the procedure with extra attention to hold her breath after she exhaled, she squeezed the trigger with the exact same amount of pressure she’d used on the previous shot.
“Well, look at that, another miss.”
“This weapon. Is not. Zeroed properly,” she said. “I don’t have the luxury of carrying the same weapon since sniper school—which I never went to, FYI.”
Duke took Booker’s generic weapon, standing and emptying his lungs on the way up. Booker knew how to fire during the low point of the breathing cycle. She was less certain how Duke thought he was going to achieve this delicate moment without lying prone. Each joint of his body below the weapon—ankles, knees, hip, spine, shoulders—was instability waiting to happen.
Duke pulled the trigger three times in quick succession. The electromagnetic snap of the weapon’s retort thundered through the range.
Booker peered through the spotting scope and witnessed three virtual holes lined up across the bull’s-eye in a one-inch group.
“Oh,” Booker said, her face turning red.
“It’s your breath control.”
****
Gunney King crossed his arms and watched his team. Good Marines, good people, but in need of discipline. Duke was one of the best snipers he’d ever met, and generally, he didn’t push back. That was good. King respected experience. He saw right away, however, that Duke was focused on Booker.
King spotted a more immediate problem—one that would lend itself to today’s lesson about professionalism and discipline. Striding forward, he stopped next to Max, who was bent over at the waist and breathing hard after his calisthenics.
“Corporal Max, recover.”
As Max stood, turning to face King a bit more slowly than normal, one of his hands trailed from a utility pouch on his thigh rig.
King narrowed his eyes. “Missing something?”
Max stood up, straining against the weight of his unpowered armor. With the pseudo-muscle layer beneath his ballistic plates disabled, moving felt like wearing thick clothes soaked in water. Strike Marines trained to keep fighting after a catastrophic loss of armor function, but working in unpowered armor was one of the more miserable things any Marine did outside getting shot at.
King touched a button on Max’s gauntlet and his armor reengaged and tightened, pressure squeezing some of his excess moisture out one-way filters. Nearly inaudible, the coolant system hissed to life.
Max breathed a little easier.
“Corporal Max, what is the Strike Marine standard operating procedure regarding use of personal electronic devices while on a firing range, virtual or otherwise?” King asked.
“They’re forbidden, Gunney.”
“Then why did I catch you tap, tap, tapping away on this?” King pulled a scuffed-up Ubi slate from a pouch on his belt.
“No excuse, Gunney.”
King handed Max the Ubi. “You’re a Strike Marine, Max, not some recruit at basic who doesn’t know better. There something you need to tell me?”
Max hesitated, then started to grind his teeth.
King kept his face impassive, with an edge of affected hardness. He wanted the younger Marine to show contrition but not kiss ass.
“My girls, Shelly and Sam…Samantha, they’re excited to have me home. About to drive my old lady crazy with stuff they want to do as soon as I get there. They were fighting about going to the R&R resort in Cuba or the rebuilt park in Anaheim. Hard to parent on one side of a screen, you know?”
“I don’t. We were dark for the last month. You can make it another day before working out vacation plans. Don’t let me catch you distracted on the range again,” King said.
“Yes, Gunney.”
King jerked his head toward an empty firing position, knowing hard silence was safer. No need to explain further. Max was a solid Marine. King’s job was to keep him that way.
He moved down the firing line, pleased to see Adams and Garrison had successfully zeroed in their weapons and were kneeling behind virtual cover killing virtual Toth warriors in one of the more challenging training programs.
“I’m watching you, Adams,” he said.
“Everyone is, Gunney,” she said.
King let it pass and took a firing position. The first thing he learned in NCO school was to remain tactically proficient. No one followed a team leader who couldn’t shoot straight. He cycled power into his gauss rifle and keyed up a mobile target sequence.
Holographic drones the size of small plates hovered down his firing lane as a timer ticked down. He readied his rifle when a haptic feedback sensor on King’s wrist vibrated, warning him just before Lieutenant Hoffman entered the room.
“Officer on deck,” King said, frowning as he saw Private Opal following Hoffman like an extremely large, extremely
well-trained service dog.
“As you were,” Hoffman said as he walked into the range, his stern expression driving a spike of dread into King’s gut.
“Hey, Opie! You’re back and bigger than ever,” Adams said, her weapon still pointed downrange despite the way she twisted to face the new arrivals.
King opened a keypad on his harness and thumbed a button to kill the range. “Render your weapons safe and leave them at your positions.” He remained in his firing lane, methodically removing his rifle magazine, then the internal grenades from the launcher slung under the main barrel. Virtual ranges were treated with the same cautions and procedures as live-fire exercises. It kept people focused…except when they were video chatting with a nagging wife back home.
Hoffman walked to King’s position as the other Marines fell in line facing them.
King decided not to mention Max’s range violation to the lieutenant.
“Let’s see it, Opie,” Adams said.
Without hesitation, the doughboy lifted his shirt to show a raw, pink scar.
King said nothing, staring at the mass of older scars that nearly concealed Private Opal’s most recent acquisition.
“Other one,” Opal said, hooking his thumbs into his belt to drop his pants.
“At ease, Opal,” King said. Once he was certain the doughboy heard him, he stared daggers at Adams.
Her eyes went wide, her face a picture of innocence, while Opal proceeded to stand with better military bearing than any of the other soldiers.
Hoffman nodded once to King, then faced the team. “You all performed admirably on New Bastion, above and beyond my expectations of Strike Marines. Any…friction…on the way to accomplishing that mission is my responsibility and no one else’s.”
No one moved or spoke and King felt the silence like it had physical weight. Ventilation and climate control units suddenly sounded like the launch platform of a cruiser.
“We have…” Hoffman looked at Opal as he trailed off. “Block leave has been postponed.”
King thought he could feel Max seize up.
“We are now tasked to join a highly sensitive mission on the Breitenfeld, under command of Admiral Valdar. More details will be released when we are on board and under commo lockdown.”
