The hatch to the head opened and Sabatini walked out wearing a clean set of utilities, drying her dark hair with a regulation green towel. She has the annoying habit of reminding me she’s a woman every now and then, even surrounded by olive drab. I couldn’t forget the kiss at the airlock, either. And after Doc Roy’s teasing in sickbay...
“Hiya, chief,” she called out cheerfully. “How’s the leprechaun?”
I smiled. “A little respect for your elders. He’s doing OK. I didn’t see him, he’s still out. I was gonna swing by sickbay before I turn in tonight and see if he’s up.”
“Tell him I don’t have a victim for poker until he gets back.”
“You did a job on me,” Johnson complained.
“You’re still a student, not a victim yet,” she explained, smiling sweetly. “O’Rourke is experienced enough to know better and still gets his ass kicked.”
“You all done in the head?” I asked.
“Uh huh,” she said through the towel. “You boys go on in. No grab-ass in there, now.”
“Don’t worry, I told him no tongue until he makes lance corporal.”
It felt great to strip off my sweaty uniform and wash the grime of Sunflower One off my body. Christ, what a place. A mining asteroid named like a floating vacation resort. What the hell were they thinking?
****
It turned out one of the social workers did know how to play poker. Having two women at the table meant that Johnson was concentrating even less than usual. I held him back on putting up more of his pay, but he owed Sabatini a week of boot shining and he was cleaning the head for the rest of the cruise. Poor bastard would have to smarten up sooner or later.
The social worker was an attractive twenty-two-year-old blonde just out of some school in the mid-west. Her name was Christine Sterndale, which sounded so horribly uppercrust prep school I was tempted to dislike her on the spot. I felt my old blue collar Irish insecurity manifesting itself. I saw the university sweatshirt with its Latin motto, heard the name, and had my knee-jerk reaction of spoiled-rich-kid-who-never-did-an-honest-day’s-work—until I remembered that she and her co-workers had volunteered for this duty out here in the boondocks to help people. And she’d probably had other options. If I’d been born wealthy, I can’t say I’d have been out there.
“I’ll take two,” she said, tossing her cards in the discard pile. “By the way, what made you all join the Marines? I didn’t expect you to be so...” She trailed off, embarrassed.
“Civilized?” I asked, dealing her two more cards.
“Walking upright? Having thumbs?” Sabatini chimed in. “Not drinking the blood of our fallen enemy?”
“I’m sorry. We’re all very grateful for your help. I just never thought of the military as compassionate. We always looked at you as bullies forcing Corporate America’s foreign policy down the throats of the underprivileged. I never realized that you sometimes oppose the bullies.”
This is why I have so low an opinion of college students. I bit back a smart remark; at least she had the guts to come out here for what she believed in. “Africa is a hell of a lot better off for our involvement,” I said, straining to keep my voice neutral.
“Well, yes,” she conceded. “But you have to admit it was colonialism that screwed it up in the first place. I apologize for making a snap judgment. I was wrong. The company and the rebels both exploited the people. When you picked up that little girl, Corporal—”
“Mick,” I corrected. “Corporal is what my bosses call me when they’re about to chew my ass. I couldn’t leave her. She was just a kid.”
“It was still the right thing to do. Is that why you joined the Marines? To help people?”
Actually, part of it was the chance to run around in the boondocks, shoot guns, and blow shit up, but I wasn’t going to legitimize a pretty girl’s waning prejudice.
“Kinda,” I answered, looking over my hand. “I joined up because my father and grandfather were Marines. It’s a family tradition. We owe the US some service since they took in our raggedy-assed starving ancestors during the potato famine. So the military became a tradition. I volunteered for the Expeditionary Units because I wanted to make a difference.”
“Lovely.” Sabatini smirked. “How many cards you taking, Albert Schweitzer?”
“Two, you jackal. Now what made a demure young flower like you join the Corps?”
“She probably got busted for running illegal poker games,” Johnson offered. “The judge told her it was prison or the Marines.”
“Boy, did you make the wrong choice,” I said.
“I grew up with five brothers,” said Sabatini. “I always played rough and tumble boy games. Sports, cops and robbers, that kind of thing. My older brother joined the Army. Went into the Rangers. I had to one-up him. Couldn’t let him think he was tougher than me.”
“I never would have guessed. What about you, Johnson?”
“Three.”
“No, you dumb bastard. Why did you join the Corps?” I gave him his three cards.
He shrugged. “Wasn’t no work in South Carolina. Especially if you was poor and black. There was high tech, but you need some college for that. Other than that, there was just farming or service jobs. I gotta wear a uniform it ain’t gonna be no red paper hat. I used to see the Marines on leave in their dress uniforms. They always looked like they was confident, going someplace. Even the poor blacks could get stripes. The Marine Corps give me three meals a day, clothes, a place to sleep, and they pay me on top of that.”
“I know what you mean,” I told him. “There wasn’t a hell of a lot of work around home. My dad had to work two jobs even with his pension from the Corps. At least we don’t have to pay rent on this palace.”
He chuckled. “I can just get you two to stop robbing me at the table, I’ll be all set.”
“Learn to play cards,” I advised. “Or learn to like cleaning the head.”
“I can’t believe they don’t teach you this in boot camp,” said Sabatini. “It’s way more useful than close order drill. Thank God you shoot better than you play or we’d all be dead back at that ambush.”
That was praise. Indirect and veiled in insult, but Johnson caught it.
I turned the inquisition back on our guest. “OK, fair’s fair. Why’d you volunteer for relief work out here at the back of beyond?”
Christine thought for a moment before answering. “I needed to make a difference too, I guess. I couldn’t just watch all the injustice in the world and not do something. I thought we could go and educate and feed the poor, and they would be able to make a better life. I never expected the violence we saw out here.”
“It’s as old as recorded history,” I said. “Since agriculture. The Assyrians, Babylonians and Egyptians all used slaves for the fields. And any time the rulers have been weak or oppressive, or the food failed, the masses have revolted.”
“Oh-oh,” said Sabatini. “Here comes the history lecture.”
This was a standing joke in the platoon. I never paid much attention to history classes in school, just memorized the bare minimum to get by. When I went to Parris Island, part of basic training was Marine Corps History. I thought it was great. These were the epic stories and exploits of the great warrior band I was joining. Later on, when we had sea duty with the fleet or garrison deployments and there wasn’t anything to do, I would study the computer nets for historical records of the events around the battles I learned about in boot camp. I gradually began to understand that history is a great, interlocked story of human behavior on a massive scale. This was one of the most exciting discoveries I ever made. I couldn’t believe how boring it had seemed in school.
I held back my speech, “OK, Marines, you don’t want a lesson in history, we’ll have one in getting your asses whupped at poker.”
I spoke too soon. I wound up losing a few bucks. Sabatini broke even. Johnson took a bath, as usual. The uppercrust, peaches-and-cream college graduate social worker was a shark
at the table. We were lucky to get off as lightly as we did. They taught cutthroat cards at that school along with Peace, Love and Understanding 101.
“Shit, boss,” Sabatini muttered in awe. “If she can shoot, we’ll trade Johnson and O’Rourke straight up for Sterndale here and play teams against the Navy. Think about it, Mick, we could retire after one cruise.”
“What do you think?” I asked our newest player. “You want to sign on? Food’s decent, pay sucks, but you’ll just take everybody else’s, and you probably get shot at as much as we do just being a social worker. Join the Corps and you get a helmet.”
“Thanks, but I plan to go into teaching or counseling after I get back to Earth.”
“Combat is definitely more relaxing. Trust me.”
“No thanks,” she laughed. “Although, I think we could accomplish a lot if we went into a place together. You could disarm the thugs and we could teach the people to better themselves.”
“It’ll never happen,” I said ruefully. “It makes too damn much sense.”
It was true. The aid workers and Peace Corps types went in first. Their work was impossible because of the fighting and social chaos, and half of the food they brought got stolen by one faction or another. So we went in to clean up the mess, by which time the people’s confidence in foreign aid was eroded all to shit.
“A word of advice,” Sabatini said, unusually serious. “Get a thick skin. Being a crusader is a tough racket. If you gotta do it, do it, but expect everybody to hate you for it. Even the people you try to help.”
I agreed. I’d seen enough of that firsthand. “Protect us, but don’t talk to my daughter” was how most civilians looked at us.
“By the way,” I asked, “what’s this revolution about?”
“You don’t know?”She was genuinely shocked.
“Hell, I didn’t find out the name of the damn rock until we were getting on the shuttle home. I assume it’s gotta be wages, conditions, or personal or religious freedom, but I don’t have a clue which.”
“It started as living conditions. The corporation stopped improvements to the facility. They slacked off on maintenance. Then food deliveries slowed down and they started rationing. You could only get food on the black market for ridiculous prices. Finally, the miners had enough. They declared independence.”
I froze as the enormity sank in. This was the potato famine, the Pullman strike and the Bolshevik Revolution all wrapped up in one horrible package.
I whistled. “Thank Christ we got out as easy as we did.”
Chapter 9
8 JUN 2078
ASTEROID BELT RESCUE SUBSTATION ECHO 7
I handed Jensen his machine.
“So that’s how they planned to suck us in,” I said. “Did anybody besides us grunts think it smelled bad?”
He keyed up another file. “Your little expedition, and the Rescue crew showing up to plug the hole, caused a firestorm back on Earth. The mining company. Congress. The Pentagon. Everybody was scrambling to assign or dodge blame.”
“Anybody try to figure who was responsible for us getting hung out to dry?”
“Actually,” he said, smiling, and handing back the reader, “some of the high ranking military took offense at being used like you were. I got some information from a secretary in General Lopez’s office. It seems the General had a hard time keeping his voice down when he got angry.”
I grinned as I looked back down and began reading again.
SNN News File 3, courtesy Brian Jensen
15 Nov 2075
Office of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Washington DC
General Rafael Lopez, Commandant of the Marine Corps, replayed the news video and smiled. His Marines did well. Mission accomplished and no dead Marines, that’s all that mattered.
He turned back to the colonel across the desk. The man was the Corps’ liaison in Congress, responsible for keeping the Commandant in touch with the mood of the legislature. General Lopez had neither the time nor patience to deal with the myriad interests and coalitions in the government, and was happy to have Marines like Colonel Bryant to attend to that.
“What are they bitching about now, Bill?” he asked.
“Well, General, the usual groups are trying to denounce this action. The mining company is putting pressure on some members of Congress to protest the use of force.”
The general snorted. “Screw ’em. If they could run the fucking place, we wouldn’t have had to go in.”
“Yes, sir,” Colonel Bryant agreed. He sighed inwardly. General Lopez was a damn fine Marine, and had an excellent combat record, but he hated Washington. His style made the liaison’s job a difficult but necessary one. “There is some concern from the Secretary of Defense that the troops used live ammo when they should have used less-than-lethal rounds.”
“Tell the secretary that with all due respect, he’s never been pinned down in some Godforsaken slum by armed rebels and had nothing but some Goddamned beanbags for protection,” the Commandant replied. “I was a brand new lieutenant leading a platoon in Africa and that happened to me. We were pinned down for six hours. They couldn’t get a medevac in for my wounded. I had to watch three of my boys die waiting for a pickup. The fleet finally sent a frigging airstrike to suppress the enemy. A hundred civilians got fried by bombing because the damn politicians didn’t want us shooting a few rebels. That’s what happens when you send the military in without any authority to carry out its mission.”
“Well,” said the colonel, “the Secretary is asking for an investigation into the use of live ammo. I think he wants to take credit for the rescued civilians but kiss the asses of the corporation by handing over the leader of that platoon.”
“Tell him to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.”
Despite his long association with the general, Colonel Bryant was taken aback. “Sir?”
“No way am I going to co-operate in the destruction of a good Marine’s career to appease these assholes. They want to hang somebody, let’s go after the idiot who put the use of nonlethals in the order. You don’t want to kill somebody, don’t shoot at him. These half-assed riot rounds are a bad idea.”
“I fully sympathize, but you know that our friends on the Armed Services Committee are going to use this against you.”
The general shrugged. “Bill, I’m bullet proof. My term’s up in a year. My pension’s safe. They’d need to catch me handing the President’s daughter over to a gang of neo-fascist extremists to fire me now.”
“Senator Donovan loves to use your temper as an issue.”
“If I had a problem with my temper, that bitch would be lying in a pool of her own blood,” General Lopez replied. “What kind of idiots elected her, anyway?”
Colonel Bryant sidestepped the question. “Bad publicity could hurt us in the budget talks. We’ve asked for some new equipment for the space security mission. The isolationists are using the cost to try to shut the whole thing down. Maybe we should at least try to—”
“No.” The answer was flat and simple. “Bill, you want to talk publicity?”The Commandant pointed to the video image. It showed a Marine in full combat gear scooping up a little girl and carrying her to safety, giving her a reassuring kiss on the head. “That image is gold. That will do for these small interventions what the Suribachi flag-raising did for the Corps in WWII. The spineless bastards can attack me as a loudmouthed old hawk, but what can they say about those men and women? Is that a vicious warmonger? Hell no, that’s a good, all-American boy saving the world.
“Don’t concentrate on the generals, or the funding, or the experts, Bill. Concentrate on the Marines out there on the line. These kids are putting themselves in harm’s way to carry out the missions Congress and the President give them. Just like we did twenty years ago. We owe it to them to stand behind them when they do make a decision.”
The colonel nodded. He had been in Washington a long time. He thought back to his active service on the Indian subcontinent, cle
aning up after the USNE.
“Aye aye, sir!” he snapped with more conviction that he had felt in a long time.
Chapter 10
15 NOV 2075
USS TRIPOLI
After the poker game, I decided to talk to Sgt McCray on O’Rourke’s behalf. I banged on the bulkhead beside the hatch to his office.
“What?” came the friendly reply.
“Cpl Collins requesting permission to enter!” I called.
“Come!”
I hit the button beside the hatch and it slid open. I walked into the office, halting the regulation two paces from the desk. “Good afternoon, Sergeant!” I snapped, assuming a position of attention.
“Afternoon, Corporal. Now stand at ease and spit it out.”
I relaxed. This one formal ritual remained unchanged. Now that we had gone through the motions, we could speak freely. “I want to recommend O’Rourke for meritorious promotion to lance corporal, chief.”
“That insubordinate fuck?”
I sensed Sgt McCray was not impressed with O’Rourke’s general conduct. Not a completely unjustified view, but I still felt the need to go to bat for my team member. “He saved my ass at that ambush.”
“That was just bad judgment on his part, Collins.”
“Come on, Sarge. You know he’s a good man in a fight. Yeah, his attitude needs work, but do you really want a Marine walking around with more hash marks than rank?” Hash marks, also known as idiot stripes, were diagonal stripes worn on the sleeve of the dress uniform, near the cuff. Each stripe denoted four years of service. Terry might be the only PFC in the Corps with three hash marks.
Sgt McCray grunted. He was apparently in a good mood. “I’ll pass your recommendation on to the lieutenant.”
“Thanks, boss.”
“By the way, your team did real good today. Even that undisciplined fuck O’Rourke.”
“Thank you, Sarge.” That was high praise indeed. And he didn’t look more than slightly disgusted.
In Every Clime and Place Page 7
