In Every Clime and Place

by Patrick LeClerc

We obeyed. Unspoken apologies flashed in both of our eyes. Terry and I would get past this. Now, all I had to do was smooth things over with Sabatini and hope the team could stand the strain. I helped myself to another nip of courage before I left the Chief.

  Chapter 17

  9 DEC 2075

  USS TRIPOLI

  Warning sirens blared throughout the ship. I rolled out of the rack, hauled on my trousers and slipped my boots on. I slid one arm into the sleeve of my jacket, grabbed my armor, helmet and rifle, and rushed out into the passageway as I buttoned up. The rest of the team followed, cursing.

  “Hey Mick, is this the real thing or just another fuckin’ drill?” asked Johnson.

  “It’s the real thing until I tell you it’s a drill!”

  “It’s the real thing,” O’Rourke grumbled, buckling his belt on the run. “Gunny saves the drills for when I’m hung over.”

  “So why don’t we have ’em five days a week, then?” Sabatini asked.

  Terry, not at his wittiest when rudely awakened, settled for a middle finger in response.

  By the time I reached my post at the weapons command center, I was buckling my web gear. O’Rourke and Johnson took up position at the first hatchway. Sabatini and I jogged across to the other. The Navy gunners were at their terminals, plotting solutions. If it was a drill, it sure as hell was convincing.

  I watched in a fog as the gunners fed information into their terminals. The Tripoli had two batteries of twin 120mm cannons, half a dozen missile launch tubes, and four linked .50 caliber machine gun positions. It was more efficient and easier to co-ordinate fire if all the guns were controlled from a central point. If this room was taken out by a hit to the ship, the weapons could be served from their individual locations.

  I still had no idea what the target was. Strictly speaking, that wasn’t my problem. My problem was to make sure nobody mutinied or boarded the ship and took over the weapons center. I didn’t think that was real likely, but it was standard procedure. The less glamorous part of our job as Marines was providing security for the Fleet.

  Having scanned the area and found no intruders or saboteurs to shoot, I dug into my cargo pocket and pulled out a foil-wrapped package of chocolate-covered coffee beans. I picked them up on leave. They were, without a doubt, the best way to stay awake known to man. It’s not always practical to brew up a pot of joe in the field, but sometimes you just need that caffeine boost. We are, despite our boasts to the contrary, only flesh and blood.

  I popped a few and tossed the package to Sabatini. She caught it and raised an eyebrow. “Are we supposed to be eating on duty?”

  “I’ll cover you while you eat, then you cover me,” I replied. “I shoot a lot better with my eyes open, so I think the beans are a good idea.”

  She cracked a brief smile, taking my advice and munching.

  “Grab a few and run the bag over to Johnson and O’Rourke. Tell Terry they’re not Irish Coffee beans, or he’ll hoard ’em.”

  She almost kept a straight face and jogged across to the rest of the team. It was as if she was trying hard not to be amused by my feeble attempts at wit.

  I felt a surly anger swell up. She was still ticked at me. So was Terry. And neither of them would open up about it. Christ, how had I gotten to this point without sleeping with either of them?

  I called to the gunnery officer. “Ensign Hatori, sir. What’s up?”

  “That’s the Navy’s business, Marine,” the officer replied formally. He was a serious aristocrat. When we first shipped out, he bragged about his family’s great naval tradition until we were all sick of him. I shut him up by pointing out that after we kicked their asses at Leyte Gulf his esteemed ancestors hadn’t captained anything bigger than a fishing boat until they had the brains to move to America and join a real Navy. Needless to say, I wasn’t his favorite shipmate.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” I said low enough so only he could hear, “but you got me and my Marines out of bed to guard your squid gunners’ behinds, so stop admiring your reflection in that butter bar and tell me what the hell is going on.”

  Terry would’ve been proud. It was insubordination, but Hatori was a twenty-two-year-old, newly commissioned Navy boy who hadn’t seen a shot fired outside the practice range. I had been dealing with dumbass orders from Naval Academy pukes like him for a dozen years. I took the opportunity to vent some of the past week’s frustration on him.

  I could see the ensign struggle for a few moments before answering stiffly, “Very well, Corporal. I suppose you and your team deserve an explanation.” We didn’t, really, but he was too new to realize that. He was young and insecure enough that a crusty old NCO could still intimidate him. “We received a distress call. A rescue ship got an SOS and found an escape pod from a supply ship. The survivors said they were attacked by pirates. A ship that matches that description was found floating, abandoned and stripped. This ship on the scanner is unregistered, armed and in the same area. If she doesn’t respond to the Captain’s hailing shortly, we will fire.”

  Wow. This was the real thing. “Thank you, sir.”

  He gave the merest nod of acknowledgment and stepped briskly back to his position at the center of the room, posing for the statue he knew would be erected in his home town someday.

  “Sir,” said a gunner, “I have a ship’s name. Crnazastava, but don’t ask how to pronounce it. Flagged to a private company in South Africa.”

  “South Africa has a merchant fleet in space?” I asked.

  “Not that I’ve heard,” said a petty officer. “But you can get a South African ship’s registration in a cereal box back on Earth, so it’s probably a front.”

  A few uneventful minutes passed as radio hailing attempts were made. I took a look at the image of the enemy ship on the large monitor in the center of the gunnery station. It was a big sucker. Probably a converted freighter. Even I could see it was modified for piracy. Bigger engines were installed, and I could make out a pair of ring-mounted missile launchers near the bow, and a gun turret aft. The center section of the ship rotated, much like ours, to produce artificial gravity for the crew and cargo areas. It was formidable enough to scare any merchant into surrender, and fast enough to elude most pursuers. It was pulling away as I watched.

  “Ensign Hatori!” Captain Turner’s voice came over the intercom.

  “Sir!”

  “Put a shot across her bow.”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  I perked up, interested. This was real Captain Blood stuff.

  Hatori barked an order to one of the gunners, who punched a button on his keyboard, then took a sip from the coffee cup on his desk.

  OK, maybe it wasn’t real pirate movie stuff. I was disappointed.

  I felt the vibration of the big 120mm gun more than I heard it. The round was a tracer, designed to show the other vessel that we meant business. It was aimed to sail just in front of the enemy if they maintained current course and speed.

  The enemy were ready for a confrontation. The turret near the stern opened up with a laser. Our ship’s defense kicked in automatically. I don’t know how it detected a laser before the beam cut a hole in the hull, it just did. Ask one of the gunners.

  The defense consisted of chaff dispensers, commonly referred to as sandblasters. They fired a cloud of powdered silica. When a laser hit it, the cloud acted like a million tiny prisms, dispersing and refracting the light to the point where it was more likely to give you a suntan than punch a hole in the ship. It played hell with the targeting software on guided missiles, too.

  “Return fire,” ordered Hatori. “Concentrate on the engines.”

  The .50 cal machine guns opened up immediately, the slow rhythmic chatter sending vibrations through our whole vessel as they fired a spread toward the enemy craft. At these distances, the rounds took so long to impact that common practice was to fire a few bursts to either side of the target as well as ahead, to allow for any evasive maneuvers. The 120mm guns opened up with buckshot
rounds. Less damaging than solid projectiles, they stood an excellent chance of hitting the vulnerable engines with at least a few of the small pellets. They were also a good defense against the missiles the enemy ship began launching.

  Our weapons seemed old fashioned compared to the armament of the pirates, but the advantage of flinging big dumb chunks of metal at the enemy was that they were hard to trick. The sophisticated guidance systems of missiles could be jammed or led astray by decoy flares. Lasers could be defeated. The bullets and shells we fired might not follow a foe through a turn, but they flew through chaff without any trouble. They worked even better out here in space than they did on earth. There was no air resistance to slow them or gravity to make them drop.

  The battle was interesting to watch. I had never seen naval combat before. I was used to the noisy, pulse-pounding, adrenaline-filled chaos of infantry combat. Here, there was no sound. In space, bright flashes of enemy missiles exploding at a safe distance were accompanied by silence. There was a certain beauty to the shimmering rainbow clouds of refracted laser light and the graceful lines of tracers closing on the ship as it tried to evade our gunnery. The Navy gunners typed into the targeting computers, calmly relaying data to Ensign Hatori, responding to information coming in over their headsets, and sipping at the mugs of ship’s coffee. It looked more like a catalog shopping outlet than a battle station.

  As I watched the strange ballet on the monitor, one of the engines on the pirate ship flared brilliantly and then faded.

  “Ha!” Petty Officer Thomas gave a cry of satisfaction. It was the first display of emotion since the battle started.

  The enemy ship began to drift to port. The loss of one of the three maneuver engines allowed the .50s to zero in on the stern of the vessel. The heavy, jacketed, half-inch rounds chewed into the engines. I could see a few streamers of condensing vapor as air escaped. These soon cut out.

  “Probably has a self-sealing hull, sir,” Petty Officer Thomas reported. “More evidence she’s converted with the full pirate package. Probably right down to a skull and crossbones on the fuzzy dice hanging by the bridge.”

  A self-sealing hull was standard on all Navy ships, and those likely to see combat. It consisted of a double hull with a network of pipes running between the two layers. It looked and worked a lot like a fire sprinkler system in a building back on Earth, except that it contained sealant foam instead of water or fire-suppression chemicals. Pressure loss from a puncture activated the system. It was a great system, and made Navy vessels capable of fighting in deep space without risking the loss of all their air from a minor hit. The downside was that it increased the cost of the ship by a hell of a lot. It was cheaper for a merchant ship to build a tougher hull if its only worry was the occasional free-floating debris. If you were willing to foot the bill for the foam system, chances are you planned on combat.

  The remaining engines of the raider sputtered out, shredded by .50 cal rounds. The same weapon had been used with similar effect on Japanese Zeros and German Messerschmitts more than a hundred years ago. I liked the .50s. They were nearly fossils, but they did the job. Regardless of how much high tech was proposed to replace them, the old relics stayed in use. Kinda like Marine infantry.

  Hatori gave orders to the two 120mm gunners: “Shift aim to the weapon mounts. Seaman Richter, switch to HEAP. Reilly, continue to use the buckshot rounds on any enemy missiles.”

  HEAP rounds (High Explosive, Armor Piercing) sported a depleted uranium nose to punch through a hull, and were filled with an explosive charge on a delayed impact fuse. These rounds would hit a ship, penetrate, and then explode inside. Our Longbow rocket launchers worked on the same idea but a much smaller scale, to take out a vehicle or bunker rather than a spaceship.

  Soon the enemy missile launch pods were blown off and the whole section housing the laser turret came apart spectacularly. The enemy drifted aimlessly, apparently disarmed and immobilized.

  “Apparently” is a big word. I saw “dead” rebels in Africa come to life and shoot Marines in the back after their positions were overrun. Ski saved me from one near Kinshasa, and I got another one who was aiming at Terry. This was the experience that made me wince at Hatori’s next statement.

  “Enemy vessel neutralized, Captain.”

  “Maintain weapons-ready status, Ensign,” Captain Turner responded over the intercom. “All Marines report to shuttle bay.”

  “Fuck,” I muttered. “We’re gonna have to board that mother.”

  “Just a question of occupying and searching the hulk, Corporal,”Hatori tried to reassure me. “The ship is dead in the water.”

  Somehow, I wasn’t reassured. Neither were my team. Sabatini rolled her eyes. Johnson, being the new guy, just shook his head. Terence J. O’Rourke, as usual, put it best: “If you’re wrong and they kill me, sir, I’m gonna slap the shit out of your ancestors and then come back and haunt your cannon-cocking squid ass.”

  Ensign Hatori’s expression was one of a man who had been expecting champagne and gotten a glass of warm piss. I took advantage of his stunned silence to tactically redeploy my command. “You heard the captain, Marines! Saddle up and beat feet!”

  On our way to the shuttle bay, we met armed sailors coming to take our place guarding the ship’s control centers. They jogged along with their semi-automatic shotguns in one hand and the magazines in the other. The Navy doesn’t want to take the time to teach their people to shoot; they have Marines and SEALs for that. They just picked a weapon even a blind man could score with at close range and made sure they didn’t let the swabbies run with loaded weapons. They would not ready the shotguns until they were in position. Thank God we didn’t expect to be assaulted.

  At the shuttle bay, Lt Mitchell was already issuing orders to the assembled troops. We broke out our vacuum suits from the wall lockers nearby. These worked something like a diver’s drysuit. We had to strip down to our skivvies and put these on first, then our regular utilities and armor. The suits would protect us from depressurization, and had an air supply which we connected at the back of our body armor. A breathing mask fit into our standard combat helmet, and the hose ran under the armor to the supply tank.

  Having the suit and breathing hose under the armor made sense. If a shot punctured the suit, or the hose snagged and got cut, it didn’t matter if the armor saved your skin, you were going to die. We wore the utilities over the suit so we could have access to our pockets. We often kept battle dressings, quick patches for the suits and sundries in the big cargo pockets of our trousers. These things don’t help a damn if you can’t get at them.

  After we suited up, Lt Mitchell gave a quick briefing. “OK Marines, listen up. We have to board that ship, overcome all resistance, catalog the cargo and crew and bring back some intel. McCray’s and Hernandez’s squads will take shuttle number one and assault the main crew area near the stern, then work forward. Pilsudski’s squad plus the headquarters elements will assault the bow and seize the bridge in the second shuttle. We will meet up near the center of the ship.

  “We have no good estimate on enemy strength. A freighter that size only requires a crew of twenty, but it’s big enough for a hundred. If they planned to board ships, they probably have a good supply of small arms and some trained infantry. Be ready for resistance. Don’t fuck around, if they have a weapon, kill ’em.

  “We carry buckshot for the 20mm ammo and soft tips on the 5mm. No high explosive rounds, hand grenades only. If we breach the hull, everybody dies. We don’t know what the cargo is, so watch the fire discipline.

  “The Navy will launch some chaff projectiles and a few drone missiles. If the enemy have any defense guns left, they should concentrate on the rockets, not us.

  “We don’t have a hell of a lot of information about this vessel, so just keep your eyes open, stay alert and watch your asses. Any questions?”

  There was an uncomfortable pause.

  “Is it too late to request a transfer to the Coast Guard, sir?” I as
ked.

  It wasn’t original, or particularly witty, but it was the tension breaker we needed. The platoon laughed, joked and barked battle cries as we piled into the shuttles. Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children headed out for another ad hoc mission, underpaid, under-equipped, and without the information we needed, because we were convenient and ready.

  Chapter 18

  9 DEC 2075

  ASSAULT SHUTTLE/CRNAZASTAVA

  I felt the tightness in my throat and the drop in my stomach as the adrenaline started to pump. I looked at the nervous grins of my squadmates, saw the determination behind them and felt the confidence we had in one another. Johnson had shed his jitters from his first deployment and looked ready and eager. Sabatini flashed me a cold smile and fluttered her eyelashes as she checked the sling on her rifle, looking like a sexy, flirtatious angel of death. O’Rourke smirked sourly, here we go again etched on his features. Sgt McCray tried to look disgusted, but a little pride shone through.

  “Try not to fuck this one up too bad, OK?” he asked.

  “Fuckin’ A, boss,” someone acknowledged.

  Most of my fear drained away, replaced by a feeling of closeness to this band of roughnecks. I was honored to be counted with these people. This was why we bitched about it, but never actually requested that transfer to the Coast Guard.

  I reserved my pity for the poor dumb bastards who were going against us.

  The assault craft shuddered as it docked with the raider. As we became part of the ship’s rotating mass, its artificial gravity took over and we once again had weight, rotation making us “fall” away from the center of the pirate. The docking bay sealed with the hull of the enemy ship, and automatic torches began to cut through the vessel’s outer skin.

  “Mask up, Marines!” ordered Sgt McCray.

  I released a shaky breath and pulled up my mouthpiece, then slid down the transparent visor of my helmet. I checked my team’s radios and chambered a round in my ACR. I folded the scope over to the side and flipped up the old-fashioned iron sights. Any Marine worth his salt doesn’t need a scope in a close quarters shipboard action, and I don’t like the way it cuts down your field of vision. You can scan the area over open sights a lot easier, and in a close-up battle, that counts for a lot.