“Yeah?” the sergeant replied, cautiously lifting his eye from the rifle sight but not lowering the weapon.
The four Khalians spread a thick cloth on the ground and then twitched their ears approvingly as Mack dragged the still struggling Pirelli onto it. Then they took their places beside the humans at the sides of the cloth. One of them gave a sharp nod to Mack to show that they were ready. “On the count of three,” the doctor told the Marines. “One, two, three!”
Though the villagers didn’t understand the words, they understood the inflection, and helped to hold the now well-wrapped Pirelli still while the stronger humans carried him to the cleared space. Without speaking, they let go as soon as the Marine was lowered to the ground, and obediently started back toward the perimeter.
“Well, I’ll be a son of, a supernova,’” Tarzan opined.
“Men, get the other wounded where Doc can take a look at ‘em.”
“What other wounded?” Zanatobi asked. “We’ve got two dead.”
“Those others,” Tarzan said, pointing to the weakly twitching forms of wounded Khalians strewn about the landing strip. “Come on. Our orders are to secure this position. They don’t specify how. Mack here shows us how to do it without further casualties, and you want to argue. Mack, get your helpers to come back.”
“Yes, sir!” Mack was surprised at the enthusiasm in his voice. Tarzan was smiling as well.
“Krim damn it, I think that’s the first order I ever gave you you didn’t argue,” the veteran commented.
“Yes, sir!” Mack returned, doing his best imitation of a salute.
Then everyone got busy healing some wounds.
Admiral Dav Su Allison, retired
Rules of Command 41.45428D2.2
Field Diplomacy
As the purpose of any action by the Fleet is determined by political and economic necessity, there may be occasions when field personnel must deal with diplomatic matters far beyond their normal purview. In order to best prepare for such circumstances, it is necessary that every officer and, ideally, all personnel be thoroughly indoctrinated on the full range of immediate and long-range goals. If this cannot be done, it is indicative that there has been a severe breakdown at the Flag level of command. As propaganda rarely reflects the true purposes of any military conflict accurately, careful briefing is mandatory.
There is no accounting for the opportunities that may have been lost by field officers being unwilling or unable to react to diplomatic initiatives. By their very nature, such situations are transitory and fragile. There are numerous records of occasions when such an action was taken, both successfully and with varying degrees of disaster. An example of the former is Claremont’s Peace, which led the way for the eventual integration of the Fleish Ergonic into the Alliance. Captain Claremont far exceeded his authority, but emerged with a beneficial result. (Ed. note: Fleet records are incomplete on the subsequent commands held by this officer. He is believed to have been placed in command of a long-range exploration mission that was subsequently lost.) An example of where a similar action has had a less fortunate result would be the negotiation by Marine Sergeant Snyder with the Slwin League. While his efforts did result in the end of hostilities in the first Pelic War, it also virtually guaranteed the occurrence of the far more destructive Second Pelic War.
Just as a diplomat would be inept at combat, field personnel should acknowledge their own limitations, regardless of the temptation. A line officer should recognize the need for a diplomatic specialist, just as he or she would call for trained medical or engineering personnel in a different set of circumstances.
The guidelines that must be obeyed whenever a field officer finds himself in a diplomatic posture are:
1. The officer should take only those actions needed to stabilize the situation.
2. In no circumstances . . .
THE RED SHIFT Lounge was the sort of bar where people left their uniforms back in their billet, so the sergeant who entered wearing dress whites and a chest full of medal ribbons attracted the instant attention of the bartender and the half-dozen customers.
The unit patch on the sergeant’s left shoulder was a black shrunken head on a white field, encircled by the words 121st MARINE REACTION COMPANY. The patch peeped out beneath a stole of Weasel tails, trophies of ten or a dozen Khalians.
The Red Shift was part of the huge complex of Artificial Staging Area-Zebra, where if you weren’t military or a military dependent, you were worse. Everybody in the lounge this evening, including the bartender, was military: the two men in a booth were clearly officers; the two men and the woman drinking beer at a table were just as clearly enlisted; and the stocky fellow at the far end of the bar could have been anything except a civilian.
But no uniforms meant no insignia, no questions about who had the right to go find a mattress with whom . . . no salutes.
And none of the problems that occurred when somebody figured a couple hot landings gave him the right not to salute some rear-echelon officer.
But down-time etiquette didn’t matter when the guy in uniform was a sergeant from the Headhunters, the unit that had ended the war between the Alliance of Planets and the Khalia.
The War between Civilization and Weasels.
“Whiskey,” ordered the sergeant in a raspy, angry voice.
“I thought,” said one of the officers in diffident but nonetheless clearly audible tones, “that the One Twenty-First shipped out today on the Dalriada at eighteen hundred hours.”
The clock behind the bartender showed 1837 in tasteful blue numerals that blended with the dado lighting.
“For debriefing on Earth,” the officer continued.
“And the parades, of course,” his companion added.
The sergeant leaned his back against the bar. Something metallic in his sleeve rang when his left arm touched the dense, walnut-grained plastic. “I couldn’t stomach that,” he said. “Wanna make something of it?’”
“Another beer,” said the stocky man at the other end of the bar. His voice was mushy. The bartender ignored him.
“No, I don’t,” said the officer. “I don’t suppose I would even if I were on duty.”
“Bartender,” called his companion. “I’ll pay for that whiskey. As a matter of fact, Sergeant, would you like to—”
He paused. The first officer was already sliding out of the booth, carrying his drink. “Would you mind if we joined you?” his companion said, getting up and heading for the bar before he completed the question.
“Naw, I’m glad for the company,” the sergeant said. “I just couldn’t take—I mean, peace with the Weasels? We had ‘em where we wanted ‘em, by the balls. We shoulda kept going till this”—he tugged at his Weasel-tail stole—“was the only kinda Weasel there was!”
“I’m proud to meet a member of the Headhunters,” said the first officer. “My name’s Howes”—he stuck out his hand—“and my friend here is, ah, Mr. Lewis.”
Beyond any question, the two men were commanders or even captains when they were in uniform.
“Sergeant Oaklin Bradley,” the Headhunter said, shaking hands with both officers. “Sorry if I got a little short . . . but ‘cha know, it tears the guts outta a real fighting man to think that we’re going to quit while there’s still Weasels alive.”
The bartender put the whiskey on the bar. Bradley’s back was to him. The bartender continued to hold the glass for fear the Headhunter would bump it over.
“You were there at the surrender, I suppose?” Howes said as he picked up the whiskey and gave it to Bradley.
The woman, an overweight “blonde” in a tank top, got up from the table and made her way to the bar. She was dead drunk—but familiar enough with the condition to be able to function that way.
“Aw, Babs,” said one of her companions.
Earlier, the trio at the table had
been having a discussion in loud, drunken whispers. Just as Sergeant Bradley entered the lounge, Babs had mumblingly agreed to go down on both enlisted men in an equipment storage room near the Red Shift.
If her companions were unhappy about losing the entertainment they’d planned for the evening, it didn’t prevent them from joining her and the two officers in the semicircle around the uniformed hero at the bar.
“Oh, yeah,” Bradley said. “I was there, all right.” He’d waited to speak until chair legs had stopped scraping and everyone was close enough to hear easily. “We landed right in the middle of the Weasel Presidential Palace or whatever . . .”
“High Council Chambers,” Lewis murmured.
“Yes, yes, I’d heard that,” Howes said. His eyes were greedy as they rested on Bradley’s fringe of Weasel tails. “The Khalia worship strength, so just reaching their capital put the Alliance on top of their dominance pyramid.”
The man at the end of the bar stared into his empty mug, turning it slowly and carefully as if to make sense of his distorted reflection in the bottom.
“We killed so many of ‘em you could float a battleship in the blood,” Bradley said, licking his lips. “Never felt so good about anything in my life. We blew our way into the very fucking center of the place, caught all the Weasel brass with their pants down . . . and Cap’n Kowacs, he said we had to let ‘em surrender instead a burning ‘em all the way we shoulda done.”
Bradley tossed down his liquor in a quick, angry motion, then slapped the empty glass on the bar. Babs shifted closer so that one of her heavy breasts lay against the Headhunter’s biceps.
“Well, it did end the war,” Lewis said, examining his fingernails and looking vaguely embarrassed for disagreeing with the hero.
“That part of the war!” Howes retorted sharply: “There’s still whoever it was behind the Khalia to begin with.”
The bartender refilled the whiskey glass.
The Headhunter at the bar of the Red Shift Lounge remembered . . .
* * *
In the belly of Dropship K435, Captain Miklos Kowacs squinted to focus on the image of their target. His holographic display stayed rock-steady as they dived toward the huge Khalian complex, but Kowacs’s own eyes and brain vibrated like dessert gelatin.
Speed through an atmosphere meant turbulence, and the Lord knew that to survive the Headhunters were going to need speed as well as electronics that spoofed the Identification: Friend or Foe signal from the Weasel fortress.
Every second Marine in the three line platoons carried a man-portable rocket launcher. “Man-portable” because-men were carrying them, not because they were light or handy. Most of the Marines who didn’t have launchers lugged three packs of reloads.
The rockets were to disable the missile launchers of the Khalian base. Even when that job was done, the Headhunters wouldn’t have to go underground after the Weasels: three of the Marines were strapped under thirty-kilo tanks of DPD gas—
That was designed to sink through the tunnels of a Khalian burrow and kill every living thing that breathed it.
There’d been plenty of room aboard the Attack Transport Dalriada, the K435’s mothership, but the Headhunters were over-equipped to fit comfortably onto the dropship itself. Marines squatted shoulder to shoulder, bumping one another and cursing bitterly . . .
Knowing, among other things, that the weight and bulk of the rockets that the mission required meant that they’d had to leave behind the body armor that they’d otherwise have been wearing during an assault like this.
Of course personal armor wouldn’t matter a damn if the ship bit the big one while they were all aboard her.
The units aboard the Dalriada’s other seven dropships had normal missions: land on the fringe of a defended area and attack. The 121st was different. Last time out, the Headhunters had captured a Khalian courier vessel; now the whole company was shoehorned into a secret weapon that pretended to be a Weasel ship, telling the target not to fire on them as they raced down to cut Khalian throats.
There were various ways the local Weasels could configure their IFF. Faint lines across Kowacs’s hologram display recorded the burning tracks of the first two drones sent ahead of K435. At the third try, the fortress hadn’t fired, so Operations was betting that K435 could get in untouched if it sent the same IFF response as that last drone.
Operations bet a single hundred-Marine chip. The Headhunters were betting their lives.
“. . . seconds to touchdown!” the flight deck warned. A break in transmission erased the figure, but if they were seconds close, K435 was well within the defended envelope.
“Wait for it!” bellowed Sergeant Bradley over the unit frequency as he saw inexperienced troopers rise to jump out before the dropship landed.
No missile explosion, no hammering flares from autoloading plasma weapons. They were all going to live—
Until the Weasel ground personnel got done with them. That was fine. Weasels were what the Headhunters had come to meet.
Too many new Marines on this drop. There’d been too fucking many casualties in the Bull’s-Eye operation . . .
Kowacs felt a minuscule lift in K435’s bow as the shock of the vessel ‘s approach was reflected from the ground: An instant later, the braking motors fired at-full thrust and hammered the rows of squatting Headhunters down against the deck plating.
“Nowl” Kowacs, Bradley, and all four platoon leaders shouted as explosive bolts blew away the dropship’s hatches and the 121st Marine Reaction Company, the Headhunters, lurched into action.
The world was bright and hot and smelled like brown flames.
An orbital-defense missile roared up from its launcher as the. Marines shook themselves out onto the flat roof of the fortress. The sound of the three-tonne missile going super-sonic just above the launch tube was earsplitting.
A Headhunter fired her hand-held rocket launcher while she was still aboard K435. Backblast made that a dangerous trick—but this wasn’t a desk job, and starting to shoot instantly was a pretty good response to the shock of landing and the missile launch.
The Weasel missile tube was built into the fabric of the fortress. The small Marine round guided for the center of the opening, then fired a self-forging fragment straight down the tube’s throat. Even if the armor-piercer didn’t penetrate the launcher cap while the next anti-orbital round was being loaded, it was almost certain to jam the cap in place and prevent the Weasels from using that tube again.
The Weasel fortress was a jumble of huge flat boxes, with point-defense plasma weapons inset at each corner and heavy missile batteries buried deep in their cores. K435 was supposed to have landed on the highest of the twenty to twenty-five cast-concrete prisms, but that hadn’t worked out: a box to the west overlooked the one on which the Headhunters were deploying, and the Weasel plasma guns could depress at any instant to sweep the whole company to a glowing memory.
“Delta, check two hundred twenty degrees,” Kowacs ordered his Weapons Platoon. His helmet’s artificial intelligence put him at the top of the pyramid of lieutenants assigning sectors and sergeants highlighting specific targets for the Marines of their squad. “Clear the high—”
There was a deafening crash and a blast of static—a plasma discharge radiated all across the radio-frequency spectrum.
Corporal Sienkiewiez stood beside Kowacs because her strength and ruthlessness made her the best bodyguard he could find in a company of strong, ruthless Marines. She’d just fired her hand-carried plasma weapon, a heavy tube that looked delicate against her husky two-meter frame.
A Khalian gun position vanished; then the whole top edge of the concrete prism stuttered with dazzling plasma bursts and long tendrils of quicklime burned from the concrete and spewed away in white-hot tendrils. Delta had its own belt-fed plasma weapons set up on tripods, and they didn’t need Kowacs’s orders to tell them it w
as everybody’s ass if they didn’t nail the close-in defenses before some Weasel brought the guns under manual control.
The noise of plasma weapons, rockets, and rocket warheads made it hard for Kowacs to think, much less hear any of the message traffic on his earphones. Although Kowacs’s helmet damped the worst of the racket, shockwaves slapped the skin of his face and hands like huge hot raindrops.
Squad leaders with echo-location gear were using the noise to map all the surfaces of the Khalian fortress. When holographic images on a sergeant’s helmet visor indicated a missile tube in his squad’s sector, he relayed the target to a Marine with a rocket launcher.
The Headhunters’ top-attack rockets ripped and snapped all across the concrete jumble. Occasionally a blast of smoky yellow flame indicated that one of the big Khalian missiles had blown up within its launcher.
But the, Khalia weren’t shooting anymore.
Kowacs turned around so that his unaided eyes could confirm what his visor display already insisted. Through the skeletal ribs of K435 and across the fortress, as well as on his side of the landing vessel, nobody was firing except Kowacs’s own Marines.
Missiles didn’t rise to engage the ships in orbit. Plasma weapons didn’t chew themselves new firing slits so that they could bear on the Marine landing force . . .
Unbefuckinglievable.
There was a momentary lull in the gunfire as the rest of the Headhunters realized the same thing. Then Sergeant Bradley screamed, “Door opening!” on the primary unit push, and three rockets streaked-simultaneously toward the northwest comer of the block on which the Marines had landed.
The leaves of the hidden steel trapdoor rang like bells as they flew apart under the impact of the self-forging fragments. There were swatches of fur in the blast debris also.
The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies Page 24
