Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper

by Rick Partlow

  “And Lt. Webster conveniently found administrative work that had to be done back here at the FOB both times, and assigned me to complete it.” The bartender brought my drink and I paid for it with my ‘link. “Another sonic screwdriver,” Vicky told him, motioning with her empty cup.

  “Webster is Alpha’s XO?” I asked.

  “Was,” she corrected me. “Since Cronje blew his brains out, Webster is acting company commander.” She shrugged. “He makes all the right noises about how Captain Cronje was troubled and made mistakes, but he still holds his suicide against you and, by extension, against me. He doesn’t trust me and he’s doing everything he can to undercut me.”

  “Shit,” I sighed. “I’m sorry, Vicky. Maybe I could talk to Geiger. She was no fan of Cronje’s. She could light a fire under Webster’s ass.”

  She laughed softly, the sound touched with bitterness.

  “And tell her what? That your girlfriend is whining about not being sent out on patrol? Even if she did say something to him, it would probably just make things worse. I have to just ride this out.” She shrugged. “It probably won’t last long after we pull out of here, whenever that is. When we’re dropping on Tahni-Skyyiah, it’s going to be all hands on deck. And if we survive that….” She knocked on the plastic of the bar top, pretending it was wood. “…then this will all be over.” A faint smile tugged the edges of her frown up and she put her hand on top of mine, interlacing our fingers. “We can find that little, quiet colony world and figure out how we’re going to spend the rest of our lives.”

  I nodded, then grabbed my cup and downed the tequila in a single gulp, which is mostly what tequila is good for. The drink helped to hide the gulp. This wasn’t, I decided, a good time to tell Vicky about my conversation with General McCauley.

  “Until then,” she went on, “I’ll just keep my head down and do my job.” She laughed. “Maybe I should ask for a transfer to your company.”

  “Oh, God,” I moaned, setting the cup down, wishing it was glass so I could slam it with some authority. “Vicky, I was just starting to figure out how to be a damned platoon leader. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I don’t know why they put me in charge.”

  “You’re a fucking liar,” she accused, punching me in the chest. And it hurt. That woman knew how to punch. “You started out in our platoon as a damned private and every single time you’ve been promoted and given any responsibility, I always hear that same song and dance, that you don’t know what you’re doing.” She snorted. “Yeah, right, you’re so damned incompetent that you have a Bronze Star and a Silver Star….”

  “Two Silver Stars,” I corrected her, shrugging. I hadn’t had a chance to tell her about that, either. “Geiger put me in for one for the spaceport, and General McCauley told me he’s going to approve it.”

  “Jesus, give me strength,” she pleaded, rolling her eyes. “Two Silver Stars, and you came up with the plan for probably the only covert op the brass ever let Drop-Troopers run in the whole war when you were a squad leader. So, Cameron Alvarez, I don’t want to hear you tell me again how you don’t know what you’re doing, or how you won’t be able to handle this. Bullshit. When they finally throw something at you that you can’t handle, I want to be there to see it, because it hasn’t happened yet.”

  “The Skipper was a legend, Vicky,” I protested. “How the hell do you replace a legend?”

  “Just look out for your people. Whether it’s a fire team or a company or the whole damned brigade, look out for your people and accomplish the mission without wasting them. That’s what the Skipper always did.” She checked the time on her ‘link and sighed. “Shit. I have to be up in six hours.” A smile flickered across her face. “I think I might know a place where we could be alone for a while, if you want to get out of here.”

  Need stirred deep inside me and I suddenly remembered how long it had been since we had any time to ourselves. I grinned and grabbed her hand and we headed for the door. A pair of MP’s was waiting for me there, their expressions grim.

  “What’s up, guys?” I asked them.

  “Sorry to bother you, sir,” the higher-ranking of the two, an E-5 told me. “Could, uh…could we step outside?”

  “Sure,” I said, shrugging incomprehension to Vicky.

  The street outside the O-club was nearly deserted at this time of night, the glare from security spotlights at the FOB perimeter throwing odd shadows extending every direction from the surrounding buildings.

  “Sir, this is kind of a weird situation, but we, um…we have one of your people outside.” He sighed and shifted with obvious discomfort. “Look, sir, we ain’t really got our shit together yet, you know that. They brought us in mostly to help control the locals, but we ain’t got a brig or anything down here yet and I wouldn’t want to be tossing any of our guys into it if we did. I mean, this was a tough fight, I understand that.” He waved back across the street to where an all-terrain utility rover was parked. A single figure sat in the back of it, their face invisible from this angle. “I thought maybe you could deal with this however you wanted? I would’ve called your First Sergeant,” he added, apologetic, “but the corporal said he thought you’d be in the O-club, so….”

  “It’s okay,” I assured him. “I’ll talk to him. Thank you, Sergeant.” I cast an apologetic look at Vicky. “Give me a few minutes?”

  “Take your time,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll be back at the bar.”

  The MP’s held back and waited while I walked to their car and pulled the door open. Vince Delp was sitting in the back seat, looking miserable and smelling drunk. A nascent bruise was already beginning to swell on his right cheek and a fleck of blood stuck to his upper lip from a blow to the nose.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Vince,” I sighed, sliding in beside him. “You had to do this on my night off?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, head down, unable to meet my eyes.

  “Was it a girl again?” I wondered. “Another loud-mouthed REMF or Fobbit?”

  “Lieutenant,” he said, his voice breaking just slightly, “I don’t think it was really any of those things. It’s just….” He trailed off and let his head rest against the back of the seat. “I keep seeing their faces, sir.”

  “Whose faces, Vince?” I thought I knew, but I had to ask. “Who do you see?”

  “John…Corporal Muller, I mean.”

  I nodded. Muller had been Delp’s team leader. He’d bought it this mission.

  “And Mancuso before him,” he went on. “And Benavidez, and Clarke and Sgt. Carson, and Gunny Hayes….” He stopped and in the splintered shadows and glare from the light outside the car, I thought I could see his shoulders shaking. His sob confirmed it. Delp bent over, face buried in his hands, and I put a hand on his shoulder, waiting.

  “I’m okay when I’m out there,” he explained once he could talk again. “When I’m in the suit. Nothing can touch me in the suit. It’s like I’m immortal. But when I’m just around, just hanging in the barracks or the tent, when there’s nothing to do but think, well…I just think. I think about them all. About how everyone I ever made friends with or played cards with or told stories about home with, they’re all dead.” He shrugged. “Not all. But you know what I mean, sir. It’s like I don’t want to get to know them anymore. Because the more I get to know them, the more I gotta think about them afterward. Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I assured him, sitting back. The inside of the car smelled like a drunk sweating synthahol out of every pore. “I know that better than anyone, Delp. Better than you. I’ve lost almost everyone who was ever important to me.” Everyone but Vicky. “And that started long before this war.”

  “How do you do it then, sir?” he asked, pleading. “How do you keep them out of your head?”

  I considered that, maybe for the first time, and I answered him honestly, as the answer came to me.

  “They’re never gone from your head, Vince.
They never will be. But they don’t have to haunt you. Every one of them took something from you and left something behind, and it wouldn’t be right to forget them. But you keep making friends, keep letting people close, and the new memories help keep the old ones from taking over your head. You get what I’m saying?” He nodded.

  “I think so, sir.”

  “And if you let new people close,” I went on, “then maybe there’ll be someone you care about there to tell you to stop when you try to do something this fucking stupid again.” I put an edge to the last few words and his eyes widened. “Look, Delp, you’re a hell of a Marine. I need you walking point. You save lives. You win battles. But I can’t have this shit, not anymore. I’m the company commander, and I have dozens of Delps to look after. I can’t be holding your hand anymore. So, here’s the deal. We’re going to be on Point Barber for at least a few more weeks. Since you get in trouble when you have time to think, I’m going to have a little talk with Top and Bang-Bang and I’m going to make sure you don’t have time to think for the next few weeks. From the minute you finish breakfast to the minute your exhausted little head hits the pillow, you’re going to be working, and not the kind of work where you’ll have the mental energy to sit around brooding. This’ll be the kind of work where you’re so fucking tired, you’ll dread reveille in the morning.”

  His eyes were wider now, like a cartoon character, and I felt a bit guilty but pushed it aside. That ship had sailed.

  “You may think I’m being rough on you,” I told him, “but I’m not. I swear to God and on my mother’s grave, Delp, this is by far the most merciful of the options I have left open to me to deal with you. Unless you want to spend however long is left in this war in a cell, this is your best bet.” He opened his mouth, but I held a hand up. “Don’t bother thanking me, don’t bother promising me you’ll do better, because I’ve heard it all before. You’re going to behave and do your job because Top and I and your platoon sergeant and whoever your platoon leader winds up being are not going to give you any other choice.”

  I jerked a thumb at the car door.

  “Now, get out and get back to the tent and I want you to tell Bang-Bang exactly what I just told you. And when Top talks to him in the morning, he’d better recite back to me verbatim what I just told you. You got me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was grateful to me or just grateful to get out of the car, but he was grateful and then he was gone.

  “You get it sorted out, sir?” the MP sergeant asked me when I slid out behind Delp.

  “It’s sorted.”

  One way or another.

  I headed back to the bar to find Vicky and take my own advice.

  23

  I decided about twenty hours in that I didn’t like the CSS Hermes. She had a smell to her, like the smell of new clothes fresh out of the fabricator, a sharp edge to every corner, and I just couldn’t feel comfortable in her passageways. It was like no one had lived in her before, no stories had been told about her. I’d been sitting in my compartment since we’d entered Transition Space, working on the endless reports, documenting training, disciplinary action, simulator time, patrols we’d run in Deltaville, emerging only to eat or attend battalion and brigade meetings, otherwise stopping only to sleep. This was work that should have been done two days ago, though how I was supposed to do it and lead company-size patrols, I wasn’t sure.

  How the hell, I wondered, did anyone ever get any work done in this job?

  My vision was starting to blur by the time I finished the last report and I whispered a prayer of thanks that no one else had knocked on my door looking for solutions to problems they should have solved themselves. I checked the time. It was 2330 ship’s time, which was meaningless to my body since I was still on Deltaville time, and I was neither hungry nor tired. I tried Vicky’s ‘link address and it politely told me that she was sleeping and not to bother her until morning unless it was an emergency.

  Of course, I was one of the few people who could call her and say it was an emergency, but I wouldn’t do that to her. I knew how rare and precious a good night’s sleep was for a platoon leader, and it was becoming even rarer as a company commander. And I wasn’t going to get it tonight, not unless I resorted to a pill. I tried to avoid that, because I’d seen some Marines who couldn’t sleep without them at all after using them for years.

  Instead, I pulled on my boots and my fatigue top and went for a walk.

  It was, perhaps, a remnant of my enlisted days that I felt like an intruder entering the storage bays for the Vigilantes. They were off-limits to unauthorized personnel, and it took me a moment to realize I was authorized personnel now. If this was a Fleet cruiser, there would have been duty crews on shift work, pulling maintenance, but Marine troop ships did things differently. We were always headed planetside, and they did the best they could to get us ready for the day-night cycle we were heading toward, so there was a shipboard night and day, and at night, the lights were dimmed and the only people working were skeleton crews on the bridge, in engineering and damage control.

  The storage bays seemed deserted; the suits relics left behind from some lost civilization like China’s terracotta armies. I went to mine, first. It had been repaired a few days after the nominal end of the battle and I’d stripped and cleaned it five times for every patrol I’d taken it out on since, but I gave it a quick systems check again out of habit. Everything was nominal, and I knew it would be, but one more check never hurt. I pushed the chest plastron closed and let the palm of my hand linger there for a moment, like I imagined the old cavalry soldiers might have with their horse.

  The Vigilante was, I thought perhaps with no small bit of prejudice, the finest weapons system ever fielded. I tried to imagine fighting this war without it and shuddered at the prospect. The battlefield was a nightmare of high-energy lasers, ionized gas and charged particles, and facing all that with nothing but the thin armor of a Force Recon Marine made my testicles want to crawl up into my stomach.

  I left my suit and paced down the row of maintenance racks for the company Headquarters Platoon to the Boomers. To my Boomers. That was a kick in the ass. Their coil guns were long and awkward, forcing them to leave a drop-ship from the boarding ramp at a landing zone instead of jetting from a drop rack, but they were sledgehammers, specialized tools I had never had access to before. Besides the gun, their backpacks were larger than a standard Vigilante’s, the hopper for the coil gun ammo bulging out on one side. I grabbed the lever on one side of the hopper and yanked it downward, admiring the angular, grooved lines of the tungsten darts.

  “Impressive, aren’t they?”

  I very deliberately did not spin around like an idiot at the unexpected question, though my hand did tighten on the loading lever. I recognized Top’s voice. I pushed the hopper shut and turned toward her. She was watching me, hands on her hips, an amused expression softening the hard lines of her face.

  “They are. Did you come down here in the middle of the night just to get one more look at them before you went to sleep?” I smiled to take the edge off the words. It felt strange being able to talk to Top this easily. Even as a platoon leader, she’d intimidated the hell out of me. When had that changed?

  “I came,” she told me, not seeming to take offense, “because you’ve been buried under mounds of paperwork and I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “Paperwork?” I repeated, frowning in confusion.

  “Sorry, old habit. Back when I was your age, the military still filled out all those reports on actual paper. It was a nightmare. We had warehouses full of that shit, too much to ever scan all of it into our computer systems, so most of it got tossed in the incinerator a century ago.”

  “That sounds horrific,” I said. “It also sounds just like something the military would do. How did you find me here anyway?”

  “I tracked your ‘link.” She nodded toward the device on my belt. “You can do the same to anyone in the company now,
by the way, if the need arises.”

  “I knew that,” I told her, “but I think I’d managed to make myself forget it, because I know how much I would have liked it when I was an enlisted Marine.” I shuddered involuntarily. “So, what was it you didn’t want to interrupt me about?”

  “Many things,” she said, being as cryptic as she’d always been, though at this point in my career, I found it less mysterious and fascinating and more annoying. She leaned against the bulk of one of the Boomer suits. “First of all, Private Vince Delp.”

  I moaned and covered my face with a hand.

  “Don’t tell me he’s gotten into more trouble. I thought the extra work details were helping keep his nose clean.”

  “They have been,” she said. “So far. He hasn’t touched the booze since that one night on Point Barber, as far as I know.”

  I sagged with relief.

  “Thank God. What is it, then?”

  “It’s a temporary solution, sir.”

  I blinked, realizing she’d called me ’sir.’ It might have happened before, but it hadn’t struck me as significantly as it did in that moment.

  “I get that,” I told her. “He needs psych counselling, and I thought about ordering him to it, but….” I hesitated, wondering if I should admit it, then deciding she probably already knew. “I went to a head-shrinker myself, and I just know that if someone had ordered me to talk to her, I wouldn’t have admitted a damned thing.”

  “Probably true. And keeping him busy might work through this next campaign.” She shrugged. “And maybe this is the last campaign, but the kid is going to have to face this for the rest of his life.”

  “We all are,” I muttered. “But yeah, I’m going to push through a medical recommendation for him afterward. I just didn’t want to do it before the last push. I kept thinking how I would have felt if I’d gone through what he has and someone told me I couldn’t be there for the last dust-up.”