Starfist FR - 03 - Recoil

by Dan Cragg

  “I made reservations for nine o’clock,” Barbora said. “So we’ve got time for a drink before we have to leave.” She cocked her head questioningly.

  “I brought a bottle of Wildcatter schnapps,” Jindra said. “Is that all right with you?”

  “Lovely lady,” Williams said, “we are Confederation Marine sergeants. We have yet to meet any alcoholic beverage that isn’t all right with us.”

  “With pleasure, Jindra,” Kindy said. He suspected Williams had called her “lovely lady” because he didn’t remember her name. Score one for me, he thought. Barbora hustled away to get glasses—but not so fast that her hips didn’t sway. Jindra went with her to open the schnapps.

  “Now, don’t you two go trying to steal them,” Barbora called over her shoulder. “They asked me out to dinner. You two are just add-ons.”

  That made Marketa and Petra laugh, and Marketa reached out to take both Marines by the hand. Petra, standing to Marketa’s left, smacked her nearer hand away from Kindy’s. “Now, now,” she said, “don’t be greedy.”

  She took Kindy’s hand in both of hers and gazed into his eyes. The two men very carefully did not look at each other. Were the women already fighting over them?

  “You must be very strong,” Marketa said to Williams. She slipped her hand up his arm to his biceps.

  “I’ll bet you’ve been all over Human Space,” Petra said to Kindy.

  “We’re strong enough,” Williams said proudly. Kindy cleared his throat before saying, “I’ve seen a lot of it, yeah.”

  “Oh, yes, very strong,” Marketa husked, kneading his upper arm.

  “I was born in Sky City,” Petra pouted. “I’ve never been offworld.”

  “Come, come,” Barbora said suddenly, insinuating herself between the other two, “I saw them first.” She handed glasses of amber fluid to the two Marines. “Why are we standing here?

  Let’s sit down and make ourselves comfortable.” Her hips swayed with delightful grace as she led the way to a love seat, a sofa, and three comfortable chairs. She artfully put the men in chairs that had been placed so they were the twin foci of the room. The women took seats facing them, moving so their dresses settled cloudlike until they rested as dew upon their bodies.

  And they chatted, chattered, until it was time to leave for the restaurant. Afterward, neither Kindy nor Williams could remember what they talked about; they’d only been able to hear the tones and tinkles and trills of the women’s voices, see the shimmy and shimmer of the dresses caressing their bodies. They were entranced. And preening. Williams snickered to himself on the way to The Upper Crust. The women had piled into the rear of the Land Runner

  straightaway and closed the doors, leaving Kindy to sit in the front with Williams. Any chance of Kindy’s having fun on the way to the restaurant, Williams thought, is cut off. The Upper Crust, Sky City Even though on most missions to strange worlds they spent nearly all of their time in the field, away from civilized amenities, Sergeants Him Kindy and D’Wayne Williams had been around enough to have dined in some of the finest establishments in all of Human Space. So even though The Upper Crust was one of the best restaurants on Haulover, to the two widely traveled Marines it had more pretension than class. But that was fine with the Marines. The pretensions didn’t extend to the prices, which weren’t much higher than at the Snoop

  ’n Poop in Havelock, or to the dress code—a restaurant with more class than pretensions wouldn’t have let them in dressed as they were. Besides, the four lovely women with them provided all the class Kindy and Williams could possibly desire. The table at which they were seated was shaped like a halfmoon. The maître d’ sat the four women along the curved side and the men on the straight, once again at the focus, with neither sitting next to a woman. They examined the menus—

  Kindy and Williams accepted the women’s suggestions—had an aperitif, ate when the food arrived, had a flaming concoction of something local for dessert, and talked. Oh, did they talk. In Barbora’s living room, they’d chatted and chattered about things of little interest to anybody, other than their value as icebreakers—and for the men to hear the voices of women. At dinner—before the entrée; during dining; before, during, and after dessert; and afterward until they had to leave—the women asked questions about the Marines’

  work. Between them, Kindy and Williams had enough stories, mostly true, to keep them all talking for more than a week. And enough of those stories were unclassified that they could take several days to tell them without risk of revealing secrets. The women punctuated the men’s stories with gasps, shivers, occasional laughs, and, once in a while, a hand stretched across the table to touch a hand or wrist, and exclamations of

  “You’re so brave!” were heard. Kindy and Williams ate it up. They were in love. Not with any one of the women in particular; each of them would have been happy with any of the four. By the time they noticed that they were nearly the only people left in The Upper Crust, and the maître d’ and waiters were surreptitiously checking their watches, Kindy and Williams were actively wondering exactly how they were going to pair off for the night. Or trio off—they wouldn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings by leaving her out. Or whether they’d all stay together in one big mash. Kindy signaled for the bill, which he and Williams split, adding a tip generous enough to make the staff smile. By the time they were all back in the Land Runner, the two Marines were suspecting that matters weren’t going to work out the way they’d thought: The women once more piled into the back of the vehicle, leaving Kindy and Williams to ride together in the front, sans the anticipated contact with wonderful female flesh.

  “Where to now, ladies?” Kindy asked from the driver’s position.

  “Back to my place,” Barbora said in a voice dreamy enough to restore hope in the men’s hearts. 518 North Hamilton Street

  “I had a wonderful time!” Barbora gushed as they all stood at the foot of her porch steps. “Thank you, both of you, for an absolutely delightful evening.”

  “Oh, me too,” Marketa chimed in.

  “Thank you so much!” Jindra and Petra added.

  “It was my pleasure,” Sergeant Williams said, giving a shallow bow. “You’re such wonderful company.”

  “My pleasure too,” Sergeant Kindy said, reaching out to pull one or more of the women into an embrace. The women hardly seemed to move, but his hands and arms snared none of them.

  “But it’s late now, and we all have to be at work early,”

  Barbora said, “so I’m afraid it’s time to bid you a fond adieu.”

  “Yes,” Jindra said, “ ‘adieu’ rather than ‘good night.’ ”

  “We’ll have to do this again,” Petra said.

  “And go someplace where we don’t spend the entire night in a restaurant,” Marketa said.

  “Well, you’re home,” Williams said, looking at Barbora.

  “Can we give the rest of you a lift home?”

  “Oh, no need for that,” Marketa said. “I’m just a few doors down.”

  “Jindra and I came together in my landcar,” Petra said, “so we don’t need a ride.”

  “Call Barbora to set up another time for us all to get together,” Jindra said. “Please. I’d really like to see you again.”

  She looked at both of them. Williams swallowed a sigh.

  “We will,” Kindy assured her, and looked at Barbora who smiled back at him and nodded.

  “We’ll still see you home,” Williams said, “even if none of you need a ride.”

  There was a quick flurry of women stepping close, leaning forward with hands touching shoulders or chests, and the brushing of lips across cheeks. By the time each of the Marines had been lightly bussed four times, Marketa was more than halfway home, skipping all the way. Jindra and Petra jumped into Petra’s landcar and headed off. Barbora danced up the steps to her front door, opened it, and blew a kiss over her shoulder before she disappeared.

  And then Kindy and Williams were standing alone on the
walkway. They looked at each other for a moment then, as though in response to a parade ground command, turned about and got in the Land Runner. On the way back to Marine House, Williams asked, “Do you think we just got taken?”

  “We’re Force Recon, Marine. We find ways in where others don’t even try.”

  They rode in silence the rest of the way. After he parked in back of Marine House but before opening the door and dismounting, Williams had another question.

  “Remember that night in the Snoop ’n Poop? When all those women Marines came in? Remember the two gunnys who followed them in?”

  “Yeah, the sheepdogs.”

  “I’ve got a funny feeling that all four of them were acting as sheepdogs for each other.”

  Kindy thought about it for a moment. “You know, you might be right. You just might be.”

  Williams nodded as though to a great truth. “There’s nothing a Force Recon Marine likes better than a good challenge.”

  “Got that right, brother.”

  Marine House

  When Sergeant Williams woke the next morning, he found Sergeant Kindy already awake, sitting half dressed on the side of his bed, staring at something in his hands, looking distressed.

  “What?” Williams asked.

  “I just found these in my shirt pocket,” Kindy said, handing over two small slips of paper. “They must have put them there when we were saying good night.”

  Williams gave him a curious look, then looked at the slips. The first one had three words, “Call me, please!” and a comm number. Williams raised his eyebrows at Kindy while he shuffled the other slip of paper to the top. He read it; a comm number with the words, “I’d love to see you again. Soon.”

  Williams remembered his own chest being touched near the shirt pocket; he dropped the two slips of paper and dove for his own shirt, but the pocket was empty.

  “You son of a bitch,” he swore. Kindy nodded as he scooped the numbers off the floor. “I probably will be,” he agreed. He displayed the numbers, one in each hand, as though balancing them. “All I know is, neither of these numbers is Barbora’s. Jindra? Petra? Marketa? Who is who here? I’m going to be in trouble when I call one and probably use the wrong name.”

  Williams stared at him for a moment then held out a hand.

  “Give me Barbora’s number and I’ll help with the recon to find out which number goes with which woman.”

  Kindy stared back, then scrabbled for Barbora’s number and handed it over. “Force Recon!”

  “We find out what others only guess.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  Flitterette Homestead, Haulover During the week after the raid on the Shazincho homestead, the Force Recon Marines split into squads and doubled the number of raided homesteads they could visit. They continued to find nothing that could lead them to the raiders. None of the sites they visited was new; the raiders didn’t strike that week. It was as though the raids had stopped.

  “What do you think, boss,” Sergeant Kindy asked Ensign Daly when the search came up empty on a sixth homestead, “did we scare them off?” The two squads met up and the Marines of both squads were gathered around. Daly looked around the debris of the Flitterette homestead, another small timber operation, and shook his head. “No,” he said slowly. “Whoever did this isn’t likely to be scared off by a few Force Recon Marines. They’re too well organized, and too able to conceal their tracks coming and going. They might be lying low to see what we’ll do next, but we haven’t scared them off.”

  “I was afraid you’d say something like that,” Kindy said.

  “So what are we going to do about it?”

  Daly gave him a quizzical look. “Him, that’s the kind of question I used to answer when I was a squad leader. You’re a squad leader now; why aren’t you answering instead of asking?”

  “Because you’re here, and you’re in command,” Kindy answered.

  “And once you see what kind of—” Daly began, but was cut off by Sergeant Williams.

  “—mistakes the officer makes, the squad leaders will divulge a better plan.”

  Daly shot a withering look at Williams, but the sergeant just looked at Daly with a bland expression. Corporal Nomonon nodded sagely. “That’s the way it always works.”

  “But sergeants don’t normally say it in front of the officers concerned,” Daly said.

  “Or in front of the peons,” Lance Corporal Skripska murmured. Williams elbowed Skripska in the ribs. “Ellis should have said that,” he said sotto voce. “He’s junior to you.”

  “Yeah,” Skripska murmured back, “the only one on this mission who’s junior to me.” Ellis looked back at him; in his chameleons his shrug went unseen.

  “Do what you think is best,” Daly told the squad leaders.

  “But until somebody comes up with a better idea, we’re going to continue with what we’ve been doing. Maybe we’ll catch a break somewhere, find someplace where they didn’t simply vanish, left some sign we can follow, or something else that will lead us to them. In the meanwhile, I’ll send a drone back to Basilone, with a request for string-of-pearls assistance.”

  The squad leaders allowed as how that was a very good idea, one worthy of a former squad leader. Before Daly’s message drone had time to reach Halfway, a drone came in from Halfway, telling the Marines to expect a navy starship that would take up station around Haulover and lay a string of pearls. That was the problem with interstellar communication; it took time, seldom less than two weeks, and sometimes as long as a few months, for a message to reach its destination and a reply to return, and sometimes an answer came before the question was asked. Office of the G3, Fourth Fleet Marines, Camp Basilone, Halfway Lieutenant Miltiades Atticus was far more on the ball than Colonel Archibald Ross from the Heptagon’s C5 had been. When he received the dispatch from headquarters Marine Corps that contained information on the announcement from President Chang-Sturdevant about the Skinks, he had just read the first report from Ensign Daly, commanding the two Force Recon squads on Haulover. Daly’s report gave what few details the Marines had managed to glean from the homesteads they’d investigated, and mentioned the lack of cooperation from both the planetary administrator and the board of directors. Atticus immediately made a connection between the two messages. He raced to the office of his commander, Colonel Lar Szilk, the G3 operations officer of Fourth Fleet Marines, and rapped on the door.

  “Come,” Colonel Szilk said without looking up from his console.

  “Sir, I believe we’ve got a problem,” Atticus said, rushing into the office and handing the flimsy to Szilk. Szilk’s eyes popped when he read the brief message. He looked up at Atticus and murmured, “Hostile aliens? I’d say we do have a problem.”

  “Sir, Haulover. The incidents there. We sent two Force Recon squads to deal with the situation.”

  “By Buddha’s blue balls! If these”—he glanced back at the flimsy for the word—“Skinks are there and all we have in place is two squads . . .” He jumped to his feet. “Thanks, Miltiades. Return to your post. I’m going to see the big guy.” Szilk bustled out of his office. Office of the Commanding General, Fourth Fleet Marines As was his habit, Lieutenant General Indrus left his office door open, so Colonel Szilk marched right in without waiting to be announced by Commander Eddit Gyorg, Indrus’s aide-de-camp.

  “Sir,” Szilk said without preamble, “have you seen the latest dispatch from HQMC?” He placed the flimsy on Indrus’s desk.

  “I’m reading it now,” Indrus said, waving Szilk to a visitor’s chair near his desk. He finished reading and looked up from his console. “So, she’s finally decided to go public with it.”

  “Sir?” Szilk asked, confused. Indrus tapped a command into his console and his office door silently closed. “This isn’t to be repeated,” he told his G3.

  “I wasn’t on the need-to-know list, but I’ve known about the Skinks for a few years now. Someone who is on the list realized that, since one of my FISTs
had made contact with the Skinks on two different occasions, I should know about them. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you, but I was sworn to absolute secrecy.”

  “One of our FISTs has had contact with hostile aliens?”

  Szilk said, shocked. “I had no idea.”

  Indrus nodded. “A platoon from Thirty-fourth FIST was the first—the first that we know of. That was on Society 437. That religious war on Kingdom a couple of years ago?” The general shook his head. “It wasn’t about religion, it was against an alien invader—the Skinks the president just announced. Thirty-fourth FIST went in to deal with what was reported to be sectarian violence and found a strong alien force. They needed assistance, and Twenty-sixth FIST was sent to help them.

  “Over the years, there have been unexplained disappearances of small military units and nongovernmental explorers. The thinking now is that at least some of them may have run into the Skinks. Anyway, the Skinks are why Society 437 hasn’t been colonized, even though it seems an ideal choice.” He cocked his head. “Do you know that those two FISTs are quarantined?” When Szilk shook his head, Indrus said, “That was to keep knowledge of the Skinks from getting out. They were threatened with Darkside if they told anybody about the aliens. As far as that goes, everybody who has knowledge of the Skinks faces a Darkside penalty for divulgence—as does everybody unauthorized who learns of them. Or did, I should say.” He lifted the flimsy Szilk had placed on his desk. “But now it’s public knowledge.”

  “Kali’s bloody arms,” Szilk whispered. “I had no idea.”

  “If my G3 didn’t know, that tells me security was as tight as it should be.” Indrus looked back to the reports he’d been reviewing. “And now it seems the Skinks are back,” he said softly, “and we sent two lone Force Recon squads to face them.”

  “If that’s the case,” Szilk said, “those Marines have no idea what they’re facing.”