Black Sword (Decker's War, #5)

by Eric Thomson

  “In another life, I was, in part, responsible for Windom ending up in the Marine Light Infantry, via the usual route,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

  “Oh, fuck.” Trieste groaned while shaking his head. “You poor, unlucky sonofabitch.”

  Even Surly Hank had the grace to look dismayed at Zack’s revelation.

  “Meaning this is about revenge. That’ll end well for everyone involved.” Singar rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Kudos to you for standing tall and taking it, Pops, but watch yourself. That bastard is setting you up for a load of grief.”

  “More reason for us to have Bill’s back, right?” Trieste asked. “Any trouble he gets will blow back on the rest of the platoon, so we might as well close ranks.”

  “Sure, what the heck. I’ve never liked Windom anyway. He has a nasty streak that goes from here to Alpha Centauri. Is that why he’s in the Light Infantry, Bill?”

  “Could be, Jimmy.” Decker grinned at James Jones, whom he’d pegged as a fellow alum of the Master Gunner School, along with Retief. “Most people never change, right?”

  “Besides, in a straight up fight, my money’s on Poppa Whate. An old man like him who takes this shit and can still laugh about it won’t knuckle under.”

  “Careful who you call old, Benji.” Decker said to Benjamin Gomez, the youngest but by no means the slowest of the platoon. “I heard Jaya tell Radzell they’re moving the unarmed combat classes up by a few days. You might experience a nasty surprise tomorrow.”

  “Hah. I want to see you and Windom go a few rounds.”

  “Nah,” Trieste waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “The chrome-domed bastard’s too chicken.”

  “What this talk about chickens?” Corporal Radzell stuck his head through the open door and eyed his charges with suspicion.

  “We’re hoping to see some for supper, Staff,” Decker replied.

  “Then you’ll be sorely disappointed. It’s meatless Wednesday. Formation outside in one minute, so let’s move, people.”

  “Meatless Wednesday again?” Hank’s permanent scowl took another dark turn.

  Retief gave him a comradely slap on the back.

  “They come around once a week. Just have an extra helping of lentils. That’ll fill your bottomless stomach nicely and put fiber up your backside.”

  “Shit.” Singar held his nose. “Nobody eats legumes tonight, not if we’re grappling on the mats tomorrow morning.”

  “Speaking of chicken...”

  *

  “You took unarmed combat during your first basic.”

  Sergeant Windom’s eyes roamed over the semicircle of trainees standing at the edge of a large mat, laid out over a grassy area near the barracks.

  “A few of you were even blessed with advanced training in your previous lives.” He pointedly stared at Decker. “So I’m not here to teach you anything new but to scrape the rust off your muscle memory and have you reacting properly again. I want to see your form first, so I know what to work on. Why don’t we have the two biggest slabs of brainless meat go first? Harris and Whate, you’re on.”

  Surly Hank gave Zack a calculating stare as they took their places in the center of the fighting ring. Decker knew he couldn’t delve too deep in his bag of dirty tricks, lest he maim or kill the younger man. That meant with Harris’ longer reach and greater bulk, he could end up fighting hard for a stalemate, let alone a victory.

  No doubt Windom, who knew Hank disliked Zack, expected to see his old troop leader’s face ground into the mat. However, having watched his fellow recruits over the last two weeks, the Marine knew he had one advantage over Harris. He had the sort of speed that came from routine brushes with death.

  Hank took a low stance, arms hanging at his sides, knees bent, his massive body well balanced. Dispassionate eyes met Zack’s, telegraphing nothing but apparent concentration. Decker, no stranger to unarmed sparring, stood with legs spread shoulder-width, knees loosely flexed.

  Harris leaned forward and emitted a loud and prolonged raspberry, eliciting amused guffaws from the other recruits. Even Windom cracked a faint smile.

  “Ready,” the sergeant intoned, “aaaaaand fight!”

  Zack’s opponent lunged at him, propelled by massive thigh muscles, his arms reaching out for a wrestler’s embrace. The Marine shifted to one side with a speed that astonished even Windom, who’d seen Decker fight years earlier, and deflected Hank with a uke nagashi irimi. Unbalanced, Hank slammed into the mat. Decker backed away, letting him climb back to his feet.

  The bigger man shook his head once, as if in disbelief that Zack could move so fast. But he was smart enough to look for a better tactic than brute force. Both men circled around the mat’s center, trying to read each other’s next move, looking for that one vulnerability.

  “Come on, ladies, this isn’t the fucking regimental ball. You’re supposed to put each other out of action as quickly as possible.”

  Windom’s irritatingly nasal drawl bounced off Decker’s concentration, though it seemed to reach Harris, judging by his brief glance at the sergeant. It proved to be enough.

  Zack closed the distance between them, seized Hank’s right wrist and threw him on his back with a Decker-style irimi nage. In a flash, he brought his foot up, as if intending to slam his heel into the prone man’s throat.

  “Stop,” Windom shouted in alarm. “Back off, Whate.”

  Zack complied, but said, “I wouldn’t have finished the strike, Sergeant.”

  “It sure looked that way.”

  “What the fuck was that?” Harris asked, climbing to his feet for the second time in one minute.

  “Aikido.”

  “Shee-it, Pops, you sure can move.”

  A sneer twisted Windom’s lips.

  “You might call it aikido, Whate, but I call it sloppy.”

  Decker bowed his head and said, “I’ll defer to your greater knowledge, Sergeant, and would be pleased to spar with you so I may learn to be less sloppy.”

  Half a dozen soft snorts erupted behind him as the watching recruits tried to stifle laughter at Zack’s deadpan tone. The Marine put on an entirely innocent expression though his eyes danced with merriment at seeing Windom’s jaw muscles work.

  The sergeant knew Zack was challenging him to put up or shut up and was desperately searching for a way out. Zack had been able to best anyone in Third Troop, 902nd Pathfinder Squadron back in the day, and it didn’t look like he’d changed. In fact, he seemed to move with even deadlier purpose than ever.

  Finally, Windom said, “Trieste, Singar, you’re up.”

  *

  Talyn reached for her cup of lukewarm tea as she bit her lower lip in thought. The only recruit from Desolation Island in the last year who matched Ariane Redmon’s particulars was a Private Sharon Lee. And she’d been shipped out to the regiment’s 1st Battalion on Marengo months earlier as reinforcement for their reconnaissance platoon.

  Judging by the casualty lists, it bore the brunt of insurgent counter-strikes. That was not necessarily unusual for a bush war fought in harsh terrain where finding the enemy was ten times harder than defeating him. So far, no Lee, S., reported wounded or killed, but the odds didn’t look promising.

  The sanest course of action would be to extract Zack and take the next starship for the Rim. But ‘William B. Whate’ had already invested a lot of time and sweat into joining the Regiment of the Damned in pursuit of Ariane Redmon.

  He’d object to taking a shortcut at this late date. Talyn could picture him arguing, not without reason, that the regiment would likely send him straight to Marengo and the recon platoon within a day of graduation, allowing him to remain undercover.

  Unfortunately, her window of opportunity for a trip to Fort Erfoud and a quiet word with Decker was almost shut. The syllabus showed his platoon heading into field training for the rest of the course. Their Erfoud phase was over, and the jungle phase was about to begin.

  Twenty-Six

  “Are you ready t
o give up yet, Decker?” Windom asked when Zack finally made his way up to the cliff-top observation post where the sergeant, comfortable in his environmentally controlled battle armor waited.

  The jungle phase had been one long stretch of ass riding by instructors who enjoyed good meals, adequate sleep, and a life insulated from the miseries of the bush. By now, they had racked up two weeks of endless patrols, ambushes, and raids, wearing unpowered scout armor and carrying heavy packs.

  Nasty fauna, little rest, and insufficient nourishment compounded the misery of the jungle heat and humidity. Decker figured he had lost a good five kilos of muscle from a body that had little spare fat to burn.

  The current tactical problem was to be their last one before they relocated from the jungle to Parth’s Antarctic wastes for the next phase.

  Decker, feeling light-headed from the climb, on top of both sleep and food deprivation, shook his head as he slipped into the small hide beside Windom. It was their first time alone in a while.

  “Why the fuck should I, Staff? We’ve seen worse at the Pathfinder School.”

  A cruel smile exposed Windom’s white teeth.

  “You were younger then, and a noncom, not a soft-arsed HQ officer.”

  “Are you ready to give up yet, Earle? Because if you haven’t figured it out by now, between the two of us, I’m still the better Marine, and the others know it. That’s why your collective punishment bullshit never worked. I’ll graduate, no matter what you try, so why bother?”

  Soft laughter escaped Windom’s throat.

  “We’re not anywhere near done yet, Decker. Most of our trainee casualties happen either during the cold weather or mountain phase. An over-the-hill, delusional asshole like you has an even chance of never seeing graduation. Besides, you’re not close to paying off the debt you owe me. Now button your lips and do your damn job. Enemy sims will pass through the area before nightfall, and you wouldn’t want to be the one who fails to warn your platoon.”

  Enemy sims, essentially humanoid-shaped target drones had become the bane of their existence over the last week, appearing without warning at all hours. Every trainee, including Decker, had become a simulated casualty more than once, and the staff denied casualties their rations.

  It forced them to hoard what they had, supplementing it by foraging for edible plants. But they were learning, or rather relearning advanced fieldcraft and fighting techniques.

  “Does that mean you’re here to make sure I fuck up and get the platoon overrun, so we go another twenty-four hours without food?”

  Decker scanned the dry riverbed below with his helmet-mounted sensor for any movement along or just inside the tree line.

  “The idea had crossed my mind.”

  “You want to hear what I thought about just now, Earle?”

  “No, and I don’t give a shit either.”

  “I wondered how much better life would be if I shoved you off the cliff.”

  “The battle suit will make sure I don’t break my neck, jackass,” Windom replied in a contemptuous tone. “And then I’ll have the evidence I need to send you back into exile.”

  Decker peered over the rocky lip.

  “Maybe, but it’ll rattle you hard enough I’ll have time to climb down, rip your tin can wide open and break your neck before you can do anything about it. Training accident. Sad, but it happens.”

  “There you go threatening staff again.”

  “But you have no proof to bring me up on charges, Earle. Your suit’s not recording. I figure you want none of your own behavior up for review.”

  The sergeant snorted.

  “How do you figure that, dumbass?”

  A dismissive smile twisted Decker’s face.

  “I can tell by looking. The school teaches Master Gunners plenty of little tricks, including how to turn this training carbine into something lethal. You want me to show you?”

  “Just do your damn job.”

  Windom wiggled backward out of the hide and vanished down the slope, leaving a contented Zack to his solitude. There was no way he could tell whether the sergeant’s battle suit was logging anything, short of seeing the visor’s heads-up display. And for that, he would have to wear it. But Windom using Decker’s real name was a dead giveaway. The regiment frowned on something like that.

  After a few minutes, he pulled a ration bar from his thigh pocket and chewed on a corner, smiling. Decker wondered how long it would take the staff to figure out he’d pilfered their packs when they weren’t looking.

  Hopefully, the others would be circumspect enough to not give the game away by eating their share where Windom and his helpers could see. A few bites were enough to calm his raging hunger, and he carefully re-wrapped the rest and put it back in his pocket. Moments later, he caught shadows moving along the game trail that ran parallel to the riverbed.

  “Niner, this is November One,” he whispered into his helmet’s commo pickup, “we have tangos headed your way. I can see a dozen moving along the river. They’ll be stumbling into you in fifteen minutes at most, over.”

  “Roger,” Sergeant Jaya replied. “Niner, out.”

  Something told Zack that Windom would try to screw them over once again and gum up the gears. He scrambled out of his observation post and quickly made his way down to the game trail.

  Moving with the stealth of a lifelong recon trooper, Decker caught up to the sims before they reached the platoon position. Sure enough, Windom was hiding in the shadows, plotting a nasty surprise of his own.

  When the sims entered what Decker figured was the sentries’ field of fire, he took aim at the rearmost drone and shot it with a double tap. Then, in rapid succession, he shot two more before the rest of the platoon reacted and took out the rest.

  “What the fuck was that?”

  Windom’s outraged shout over the radio brought everything to a halt.

  “I believe it’s called nailing the enemy,” Decker replied, stepping out from behind the tree he’d used as his firing position. “Staff.”

  “What are you doing here, Whate?”

  Windom scooted out of the shadows and planted himself athwart the trail.

  “My job.” He pointed at the motionless sims. “I believe you owe us two days’ worth of rations, Sergeant.”

  “I owe you clowns nothing, and that’s your fault again, Whate. You left your observation post without authorization.”

  “Because I saw another threat emerge, this one in fully powered armor, preparing to fuck us over. There was no time to warn the platoon, so I used my initiative like any light infantryman would. It worked.”

  “What additional threat?” Windom asked, before Decker’s words registered. It was too late. Soft sniggers came over the radio. “Dammit, Whate. You crossed the line, and it’ll cost.”

  Jaya emerged from the dense underbrush and raised his visor.

  “In fairness, Whate has a point,” he said in a low voice, his radio pickup turned off so the others couldn’t overhear. “You were about to screw with their attempts at repelling the enemy, and we expect our Marines to show independence and initiative. I think they’ve earned their rations.”

  Decker knew he shouldn’t be witnessing disagreements between the staff, so he pretended not to understand Jaya’s stage whisper.

  Windom gave his second in command an irritated shrug but he had the air of a man caught in a trap of his own devising.

  “I’ve decided that Whate will pay for his insolence at another time,” he said over the radio. “Corporal Radzell can issue the rations. Then we’ll shift camp since this one’s apparently been compromised.”

  Then, after an angry glare at Decker, Windom stomped away to revive the sims.

  *

  A blinding wall of snow and ice crystals slammed into the line of men making their way up the Kurgan Glacier, at the edge of Parth’s Antarctic region. The ropes that tied them together into two columns of five, for safety, became their only connection a few seconds later. They would, if t
he point men didn’t see a crevice in time, become their lifelines.

  Windom and the other trainers were out there, somewhere, watching them through their helmet’s IR pickups, snug and warm in environmentally sealed battle suits. Decker and his comrades, however, still wore the same, unaugmented scout armor as before, only with extreme cold weather battle dress underneath instead of the tropical version.

  In an added twist, whereas Jaya had played the role of platoon leader before, with Radzell as his platoon sergeant, the trainees were now in charge of each other. Surprising no one, Decker had taken the first tour as leader. It meant he was walking point on this leg of their trek, unwilling to let a less experienced recruit navigate them over the cracked ice sheet.

  The accelerated course had arrived in the Antarctic region six hours earlier after two days at Fort Erfoud to rest and trade their jungle gear for the low-temperature equivalent.

  Fortunately, it was summer in the southern polar region, and the almost constant, howling wind was a mere twenty degrees below the freezing point. During the winter, when little sunlight made it so far south, temperatures routinely dropped to minus eighty or worse. Even convict-recruits weren’t allowed to operate in such cold weather without fully sealed armor.

  “Hold in place, and hunker down,” Decker ordered over the platoon push. “There’s no sense in tempting fate with visibility at the bottom end of sweet fuck all.”

  “Don’t sit around grabbing your asses for too long,” Windom’s nasal baritone intruded. “Or you’ll never make it to the objective on time. You know what that means.”

  “That we’ll be rummaging through the staff’s packs again,” a carefully masked voice replied.

  “Who said that?”

  “All right,” Decker growled. “Everyone get off the damn push. We’re staying put until I can see where I’m stepping. There’s no point in making H-Hour if it means we lose someone along the way. Squalls like this, they’re over before we’re bored enough to lick metal. And by the way, Sergeant Windom, the guys would like to see number three ration bars now and then. The number ones and twos you staff seem to prefer are getting old.”