Of course, the phones were ungodly expensive, so that was one more concern for her as the responsible officer for them. Recon got all the high-speed, low-drag gear, but someone had to sign for all of that expensive equipment, and that someone was in the platoon was her.
The expense and obvious size constraints also relegated the team phones to VBV, or voice-to-binary-to-voice. The big commercial and military hadron systems could broadcast, if that was even a word that applied, visuals and large data dumps, but the small team phones were far more limited.
She sighed and put the phone back in her holster. Top knew what he was doing, and she didn’t need her to keep bugging him. She was just bored. While she had initially been glad to have the time to snap in with the platoon, they’d been sitting on the planet for going on three weeks, and there had been no sign of any violence. The Federation had two ships in orbit and more than 2,000 Marines on the surface, and so far, nothing of note had happened.
Esther knew that most of what a recon unit did was boring—that had been brought out ad infinitum by her instructors. They watched and reported. But there was a mystique about them that had perhaps clouded her visceral understanding. She’d let the crossed paddles on her patch become a symbol for derring-do. But the reality was that recon battalion was a support unit, providing the eyes and ears for the infantry. They were not MARSOC nor the SEALs. No Hollybolly moviemaker was going to be rushing to make a flick of six Marines and a corpsman who just sat around and watched.
It was true that battalion recon did do missions, such as taking out targets like bridges, calling for fire, even targeting enemy leadership. Esther had a school-trained sniper in the platoon as well as two school-trained engineers. During the Evolution, her company’s Second Platoon had earned a Chairman’s Unit Commendation for destroying a loyalist airfield, but the most common mission was just what they were doing now: sitting on their butts and watching.
And the boredom was driving her crazy. She had to do something, anything.
When her phone buzzed with the skipper’s code, she almost fumbled taking it out.
A mission! Finally!
“Lieutenant Lysander, pull your teams now to their rally points,” he said.
Hell yeah! A platoon size mission!
“Roger that. What’re my orders?”
“You’ll be picked up by commercial buses. I’ll brief you when you get back.”
What? Commercial buses?
“Sir? Buses?”
“Affirmative. I think you have Starlight Lines, complete with all the latest flicks,” he said, the bitterness evident in his voice.
“Uh . . . Skipper? Can I ask what’s going on?”
Another good thing about the hadron phones was that as they didn’t transmit or broadcast in the normal sense, they were completely secure. Someone would have to physically take one of the 16 phones in order to listen in.
“Sure, why not? Lucky Fortune has negotiated a new deal with the local union, so now we’re not needed anymore.”
“The union?” she said with a sinking heart.
“Yeah, the union. Seems as if our mere presence convinced them that their factories are needed for the defense of the Federation. So in a fit of patriotism, they’ve agreed to the company’s terms.”
Fucking hell!
“Roger, understood. We’ll start packing up now. Do you have a timeline for our pickup?”
Three of the Marines who were sleeping were up, listening in to her. They did not look happy.
“That’s a negative at the moment. I’ll get back to you on that. You are now in a Level Four status. However, if there ever were any belligerents in your area, and they have not received the word that we are all friends again, you may defend yourself.”
“Roger that. Level Four.”
Level Four meant that kinetic weapons were not to be loaded, and energy weapons were not to be powered up. Which would make it hard to defend themselves if they were hit. But she was pretty sure that not only would they not be hit now, they had never been in any danger of that in the first place.
“Stand down the Two-Oh-Oh-One,” she told Grayback. “Everyone else, let’s pack it up.”
“Let me guess,” Duke, the team leader, said. “We’re all friends now that the Marines were called in as a show of strength.”
“Got it in one, Duke. Now let me pass the joyful news to Top Gann and the rest of the platoon. Peace is at hand.”
“Yeah, joyful. We’re all so very fucking thrilled,” Duke said as he kicked a clod of dirt across their hide.
Esther understood their anger at being used as pawns in a corporate negotiation. She was livid. Her father had fought against the pervasive integration of the big corporations and the old government. After the sacrifices of the Evolution, after her father and mother had been assassinated for the cause, it looked like it was business as usual.
JOINT TRAINING AREA, GENERAL HABITATS #26
Chapter 25
Esther twisted to look over her shoulder at the Top and gave him a thumbs up. He returned it with two thumbs up.
Master Sergeant Lee Gann had been in the community for almost 15 years and had come to the battalion after two tours with MARSOC—and he was going batshit crazy. In MARSOC, every Marine in a platoon was an operator, not matter how high the rank. In battalion, neither the platoon commander nor the platoon sergeant normally conducted operations. Their position was back at the supported unit’s CP, both to control the teams and to give advice to the unit commander.
Esther and the Top had just spent an excruciating two weeks in 3/14’s CP for the annual Valiant Force exercise. The fact that the purple forces, of which 3/14 was part, got their asses kicked by the green forces, had only added to their frustration.
Esther was too far down the food chain to be in the after action meetings, so she’d expected to cool her heels for three days while waiting for embark and the trip back to Omaha. And as the planet was still being terraformed by General Habitats, there wasn’t even a city in the region where they could get some libo. So when the Space Guard liaison had asked for volunteers to get some of the Guard pilots their drop quals, she’d jumped at the chance.
Esther had never worked with the Space Guard. They were the “third” arm of the Federation military, with historical roots going back to the United Kingdom’s 19th Century’s Waterguard. Their original mission of combating smuggling had evolved to encompass anti-piracy and even local defense, although their cutters did not have the weaponry to take on most navy ships. Esther wasn’t all that versed on the Guard. Like many Marines and sailors, she sort of considered them as younger siblings, well-meaning, but not that effective. She knew that Marines were occasionally attached to the Space Guard on anti-piracy missions. She also knew that the Space Guard had posse comitatus[10] and so the power to arrest, so a Guard officer had been attached to a few ships she’d been on, but that was about the breadth of her knowledge.
Except for two more things. Space Guard cutters were both space and atmosphere capable, and they were sometimes welcomed where Navy ships were not. In this case, it was the first that mattered. Because the ships could operate in deep space as well as planetary atmosphere, they could be used as platforms to insert small forces onto a planet. One of those ways was through jumping.
A space-only Navy ship could insert Marines with the “duck eggs,” which were two-man capsules that were essentially shot out at a planet from up to a million klicks away. The duck eggs would hit a planet’s atmosphere, then the outer skin would ablate away releasing the two Marines inside to parachute to the surface.
While this was still the primary method of clandestine insertion of recon Marines or SEALs, duck eggs were expensive, the process was wearing on the Marines, and it required a configured ship to conduct the operation.
A SG cutter had far less of a footprint, and it could enter the atmosphere. Within each cutter was a drop hatch where emergency supplies—or Marines—could parachute to the surface.
At least that was what she told the SG liaison. Truth was, she’d have paid to do it. Aside from her boredom, she simply loved jumping.
Esther had 14 training jumps to her record. Thirteen were from aircraft, and one was from a duck egg. This would be something new. The cutter needed three successful drops to earn her quals, and with ten pax being the max load, that would allow each Marine in the platoon to get a jump. She pulled rank and made sure she and Top were on the first stick, and that she was the doorman.
The ship was an Ageon Class, the second smallest cutter and just slightly larger than a Marine Stork. There were only five crew with the skipper being a very young-looking lieutenant (jg).
The cargo compartment was extremely cramped with ten Marines; each Marine had to sit in a chain, the legs of one around the Marine in front of him. A Stork could carry 38 Marines (50 in a pinch), but the cutter needed much more room for its engine train.
The little cutter had shot into space, pulling a couple of G’s that had not been compensated. Esther had been pressed into the Top behind her. She had expected it. G compensation was a drain of energy, and the cutter was a combat ship, so it was conducting emergency lift-off procedures. It was a long three or four minutes before the skipper cut in the compensators and Esther could breathe normally.
The ship entered the exosphere, which was the requirement for the quals. The control panel let her know the ship had turned and was reentering the planet’s atmosphere. There was a slight vibration making itself felt through the dampeners as the ship reached the mesosphere, but nothing like she had experienced in her duck egg insertion.
Esther felt her heartbeat quicken. When the hatch over the compartment opened, she got even more excited. She edged forward and put her legs over the edge, dangling them 15,000 meters above the planet’s surface. At the cutter’s speed, they should be whipping about, but the ship was designed with a slipstream baffle that acted as a sort of shock absorber. Right at the skin of the ship, Esther barely felt a thing. When she jumped, she would gradually feel the bite of her forward speed as she progressed away from the ship. By 15 meters, she would have slowed enough so that she could survive the transition. She’d still feel a serious jolt, but a survivable one.
The cutter could slow down enough for a normal exit, but one of the three jumps had to be a high-speed drop, and Esther had eagerly asked that it be on her stick. If she was going to do this, she wanted to experience something new, and she already had 13 routine jumps.
The red light on the edge of the hatch switched to amber.
“One minute,” Esther passed needlessly over the net; everyone could see the light change.
At thirty seconds to drop, the light shifted to a flashing amber. Esther put both hands alongside the edges of the hatch as she stared at the light. At ten seconds, the light started flashing faster, and the horizon shifted as the helmsman brought the cutter around and lifted the nose. When the light turned green, Esther let go, and with the helmsman applying a jolt of power, Esther slid out of the hatch, immediately tucking into a tight position.
The cutter was flying at 500 KPH, far too fast for a normal drop. However, the dampening system worked, slowing her down to a more manageable, if still fast, 220 KPH by the time she exited the ship’s envelope. The slowdown occurred in a little more than a second, though, so it was still a jolt, even if not quite as severe as the exit from a duck egg.
The jolt knocked the breath from her and whipped her around, but she kept her position for a few seconds before opening up into the standard free fall arch which deployed her wings.
All ten jumpers had exited together, but the cutter’s climb separated them by 10 to 15 meters, which was good. She would have hated slamming into Top Gann at those speeds. Esther watched as the other nine jumpers assumed free fall positions. Everyone was in control.
She turned back to the ground, ready to have some fun. Except for a few qualified “flyers” with MARSOC, Marines were issued standard freefall wingsuits. It took hundreds of qualification jumps to be certified on the advanced suits where a Marine could maneuver like a falcon, but the standard suits were no slouches. Esther brought her arms back slightly to increase speed when Top flew in front of her, completing a barrel roll and flashing her another thumbs up.
Challenge on.
Esther dipped under him, increasing her speed, then pulling up sharply on the other side of him. She was still falling, so “up” was relative. As she approached the vertical, she tucked her legs in and bent over backwards, completing the loop.
Esther hadn’t ever completed the maneuver, which was pushing the capabilities of the wingsuit, and it was done much more easily at lower altitudes, so she was relieved when she transitioned smoothly back into controlled flight instead of flailing around like a neophyte.
“Not bad, Lieutenant,” Top passed. “But how about this?”
He started spinning like a corkscrew. It made Esther dizzy just looking at him.
Doc B flashed by her and came up alongside the Top. He started corkscrewing, even if his were not as crisp at Top’s. Top stopped after ten seconds, and Esther swopped in front of her. Within moments, the three of them were performing a “Thach Weave,” an interlocking maneuver named for an old Earth Navy fighter pilot. They swept back and forth between each other like strands of hair being braided.
None of this was authorized on a training mission. But Esther didn’t care. It was pure joy. And if they didn’t want them to play like this, then why introduce them to the maneuvers?
She pulled out of the weave, then started experimenting with somersaults, trying to stop each rotation exactly at the horizontal.
Her AI flashed a warning on her visor. She was getting out of range if she was going to reach the DZ. Reluctantly, she checked to make sure no one was above her and released her chute. The shock as the almost invisible foil deployed was almost negligible when compared to the exit from the cutter. She oriented on the DZ in the distance and checked her altitude, quickly querying her AI on O2 levels. Satisfied that she could breathe, she retracted her visor, letting in a blast of frigid air. She didn’t care. It felt great!
Far below her feet, 30,000 Marines, militia, and civilian contractors were grubbing around, trying to get ready to embark ships to return to their home bases. Up here, Esther didn’t have a care in the world.
Too soon, she was coming into the DZ. She flared for a tip-toe landing, with less of a shock than stepping off a stair. As she gathered up her chute, Top came in, landing a little harder than her and taking an extra step.
“Hey, Top! There’re four empty slots in the third stick. I bet if we get back to the paraloft right now, we can pack our chutes in time to grab two of those spots. What do you say?”
But Top wasn’t saying anything. As soon as Esther suggested it, he took off at a run, making a beeline to the loft. He was still struggling to gather his chute as he ran, and that let Esther catch and pass him a few meters from the loft.
And to think, they actually pay me to do this, she thought as she slammed her chute on the table and started repacking it.
SAINT TERESA
Chapter 26
“I need that support now, Captain,” Gunny Michael “Monty” Montgomery passed.
“I’m working on it,” Esther replied, trying to keep calm while her emotions ran rampant.
“Top, what’s the Navy saying?” she shouted across the CP to where he was standing over the Naval Weapons Controller.
“The ‘Navy’ is saying stand by, Captain,” the Navy lieutenant shouted back at her. “Your yelling isn’t going to speed things up.”
“I’ve got Marines who are getting overrun, Lieutenant. I can’t reach them. It has to be you.”
>
“When can we get those fighters?” Lieutenant Colonel Bertolucci, the infantry battalion commander asked, putting himself between the livid Esther and the Navy lieutenant.
Esther knew that the delay wasn’t the fault of the lieutenant. She was just the liaison between the Marines and the ship, and she’d put in the support request. But the Navy officer was a handy target for her anger, and she was letting her have it.
The request had been submitted, and now it was up to the operational commander to allocate his forces. He could send his two Experions to support four Marines on Saint Teresa’s moon, or he could keep them around the Fairfield Bay as security against the six Uni Ramheads that hadn’t been located yet. Esther was pretty sure what the commander would decide, but she had to keep trying.
“How about Osprey-Two,” the colonel asked Major Baxter, his operations officer.
“Still 30 minutes until refueled, then 15 to the moon,” Captain Francis, the FAC answered for the major, which was pretty much what Esther had expected.
Osprey-One had been shot down by a Uni missile two hours ago, and Osprey-Two had barely made it back from Bingo to refuel. The Marine Corps Wasp was a wickedly effective platform in an atmosphere, but not as good in space. It would be a sitting duck to a space fighter, but against a ground force as what was attacking Monty and his team, it should be effective if it could punch through into the tunnels.
“As soon as they have enough fuel to make it to the moon and back, have them take off,” the colonel ordered.
“Aye-aye, sir,” the major relied.
“Monty, hang on. We’re trying to get a Wasp up to you,” she passed.
“A Wasp? We’re pretty deep for whatever one of them is packing.”
“Can you get to the surface?”
“Yeah, we can, but we’d have to fight through 20 or 30 Unis to get there.”
Esther's Story: Recon Marine (The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins Book 2) Page 17
