Master Sergeant

by Mel Odom

  Sage accessed Gilbride’s feed and brought up the medical reports on his HUD. He didn’t understand a lot of the information, but he understood enough of it to know his guess had been right.

  “He was Torgarian,” Gilbride confirmed as he waved the med-drone away from the body. He ran a hand over the corpse, scanning it with his suit’s magnetic resonance spectroscopic field. “From what I see here, he was in the last stages of the sickness. There’s a lot of lung scarring, liver damage, throat damaged by stomach acid—probably from throwing up—and weight loss. I don’t think whoever had him out here was getting much work out of him at the end.”

  One of the medtechs hauled another body out of the hole and laid it beside the others. The second dead man looked as wasted and emaciated as the first.

  Gilbride glanced at the new body. “All of them were dying.”

  “That explains why whoever set this trap didn’t take these people with them,” Kiwanuka said. “The work force was perishing. The site was compromised. They burned them to keep the flu from spreading. Using the compound as bait to reel us in was an easy decision because they weren’t losing anything.” She paused. “Could be whatever drugs they cooked up out here are compromised too.”

  Sage made a note of that because that had occurred to him too. An outbreak of Chehgar could decimate the Makaum people. If it got loose in the orbiting space station, a lot of civilians who might not have had the vaccine would die and the military would lose access to the intel the station offered. He pulled up files on the planet, looking for medical records.

  “The Makaum have all been given the Chehgar vaccine,” Gilbride said. Evidently he’d anticipated Sage’s concerns. “Command thought it was essential because Charlie Company was cycling rehabbing veterans into the mix that might have been exposed to carriers. It didn’t take a lot to convince the Makaum natives they needed the vaccine. They’ve had experience with vile sickness pumped out by this world.” Gilbride pointed back at the bodies. “These people show no signs of the vaccine antibodies.”

  “Our people are protected too,” Sage agreed. “Probably most of the upper echelons of the corps because they don’t like to leave much to chance. But there are a lot of people in harm’s way if whoever put this operation together didn’t contain their people.”

  “What I’m seeing here are antibodies from the fifth-generation flu strains,” Gilbride said. “It’s a lot weaker because the Torgarian immune systems were starting to fight it. Probably the sickness was dormant in these people and it wasn’t until they were subjected to these hostile conditions—maybe contact with alien flora and fauna—that the sickness presented again. By the time whoever enslaved them had a clue about what was really going on, it was too late.”

  Sage cursed and glanced back at the empty buildings, thinking about the death all around him and how it probably wasn’t going to stop.

  Unless he found a way to stop it.

  “Let’s pick up the pieces here. If we look close enough, maybe we can figure out who was behind this.”

  TWELVE

  West-southwest of Makaum City

  0612 Zulu Time

  You’ve got to pack it in, Top.” Colonel Nathan Halladay’s image ghosted on Sage’s HUD. He looked neat and fit and in his early fifties. Thin strands of gray flecked his short brown hair and lent him the air of a distinguished university professor or a CEO.

  Given the job Halladay had of placating General Whitcomb and maintaining the fort on Makaum with boots on the ground, as well as the various contingents of the Makaum populace and the corps, the colonel probably had the skills of both.

  Sage walked through the buildings, going over terrain he’d already covered a half dozen times. He’d shot vid of the compound as well, intending to go over it again later.

  The sun hung in the eastern sky. The slight green tint deepened the emerald jungle’s hue and made the bright flowers stand out in vivid colors. A cloud of jewel-winged insects lifted from the tall tree tops and buzzed him, plinking against his faceshield behind Halladay’s grim face.

  “We need a little more time, sir,” Sage said. “The answers are here.”

  Halladay’s green eyes narrowed. “You’re all out of time, Sage, and I’m confident you’ve found whatever answers were there. We’re going to have trouble containing intel about the Chehgar flu, and when that gets loose among the Makaum people, I don’t know how their leaders are going to react, despite the fact they’ve had the vaccine.”

  “We didn’t bring the flu here, sir.” Sage tried to curb the anger he felt at being able to finish the mission as he saw fit, but the lack of sleep was catching up to him. As well as the post-combat stress. Some of the surliness threatened to emerge. During combat, he was cool under fire, but afterward he liked to take time for himself, to think about things.

  With a third of the recon team dead, he had a lot to think about. And then there was Terracina’s death and the handoff of the fort to consider. He was going to walk into that as the guy who shot the sergeant off the kifrik web. The story wouldn’t always include the sabot round that had penetrated Terracina’s face and was about to go off.

  The already troublesome situation had become even more prickly.

  Halladay knew it too. Sage suspected that was why the colonel was barking so loudly.

  “I know we didn’t bring the flu here,” Halladay growled. “I also know that the general is going to be up soon, and he’s not going to be happy with my report. I want to at least tell him the remaining soldiers and hardware that went out into the jungle last night are safe.”

  “Understood, sir.” Sage read between the lines, knowing that Halladay had told him more than he’d wanted to, revealing that the general kept himself at arm’s length from the day-to-day ops at the fort instead of staying in the know. Whitcomb was effectively ROAD, retired on active duty, just marking time.

  He wasn’t going to be allowed the luxury of keeping tonight off his desk. Whitcomb was going to have to deal with the Makaum people, the diplomatic corps, and Command. With this many soldiers dead, the fort would need reinforcements soon.

  If the general’s discomfort hadn’t come with the deaths of the soldiers, if only Sage’s neck had been on the chopping block, Sage would have called it a fair exchange for causing Whitcomb problems.

  Sage glanced over at the impromptu burial site. Vid had been shot of all the dead, DNA samples taken, and the bodies had been burned. Black and gray coals filled the wide area above the depression. Flames from the chem burn still flickered in the freshly dug soil that lay scattered.

  Forty-three dead had been taken out of the depression. Shallow graves containing nineteen more dead had been discovered by Gilbride’s cadaver bots. Those had been exhumed as well and tossed into the flames.

  “Don’t just understand me,” Halladay said. “Get on a jumpcopter and get back here. We need to figure out how we’re going to square this.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Halladay’s voice softened only a little. “Give the order before I do, Top. I don’t want to undermine your authority before I’ve even put you into your position.”

  “Yes sir.” Sage tamped down his anger, knowing it was more from frustration than anything else. He cut the private comm, then addressed the soldiers around him, letting them know they were shutting down the op and leaving.

  Unhappy with the situation, Sage strode back out into the narrow paths between the buildings and walked to the outer perimeter to watch over his soldiers as they pulled out of the area. Kiwanuka joined him. She hadn’t strayed far from his side since they’d been on the ground together.

  “Did the brass pull rank?” Kiwanuka asked.

  “Halladay did.” Sage’s response was clipped and final.

  “Don’t hold that against him, Top. Halladay’s a good officer. He puts his people first because he cares about them. Not because he wants to look good for the general’s reports.”

  “I’ll take your word for that.”

>   “Do that. But he’ll prove himself to you.”

  Sage let that go. Halladay’s eventual palatability as a commander wasn’t something he wanted to talk about. He held the Roley at the ready and watched over his troops. Magnifying his vision, he scanned the tree line around them. Now that it was daylight, everything seemed bigger and more open. The netting overhead blocked the sun except in the places gaping rips had been made during the attacks.

  Teams aboard the hovering jumpcopter reeled in a cargo basket holding two powersuits.

  Movement fluttered along the tree line. Sage called for more magnification and made out a young, lean face gazing down at the compound. At first Sage thought the watcher might have been one of the ambushers returning to the site, maybe with others in tow who would have shoulder-mounted missile launchers that would take down the jumpcopters. Then he saw that the young man was Makaum and dressed in camo gear so effective it made Sage use his suit’s thermographic imaging to pull him out of the brush. He was short and slender, sleekly muscled, not an ounce wasted on him. But his face still held a little of a child’s roundness.

  Accessing the AKTIVsuit’s digital recording app, he captured an image of the young man’s face and ran it against the database he had of Makaum people Charlie Company did business with in some capacity.

  Nothing turned up.

  In addition to the camo gear, the young man carried a short composite bow and wore a low-grade Tschang beamer at his hip. The bulky pistol looked out of place on the young man.

  “We’re being watched,” Sage said.

  After a moment, Kiwanuka replied, “I see him.”

  “Recognize him?”

  “No. Probably one of the local hunters. The Makaum keep their own exploration teams in the jungle to find food.”

  “They seem pretty well set in their sprawl.”

  “They are, but over the years they’ve had crop failures. Blights and disease have struck their fields and their fruit trees, killing them out in a season.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “They tried to modify the original plants and trees, make them produce more of the kinds of fruits and vegetables they wanted. You hear the scientists tell it, Makaum plant and insect DNA is extremely rigid and won’t tolerate outside modifications. You hear a tianban—a shaman, more or less—tell it, then it’s just the planet striking back, lashing out at anything that would imprison it. They say the planet has ‘Live Free or Die’ embedded in its genetic makeup.”

  “The scientists ever find that in the DNA?”

  “Not to my knowledge, but I don’t talk to the scientists much.”

  “Is the recurve bow indigenous or did he buy it from someone?”

  “The bow is indigenous, made of two different kinds of wood, horn from hellbeetle, and glue strained from a kifrik’s web. Within fifty meters, those guys are lethal, and some of them make kills out to a hundred meters. They can be really effective in the hands of a Makaum hunter who knows what she’s doing.”

  “Women hunt too?” That didn’t surprise Sage, but he liked to have information.

  “There’s no real gender specification here. Anybody can do any job. But the Makaum tend to have more female Quass than males.”

  “Quass?”

  “Political leaders. Think of them as something between a house parent and a full-blown congressman. They serve the needs of the locals on a smaller scale and talk directly to the Makaum ambassadors. It allows them to deal more effectively with the needs of the community.”

  The young Makaum man turned his head and stared at Sage. The contact only lasted a moment, then the young man was gone, fading back into the jungle like smoke.

  0629 Zulu Time

  When the cargo basket drew even with the underside of the jumpcopter, Sage threw a leg over the basket’s side and clambered out onto the vibrating floor of the cargo area. He slid his Roley over his shoulder and looked at the men and women who had survived the night with him.

  “You people did good,” Sage said, and broadcast his words over the comm. “Sergeant Terracina would have been proud of you.”

  No one responded.

  Sage let it go at that. Now wasn’t the time for a lot of words. Soldiers needed time to recover and absorb their wounds and losses. And pushing any more rhetoric down their throats might have inspired insubordination over his role in Terracina’s final minutes.

  The soldiers remained secured in their AKTIVsuits, totally closed up. They would stay that way until they’d been through DCon.

  “Clear for evac, Sergeant Sage?” the jumpcopter lieutenant asked.

  “Clear. Take us home.” Sage grabbed the support post in the center of the cargo space. Fatigue chafed at him and made him feel slightly off balance as the jumpcopter heeled in the air and came around. He was slow enough to react that the near-AI almost took over adjusting for him till he backed it off with a sharp command. He kept his faceshield locked. All of them did in an effort to stave off any more exposure to the Chehgar flu than they’d already had.

  Most of the soldiers sat on the low benches along the walls and held on to the cargo netting. They talked among themselves, chatting through suit-to-suit comm, putting their heads together to make the connection. A few of them—the more experienced members among them—lay back and caught forty winks in case the chance didn’t present itself after their return to the fort.

  The dead mercs that had been recovered lay in the back, stacked like cordwood with nanogel layers between them to fashion a crude shelving system. Cargo netting hung from ceiling to floor in front of them, hooked into place so they couldn’t come forward if they hit turbulence or had to take evasive action.

  The jet turbine ran loud now. There was no reason at this point to hide their position. The steady hum of the engines offered Sage a calming backdrop. Noise like this meant a soldier was almost safe, almost home. He lipped the AKTIVsuit’s built-in water reservoir and took a couple swallows of cool, electrolyte-charged liquid. Since the suits ran at full charge in daylight, the cooled water was a perk.

  After a final swallow, feeling some of the parched sensation abating, he stared at the dead men on the other side of the cargo netting. One of the men’s profiles looked familiar. Giving in to his curiosity, Sage went forward and slipped through the cargo netting.

  The dead man’s chest had been ripped away by heavy caliber rounds, leaving gaping holes in the middle of torn tissue. Flesh and blood had sheared away easily, but some of the cybernetic infrastructure and artificial organs remained, including one of the lungs, which looked like a glossy bubble filled with blood veins inside the man’s chest.

  The man’s face hadn’t been touched but was partially concealed by the helmet and faceshield he wore. His gear was top of the line and looked like it had been well cared for up until the time he died.

  Sage knelt beside the dead man, knowing he was drawing curious stares. He ignored that and focused on the dead man. Reaching for the man’s helmet, he tabbed the releases and popped the emergency faceshield, removing the whole front the way a medtech would have to do to give emergency treatment.

  The man was handsome, too handsome to be in the line of work he was in. Death had revealed the facial reconstruction he’d undergone at some point, leaving the old skin grafts slightly visible as waxy patches now that the blood had drained. His hair lay smoothly in place. His eyes were open, the pupils of both blown in death.

  “What’s the sarge’s deal with the dead guy?” someone asked.

  “I don’t know. Don’t know him or any of those guys we blew up last night,” someone else answered.

  Kiwanuka came to a halt by Sage. “Is there a problem, Top?”

  Sage nodded. “I know this guy.”

  “How?” Suspicion colored her question.

  “Didn’t know him well. Met him in the Azure Mist Tavern night before last.”

  “This was one of the guys you got into the fight with?”

  Sage wasn’t surprised people kn
ew about that, but it was good to find out that the fort grapevine was in working order. “This was one of them.”

  “He worked for DawnStar?”

  “Maybe. I’m going to need to find out about that.” Sage shoved the faceshield into one of the dead man’s thigh pockets, leaving his features bare.

  THIRTEEN

  Enlisted Barracks

  Charlie Company

  Fort York

  1014 Hours Zulu Time

  Colonel Nathan Halladay stood awaiting Sage’s arrival outside the DCon chamber in the med center when the sterilization cycle finished. The colonel’s face was clean shaven, his cheeks gleaming, and he went armed, a coilgun sheathed in a shoulder rig under his right arm and another at his right hip. He held a PAD in his left hand.

  Sage came to attention immediately and raised his arm in a salute. “Sir, Master Sergeant Frank Sage.”

  Halladay seemed to be taken aback a little. He was slow off his marks returning the salute, but when he did, it was textbook perfect. “At ease, Top.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Sage dropped into parade rest, the Roley slung over his left shoulder. “I was on my way to turn in my after-action report.”

  “I appreciate the diligence.” Halladay acknowledged the other soldiers filing from the DECON chambers and heading off to the mess hall. “I’ll expect that report soon.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “In the meantime, I want to know what happened out there.”

  “We were ambushed, sir.”

  “In detail. Come to my office and we’ll talk.”

  Sage fell in step with the man. A four-man personal security detachment walked in two-by-two formation around them. All of the members of the PSD appeared competent, but they were too relaxed after an ambush for Sage’s taste. He watched Halladay as they walked, taking some measure of the colonel, noting that the man was in good shape and watchful. Halladay wasn’t a fool, and he was attentive. That alone could keep a soldier alive.

  Colonel Halladay’s Personal Quarters