Master Sergeant

by Mel Odom

  “Neither do I.”

  “Good.” Halladay waved his hand and the holo vanished. “Then get a good night’s sleep, Top. Reveille comes early.”

  FOURTEEN

  Personal Quarters: Sage

  Enlisted Barracks

  Charlie Company

  Fort York

  2223 Hours Zulu Time

  At least Charlie Company had plenty of water on Makaum, and access to it as well. Sage had been on several planets where water had been in shortage and bathing had been low on the list of priorities. He luxuriated in the shower despite the hostile stares of the other soldiers, letting the heat soak the aches from his body, then he dried off and returned to his quarters.

  Dressed in boxers, skin still tingling from the shower, Sage went through a combination of martial arts and yoga to finish loosening up his muscles and to relax. Even though he’d been up for over twenty-four hours, discounting the attempt last night at sleeping, he couldn’t relax. Despite his best efforts and the fact that he was practiced in all of that, he couldn’t let go of things. His mind kept reliving the ambush and Terracina’s death. He’d seen holos of the man’s family, and he’d written emails like the ones Terracina’s wife and children had already gotten.

  Sage had lost men before, but for the last six years he’d worked in training. Out in the field, a soldier knew that men died on a regular basis. That was accepted. A soldier learned how to compartmentalize, to wall away the confusion and the hurt that might have prevented him or her from doing the job.

  During his time in training, Sage knew he’d lost some of that distance he’d learned to insulate himself with. On top of that, he’d liked Terracina. The man hadn’t deserved what had happened to him. His family had needed to have him back with them, safe and sound.

  Terracina’s face reappeared with the sabot round sticking out of it. Then he fell into the Green Hell. Over and over and over, till the sight and sound of his death hammered Sage’s mind. He’d come to Makaum to make a difference, to get away from the soldier mill he’d been stuck on, churning out cannon fodder for the front line.

  Occasionally a few soldiers were lost in civilian accidents, a few more in suicides or drug overdoses, but Sage hadn’t lost any like he’d lost last night in a long time. And he’d never lost anyone the way he’d lost Terracina, never taken up a weapon against a fellow soldier like that.

  Every time he closed his eyes, Sage saw Terracina clinging to the kifrik web again. The sabot round stuck out of the sergeant’s face through the shattered shield and time ticked away.

  Again and again, Sage burned through those web strands and watched the man drop into the dark jungle below. The explosion replayed in an endless audible loop, till Sage lay on his bunk covered in an ice-cold sweat.

  We’ve got targets pinned to our backs. Halladay’s words resonated in Sage’s mind.

  Sage focused on that, and he realized what he needed to do. Terracina had been assassinated last night. The sniper with the jumppak had been assigned to take out the sergeant. The only way Terracina could have been found so quickly in all the confusion of the attack was if someone had supplied him with Terracina’s DNA or the AKTIVsuit’s unique identification code.

  Either way meant Terracina had been betrayed. Ultimately, Sage had been the man’s executioner, even though Terracina was already dead.

  Abandoning his bunk, Sage dressed quickly, choosing camo gear with built-in bulletproof armor that wasn’t anywhere close to being as protective as an AKTIVsuit, but would offer some defense against small arms and not be as noticeable. Where he was going, he wanted surprise—at least temporarily—as an advantage. He left his Roley in his locker and strapped the big .500 onto his hip, adding a couple of Speedloaders to his thigh pocket. He left the helmet too, but slipped on an ear/throat setup in case things went worse than he anticipated.

  Then he went out, sealing his quarters behind him and wondering if he’d ever see them again. If he was going to be ineffectual here, he didn’t care. Makaum was just a way stop for him. Either he’d get moved along to the front line, or his presence here wouldn’t matter.

  But he wasn’t going to quietly sit back. Those days were over.

  Oral Statement of Corporal Ralph Schmeltzer to Colonel Nathan Halladay

  Re: Master Sergeant Frank Sage

  Charlie Company

  Fort York

  0356 Hours Zulu Time

  There was no stopping him. I want to make that clear. I got the impression that if I had tried to interrupt Sergeant Sage, he would have put me in the infirmary.

  [Colonel Halladay: Sage told you that?]

  He never told me that, there was no threat, but he had this look in his eyes. If you’d have been there, you would have known. Same as me. Wasn’t nobody gonna stop him.

  I was manning the desk at the morgue, which is pretty boring. You stand at security post for eight hours, check in bodies, make visitors sign in and out, make sure all the paperwork is done correctly, make sure stuff stays where it’s supposed to unless somebody’s supposed to take it. Like most posts around the fort. Just a null-sweat detail. I was looking forward to getting a beer and catching up on the gossip. There were still a lot of stories about the ambush that I hadn’t heard.

  I knew Charlie Recon had taken a beating out in the jungle. Everybody knew that before the jumpcopters came back with all the dead. My squad mates were talking about it while I was getting ready for my sec detail. A lot of soldiers got killed. I was lucky. I haven’t been on Makaum long and I didn’t have anybody outside of a handful of soldiers that I’d gotten close to. I didn’t know any of the dead soldiers.

  It’s kind of hard to get tight with anybody at a billet like Fort York. Not everybody here operates on the straight and narrow. Command is soft.

  Crap, sir! I didn’t mean to say that! I wasn’t thinking!

  [Colonel Halladay: Keep going, Corporal. Just tell me what happened.]

  I don’t mean any disrespect, Colonel Halladay. I know what you’re up against here. I just been places where everything ran tighter. You got guys working their own deals with the corps, doing things off the books. That’s what I’d heard happened to Charlie Recon. That’s what everybody was talking about. That somebody had burned First Sergeant Terracina. Set him up for that ambush.

  Anyway, enough about that. You wanna know about last night. When First Sergeant Sage arrived.

  I was at the check-in desk reading a fantasy novel a buddy had loaned me. That late at night, the morgue doesn’t get much action, you know? So I was sitting there not expecting nothing when the sarge shows up.

  I didn’t know him. Hadn’t laid eyes on him. But I’d heard about the dustup he’d had with the corps bashhounds on the DawnStar space station. Heard it was DawnStar sec he’d gotten mixed up with, but I still don’t know if that was true.

  You know how stories get told at the fort. I liked that the sergeant had stood up to them. We take a lot of crap from those guys.

  The sergeant buzzed me through the comm and identified himself. I’d heard he was a stickler from a couple guys that he trained who are here now. The sergeant is the reason they’re here instead of on the line somewhere facing the Sting-Tails. Those soldiers, they don’t know whether they have him to thank for being on Makaum, or whether they’re supposed to hate him for scoring them so low in boot camp. He’s a real by-the-numbers guy. That was why I was so surprised by what he did. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  I made him show me his bonafides, checked them out, then I buzzed him in.

  He was wearing light-armor camo and a sidearm. A revolver, I think. That was it. No other weapons that I could see. I was surprised that he didn’t have his rifle. You’re not supposed to go anywhere without it. I thought about saying something about that, thinking maybe after last night he’d just forgot it because that can happen, then I caught myself and stopped. Probably a good thing. I didn’t have no business telling him his business. Given what happened, I figure I saved my
self a beating.

  He looked at me with those eyes. Man, I’ve never seen eyes that cold and hard. I reached for my rifle before I’d even noticed it.

  “You’re not gonna need that weapon, son.” That’s what he told me. Just as calm and as rational as you could imagine.

  I nodded and took my hand back, then asked him what could I do for him.

  “I’ve got a requisition,” he says.

  I told him sure and could I see his paperwork.

  “Paperwork will be coming later,” he says.

  I told him that wasn’t how things were done. I got to admit, I was even wondering if this was some kind of test.

  He stepped around my desk, looked at the computer, and got the information he was looking for.

  Or maybe I should say who he was looking for. Turns out he wanted a corpse of one of the guys that was brought back when Charlie Recon came back from the field.

  Dead guy’s name was Andresik, Shannon. I don’t know much about who he was, other than a dead guy, I was told, who attacked Charlie Recon, but DawnStar Corp was handling the funeral arrangements. They’d already put in the paperwork to reclaim the body. Quartermaster just hadn’t cut the body loose yet. I figured it would be sent along through channels in the morning with the rest of the mercs Charlie Recon found out there.

  Andresik wasn’t on the books as an employee at DawnStar. He was a freelance bashhound. Not working for anybody that anybody knew of. I’m friends with one of the intel techs that tracked Andresik, and she told me you had requested whatever information she could find on the dead guy, Colonel Halladay.

  Master Sergeant Sage looked over that information too. I saw him draw it up on my workstation.

  Then he went back and got the dead body out of the freezer. Just humped it up over his shoulder like it was a duffel and went on out the door.

  I didn’t try to stop him. You want my opinion? Nobody was gonna stop him. Or what happened later. He was like a heatseeker, and he was locked and loaded.

  END OF STATEMENT

  Nelumbo

  Makaum Sprawl

  0017 Hours Zulu Time

  The Nelumbo sat like a jewel in the darkness, outshining the other offworld clubs that sat across the streets from it. The premium location showcased the laser show that climbed the exterior, presenting hundreds of colorful images rendered in off-white. Most of them were of offworld sights, objects and environments and people the Makaum natives had never seen.

  Sage thought he recognized some of the images, but he wasn’t sure. The programming controlling the visual display rendered the images in fantastical proportions, stretching and distorting everything. Some of them might have been erotic. Others might have been completely fabricated. All of them together created a sliding kaleidoscope of shifting visual effects.

  Music blared from the speakers, underscoring the otherworldly effects of the building’s skin. Like the visual presentation, the audio was a stew of hundreds of tunes that poured like a waterfall into the night and drowned out all other sounds. Sage suspected a lot of white noise went into the sound mix as well, because he felt vibrations running through his body and the night insects hovered outside an invisible barrier at least a hundred meters distant.

  The club was named for a variety of Terran lotus fossil that had been found in North Dakota, in the pre-Terran Alliance territory that had been known as the United States. DawnStar had recreated the extinct lotus and chosen it as the icon for their pharmaceutical corp, making the statement that they could, in a sense, resurrect the past, or the dead.

  Sage pulled the crawler in next to the curb in front of the club. Now that he was in motion—had a chosen plan of action—he felt calmer. What he was doing had a real good chance of getting him killed, but he knew he wasn’t going to get any rest until he followed through on it. Good soldiers had died out in the jungle as the result of an ambush, and that event was getting swept quietly aside by everyone involved.

  He wasn’t going to let that happen.

  Three bashhounds stood outside the club. They eyed Sage warily and he got the impression they already knew who he was. He slid out from behind the crawler’s controls and they noted the pistol strapped to his hip. They were armed as well.

  Crawlers and bicycles drove by on the streets, but the eyes of the drivers and riders were on the shifting mosaic that continually climbed the building’s exterior.

  “Hey.” One of the bouncers held up a hand. “You can’t leave that vehicle here.”

  Sage looked at the man as he went to the crawler’s cargo deck. He never broke stride. He harnessed the anger inside him and used it to fuel his actions. “Are you in charge out here?” His tone was hard, unflinching.

  Stepping back unconsciously, the bashhound glanced at one of the other men.

  Before the man could say anything, Sage fixed the second man with his gaze. “I guess that makes you in charge.”

  “What are you doing here, Sergeant?” The bashhound was nearly seven feet tall, amped up on organic growth hormones as well as cyber. He didn’t look totally human anymore. Either he felt confident in his abilities or he decided he needed to mark his territory.

  “Making a delivery.” Sage reached into the cargo deck and shifted the bodybag to his shoulder. The dead man’s weight was considerable.

  “There are no deliveries scheduled.”

  “This one’s a surprise.” Sage nodded toward the club. “Is Kos inside?” He started toward the group, managing the dead man’s weight easily.

  The bashhound narrowed his eyes and frowned. “Kos isn’t one of your fans.”

  “Not a big fan of his either.” Despite the coolness of the night, sweat trickled down Sage’s back. He knew he could be dead in the next handful of seconds, but he also felt certain that what he was about to do needed doing. He wasn’t going to let Terracina die in vain, and he wasn’t going to let the sergeant’s killers get away with what they had done. A line had to be drawn. That was what soldiers did when they were in enemy territory and were supposed to occupy an area. They drew a line.

  The three bashhounds gathered in front of Sage, bringing him to a halt. They wore half-meter-long shoktons, fighting clubs amplified with electrical charges, but he didn’t doubt for a moment that they had more lethal weapons hidden on their person. The two surrounding the leader drew their shoktons and shifted into ready positions.

  “I’m going to see Kos.” Sage kept his voice steady, not threatening, but determined.

  Around them, a number of passersby halted to watch the obvious confrontation. A few of them were Makaum wearing offworlder clothing. Most of them appeared to be corp execs and personnel, clerks and middle management. Some of them were Terran military, and some of them were Phrenorian warriors.

  Sage felt the tension radiating from the standoff and realized that it might break off in more ways than he’d planned on. He hadn’t considered that because he’d been so focused on what he was going to do. If things went badly, he knew he was going to kill the men standing in front of him. He hadn’t gone there to back down. He reached into his pocket and took out the other thing he’d brought with him. The familiar fist-sized egg shape held his body heat and almost felt calming.

  The bashhound grinned. “You’re not seeing Kos, but you are going to see the infirmary.”

  Sage activated the tangler grenade and hurled it at the feet of the three bashhounds. As soon as the device exploded, a dozen strands of plaswire leaped out of the housing. Controlled by a nanobot guidance system, the strands wound around the bashhounds and pulled them into a flesh-and-blood bundle that stood unsteadily on six legs. The strands wrapped tight, but not so tight that they cut into flesh because Sage had set the grenade for nonlethal. Trapped against each other, the men struggled to get free.

  One of the men managed to pull a coilgun, but he couldn’t point the weapon at Sage.

  Striding forward, Sage yanked the pistol from the man’s hand, then threw his shoulder into the center of the man’s
chest.

  Knocked backward, the three bashhounds strove to remain on their feet, but it was a lost cause. One of them fell and brought the others down with him.

  Another tried to use his in-head comm but the tangler’s anti-communications countermeasure kicked in and silenced the channel.

  Shouldering his burden, Sage kept walking, climbing the low steps toward the club’s door.

  FIFTEEN

  Nelumbo

  Makaum Sprawl

  0023 Hours Zulu Time

  Are you sure you should stay in here with that madman coming?”

  Velesko Kos looked with distaste at the corp exec sitting beside him. For the past ninety-three minutes, they’d shared one of the VIP tables at the back of the club. Even though he loved the luxury that being around people like his companion afforded, Kos’s patience was wearing thin. People like his companion were lapdogs, bred and kept for a single skill. Kos was a predator, a man used to taking what he wanted.

  For a time, he had done exactly that, on a dozen different worlds, before he had come to the attention of the corps. They had seen what he could do, what he was willing to do, and they had made him offers that he couldn’t refuse.

  Unfortunately, he occasionally got stuck with men and women like his present companion. It wasn’t all bad, of course. The fringe benefits given to people like his companion tended to trickle down to those around them. After all, largess couldn’t be adequately enjoyed without the presence of little people.

  Herman Kiernan was an important cog in DawnStar Corp’s public relations department. The CEO believed that Kiernan had a handle on the Makaum pulse and was keeping the locals pacified. Maybe that was true. Kos just hadn’t seen any of Kiernan’s brilliance in play, although the man did command more attention from the Quass than any other corp Kos knew of. Of course, Kos didn’t make it a point to find out what other public-relations people were doing.

  When Kos was called into play, he deleted resistance. He didn’t try to pacify it, as Kiernan and his ilk did.