Blood Contact

by David Sherman

  " ‘We have our orders.’ We follow them ‘even though we disagree with them.’ Gunny, do you have any idea how strange that sounds coming from you?"

  Bass nodded. "I speak up when I disagree, yes. But when Mother Corps tells me to go someplace, I go. Doyle tell you about that?" He indicated a sheet of paper on top of the chest of drawers.

  "No, what is it?"

  "Read it."

  Hyakowa stepped closer and picked up the page. It was orders from the battalion headquarters, signed by Commander Van Winkle himself, instructing Captain Conorado to detach third platoon under the command of Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass for an investigative mission to Society 437. At the bottom was an endorsement:

  Heartily concur

  (signed)

  Theodosius Sturgeon

  Brigadier, Commanding 34th FIST

  "Doyle gave it to me when I went to see the Skipper," Bass said.

  "Do you think Van Winkle asked the Skipper what platoon he wanted to send?"

  "Didn't you notice how mad the Skipper seemed when he told us before formation? I don't think he was consulted. I think he was given orders just as we were given orders."

  "But why us?"

  Bass finished with the chest of drawers and stood to face his closet. "Maybe it's a test. Maybe someone wants to see if they promoted the right people. Then again," he turned to Hyakowa, "maybe somebody just thinks we're the best platoon in the FIST and they trust us to do the job right without having a higher ranking officer along to supervise."

  Hyakowa looked at him oddly. That didn't sound right; it made too much sense.

  When orders came down for a mount-out, they were always drop-everything, hurry-up-and-do-it-right-now. It didn't matter that third platoon had two days to get ready—the men had to pack and store, right now, whatever they weren't taking. So what if getting ready only took an hour? People higher up the chain of command had things to do and wanted to make sure the men were ready first.

  "So now what do we do, Corporal Kerr?" MacIlargie asked an hour after morning formation.

  Kerr glanced around the fire team room. Everything they were taking was packed, other than a few last minute items they'd need over the next couple of days, and was either stowed in the company supply room or secured in the fire team room.

  "Field day. When I get back I want this room so clean you'd be willing to let Top Myer eat off the deck." He left Claypoole and MacIlargie alone and went in search of Sergeant Bladon. Kerr knew MacIlargie was right. What were they supposed to do for the next two days?

  Claypoole glared at MacIlargie. "You had to ask, didn't you." It took a struggle, but he managed not to shout too loudly. "You couldn't keep your mouth shut—you had to ask. Now we have to clean this room again."

  "What's he talking about?" MacIlargie said, giving the room a puzzled look. "This room is clean. Since he got here it's been cleaner that it's ever been! What do we have to clean?"

  "Since it was your big mouth that caused this field day, I'm going to stand here and supervise, make sure you do it right."

  "There's nothing to clean, I mean look at this." MacIlargie bent over to brush his fingers across the floor. Then Claypoole's words hit him. Still bent over, he looked up. "What'd you say?"

  "I said, ‘Since it was your big mouth that caused this field day, I'm going to stand here and supervise, make sure you do it right.’ "

  "What do you mean, you're going to supervise and I'm going to do it?"

  Claypoole leaned forward aggressively and tapped the insignia on his collar with his thumb. "See that? I'm a lance corporal. You're a PFC. I rank you. In the absence of the fire team leader, I'm in charge. Get to work."

  MacIlargie stood and gaped at Claypoole. Maybe he really should put in for a transfer, he thought.

  Two days after getting their mount-out orders, third platoon assembled at the Camp Ellis landing field, which sometimes doubled as an orbital-craft terminal. Again, it was hurry-up-and-wait. They were on time, but the shuttle that would ferry them to the orbiting ship was an hour late. When they first saw the Essay, the navy's surface-to-orbit shuttle craft, it was a speck descending in a speed-eating spiral. When the Essay was still a thousand meters up, its coxswain pulled it out of its spiral and popped the drogue chute, slowing its speed further. At two hundred meters, forward-facing jets fired downward until nearly all forward motion was canceled and the Essay touched down with a slight bounce.

  "It can't be," Charlie Bass murmured when he read the stenciled name on the side of the Essay.

  "Can't be what?" Hyakowa asked.

  "The Fairfax County. That ship was due for decommissioning the first time I mounted out on her." He shook his head. "That was more than twenty years ago."

  "It's got to be another ship with the same name."

  Bass looked beyond the stenciled name. "Nope. It's the AV-27 1. That was the Fairfax's number."

  Hyakowa shrugged. "I guess they refurbished her, made a new ship in the same hull."

  "I hope so. The old Fairfax was a real scow." But Bass didn't believe it; the Essay needed to be scraped and painted. That wasn't a good sign.

  The ramp dropped and two Dragons from the ship's compliment scooted out on their air cushions. They needed scraping and painting too. Bass groaned. Hyakowa swallowed.

  "Let's do it," Bass said softly.

  "Aye aye, boss." Hyakowa shouted orders to the squad leaders to have their men board the Dragons. Owen the woo perched on Lance Corporal Dean's shoulder and restrained its eagerness to examine the interior of the Essay. It had ridden on Dragons, though, and simply hopped into a niche in Dean's webbing for the trip to orbit.

  The smudges on the null-g vacuum suits of the sailors who affixed the tunnel to the Essay so the Marines could exit the shuttle through the well deck into the ship proper did nothing to inspire Bass's confidence in the ship. Neither did the chief petty officer who oversaw the actual transfer—he needed a shave, and the cuffs of his uniform shirt were frayed.

  The thrumming of motors and the whining of heavy equipment, noises that always assaulted the Marines' ears when they boarded ships in orbit, sounded a bit off as if they were missing an occasional beat. The bulkheads of the passageways needed scraping and painting, and the decks were embedded with deeply ground-in crud. At one point, as the sailors towed the weightless Marines along the passageways to their compartment, Bass noticed that the gasket on a safety hatch was corroded badly enough to prevent it from making an airtight seal. He closed his eyes and forced himself to relax.

  "It's a hold!" Hyakowa exclaimed when the Marines reached their destination. "This isn't a troop compartment, it's some kind of hold."

  The large room the Marines were deposited in had rows of metal pipes going from the deck to the overhead three meters above. Horizontal metal frames, two-thirds of a meter wide and little more than two meters long, were supported by the pipes. The frames were half a meter apart. Each had a sheet of polymer stretched across it. Cots. Passages less than a meter wide ran between the rows of cots. A quick calculation showed two hundred cots.

  Bass shook his head. "It's a compartment all right. This is what they used to look like. The Fairfax was built for use in the Third Sivistrian War. The Confederation had to move a lot of Marines and soldiers in a hurry, so the troops got packed into compartments like this." He sighed. "But they used to be in better condition."

  The compartment's deck was as filthy as the passageways had been. The lighting was uneven, since some fixtures weren't working and hadn't been fixed or replaced. There were no personal lockers for the troops. Even the woo looked dismayed at the living conditions.

  "All right, listen up!" Bass called out. His men turned to look at him from whatever perch or handhold they were anchoring themselves to. From their expressions, he knew they were more put out than he was by the compartment and the ship.

  "You heard the Skipper when he gave us our marching orders—this isn't an emergency operation. As you can tell by our luxury accomm
odations, the navy doesn't put a high priority on it either. We'll be getting underway soon. Once we have gravity again, we'll rearrange this compartment to make it more livable. Now stand by, I'm going topside to see—"

  He was interrupted by static from the ship's PA system. "Now hear this, now hear this," a slightly annoyed voice said through the static. "All hands not at duty stations, secure yourselves for getting underway. Gravity will go on in thirty seconds. That goes for the Marines too."

  The static clicked off.

  "You heard the man," Bass said. "Secure your gear in a lower rack and get into a higher one. Do it now."

  There was a brief bustle as the Marines shoved their packs into lower rack spaces, then clambered into higher ones. They made it just in time.

  A loud clang reverberated through the ship, followed by a steady vibration. Gravity returned, not in the smooth transition from zero to one the Marines were accustomed to on navy ships, but in chunks that jerked and bounced them on the polymer sheets.

  "Oh, my aching back," MacIlargie grumbled when normal gravity was finally restored. "That thing is hard."

  "Now you know why it's called a rack," Kerr said.

  The Fairfax County was underway, headed for its first Beam jump point on its way to Society 437.

  Chapter 10

  Lieutenant Commander Lydios Bynum, in twenty years as a navy surgeon, had pulled "shore duty" only once: on a tour with the 127th FIST as a battalion medical officer. In charge of the battalion aid station during the Cathagenian Incursions on Wolozonowski's World, she had won a Gold Nova—the Confederation military's second highest decoration for heroism—when the station had come under intense infantry ground attack supported by artillery fire. Unmindful of the incoming fire, Dr. Bynum had found a lightly wounded NCO and ordered him to form a defensive perimeter around the medical complex.

  The Marine sergeant had gathered a group of walking wounded who still had weapons, and with those men held off the advancing Cathagenian forces until reinforcements arrived. Meanwhile, Dr. Bynum calmly attended to her patients. Her anesthesiologist, a nurse, and a corpsman had all been killed while assisting her in the operating theater. She herself had suffered multiple puncture wounds caused by the mortar round that killed her surgical team. One small fragment had penetrated her larynx. She had continued her work as she spit up mouthfuls of blood to keep her lungs clear, giving her assistants orders in a whispering gurgle. Later, skilled surgeons replaced the larynx, but she never got back the clear soprano voice she'd been born with.

  The Marine they were operating on at the time survived, due mostly to Dr. Bynum's skill and courage. But it had been a very close thing. Cathagenian grenadiers were already inside the aid station perimeter by the time a platoon of Marines arrived to drive them off.

  That experience had taught Dr. Bynum two things: an appreciation for the abilities of Marine noncommissioned officers, and a profound contempt for military chickenshit. With that attitude she was guaranteed two things: never to be promoted beyond the rank of lieutenant commander, and consistently and distinctly unglamorous assignments—more than twenty years as a ship's surgeon, treating the injuries and diseases sailors sustained on shipboard and in a hundred ports throughout Human Space. One thing for sure: nobody ever messed with the ship's doctor on a starship.

  When Dr. Bynum wore her uniform, the only decoration she displayed was the Gold Nova. Navy line officers who'd never been in combat, much less decorated for bravery, found themselves distinctly uncomfortable when she was around. Her assignment to the CNSS Fairfax County was to be her last. She'd been offered a pleasant and lucrative job as director of a civilian hospital in Brosigville on Wanderjahr, of all places, and when the current mission was over she would put in her retirement papers and settle down. Maybe she'd marry. Well, this last trip at least would be interesting, and besides, the Fairfax would be carrying a platoon of Marines, and she liked Marines.

  Lydios Bynum's grandfather, Harry, had been an engineer on a deep-space merchantman, pursuing a profession that had been in his family for generations. Before that his people had sailed far from their West African homeland, earning their keep navigating Old Earth's oceans. Looking for a berth on an outgoing ship after completing a voyage to Kandaros, in the Joannides System, he'd met Lydios's grandmother. Alexandra Malakos had been a statuesque dark-haired beauty working in the shipping office owned by her father, Gregory Malakos. The Malakos family exported olive oil. Kandaros in the 25th century was famous for its olive oil production, an art its early settlers had brought with them from their Hellenic homeland on Old Earth.

  Lydios remembered her grandparents vividly as a happy couple who enjoyed the pleasures of life, but of all things, they loved music most. Her grandparents could play various musical instruments and had reasonably good singing voices. Her mother, however, was a natural soprano, and though untrained, had sung professionally in her youth. Her fondest dream was to see her youngest daughter, Lydios, sing in an opera company.

  The future navy surgeon loved music too, but as a child she endured the endless voice training sessions with a succession of tutors only because that was what her mother wanted. When asked by admiring adults if she would pursue a career in the opera, she would answer, "Yeah, maybe, kinda, sorta," which aggravated her mother, but instead of asking Lydios if she might have other goals in life, she pressed on with the interminable voice lessons. In later life that phrase, "maybe, kinda, sorta," became Lydios's stock response whenever asked a question she really did not want to answer.

  Left to herself and among her friends, Lydios loved singing the ribald, humorous songs of the Kandaros folk tradition. By the age of eight she knew all the verses to "Clementine" and "Goober Peas." At her thirteenth birthday party she severely embarrassed her parents and voice teachers by substituting "Goober Peas" from Mozart's Don Giovanni:

  Sittin' by the roadside on a summer's day,

  Chattin' with my messmates, passin' time away

  Layin' in the shadows, underneath the trees,

  Wearin' out our grinders, eatin' goober peas.

  But Lydios was good, very good. By the time she graduated from conservatory, she'd developed a "lush" mezzosoprano, as one critic described her voice. At her first public performance she sang Helmut D'Nunzio's arrangement of Virgil Thompson's Symphony on a Hymn. Her rendition of "Yes, Jesus Loves Me" so moved one critic that he wrote, "Her voice brims with warmth and a nuanced and imaginative interpretive gift that is utterly spontaneous and true to the languorous phonic poetry of late twentieth century American English."

  Both her mother and father, but particularly her mother, almost had apoplexy when, shortly after her twenty-second birthday, the young woman solemnly announced she was going to become a doctor.

  "Lidi!" her mother screamed, brown face almost turning white with fury, "You can't! You can't! Why, it'd mean—" She coughed and sputtered and staggered to a nearby settee where she labored to catch her breath.

  "Honey," her father intervened, "you have trained for years to be a wonderful soprano, and you are—" He gestured, looking for the right word. "—you are a true artist. You have a great career ahead of you. Medical school now would mean years more of study. Why, you'd have to start all over again! You would never sing professionally! Think of what this means to your mother and me."

  "And you will have to deal with—with dead things and blood!" her mother gasped from the settee. She groaned and put her head in her hands. "You will pull slimy things out of people's insides, Lidi!" Her mother almost fainted at the thought.

  "I will save people's lives, Mother," Lydios responded quietly. "And I will make people feel better. Mama, Daddy, I love music too. But I will be a doctor."

  When her youngest brother, whom Lydios loved dearly, was nearly killed in an accident, she had accompanied him to the hospital. She was so small and slight she was able to stand in a corner behind a partition and watch the proceedings without being noticed. When the surgeons had finished the ministratio
ns that saved her brother's life, one of them spotted her standing there, her small brown face peering out at him. He said nothing, just pulled off his surgical mask and winked at her. From that moment forward Lydios Bynum knew she would be a doctor. But she had never dared mention it to her parents until now.

  "And just how do you intend to pay for your medical schooling?" her father demanded, losing his patience at last. "I'll tell you this, young lady, you won't get anything from us! Not a thing! Come on, Lidi, how will you pay for this—this fantasy?"

  Lydios had no answer to that, but Grandpa Harry did. "Lidi," he'd told her, "anybody can succeed with a Bynum behind them."

  It took her thirteen years to complete undergraduate school, medical school, her internship and residency. Grandpa Harry left her enough money in his will so she could finish. Her parents passed on just before she graduated from medical school. They had left her nothing of the family fortune. And then she enlisted in the Confederation Navy. She knew that Grandpa Harry would've enjoyed living to see that, but it was just as well her parents were already gone because surely they would have died if they knew their intransigent daughter had opted to become a sailor.

  Since a ship's surgeon was technically on call all the time, Dr. Bynum had learned to sleep whenever and wherever the opportunity arose, so often she would be awake when most of the crew were sleeping or standing watch. She frequented the wardroom during the mid-watch, or 04 hours standard, when she could have it mostly to herself. There, she would enjoy a quiet cup of coffee and a smoke. She usually avoided the place during the dog watches between 16 and 20 hours, when the dinner meal was served. Because of her irregular schedule, she could be in there when most of the other officers were at ship's stations or in their staterooms.

  Lance Corporal Rachman Claypoole started and tried to jump to his feet when someone woke him up by thrusting a hot mug of coffee at him. He'd been dozing on the wardroom detail—nobody had come in for over an hour—and an officer had caught him sleeping. Damn! Court-martial offense. "Yessir! Right away sir," he mumbled, taking the mug to fill it before he realized it was already full. The officer stood there, grinning down at him. It was the dark-skinned female lieutenant commander, the doctor, the one with the Gold Nova. He'd seen her in the wardroom once or twice before, and she had always nodded at him in a friendly way. He wanted desperately to know how she'd won the Gold Nova, but Marine lance corporals, even one as bold as Claypoole, avoided familiarity with officers, even doctors, who were not quite the same as other officers. She never asked for anything when she came in, and served herself when she wanted something. Sometimes she just sat at a table for hours, smoking and reading on her personal vid, seldom talking to the other officers when they happened to wander in. Whenever Claypoole had managed to look over her shoulder at the stuff on her vidscreen, it'd been medical jargon, so he'd quickly lost interest.