The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins: The Complete Series: Books 1-5

by Jonathan P. Brazee

  Esther almost laughed but studiously avoided turning to watch. There was a sound of flesh hitting flesh, which got her attention, and she turned just as Verone slammed into her, bouncing off and hitting the small table. Tantou stood over the woman, hands still extended from shoving her, his face a bright red.

  Esther lost it. She jumped up, grabbed Tantou by the front of his shirt, and bulldozed him up against the bulkhead.

  “You will never, I repeat never, put your hands on anyone in this station again,” she said, her voice deadly serious.

  “But . . . but . . .”

  “No freaking buts. If you touch anyone else, I will personally beat the living shit out of you before pressing charges.”

  She could tell he was about ready to crap his pants, the fear was so palpable on his face. She was going to add something else, but she’d made her point. She let go of his shirt, then turned back to Verone.

  “You OK?”

  “Uh . . . yes. Thank you. Yes.”

  Half of her Caspian Pilaf was spread out across the deck where it had been knocked off the table. She shrugged, then knelt and started shoveling it back on her tray with her bare hands. She felt more than heard Tantou skirt around her to go back into the lab, giving her plenty of space.

  Slowly but surely, the Port Section, who were in the station, turned away from the scene, resuming whatever they’d been doing before. Esther ignored them. She’d lost it, but she wasn’t going to apologize or make excuses.

  She dumped the tray in the trash, then took a long look at the hatch leading into the lab. Tantou had been thoroughly cowed, but he wasn’t the type of man who would meekly accept what had happened. He was still COM, and he could make life miserable for her.

  Fuck him, she thought as she walked over to the comms station to report what she’d done.

  Chapter 17

  It didn’t take long for Tantou to reassert himself as the COM. Shortly after Esther had gone off on him, one of the dragonflies picked up something hidden about two klicks from the station. Gunny Medicine Crow and Staff Sergeant Rapa had been out on a patrol—on which Esther had sent them just to get them out of the pressure cooker that the station had become—so Esther had diverted them to check it out. To Esther’s surprise, the two of them had returned riding a WCD Palomino, of all things. Esther had chewed out the gunny something fierce. Marines did not loot, period. But between the time the gunny had returned and when Esther was done with her, the Marines were already taking turns trying out the exquisite bike.

  Esther knew that she should secure the bike, but the Marines, troopers, and even Dr. Williams were so excited, so pumped, that she relented, declaring it “abandoned property under Federation jurisdiction” with the warning that if anyone came to claim it, it would be returned.

  This was contrary to every regulation she knew, but she put the morale boost higher on her priorities than following some convention signed by politicians who’d never marched to the sound of guns.

  She laid down some serous restrictions as to its use. Break those, and the bike was going to be put up in storage.

  And the temptation had proven to be too much for her as well. On the second day, after gunny offered, she’d relented and taken the bike for a short ride. It had been a blast, and she could see the allure. WCD made one sweet machine.

  But it had given Tantou the ammunition he needed. If someone had used the cross-country bike to get into a position to spy on them, then there was still a threat. For him, that meant the known installation 2000 klicks away, and by going up his own chain, got a mission approved to take over that station. Esther had tried to object, but she’d been told to comply. Tantou’s contacts evidently outranked hers.

  Esther didn’t think that the Palomino came from their target—that was too far of a trip on a bike. So there had to be others out there, people a lot closer. But her hands were tied, and now, aboard one of the Porto’s shuttles, she was heading out with Tantou and his sidekick Dr. Polonov, the Port Section, and SFC Juarez and four troopers.

  Esther was still angry at the mission creep. The Marines were there to provide security, not go arrest interlopers. Technically, while they could take prisoners of war in a battle, the restrictions concerning posse comitatus made it illegal for the Marines to arrest anyone, hence the IS team. They had police powers as part of their charter, so they were the point of main effort for the mission. Juarez had been so excited and full of himself that he was running around like the proverbial chicken with his head cut off, going as far as trying to give Esther orders—orders she ignored.

  “Two minutes,” the shuttle crew chief passed.

  Esther checked her M99. She had no idea what they’d be facing. And while her Marines were among the very best in the Corps, they had not worked together in standard infantry ops, nor had any of them been regular infantry for quite some time. Individually, they were superb, but as a unit, they were largely untested, and that could prove fatal if they encountered a determined and well-trained opponent.

  Esther watched the repeater as the shuttle pilot swept around the small, shielded dome. It looked barely more than a storage unit, the same kind used on hundreds of worlds. The entry airlock looked to be a low-grade commercial lock, and it was pointed to the dark side of the planet.

  “Bring us in here, if you can,” she passed to the pilot, touching the repeater at a spot corresponding to a cleared area about 20 meters beyond the airlock’s entry.

  The repeater display was in front of her, and SFC Juarez was leaning in to see, but the troopers were not the ones who were going to breach the domes, so Esther used her hands to indicate the lock’s position to Gunny and her section at the back of the shuttle.

  The pilot made one more circle as his scanners relayed data to the Porto. Both the shuttle’s and the Porto’s weapons systems would be searching for any threat, she knew.

  Esther’s hand strayed to her harness quick-release as the shuttle flared in, the G’s pushing her deeper into her sling seat. The back ramp started to lower before they landed, and while still five or ten meters up, the Marines released their harnesses and stood. The shuttle hit with a light thud, and Port Section ran out the back, followed by Esther, the troopers, then the two civilians.

  The five troopers fanned out in reasonably good form, oriented outwards, away from the dome. They hadn’t picked up any bad guys in the surrounding area, but a complacent soldier became a dead soldier all too often.

  Esther followed Port Section as Sergeant Ganesh, who was ready to blow the lock, tried to cycle it. To Esther’s surprise, the outer door opened.

  “Do we have your OK?” Gunny asked her.

  There were two considerations. The first was tactical. Cramming Marines in an airlock made them easy targets. Someone with a crew served could mow them down as the inner door opened. Marines, in general, did not like to enter a building through a door or hatch. They had brought enough ordnance that could blow a hole in the outer wall, but depending on the configuration inside, that could destroy the dome’s integrity, and it could injure or kill anyone just on the other side of the wall.

  The second reason was more on a political level. At the moment, Esther could cancel the mission and leave. No harm, no foul. There would be little, if any, legal ramifications. The moment they entered the outer door into the lock, they would have crossed the line. Their actions could be considered something as mild as trespassing or as major as an act of war.

  Esther was half-tempted to cancel the mission. She couldn’t see any advantage to continuing, and as the ground commander of the operation, she supposedly had the authority to do so. But higher-ups had deemed the mission necessary, and she’d have to explain just why she’d failed to comply. She’d been hoping to find a valid reason once on the site, but nothing was jumping up and grabbing her attention.

  “Proceed,” she told the gunny.

  The plan had been for the Port Section to enter the dome en masse, using tried and true clearing techniques. Once cl
ear, the rest of the people, short two troopers who would remain outside, would enter. SFC Juarez would arrest anyone inside, and the civilians would poke around to get an idea of what the prisoners were doing. At the last moment, though, Esther joined the other Marines in the airlock just before the outer door closed. With nine Marines in HED’s, it was an extremely tight fit, which made them a very tempting target.

  There was no decontamination spray or irradiation. As soon as the lock pressure reached equilibration with the inner dome, the inner door opened, and the Marines darted in, moving in their assigned directions, ready to engage.

  Which was overkill. Fifteen civilians were lined up in the middle of the front compartment, hands in the air. They were not in environmental suits, and they were offering no resistance.

  “I’m Doctor Angela Boran-Smith, chief of mission. We are Confederation citizens,” an older woman said after taking one step forward. “This lab is the property of Jindal-Fergusson, and you are breaking intergalactic law with your entry.”

  “Get Juarez,” Esther told Sergeant McConnaughy.

  “Please stay where you are for the moment,” she told the civilians, not that she thought they would move a muscle with seven Marines holding down on them.

  Most of the civilians looked positively terrified, and Esther couldn’t really blame them. None of them had the “military” look, and to have nine weapons-bearing Marines barge in had to be disconcerting.

  “I said, we are Confederation citizens,” Doctor Boran-Smith said, her voice on the edge of cracking.

  “And you are trespassing on Federation territory,” Esther told her.

  She shouldn’t be saying anything, she knew, leaving that for SFC Juarez, but it was rather awkward just standing there. The Confeds were standing quietly, but she didn’t want them to try anything in a panic.

  “But we’ve got authorization!” the leader protested.

  At that moment, the inner door opened, and Juarez and his troopers, rushed in, weapons drawn.

  Esther pointed at the leader, and Juarez almost ran to her, making her flinch, and said, “I’m Sergeant First Class Enrique Sanderson Juarez, Federation Civil Defense Corps. I am placing you under arrest for Criminal Code 2002.1, trespassing on restricted Federation property.”

  “But we’ve got authorization! I just told her that,” she said.

  That seemed to confuse Juarez for a moment, so Esther stepped back into the mix and said, “I can assure you that you do not. But if by some stretch of reality you do have authorization, and that has not filtered down to us, then you have nothing to worry about. Until then, I suggest you comply with whatever Sergeant First Class Juarez tells you to do.”

  “Where are your labs?” Dr. Tantou, who’d come in with the troopers, asked.

  Esther had to keep from rolling her eyes. The building was a pre-fab dome, and this front section was living spaces, to include racks that folded up into the bulkheads. The hatch leading to the rest of the dome, with the convenient handwritten sign on the door that said, “No food in the lab!” was a pretty good indication as to its location

  “That’s private property,” one of the prisoners said. “You have no right to enter it.”

  Tantou started to argue back, but Esther pointed at the hatch, so he and Polonov disappeared inside. Two of the prisoner tried to follow but were restrained by troopers.

  “Do you think they really work for JF?” the gunny asked her as they watched.

  “Probably, or at least as much as all our civilians work for Allied Bio,” she answered. “Not that it matters. Jindal-Fergusson’s got offices and factories within the Federation, so the Federation can reach out to them if fines are part of what happens here.”

  “Uh, Skipper? I think you might want to see this,” Sergeant Ganesh said from the far side of the compartment.

  With one last glance at the troopers processing the prisoners, Esther, followed by the gunny, walked over and into a surprisingly roomy locker that was serving as an armory. The weapons racks were two-thirds full with an array of rifles, but right in the middle was a crew-served hadron beam cannon of the type that Gunny Chun had destroyed on Calcutta.

  “Gunny, put four Marines outside and send Rheumer and Ford back in,” Esther ordered.

  Rheumer and Ford were FCDC, and she’d assigned them to take the outside. They made their living guarding installations, so it seemed like a natural choice. But if a third of the weapon’s racks were empty, and as she was positive that none of the civilians were military types, that meant that there were probably others out there, armed Confed soldiers or mercs. If someone was out there and planning a counterattack, Esther wanted Marines out there, not guards.

  But if there was anyone out there, they held off. Four hours later, the prisoners, the weapons, and quite a bit of scientific gear and samples had been loaded up on the shuttle. Juarez put an official-looking lock on the airlock and posted a form that placed the building under Federation investigation. The lock wouldn’t stop anyone who was determined to enter, but forms had to be followed, Esther guessed.

  As the shuttle took off, Esther’s mind tried to make sense of what was slowly coming to light. The sniper who had hit Alfayed had probably been Brotherhood or was Brotherhood-trained. The crew-served that Gunny Chun had slagged now looked to be from the Confederation.

  For three supposedly friendly governments, there seemed to be a lot of confrontation going on.

  Chapter 18

  Esther followed in trace of Staff Sergeant Kneffer. She knew Gunny Chun was probably chaffing at having her with him again, but she couldn’t stay cooped up in the station. If she did, she’d probably kill Tantou before the day was out. The man, with his petty demands, was driving her crazy. There was a very evident divide within the geeks, as the Marines and troopers called them, and Esther was getting sick of it. Ever since she’d thrown Tantou up against the wall, Williams, Verone, and Veer seemed to think that they could go to Esther to complain, and while she liked them, particularly Williams, she not only couldn’t do anything about their issues, she adamantly did not want to get involved. Going out with the Starboard Section was just her way of hiding.

  This was the second time in two days that she’d gone out with Starboard, but the last time was on another raid, one that ended up far differently than the one on the J-F installation. This installation was 500 klicks to the south and just at the twilight line at the edge of eternal night. The Marines had to breach the wall of the small building, and inside, they found the bodies of three men, all dead. They had suicided, complete with brain wipes. There would be no resurrection, no recovery for them. Some of the equipment in the installation was Brotherhood, but not enough to make a declarative statement as to their origin one way or the other. Even in death, their bodies screamed military to Esther. Without uniforms, while they probably were not officially in a military service, they had the look about them that they’d served. Their DNA was scanned and forwarded, but if they were from the Brotherhood PHM or another high-level security organization, there would be no record in any public data base that they ever existed.

  The patrol was trudging to a small spot that both gunnies thought would make a decent sniper firing point. They were going to check it first for any sign it had been used, then emplace some ground sensors. They’d identified 112 such potential FP’s so far and investigated 47 of them.

  Esther brushed against another of the tall, brown, fanlike funguses. She tried to avoid touching any of the vegetation, but sometimes, it couldn’t be avoided. Many of the fungus-types exuded either a white or a dark liquid where they were touched, a liquid that could burn naked skin. The snipers loved it, as they could tell if someone had passed by recently. But that went both ways. It could also tell anyone else where the Marines had moved. On a more personal level, though, was that any fungus-sap had to be removed in the airlock before entering the station, and the stuff was uber-sticky. It was a royal pain-in-the-ass to get off, even with the biojets blasting away
at full strength.

  “Cougar-Six, this is Cougar-One,” Sergeant De Vries’ voice came over—broken, but readable—over the net.

  “Go ahead,” Esther responded.

  “The station has been hit with a rocket. There’s been extensive damage, but no one’s been hurt.”

  “Is the station secure?” Esther asked, her heart pounding.

  “Roger. There was a breach, and there’s contamination, but the breach self-sealed. The gunny’s in the lab now assessing the damage,”

  “Understood. We are on our way back now,” she said, with Gunny Chun, who was listening to the comms watching, twirling one finger in the air and then pointing back in the general direction of the station. “I’m setting Alert Condition Alpha. Stay inside the station until our return unless the situation forces a reaction.”

  Gunny Chun had already started turning the patrol around. Esther checked her AI. They had almost 2000 meters to cover before they arrived.

  Esther had been wondering if there was going to be a reaction to the two raids. She now had her answer.

  Chapter 19

  Esther was seething as she waited for the airlock to cycle, Juarez standing beside her.

  It should never have gotten this far.

  Since the first rocket attack that destroyed the lab four days ago, the station had been hit five more times. There was more activity in the surrounding area as well. Esther had sent out the Marines in a cordon to try and keep the bad guys at bay, but with the rockets being fired at up to ten klicks, that hadn’t done much good. One of the enemy crews got too close, though. Two days earlier, Gunny Medicine Crow and Sergeant De Vries had engaged a team setting up a launcher with the gunny getting kills at 4,565 meters, which was going to be a new record, if the data analysis held up. But one kill did not stop the incoming.