The female sniper had been the one taken out by Gunny Medicine Crow, and Esther was still amazed at how the gunny achieved that. The enemy sniper had the positioning on her, and she had her array of sensors, but the gunny used them against her. Using her fart-catcher, her knife, and some tubing, she set up a dummy firing position, actually blowing out through the tube to make a CO2 bloom. The other sniper fell for the trick, exposed herself, and the gunny took her out with her M99, the same as any infantry Marine would have done.
It had been a remarkable feat, one that surely needed to be taught in sniper school, but the way things were evolving, Esther was sure no mention of it would be made—ever. This mission was going to be highly classified and buried.
At least they were leaving. At the same time that Esther and Medicine Crow had been waiting for Gunny Chun to get into position, the giant multi-galactic corporation Mei Shan had bought out Allied Biologicals’ share in the bio-rights to the planet. The Mei Shan Group was headquartered on the independent (and tax haven) world of Du Pierre 4, but Mei Shan Plastics, Inc, was incorporated on Hiapo, and therefore as a Federation company, qualified under Federation law for the purchase—this despite the fact that the company had nothing to do with biological research as far as she could tell. As far as Esther was concerned, the buyout changed nothing, but she’d received her orders as well: stand down. Somehow, Mei Shan’s purchase evidently removed the threat of the still-lurking Brotherhood ship.
For the civilians, this was a victory, and they were in celebratory mood. They were happy to be leaving the planet, and they’d been told to expect some hefty bonuses. For the Marines and troopers, the eleven bodies stacked neatly against the bulkhead dampened any enthusiasm.
The Porto’s shuttle had finally been released, and along with the ship’s surgeon, the popsicles were being readied. The troopers and the enemy snipers were going to the Mei Shan ship which had just arrived in system, but by unspoken demand, the Marines were going to the Navy ship. The brotherhood between the Marines and the Navy created a trust that wasn’t always there with other organizations, and the Marines always preferred Navy medicine.
With the buyout, secrecy was no longer a factor, and the Marines expected to be recalled soon. Mei Shan had their own security teams, so the IS Team was being lifted off today, and the Marines, while still at the station, were somewhat redundant. And the Marines were down to eight effectives. Esther, along with Staff Sergeant Brooke, were two of those effectives.
Esther was still limping. Between the bruise of the impact and the burns from the atmosphere, her hip around to just above her ass was a mess, one that the ship’s surgeon said a day in sickbay with minor regen, and she’d be almost good as new. But as long as there were Marines on the planet, this is where she’d be, too.
The eight Marines were standing by to take out the popsicles. Dr. Williams gave six of them fairly good prognoses. Riko could possibly be resurrected in the Porto’s sick bay. He’d been shot in the side, not doing much damage but destroying the integrity of his HED 2, so the suit had shut him down as per protocol. It was well within the ship’s medical capabilities to zap his heart back and heal the relatively minor wound. The rest would probably go back to one of the Naval hospitals before being resurrected. Dutch faced a long and painful regen, but he should be able to make it. Spig and Farouk were the only two confirmed fatalities, and Mobutono was borderline. All told, Dr. Williams said the Marines and the IS Team were pretty lucky to escape as lightly as they did, but Esther thought it had been a pyrrhic victory. Two enemy snipers had taken on the Marines and did far more damage than they should have before being killed themselves. Were it not for Gunny Medicine Crow’s intuition first and then action second, Esther thought more of her Marines might have been taken out.
“OK, we’re ready for them,” a petty officer said, coming into the station.
“That’s us,” Staff Sergeant Rapa said, powering up his HED.
Veer and Williams helped the Marines and troopers take out the popsicles. Each of them was put in a cradle with old-fashioned straps securing them. The ship’s surgeon made his readings, then gave thumbs up. They were ready to go.
Not everything was ready, though. As they filed off the shuttle, Staff Sergeant Francisco and Corporal Hamilton came back onboard, pushing Gunny Medicine Crow’s Palomino.
“Hey, what’re you doing with Isá?” she asked, watching the bike disappear into the cargo bay.
“Orders,” Rapa said. “The Intel types want to get their hands on it.”
He lies well, Esther noted and filed that fact away for future reference.
The bike was not going to Intel. Staff Sergeant Rapa had approached her the night before about it. The gunny had taken a liking to the bike. Who wouldn’t? But she had gone further than most, for reasons Rapa had tried to explain but still eluded her. But the bottom line was that he wanted to take the bike back before the new Mei Shan landlords claimed it.
Esther knew what he was suggesting was illegal. It could even be career-threatening, both for Rapa as the mastermind and for her as the officer-in-charge. But she didn’t hesitate. Medicine Crow had gone above and beyond, but she would never be recognized for it. None of them would. If they were all going to be screwed, it would be nice to screw over someone else in this mess. She wasn’t sure how he was going to get the bike all the way back to Earth where Medicine Crow was from, but she wasn’t going to ask. The SNCO mafia could get almost anything they wanted done.
They all stopped at the airlock, eight Marines, five FCDC troopers, and two civilians, bonded by their experiences. The shuttle slowly rose before speeding up. They watched until it disappeared from sight.
“I don’t know how much longer we’re going to be here,” Esther said, initiating the airlock sequence. “But we might as well make the best of it.”
FS PORTOLUMA BAY
Chapter 25
“Well, sir, I’d best get the team up here, then,” Esther said, her voice tight as the anger smoldered inside of her.
Esther knew she could be a hard-ass, but she didn’t consider herself an angry person. This mission, though, had seemed to put her in a permanent state of anger, and it had been difficult for her to avoid lashing out as Lieutenant Commander Chacon briefed her. The only thing that held her back was the knowledge that the man had no control over the situation, either.
Esther had figured that something was up five days after the Mei Shan team’s arrival. They’d invaded the station amidst palpable excitement and had not only repaired the lab, but two days later, construction crews arrived to start an expansion of the facilities. That construction effort came to a screeching halt three days later after one of the corporate bigwigs came down to the station and locked himself and his retinue in the lab with the scientists for five hours. When he came out, he was not looking happy. Two hours later, the construction crew was picked up and lifted off-planet.
With the security turnover with the Mei Shan team completed, the Marines had simply sat around, watching serioholos on the new projectors the Mei Shan crews had brought with them. Once a day, Esther had asked when they would be taken off the planet.
For Esther, that occurred on the ninth day. Leaving Gunny Medicine Crow in charge, she was shuttled to the Porto where she’d cooled her heels for a day until the captain had briefed her.
She left the captain’s stateroom to the comms shack and had the sailor on watch connect her to the station. One of the Mei Shan techs answered, and she had to wait while he got the Gunny.
“This is Gunnery Sergeant Medicine Crow,” the gunny said as she took the mic.
“Gunny, you’ve got 90 minutes to pack up and get ready to leave,” Esther told her without preamble.
“Ninety? That’s not enough time, ma’am. The weapons are still in the racks.”
“I had to fight to get that. They wanted an hour.”
“What’s up, ma’am?” the gunny asked.
“I’ll tell you when you get up here. Go to
it.”
She cut the connection, then went back to the small stateroom she’d been assigned as the senior Marine onboard. It was tiny, with a rack that pulled down from the bulkhead, but she was glad that she wasn’t sharing it with anyone else. She was not in the socializing mood. She pulled down the rack and got on, not even bothering to take off her boots.
She must have drifted off, because a gentle rapping outside her hatch woke her.
“Who is it?” she asked, her mouth dry and nasty.
“It’s Gunny, Skipper. We just arrived.”
Esther stood up and opened the hatch. The gunny was still in her HED poly skins, and she had to be dying to get out of them.
“Um . . . go get cleaned up and get some chow in you. Let me check with Commander Chacon, but plan on meeting in the wardroom at, say, 2000.”
“Roger that, ma’am.”
Speaking of eating . . . Esther thought as the gunny left.
The Porto’s wardroom was small and had only one sitting, and that sitting should have ended about ten minutes prior. But the fabricator was available around the clock. Esther had only eaten twice on board, and she was hungry. She had some time to kill, so after confirming the meeting with the commander, she headed on down and dialed up some beef stew and a jackfruit smoothie. She sat down and buried herself in the food, trying to focus on the food and calm down.
It wasn’t working. She was still angry when she went back to her stateroom, and that hadn’t ended when she picked up Commander Chacon. Moving down the passage, she tried the breathing exercises her brother Noah started her doing back when they were teens. She wasn’t sure if it did any good, but she hoped she looked calm, at least, as she and the commander entered the wardroom where her Marines waited.
Commander Chacon motioned for her to take the lead. Esther had thought he would do the brief as he was more familiar with the situation, but she nodded, and moved to the front of the small group.
“That was not the easiest mission I’ve had,” she started. “And I’m sure you can all say the same thing. We’ve lost one of us for sure, and that could end up being two. Seven more are going into regen—well, maybe not Sergeant Rikoman, but you know what I mean.
“But no matter what, we upheld the honor of the Corps. We got hit, but we hit back.
“That’s not why I called you here, though. We’ll write our after-action reports. I’ll conduct your exit interviews. But that will start after we get a good Navy meal and some sleep in a real rack. Right now, I wanted to let you know just what the heck has happened.”
Almost as one, seven Marines leaned forward to hear what she had to say.
Esther took a deep breath, looked at the ship’s skipper, and then turned back to the Marines.
“As you know, Mei Shan bought the bio-rights to whatever Allied Biologicals had on the planet. How that worked, I don’t know, and it’s not important. What is important is that the planet is a bust. That is, what is on it is a bust. There is no known biological gold mine.”
The Marines broke out into quiet murmurs at that, looking at each other in confusion, and Esther held out both hand, palms down, to quiet them.
“Whether there was ever any potential, we don’t know yet. What is pretty clear, though, is that Allied Biologicals knew pretty early on that the line of research was a dead end. That might have been after the initial word had been leaked, or it could have been a scam from the beginning.”
“Scam?” Sergeant Delay asked.
“Yes, a scam. We are now sure that from the time we arrived, the planet was a dry well. There was scientific interest, both as a ribbon world and because of its life forms, but nothing there is of benefit to man.”
“No medical miracle?” the gunny asked. “No cure for the Brick?”
“None at all. Which should have been obvious. Have we ever discovered organics on any planet that we can make use of? The capys can eat earth products, but have we found anything we could use? We were all pulled in by the promise, an empty promise.”
“And that’s what all the arguing was about. Tantou, and I bet Polonov, they knew all along. But the others, they weren’t in the loop, and when their experiments were going south, they started to see the light,” Staff Sergeant Rapa said, sounding disgusted.
“Yes, it seems that way. And Allied Biologicals needed to keep the facade going.”
“Until they could sell the rights!” the gunny exclaimed as the impact hit her.
“You got it in one, Gunny. We’re sure that’s exactly what happened.”
“What about everybody else?” the gunny asked. “Why were we getting hit if what was there was worthless?”
“That probably wasn’t known initially. It looks like it was coming out, though. The station we took? Their research had pretty much uncovered it.”
“Is it true that AB pushed that raid?” Rapa asked in disgust.
“Yes,” Lieutenant Commander Chacon said. “Too late, though.”
“What about the attacks on us?” the gunny asked, seemingly pushing for something.
Esther looked at the commander to make sure she could give out more.
“Sources indicate that the indirect fire attacks were made at the behest of Allied Biologicals. They wanted to push a sense of urgency into the bidding process.”
“If others are desperate enough to hit Marines and FCDC, then whatever was being guarded had to be pretty valuable,” Gunny Medicine Crow said, the bitterness evident in her voice.
“What about the Brotherhood? Were they here?” Staff Sergeant Rapa asked.
“Almost certainly,” Esther answered.
“Were those memitim that the two gunnies zeroed?” he persisted.
“Probably. We’ll never know for sure, though.”
“So, we get into a sniper match with Brotherhood memitim, and what, we just ignore it?” the gunny asked.
“They won’t admit it, and to be frank, neither will the Federation. You won’t mention it again, once we leave this wardroom.”
“That’s bullshit, ma’am,” Sergeant Delay said. “They killed Spig. Dead. No resurrection.”
“That’s right, they did. And Gunny Medicine Crow killed one of them. Dead. No resurrection.
“Look, I know you’re all upset. The Brotherhood is never going to come clean on this. They don’t want anyone to know they were taken in. And the Federation isn’t going to force the issue.”
“Why not, ma’am?” the sergeant asked.
“Because it’s not worth a war. No single Marine is. Not Spig, not anyone else. No, according to the records, Spig was killed in the line of duty in action against criminal elements.”
“So, what’s going to happen? I mean to AB? Mei Shan, they’re one of the biggest corporations in the world,” Staff Sergeant Francisco asked. “They’re not going to stand by and let some two-bit company take them like that.”
“They probably will. Whatever they paid for the rights, that’s peanuts compared to the damage they’d suffer if it were known that they’d allowed themselves to be taken. If I had to guess, I’d say they’ll keep the research station open, always on the brink of making a breakthrough. Eventually, it can be closed down on a cost-benefit basis.”
She looked at the Marines as they took it all in. Most looked royally pissed—just as she felt. There wasn’t much else to say. Oh, there probably was, but Esther certainly didn’t know everything about the situation.
“Sir, do you have anything?” she asked Lieutenant Commander Chacon.
“No, I think you covered it.”
“OK, well, everybody settle in. Grab some chow and get some rest. I’ll contact you tomorrow when I find out what’s next.”
“May I speak with you privately, ma’am?” the gunny asked as the rest of the Marines filed out of the wardroom.
Esther nodded, and the two Marines returned to her stateroom. Esther closed the hatch, then pointed to the fold-down stool in its slot in the bulkhead. The gunny remained standing.
�
��Captain, all of this is so much bullshit, I don’t know where to start.”
“You think I don’t know that, Gunny? You don’t think I’m royally pissed?”
“I killed for them, ma’am. I killed three people, not to protect the Federation, but so the Allied Biological CEO can buy a blue Lambo to match his red one. In my book, that’s murder. You don’t have that on your hands, ma’am, with all due respect.”
What the . . . just who the hell do you think you are, Gunny?
Esther pushed back on the volcano that threatened to erupt and said instead, “Because you pulled the trigger, you think that makes you more liable? I’m the one who ordered you into the fight. I’m the one who ordered Marines to kill and die. I’m sorry Gunnery Sergeant, but you don’t have a flying fuck of an idea on how heavily that weighs on a commander’s shoulders. You were obeying orders. I gave them!”
The gunny didn’t seem to understand she was treading on thin ice as she said, “You should know, of all people. Your father led the Evolution, so we could escape the yoke of corporations, yet now you seem to be surrendering to them. How can you do that, you of all people?”
Esther was gobsmacked. She slowly stood up to tower over the shorter Marine, her fuze exploding.
All of the last few days spewed forth with “How dare you, Gunnery Sergeant! You don’t know the first thing about my father, what he believed in, what he fought for, what he died for! He believed in the Federation, all of it. And that includes the corporations. He did what he did to save the Federation, and some of what he did was horrible. He killed 11,000 people on Watershed. Men, women and children. How the fucking hell do you think he felt about that? He was devastated, but without a doubt, he’d sacrifice another 11,000 in a bleeding second if that was what it would take to save the Federation. Eleven-thousand more innocent souls.
“Let me tell you this, Gunnery Sergeant! If you try and bring my father into this to shame me because you don’t have a clue as to what sacrifice means, I will fucking crush you like a cockroach,” she said, her nostrils flaring.
The United Federation Marine Corps' Lysander Twins: The Complete Series: Books 1-5 Page 88
