by Jay Korza
Seth exited his quarters and almost ran into Surgeon. “Mike, good morning.”
“Good morning, sir.”
“Ugh. Sometimes I really hate this rank thing. When we are out there, fighting, submerged in something important, it doesn’t bother me. But when it’s you and me, in a hallway saying good morning, I want to hear it from my best friend Mike, not my First Sergeant Mike ‘Surgeon’ O’Connor.”
“Is that an order?” Mike chuckled.
“Yes, fucker, it is.”
“Okay, Seth, sir. Good morning, buddy.”
“Better. Thank you. But we will have to address the fact that you are wandering around officer country without an escort.” Seth faked sincerity as he motioned to the hallway they were in. Naval tradition dictated that enlisted personnel were not allowed in the berthing areas set aside for the officers.
“I’ll schedule a public flogging later. But before that, we need to grab some breakfast then go over our new squad structures. I invited Captain Riley, Joker, and Wilks to the meeting. Anyone else you’d like to join us?”
“No, that’s a good group for this. Too many chefs in the kitchen just make these things that much more difficult. Let’s go get some chow.”
After breakfast, they made their way to a conference room and met the other team members who had been invited.
“Good morning, everyone,” Emily began. “I’m glad to see everyone could make it. I’d hate to have to watch Captain Fields track you down via your datapads if you hadn’t shown up.”
Surgeon looked to Seth, who squirmed in his seat. “Not fair.”
“Regardless.” Emily enjoyed herself. “I’m sure everyone has come to the meeting with some ideas already set about our squad makeup. So let’s get started.”
Wilks and Joker stood together and went over to a large screen on the far wall. Joker tapped in a few commands on his datapad and the larger screen came to life.
“We talked about it last night, and Joker and I came up with the following squad lists.” Wilks motioned for Joker to show the overview.
“To be upfront, we were pretty drunk by the time we finished, so we might need to tweak a few things.” Joker smiled.
“You mean like removing Godzilla from fourth squad,” Seth pointed out.
“Yeah, like that. Though in all fairness, you can see how Godzilla balances out the power Cueball gives to second squad,” Joker quipped while removing the mythical squad member.
Wilks had always been a very straight-laced soldier but Joker was definitely proving to be a bad influence and rubbing off on him. He continued. “We have thirty-one operators and two Coalition officers. We also have four non-Coalition officers who have been doing well in combat and learning how we do things. We put those officers in squads as operators but also available to take over as officers if Captains Riley and Fields see fit.”
Joker took over. “First squad will be our scientific technical squad. Starting with the Grethnar lieutenants, Jenarah and Kuruk. Because of their symbiotic relationship, we needed to keep them together and they are the only other actual scientists on the team aside from Captain Riley.
“The squad leader will be Chief O’Connor, Doc. Bloom and Jeeves for obvious reasons. Shar’tuk is there in case we run into any more Nortes objects or writings that he can identify. Snake because of his seniority and security bypassing training. And Mitra as a general shooter for the squad.”
“Looks good. Second squad?” Surgeon asked.
“Wilks will be the squad leader and he’ll take Davies, Ratchet, Cueball, Reaper, Demetri, and Telfer.”
Emily raised her eyebrow at the mention of Wilks and Telfer being on the same squad. Wilks didn’t shy away from what everyone else was thinking. “I know you might think that is a bad idea, seeing as how some of you have pointed out there might be a certain kind of chemistry between Major Telfer and myself.”
“Might be?” Emily prodded.
“Okay, there is,” Wilks admitted. “However, I think that chemistry works to our advantage. We all know, Telfer included, that she can be difficult to work with. She’s great at her job but she feels that because she’s an officer she should be in charge. When she is subordinate to an enlisted person, I am the only one she has worked well with. It only makes sense to put her on the squad she will work best with, regardless of the reason.”
Seth and Emily looked to each other and knew they had no room to talk on this particular subject. Even if they were the commanding officers, they couldn’t be hypocrites.
“Sound logic, Gunny. Continue.” Emily gave her blessing.
Joker changed the screen again. “Third squad will be run by me, followed by Lieutenant Stroth, Fang, Hood, Blaze, Jenson, and Nitaha.”
“Wait a minute.” Seth actually stood from his chair. “Nitaha?! Are you serious? She’s not even a year old. She’s still a…a…puppy for God’s sake. Not to mention, not even a soldier.”
Joker gave Seth a second to calm down before he responded. “Sir. Seth. In the end, as her father and the commanding officer, you can always change this and keep her on the ship. But let me explain to you why we put her on the squad.
“First off, she’s going to be in the middle of a battle regardless if she’s on the ground with us or not. If she’s on board the ship, or any of the Coalition ships from the Seventh Fleet, she’ll be in the middle of it. At least on the ground she won’t just sit in her quarters and wait for someone else to decide her fate.
“Secondly, we spoke with Fang and he believes she can handle herself. Shirka cubs have evolved to be combat-ready the moment they chew themselves out of their birthing sacks. She’s had many months of training with the best Special Forces operators in the Coalition. She can do this.
“Thirdly, she has fought with us on multiple occasions in the past. I realize that other than her first action on her birthing planet, all of the other encounters have been unplanned, but she still fought as well as any of us.
“In the end, I thought you would rather have her on the ground with us, in Fang’s squad, where you could keep an eye on her and protect her.”
Seth had already sat back down as he listened to Joker. “You have good points, but I need to think about this some more, a lot more, and talk to Nitaha about it also. Let’s look at fourth squad.”
“Yes sir.” Wilks continued. “Fourth squad will be run by Surgeon, and include Scan, Jockey, Patz, Cannon, Vinci, and Boddie.”
“We tried to maximize our non-human assets by spreading them out among the squads. Some of our operators’ specialties won’t matter or come into play once we’re on the ground so we just placed them in squads randomly.” Joker finished the presentation.
“I like it,” Surgeon offered.
Seth looked around the room and received approval nods from everyone. He and Emily were joint commanding officers on this mission but he was the tactical lead, so he had the final say.
“The squads are approved. Send everyone the updated list and have them start training in those squads today. I want a squad competition daily to end each training cycle. It’s a good morale booster and makes everyone want to work that much harder.” Seth paused for a moment. “And Joker, I want Nitaha working with her squad. I haven’t made my final decision yet, but I think giving her several weeks of training and watching her during that time will allow me to make a better decision as opposed to just thinking about how I feel about the matter.”
“Yes, sir.” Joker was happy Seth was coming around to the idea, even if it was slowly.
Emily and Seth stayed behind after everyone else left.
“I know that wasn’t an easy decision for you.”
“Letting Nitaha train with the squad is actually a very easy decision. As a Shirka, she needs combat training and bonding time with Fang. Letting her go into battle with us will be the hard part.”
“So you’ve already decided?”
“I read a neuroscience article years ago that said our subconscious mind makes all of
our decisions within nanoseconds of becoming aware of any given situation. But sometimes, it takes a very long time for our subconscious mind to convince our conscious mind of that decision. My subconscious is still fighting the good fight, and I’m sure it will win, but it’s going to take me awhile longer to come to terms with sending my daughter into combat.”
Emily put her hand on Seth’s and said nothing. She would sit there with him for as long as he needed her to, and then some.
Chapter 17
Three weeks passed by quickly, faster than Seth thought it would have. Waiting to go into battle was always worse than actually being in battle. There’s no time to think about what might be when you’re actually in the thick of it.
But the Seventh Fleet had arrived and with it some disturbing news. The fleet admiral had brought Seth and Emily, along with their team leaders, to his carrier for a mission brief.
The admiral stood at the front of the room. “When we dropped back into normal space several hours ago to make our last course adjustment, we received an update from the president.
“The Nortes empress has officially cut ties with the Coalition and attacked three of our ships at the edge of Sector 692. All hands were lost. No reason for the attack has been given and our analysts have not been able to come up with a plausible theory as to what precipitated the event.”
Seth looked at the update on his datapad. “The Nortes ships were clearly trying to leave Coalition space when they were spotted by the Coalition ships that were watching the border.
“Which makes no sense at all. The Nortes aren’t a part of the Coalition. If they wanted to leave the border and venture out for any given reason, they wouldn’t have been stopped by our ships.”
The admiral nodded in agreement. “Very true. But based on the combat data we received from a remote relay buoy, it appears as though the Nortes attacked our ships to keep them from filing an intel update on the passing cruisers.
“The Nortes did everything they could to keep transmissions from leaving the engagement. Luckily we had a very competent intel officer aboard one of the ships who was able to circumvent the jamming attempts and send back some data from the fight. They didn’t want us to know they had passed or where they were headed to, and they were willing to kill thousands of our sailors to that end. But they didn’t just slip through, and those bastards will pay in the end.”
“I’ll do some research after the meeting, Admiral. I’ll see if I can correlate the Nortes flight path to any of the new information we have gained over the last several months,” Emily offered. “We knew a month ago that there was a cabal working within the Nortes government and we did our best to send them in errant directions, but it seems they found something to follow up on.”
“Yes, the president read me in on the cabal. Which leads me to a very important question. Can we trust Major Telfer?”
“Yes,” Seth and Emily said in unison without hesitation.
Emily took over. “She is the one who told us of the cabal and gave us a lot of information on it. Or at least all of the rumors she knew of from her work in the intelligence community. She has provided us with even more information since then and has proved to be a valued asset.”
“If I may?” Wilks asked. “I have had my two best cybertechs watching every single character of data that she has sent, received, read, or done anything else with for this entire mission. She’s clean, sir.”
Emily wasn’t aware Wilks had had Bloom and Jeeves spying on Telfer, but she was glad he did. She was sure Wilks had done it on his own. In case he was discovered, it would allow the team’s commanding officers to have plausible deniability if the Nortes government ever found out and cried foul about their officer being spied on. Not that such an issue would be a problem now. Telfer wouldn’t want anything to do with her government after she found out about the attack on the Coalition Navy, Emily was sure of it.
Wilks’ admission gave the admiral a more secure feeling about Telfer and the meeting was able to move forward. They finished sharing information and then finalized their plans to finish the mission. The commandos headed back to their ship to make their final preparations.
“Ma’am?” Wilks stepped in front of Emily as they disembarked from the shuttle.
“Yes, Wilks?”
“I’d like to be the one to update Major Telfer on the latest intel.”
“Of course. Let me know how it goes.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Wilks headed to the major’s quarters and told her everything.
“Well then. I think you should lock the door, Jeff.”
“Excuse me, Major?”
“Putem. My first name is Putem. And I’m not a major any more. Effective immediately, I am resigning from the Nortes military.”
“Okay. So why am I locking the door?”
“I am no longer a major and therefore the fact that you are an enlisted man is no longer an issue. That being said, would you like to lock the door, Jeff?”
Wilks wasn’t sure how many people actually knew his first name, but the fact that Putem did was oddly arousing. She may have had to ask him twice to lock the door but he didn’t need a third time to get her meaning.
Two days later, right before the combat drop, the admiral swore in Putem Telfer as the newest first lieutenant in the Coalition Marines Corps. She wasn’t happy about the drop in rank but she understood she had to prove herself in her new uniform, and she would.
Wilks wasn’t happy that his two days of a romantic interlude with Telfer were over. She told him that with her new commissioning, she was once again an officer and bound by her oath, and nothing more would happen between them. There wasn’t anything he could do about it.
At least he got to keep his spot as the leader of Second Squad. Seth decided that too much training had taken place with Wilks as the leader and a change in the squad layout could harm morale and cohesiveness. Telfer would most likely lead in the next action they deployed to, but that was something to discuss later.
As the Seventh Fleet entered the Cherta-held system, they were met with immediate hostilities. The admiral and Emily both tried to obtain a scientific parley but all requests were denied and met with intensified battle.
They were able to break through the Cherta’s first line of defense and continue towards the fourth moon of the eighth planet. This is where their final destination was, on the surface of the northern hemisphere.
They detected Cherta ground forces around their target, too many for the commandos to handle on their own. Four hundred Marines would be dropped to help secure the area.
Once they were on the ground, the fighting intensified. They couldn’t land directly at the site they needed to get to, so they had to fight through five kilometers of enemy forces. Three days later, they were at the dig site from Emily’s past, trying desperately to hold what they had fought so hard to earn.
Seth’s heart pounded. He ran faster than a Shirka with his fur on fire. There were no more points of cover or even concealment as he retreated to the newest skirmish line his fireteam had set up. He wasn’t sure whether it was the zigzag pattern he ran in or the ineptitude of his enemy that kept him from getting shot, but he didn’t really care so long as his luck held out for another twenty meters.
“Just fucking run, Cadet! Why are you dancing out there?!”
Seth could hear Surgeon’s voice coming over the commlink but he didn’t want to waste any oxygen on a reply, quippy or otherwise. The enemy rounds were getting closer, as evidenced by the heat Seth could feel passing by his face and the exposed portions of his arms. The enemy used a metal slug that was propelled so fast that it superheated the air it traveled through. The round also melted right through Coalition armor and sometimes even set their targets on fire.
Seth dove into the rock formation the rest of his fireteam was using for cover, and as he did so, an enemy round grazed his right boot and melted a good portion of his boot’s heel. “Damn. I just broke these in,” he sai
d through ragged breaths.
“If you’re done resting over there,” Joker started in on him, “we could use another rifle on our one-two corner.”
Seth was about to retort that he hadn’t brought one when he realized that Jenson and Boddie were lying near the one-two corner, dead. Seth had two rifles to choose from; there always seemed to be an extra rifle lying around lately—too many in fact. Seth picked up Boddie’s rifle and took all of the extra ammunition he could from both of his dead friends.
Surgeon walked the inner perimeter to check on his men and also the status of their current positions. The war was taking huge tolls on the Coalition; fighting on a multitude of fronts against two superior forces wasn’t going to last very long. Today they were fighting the Cherta, or at least the Cherta forces. Surgeon had gotten a glimpse of the alien enemies earlier but he didn’t recognize their species. Luckily, they were fairly horrible soldiers and couldn’t aim worth a shit. Days like today sometimes gave Surgeon just a smidgen of hope that the Coalition could pull out of their funk and win a major engagement or two to turn the tide in their favor.
Surgeon opened his commlink to his wife’s team. “Daria, I hate to bug you, but we’re getting our asses kicked out here. Do you have any sort of time frame for me?”
Emily answered for her friend and subordinate. “I wish I had an answer for you, but I don’t. The fact that the Cherta forces are pushing so hard for this moon makes me even more certain that I’m right it contains something very important to them. We need it. I’d bet my life on it.”
“You already are, Captain.” Surgeon paused before he spoke again. “We’ll back your play, Emily, but at some point we may have to leave, even if we don’t get what we came for. We could come back with more reinforcements. Otherwise, we may get into the chamber but we’ll never get back to the fleet to use it.”
“Understood. I trust you to decide when we’ve crossed that line. Let me know when it’s time to go.” Emily ended her side of the conversation.
To the rest of the fireteam, Surgeon said, “The captain needs more time. We need to hold this line for as long as possible. If she makes it in to the chamber, then we’ll head out in our scout craft and drop a tactical nuke behind us as we leave. Our ships in orbit are still engaged with the enemy and keeping them from landing at our six, so we still can’t get orbital fire support from them. I’m open to suggestions other than keep shooting and don’t die.”
