Corpsman

by Jonathan P. Brazee

  And now, she was a Federation Marine. Avó’s treatment had gone exceptionally well. He wasn’t 100% and probably would never be, but he was more than functional. With home visits by assisted services, he could live as he wished. Leticia had at first resisted enlisting, but with Avó insisting, and with Liege’s enthusiastic backing, she’d taken the plunge. Liege knew that this was the first time since their mother had died that Leticia was finally on her own, doing something for herself.

  “So, you didn’t tell me where you’re headed,” Liege said as they broke the hug.

  “Well, after ITC, I’m out to 3/13.”

  “Oh, an Outer Forces Marine. Out in the booneys!”

  “That’s right, no soft living for me. I’m out to the frontier, where Marines are hard!”

  “Dream on, little girl. The Inner Forces are where it’s at,” Liege said with a laugh.

  “Who knows, maybe I’ll ask for RTC[14] after that. See how you snake-eaters live.”

  Liege punched her sister in the arm, saying, “You got enough in the tank for that?”

  Her thoughts briefly skirted the mass of memories of SRCC first, then RTC. Without a doubt, the two courses were the hardest, worst, and best things she had ever accomplished. Hardest was self-explanatory. Only 22% of those who started RTC graduated. For the few women who volunteered, the numbers were even worse. And while fit, Liege was hardly a super-stud.

  Worst was because they came close to breaking her. She’d been pushed to the edge, and she’d seen that she was lacking. On more occasions than she wanted to remember, she’d come ever-so-close to quitting.

  Best because actually succeeding had been the single most emotional moment of her life, to know that she had made it, that she’d been able to dredge up the raw material within her to be tempered into the steel that she was today—and that raw material was simple force of will. Physically, she didn’t have all the same tools, but mentally, she was hard as a diamond, making it through when some monster physical specimens had quit.

  It had been a very close thing with her, but as Liege looked at her little sister, she knew that if anyone could make it, she could.

  “And what’s going on with Vic?” Liege asked. “I saw him sitting with Avó in the stands.”

  Leticia colored, looked down, then raised her face to look her sister in the eyes.

  “He came to see me graduate, of course. And we’re spending three days in Kentville—oh, when are you going back?”

  “Tomorrow morning. I trust we can all eat together as a family tonight?”

  “Oh, of course. But—”

  “Yeah, invite him too. Then you can go play house with him.”

  “It’s not like that, Liege.”

  Liege knew it wasn’t, really. Maybe she was a little jealous of her sister—and a little jealous of Vic. Leticia was smart, beautiful, and level-headed. She and Vic had become close after Liege had been awarded her Navy Cross, and things had evidently heated up after Liege left for SRCC. Liege had been first assigned to First Recon on Tarawa, but when the billet with regiment on Gobi came open, along with a place in the Independent Duty Corpsman Course, that had taken Liege away from her family, and Vic had stepped in as Leticia’s support. After Avó’s improvement, when the option of Leticia enlisting was first broached, Vic had decided not to re-enlist. He’d said he did not want the complication of a corporal in a relationship with a private.

  Of course, that hadn’t too hard of a decision for him. Vic came from a very, very wealthy and high-placed family on Broadbent. Most of the high-society families sent their sons and daughters to the Navy, if public service was deemed appropriate, but Vic went Corps. No one had had expected Vic to make the Marines a career, though. He had many more options available to him.

  When Leticia entered boot camp, Vic had gone home to “take care of some family matters.” To be honest, Liege had thought he’s been gone for good and had only used Leticia as a local hook-up. So she was surprised, and more than a little gratified, to see him show up for the graduation.

  “So, Private, let’s go pick up Avó and your boyfriend. I’m thinking Carlito’s for dinner? Nobody on Gobi can make a decent pizza, and I’m dying for a couple of slices.”

  Taking her sister’s arm in hers, she led her back to the bleachers. Walking like that might not be regulation, but family came first.

  GOBI

  Chapter 25

  There was a soft plop from a few meters off Liege’s right.

  “Shit, Moose! Stay still!” she subvocalized into the throat mic.

  She listened a moment longer, hearing nothing else.

  Moose, Staff Sergeant Phil Warner, did curls with a ton on each arm and ran 50 klicks before breakfast—if you believed what he said. And he really wasn’t that far off. He was an absolute beast. But he had a hard time with discomfort, and lying in the muck of the swamp was very, very uncomfortable.

  Liege hated it, too, but that hate was shoved back in the recesses of her mind, and she simply ignored the smell, the knowledge that her skin was being attacked by millions of parasites, molds, and bugs, and the constant itch. She was on a mission, and that was what mattered. The party-girl Liege worried about appearances and could spend an hour getting ready for a night on the town, but the corpsman Liege was a different person, professional and confident.

  That didn’t mean she didn’t hope the mission ended soon. They’d been parked in the heavy cover of the swamp for a day now, and the thought of a hot shower filled her with anticipation.

  Another soft plop reached Liege’s ears, and she was about to call out Moose again when she realized that the sound was from the wrong direction.

  “I’ve got something from our six,” she passed as she ran through her inputs.

  “What, Doc?” Dannyboy, the team leader asked. “I don’t have anything.”

  “I don’t know, but I know I heard something.”

  If there was something out there, it wouldn’t surprise anyone that Liege had heard it first. Her hearing, or rather her ability to discern the differences between sounds, was better than anyone else’s. But the various scanners they had emplaced were quiet, showing nothing unnatural.

  The team had eyes on the slightly raised dry hummock of grass and bushes that marked one of the few large dry spots in the huge expanse of morass. They’d wired the ground with explosives, ready to detonate if the enemy landed. No one expected an approach from the rear, but the unexpected often has a habit of sneaking up on a person, so they’d laid out interlocking sensors to warn of any approach from that direction.

  Liege strained to listen, and just as she had convinced herself that there really wasn’t anything back there, she heard the distinct sucking sound of a foot being lifted from the muck.

  “I—”

  “I heard it,” Dannyboy interrupted her. “Fidor, why aren’t we picking anything up?”

  Fidor responded, but Liege couldn’t make out what he said. Couple the subvocalization, which was hard to master, with Fidor’s horrendous Almatty accent, and he was often undecipherable.

  “Fuck it all, Fidor. Concentrate.”

  Dannyboy had somewhat of a mouth on him, and it still sounded odd to hear cursing in the calm monotone required for sub-v comms.

  “I’m re-routing the Charlie band,” Fidor said, much clearer than before.

  Liege switched her display to the Charlie band, not wanting to wait even an instant for her AI to make the switch if something came through. There was a flicker in the display, then three figures appeared. Whoever was heading their way was at 150 meters and closing.

  “Cross-polarization,” Fidor said, “with freq-hopping. Clever.”

  I knew we should have hard-wired, Liege thought.

  They’d had time to run shielded wires, and those were extremely difficult to jam or spoof, but they could be picked up by sensitive orbital scanners, and if they were, the wires might as well be big flashing neon arrows right back to the four of them.

  Co
me on, Dannyboy, what do we do?

  Dannyboy, Staff Sergeant Lu Tien-chieu, had never acted as team leader before, and Liege thought he was too cautious, too risk-averse. Unnecessary risk was foolish, but being too cautious could be just as bad, if not worse.

  “I think they’re going to give terminal guidance to whatever is incoming. We can live with that. Keep low and let the fuckers just walk on by,” he finally passed.

  Liege rolled her eyes. They had the islet loaded for bear with explosives, and while they were shielded from overhead scans, they would not stand up to visual scrutiny. But Dannyboy was the man with the plan, so Liege sunk deeper into the muck until only her nose eyes, and forehead were above the surface of the nasty glop.

  Fidor and his AI kept playing with his inputs, trying to keep one step ahead of the enemy AIs. The enemy avatars flickered in and out as they got closer. It looked like they were going to walk right over the four team members, which wasn’t too much of a shock considering that there was much deeper water on either side of them.

  She didn’t need the avatars as the enemy got closer; she could hear them. They were good, and they were mixing up their stride patterns, but they were still plunging through black muck that sucked at their feet.

  Liege was feeling naked. She wished she’d had a tarnkappe[15] at least, to drape over her. Many of the active camo and light bending projectors were not as effective, or wouldn’t even work in water, but she thought anything would have been better than nothing. As the footsteps got closer, she flipped her monocle back and out of the way. She was now cut off from her visual displays, but she could see movement—she didn’t need her AI telling her that an enemy was just a few meters away.

  Just keep on walking, she tried to force the thoughts into whomever just stepped past a bedraggled bush.

  Without consciously deciding to do it, she sunk below the oily surface, out of sight (she hoped).

  Liege felt a swirl of water near her legs. She gripped her combat knife with her right hand.

  A boot landed on her thigh, and Liege twisted, knocking the enemy off balance while she surged to her feet, black water pouring off of her as the lunged for the man who was only now gaining his balance. Knife hand forward in a Sukido, she reached for his neck—only to be blocked aside. She splashed into the water face-first, hand forward to stop her fall, only to have it sink 20 centimeters into the muck. A body landed on her, and she felt the whisper of the electronic blade kiss her neck.

  “You’re dead, Doc,” someone said into her ear.

  Her AI told her the same thing through her cochlear implant. Liege stopped struggling and turned around to see the grinning face of Gunnery Sergeant Warden Johansson, “Stein,” before he winked and dove thorough some half-rotted skunk cabbage and out of sight.

  Of all the people to kill her, it had to be Warden. The gunny was new to the team, but he had quite a rep. Sharp as a tack, he had an infectious sense of humor and was a physical beast. This was their first force-on-force since he’d arrived, and more so than usual, Liege had wanted to make an impression. A good one, that was, not getting killed when she’d had the jump on him.

  She looked down at her combat knife. The electronic blade glimmered in a dull blue. With a groan, she slammed it into her belly, committing electronic seppuku. She almost wished it was a real blade.

  There was a flurry of motion over where Moose had been. Liege flipped down her monocle, but it was now covered with muck. Being dead, she wouldn’t be able to communicate, but at least she could see what was going on.

  Liege kicked at the nearest skunk cabbage, which had made up most of her view for the last day.

  Of all the plants to terraform a world with, why skunk cabbage? What possible environmental benefit do they have that outweighed their nasty smell?

  She kicked another, knocking it off its stalk, then strode to the muck to sit on a small tuft of grass, a small throne in the midst of the morass.

  Shots rang out, but Liege didn’t bother trying to clean her monocle. She’d find out soon enough what had happened.

  “OK, bring it in,” Warden passed a few minutes later.

  Liege didn’t know where “in” was, given the state of her monocle, but she heard Moose splashing through the swamp, so she hurried to catch up to him. Another 30 meters, and Warden, Dannyboy, Gidge, and Teri were standing knee-deep in the water. Liege could hear the last two coming in as well.

  “That was fun, huh?” Warden asked as the last of them gathered.

  Liege wouldn’t really call the last day “fun.”

  Warden was the Team Two leader. The captain had Team One. Warden had broken up the team into two smaller teams for this force-on-force. He’d told them he wanted to see how they worked together in the field before they left for the quarterly Dark Eye exercise. Liege had thought he could learn enough about them during the two-week exercise, but it was his team and his call.

  “So, I have to nod to Dannyboy here. Looks like he’s the only survivor.”

  Liege looked up in surprise. Somehow she’d assumed that Warden had to have made it through the exercise in one piece.

  “So, I want to see how you laid out the explosives. . .”

  Liege was suddenly glad that Dannyboy had insisted that they lay out the training aids in a sound tactical manner, not just throw them on the ground.

  “. . . so let’s head on over and take a look. And I’ve got a Stork arriving in 40 to take us back.”

  “Oh, the crew chief’s gonna be happy to see us climb aboard, dripping black snot like this,” Moose said, to general laughter.

  Liege’s mood was getting better. First, Warden had been killed, so he couldn’t lord that over her. Second, they were flying back instead of humping it. And it had been kind of fun, she had to admit. It would have been better if she had taken down the team leader, but the look on his face as she rose out of the water like some sort of zombie Birth of Venus had been priceless.

  Chapter 26

  “Some training, huh?” the gunny asked as he approached Liege, a pitcher in hand with which he topped off her stein.

  Dark Eyes had just concluded, and it looked like the company had done well. They wouldn’t know for sure until the debrief in the morning before they flew back to Portillo. Liege wasn’t worried; Dark Eyes was a requirement to remain deployable, but in her two tours with regiment, she’d never been in a company that had failed.

  “It was OK. We got it done.”

  “Sure, I know that. But it was fun, right?”

  Is this guy ever in a bad mood? Liege wondered as she looked over at him.

  She didn’t really know what to make of her team leader. On one hand, he had a continual smile and an almost annoying habit of being eternally sunny. On the other hand, when he moved, there was no doubt that he was an extremely dangerous man, one you didn’t want to cross.

  Liege wasn’t sure why the gunny put out that kind of vibe. He wasn’t particularly large, nothing like Moose. Given the right kind of clothing, he could look somewhat inconsequential, in fact. With his shirt off, it was different. The first time Liege had seen him shirtless, she had been surprised to see how chiseled his body was. He looked really, good, something both she and Teri had remarked to each other at the time, Teri with her typical crudeness that made Liege laugh.

  Even sitting beside her, leaning back in the bench seat, a stein in his hand, he exuded a deadly competence. His record backed that up. Liege hadn’t bothered to delve into the details of his background, but he had three silver stars and five BC1s, and what he’d done on Indigo Seas was well-known throughout the Corps.

  “Gunny Johansson, good to see you again,” someone said from behind him. “Doc Neves, you too.”

  “Sergeant Major, glad to be back in a real billet. Headquarters was driving me batty.”

  Retired Sergeant Major “Crutch” Carruthers was a fixture outside of Camp Wister—really the only fixture. Wister was a temporary camp used for extended field ops, a thousand klicks fro
m the regimental headquarters at Camp Portillo, and his appropriately named The Bar was the lone civilian dining and drinking establishment outside the gate. Just about every recon Marine over the last 20-odd years had spent more hours inside than he or she would want to admit. The walls were covered in memorabilia—anyone could tack up whatever he or she wanted. Behind the beat-up metal bar, pictures of Sergeant Major Crutch’s highlighted his career. Centered was a prominent picture of him with none other than General Lysander, back when Crutch was a corporal and the general was a lieutenant. The sergeant major was Old Corps.

  “I’m surprised you survived a full tour there, Gunny. Thank the gods I never had to suffer through that.

  “Well, take care when you ship out. You’ve got a tough gig coming, but I know you’ll do fine,” he said, clapping both of them on the shoulder before leaving them.

  “Ship out?” Liege asked the gunny.

  “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Warden answered, looking confused. “He somehow knows some things before anyone else, but I haven’t heard of any hot spots popping up right now. Maybe the years are finally creeping up on him.

  “Well, if there’s anything to it, I guess we’ll find out. But anyway, I’m glad I caught you here before the rest showed up. I just wanted to tell you that you did well out there.”

  “Oh. Just doing my job,” Liege said, but suddenly feeling good.

  “Yeah, we’re all doing our jobs, but I watched how you shepherded Moose. You’re a good leader.”

  “Moose does fine,” she protested.