Lieutenant (The United Federation Marine Corps Book 3)

by Jonathan P. Brazee

“Well, Ansel Adams, about time you earned your paycheck. Start clicking away,” Ryck told Sams.

  Sams reached into his cargo pocket and pulled out the Leica replica he’d been given. With the requirement of no electronic signatures, no matter how small, the teams had been relegated to mid-20th Century, Old Reckoning, cameras. The real cameras were too rare to outfit everyone needing one, but replicas had been fabricated, complete with manual shutter speed and f-stop aperture adjustment. The Marines had gotten crash courses in their use, and while neither Ryck nor Sams had set the world on fire, Sams had been the better photographer of the two.

  Sams put on the telephoto lens and began to take photos of the giant capy while Ryck pulled out his recon log to enter the sighting. The entry would be married to the photos later when the film could be developed.

  This was big. In just a few short minutes, the little that mankind knew about the capys had been tossed asunder.

  Chapter 19

  “Hey,” Ryck said, kicking the sleeping Sams who was prone below him. “You’re up.”

  The two Marines had been observing the capys for two days now. Other than that first bombshell, nothing surprising had occurred. The smaller capys had rotated their way around the basin. At the moment, they were a good 1,500 meters away, on the other side of the small group of buildings.

  The more Ryck watched, the more certain he was that the giant capys were sentient. They had expanded one of the buildings and erected a stone wall. The wall didn’t seem to lead anywhere, and Ryck couldn’t come up with a reason for it, but the giant capys worked with individual purpose, not with the instinctive precision of earth ants or bees.

  “Anything?” Sams asked, stretching his arms.

  “Nothing of note. The giants still ignore the livestock. They’ve stopped building the wall, though.”

  “Doing anything with it?” Sams asked as he moved forward to where he could observe the basin.

  “Nope, nada. It’s just sitting there, a monument to nothing, and the giants are ignoring it now,” Ryck said.

  “What’s with these things?” Sams asked. “In the scifi holos, aliens are reptiles, or dragons, or even big bugs, bent on eating all of us. But when we finally get contact, all we’ve got are teddy bears that just sit around doing nothing?”

  “Don’t complain. ‘Nothing’ is pretty good right now. You forget, I’ve seen them in combat.”

  Sams harrumphed, accepting Ryck’s statement, then asked, “Well, do you think we should move yet?”

  Ryck had been thinking the same thing. The assault was to take place in three days, unless something had changed since they’d been inserted. Ryck and Sams were almost opposite where the Marines would land, and they needed to be there to offer pathfinding for the incoming craft. It would take at least a day to move back, so they could leave early to get in position. On the other hand, the longer they stayed at the LZ, the more chance they had to give the position away.

  “No, let’s stay here another day. We’ve still got time.”

  “Roger, that,” Sams acknowledged as he settled into position. “You leave me any bacon?”

  “You son-of-a-bitch. Why’d you have to bring up bacon? I’d kill for some,” Ryck said, grimacing at the thought of the base paste he and Sams had been sucking down.

  The base was a homogenized version of the bases used in food fabricators, guaranteed to provide all the nutrients a hungry Marine needed. Not having gone through a fabricator, though, it tasted like shit, and it didn’t come close to filling the belly.

  “Well, those farmers said the capys tasted great. You saw that, right, on the vids? What say I sort of sidle on down there, grab one, and we can have a BBQ?” Sams asked, amused sarcasm dripping off each word.

  “Sure thing, Bobbi,” Ryck said, using Sams’ nickname, “you just run on out there and pick the fattest, juiciest one. Grab some BBQ sauce while you’re at it.”

  “Think I might, at that. You like your sauce spicy or tangy?”

  “Fuck you. Now I’m going to be dreaming about food, asshole,” Ryck said, scooting back down the small rise to the hollow where they’d been sleeping.

  He heard Sams softly chortle as he slid down past the flat spot where they slept and all the way to the bottom of the gully, another two meters in back of the crest. At about 2.5 meters below the highest point, he could stand up safely. Ryck stretched, and then wandered over to where some rocks protruded from the ground. Next to the big tree that marked the spot, he scraped away at the dirt between some rocks with a stick they had gathered, then undid his trou.

  Ryck sighed with relief as he emptied his bladder. They had no idea as to the olfactory capabilities of the capys, but nothing the biologists had discovered indicated that it might be anything out of the ordinary. Anyway, the two Marines had to piss. The base paste might keep their other side blocked up, but not piss. He closed his eyes and let it flow.

  Something interrupted the sound of the stream hitting the dirt. Ryck opened his eyes to see a giant capy walking towards him, dragging two huge logs. He glanced at the modified M72 HGL where he’d laid it against a rock.

  Stupid! Putting it down in enemy territory!

  He froze, alternating between diving for his weapon and standing still. The capy was 20 meters away, and it hadn’t seemed to notice anything.

  Ryck slowly slid his dick back inside, drips be damned. The recon skins had been adjusted through a calculated guesswork to be able to shield them. Ryck knew he was about to find out if they were effective.

  The capy veered toward Ryck, and Ryck almost broke for his weapon, but the creature stepped into the gully, and then pulled the logs hand-over-hand to get them across. It climbed out on the other side, not even five meters from Ryck.

  The thing was huge, and its muscles bulged under its fur. A musty, slightly pungent aroma filled the air. Just as it came abreast of Ryck, it turned its head and looked right at him. Ryck tried to will his heartbeat down, sure the beast could hear his pulse, skins or no.

  The giant capy might have paused looking at him, or it might not have paused. Regardless, it didn’t hesitate in its step and kept walking.

  Ryck waited until the thing was out of sight before he dared to move. He picked up his M72, then made his way back to their hide.

  “Did you see that?” Sams whispered excitedly. “One of them just came out of the woods, not 30 meters away!”

  “Yeah, I saw it,” Ryck simply said, sitting down to make the entry in his log.

  With the giant capys, at least, the new skins seemed to have worked.

  Chapter 20

  For the first time, the soldier capys, the same type that Ryck had fought, made an appearance. Four of them had marched out of the small stand of trees on the far side of the basin. The mountains rose up from those trees, so Ryck didn’t know if they came down from the mountains, if they marched up from somewhere, or if they had been lifted by some sort of vehicle. They had just shown up.

  The four seemed to examine the wall the giants had built. The giants (the two Marines had counted about 20 of them) ignored the soldiers just as the soldiers ignored them. That shattered the theories Ryck and Sams had come up with regarding the relationship between the three types of capy.

  The soldier capys were much smaller than the giants, and they were far more slender, if still a bit pudgy by earth standards. They all carried the same energy guns that Ryck had seen before, the ones that looked like truncated jai alai xistera with a ball of light in the basket. One big difference, though, was that the soldiers had the faint blue glow of what had to be their shielding. That glow became more pronounced in the darkness, making them easily visible to the two Marines.

  An incident before darkness closed in really caught Ryck’s attention. A giant capy with a branch on its shoulder walked close to two of the soldiers. As he passed one of the soldiers, he turned at the same moment the soldier stepped to its left, putting it right where the back of the branch collided with the soldiers head. Ryck expect
ed a shower of sparks as the shield deflected the branch, but that never happened. There was barely a pulse, and the branch struck the soldier in the head. The soldier went down hard while the giant continued walking.

  The second soldier didn’t seem upset, and it didn’t chase down the giant. It merely walked to the downed solder and stood there. After a few moments, the downed capy struggled to its feet. Ryck and Sams both plainly saw the dark bluish-red blood on the side of the capy’s head, even from their hide over 1,000 meters away.

  The two soldiers moved off, even if the one seemed unsteady on its feet.

  Ryck and Sams bounced the incident around for quite some time as the night wore on. If a shield could stop Marine energy weapons, if it could stop M99 darts, surely it could brush aside an accidental hit with a log. Sams figured that the soldiers kept their shields powered down to save energy until they were needed. Ryck had to admit that made sense, but something just didn’t sit right with him with that explanation.

  Chapter 21

  Ryck and Sams were still about 400 meters from the planned assault LZ when something big flew overhead, its shadow flashing over them.

  Was the assault already on? Ryck wondered, taking a quick look at his watch.

  No, it was not for another ten hours, right at dawn. Marines liked to fight in the dark, but the captive little capys seemed to be better suited than humans for darkness, so a daylight assault it was.

  Ryck motioned to Sams that they needed to break off and get eyes on the basin. The two Marines moved forward at a slightly faster pace, knowing that the capys should be no closer than 1,000 meters from their position. Moving in a crouch, they went to their bellies for the last 20 meters, edging up to where they could see what was going on.

  A blockish ship, perhaps 40 to 50 meters long, had landed close to Capytown. The back was a simple ramp that had already been lowered. This was Ryck’s first glimpse of a capy ship, and it was surprisingly mundane to him. He had sort of expected something more exotic, like the alien ships in the flicks. This was nothing so much as a huge, flying cargo container.

  “What do you think’s up?” Sams asked as he snapped away with his Leica.

  “Well, we’ve got more of the soldiers here now, what 30, do you think? And the giants seem to be—shit, is that another new kind of capy? Over there with the little ones?” Ryck asked.

  Sams shifted his gaze, pondered a moment, and then said, “I don’t know. It looks like a soldier without the gear. And check it out, it’s herding the little guys.”

  Ryck studied the new capy. Sams was right about one thing: it was herding the little capys towards the ship. Whether it was an unarmed soldier? Well, Ryck wasn’t so sure about that. True, it looked like one of the soldiers, but it was a little taller and a little more slender. “Gracile” was perhaps the right description. More than that, it moved differently, without the sense of purpose the soldier capys seemed to have. The appearance was close enough, though, so that Sams could be right.

  As the herd of capys turned toward the ship’s ramp, it immediately became clear what was happening. The little capys were being taken away. With the sudden appearance of more soldiers than the two Marines had seen before, the coincidence was too much to ignore. The capys knew something was up.

  “They’re leaving,” Sams said, coming to the same conclusion. “Division’s not going to like that.”

  The mission of the assault was not just to eliminate the capys from this one world. A simple planet buster could do that. The prime purpose was to engage the capys with an overwhelming force. Overwhelming to the point of ensuring victory, but not so much that combat was not engaged. Two capy-held planets were being attacked simultaneously, led by the Federation Navy and Marines, but with heavy reinforcement from the Brotherhood, the Confederation, several independent worlds, and three mercenary companies. Each unit, armed with every weapon imaginable, was to assault a specific objective independently. A heavy reserve force was to be kept to ensure no unit got into too much trouble, but the militaries of mankind wanted to analyze the effectiveness of various weapons and tactics in attacking the capy forces. Based on the analysis, the coalition could better plan to take the war to the capys in earnest. This was basically a rehearsal. But the capys had to cooperate. They had to stay and fight.

  If Ryck and Sams’ capys were leaving in such haste, then Ryck had to assume the rest on the planet were doing so as well. He wished he could contact any of the other seven teams (his three and Kylton Granger’s four) to see if their groups were also leaving. But to do that would break emissions silence. It was possible that this was just a routine move, a pure coincidence.

  That possibility was smashed, in Ryck’s mind, at least, when the soldiers rolled out what was technically called a BFG.[38] It was manhandled (capyhandled?) to point to the planetary west, aiming in the only direction from which the basin was not protected by the steep mountains. This was the logical approach for aircraft. A second BFG was wheeled out of the ship, then a third.

  By this time, the shepherd capy had about a third of the little ones rounded up and moving up the ramp. The giants were dismantling two of the buildings, carrying the components up the ramp and into the ship’s hold.

  Ryck was struck at how little the different capys seemed to interact. They moved aside for each other, but they didn’t seem to communicate between themselves. The soldiers did not seem to communicate with the giants who did not communicate with the shepherd.

  At this rate, Ryck figured the little capys would be loaded up within the hour. He didn’t know how much dismantling the giants would do, and the soldiers were a big question mark. Were they there to cover the withdrawal of the rest, or would they stay to fight? If they stayed, given their proven ability to shield themselves from most Federations sensors, then those guns could prove deadly to 3/12, the Marine battalion assigned this basin as their mission.

  “Well, boss? What’s your plan?” Sams asked.

  Without a fight, the mission would be a total failure. And the Marines were not scheduled to kick off for almost nine more hours. If the capys were egressing the planet, they would be long gone, leaving the forces of man an empty battlefield. He didn’t know if the assault forces were in position to move up H-hour, but Ryck knew he had to try something. He had to get out the word.

  “I’m going to notify Division,” he told Sams, who merely grunted, neither agreeing nor taking issue with Ryck’s decision.

  By breaking emission discipline, Ryck was going against his orders. However, this was an emergency, in his opinion. If he didn’t pass the intel, then the overriding mission would not be achieved and 3/12, by not having surprise as an advantage, could be in significant danger.

  Breaking emission discipline could also put the two of them at risk. They’d remained undetected so far, but this could put them on the skyline.

  Ryck pulled out his journal and encoded a quick message to the effect that the capys at this location could be gone in another hour. He also included the location of the three BFGs. He wanted to keep his transmitter powered for as short a time as possible, so everything was worked out before powering up.

  “Ready?” he asked Sams.

  “Go for it.”

  Ryck popped the powerpack, the two elements coming together and creating the electricity needed to run the MC884 deep space communicator. Within seconds, the pack was hot, generating juice. Immediately, he started keying in his message.

  “Uh, the soldiers have stopped and are standing around, like they’re looking for something,” Sams said beside him.

  Shit!

  Ryck tried to rush, but that created mistakes.

  Calm down. Do it right.

  He finally got the message keyed in, and without hesitation, hit the transmit key. He then immediately pulled the powerpack and split it open with his Hwa Win combat knife, pouring the contents onto the dirt.

  “Oh, shit! That did it,” Sams said in a hushed tone as if the soldier capys could hear him at th
at distance. “I’d say they know exactly where we are now.”

  Ryck grabbed his binos and looked up. Sams was right. The capys were undoubtedly focused on where the two Marines lay in the low brush at the edge of the open basin. Within moments, about 20 of them unlimbered their weapons and started moving across the grass in their direction. There were a few flickers, then the round balls of light appeared at the muzzle of their weapons.

  During the fight on GKN, Ryck had only briefly seen the capy’s energy rifles. Even during the briefs back at Division, the actual construction of the weapons had been sketchy. Despite the oncoming capys, Ryck twisted his binos to their highest magnification and studied the weapons. Each gun looked the same. From the trigger on back, it could be human-made. Once again, the faintest flicker of the question of mutual evolution versus parallel evolution went through his thoughts, but he pushed those aside for another place and time.

  From the trigger on forward, though, the guns were decidedly different. The “barrel” looked like the previously noted jai alai xistera, the muzzle flattening out into a spoon-like platform, slightly curved. In that platform, balls of blue light shimmered as they rotated in their cradle. When the capys fired, the balls of light shot off, barely visible as they left the gun and went downrange. Ryck had not seen the re-loading process before, so he didn’t have a feel for how long it would take, or where the light charges were even stored.

  “Uh, Ryck. They might be plodding along, but you think maybe we might want to get out of here?” Sams asked.

  Ryck took his focus off the weapons. The capys had covered a good 150 meters and had another 600 to reach the two Marines. As on GKN, they didn’t seem to be moving fast, but their progress was steady. Ryck didn’t know the range of their weapons, either. On GKN, the capys had been firing from 500 meters or less.

  “Yeah, ’bout time to diddiho. Let’s, uh, how about Rally Point Bravo, the one with the grandfather tree?”