Derelict: Marines (Derelict Saga Book 1)

by Paul E. Cooley

  Taulbee and Dunn exchanged a glance. He knew the Captain was wondering if he should tell Oakes that they were going to be towing a goddamned humongous ship back to Neptune. “Maurice,” the Captain said, “how much more fuel would we need if we dragged something back to Pluto?”

  The pilot looked confused, his eyes shifting from the Captain to Taulbee and back. “How large, sir?”

  Dunn stared at each person in turn before speaking. “This conversation stays here. In this room. If anyone blabs or tells tales out of school, then I’ll know where the information came from? Understood?”

  “Aye, sir,” the group said.

  “May I?” he said to Oakes, gesturing to the screen.

  “Of course, sir.”

  Dunn made a few hand gestures and the images of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt disappeared. Taulbee had no doubt the Captain had connected to Portunes to pull images and data from their logistical conversations. Dunn was taking a risk here, but Taulbee realized without the proper information, Oakes and Nobel couldn’t possibly be prepared.

  A picture appeared on the screen. Both Oakes and Nobel stared at it in confusion. “This,” Dunn said, “is the Mira.” The room was silent as a grave. “She appeared a few days ago in the Belt.” He waved a finger and a list of specifications appeared. Tonnage, width, length, volume, presumed cargo, all appeared in a panel next to the 3-D model of the giant ship. “Part of our mission involves towing the ship back to Neptune, if possible.”

  Oakes and Nobel locked eyes. “Um,” Nobel said, “okay. So that would explain some of what Portunes was doing to Black.”

  “I’m sure it does,” Oakes said. He looked back at the Captain. “Okay. So, we’ll need to refuel at PEO and refuel again before heading to Neptune, sir.”

  “Thought so,” Dunn said.

  Nobel held up a finger. “But there is a problem, sir.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, we’ll be a hell of a lot slower towing that monstrosity. It might take us a while to travel back to Neptune. Pluto’s gravity alone will cause problems.”

  Oakes held up a finger. “Not to mention, we’ll have to stow the, um, cargo in orbit while we refuel on the way back. Or we ditch it some part of the way to Neptune, return to Pluto to refuel, and hook back up to the—the—” He paused, his eyes boring into the model. “Sir? Are you sure it’s the Mira?”

  Dunn nodded. “It is, Maurice. PEO confirmed it and the codes check out.”

  “What the hell is she doing here, sir?” Nobel asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Lieutenant.” Dunn smoothed the creases in his jumpsuit. “She has no power that we know of and is drifting through the Kuiper Belt.”

  “Is she going to run into anything, sir?” Oakes asked.

  Taulbee cleared his throat. “If I may, sir?” Dunn gestured for him to go on. Taulbee tented his hands. “Look, I know this is a shock to say the least. But it doesn’t matter how she got here or why she’s here. We won’t know that until we reach her. The only important part of this meeting is for you two to tell us what’s possible and what’s not. If we’ve been given an impossible mission, then let’s make it possible. Otherwise, let’s just come up with the best plan.”

  “Well stated,” Dunn said. He turned his gaze back to the engineer and the pilot. They both looked paler than they had before. “So. How much time do you need to figure it out?”

  Oakes bit his lip and then rubbed his shaved scalp, the hard stubble whispering against the flesh of his palm. He thought for a moment while tapping his fingers on the table. His eyes flicked up and down Mira’s specifications. Nobel studied them too. After a full minute of suffocating silence, Oakes grinned. He nodded to himself. “We can do this, sir.”

  Nobel shrugged. “Lieutenant Oakes is correct, sir. We can do this. I have a feeling Portunes has already figured out the best way to go, but I’ll ping him as soon as the meeting is over. Just means that Lieutenant Oakes will need to replot his courses.”

  “Why do I bother?” the pilot chuckled. “I’m sure Portunes has it all laid out. Remind me again why I have a job?”

  Dunn smiled. “Because AIs are expensive and meat bags aren’t.”

  “Oh, right. Forgot about that,” Oakes said, his white teeth glowing in spite of the overhead lights.

  “Besides,” the Captain said, “you’d be out of a job. Now. Tell me how we’re going to do this.”

  The five men conferenced-in Portunes and took another hour to come up with navigation scenarios as well as fuel scenarios. In the end, they chose the option of refueling at Pluto before heading for Mira and refueling afterward. The “afterward” part was the most troublesome. Assuming they could tow Mira, something that might be completely out of the question after an inspection, getting past Pluto’s gravity on the same trajectory they used to get to the outer Kuiper Belt would be problematic. But considering they had to refuel at Pluto regardless, they had to find a way to make it happen.

  Portunes rated their success forecast at 75%. Not the kind of odds Taulbee wanted to hear, but a 3 in 4 chance was better than no chance at all. By the time Dunn called an end to the meeting, Taulbee felt as though he’d been up all night. A look around the table told him the others felt the same.

  “Get some R&R,” the Captain said as he stood. The command crew stood as well. “But reveille is going to be early and we have a lot of work to do. So, um, try not to have too much fun. Now, get out of here.”

  The men saluted. “Aye, sir.” Dunn nodded to them and headed out of the room. Taulbee looked at the men. “You have your orders. Let’s make sure this goes as smoothly as possible. It’s going to be a long trip and we can’t afford to leave anything behind or miss any details. Dismissed.”

  The crew filed out of the room by rank, Taulbee and Oakes leading the way with Nobel and Cartwright just behind them. When they reached the personnel deck, they broke up and headed in different directions, except for Oakes and Nobel.

  Taulbee wanted to get drunk. He wanted to get stoned. But what he wanted more than anything was four hours of rack time before he resumed planning the recon of Mira. If enough of her was intact, it could take them more than half a day, with two squads, to scour every inch of her looking for data, survivors, and why humanity’s beacon of hope had failed.

  Chapter Nine

  When he awoke, Carbonaro had already left. Whenever they had sex, she was off to the showers and back in her bunk in less than twenty minutes. Dickerson wished it was different, but he wasn’t sure she even had a romantic side. Didn’t matter. She was a fuck buddy, and he knew that’s as far as their relationship would ever get.

  Dickerson rose from the communal bed and stretched. The room had no windows, no terminals, nothing apart from an AI cam in the upper corner making sure violence or assault didn’t occur. He often wondered exactly how the AIs decided what was just sex and what was actually an assault. When someone like Carbonaro decided to knock boots, a few bruises here and there was expected. The woman was a damned reactor for passionate sex followed by the sorrow of an empty bed.

  He slowly dressed and checked the time. They’d fucked three times in the last hour and that was one less hour he had to sleep, real sleep, before reveille woke him for the load out. Dickerson sighed as he pulled on his boots. He checked to make sure he and Carbonaro had left nothing in the room, and stepped out. As soon as he closed the door, he heard the whine of the grav-plates cease and the sterilization routine kick in. The room would be ready for the next sexual rendezvous inside of a minute.

  Yawning, Dickerson walked down the hall toward the barracks. His coffin, the meter and a half-high cocoon of metal and plas-steel, awaited him with cool sheets and a warm blanket. He was looking forward to climbing in, sliding on the top, and reading from one of the classics. He was sure that by the time he managed four or five pages, he’d be fast asleep.

  He considered going to the rec area and having one last vape to help him sleep, but decided against it. Carbonaro ha
d worn him out. In a good way, of course, but he was exhausted. Between her and the exertion from the training exercise, he was ready to go to sleep.

  The hallways were practically deserted. He passed a few non-rates, mostly privates and PFCs, but they were locked in their own conversations, presumably headed for the conjugal areas. Day after tomorrow, he’d be back in space and headed way the hell past Pluto. These marines? They would undoubtedly spend more time marking time, being bored, and losing their edge. Trident Station only had three S&R teams and the rest of the marines at the large station were either newbies getting trained up, or marines that had fucked up so badly they’d been shunted to the outer reach for disciplinary reasons. If you weren’t S&R, Neptune was the last place you wanted to be stationed.

  Dickerson saw lights in the briefing room. He yawned again, his body trying to tell him it was time to hit the coffin, but he couldn’t resist. As quietly as he could, in case an officer or an NCO was inside, he breached the room’s threshold and peered in.

  Corporal Kali, still dressed in the same jumpsuit she’d worn to the briefing, stood before the large holo-display at the back of the room. On the screen was the model of an intact T-87. She seemed to be studying its every angle, her fingers waving in the air and rotating the diagram.

  “Excuse me, Corporal,” he said quietly.

  She stiffened almost imperceptibly and turned her head to look at him. “Dickerson. What is it?”

  “May I join you?”

  She blinked at him, thought for a moment, and finally nodded. Kalimura immediately refocused her attention on the holo. She waved her hand again and the pristine T-87 fell into the shape of the wreck they’d trained on that morning. She stepped back from the model. “What are you still doing up?” she asked without turning to him.

  Dickerson walked to the holo-display and stood to the left and slightly behind her. “Just wandering around. Was planning on hitting the coffin soon, but I’m a bit of a nosy bastard.” He nodded to the display. “Just wanted to see what you were doing with the T-87.”

  “Trying to get better,” she said. “Still trying to figure out what I should have done to protect my squad.”

  “You have the holo recordings?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  “Okay,” Dickerson said, “then let’s see them.”

  She commanded the display to replay the holos. The two marines watched in silence as the scenario played out. Dickerson watched as one of Kali’s fireteams crept around the starboard side. “Freeze,” he said to the display. The Corporal glanced at him in irritation, crossed her arms and waited. “Zoom in starboard side, iso view.”

  The display followed his commands, the image turning and twisting as the view changed from head-on to isometric. Kali’s fireteam, Wendt and Elliott, were frozen near the corner, their weapons pointed in front of them. Dickerson gestured at the pair of marines. “See that? See how they’re bunched up and not even bothering to check for threats above or behind?” Kali nodded. “Sloppy. Damned sloppy. The two of them know better.”

  “So why didn’t they get in position?” she asked.

  He locked eyes with her. “Because you didn’t tell them to.”

  Kali blinked. “What do you mean? If they know better, then why—?”

  “Because,” he interrupted, “you didn’t tell them to. You’re going to fight alongside both inexperienced and experienced marines. You’re going to command both as well. And these idiots,” he gestured to the display, “were waiting for instructions. Not because they don’t know any better, but because they know you don’t.”

  She opened her mouth to speak and closed it. He could see her mind turning over his words, testing his reasoning. “You’re telling me I need to treat everyone as though they don’t know any better.”

  He nodded. “You have to command, or they won’t command themselves. In a real situation, I guarantee you Wendt and Elliott would have done the right thing. But you can’t take that chance. Don’t assume the grunts know jack shit. That’s why you’re an NCO and we’re still non-rates. We’re tools,” he said, “learn to wield us, learn to use us, learn how to make us kill for you.” Dickerson waved at the display. “Play.”

  The scenario played out. Wendt and Elliott came around the side just in time for Dickerson and his partner to light them up. He knew that on the T-87’s port side, the other squad was getting a taste of paralysis rounds and humiliation. Kali looked as though she wanted to cover her eyes, whether in disbelief or embarrassment, he wasn’t sure.

  “And they’re dead,” she said quietly. “Just like that.”

  Dickerson nodded. “Just. Like. That.”

  She rewound the recording and the two of them viewed it from the port angle. They watched it play out in silence. He glanced down and saw her hands were clenched into fists, the fingers pale from the effort. Dickerson looked up just in time to watch the ambush. It was fantastic. Murdock and Copenhaver wiped out Kali’s port fireteam with such ease, it was hard to believe Carbonaro and Niro were even marines. They might as well have been kids and pretty dumb ones at that.

  Dickerson waited as the silence lingered. The Corporal kept replaying the port ambush from different angles, seeing how Cartwright’s marines had snuck through the wreckage to end up flanking her squad. Both Copenhaver and Murdock moved with incredible grace before sneaking up on the enemy and dispatching them with ease.

  She shook her head. “Should know better.”

  “Carbonaro does. Niro is a private. He’s green like you.” She glared at him when she heard the words, but he didn’t back off. “He’s new to z-g combat and doesn’t yet think in three dimensions. He had a high combat rating for ground assaults, but until arriving here at Neptune, he’d never been in any z-g scenarios.”

  “Carbonaro didn’t lead him.”

  “Correct,” Dickerson said. “Because she was waiting for you to lead. You wanted to send a nano-probe out. Taulbee nixed it to teach you a lesson.”

  “Which was?” she asked.

  “Maybe to impress upon you how important it is to assume nothing about your marines. They’re your charges. They’re your responsibility. And you have to think when they can’t or shouldn’t.” He paused and looked back at the screen. “You’re an NCO now, Corporal. You were fast-tracked for promotion. That means the brass has an interest in you. Hell, you could eventually end up commissioned for all I know. But for that to happen, you need to pass z-g combat training. Right?” She said nothing. “So start leading. You’re a smart woman, Corporal. Don’t let them make you feel dumb.”

  Her fists unclenched. She slowly turned her head to him, her eyes filled with anger. “Are you trying to say the rest of S&R Black thinks I’m dumb?”

  “No, Corporal,” he said. “With respect, you’ve been acting like it. You haven’t asked our opinions. You give orders, the squad follows them. If you ask them questions, they’ll respond. And as any green commissioned officer knows, you always listen to the NCOs. And for green NCOs? They have to listen to the non-rates. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes,” she said after a long moment. He waited for her to rip his head off, yell at him in that feminine growl of hers that sounded like a panther on a killing spree. He’d spoken a little too frankly for decorum’s sake, but it was the truth. She appeared to know it too. “Thank you, Lance Corporal Dickerson.”

  “You’re welcome, Corporal.”

  She stared at the display one last time before turning it off. The images disappeared leaving them alone in the empty briefing room. “Tell me, Dickerson.” He raised his eyebrows. “Why are you still a non-rate?”

  He laughed. “That’s a good question. Let’s just say I have a few black marks in my dossier.” He tapped his left shoulder. “You saw the scars today?” She nodded. “I’ve been to the brig three times, taken punishment twice, and was damned near thrown out of the marines. They don’t want someone like me anywhere near a command position.”

  “Insubordination? Slugg
ing an NCO?”

  He blinked. “You read my jacket.”

  She nodded. “Standard procedure for all—”

  “I know, Corporal,” he said. “I used to be an NCO, as I’m sure you read.” She said nothing. “I’m not a loose cannon,” he said, “but I don’t like being given orders that will obviously endanger my fellow marines, especially those under my charge.”

  She placed her hands in her lap, the fingers curling together. “So what happened?”

  Memories of that night popped into his mind. He pushed them away with effort before finally managing a smile. “That’s a story for another night. Right now, I need sleep.” He pointed at her. “And so do you, Corporal, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “You’re right. Reveille is going to suck.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Thank you again, Dickerson.”

  “My pleasure, Corporal.” He almost reached out to touch her shoulder, but stopped himself. At that moment, she looked more like a friend than an NCO. He had to remind himself of his station, not to mention hers. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m headed to my coffin.”

  “Of course,” she said with a wave.

  He spun on his heel and walked out of the briefing room. Dickerson felt her eyes on his back as he departed, wondering what she was thinking as he headed off to sleep.

  Chapter Ten

  The sprawling equipment bay stretched into what seemed like infinity. Although it was .5 km in length and .25 km in width, its 100-meter height made the building intimidating. Since Trident Station currently housed less than a fifth of its total capacity, its vast logistics and quartermaster warehouses were practically bare. The equipment bay seemed particularly empty.

  Rows of unused shelves stretched to the ceiling. The heavy Atmo-steel girders could support thousands of metric tons of mass, especially given that the grav-plates in the equipment bay were kept at .3g. Kali stared upward and found an entire shelf of ground-capable assault vehicles. Some were troop transports that could carry up to twenty marines. Others were hybrid combat tanks that carried a complement of three, while possessing enough firepower to level a small city. They all hung up there as if they weighed nothing. From her vantage point, they looked more like toys.