“Remfie,” Fromm muttered. Not the smartest thing to say, calling an accredited ambassador a Rear-Echelon Motherfucker, but Heather appreciated the gesture. She understood; he was placing her in a position of trust, because he needed somebody to trust among the Embassy’s weenies, or what was likely to be a nearly impossible mission could cross out the ‘nearly’ part.
“He is,” she admitted with a rueful grin. “Still doesn’t explain why we got reinforcements nobody asked for, unless someone in higher has figured out a way to foresee the future and anticipated we’d be having problems.”
“No, it had nothing to do with local conditions,” Fromm said.
“Budgetary?”
“You got it. The Corps had to disband five Marine Expeditionary Units after Congress overrode President Hewer’s veto and initiated cutbacks. A lot of their personnel got discharged, but a few units ended up distributed in penny-packets around the galaxy, with their upkeep paid for by the Marine Security Detachment budget. The Corps didn’t want to lose the trained cadre those troops represented, and this way the State Department pays for most of their upkeep. The Congress-Rats love the State Department, so they didn’t cut its budget.”
“Ah.” Heather had suspected something along those lines, but delving in Marine Corps’ politics wasn’t her job. Her professional curiosity was largely focused on the affairs of non-humans. “Sneaky,” she added appreciatively.
“We’re going to need those units,” Fromm said. “The Lampreys got slapped down hard on Astarte-Three, but they aren’t done playing games. I was there. I…”
The Marine froze for a second, his eyes focused on something only he could see.
“True enough,” Heather said, breaking the awkward silence. Fromm snapped out of it and turned his attention back on her.
Her own info on interstellar affairs was more detailed than a Marine captain was cleared for, and she agreed with his estimate. Of course, Fromm’s knowledge was of a far more personal nature; he’d lost most of his platoon during the skirmish on Astarte-Three. Said ‘skirmish’ had decimated a Marine Expeditionary Unit and almost sparked a full-fledged war with the Lhan Arkh – better known as the Lampreys – and their client races, which included the few Snakes left in the galaxy.
“Of course, none of that matters here. We’re nowhere near the Lhan Arkh’s sphere of influence,” she concluded.
“Yeah. Higher thought this would be a nice quiet spot to stash me away for the time being.”
The events at Astarte-Three were on the public record, as were Captain Fromm’s promotion and commendations resulting from the incident. Something else, something unofficial, had led to his transfer to the ass-end of nowhere, not to mention a command below his new pay grade: a reinforced platoon did not a company make. She’d have to do a little digging to find out more.
The captain took a moment to check out the countryside as they drove on. The bucolic scenery was pleasant enough: Kirosha children in colorful knee-length tunics ran through orderly rows of gold-tinged Jusha; their antics were both work and play, serving to scare an assortment of flying critters away from the food-bearing plants. Jusha’s nut-like seeds were the principal staple of the continent, being used for everything from bread and noodles to a variety of alcoholic beverages, some of which were quite pleasant to human tastes, even the ones who also were violent emetics to human metabolisms. New visitors to Jasper-Five were warned not to consume any drinks before using their implants to run chem tests on them. A few practical jokers loved to offer newcomers the bad stuff. That didn’t apply to Marines, though: their digestive nanites would strip anything even remotely organic of any toxins and allow its nutrients to be absorbed. Marines could almost literally make a meal out of mud and cardboard.
“It looks peaceful enough around here,” Fromm said.
“It normally is. But there’s signs of trouble even in the country. Coming up in a couple minutes, as a matter of fact. The village to the left of the road.”
A makeshift camp had been erected near the village, haphazardly arranged canvas tents contrasting with the neat rows of wooden houses that served as the peasants’ permanent dwellings. A group of about twenty Kirosha, mostly males, were gathered on a fallow field nearby, practicing with spears, swords, throwing axes and weaponized farm implements. They all wore black tunics emblazoned with a distinctive sigil: a hand clenching a set of spiked brass-knuckles.
“Meet the Final Blow Society. Or the Order of the Coup-de-Grace, if you will,” Heather said as they drove by. A few of the black-clad warriors stopped their drill to look at the passing vehicles. Her hand instinctively reached for the shoulder holster under her jacket before she stopped herself. They hadn’t attacked her car on its way to the spaceport, and they probably wouldn’t attack them now, either. The armed peasants’ glares were definitely unfriendly, though.
“One of the rebel groups?”
“The largest one. They’ve been flocking to the capital over the last few days, allegedly to present their grievances to the Crown. They are suspected in participating in the arsons plaguing the shantytowns around the capital, but either their sponsors are protecting them or the authorities are choosing not to suppress them.”
“And all they’ve got is spears and swords?”
“Yes, for the most part. There’s been a few snipers at work in the slums, shooting at firemen, that sort of thing. The Crown has very strict laws on firearm ownership, so those weapons must have been stolen from the police or military.”
“When I see a bunch of people wearing the same colors, it says ‘military’ to me.”
“The Kingdom is willing to look the other way as long as they pretend to be a martial arts club.”
“Who’s paying for all of this?” Fromm asked. “The uniforms, the weapons, the food they eat? Can’t be cheap, having a bunch of peons running around playing with sticks instead of raising crops or digging ditches.”
“The food’s easy: they ask for ‘voluntary’ contributions from nearby villages, which come out of whatever is left after the royal tax men get their cut. The rest comes from whoever is sponsoring them. The Preserver faction is the likely culprit. It is composed mainly of high-ranking bureaucrats, the Magistrate class, along with a smattering of aristocrats.”
“Rats will be rats,” Fromm said.
The motorcade left the village and the gang of martial artists behind. The smoke pillars up ahead grew larger. Heather saw Fromm was leaning forward, his eyes narrowing.
“The fires are nowhere near our designate route,” she said.
The slums and the fires beneath the rising smoke were hidden from sight by a series of hills, each topped by a small fort and a watchtower. Fromm switched his attention to the fortifications as they drove past them. The ones nearest the road were relatively modern, their squatting, sloped walls designed to deflect cannonballs. Soldiers in colorful blue and pink uniforms and peaked caps milled atop the forts’ battlements; their gates were closed, and cannon and machinegun barrels poked behind the crenellations above, further protected by metal gun shields.
“Sixty-millimeter rifled artillery,” Fromm said, mouthing the specs his imp gave him. “Antiquated even by local standards, but almost as good as French seventy-fives from the second century BFC. And eleven millimeter heavy machineguns. Enough to penetrate standard infantry force fields after ten, fifteen direct hits. The locals really got far on their own, technologically speaking.”
“Good thing you won’t have to fight them, then,” she said.
“My job is to assess capabilities. Intent I leave to the politicians.”
“Fair enough. And although we aren’t formally allied with the Kingdom, we do have a trade agreement and full diplomatic ties.”
“You know who had all kinds of trade agreements and full diplomatic ties? France and Germany, just before they went to war with each other.”
“Sure, but neither France nor Germany could blast every enemy city to cinders.”
“
Neither can we, not right this second. That would take at least a corvette in orbit,” Fromm said as the car passed the line of fortifications and drove past the suburbs, white-washed houses with green triangular roofs and black-and-red trimming, surrounded by similarly-decorated walls. Road traffic was strangely sparse for this time of day, Heather noticed. “We have no Fleet assets in-system, last I checked.”
“There is the squadron at Lahiri. That’s eight hours’ warp-transit away. None of the nations on Jasper-Five have any space assets beyond the weather and communication satellites we sold Kirosha, none of which are armed. The local tech is below even what Earth had during First Contact. They are completely helpless against us.”
“How about the other Starfarers in the area? Our good friends, the Wyrms and the Ovals?”
“The Wyrashat and the Vehelians have trade concessions and an embassy and a consulate, respectively,” she said, pointedly using the two species’ proper names rather than the borderline-insulting slang terms. “They have no military vessels anywhere near us.”
“They’ve got about five hundred people apiece in the Enclave, though,” Fromm said after checking with his imp. “And a short company’s worth of soldiers each.”
“A Velehian security detachment, and a Wyrashat Honor Guard. Hardly a threat. Hold on,” she said as her imp chimed in with a call from the Ambassador. She answered it.
Javier Llewellyn’s disembodied head appeared in front of her, the image inputted directly into her visual cortex by her imp.
“I just received a request from Envoy Lisst,” the Ambassador said, not bothering with any pleasantries before getting to the point, as was his wont when dealing with underlings and other inconsequential people. “He’s returning from the Royal Palace following a meeting with Her Supreme Majesty and would like to join your convoy on the way back to the Enclave. Security concerns.”
“We can rendezvous with him in a few minutes, as long as the roads are clear,” Heather said.
“Do so. Convey my regards to the Envoy.”
Llewellyn’s projection disappeared.
Heather turned to Fromm. “Speaking of the Vehelians, their Envoy wants to join our little parade.”
“Guess he’s worried,” Fromm said.
“With good reason. Something is wrong.”
Heather contacted all the vehicles in the convoy; the contractors in the escort cars weren’t happy about the detour, but a call to the Caterpillar top exec took care of their complaints.
The street they were on was wide and straight, but the rest of the city was a maze of narrow, twisting little paths weaving between wood and brick buildings, mostly three and four-story structures with peaked roofs that were clearly attempts to ape the more prosperous houses in the suburbs. Things didn’t look normal, though.
When she’d left for the spaceport, the city of Kirosha had been teeming with people, mostly on foot or on bicycles and tricycles, along with a few internal combustion cars reserved for the well-to-do. The streets were curiously empty now; the few Kirosha she could see – men in their traditional wide trousers, flowerpot or pointy hats and colorful tunics, women similarly clad except for shawls covering their heads and shoulders instead of hats – were clearly in a hurry to be somewhere else. A few of them were even running, something the dignity-conscious Kirosha only did when in fear of their lives.
“Are we going too far out of our way to pick up the ETs?” Fromm asked.
“A few minutes. At least traffic won’t be an issue.”
The street they were on – Triumphal Thoroughfare One – led straight to the Palace Complex, series of buildings and monuments that had started out as a fortress on top of a hill and had grown in leaps and bounds as successive rulers put their own stamp on it. Its principal building was the Royal Ziggurat, a flat-topped four-hundred-foot tall pyramid off to the side of the original hill, painted a bright canary yellow the Kirosha considered beautiful and Heather found painful to look at. The complex was surrounded by its own fortifications, an old-fashioned curtain wall with towers placed every hundred feet and watchful Royal Guardsmen standing on its battlements. Far more guardsmen than normal, Heather noticed.
The main gates to the palace were still open, however, and two black-painted cars emerged from them, each vehicle flying a little banner festooned with the colorful dark-blue and gold sigils of the O-Vehel Commonwealth. Heather’s imp chimed again.
“Greetings and good health, Ms. McClintock,” Envoy Lisst’s projection said in perfect English, or rather, his implant did. Vehelian imps were more sophisticated than anything humans could manufacture themselves: their implanted nano-chips could access the Envoy’s thoughts and translate them into any of the seventeen Prime Languages of the known galaxy. Just as well; to human ears, Vehelian speech sounded like an unintelligible collection of growls and hisses.
Vehelian heads looked like large eggs, their noses and mouths so flat they appeared to be drawn on their surface; their only other facial features were rows of little bumps that the human eye could barely discern but which were the primary way for the species to recognize each other and to express emotions. Heather was a trained exo-diplomat; she could read the slight discoloration in the upper row of bumps over the Envoy’s eyes as clear signs of worry.
“And good health to you,” she said. “We welcome the chance to render assistance. Please follow my car, and we will hopefully reach the Enclave without incident.”
“May hope become fact, and bless you for your kindness.”
“You honor me,” Heather said. Most VIPs wouldn’t have personally addressed a mid-level flunky like herself, but the Vehelians were rather informal in such matters, which made them a rarity in Starfarer society.
Her imp talked to their imps, and the two limos put themselves in the center of the formation, between Heather’s car and the bus, driving single file as they turned from Triumphant Thoroughfare One to the Road of Good Fortune, which would lead them straight to the Enclave. Problem was, there were a few questionable neighborhoods along the way.
As the motorcade left the palace grounds, it travelled through more built-up areas, residential buildings with shops on their lower levels, tightly packed except for the occasional park or plaza opening little clearings in the warren-like mass. One such plaza was empty; gone were the usual bunch of peddlers, laborers and beggars. Drums and gongs started playing as they drove by, however, and she spotted men in black tunics and brass-knuckle symbols coming out of nearby buildings. Coming out at a run.
“Trouble,” she said, moments before a rocket-propelled grenade struck the lead car.
Three
Year 163 AFC, D Minus Ten
The new skipper showed up just in time to ruin Lance Corporal Russell ‘Russet’ Edison’s card game. The death and mayhem that followed were just par for the course.
In Russell’s experience, all officers had lousy timing. The former CO of Third Platoon had been an okay guy for a First Lieutenant, but he’d managed to walk right in front of a speeding Ruddy motorcar. Sad way to buy the farm, run down like a dog on the street, but those were the breaks.
“Shuffle up and deal already,” Russell told fellow Lance Corporal Conroy, who was wrinkling his nose and casting glances out the window of the break room. Russell understood Conroy’s worries. He could smell the not-so-distant fires, too. The Ruddies were aliens, but their atmo and chemistry were Class Two, just like humans, even though they looked more like animated red-skinned dolls than people. Their food was even edible, not that was an issue for Marines. The fires that were burning outside the big city smelled just like they would in a human world.
And just like in a human world, the smell of arson was the smell of war. Things were getting hairy on Jasper-Five.
Until recently, their current deployment hadn’t been too bad. Russell didn’t like having his platoon out by itself, but life away from a regular base had its benefits if you weren’t married or otherwise encumbered. The food was damn better, for one;
the Marines didn’t have a mess hall, so they ate at the Embassy’s cafeteria, where the chow was miles better than any tray-rats he’d ever had on base. And there were no MPs to worry about, just a bunch of ‘constables’ who treated the Marines with kid gloves. The platoon sergeant ran a tight ship, granted, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once, and that meant the more creative grunts like Russell and his gang had plenty of opportunities for extracurricular activities.
Conroy shook his head and finished shuffling the cards. Russell had checked the deck himself, making sure there were no marks on them. Using your imps to cheat was a tradition as old as the Warp Marine Corps itself. The same micro-implants that let the soldiers do all kind of nifty things to the enemy also made them hell to supervise in peacetime. Even the fact that imps could record every second of your life wasn’t enough to stop them; there were ways around that, if you had a creative mind.
“Smells like the Ruddies are having a party,” said the one private at the table. PFC Raymond Gonzaga was a little rat-faced guy who’d been busted down the ranks a good dozen times. Good guy when the chips were down, but a complete disaster during peacetime.
Russell was like that, too. He’d made it all the way to E-5 before he’d been caught trying to catch a ride back to base while naked, drunk as a skunk and in the company of a couple of bug-eyed tentacle-waving aliens – he never found out what species – who were also drunk. The details of the escapade remained hazy (he’d disabled his imp’s recorder at some point and whatever he’d taken had done a number on his short-term memory), but it’d earned him several Ninja Punches, including a demotion back to Private First Class.
Decisively Engaged (Warp Marine Corps Book 1) Page 4
