The flight back to orbit was much less violent than the descent had been. The Essay docked in a welldeck. When atmosphere was restored and the ramps opened for him to exit, he was met by a burly chief who was chewing on a stub of one inch hemp cable, the same way Hummfree had seen other chiefs chew on cigar butts.
"Your name Hummfree?" the chief growled.
"Sure is, Chief. What's going on?"
The chief stuck out a hand that could well be called a paw and growled, "I'm Chief Nome. Welcome to the Grandar Bay, the worst assignment in the Confederation Navy. Your ass belongs to me."
Chapter Eleven
"Come on, Sergeant Ratliff, you can tell me, you know I won't blab it all around," Corporal Dean said. He and his squad leader were alone in the squad leaders' quarters.
"Even if I believed you wouldn't blab," Ratliff said without looking up from the gear he was cleaning, "which I know better than to believe, I wouldn't tell you because higher-higher has decreed that you aren't cleared to know."
"But--"
"Besides which," he looked at Dean, "higher-higher hasn't bothered to enlighten the best squad leader in the FIST."
Dean opened his mouth to say, I don't care if Sergeant Linsman doesn't know, it's you I want to hear from, but thought better of it--Ratliff didn't look all that happy about the cleaning he was doing and just might welcome a chance to take it out on one of his fire team leaders. Instead he asked, "What about Gun--ah, Ensign Bass?"
Ratliff shrugged and turned back to his cleaning. "He says he doesn't know either." He paused, looked at what he was doing, then said, "Is your fire team ready to pass an inspector general's inspection?"
"It's not an IG. The commandant himself was just here. An IG wouldn't come right after the commandant."
"That doesn't answer my question, Corporal."
Corporal. His squad leader had addressed him as "Corporal." That must mean he was getting annoyed. "Just about, Sergeant."
"'Just about'? They better be completely ready by the time I finish here and go to conduct my own inspection."
"Ah, right. They will be, Sergeant Ratliff." He hurriedly headed for his fire team's room.
"He doesn't know," he told Lance Corporal Godenov and PFC Quick when he entered the room. "And he's pissed. He's coming to conduct an inspection, so let's make sure everything is ready." He began inspecting his men's uniforms and equipment to double-check that everything was shipshape.
An hour later Ratliff looked in.
"Oop," Godenov said. He was the first to see the squad leader.
"We're ready for your inspection, Sergeant Ratliff," Dean said sourly. He thought it was very unfair that Ratliff was going to inspect them now.
"You sure you're ready?" Ratliff asked.
"Yes, Sergeant."
Godenov and Quick stood at attention.
"Well, I'm too damn hungry to conduct an inspection. I want to go into Bronnys and scarf a reindeer steak, and wash it down with a few gallons of Reindeer Ale. You want to come with me? We'll see who else wants to go." He looked at Godenov and Quick as though seeing them for the first time. "What's the matter with you, Corporal? Chow call's already been sounded, dismiss your men."
Godenov and Quick broke into smiles, relieved they didn't have to stand an inspection.
Dean glared at Ratliff. "One of these days I'm going to be a sergeant too, you know," he said. "Then I won't have to put up with this mickeymouse from you anymore."
Ratliff nodded. "Yeah, one of these days when no one's looking you just might sneak by and make sergeant. By then, of course, I'll be a staff sergeant. And you know, a staff sergeant can dump a lot more mickeymouse than a sergeant. Come on if you're coming, I'm hungry. And you two, get out of my barracks."
Godenov and Quick scrambled to change into their civvies; just because they weren't going with their squad leader and fire team leader didn't mean they were staying on base.
Big Barb's, a combination ship's chandler, bar, restaurant, and bordello in Bronnysund, the town just outside the gates of Camp Major Pete Ellis, was third platoon's unofficial shore liberty headquarters. Nearly every night when they weren't on a field exercise or a deployment, at least a few members of the platoon could be found there; on weekends very often they could all be found in Big Barb's. Which made it very convenient for the duty NCO if an emergency arose and they had to be called in from liberty.
Big Barb's was where Sergeant Ratliff and Corporal Dean--along with Corporals Dornhofer and Pasquin, the squad's other two fire team leaders--headed when they left the barracks. So did Lance Corporal Godenov, PFC Quick, and the rest of the squad, but the four NCOs formed one group and the junior men another. Nobody minded the exclusionary nature of the caste system; there were other nights when all the members of a fire team--or even the entire squad--went on liberty together without regard for rank.
Second squad and guns were already in Big Barb's when first squad showed up--neither Sergeant Linsman nor Sergeant Kelly had felt as much compulsion to overclean his gear as Ratliff had, so they'd sounded liberty call for their squads earlier.
"Joseph!" a familiar voice gleefully shrieked.
Dean grinned and shouted, "Carlala!" He opened his arms to the broadly smiling young woman who ran at him. He didn't notice the local fisherman from whose lap she had just leaped. The fisherman quickly took in the number of Marines who'd just entered Big Barb's, added that number to the number already there, and wiped the scowl off his face and sat back down. He wouldn't have to go alone into a fight for Carlala's favors, but there were simply too many Marines who'd just returned from a major campaign. People might get killed. Besides, another comely lass was winking at him. He winked back and put Carlala out of his mind.
Dean didn't brace himself when Carlala threw herself into his arms--why should he? She was slim, almost skinny, so she couldn't hit with much of an impact.
Or so he thought.
Carlala met Dean with enough momentum to stagger him, and only Pasquin's quick reflexes and his shoulder kept the corporal from toppling backward. As it was, being hit fore and aft drove all the air from Dean's lungs and he had to quickly extricate himself from her kiss to keep from being suffocated.
"Carlala!" he wheezed.
"Joseph, you're back!" she squealed, then said with a pout, "Don't you like my kisses anymore?"
"I love your kisses!" he said, and planted one on her--but made sure he took a deep breath first. "Let's find a table," he said when they came up for air.
Carlala looked back at him and leaned into his face. "Not a room?" she asked, her lips almost brushing his.
"I'm hungry--" he began, then stopped when her lips pressed against his and her tongue darted between them. "Well, maybe..." he gasped when she broke away. As she led him away, he managed to maintain enough awareness of his surroundings for his eyes to pop when he saw Corporal Kerr sitting like an Oriental potentate in a captain's chair.
The reason Kerr looked like an Oriental potentate was the two lovely young women sitting on the arms of the captain's chair. Each had an arm around his shoulders and held a schooner of ale for him in her other hand. Both were busy alternately buzzing into his ears and pecking at the sides of his face.
Kerr looked mildly embarrassed by their attentions. They were Frieda and Gotta, one blond and fair, the other dark and sultry. At the blowout party Brigadier Sturgeon had thrown for the FIST on its return from Kingdom, Big Barb had assigned them to bring moody Kerr all the way back to the living. Since they hadn't been satisfied with their progress that night, they assigned themselves the job of making him forget the time when he'd almost died from his wounds. They managed to get part of the story from him that night, and the rest from others in third platoon who'd been with him when they all thought he was killed.
The two were enough of a distraction that Kerr wasn't brooding on the subject of death as often as he had been. Corporal Pasquin understood Kerr's mood. He hadn't been with third platoon when Kerr was almost killed, but he'd ha
d his own ghost to lay to rest, and fully approved of what Frieda and Gotta were doing.
Not that Pasquin was paying much attention to Kerr's healing; he was fully occupied himself. He sat at a table with a two-inch-thick reindeer steak already cut into bite-size chunks, devouring it, along with a couple of baked potatoes swimming in butter and a double-size serving of broccoli on the side.
Pasquin was sitting sideways at the table because Erika was perched on his knee. Erika grasped a schooner of ale in both hands, which she tipped for him every time he wanted a quaff. She giggled each time, because some Reindeer Ale dribbled down his chin onto his shirt with every gulp.
Pasquin laughed right along with her, it is funny, he thought. He also thought it would be funnier when he simultaneously chewed on a particularly juicy chunk of steak and butter-drowned potato, and slobbered a kiss that left juice and butter dribbling down her face onto her chest.
Erika gave out a startled laugh, then yelped as ale sloshed from the schooner and drenched the front of her blouse.
"Oh, what have you done?" she wailed. "Now I have to bathe and change my clothes."
"Gimme a few minutes to finish here and I'll help," he replied as he shoveled more food into his mouth.
"Oh, Raoul, you say the nicest things," she breathed as she leaned close to his ear.
He yelped and sprayed the table with a mouthful of half-masticated steak and broccoli when her teeth sharply nipped his earlobe.
Across the table, with as much savoir faire as he could muster, Claypoole used a napkin to pluck a globule of Pasquin's ejecta off his shirtfront.
"I'm sorry, Jente," he apologized to the young woman who sat next to him. "You'll have to excuse my friend. He was in Recon before he came here and doesn't know how to behave in polite society."
Jente looked amused rather than offended. She lay a hand on his wrist and said, "It's all right, Rock, I understand. He's a Marine infantryman, just recently returned from a major operation where he was wounded again. That gives a man both a need and a right to let off steam." She gave his wrist a squeeze before removing her hand. "Very few men can display as much gentility as you do after an experience like that." She had no idea what the operation had been or who the foe was--nobody in Big Barb's except the Marines did--only that the fighting had been fierce and the casualties heavy. "It's a marvel that you can be so sweet after an experience like that must have been."
Claypoole preened at her praise. It was the things she said, things like that, that allowed him to be so polite and "sweet" when what he really felt like doing was letting off steam the same way Pasquin was. But Jente was so...so...He couldn't describe what she was, only what she wasn't. She wasn't loud and raucous and free with her body like the other young women in Big Barb's. Of course she wasn't; she wasn't one of Big Barb's girls.
She was one of the young women from Brystholde, a village forty kilometers down the coast, who had been brought in to help the Marines party when they got back from Kingdom. Gunny Thatcher had been very firm when telling the Marines of Company L that the young women from the remote villages who came to party were nice girls, and woe to the manjack who didn't treat them the way he'd want his sister to be treated. Of course, some of those young women had ideas of their own that had absolutely nothing to do with being treated like anybody's sister.
Jente was one who wasn't interested in being treated as if her big brother was watching. At twenty-four, she had decided it was time she got married. She wasn't interested in the fishermen from Brystholde or the other villages in the area, so she'd gone to the party to see if the Marines were any different from the men she knew. In ways she couldn't describe, this Rachman Claypoole was not only different from the men she knew at home, he was different from the other Marines. She knew he didn't behave any better, because she'd seen him when he didn't know she was there, and he was just as loud and reckless as the rest. Except when he was with her.
When he was with her, his behavior changed radically. He was nice, he was gentle, he was attentive, he was...sweet. No other man had ever treated her the way he did; it seemed he never wanted whatever he could get from her, but instead wanted to give her what she wanted.
What she wanted most, though, was something she hadn't told him. She wanted a husband. Rock--she thought that nickname was so charming for such a gentle man--was the best potential husband she'd met. There was only one thing wrong about him in that regard. Once in a while he had to go away, and every time he had to go, there was a chance that he'd come back maimed or crippled--or that he wouldn't come back at all. If he got out of the Marine Corps at the end of his enlistment and settled on Thorsfinni's World, that would be no problem. Or she could go with him wherever he wanted to go; that would be fine with her as well.
But he wasn't going to get out of the Marines at the end of his enlistment. She didn't understand why, all she'd managed to get out of him on the topic was, "I'm in for the duration." She'd asked around and found out all the Marines of 34th FIST were "in for the duration"--whatever that meant.
Well, he seemed confident about his ability to come back whole every time he went on a deployment, and since she first came to meet the Marines of 34th FIST, she'd met several who'd gone on far more deployments than he had and come back whole from every one of them.
Which left only one barrier to marrying him.
She leaned close and whispered, "I'm through eating, you're through eating. Do you think your friends will be upset if we leave?"
Claypoole looked at the other Marines of third platoon. Would they mind? They were all so busy eating, drinking, or paying attention to their women he doubted anybody would even notice if he and Jente left.
"If we leave quietly, we'll be okay," he whispered.
They took each other's hand as they stood and headed for the exit.
Outside, the closing door cut off the roar of Marines on liberty, dropping them into near silence. Their ears briefly rang from the abrupt absence of loud noise.
After a few steps Jente quietly asked, "When will you be promoted to staff sergeant?"
Claypoole barked a short laugh. "I have to be promoted to sergeant first, and I haven't been a corporal for very long." He shook his head at the silly notion. He would have been appalled if he'd made the connection: Marine Corps regulation forbade marriage for enlisted men under the rank of staff sergeant, a fact that Jente had found out.
"Are you interested in becoming an officer?" she asked, pulling his arm close so it pressed against her breast.
"Me, an officer?" Neither did he make the connection there; he was distractingly aware of the warm pressure of her breast against his arm.
In the background they heard Big Barb's bellow, audible even through the soundproofing of her outer walls, "Vere's Charlie? I vant Charlie!"
They couldn't hear Sergeant Kelly's roar in reply: "Charlie's an officer now, he doesn't pull liberty with the likes of us enlisted pukes!" Kelly's roar was loud enough to be clearly heard above the rattle of both of his squads' guns, but he wasn't nearly as loud as Big Bertha in full voice. Big Bertha came by her name honestly. She was huge, with rolls and slabs of fat around her belly, under her chin, hanging from the backs of her arms, and sliding off everywhere else they could establish a hold.
"I don't care Charlie's no stinking ossifer, I vant him!" Big Bertha's rolls of fat bounced and jiggled with every word she shouted, and she shimmered hard enough to knock away anyone who stood too close when she spoke up.
The Marines laughed uproariously. Most of them knew what then-Gunnery Sergeant Bass had done to secure Big Barb's big upstairs private room for the last promotion party he'd thrown.
"You can 'vant' all you want," Dornhofer roared, "but Katie might have something to say about whether or not you get him!"
"Katie! Katie ain't half da voman I am! Katie ain't a turd da voman I am!"
"Big Bertha, nobody's anywhere near as much woman as you are!"
Chapter Twelve
Admiral of the St
arry Heavens Orange finally figured it out. It was inevitable that he would, of course. Members of his staff, along with Commander Happiness and his top staff, had said it either directly to him or in his presence often enough that it finally sank in--just deeply enough for him to believe the idea originated with him, of course.
"We've tracked that pirate ship three times," he announced to his staff and Happiness in the Goin'on's senior officers' wardroom, which he'd commandeered as his operations center, "and each time she came out of her jump from 43q15x17-32 in the same place, made the same turn, and then we lost her. What we'll do this time is place picket ships along her vector. One of them will have to spot her when she returns to Space-3, and we'll get a fix on her next vector and follow that scoundrel to her home." He positively beamed at the assembled officers. His staff, knowing him well enough, heaped fulsome praise on the admiral for the brilliance of his idea.
Admiral Orange cut off his beam and glowered at Happiness, the only officer in the wardroom who hadn't thrown glory at him. "Do you have a problem with that, Commander?"
Happiness did his best not to quail under Orange's glare. "Not with the basic plan, sir. I think the basic plan is exactly what we need to do, and I wish we had done it earlier. But we only have six starships, including a tug. That's not nearly enough to form a proper picket line--the Broken Missouri can return to Space-3 anywhere along a twenty-light path."
Orange grunted. Happiness's praise of his brilliant idea wasn't as enthusiastic as his staff's, but the Goin'on's captain had praised it nonetheless. And he pointed out the one flaw in it, a flaw his own staff had evidently not seen. He briefly glowered at them, then turned back to Happiness and bestowed a beatific smile on him.
"Captain Happiness, that is one of the benefits of being Chief of Naval Operations for a peace-loving world. The citizenry, and most of the government, is happiest with its military when its military is out of sight. I can order out the entire fleet for this picket duty, and everyone will be so happy to see our ships out of planetary space that nobody will pay much attention to where we've gone or what we're doing, so long as I don't tell them we're invading a sovereign world. Which, of course, we aren't, although we may invade a pirate den when we find where that pirate ship makes planetfall." He beamed again.
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