First to Fight (3 page)

“Get as flat as you can,” Procescu added, “get behind a ridge or a rock. This is going to be close.”

The double-mach-plus Marine Raptors screamed almost straight down from the heavens. When the lead aircraft was still little more than a rapidly growing, shiny speck in the sky, it was stitching a line of plasma bolts from the bottom of the gorge to halfway up the left slope, barely fifty meters from the trees. Just when it looked as if it was going to follow its bolts into the holocaust in the gorge, its forward vernier jets flamed, bouncing it back skyward. Before the lead aircraft finished its maneuver, its wingman twisted to stitch bolts up the right side of the gorge.

The bolts from the Raptors’ cannons were to the bolts of the assaulters what the assaulters were to hand-blasters. Each bolt vaporized whatever it struck, leaving a steaming hole nearly five meters in diameter. Molten rock pooled at the bottom of each crater. Gouts of lava flew everywhere; some landed harmlessly on rock and quickly solidified, some charred trees or set them ablaze, some killed men.

The wave of heat expelled by the explosions washed across the open and incinerated anyone in its path. The foliage on the nearer trees flashed vapor and the outermost line of trees burst into flame. For twenty-five meters into the trees, anyone standing was hit by a wall of superheated air that seared lungs and peeled off skin. Most of the bandits were in the open or standing in the first twenty-five meters of the tree line. Not all of the Marines were behind something that could deflect the heat wave.

The stunned survivors picked themselves up and took stock. The few bandits who survived were in full flight. But Procescu was dead, as were Lieutenant Kruzhilov and Staff Sergeant Chway and everybody who had been on the right flank with the platoon sergeant and the assaulters. LeFarge was gone—instantly vaporized—and the UPUD lay on the ground, now a thoroughly useless, half-melted chunk of slag. Half the Marines who began the day with the Bravo unit were dead. A quick survey told Bass ten times as many bandits had died in the fight.

‘That’s too damn many good Marines died today,” Bass said to himself.

Third platoon’s comm man had hidden behind a good—size boulder during the air attack, so both he and his UPUD survived. Bass used it to report the results of their fire mission to Flamer and to request pickup. While awaiting it, he looked at the black box with disgust. If the damn thing had worked right, they would have had air support before the bandits made their assault, and not so many Marines would have died.

Half an hour later the survivors of Purple Rover Bravo and the corpses of their dead—as much as could be found of them—were aboard hoppers, flying back to Battalion.

“You
what
?” Daryl George exclaimed in amazement. “No, no, no-no-no, you can’t blame me for your incompetence! No wonder the you-pud didn’t operate the way you expected it to. You aren’t supposed to separate the satellite units from the company you-pud.”

“Say again?” Bass demanded. His fists clenched and he took a step toward the manufacturer’s rep.

George spoke quickly. “Only the company command unit Universal Positionator Up-Downlink uplinks to the string-of-pearls. The others communicate through it. Once you got a ridgeline between the company headquarters and your Bravo unit, you lost satcomm. It became just a line-of-sight radio. It’s in the manual, right there for anyone to see: Appendix F, Annex Four, Section Q, Subnote Seventeen. All there. It’s all right there,” he shrilled. “What’s wrong with you people? Didn’t you read the manual? You would have known that was going to happen when you split groups if you’d read the manual.” George emphasized each word, pumping his fist up and down in time to the words. His normally sallow complexion reddened.

Sergeant Major Tanglefoot saw red but still put out a hand to restrain Bass. There was something more he wanted to know. “How did it give coordinates if it was ‘just’ a radio?”

“Through its inertial tracking system,” George answered quickly. “I don’t understand why it gave the reading it did—it’s a very reliable inertial system. Maybe your comm man wasn’t maintaining a regular pace. Maybe—”

Daryl George barely got out his second “Maybe.” Bass knew every man in his platoon by name, knew their personal histories. They were more than just faces to him, they were his men. Bass remembered the ashy deposit on the ground that had been LeFarge, who had wanted only one thing out of life: a commission in the Marines. And Bass knew he would have made a good officer. And Lieutenant Procescu. Bass had known him for fourteen years, since the young Procescu had first joined Bass’s squad as a PFC. The lieutenant hadn’t gotten his head down quickly enough and his brain had been cooked instantly, the skull cracked open like an overboiled egg, brain matter swollen several times its normal size protruding obscenely through cracks in the glaring skull.

“I told you you’d personally pay if one man was lost because this Mark One didn’t work as advertised,” Bass cut in, his voice like a blaster bolt. “It didn’t work and we lost a good many more than one man because of it.”

It took Sergeant Major Tanglefoot, three first sergeants, and two gunnery sergeants to pull Bass off George. But they’d given him a few seconds to work off his steam on the manufacturer’s rep before they’d intervened.

It ultimately took three operations to fully restore vision in George’s left eye, but the doctors declared him fit to be released from the hospital after only a week. Almost a year of intense physical therapy passed before he regained a reasonable degree of use of his right arm, though. His limp didn’t last quite that long. And nobody ever notices his oral prosthesis. When the Marine Judge Advocate explained the civil charges that could be brought against him for failing to ensure that the Marines were properly informed of the deficiency inherent in the UPUD Mark I, George decided to drop criminal charges against Bass.

So Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass wasn’t charged with attempted murder, which was precisely what he’d attempted; he was court-martialed for something many in the Confederation Marine Corps considered a much more serious offense: Article 32A(1) (b) of the Confederation Armed Forces Uniform Code of Military Justice, Conduct Unbecoming a Noncommissioned Officer. The court took extenuating circumstances into consideration before delivering its verdict. Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass was reduced one grade in rank. Staff Sergeant Charlie Bass was then assigned to duty with the 34th FIST on Thorsfinni’s World, a hardship post somewhere out in the nether reaches of Human Space.

CHAPTER

ONE

“What does your middle initial stand for?” the recruiting sergeant asked. “I’ve got to have your full name.”

From the age of eight, Joseph F. Dean despised the middle name his parents had saddled him with—Finucane, after his maternal grandfather. It was in that ill-starred eighth year of his life, on the first day of his enrollment at the New Rochester School for Gifted Children, that a ten-year-old upperclassman took to chasing him during recesses and after school, boxing his ears and kicking his rump, singing, “Fin-u-can, Fin-u-can, I can kick your new can!” Dean endured the torment as long as he could, and then one day he laid the bully’s head open with a field-expedient cosh made from a sock and a piece of concrete he’d found in the street. The next day he was expelled from the prestigious school. Joseph Finucane Dean was not only an intellectually gifted child, but in the art of attack and defense, a precocious one.

“During your initial interview, Mr. Dean, you did not give your full name,” the recruiting sergeant explained.

“Uh, Finucane, sir.”

“Is that with an E?”

“Yessir,” Dean answered, “terminal E,” he emphasized, and then felt embarrassed at maybe sounding too pedantic.

Joe Dean was sitting in the Confederation Marine Corps recruiting office as the result of a spontaneous decision on his part—especially since he’d always dreamed of joining the army, in the footsteps of his late father, who had been a highly decorated veteran of the First Silvasian War. He had lived and breathed army and could hardly wait until he finished college to enlist.

On a cold and blustery day, a too-familiar kind of day in the bleak and inhospitable city called New Rochester by its wearily cynical inhabitants, Joe Dean had felt good for a change. He walked lightly through the portals of the Federal Building and slipped into one of the interview booths reserved for the army recruiting office. Immediately, a computerized display activated and he found himself staring into the face of a young woman dressed in a pale green army uniform. She was very pretty, and he wondered idly if it was the image of the recruiter herself or one generated in cyberspace.

“My name is Sergeant Sewah Fernandez-Dukes of the Confederation Army Force,” the image on the screen announced. “May I have your full name?’ Dean felt a twinge of doubt, almost dismay. Somehow, the beautiful woman with the alluring voice just didn’t fit his idea of what it was he wanted to be if he donned a uniform.

“Uh, yes, ma’am: Joseph F— ”

“Gawdamn, Bulldog, I was so hungry I could’ve eaten the north end of a southbound
kwangduk
!” a powerful voice announced from the corridor at just that moment. Joe Dean stuck his head out of the booth and instantly the image of Sergeant Fernandez-Dukes disappeared from the screen. Two men, one short and squat and the other, the one who had just spoken, big—Dean estimated his height at about six-four and guessed he must weigh fully 250 pounds—were passing by. Both were dressed in impeccably tailored uniforms, bloodred tunic with a stock collar over navy-blue trousers. The bigger man’s sleeves were adorned by huge gold chevrons worn points up with rockers underneath, so many Dean couldn’t remember moments later how many there were. Other stripes marched up from the cuff in diagonal slashes to meet the lowermost rocker of the man’s rank chevron. A bloodred stripe slashed down the outside seam of the big man’s trouser leg, and a bronze collar device—an eagle rampant on a globe floating on a river of stars, a ribbon scroll in its beak—glinted powerfully in the light. Tucked under the big man’s right arm, the one closer to Dean, was a plain ten-inch stick of black ebony capped by the same eagle device. He carried the stick wedged tightly in his armpit, his right hand grasping the stick just below the eagle’s head.

The other man was short and squat with broad shoulders and thick arms on a short torso mounted on short, bow legs. He walked bent forward aggressively, his head thrust out while his arms pumped energetically back and forth, his hands balled into huge fists. Dean could see he talked out of one side of his mouth, and when he laughed, it sounded like a dog’s
rark! rark! rark!

The two men passed on down the corridor, talking and laughing loudly, their footfalls echoing sharply on the marble floor. They disappeared through a door marked
MARINES
.

Slowly, Joe Dean got up and followed them. Later, when he thought about that moment, it seemed as if scales had fallen from his eyes and everything he’d ever learned about the army, and all his dreams of joining it, just floated right out of his head. A man mesmerized, he drifted down the hallway past a long row of booths. Some were filled with young men and women earnestly talking to the computerized recruiters. He didn’t bother to look to see which services they were talking to. The three booths at the end marked
MARINES
were empty. Joseph Finucane Dean slipped quietly into the first one.

“Gotta get all these details straight,” Master Sergeant Riley-Kwami said, leaning back in his chair. He was the bigger of the two men Dean had seen in the hallway. From his neck hung a gold pendant on a midnight-blue ribbon speckled with silver diamonds, just like the one Dean’s father had won—except the Marine’s pendant bore the face of what looked like a Norse god instead of the Greek goddess on his father’s. He could not help staring at the decoration. The recruiter was being patient with Dean because the scores on Dean’s intelligence tests were among the highest he had seen since going on recruiting duty two years earlier.

The initial recruiting interview was completely automated. The interview booths worked up a complete physical profile on the prospective recruit while also checking, through other computer databases, every facet of the individual’s life. Even before Dean stepped out of the booth, the Marine Corps knew he’d been kicked out of school at age eight and why, as well as the state of enzyme function in his stomach. Within five minutes, as he calmly answered innocuous personal questions, he had been found fully qualified and a highly desirable prospect for enlistment. Also, the first entries in his service record had been completed.

“Elly, terminate,” Riley-Kwami said. “Elly’s our pet name for the recruiting program,” he explained. “I wanna shut her down for a few seconds so we can talk off the record. I’ll turn her back on when we get back to the official stuff. She might know how to spell your name, Mr. Dean, but you gotta speak up to make sure. Funniest things happen to you when you rely too much on all this razzle-dazzle technology. Goddamn thing should’ve caught that during the interview and asked you to spell out your middle name.” The big master sergeant shook his head. “Gotta get a tech man down here to fix that. Gawdamn army and navy’s got the money to run all this crap, but what we got is real crap. Was it mine or the Bulldog’s image on the computer screen in the interview booth?” he asked suddenly.

“Not you, sir. A heavyset man with two stripes over a gold star.”

“Corporal Bildong, known affectionately throughout the Corps as ‘Bulldog,’ for obvious reasons.” The recruiter nodded. “And Mr. Dean, don’t call me ‘sir,’ for two reasons: first, I’m not an officer—I work for a living. Sorry,” he added quickly as a look of bewilderment passed over Dean’s face. “Old service joke, Joseph. You’ll catch on. And second, because I’m a master sergeant and that’s how I like to be addressed—as Master Sergeant.”

Joe Dean smiled broadly, feeling comfortable and natural in Riley-Kwami’s presence. He wanted to be like him.

“Finucane?’ Riley-Kwami mused. There was something about this Joseph Dean that made the older man want to sit back and relax, tell a few war stories. He sensed they would not be wasted on this prospect. “A Gaelic name, isn’t it,” he said, a statement, not a question. “Ethnology is sort of a hobby of mine. You can get curious about that sort of thing in the Corps, because we get to so many places downstream where you gotta know such stuff. I mean
way
downstream, places the army never gets to unless there’s a serious war on. So I always wonder where people come from. Languages you get to know too. You should hear me cuss in Sino-Hindi. I picked that up on Carheart’s, when we were training the constabulary there, oh, twenty years ago now. Bulldog was my fire team leader then and he’s still a two-striper.” Riley-Kwami laughed shortly. “But a damn fine Marine, Bulldog. Carheart’s,” he sighed, an indication that there was more to duty there than training the constabulary. “Hell of a tour, Carheart’s. The
kwangduks
come up and shit right in your mess kit, you don’t watch real careful. But the girls . . .” He let his voice trail off. “ ‘Finucane,’ huh? A beautiful sound that name has to it, Mr. Joseph Dean.”

“My mother’s maiden name, si—uh . . . Master Sergeant.”

“You’re learning, kid, you’re learning,” Riley-Kwami said, shaking his forefinger at Dean. He looked at the young man’s red hair and freckles and decided he was probably Irish through and through. “We don’t see too many pure Anglo-Irish anymore. We don’t see many pure anybodies anymore. Look at me: Most of my ancestors came from West Africa back before the Second American Civil War. But some on my father’s side came from the Auld Sod during the Potato Famine. So my family name’s Riley-Kwami. You gawdamn Irish jumped all kinds of fences these past five hundred years!” Master Sergeant Riley-Kwami slapped his palm on his desk and roared with laughter. “Okay, Elly,” he said to the computer, “we’re on again.” Then to Dean, all business now, “Mr. Joseph Finucane Dean, do you hereby honestly and freely express the intention to enlist into the Confederation Marine Corps for a period of not less than eight years? And do you also acknowledge that if you are enlisted into this Corps, you receive no guarantees of training, schooling, or assignment beyond those stipulated by the Corps as in the best interests of the Corps?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then, Mr. Dean, be here tomorrow morning at eight hours for your formal enlistment and swearing in. When you come down here tomorrow, bring only the items of personal hygiene you can carry in a small bag. Dress casually for the weather, but wear only those clothes you do not want to keep. Do not even bring money, is that clear? You will sign some papers and then be formally sworn into the Corps by the Skipper. You will then be transported directly from here to a port of embarkation to be determined in the morning. Your next stop after that will be Boot Camp. Is all this clear to you, Mr. Dean? You will be given a full briefing before you depart tomorrow. Tell your family that by midday we will contact them with information on how they can get in touch with you. Mr. Dean, you will be leaving this world for a very long time. Your training will be very hard and very long and you will most likely be assigned to duty in some of the most disagreeable places in space. You may very well die there. Do you still intend to be here tomorrow at the appointed time?”

“Yes, Master Sergeant.”

“Elly, take a break.” Master Sergeant Riley-Kwami reached his big paw out to Dean. Joe Dean stood and shook it firmly. “You have made the right decision, Mr. Dean.” Riley-Kwami smiled. “It’s a hell of a tough life, but you’ll love it, Mr. Dean, you’ll love it!” He grinned fiercely. Behind Master Sergeant Riley-Kwami’s glittering eyes Dean thought he saw something, a wild spirit called up from the souls of long-dead tribal warriors or Gaelic clansmen that thrilled and frightened him at the same time. And then he knew: it was the thing that won you the midnight-blue ribbon with the silver diamonds.

Back at work, Joe Dean announced to his shift leader, Mr. Buczkowski, that he was quitting. “Butch” Buczkowski was a powerful man, physically hardened after nearly seventy years working out-of-doors on the lake. At eighty-two he was still a decade away from the mandatory retirement age. He shifted the cigar stub from one side of his mouth to the other before he spoke. “What the devil are you telling me, Joe?’ Buczkowski squinted hard at the young man. His cigar shifted one more time.

“I went down to the government building and enlisted in the Marines, Butch.”

Butch took the cigar stub out of his mouth and spat leaf fragments onto the ground before he stuck it back in. “Joe,” he said patiently, “do you have any idea what the devil you’re getting yourself into?”

“I have some idea,” Dean answered almost defiantly.

“The devil you do!” Butch exploded. “Joe, you ever been on an interstellar ship, ’specially a goddamned troopship? You’ll be cooped up in there thirty days before you get to that training world, whatever they’re calling it these days—it was known as Arsenault in my time, after the guy who first settled it—but we recruits called it Asshole, because that’s what the Confederation turned it into when they bought it from Arsenault’s descendants a hundred years ago and made a planetary training center outta it. Yeah. Those Arsenaults were some smart people, unloading all that worthless real estate on the Confederation. Yeah. I was there during the First Silvasian War, the one where your daddy got his medal.”

Butch was silent for a moment, regarding Dean. “When ya leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Jesus.” Butch sighed. “I’d give you some money, kid, but you know, there won’t be anywhere to spend it until you get your first liberty, and that probably won’t be for another year. Hell, they might not even give you any pay until you’re through with your basic training.”

Butch took the cigar from his mouth and removed more masticated leaf with a stubby index finger, which he wiped on his coveralls. “I was in the army, Joe, and our depot was in the temperate region of the planet. The Marines’ depot was in the tropics. We trained there for two months, and Joe, I was never so glad to see snow again! The dumb-ass Marines took most of their training in the tropical zone, except for the mandatory month on one of Asshole’s airless moon—we called it the Turd—where we learned to live in near zero gravity and all that shit.” Butch stuck the cigar back into the comer of his mouth.