Starfist FR - 03 - Recoil (22 page)

adorned with a flowered vase and cup. She knelt gracefully next to the Over Master and placed the tray next to his knee. The third female brought a tray with two steaming pots. She approached the Grand Master, bowed low at the waist, and extended the tray to the kneeling female, who took one of the pots and poured a small amount of hot beverage from the pot into the delicate cup. After lowering the pot to her tray, she picked up the cup and drank it dry. The Grand Master watched with seemingly minor interest and, after a couple of moments during which the kneeling female showed no signs of distress, gestured for her to pour the cup full, and for the female with the tray now bearing one pot to deliver it to the Over Master’s servant. The Grand Master’s servant poured beverage into the cup and raised it in the fingertips of both hands, lifting it to where he could easily reach it. She kept her eyes averted downward. Instead of taking the offered cup, the Grand Master growled at the Great Master, instructing him to assemble the staff; now that the Earthman Marines had finally arrived, it was time to begin planning to annihilate them. While the Grand Master was instructing the Great Master, the Over Master drank deeply and accepted a second cupful of the steaming beverage, which he sipped more sedately. He listened intently while the Grand Master instructed him to gather more intelligence on the numbers and disposition of the Earthman Marines. Some minutes had passed since the Grand Master’s servant had sipped from his cup, and neither she nor the Over Master were displaying any signs of distress. The Grand Master finally accepted the cup and drank from it.

NINETEEN

Briefing Room, Headquarters, Task Force Aguinaldo, Camp Swampy, Arsenault The commanders and staff officers of Task Force Aguinaldo perspired quietly as the huge overhead fans languidly stirred the stultifying air. Nobody noticed the sticky heat. All eyes and ears were on General Anders Aguinaldo. He was not a big man and, in his sweat-stained utilities, he looked no different than the dozens of other officers crammed into the big hall. But when the short brown man opened his mouth he seemed to grow in size. He spoke with a powerful voice using a soldier’s vocabulary, and he had the uncanny ability to appear to be looking each officer straight in the eye as if he were speaking to each man and woman personally, saying to them as individuals, “You are good enough to be on my team so I know you’re good enough to make this work.”

“People, I have called you here to announce the next phase in the preparation of this task force for battle. You have all done a fine job training and reorganizing your respective commands and I hereby commend all concerned.” The Marine four-star smiled. “And I expect official commendations to be showing up for signature in my office for those of your personnel who were most outstanding in this long and sometimes painful process. Now we are ready to put this task force through its paces.

“We are all going into the field, people, every last one of us. I have scheduled the first of several field training exercises de-

signed to test the ability of your commands to work together under simulated combat conditions. I don’t want to hear anybody refer to these exercises as ‘war games.’ War is no game, as those of us who’ve been there know. So-called war games are plotted by eggheads far removed from battle, men who think they know their asses from their elbows—but they don’t know jack shit about war, off in their ‘war rooms’ playing with their sand tables and virtual battlefield arrays. We won’t have any of that here.”

Colonel Raggel, sitting in the back of the room with Sergeant Major Steiner, whispered, “This is going to be good, Top!”

“I have arranged for permanent-party units stationed here on Arsenault to be the aggressors. They have been fully trained on all known aspects of Skink tactics. They’ll be out there somewhere,” he said, gesturing at the surrounding jungle, “waiting for you to come and get them. I worked personally with those people to set up their mission. Nobody on my staff has a clue about who they are or how many of them there are or where they are. I’ve also arranged with Arsenault Training Command to flood the operational area with an ‘indigenous’ population that has the express mission of getting in your way. . . .”

“We’ll straighten that out,” Raggel whispered.

“. . . When this operation kicks off, General Cumberland, my chief of staff, will assume overall command of the task force. I will remain loose and go out with the umpires. Your job will be to work together, use your reconnaissance and intelligence assets, find the enemy, fix him, and fight him. You will learn to work together.

“We still have a few units that haven’t yet been briefed on the enemy’s capabilities and operational tactics.”

“That’s us,” Raggel whispered.

“Most of you have. When every command is up to speed on that this exercise will commence. We’re going to call it Operation Slogger because that’s what you’ll all be doing out there. I expect it to last ten days. Every swinging Richard and every pendulous Jane will deploy to the field, including my headquarters staff.

“I am going to leave you now with General Cumberland. He will give you the order of battle for this exercise. Get to know your sister units. Liaise, people, liaise. Next time we meet it’ll be for the postoperation debriefing. It’s going to be a rough two weeks but hardly as rough as actual combat will be, and when we come to that you will be ready and you will kick some Skink ass.”

Lecture Hall, Seventh Independent Military Police Battalion, Fort Keystone

“Tennnns-hut!” Command Sergeant Major Steiner bellowed as General Aguinaldo, followed immediately by Colonel Raggel and a Marine corporal marched onto the stage.

“Take your seats, men, take your seats,” Aguinaldo said, standing at the podium. Large circles of perspiration stained the armpits of his utilities but nobody noticed; everyone perspired in this region of Arsenault. Fans slowly stirred the hot, humid air in the lecture hall. The men of the Seventh Independent MPs were used to it.

“Men, I apologize that it’s taken me this long to get around to visiting you, but I have been unavoidably detained elsewhere.”

He smiled and a murmur of laughter circulated through the hall. He liked what he saw there, five hundred men under arms, fit, alert, ready for action. He nodded appreciatively at Colonel Raggel. At that the men broke into a thunderous cheer.

“I also apologize, gentlemen, that we couldn’t have given you today’s lecture a lot earlier.” He nodded at the Marine corporal sitting just behind him on the stage. “Everyone in this task force is receiving the same course of instruction but, since we don’t have that many men with the experience Corporal Wade here has, we just had to work our way to you. The maneuver elements had to come first because they’re going to have first contact with the enemy. That’s not to denigrate you or anybody else in this

task force, but you all know the infantry leads the way. Corporal Wade will be with you for several days. During that time he will impart to you everything we know about our enemy. He has seen that enemy up close and personal. Pay very close attention to what he’s going to tell you.

“Now, you all know we’re going to have a big field training exercise soon, a major maneuver operation. I am going to put this task force through its paces, see how we operate as an army in a combat zone. The Seventh MPs will have a role in these maneuvers.” Aguinaldo smiled again. “I’ve arranged to have several thousand recruits from the training depots on Arsenault participate as refugee role players and it will be your job to process them and keep order among them and”—here he paused, grinning—“do anything else that might pop up. This is to prepare you to deal with our own people if and when the Skinks show up in force somewhere in Human Space. If—make that when—we find their home world, your role there will be to keep our men from killing them all.” At this the crowd burst into a long roar of cheering and whistling. Aguinaldo, grinning, held up his arms for quiet. “Well, I like your spirit.” He laughed and the cheering broke out all over again. When the men were silent at last, Aguinaldo said, “All right, men, I’m going to withdraw and leave the stage to Corporal Wade. He has seen the Skinks.

“Men, you’ve done a good job and I’m proud to have the Seventh Independent Military Police Battalion as a part of my task force.” To the men assembled in the hall that was the finest compliment anyone had ever paid them. All the embarrassment and disgrace that had followed them from Ravenette, the years of neglect and lack of discipline that had marked them as the

“renegade battalion” at home, all that vanished at Aguinaldo’s words and every man present knew that when the task force finally went up against the enemy, he would have the chance to squash some Skink ass.

“Tennnnns-hut!” Sergeant Major Steiner roared. The men jumped to attention. General Aguinaldo and Colonel Raggel left the hall. “Awrrrright, ladies,” Steiner said, “at ease. This here is Corporal Wade and he is in charge here until he’s finished with you. I catch anybody goofing off or dozing during these lectures—you officers excepted, of course—I am gonna kick his ass for him.

“Now here’s how this is gonna work: First and Second Companies remain seated. Today’s your day, you lucky bastards. I guarantee ya, when Corporal Wade gets through today you’ll never go near swampy ground again.” He grinned evilly at Corporal Wade who nodded grimly. “Third and Fourth Companies will report here at zero-eight hours tomorrow. Staff and support, you get it the third day. Awrrright, move, move, move!”

After the excused personnel had left the hall, Steiner turned to the Marine. “Corporal Wade?”

The Marine stepped to the podium. “My name is Corporal Manning Wade of the Twenty-sixth Fleet Initial Strike Team. I was on Kingdom.” With that he removed his tunic and exposed his left side to the audience. This drew a collective gasp.

“These scars are mementos of a Skink acid gun I ran into on Kingdom.” He grinned as he put his tunic back on. “Another graft and I’ll be as good as new. Before we deploy, you will all be issued acid-resistant field uniforms. But, gentlemen, I show you this so you will have some idea of what we were up against. Rest assured, however, the enemy knows our weapons too. They learned about them the hard way. Those Skinks don’t fool around and they don’t worry about getting themselves wasted. They are experts at sneaking up on you and pulling a kamikaze attack. Next time we meet up with them you can expect they’ve compensated for our superior firepower. Meanwhile, I’m going to teach you everything we know about them, so settle back, smoke ’em if you got ’em, and enjoy the show.”

Nobody in the Seventh MP Battalion talked about anything for the next three days but the Skinks. Corporal Manning Wade, Confederation Marine Corps, was the most popular man in the battalion during that time.

Puella Queege and Sergeant Oakley sat together during the lecture on the third day. By then it was clear to her and everyone else in the battalion how deadly serious the threat from the aliens was and how important their mission was in support of Task Force Aguinaldo. Each man in the battalion knew perfectly well that he’d been sent to Arsenault by his army command to get rid of him, how much work had gone into shaping up the battalion, and how abysmally shortsighted army command back on Lannoy really was about the threat the Skinks posed to all of humanity. Each man in the battalion was very proud that he had qualified to remain part of the task force. Those Colonel Raggel had sent home had bragged before they left that they were getting the better part of the deal, but the men remaining behind came to understand that they’d been given a great honor.

“Goddamn,” someone was heard saying after the first day’s lecture, “glad we got them Marines on our side!”

Headquarters, Task Force Aguinaldo, Camp Swampy General Aguinaldo’s field training exercise, or FTX, involving two hundred thousand men operating over ten thousand square kilometers of jungle, was not entirely successful, at least not by his standards. The major problem he encountered was the lack of communication between maneuver elements, which led to poor coordination of battle operations. That was complicated by the rugged terrain over which the troops had to operate. Units moving through triple-canopy jungle on foot, subject to ambushes at any time, found it very difficult to link with other units moving against the enemy, which upset the ambitious time schedules devised by staff officers operating just behind the battle front. But by the end of the first week, everyone in the task force was beginning to get a clear idea of what it would be like to encounter the Skinks in terrain favorable to the enemy’s weapons and tactics. If time was on his side, General Aguinaldo planned to move his training activities into the temperate zone of Arsenault and even to one of its moons so that if the Skinks were encountered in those environments his troops would be able to deal with them properly. Considering the apparent cold-blooded nature of the Skinks that had been encountered thus far, he did not think it worth his time and effort to train the task force under polar conditions.

General Aguinaldo’s mandate gave him control over every aspect of operations on Arsenault. All normal training operations ceased during the FTX because all military personnel, cadre and trainees, and every civilian employee working in support of Training Command were detailed to support the exercise. Marine and army reconnaissance personnel, together with infantrymen in their final weeks of advanced training, were designated as aggressor forces and given instruction in the use of Skink tactics; basic training and boot camp personnel, along with designated civilians, made up the “indigenous population” encountered in the maneuver areas that had to be protected and evacuated. That is where the Seventh MPs came into their own.

“Rene,” Aguinaldo told Colonel Raggel after a staff conference critiquing the recently concluded FTX, “your battalion outdid itself. I am amazed at what you’ve done with those men—oh, and that one woman.” He smiled because, during the course of the exercise, he’d several times met Sergeant Queege in Raggel’s retinue.

“Thank you, sir, and I’ll pass that on to my men.”