Starfist FR - 03 - Recoil (28 page)

Sean’s eyes bugged, The captain’s grin broadened. “You know the Marines, Chief. They believe that if they’d had a single blaster squad at Little Bighorn, they would have beaten those five thousand Sioux and Cheyenne warriors without any help from the Seventh Cavalry.”

Sean looked at him blankly for a moment then returned the captain’s grin. “Right, sir. And one squad could have replaced the Spartans and beaten the Persians at Thermopylae.”

Bhimbetka nodded then shook his head. “Yep. That’s the Marines for you.”

Later, when the Broward County’s captain returned to his cabin, he opened his safe and installed the sealed orders that accompanied the orders to Haulover, orders that he had palmed without anyone’s seeing. Headquarters, Emperor’s Third Composite Corps The Grand Master had followed the reports from his scouts with great interest for an entire week. The more reports came in the more interesting he found them—and the more puzzling. He had expected a force of more than a thousand Earthman Marines to respond to the raids his troops had been making against the isolated Earthman outposts, or at least several hundred. But so far it appeared that the Earthmen were not responding with any great power. The faces of only nine individuals appeared in the recordings made by his scouts. And one or more of those nine faces appeared in every recording made of visual contacts with the Earthman Marines. Where were the rest of the Earthman Marines? Or were those nine the only ones who ever exposed their faces and hands?

The scouts had never gotten close enough to sense the presence of others but had kept outside the range of the motion detectors the Emperor’s soldiers knew the enemy carried. It was most strange.

What about aircraft and vehicles? The Earthman Marines had killer aircraft nearly as potent as the aircraft the Third Composite Corps had brought, but none had been seen since the arrival of the Marines. And there was no sign of their amphibious vehicles. It was most curious.

Even more curious was the fact that the scouts sent to look for a base camp could find no sign of one for a unit of any size. Indeed, the scouts who had trailed the Earthman Marines from the destroyed outposts determined that they seemed to bivouac inside the city on the plateau, the capital of the isolated world. The scouts who entered the city disguised as adolescent Earthmen found much evidence of nervousness and concern among its inhabitants but they saw or heard nothing to indicate the presence of an offworld military force. It was most peculiar. Was it possible that the Earthmen had only sent nine of their Marines to this world in response to the raids conducted by the Emperor’s Third Composite Corps? The Grand Master pondered that question for a time, and finally concluded that it was possible. After all, he had instructed his troops to leave no evidence of who had wrought such destruction on the outposts, who had killed the people. Perhaps the results were too subtle for the Earthmen to interpret correctly. Perhaps there was

sufficient dissent among the inhabitants of this world that the local authorities mistakenly believed that the people who established the outposts destroyed them themselves then vanished into even more remote areas of the planet to escape the attention of the authorities and build new lives in anarchy. If that was indeed the situation, then the Earthmen might well have sent only nine Marines. But if the authorities believed that, then why had Earthman Marines come instead of police investigators?

It was most baffling. The Grand Master made a decision; one of the Earthman Marines must be captured and made to answer the questions. Then, if necessary, the commander of the Emperor’s Third Composite Corps would plan a new operation, one that would guarantee that the Earthmen would send a proper force of Marines—Marines that the Grand Master and his army would most joyfully destroy for the greater honor and glory of the Emperor!

TWENTY-FOUR

Commanding General’s Office, Task Force Aguinaldo, Camp Swampy, Arsenault Shortly after he began to pull his task force together, General Aguinaldo let it be known that every man and woman assigned to his command would go armed at all times with their individual weapon.

“I want them to learn to live with their weapons, Pradesh,”

he’d told newly promoted Lieutenant General Cumberland, his deputy. “We will all carry our weapons 24-7, 365, until they become an extension of our bodies. I want everyone in this task force to know that a weapon is all that stands between them and a Skink acid bath.”

“There’ll be accidents,” Cumberland warned.

“We’ll do our best to keep those to a minimum. Except when they’re in the field, we’ll make it an offense to be caught with a ‘round up the spout’ as they used to say. That’ll cut down on accidental discharges in the barracks. I want all NCOs and junior officers to be especially alert in that regard. And I want all commanders to know that if they catch anyone without his or her weapon, even when they’re in the latrine, it’ll cost them. They’ll sleep with their weapons, eat with them, shine, shit, shower, and shave with them, and if there are any romantic liaisons among our people, by God they’d better fuck with them too.”

Cumberland chuckled as he tried to imagine what that would

be like. “The two times when a soldier is most vulnerable to attack is when he’s on the shitter or on his squeeze, that’s right,”

he said. “We’ll emphasize constant maintenance too, Andy. All that moisture and dirt will accumulate as they, er, you know . . .”

He began to laugh.

Aguinaldo slapped his knee and joined in the laughter. “But I am serious, Pradesh. You know, I don’t give a damn how these people look. There’ll be no uniform inspections in this task force, none of this ‘junk on the bunk’ foolishness. This command is not a freaking marching band or some kind of ceremonial garrison outfit. We’re going to turn it into a lean, mean fighting machine, one ready to deliver immediate fire on a wily and unpredictable enemy.”

And he meant what he said. When General Aguinaldo made visits to subordinate commands and found officers requiring their troops to work on garrison beautification details or shine the floors in their barracks—the bane of life in a peacetime military garrison—he tore them a new aperture. “I don’t want them living in filth, gentlemen,” he emphasized at staff conferences, “but a little dirt under an infantryman’s fingernails is perfectly natural, as is a little mud in the barracks, and that can be taken care of in two minutes with a robomaid. And if you don’t have one of those, a good man behind a goddamned push broom.”

Briefing Room, Headquarters, Task Force Aguinaldo, Camp Swampy

“Hold up there, old man,” someone said as Colonel Raggel was leaving a staff conference at General Aguinaldo’s headquarters. It was Lieutenant Colonel Pommie Myers, an infantry battalion commander whose unit was billeted not far from the Seventh Independent Military Police. While the two commanders were not precisely on friendly terms, they were cordial to each other whenever they met at headquarters conferences or held staff meetings to schedule the ranges that troops from both units used for firearms training. There had been some minor disciplinary incidents that the two commanders had had to resolve—usually fistfights at the local beer garden, but nothing very serious. Still, there was a subtle air of tension between the two commands, an unspoken rivalry where it was clear the infantrymen considered the MPs a very inferior breed of soldier.

Myers was a beefy, barrel-chested man who perspired constantly in the tropical heat. His face was always bright red and the tiny veins in his nose stood out like those of a boozer. He always talked in a very loud voice, leaving everyone with the impression that he considered himself the cock of the walk in all military matters. Although he never came out and said it, Raggel was quite certain Myers considered him, as an ex-rebel and commander of an MP unit, to be very much the lesser soldier. Myers himself had never been in combat. His battalion had never been called up during the recent war on Ravenette. Truth be told, he’d been passed over for promotion and was very close to the mandatory retirement age for combat arms officers in his own army. Task Force Aguinaldo was his last chance to see real action. And although Rene never told Myers, he was an infantryman himself, not an MP, and he’d commanded a battalion before being assigned to General Davis Lyons’s personal staff during the war on Ravenette.

“Raggel,” Myers said, coming up and putting a sweaty hand on Rene’s shoulder, “let’s talk.”

“Well, Myers, I am on my way back to the battalion.” Another thing about the infantryman that irked Raggel was that Myers always used people’s last names, never their first or their rank, and as a full colonel, Rene outranked Myers, and it was a violation of military courtesy that the lower-ranking officer presumed to call him only by his last name. Rene let it go though because he did not see any value in locking the other officer’s heels for him. He just returned the insult whenever they met.

“Only take a minute.” Myers guided Raggel over to an open window. “Let’s organize a little competition, you and me.” He grinned. “Like, say, a pistol competition on the range. You MPs are sidearms freaks, my men are experts with real weapons, so we’ll take the handicap and challenge your guys to a shoot-out with sidearms. We can organize prizes for the high scorers. Be good for morale, fun for us all. What do you say?”

Raggel wondered about Myers’s real motive but without hesitation he agreed.

“Understand you did well on the FTX,” Myers said, changing the subject abruptly. “Of course you MPs were mostly in the rear, weren’t you?”

“Tolerably well, yes. And your battalion?”

Myers made a face. “Ah, the goddamned umpires were enlisted men, Marines, can you imagine that?”

“Yes, they were from those FISTs that fought on Kingdom. They know the Skinks better than any of us do.”

“Bullshit, Raggel! That goddamned Aguinaldo just loves his Marines! Enlisted umpires, never heard of such a thing.”

Raggel regarded Myers carefully for a moment before saying, very calmly, “Myers, talk like that can get you sent home mighty quickly.”

“Yeah, Raggel?” Myers shot back. “You’ve turned mighty loyal for having been a goddamned rebel.”

“At least I saw real combat, old bean. If General Aguinaldo sends you home, why, then you’ll never get a chance to be a real soldier.” He grinned in a friendly manner. Evidently Myers’s battalion had not done very well on the exercise.

“Well,” Myers said, clearing his throat, “we all know infantry is held to higher standards than military police, and we all know the history of the Seventh MPs, don’t we?”

“None better than me, Myers old man, but that was then, this is now. When do you want to have this shoot-out?”

“You know how I came up with this idea, Raggel?” Myers grinned craftily. “I was out by the range t’other day and I saw two of your people out there, poppin’ away. One was that split-tail clerk of yours. I could see she was doing pretty good out there, and I figured if a woman could shoot that well, maybe your men could give mine some real competition.”

“Well, as I just asked you, Myers, when do we do it?”

“Soon as we can put our teams together. Let’s say we each pick three men, our top marksmen. You set up the range.”

“All right. Standard police pistol team rules, fifty-meter range, solid-shot projectiles. We’ll time the shooters, go through combat reloads, shoot at different distances out to fifty meters, shoot from behind barricades, in the open, offhand, keeling, prone, strong hand, weak hand, all that.”

Myers grinned. “Fine. We’ll accept the handicap. Let’s say ten days from now? The rainy season’s over for this year.”

“Doesn’t give you much time to practice.”

“We won’t need that much time.”

“Prizes?”

Myers shrugged. “The losers host the winners to a steak cookout.”

“No booze, just eats.”

“You’re on.” They shook. Raggel was not about to agree to his MPs drinking with the infantrymen; too much opportunity for old habits to revive, and that would mean big trouble.

“I’ll go back to my battalion, form up my team. You have your coaches get with mine and we’ll see that the rules are understood in advance. We’ll all meet on the range ten days from now.”

“Very good, Raggel. Ta-ta for now. Don’t arrest yourself by mistake, old man.”

“Write if you get work.”

Battalion Commander’s Office, Seventh Independent Military Police Battalion, Fort Keystone

“Sarge,” Colonel Raggel began, “let me tell you about a conversation I just had with the commander of our neighboring infantry battalion.”

Senior Sergeant Oakley sat expectantly beside his CO’s desk. This is why he’d been called up to battalion HQ? Because that infantry lieutenant colonel, a true garrison rat, had had a conversation with Colonel Raggel?

Quickly Raggel explained the challenge Myers had offered.

“So what do you think, Sarge?”

“Well,” Oakley said, grinning, “long guns and crew-served weapons? The ground pounders might offer some competition, but hand cannons? We’ll shoot circles around them, sir!”

“I want you to form a team; you coach it and set up the range for me. Who will you pick to shoot for us?”

“Three marksmen? Well, first would have to be Sergeant Nix Maricle of the Fourth Company. Then”—he thought for a moment—“well, sir, Sergeant Queege over there. She’s a natural.”

“Me?” Puella squeaked, looking up from her work consolidating the company morning reports. “Me?” she asked again.

“Yep,” Oakley nodded.

“Fine! I can spare you for this, Sergeant,” Raggel said with a grin. “Whose your third choice?”

“Me. I’ll coach and shoot, sir.”

“Damned good choices!” Sergeant Major Steiner said, patting Puella on the shoulder. “Yer th’ only soldier in this battalion that’s ever fired an M26 in anger. You’ll show ’em.”

“Very well, then. Take Sergeant Queege here, police up Sergeant Maricle, and get started. Top, get us a clerk from one of the companies or one of the staff offices to replace Sergeant Queege here for a couple of weeks. I’ll call the CO of Fourth Company and tell him to release Sergeant Maricle to Oakley until after the match. And I’ll tell you something else, you two,” he addressed Queege and Oakley. “Aside from the steak cookout the mudpushers are going to treat us to, you three will get a forty-eight-hour pass to enjoy yourselves anywhere you want on this shithole world. Dismissed.” He stood and offered Sergeant Oakley his hand. Puella’s heart sank. She was delighted and excited to be chosen as a member of the pistol team but privately she dreaded being anywhere near Maricle, who, as a nasty reminder of her past, she considered worse than a virulent dose of VD. And the thought of spending a weekend anywhere with that man made her sick to her stomach. Now, a weekend with Oakley, that was a different matter! But it was with great trepidation she accompanied Senior Sergeant Oakley down to the Fourth Company.