Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper Read online

  20

  “There you are,” Top said, straightening from a portable holographic display table and cocking an eyebrow at me. “I wondered how long they were going to keep you in the aid station for a few cracked ribs.”

  “Among other things,” I reminded her. I checked around us, making sure none of the other NCO’s and junior officers present were listening to us. They buzzed around the Brigade command tent, drawn to the crumbs of data Intelligence dropped on us like flies to shit. “Are you okay?’

  “I just had a few burns,” she said, waving it away as if third-degree burns over a quarter of her body was nothing. “They didn’t even bother with the auto-doc, just slapped a few smart bandages on me and let me sleep it off.

  “I’m sure,” I said, letting the skepticism drip from my words, “but you know that’s not what I meant.”

  Top was good at the act. She’d been Top for so long, she might forget sometimes that Ellen Campbell was down there, buried under layers of armor that didn’t come off after a battle. But something tugged at the corners of her eyes, lines of stress and grief she couldn’t hide.

  “It’s war, child,” she told me, her voice quiet, her tone weary and showing, for once, her age. “You can roll sixes all day long, but you still have just as good a shot at snake-eyes with every toss.”

  “He didn’t toss snake-eyes,” I said. “He made a choice.”

  “The mission, the men and you. The mission always comes first.”

  The words were automatic, a rote recital for all that they were true. She was putting off the real truth with the platitude, but it was coming. She pushed away from the display table, leaving troop dispositions to some baby-faced first lieutenant in Fleet Intelligence blacks, and leaned heavily against a support pole, a muscle twitching in her cheek.

  “He knew what was coming,” she told me, finally. “He knew we were getting close to the end. This had been his life for so long. I wonder if he didn’t want to see the end of his usefulness.”

  “If he was looking for a dramatic way to go out,” I said, “he sure as hell got it.”

  “You should talk, boy,” she snapped, and I could see the few seconds of vulnerability had ended and she was back to being Top again. “You took that mecha on by yourself. It might not have been as blatantly suicidal as overloading your own reactor, but it’s right up there.”

  “If I’d run,” I reminded her, “he would have come after the rest of the company, and they needed to deal with the High Guard.” I shrugged. “I was the one whose plan put us in that position, I wasn’t going to let anyone else pay for it.”

  She laughed, harsh and barking.

  “You sound just like him.” She checked the display on her ‘link. “Meeting starts in twenty mikes. You want to go find a seat?”

  It was just another tent, of course. All we’d have for the next couple days would be tents, and maybe a few Tahni buildings we took over. I’d heard scuttlebutt that we were trying to avoid that because command was afraid the Tahni might have left IED’s in the buildings that could be command detonated from sleepers they’d left among the civilian population, but rumors were like venereal disease in wartime—everyone had one and was doing their best to spread it.

  They’d found chairs, somewhere. Guess that shows military priorities. We’d been on the planet less than two full days, at least one of our troop transports had been blown up, but we still managed to bring down office supplies in one of the first shipments.

  The men and women under cover of the tent looked grateful for the chance to sit down, and if we’d set up showers already, they hadn’t had the chance to use them, or their cots. I felt guilty for having slept, even if it had been inside the auto-doc and under sedation. I recognized the weariness and fatigue in the faces, but I didn’t recognize the faces themselves. I had a passing familiarity with the staffs from the other battalions in the brigade, at least the ones who attended the briefings to which the Skipper had dragged me along, but I knew none of these Marines.

  The significance of that sent a chill up my back.

  Muted conversations buzzed around us, but I didn’t take part in them, just sat down beside Top and listened, catching snippets of the talk.

  “…fucking wouldn’t surrender,” someone was saying. “Just wouldn’t surrender, even when they were down to their last soldier. Made us kill them all.”

  “I don’t trust the so-called civilians,” a woman’s voice declared. “Too damned many of them look like retired military. I think we need to put all the males in some sort of detention center. Not that the females can’t be just as bad…”

  “…couldn’t do a damned thing about it. Major Bray was there one second, then the next, she was gone. Not even an explosion. Never saw her again.”

  I’d had enough of listening and began trying to shut the conversations out, but I was rescued by the rest of Fourth Battalion’s company commanders filing into the tent with Geiger at their lead. Her company XO was there as well, and I figured he must have taken over the company for her since she stepped into the battalion commander’s shoes.

  The plastic chair creaked under my weight as I pushed out of it and stood to meet them.

  “Alvarez,” Geiger said, nodding a greeting. “Glad to see you up and around. That was some damned epic shit back at the spaceport. I don’t know if you heard, but that pretty much turned the battle for us, taking out the reactor. It freed up the spaceport for landers to come in and drop support for the Vigilantes.” She snorted a laugh. “It was also crazy as hell going up against a mecha by yourself, but it was damned epic shit.”

  I didn’t sigh with frustration, but it was a fight.

  Then I discovered I was wrong. Not all of Fourth’s company commanders had come in with Geiger. Cronje pushed through the flap door of the tent while I was still letting out the breath I’d been holding. His piggy little eyes darted between Geiger and me, tongue darting across his lips like a lizard.

  “Always a surprise to see you, Captain Cronje,” Geiger sneered, squaring off with the man as if she were ready to fight him. “I don’t suppose you’d care to share with me where you and your company were while we were trying to take the spaceport.” She raised an eyebrow at him. “That was our battalion rally point after initial objectives were accomplished, or did I misread the Op Order?”

  “We got cut off,” he said, and I wondered if the excuse sounded as weak in his ears as it did in mine. “After that fiasco at the reactor, we tried to get to the spaceport, but there were High Guard patrols everywhere…”

  “And I’m sure your armor camera footage will confirm that,” she snapped.

  “I’m sure his armor footage would confirm all sorts of shit.” I’d meant to say it under my breath, but the anger and frustration that had built up a day at a time over the last few months had reached overload and there was no holding it back. “Like how he left Captain Covington to die.”

  “You watch your fucking mouth, Lieutenant!” Cronje exploded, surging toward me.

  I set my feet and waited. This was what I’d been wanting for weeks and if he wanted to do it in front of Brigade and everyone, then fuck it. But of course, someone stepped in the way, because it was in front of Brigade and everyone, and when you get a bunch of officers together, there’s going to be at least one do-gooder. This time, there were three, and they grabbed Cronje by the shoulders and held him back.

  People were staring, I noted, but not commenting, not interfering. After what all of us had seen these last couple days, no one cared that much. I saw Top’s lip curled in something between a sneer and the feral smile of a wolf.

  “Calm the fuck down, Greg,” Geiger told him. “You don’t have any friends here and Colonel Voss is dead, so don’t expect your connections with her staff to protect your ass anymore.”

  Cronje reacted as if she’d slapped him, then he blinked and I saw in those dark little eyes the realization that she was acting battalion commander and he was pushing very close to the l
ine. He pulled away from the captains holding him back and fell into one of the chairs, arms crossed over his chest, looking away from the rest of us.

  “Brigade!” a woman’s voice rang out from the tent flap. “Attention!”

  Cronje looked ridiculous having to jump back up two seconds after sitting down, which made me smile. I didn’t recognize the major who had called us to attention, but I did know General Terrence McCauley. The brigade commander was short, almost ridiculously short in a day when such things could be adjusted genetically before birth, and his upper body was massive, his arms long enough I thought his knuckles might hang down past his knees if he let his shoulders sag. He looked rough and ready, as if he’d walked into the tent straight off the battlefield. He hadn’t, of course. Generals didn’t suit up and drop from four hundred meters, they landed in secure LZ’s long after the real fighting was over. But he had that fucking look down.

  “At ease,” he growled. “Have a seat.”

  It wasn’t that he was angry, he was just maintaining an image. Gruff, hard-edged general who hadn’t forgotten what it was like to be a combat Marine. I didn’t know if he had ever seen combat, but if he had, it hadn’t been in this war.

  I sat down beside Top, with Geiger next to me and the whole battalion a row back from Cronje, as if the man had the scabies and everyone else was afraid of catching it from him.

  McCauley stepped up behind a folding table that was standing in for a podium in these primitive staff conditions and leaned against it. The table creaked with the pressure and I half-expected the man to go crashing forward when it collapsed. God might have a sense of humor, but apparently it didn’t run to slapstick, because the table held.

  “One Hundred and Eight Seventh Armored,” McCauley said, “your planet, your people, your government has asked much of you, perhaps more of you than has been required of anyone in this whole war, and you have answered the call. I can swear before Heaven that I have never been as proud of any Marines as I am of you.”

  Jesus Christ, my head hurt from trying to keep my eyes from rolling.

  “You may think I’m exaggerating,” the general said, as if he were reading my mind. “You may think this is general-speak, the sort of speech I’d give to the politicians—and I may repeat it to them, eventually. But I swear to you, it’s the God’s honest truth.” He shook his head. “Some of you may not know the details of what happened in the Battle for Point Barber, so let me tell you. No fancy holographic presentations, no charts, just my words to you.”

  I settled back and decided to rein in my natural cynicism and give the man a chance.

  “Before we even reached the planet, we lost two Fleet cruisers, the Salamis and the Actium.”

  “Fuck,” someone muttered somewhere behind me, and I couldn’t help but agree.

  I’d seen the Salamis go up, but the Actium too…

  “The Leyte Gulf took major damage, but she’s still spaceworthy and repairs are already underway in orbit. Some of you are already aware that the Iwo Jima was destroyed in the middle of launching drop-ships, but we also suffered the loss of the Tripoli after she launched. The remaining troop ships were able to Transition back to the edge of the system, but it was a near thing.” He let his head hang over the table as if in prayer. “I don’t have a count for the number of missile cutters and assault shuttles downed, but the numbers run into the hundreds. Drop-ships…into the dozens. But I can tell you how many Marines have died. I’ll never forget the number. I’ll see it in nightmares for the rest of my life.”

  His eyes came up and scanned across the room, meeting each of ours, the eyes of every officer and NCO in the room.

  “843 Force Recon,” he declared, “and 1,096 Drop-Troopers.”

  I grunted, the pain spearing through my chest a phantom remnant of my broken ribs. That was over a battalion’s worth of us, gone in a matter of hours. And if fewer Force Recon straight-legs had died, it was only because there’d been fewer of them in the first place.

  “You’ve all heard of the famous battles of Marine Corps history, tracing our line back to the Eighteenth Century, to the founding of the United States of America. They’re stenciled on the sides of our troop ships. Tripoli. Belleau Wood. Okinawa. Iwo Jima. Hue. Fallujah. Makung Harbor. Hermes. Barataria Bay. Well, from this day forward, ladies and gentlemen, Point Barber will be numbered among them.” He shrugged. “Perhaps they’ll call it the Battle of Deltaville, perhaps they’ll use the Tahni name, Tahn-Khandara-Ankon. But you have lived through history here, my friends, my brothers and sisters. Some of you have covered yourselves in glory, others will not be remembered, but you were all part of it and no Marine from this day forward will ever forget this battle.”

  He sighed, a mighty wind from his deep chest, as theatrical and calculated as any other part of his image, a façade for our benefit, or perhaps history’s.

  “We have suffered terrible losses. Not just the losses that will matter to wives and husbands and fathers and mothers and sons and daughters back home, but the ones we will suffer here and now from the lack of leadership. Colonel Voss and her entire staff, Colonel Shepherd, Major Bray, Captain Covington. Men and women who were the backbone of the Corps, gone in a day. But I believe that each of you, the hardened iron come from the fire of this battle, will step up and take your place. The Corps needs leaders for the last push, for the invasion of Tahn-Skyyiah, and you will be those leaders.”

  Well, yeah, of course we would. What other choice did we have?

  “We won’t be able to move forward the final step in this war without reinforcements, and it will take weeks for them to arrive. So, we’ll be bivouacking in Deltaville, here at the spaceport, but I want to assure all of you, you will be in on the invasion. You’ve all earned that. The replacements who come in to back us up will have the responsibility of keeping Point Barber pacified until the end of the war, not you.”

  I admit to sighing a bit with relief at that pronouncement, though the natural cynic in me wondered how hard he would work to keep that promise. Politicians and generals had ways of forgetting their promises when push came to shove.

  “There will, of course, be a memorial for the dead once we have things secured enough. In the meantime, I will be sending out patrol schedules to each battalion. You’ll each be responsible for detailing a company-sized element to patrol in conjunction with Force Recon and Fleet assault shuttles once per day until reinforcements arrive.” His stare turned hard and stern. “We will take casualties during these patrols, so emphasize their importance and dangers to your Marines. We will also be going over company rosters and making adjustments to leadership and reorganizations of personnel as are needed until replacements arrive.”

  McCauley nodded to his staff puke and she called us to attention one more time so he could depart the plastic tent with the decorum to which he’d become accustomed. With the general’s absence, Geiger turned to us, her company commanders.

  “You know what I need,” she told us. “Who you have, who’s operational, what you need, on my ‘link by chow, which is in two hours and forty minutes. The general wants a company, which might mean we have to combine platoons, so nobody get your nose out of joint if that happens, okay?”

  Nods all around, though Cronje seemed determined not to respond to her.

  “Alvarez, if you want, I can give your company tomorrow off from patrolling if you’re looking for a good day for a memorial for Captain Covington. You guys arrange it, I’ll bring the battalion around to your company area right before evening chow.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I could feel Cronje’s stare on me as Top and I headed for the exit.

  “I swear to God, Top,” I said to her, quiet enough not to be overheard, “I don’t care if I get busted all the way back down to private, I’m going to kick the shit out of him so bad no auto-doc in the Commonwealth can put him back together.”

  “No, you won’t,” she told me, not a shred of doubt in her tone. “Because you’re like him
.” I didn’t have to ask who she meant by him. “Too responsible for your own damned good.”

  Shit. She was, I realized, probably right. When the hell had that happened?

  21

  “Captain Covington?” Top called.

  There was no response.

  “Captain Phillip Covington?”

  Someone in the formation sobbed, but no NCO chewed them out.

  “Captain Phillip J. Covington?”

  His had been the last name read, though not the last one lacking a response. This was the final roll call, a ceremony older than the Commonwealth, maybe as old as the Marines, I wasn’t sure. The helmet and the Gauss rifle propped up in a stand beside her were ceremonial—no one in Delta had worn them since Boot Camp—but they, too, were part of the ritual.

  “Battalion!” Top barked. “Attention!”

  And we all braced as neatly and sharply as we ever had for drill and ceremony, one final sign of respect. At some final roll calls, they had live buglers playing Taps, but this was a war zone, and if Fourth had ever had a real bugle, it would have been destroyed on the Iwo Jima anyway. The mournful notes came out of a portable speaker system set up by the engineers just for this ceremony. It would come down as soon as it was over, only to be repurposed for yet another last roll call somewhere else. There would be a lot of them in the next few days. Each of our companies would have their own, but the whole battalion was only showing for this one.

  The whole battalion minus one. Cronje hadn’t come. I didn’t think anyone minded, least of all Geiger. His XO, 1st Lt. Webster, had led the company into formation. I’d seen Vicky and Freddy, but hadn’t had the chance to talk to either of them. I wasn’t sure what I’d say to Freddy. I didn’t know if he still blamed me for Port Harcourt or if he’d finally come to see who Cronje really was, and this didn’t seem like an ideal time to find out.

  At the final note of Taps, Top called the battalion to parade rest and she did something I’d never expected. She began to speak.

  “Captain Phillip Covington and I,” she said, her voice carried over the speakers to the depths of the cavernous tent, “served together for four years, nine months, twenty-seven days. In a day when most of us can expect to live two or three hundred years, if we’re lucky, that doesn’t seem so long. An eyeblink. A heartbeat. But in the military, it’s an eternity. For some people, it’s half a career. For us, it was the better part of this war. I knew him as a Marine better than anyone I’ve encountered in a very long life, better than some of the children I’ve borne. He was as dependable as the tide, a man who would do the right thing even when no one else saw it for what it was, a man who stuck by his principles even when it would cost his career. Because he didn’t care about being a colonel, wouldn’t hear of being a major.