Direct Fire #4 Drop Trooper Read online

  The two enlisted men looked at each other, then took off running the other direction.

  “Maybe the first good decision either of those assholes has ever made,” Bang-Bang mused.

  Butler was trying to stand, keeping his weight on his good leg, eyes flickering back and forth between the two of us.

  “You have a pretty clear choice here, Butler,” I told him. “I am way too fucking tired to call the MP’s and have you hauled away while I stay up the rest of the night filing a report, but you can either stick around and let Gunny Morrell laugh at you while I kick you around some more, or you can use whatever brains God saw fit to give you that you haven’t pissed away already, and get your stupid ass out of here.”

  Butler didn’t say a word, but the hatred on his face didn’t change even as he limped back into the darkness. I watched him go, wary he might have a gun hidden somewhere back there, but he didn’t come back.

  “Come on, sir,” Bang-Bang said, waving a hand. “I’ll walk you back to the barracks so no more of the big, bad men pick on my helpless little platoon leader.”

  I barked a laugh and fell into step beside him. I noticed his eyes flickering back and forth as we walked, though, and I knew he’d been at least half-serious.

  “How did you know?” I asked him. “How did you know where I’d be, and that they’d be coming after me?”

  He snorted humorlessly.

  “Sir, shit like that doesn’t happen without someone talking about it. Even if Captain Cronje or his First Sergeant, Breed, pulled dipshit there….” He motioned back the way Butler had gone. “…into a back room and told him to keep his mouth shut, there’s no fucking way he wouldn’t brag about it to someone, or make the mistake of telling the two goons he brought with him where they were going and why. Someone heard, someone told me, and here I am.” He shrugged. “I coulda brought the MP’s, or I coulda brought a fire team with me, but I didn’t think that was how you’d want to play it.”

  “You know me pretty well after just a few weeks, Gunny. Thanks for looking out for me.”

  “It’s my job, sir.”

  He didn’t say which of those was his job, but I wanted to think it was both.

  8

  I was making a mistake. I was sure of it. But it was just the sort of mistake I’d been making my whole life, and if you keep screwing up the same way that many years in a row, it ain’t a bug, it’s a feature.

  It had taken a few questions, a couple days of quiet observation to get the intelligence I needed to carry out the mission, but Greg Cronje was a creature of habit, even huddled in our safe zone on an enemy-infested city. Every night at 2100 hours local time, he would walk alone from his quarters down to the latrine, however far it was in whatever base on whatever planet we were on, and take his daily dump. I was frankly surprised he only took one per day, since he was so full of shit.

  I’d taken a recon run on the path from Alpha Company living quarters down to the latrines earlier in the afternoon, so I knew just the right spot to wait. It would have been convenient if there’d still been a lot of wreckage scattered between the buildings, but the Fleet Engineers had come down with their industrial exoskeletons and cleared the whole area out just to make sure there was nowhere for the enemy to hide and take potshots at us. Unfortunately, one of their exoskeletons had broken down in the middle of the newly-empty lot where three walls of an industrial workshop had been the day before. It still stood there waiting for a repair crew, a sentinel watching over the ramshackle shithouse they’d dug out and set up the first night.

  I leaned against the side of the engineering suit’s tree-trunk leg, hidden in the shadows by the positioning of the portable floodlights, and examined the work of the Fleet Engineers with a critical eye. As shitters went, I’d definitely seen better. Sheet metal roof propped up on lifts a few centimeters off buildfoam walls with ventilation fans in the gap, and a plastic curtain door. It might have been a good setup on Hachiman, but here, it was humid, smelly, and crawling with the local insects, and I imagined for a man like Cronje who really valued his seat time, it had to be maddening.

  I’d decided to make an anonymous complaint on the Brigade Morale Net and was running through the wording when Cronje ambled past me, hands stuffed in his pockets in a way that would have got him dropped for about a million pushups at OCS. He wasn’t carrying a weapon because this was just a nice, friendly trip to the shitter and we were all friends in the Marine latrine.

  I stepped out from cover and matched his steps from three meters back, wondering how long it would take him to notice. I’d bet myself that it would be at least ten seconds, and I was right. He spun around just two steps before the curtain door, going into a defensive stance as if Tahni ninjas were sneaking up on him.

  “Nice form, sir,” I said, arms folded across my chest. “You should offer to teach unarmed combat for the battalion officer corps.”

  He straightened, his face going red.

  “What the hell do you want, Alvarez? Are you following me?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” I assured him. “I just had to take a dump. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? It’s totally a coincidence. You know, it’s funny, I coincidentally ran into three NCO’s from one of your platoons the other night on the way back from the mess hall. It was so strange, they just happened to be sitting behind some of that rubble the Fleet Engineers cleared out, right on the way from the barracks to the mess hall. What are the odds?”

  “If you have something you want to say to me, Lieutenant,” he growled, “then I suggest you make a fucking appointment and come see me during the day.”

  “You know, that’s a great idea, sir,” I told him, shaking a finger in agreement. “I think if someone wants to deliver a message, they should do it personally, not send someone else. Because you never can count on a subordinate delivering the message you want. They just might not be up to the job.”

  He wanted to come after me, I could see it in his eyes. He took a half-step forward but stopped himself, teeth clenched, face turning so red I thought he might be having a stroke.

  “You believe this, you worthless piece of shit, if I want to deliver any message to you, I’ll do it myself, and you won’t have any trouble understanding it.”

  I grinned, showing him nothing but a cool exterior, but inside, my guts were churning, every fiber of my being wanting nothing more than to beat the living shit out of him. I thought I could do it. He was mouthy, way too loud and talkative for someone who actually knew how to fight. He was an Academy grad, and most of them had never set foot in the Underground, any Underground in any city. He probably got into a shoving match in high school and thought that and a few martial arts classes meant he knew how to fight.

  “If you have any messages to deliver to me, sir,” I said, “I can’t think of any better time than now for you to tell me. After all, I’m right here. It’s just the two of us. Who knows when you’ll have the opportunity again? You don’t want to waste it, do you? Sir?”

  Yeah, this was stupid. I was sure Bang-Bang, the Skipper, Vicky, anyone who I would have asked would have told me it was stupid. They would have told me I was risking a court-martial, getting busted in rank, maybe even going to the brig. Which was probably why I hadn’t asked anyone, just decided to go do it.

  But he was close, so very close to taking that first swing. His right fist was clenching, his left foot shifting, ready for that big right cross that most idiots who don’t know how to fight try to throw to end everything with one punch.

  The curtain barrier to the latrine slid open with a clatter of the plastic rings securing it to the metal rod across the doorway and Francis Kovacs stepped out, his shower kit clutched in his hand.

  “Oh, hey, Alvarez,” he said, stopping in his tracks. He did a double-take when he saw Captain Cronje. “Um, sir. Good evening.” He looked between the two of us. “I’m sorry, was I interrupting something?”

  Cronje hissed out a sigh.

  “No. I just need to tak
e a shit.”

  He brushed past Kovacs and stalked into the latrine. I let the breath I’d been holding rush out, the tension going out of my shoulders.

  “You taking a shit too?” Kovacs wondered, looking confused.

  “No,” I told him, disappointment heavy in the words as I turned away. “I suppose I’m not.”

  “I can’t say I’m sorry to see the last of this place,” Bang-Bang told me, arms crossed, watching the power loaders marching up the ramp of the cargo shuttle with the final pieces of our maintenance equipment in their grasp like ants carrying food to the nest.

  Behind us, our platoon and the rest of Delta Company was busy packing our personal gear into pallets to be loaded after the maintenance racks. We’d take the battlesuits with us onto our drop-ships, wearing it because this wasn’t a secure base where we could be sure it would be an unopposed lift-off.

  “You said it, Gunny.” But I wasn’t watching our shuttles or our people.

  Less than half a kilometer down from our position, Alpha was loading up their shit, and it seemed like all my problems were there with them. I couldn’t see Cronje from here, and he might be at a battalion meeting for all I knew, since I hadn’t seen Captain Covington for an hour or so, either. But Freddy was out front of his platoon, directing Marines here and there and generally trying to make himself look useful. It was a rookie move, and one I’d known was a waste of time and energy back when I’d been a squad leader, thanks to the good example of Lt. Ackley, my first platoon leader. The enlisted knew what to do and the NCO’s would make sure they did it. As an officer, my job was to make sure it was getting done, not to direct every move.

  Vicky was doing it the right way, observing from the edges, here and there darting in to spot-check someone’s work. She was my other problem. Or rather, the lack of her. It had been a solid week since the incident with Sgt. Butler and I hadn’t heard anything else from Alpha Company since, which would have been fine if it hadn’t included Vicky. I hadn’t pushed it, though. I understood the predicament she was in and I’d told her to lay low and stay away from me until things smoothed over.

  I just didn’t know when that would be.

  “Lt. Alvarez.”

  I spun on my heel at the voice coming from where there’d been no one a moment ago and nearly had a heart attack before I realized it was Top. Delta Company First Sergeant Ellen Campbell’s forehead came up to my nose and she probably weighed fifty kilos, but I would have picked her in any fight in or out of the armor. She’d been in the Marines since before the beginning of the Commonwealth, on and off, and she was probably the oldest person I’d ever met. I figured that meant she came from money, because the only people back in those days who could afford the anti-aging treatments were rich, but I’d never dared to ask her about it.

  “Yes, First Sergeant?” I said, trying not to act as if I’d just about jumped out of my skin, but the quirk at the corner of her mouth told me she knew.

  “Captain Covington wants to talk to you,” she said, nodding back to the other side of the shot-up storage building where my platoon was packing up.

  “Right.”

  That was odd. If the Skipper wanted to talk to me, why hadn’t he just called me on my ‘link? And why would he send Top? That was like sending the managing partner of a restaurant to go refill drinks. I shrugged it off and kept walking, figuring I’d find out soon enough.

  Covington was waiting for me around the corner, just out of sight of the loading area…and so was Commander Hofstetter. She was still in her dress uniform, and I wondered if she even owned a set of utility fatigues.

  “Commander,” I said, nodding to her, hoping she understood that we didn’t salute in the field.

  “I’ll leave you to talk,” Covington said, turning on his heel.

  “Sorry for the subterfuge,” Hofstetter told me, “but I didn’t know if you’d have time to make it to Brigade before you left, and I figured it would be better not to walk out there in front of everyone to have this conversation.”

  “A conversation you didn’t want to have over our ‘links either,” I assumed. My stomach muscles tightened the way they did when I was dropping into combat in my Vigilante.

  “Let’s just say that Brigade would be happier if there were as little record of any of this as possible.”

  She motioned for me to follow her and we paced farther away from the working Marines, probably to avoid one of them walking around the side of the building to take a piss break. And they would, because Marines were only a step above the street people I’d run with as a kid when it came to personal hygiene.

  “This didn’t go quite as smoothly as we would have liked,” she admitted. She scowled. “Captain Cronje is a stubborn, stupid son of a bitch, though you didn’t hear that from me. He kept insisting that he still wanted to press charges against you and finally I had to tell him that his only alternatives were to drop the charges or wind up with a sure-fire, no-bullshit letter of reprimand in his file and a court-martial for Lt. Kodjoe, and that was if I wasn’t in a bad mood and didn’t decide to take my chances and include him on the court-martial, too.” She snorted a laugh. “That part was a bluff, of course. You’re about to ship out to the biggest battle of the war so far, and there was no way Brigade was going to lose one of their company commanders at this point.” She shrugged. “But he caved, so I suppose I am not as bad of a poker player as my ex-husband used to tell me I was.”

  “So, it’s over?” I suppose the question was hopeful, but to my ears, I sounded desperate.

  “The legal part’s over,” she corrected me. “I have a feeling there’s a personal aspect to this that won’t be settled for a while.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.” I gave her a short version of what had happened on the way back from the mess hall, leaving off the names.

  “That fucking moron,” she spat, fists balling up as if she wanted to get into a fight herself. “Now I wish I’d actually gone ahead and given him that letter of reprimand.” She blew a heavy breath out through her nose. “Well, hell, I find myself kind of envying you your job, where you can just blow your enemies away with a plasma gun.”

  “Not all of them,” I told her. I offered her a hand. “Thanks for everything you did, Commander. I appreciate it.”

  She took my hand and grasped it in a tight, dry grip for a moment, but then let it slip out, as if the air was going out of her.

  “I feel like I didn’t do much. I certainly didn’t do my job. I just swept things under the rug.”

  “Ma’am, our job is to win the war. And if keeping Captain Cronje as Alpha Company commander wins the war, I guess you’re doing your job.”

  She smiled thinly, obviously not accepting the excuse but grateful for the attempt.

  “Good luck, Lieutenant. I have a feeling in a few weeks, you’re going to look back on this as the easy part.”

  I laughed long and hard at that, an honest, open laugh.

  “Commander,” I told her, shaking my head, “we’re Marines. The only easy day was yesterday.”

  9

  “You’re probably wondering why,” Colonel Voss said, “we’re having this briefing on board ship, in this very uncomfortable place, instead of back on Port Harcourt.”

  I was, in fact. And it was definitely uncomfortable as shit. There was a whole battalion of us jammed into the hangar bay of the Iwo Jima, and it was a tight squeeze, because there were also a bunch of drop-ships, assault shuttles, loading equipment and cargo pallets competing for the space. And we were in Transition, which meant the artificial gravity was activated, so space in this case meant deck space, which cut down on the possibilities even more. But it was the largest compartment on the ship and the only one where all of us could conceivably fit.

  “The answer is operational security,” Voss told us. She was standing on a makeshift platform at our center, constructed by the simple expedience of stacking four cargo pallets atop one another and then lifting her up on the hydraulic forks
of a loading jack. “As unlikely as it is that we would miss a signal going out of Port Harcourt, the truth is, it was possible. And our next mission is simply too sensitive to let it leak to the enemy.”

  “And why couldn’t we just get the op order sent to us in our company area?” Francis Kovacs whined from beside me, just the slightest bit too loud to be subtle, which was exactly Kovacs’s style.

  “Because this is how the Marines do it, Lt. Kovacs,” Captain Covington admonished, a looming presence behind us for all that Kovacs was actually taller than him. “Though if you have that strong an opinion on how battalion mission briefs should be delivered, I’m sure I’d like to see a comprehensive multimedia presentation from you on the subject by the close of business today.” He smiled thinly. “On my ‘link, of course, so we do it efficiently and don’t waste time.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kovacs said, gulping the words out. Poor son of a bitch couldn’t take a piss without stepping on his dick.

  Voss pointed her ‘link at the overhead, which in the case of the ship’s hangar bay was way overhead, and a holographic projector mounted up there lit up the space just above her position with the image of a solar system. It was generic enough that I found myself agreeing with Kovacs that this was all a huge waste of time, but I kept my mouth shut.

  Intelligence, my mother had once said, was learning from your mistakes, while wisdom was learning from the mistakes of others, and I hoped I was, at least, wiser than Francis Kovacs.

  “This,” Voss went on, “is the last occupied system along the Transition Line between Port Harcourt and Tahn-Skyyiah. It’s the last steppingstone on our journey to defeating the enemy and bringing this war to an end, once and for all. The Tahni name for it is irrelevant, because once we move in and take it, we’ll be using our name for it and theirs will only matter to the history books.”