by Rick Partlow
CONTENTS
WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
Also by Rick Partlow
FROM THE PUBLISHER
About Rick Partlow
DANGER CLOSE
©2020 RICK PARTLOW
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WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?
CONTACT FRONT
KINETIC STRIKE
DANGER CLOSE
DIRECT FIRE
1
“You don’t belong here,” Josip Brena snapped, and I knew he was talking to me.
Major Brena was a big man, tall and broad across the shoulders, his hair buzzed as close to his scalp as it could be without being shaved bald. His uniform was pressed until the edges seemed sharp enough to slice flesh and his eyes were dark pools of accusatory black fire. He paced across the front of the formation and I didn’t follow his movements, staring straight ahead, blinking at the sweat as it dripped into my eyes. Summer in Tartarus was brutal, Brena only slightly less so.
“Someone has lied to you,” Brena went on, his voice grating, gravelly. “Somewhere in your chain of command, someone has told you that you are special.”
His voice trailed off like a star redshifting as it traveled away from a telescope as he went all the way down the line of Officers Candidate School cadets, all of us braced at attention and frozen in place, not even daring to look at him.
“They told you that you deserve to be officers in the Commonwealth Fleet Marine Corps. This is a lie. None of you deserve a damned thing.”
Blueshifting now, coming back toward me. Back into my peripheral vision, a dark shape, a shark swimming in the shallows where I waded, then right in front of me in startling clarity, his chest in front of my face. I glanced upwards at his interface jacks, feeling like I could stare through them into the darkness of his mind.
As if he’d noticed me looking at his temples, he jabbed a finger toward his chest, to the dark cloverleaf symbol there.
“Do you see this, cadet….” He paused and I knew he was checking the name tape on my uniform. “…Cadet Alvarez? Do you know what this is?”
I knew how to answer. That much had been made clear to us by the NCOs screaming at us as we came off the busses from the spaceport, duffle bags dragging us down.
“Sir, yes, sir!” I bellowed as loud as I could, able to keep my voice from breaking with the volume by a trick I’d learned at NCO school. Shit. Was that less than a year ago? “It’s a major’s rank, sir!”
I tried to look past him, tried to avoid meeting his eyes. The training barracks were a sickly yellow tone behind him, the ground a sandstone red, baked in the heat just as we were, and I wondered that even the northernmost continent on Inferno was considered habitable.
“You’re damned right it is, Alvarez!”
What the hell did I do to attract his attention? Other than being first in the training company alphabetically.
“Do you know how I got this rank, cadet?” I thought for a panicked moment that he actually wanted me to answer the question and I had no idea which answer he was fishing for, whether hard work, intelligence, breeding, luck, or superior personal hygiene. Luckily, he finished the thought on his own. “I earned my commission as an officer in the Marine Corps the way my father did, and his father before him! I applied to the Service Academy, met their criteria, spent four years working my ass off physically and mentally and graduated with honors!”
He passed on from me and I sagged just slightly, feeling as if I might keel over from the relief.
“And how am I rewarded for this effort?” he went on, his volume increasing along with the outrage in his tone. “How are all of us rewarded, a line of men and women going back a hundred and fifty years? We’re told that, due to the needs of the service, the Corps is instituting this clown show! Officers Candidate School my hairy, rounded ass! Sixteen weeks to teach a gaggle of enlisted and junior NCOs what it took me four years to learn!”
Which was bullshit, of course. The Academy didn’t just teach students how to be officers. It was a college, teaching history, advanced math, science, literature, engineering. It awarded a degree right alongside the gold bar.
Off to my right, someone collapsed, a victim of the heat, or maybe of locking their knees at attention. No one moved to help them.
“It’s a fool’s errand. But orders are orders. And I’ve decided that the best way for me to protect the institution of the Marine officer’s corps is to do my best to make sure anyone who graduates from this course is worthy. Which means most of you will be returning back to your units with your tails between your legs.” I couldn’t see his sneer but I could sure as hell hear it. “Which should be about ninety percent of you.” He sniffed, and I thought if he were an NCO, he might have spat. “Platoon trainers, take charge of your units. Get this gaggle of wannabes out of my sight.”
The usual procedure for a formation like this would have been to call us to attention to turn us over to our officers, but Brena had never called us to parade rest in the first place, so we’d spent the whole twenty minutes of his rambling introduction braced and dying slowly of heat prostration. My own vision was beginning to haze over and I barely noticed when the smaller figure moved out in front of our platoon.
“Platoon,” the younger man barked, his voice higher-pitched and more pleasant than Brena’s, “at ease.”
The breath went out of me in a whoosh as my shoulders relaxed and I stepped into a wider stance, hands clasping behind my back. It was a small motion, but it made me feel as if I’d dived into a swimming pool of cold water by comparison. I was able to take a better look at the man standing before us. He was about my age, maybe a couple years older, probably no more than a year and a half out of the Academy himself, though certainly no less full of himself for all that. His face was lean and sharp-edged and pale, his eyes a dusty brown.
“I am Lt. Manzer,” he told us, his tone stiff and awkward, like he wasn’t at all used to addressing trainees. I wondered if we were his first class. “I will be your training officer for your entire OCS class, unless you’re recycled. Besides the classes you’ll be taking in the regular, organized instruction, I’ll be teaching lessons on a platoon level after training is over for the day. You will be tested on these lessons, so please treat them as just as important as your classroom education. If you have any problems or questions for me, you need to go through your training NCO, Gunny Reznick.”
Yeah, and I was so sure the Gunny would pass our concerns on to the Lieutenant rather than telling us to stuff them up our ass. Maybe the LT thought he was talking to a bunch of E-1 privates.
“I’ll turn you over to the Gunny now and she will get you settled into your barracks.” Manzer came to attention. “Platoon!” We all snapped to parade rest at the preparatory command, though it had been quite a while since I’d used drill and ceremony for anything but a memorial for the dead. “Attention!”
Gunny Reznik was as tall as Manzer and probably had bigger arms and I got the impression of a little boy playing soldier with his mother when she saluted him and he returned it, turning the platoon over to her. Whatever matronly feelings she might have had for the LT, Reznick quite obviously didn’t harbor any such good intentions toward us cadets, given the scowl twisting her features when she faced us.
“Do you worthless motherfucking officer wannabes see that big pile of shit?” she bellowed, pointing off to the side. I didn’t look because turning while standing at attention would have gotten me dropped for about a million pushups, but I knew she was indicating the huge stack of duffle bags off to the right of the barracks. It was where they’d told us to drop our bags when we got off the bus, but that didn’t mean we weren’t going to get ragged out about it.
“Yes, Gunnery Sergeant!” The reply wasn’t the antiphonal gaggle I’d heard in Boot Camp or even the slightly deeper and more organized response of NCO school. We were all combat vets, none of us lower than a corporal and most of us buck sergeants like me. The response was sharp, a chorus of professionals.
“Un-fuck this shit,” Reznick said forcefully and eloquently in the way only a gunny can, “and get it put away in your barracks in half an hour or you’ll be using your extra underwear to brush the fucking dirt off the sidewalk! Go! Now! Fall out, you sorry fucks!”
I ran because it was what she wanted, and I was pleasantly surprised to see everyone else in my platoon doing likewise with the same amount of purpose and alacrity.
“Don’t bother searching for your own bag!” I yelled over the murmurs and confusion as we reached the pile. “Just grab one and take it inside! Quick!”
I knew I wouldn’t be the only one to think of it, but all it would take is one or two of us not getting the idea and arguing with someone else about it and we’d lose time we didn’t have. Maybe they’d think I was a bossy know-it-all, but I could live with it if it meant getting through this stupid bullshit as quickly and painlessly as possible. I grabbed a duffle bag and sprinted for the barracks.
The barracks were exactly like every training barracks I’d ever seen in my time in the Marines from basic training to Armor school to NCO school, just one rack of bunks after another, a polished, white tile floor and white, plaster walls. Stairs in the near corner led to the second floor, where the females would sleep, making things complicated and harder to coordinate, but that was the military. If they didn’t put us on different floors, we’d obviously be having sex in our bunks after lights out.
At least it was air conditioned. Not well, but air conditioned.
I didn’t look at the name stenciled on the duffle bag I’d grabbed until I’d dumped it at the foot of a random, unoccupied bunk. It read F. Kodjoe and I started looking around at the other Marines as they filed into the barracks, sweat beading off brows and staining armpits.
“Kodjoe!” I yelled. “Got a bag here for Kodjoe!”
“That’s me!” The man was tall and lanky, his head shaven. “Freddy.” He grabbed the bag and started unpacking the clothes, quickly and efficiently. “Thanks man.”
“Cam,” I supplied.
“Alvarez!”
I looked around and saw a woman with short, blond hair and broad, open features holding my duffle out with one hand like it weighed nothing.
“That’s me.” I weaved between a cluster of other Marines and grabbed the bag from her. “Thanks.”
I didn’t feel like looking for another bunk and I already knew Freddy’s name, so I took the bag back to where I’d left him and tossed it on the top bunk, claiming it as my own.
“Is it okay if I take this one?” I asked, being polite.
“Long as you don’t snore,” he told me, laughing softly, not looking away from the footlocker where he was neatly folding his gear. “Where you from, Cam?”
“Trans Angeles.” I unzipped the bag and dumped everything on the bunk. I’d packed it in the order I was going to stow it, this not being my first rodeo, and I began sticking them very carefully into the second footlocker. Actually, I was from Mexico originally, but that was a long story I didn’t feel like getting into right now. “You?”
“Lagos, Nigeria. Africa,” he added, in case I hadn’t heard of it. It was only the largest city on the whole continent, the only megacity constructed there after the Sino-Russian War.
Okay, to be fair, I hadn’t known any of that until I took the educational supplements required before I attended OCS.
“Trans Angeles is a big place,” he mused, folding his duffle and laying it in the compartment at the bottom of the footlocker. “Bigger than Lagos by about half, I think I heard. A place that big has got to be crazy. Did you like it there?”
“Not particularly,” I admitted. “I mean, I’m here, right?” I gestured out toward Inferno in general. “What about you? Is this hellhole nicer than Lagos or are you a patriot?”
“Lagos is beautiful,” he assured me. He seemed a little wistful as he shut the footlocker. “My school used to take us out of the city on field trips to the nature preserves. I got to see elephants, giraffes, even lions. But there’s a war and someone has to fight it, you know?”
“A patriot, then,” I decided, finishing up and shoving my footlocker back under the bunk before I popped back up. “I don’t know which of us is in worse shape, you for believing that bullshit and leaving everything you loved to fight a war dozens of light-years from home, or me for thinking it’s bullshit but being here right alongside you.”
“If you don’t believe in it,” he said, frowning, “then why are you here?”
“In the Corps?” I shrugged. “It was either the Marines or a long stretch in punitive hibernation. In officer’s training?” I rubbed a hand over my eyes. “I’ve been asking myself the same thing. Maybe it’s just that I was the best of what was left.”
I shook my head and checked around the rest of the floor, looking for anyone else who might need a hand. Everyone seemed to be squared away so I cruised by each of the bunks and checked the tightness of the sheets in case the Gunny was going to be a real dick and blame us for poorly-made beds when we hadn’t even slept in them yet. Which was always a possibility. I never underestimated the ability of training NCOs to be dicks.
And right on time…
“At ease!” someone bellowed, and I knew right away the Gunny had walked in. If it had been an officer, they would have called us to atte
ntion, but an NCO rated an at ease.
Everyone shut up and turned toward Reznick as she stalked into the barracks about five minutes too early. She seemed disappointed not to find everything disjointed and shambolic and I wondered what these people were expecting. This wasn’t Boot Camp.
Gunny Reznick walked past me, hands behind her back, dark eyes scanning everyone carefully, as if searching out some flaw she could latch onto. She made it halfway into the barracks before she turned and faced back my way.
“Well, you turds have proven you can follow orders, which I suppose is a testament to the training you’ve had to this point. Let’s see if you can work together as well as you work separately. Females!” she bellowed loud enough to carry up the stairs. “Get down here now!”
She hadn’t checked their floor, which might mean she planned to be harder on the males or might mean this place was being monitored with security cameras and she knew what she was going to find before she even set foot in the barracks. I wasn’t crazy about either possibility.
The women tromped down the stairs in a ragged line but formed up neatly at the foot, awaiting her orders.
“I’m going to give you your squad assignment,” Reznick announced, pulling a tablet out of her thigh pocket and unfolding it. “After you receive this assignment, you will have thirty minutes to decide squad leaders, platoon sergeant, and a platoon leader for this phase of training. If whoever you pick fucks up, you all get punished, so choose wisely.” Her eyes went to the tablet. “Listen up! First squad, Taylor….”
I didn’t really pay attention to the other squads since there was no way I was going to remember them without writing this down. Until she got to Third squad and I was the fourth name mentioned. Even then, I didn’t try to memorize the others yet, just waited until she was done and snapped the tablet shut with an impatient finality. I was gratified when Freddy was on the list. It would have been inconvenient to have someone from another squad as a bunkmate and one of us would likely have had to move.
“That’s it! Thirty minutes! When I get back, the platoon leader had best be reporting to me!”