“We gotta go,” Wash said. He offered Tierney an apologetic frown. “I’m sorry, we can’t stay here. No time to bury the dead. That’s… just the way it is.”
The woman nodded, an unspoken acceptance of the grim fate in store for those exposed bodies. The jungle would reduce them to skull and bones in a matter of days. By month’s end, there would be no trace.
“Major Berlin!” Wash shouted, cupping his hands around his mouth.
The major looked up and jogged over to his friend. He slowed at the sight of all the dead captives. It was as if he hadn’t realized anything that had happened beyond his narrow cone of KTF.
“Sir,” Wash said on Berlin’s arrival, “I think it’s time we made our way back to the SLIC LZ for exfil.”
Berlin looked from Wash to the other marines. He drew a foot back, dragging up the dead leaves as he did so. “Uh, well… I didn’t think we’d get something done so fast. The landing zone is the same place we were dropped off. But I told the SLICs not to come back for two days. We’ll just have to hang out there until then.”
The marines began to protest at this, swearing as only a marine can. There was no way out—the comms wouldn’t reach an orbiting destroyer or a base—not this far behind the doro lines while competing with jammers and every other hack the dog-men used to keep the playing field even.
“Stow it, marines!” Shotton snapped, quieting his men down. “All due respect, Major, but there is not enough cover or fortification to simply wait in that tall grass for two days until the SLICs arrive.”
Wash sighed, feeling betrayed by his friend, and yet… what did he expect? There wasn’t a single part of him that believed Berlin was a capable strategist. He’d simply allowed himself to be caught up in the excitement of getting into the fight, and now his life, as well as the lives of the marines and this surviving POW, were in his hands. Hands covered in the blood of the POWs he had failed to save. If he had wanted to serve the Legion, he should have stopped this before it started. All that was left now was to lead the team to safety.
“We can’t go back anyway,” Wash said, chewing on his lip. “The doros are elite trackers. They’ll find our trail and follow it to where we landed. We have to move forward, stay ahead of them.”
“So we’re walkin’?” Shotton asked.
Wash nodded. “Through the jungle, yes. Until we either find an elevated location suitable for a general comm transmission, or until we reach our lines.”
The marines groaned.
All save Denturo. “Good. Said I wasn’t done killin’ dobies. Now I don’t have to be.”
“All right, marines!” Shotton yelled, circling a finger in the air as he turned toward the jungle that lay between them and the nearest Republic firebase. “Let’s move out!”
08
Republic Army Firebase Hitchcock
Middle-of-Nowhere, Psydon
For Sergeant Major Boyd, being a legionnaire, one of the Republic’s elite warriors, one of the best soldiers in the galaxy, was all he’d ever wanted. And he was a damn good legionnaire at that. But after six years in the Legion, an even greater opportunity came along.
Dark Ops.
Darks Ops was the Special Forces branch created by General Rex… before Rex was killed or thrown out, depending on whom you believed. If the Legion was Boyd’s coming-of-age, his boyhood, Dark Ops was where he became a man. It had gotten him his nickname—Subs—as well as sharpened his already lethal skills into something downright… mystical.
But now, as he sat in the sweltering, sun-drenched firebase under command of the Republic Army, Subs felt more like a fish out of water than a man. He didn’t belong here.
Subs was a Dark Ops legionnaire with no teammates, no Dark Ops commander… no purpose.
It all went bad a year before, during a Legion indigenous training operation gone terribly wrong.
The Legion was a strictly human force. That wasn’t because other species weren’t capable of forming elite fighting forces—anyone who’d ever faced a quad-wielding Tennar in a firefight, or tangled with a brutish Drusic in close quarters, would never again question their combat ability. It was because a humans-only approach was both efficient and effective. It allowed for standardization of equipment. It meant temperaments and motivations were reasonably aligned. It eliminated friction and made for more easily formed, stronger bonds, and greater camaraderie.
In short… it worked. And when you were knee-deep in some backwater jungle, facing hostile forces, and the only thing between you and a quick death were your brothers-in-arms… that was all that mattered.
But the Legion was active in training other species to form their own fighting forces, each different in its own way, as suited the species’ temperaments and abilities. Subs and his team had personally worked with a number of local planetary militias to make them better able to defend their own planets. The Legion couldn’t be everywhere, and having local, loyal forces that knew how to KTF was Legion Commander Barrow’s strategy for containing the brushfire conflicts erupting in the shadow of the Savage Wars.
So when the tall and slender Ukos—members of a Republic world brought in during the Savage Wars—were facing a hostile rebellion by decidedly socialist and anti-Republic revolutionaries, Subs and his Dark Ops team were sent in at the Republic’s behest to teach the Ukos how to shoot straight, how to move and think tactically, how to… KTF. All within the confines and limitations of the Ukos’ culture and physiological ability.
Unfortunately, one of the Ukos they trained—an alien who had supposedly been vetted at the highest levels—wasn’t actually interested in protecting his home planet. He was interested in killing legionnaires. In scoring one for the revolutionary guard. And so when Subs turned his back on that alien, mere moments after giving thirty Uko commandos instructions on how to fire a fully automatic blaster rifle, the traitor in the ranks used that leej-acquired knowledge, along with the Republic-supplied weapon, to fill Subs’s back with blaster bolts.
Subs’s partner, who was watching Subs’s back even as the rifle was raised, dropped the Uko an instant after the betrayal had started. But not before what was done was done.
Subs didn’t blame his buddy. That’s how life went sometimes.
What followed were hours of surgery and months of rehab, only to be told at the end of it all that his time as a legionnaire was finished. Subs was medically unfit for combat—and in Dark Ops… fighting was expected.
That didn’t sit well with Subs’s commanding officer, who passed his concern up the chain of command. And each time Subs’s case reached the next level, it didn’t sit well there, either.
Once it reached the sector Legion commander’s desk, arrangements were made. Subs was less than a year away from retirement, and it was decided that he would wind out those last few months in the Legion, until his Republic pension activated. No combat, of course—someplace out of the way of all that. And yet, someplace close enough to the fight that he’d get over the threshold required by the House of Reason for time served in war zones. Which meant a bigger pension, something that would make civilian life just a little bit easier.
Because, as far as the men running the Legion were concerned, a man like Subs deserved that much. And if the Legion wouldn’t take care of him, then who would?
It really was a beautiful thing.
But if Subs had known that it meant being stuck in a sweltering Republic Army forward supply base, one that smelled constantly of urine and jungle rot, he probably would have told his CO to frag off.
As it was, he’d thanked the man profusely, and now here he was, out of uniform, sitting on the edge of a rifle pit that had been dug out along the base’s perimeter, his legs dangling into the foxhole.
He looked out past the mile-wide zone of cleared trees—the jungle was struggling to regrow in between defoliation drops—and into the swaying tree line beyond. Just passing the time.
The kids were out there. In the jungle. A bunch of fresh-faced basics patro
lling in a part of Psydon where dying wasn’t so common. Which was why Subs was there, too. They didn’t want him to die, not after pulling all the strings needed to keep him in.
He’d taught the basics how to do what they did better. Partly because he had nothing else to do, but also because he’d grown attached to them, and he wanted them to come back from their patrols in one piece. Since he couldn’t go out with them—he had explicit orders not to leave the wire—teaching them was all he could do. So he told them all the things that their R-A drill instructor left out. Showed them how to move through the jungle quieter, quicker… deadlier.
Sometimes they went out and returned just fine, and he was proud of them. Told them they were learning how to KTF, and that the doros would tuck tail and run if they ever made the mistake of mixing it up with them.
Other times those boys and girls would come back, but not whole. The patrol would return with the medical bot pulling a stretcher behind it. Sometimes with a dead basic… sometimes with a basic whose life had just been changed forever. And on those days, he wondered if he could have prevented that if they’d let him go out with them.
He thought so.
He was waiting for the platoon to return. Smoking a cigarette and looking through a haze of blue smoke for that first basic to emerge from the thick jungle. But Psydon’s tropical sun was waiting out there with him, and its heat was oppressive against his leathery tanned neck.
Subs took a final drag of the cigarette and flicked the butt into the rifle pit. He watched the red glow of the cig wink down there in the shadows and decided that it might not be so bad to wait awhile in the shade the pit provided. But as he looked down, he saw something else. A glimpse of his stomach, visible past the marine-style flak jacket he wore open.
It was the first time since he’d been a young boy that he couldn’t see any abdominal muscles. He wasn’t fat, not by any stretch; even at thirty-eight, his body was better than those of the basic teenagers running around on behalf of the army. But there was no denying the fact that life on the firebase wasn’t doing him any favors. Without other leejes to push him, without those long, grueling operations that were achieved through tenacity, heart, and determination… he’d grown soft. At least a little.
And a little was too much.
He could get fat when he officially retired. Until then, it was time to kick his own ass.
Subs slapped his stomach. There wasn’t enough fat there to ripple. “Sit-ups, Sergeant Major Boyd. Sit-ups.”
Sergeant Major Boyd.
That was another thing about being stationed alone on an army base. In the Legion, he’d been given the call sign Razor because of his penchant for shaving the entirety of his hair and eyebrows with an old-fashioned straight razor. It made him feel clean and cool inside his bucket. Then in Dark Ops, he got the nickname Subs because he seemed able to fill in for any job on the team that needed doing. And he did it well.
But here… everyone referred to him as Sergeant Major Boyd. And now he was calling himself Sergeant Major Boyd. But he was Subs. He was Dark Ops.
Sergeant Major Boyd was what they would refer to him as during processing when he retired in three months. But he couldn’t be a Sergeant Major Boyd—not yet. Not while he was Dark Ops.
At the noise of an incoming SLIC, Subs looked up from his perch at the top of the foxhole. The aircraft flew directly overhead, making for the firebase’s only landing pad. He looked back to the jungle one more time. Still no sign of the kids returning. His kids, as he’d begun to think of them.
“Guess I’m staying out in the sun,” Subs said to himself as he stood up and dusted off his hands, not at all looking forward to the long walk in the harsh sun to reach the landing pad. But… maybe he could be of use. There was no reason for anyone to make a stop here, at Firebase Hitchcock, unless it was an emergency.
After a few steps he decided to jog, heat be damned. Then he decided to sprint.
Blame it on his disappearing abs.
***
When Subs got within five hundred meters of the landing pad, he decided to slow his pace so as not to be huffing and puffing on arrival. The SLIC’s two pilots were already out of the craft, stretching, while maintenance bots rolled around the vehicle. There was no sign of the door gunner, which meant the poor marine had probably been shot while ferrying troops somewhere in the Psydonian jungle.
Subs looked around, wondering what was taking the medics so long to reach the craft. He quickened his pace, again hoping that he could be of some use. He’d been trained as a medic while in Dark Ops. At least at a rudimentary level. They all had.
But as he drew near, something about the pilots threw up a flag. Their demeanor, the way they held themselves… it seemed off. And then the door gunner appeared from the other side of the SLIC, emerging from beneath the vehicle’s shadow. He walked over to his crewmembers and began speaking to them, swinging his arms behind his back and then forward in an exaggerated clapping motion.
His mind still on injury and triage, Subs thought that if the door gunner wasn’t wounded, that only meant some kid was on board, all shot to hell from a trip into the jungle, and needing immediate medical attention. Even a small forwarding operating base like Hitchcock had enough stasis bubbles and med bots to at least keep a soldier from dying until they could get further treatment. They might end up a cyborg if regenerative medicine couldn’t be applied right away, but at least they wouldn’t die.
Yeah, some wounded legionnaire or marine probably explained the SLIC’s arrival from the jungle. As for the flight crew’s casual demeanor… maybe they’d simply gotten used to the sight of young Republic citizens with missing limbs or holes burned into their bodies. Psydon was that kind of war. And while Subs wasn’t crazy about the featherheads being so cavalier, he didn’t begrudge them their behavior. You had to do what you had to do just to deal with it all. And they’d done what they could in getting their SLIC down onto the landing pad.
Subs sprinted the remaining distance. The heat beat down on him from above as he moved, then greeted him from the ground up once his feet landed on the hot duracrete pad.
It felt good. Doing something. Running. Getting shot and a year’s worth of rehab made you grateful for movement.
Subs reminded himself not to take it for granted. There would be a time when he could run no longer.
He slowed to a stop, breaching the flight crew’s bubble of conversation. They’d been watching him sprint toward him, looking confused as if trying to figure out what was so important.
“How many wounded?” Subs asked, pleased with how little winded he was. “What’s taking the med team so long?”
“Cool your thrusters, Leej,” said one of the pilots, friendly enough.
Subs had no idea how they took him for a legionnaire. His jungle camo pants were standard for the Republic soldiers on Psydon, and his open vest was marine-issue. Subs looked down, remembering his open vest and the large Legion crest tattoo on his midsection, the hilt of the blade at his chest and the blade running down to his navel. Yeah, that was a pretty good giveaway.
“No wounded here,” added the other pilot, a handsome man with a movie-star smile. “If there were, you’d see us doing everything we could to keep ’em alive—with or without a med team present.”
Subs nodded, relieved to hear that—happy that he’d misread the pilots and their gunner as men too jaded to care any longer. But he still didn’t understand why they were landing on this firebase that no one visited unless ordered to.
He examined the SLIC. It wasn’t fitted for med duty, but it was stocked with a payload of missiles—not a full attack bird, so probably a craft outfitted to insert troops rather than a full-on gunship. There was no visible damage to the craft suggesting she needed to make an emergency landing, nor was there any trail of fluids or smoke suggesting a technical problem. But maybe the jungle humidity had simply taken its toll. There were sensitive pieces of technology on board that may as well have been magic to an old
legionnaire like Subs. And maybe the pilots simply got too nervous to keep going without getting on the deck to see what the matter was.
Evidently, the crew picked up on Subs’s confusion. That, or his examining stares.
“We’re just stopping to refuel is all, Sergeant Major,” offered the crew chief.
Refuel? That was… odd. Subs had been inserted by SLIC countless times, and while he couldn’t spout off the exact fuel capacity nor the precise number of miles a skilled pilot could coax out of the craft, he’d developed something of a gut feeling for how long a SLIC could stay in the air before going down. He’d been on ops requiring a stopover for refueling. He’d been on ops where the SLIC could no longer run on fuels and was forced down. He knew how far and how long a SLIC could go on a round trip, and how long it could hover on overwatch before having to break and return to base. And for this crew to have to land here of all places suggested that they were a long way from home.
The only thing Subs could think of was that the crew had done an insertion much deeper in the jungle that what he was aware was authorized. It was possible they’d been holding an overwatch position to pull security over the firebases in the region, but that was a pretty thin explanation. The big ships in orbit had taken over responsibility for keeping an eye on the battlefield after the doros started to get adept at shooting up SLICs.
“Where did you take off from?” Subs asked.
The pilot with the movie-star smile tried to dismiss the question out of hand. “Can’t really say, Leej. Classified.”
Subs smiled back, hoping to express his amusement at the flight crew. He pointed to the identification chip tucked beneath his skin where sternum met collarbone. His meat tag—a backup identifier just in case he was removed from his armor and killed. “See, I’m Dark Ops. And that means there is nothing that the regular Legion does that I can’t know, too.”
The three crewmen looked from one to another as if playing hot potato over who would answer the man who’d just revealed himself to be a highly skilled Legion-trained operator standing in their midst. The two pilots stuck together, staring at the crew chief expectantly, though they were officers and he an enlisted man.
Order of the Centurion Page 7