“Watch out!” Gonzo shouted, a moment too late.
A blinding flash of light filled Russell’s field of vision before being replaced by darkness and a blinking sign. YOU’RE DEAD flashed in red letters for several seconds. Russell shrugged and ran the instant replay. Speak of the devil: a Lamprey sniper had nailed him from the top of the Kirosha Royal Pyramid with a 5mm laser rifle. Well, at least he was out of the game.
He switched back to regular vision and lay back on the VR armchair in the rec room. The third member of his fireteam, who’d gotten killed early on, was sitting between Russell and Gonzo, who was cursing out a storm while he continued playing. He was trying to reach the rest of the squad, but with Lamprey snipers running around he probably wasn’t going to make it.
“Was it really that bad?” Keith ‘Grampa’ Gorski asked him. The newbie wasn’t the usual kind of boot; he was in fact a damn Ancient, one of the seventy million or so people still drawing breath who’d been around during First Contact. He didn’t look like he was a hundred and eighty years old, or even ninety; he was one of the lucky sumbitches who were able to completely turn back the clock and look twenty-seven or so for however many centuries it took for the Grim Reaper to catch up to them. Although he obviously dyed his hair black, the fancy fuck.
“It was nothing like that,” Russell said, nodding his head at the other grunts still playing in the rec room. They could have just as easily played from their bunks, but the VR chairs were designed to make their real bodies comfortable while their minds were having whatever fantasy adventure they’d chosen to waste time on. All in all, Russell would rather play a hand of real-life poker. By the same token, VR porn didn’t do much for him, either. Even the ugliest flesh-and-blood hooker was better than a virtual supermodel, as far as he was concerned. He was weird that way.
“But it was bad,” Grampa said. He knew about bad. The old guy had lived in the aftermath of First Contact, had fought in one of the militias trying to keep order after the surviving cities fell apart in chaos and panic, then joined the Old Army and done some pretty harsh things when a good chunk of Mexico was annexed into the US, which the few surviving Mexicans hadn’t liked one bit.
“The real Kirosha fight wasn’t fun, yeah. Not fun at all, being out there with no support but a bunch of civvies trying to remember their Obie training, a gaggle of mercs, and a few friendly Eets.”
“I can see that.”
“You haven’t fought any ETs, have you?” Russell asked him.
Grampa shook his head. “I was done with fighting by Year Twenty, when they did the big demobilization so they could start in on the Space Navy and all that happy crappy. Haven’t worn a uniform or fired a round since then until I volunteered after the Days of Infamy. All the fighting I did was against my fellow man. A few women, too, not counting the wives.” He grinned. “I fought with my better halves plenty, but we never exchanged gunfire. You ever fought humans?”
“Once, sort of. Some Pan-Asians and Columbians went off the reservation and tried to play pirate on Peterson System. We hit their base and they folded like a pup tent. Not much of a fight. All my serious shit involved Echo Tangos. Lizards once, Horde pirates, two times, a couple primmie species you’ve never heard of, then the Ruddies at Kirosha and the Furries and Vipers at Parthenon.”
Grampa had ended up replacing the third member of Russell’s old fireteam, who’d gotten killed at Parthenon. He still woke up expecting to see Nacle around, looking sad and disappointed at something Russell had done or said. The little Mormon had been a good guy. Even Francesca had broken down in tears when hearing about her favorite customer’s demise, and that hooker had a heart of solid granite.
The old guy – had to be the oldest boot in the Corps’ history – nodded. “Yep, this is going to be a learning experience.”
Russell had looked at Gorski’s records; the Ancient had breezed through Recruit Training and the School of Infantry before spending a year with the 23rd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, which had been set for an attack into Lamprey space that never materialized, and transferred to the 101st MEU after Parthenon. He was surprised the old bastard hadn’t gone through OCS and become a boss instead of a grunt. He was surprised the guy had enlisted at all.
“Last time I was running around with a gun, we didn’t have no fancy powered armor,” Grampa said. “It was just us. We didn’t even have APCs most of the time. Shank’s mare or whatever civilian transport we could requisition, when we had enough fuel to keep it running, that was. Half the country was dead. The other half was running out of everything – food, fuel, medicine. Most of the time we helped get stuff from places that had too much of it to places that had nothing. And to keep thieves from stealing it along the way.
“That was hard. Most of the poor bastards we ended up shooting and blowing up were just hungry and scared, trying to provide for their own. But I guess it’s the same with aliens, too. The fuckers at the sharp end are mostly just like us, following orders and worried only about making it out alive.”
“Guess so,” Russell said. “Don’t spend a lot of time thinking about their feelings.”
This was the longest conversation he’d had with the old guy since he’d joined Russell’s crew. At first, he’d been too busy making sure the newbie could cut the mustard. He still had no idea why someone that age would see fit to join the Corps.
“Yeah, I didn’t think about it too much, not when I was doing the fighting. Saw too many buddies freeze up and get shot. Can’t second-guess yourself when you’re out there.”
“So what were you up to after you left the Army?”
“Bunch of stuff. I started five different business ventures,” Grampa said. “Three did pretty well, the other two were complete disasters. Been married seven times; longest one lasted all of eight years. Ten kids, each more worthless than the last. Managed to spend every cent I’ve earned, mostly to stay alive.”
As it turned out, staying young forever was pretty expensive. Aging was caused by a bunch of different things, and suppressing them had a bunch of side effects, which required even more stuff to suppress them. Kinda like fighting a war, come to think of it. The drugs you had to take to stay young after you hit a hundred or so cost about three, four times as much as what the average American made. The biggest bennie of being in the military was that the government picked up the tab for your anti-aging meds. The main drawback was, you’d better make it worth the government’s while to stay in uniform. Well, that and the chance you’d get killed, which in times of war happened quite a bit.
“When the ETs bushwhacked us, I figured it was time to do something worthwhile for a change. I never went past E-4 in the Army, and I don’t want to be a goddam officer. So here I am.”
“Well, brah, you picked a fine time to join our beloved Corps. All the alien asses you can kick, as long as you don’t mind them trying to kick yours.”
“Sounds good to me.”
We’ll see how good it sounds when you’ve running around in a sealed suit for three days straight and you can’t even smell your own stink anymore, haven’t slept a wink the entire time and the Doze-Nots are beginning to make you crazy. Hope you ain’t forgotten how shitty it gets. But at least the dude wasn’t some civvie trying to play soldier. Maybe he’d handle it fine. On the other hand, maybe he’d think he was too good to take orders from a brand-new Corporal. So far Grampa hadn’t bitched about being the low man on the totem pole. Hopefully it’d stay that way.
And there had to be more to Gorski’s story than what he’d said; Russell was sure of it. You don’t make that close to your two hundredth birthday only to join an outfit where you got shot at on a fairly regular basis. Old bastards usually ended up in the Navy. Not that he expected the Foxtrot-November to share his real reasons, not at first anyway. After they went through a couple fights together, things might change, or they might not. Some people never opened up to the rest of their team. Russell didn’t even care all that much, as long as it wasn’t somethin
g that interfered with his fireteam’s work.
“Shit, I’m dead,” Gonzo said from the couch.
“Well, that’s all of us.” It would be nice if they could just leave, but they were going to have to wait until the whole thing was over, and then sit through an after-action discussion. Trust Sergeant Fuller to turn a game into a pain in the ass.
Grampa seemed to be about done with the small talk, so Russell let him be and went back to writing the email he’d been working on for the past few months. First time in his life he was trying to write to somebody he’d had sex with. First time he’d contacted anyone he’d been with, other than as a return customer.
Damn warp-witch done put a spell on me.
The thought was half a joke, but only half. His brief dalliance with one Lieutenant Commander Deborah Genovisi had been one of the weirdest experiences of his life. He still couldn’t get her out of his mind. Chances were they’d never see each other again. She was in the Navy, training to be a warp fighter pilot; as usual, the Navy couldn’t let the Corps have any cool toys without trying to muscle into the action. Anyway, they’d ended up assigned to different fleets in different parts of the galaxy. Following her on Facettergram was already above and beyond. Even crazier was writing an email to her.
And yet he was still doing it. Well, trying to. He hadn’t been able to come up with something he was willing to actually send out, to bounce around assorted shipping vessels until it made its way to whatever base she was posted at; she hadn’t made her location public. For all he knew she’d forgotten all about the corporal she’d screwed during the victory celebrations at Parthenon.
Russell smiled at the memories. That had been a good time. Nobody at Parthenon-Three would let him pay for drinks. Even most of the hookers were giving it up for free, except he hadn’t had time for their attentions. He and the commander had barely left her room all week long.
“You got it bad, bro,” Gonzo said.
“What?”
“You heard me. First time is the hardest.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Whoever’s got you hooked on her.”
Gonzo didn’t know who it was. Good thing, too, because the witch had creeped him out when they both met her. He’d think Russell was insane. Which he probably was.
Russell shrugged and mentally put the unfinished email in its virtual ‘Saved’ cabinet. One of these days he’d send the damn thing. And she wouldn’t reply.
Part of him was worried about what would happen if she did. The rest of him figured one or both of them would get killed before any of that mattered.
Two
Haven-One, Interstellar Trade League, 166 AFC
See, the normal thing to do when faced with an impossible situation is to report back and wait for further instructions, NOT to try to solve it by yourself.
Heather McClintock chided herself a couple more times, probably not a good idea while scaling a mostly-sheer wall in the middle of the night, trying not to attract the attention of the ITL Security Force guards patrolling the grounds of their headquarters, some ninety feet below her. On the other hand, her mental grumblings gave her something to do while she painfully inched her way up towards her objective.
If you weren’t expecting to play secret agent, why did you pack a Ninja Suit, uh? You were actually looking for an excuse to use it. Well, here you are, playing hero and risking life and limb.
She reached out with her right arm, used the artificial nano-hairs of her suit to create a temporary molecular bond with the wall, and used that and the similar foothold on her feet to move a few more inches up. Ninety-one feet up: forty-seven to go. Even with her enhanced musculature, holding on to her body weight plus her equipment was not fun. If she was planning on making a habit of this sort of thing, she’d better increase her workout regimen. Or accept that being an intelligence officer was meant to be largely an office job and this sort of thing was best left to Marines, Special Ops troopers and other people too dumb to know better. Like her boyfriend.
He’d probably think I was insane if he knew what I was doing. And when a Marine captain whose Purple Heart had a full set of silver oak leaf clusters thought you were crazy, well, you were pretty damn crazy.
She had good reasons for taking the insane risk, though. This little nighttime excursion was the only quick and sure way to figure out if the Interstellar Trade League was about to throw its not-inconsiderable weight behind Earth’s enemies. The Int-Trads controlled the flow of money, goods and information over a good sixth of the known galaxy. Although the ITL claimed not to be interested in politics, it had financed – and bankrupted – entire civilizations, not to mention used its fleets for assorted and very political ends in their ten-thousand-year history. The League had declared itself scrupulously neutral in the current conflict, which meant doing business with both sides. There were rumors that the situation was about to change, however. The Agency had decided to confirm or deny the rumors the old fashioned way: by stealing some first-hand data.
Her mission was to pose as a junior member of a UPS delegation holding face-to-face meetings with the ITL and make contact with a disaffected League-Master who had shown some willingness to divulge the League’s secrets in exchange for a small fortune in highly illegal drugs. His choice recreational substance was some sort of exotic natural compound that even Level Five bio-fabbers couldn’t reproduce. Unfortunately, like junkies all throughout the galaxy, the League-Master in question had been full of it. He was in fact no longer a Master, having been recently expelled due to rank incompetence, and knew no more about the ITL’s current plans than any local denizen of Haven-One, the planet that served as the League’s corporate headquarters.
After discovering her contact had been lying through his proboscis – his species didn’t have teeth – Heather should have given up, reported the failure, and resigned herself to spending a boring week playing corpo-rat games. Maybe use her spare time to catch up on her reading or watch some flick in her media queue. Instead…
A hundred and thirty feet. Ten more to go. She got a grip on the wall and was about to move when she heard something. The approaching whirring sound made her freeze in mid-motion, with most of her weight supported by her left arm. A security drone was making a pass around the building. The flying device was unarmed and only a little larger than a sparrow, but its sensor suite scanned its surroundings in a multitude of spectra. Fortunately, Heather’s ninja suit was designed to block and absorb all emissions coming from her, everything from her infrared signature to the chemicals she exhaled with every breath, while projecting a holographic chameleon field that blended her near-perfectly with her surroundings. It was hellishly hot inside the skin-tight outfit, but it was worth it. The only thing that could detect her while motionless would be a full gravity-wave scan, and those interfered with communications, so they were rarely used.
Rarely wasn’t never, though. If the drone decided to be extra-cautious, it would spot her. The League wasn’t a government per se, but Haven-Two’s nominal authorities would be happy to execute a spy after squeezing every last bit of actionable information out of her. Heather held her breath and remained still, acutely aware of the sweat building up between her skin and the ninja suit, itches she couldn’t scratch, and the growing strain on her arm and shoulder.
The drone moved on, blissfully unaware. She could breathe again.
By the time she reached the balcony, her arms were beginning to shake. She made it over the railing and took a few seconds to recover. The ninja suit helpfully extended a drinking tube next to her mouth under the mask and she took a few sips; the water would have been tepid under different circumstances, but with her current core temperature, it felt positively cold going down.
Smuggling the suit in had been easy enough; it broke up into several parts, each of which looked like a normal garment or undergarment; it would take a molecular-level scan to identify the nano-systems woven into the fabric. Good thing she’d managed to fast
-talk a friend from Operations to let her requisition it. This was supposed to be a simple intelligence-gathering op, but after her close calls at Kirosha and Trade Nexus Eleven, she’d become downright paranoid. She now felt naked without a full set of tools of the trade.
The balcony looked down on the walled courtyard where the ITL conducted its meetings. A set of sliding glass doors led to the inside of the Factor’s office. The ‘glass’ was made of reinforced transparent sapphire, tough enough to resist beam weapons for several seconds. It also had an advanced lock and scanner that would only grant passage to someone with the proper biometric signature.
Bypassing the lock and gaining entry took her about fifteen seconds. The CIA got some of the best toys in the galaxy, courtesy of their oversized and well-hidden budget. You didn’t want to scrimp when facing civilizations that were largely more advanced than your own.
The Factor’s office was surprisingly similar to what one would find in an American city. Form followed function; most of the League’s species had body shapes that could use chairs, although a few other pieces of furniture in the spacious room were designed to accommodate centauroids, creepy crawlers and other variations. The biggest chair belonged to the Factor, of course. More importantly, said chair also contained a node server filled with xenottabytes of data.
Breaking into the server was almost beyond the capabilities of her bag of tricks, but she managed. Finding the data she was looking for was only slightly more difficult. The whole thing took about fifteen minutes of hard work and an hour spent in intense boredom while she downloaded files and erased any traces of her presence.
She was ready to go to bed when she was done, although that would require her to get there first, after a climb down and another slow dance through the League’s security perimeter. And once she made it to her room, she’d have to prepare a preliminary report, since she couldn’t well do it during the day, when she was supposed to be working. In other words, her bed would remain untouched.
Warp Marine Corps- The Complete Series Page 66