Forge and Steel

by David VanDyke

  Bull bit down on his reply, realizing she was right.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Reaper went on, watching him closely. “You’ll do fine. First dance with the elephant, right?”

  Bull fought not to drop his eyes. After all, everyone had a first time. “How did you know?”

  “Duh. I read your file.”

  Bull looked away, thinking. With a whole battalion aboard the assault carrier and many experienced officers, what were the odds of him drawing the short straw? “Why me, then?” he said quietly. “Why not someone more senior?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. Your platoon is the best aboard, according to their record before you took over when Morehead made Captain. Your NCOs are outstanding. Your troops are outstanding. This will be a hairy one. I want the best people to cover my sorry, high-value ass.”

  “You mean you want the best chance of completing the mission, don’t you?”

  Reaper snorted, but said nothing.

  Bull wasn’t sure if that was derision at his parroting the party line, or something else entirely. He simply didn’t know what to make of someone like her. Someone who, after his four years of officer training, didn’t fit into any of the neat slots in his military world.

  Instead of trying to figure her out, he returned to putting on his battle armor, composed of integrated layers of protection from the skin out, culminating in polycarbon and ferrocrystal plates that made Marines look like orbital drop troopers from some old video game.

  Somewhere along the line, Kang came back with the two lovers, Acosta sheepish and Suarez smug as she rubber-banded her short hair into a ponytail.

  Donning backracks full of gear – additional air supply, ammo, charge packs, grenades and more – signaled the final step in the unit’s preparation. Line Marines snapped their pulse rifles to retractors and clipped them in carry position at their chests, while designated troops picked up rocket launchers, portable railguns and heavy lasers.

  The platoon’s two scouts played with their gnats, controlling the tiny drones with chips implanted in their heads, the signals run through their HUDs. They spun and danced around each other like fat, angry birds.

  “Fall in, you diggers!” Gunny Kang roared, trotting out of the armory onto the flight deck where two extended-model stealthed assault sleds waited. He set himself and waited for the formation to assemble before ordering them to open ranks.

  Bull walked down the lines and looked his Marines over one by one, Kang following. Unbidden, Reaper strolled behind, but said nothing. Now that she wore full battle rig, helmet dangling from her left hand, she seemed to fit in better.

  As he turned toward the front of the formation, he caught sight of her chest and back plates, which displayed insignia: three up, three down and a star inside. He recognized it as an outdated Sergeant Major’s rank from the old U.S. Marine Corps.

  Drawing her to one side, he leaned down to speak to her privately. “You can’t wear that insignia.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s not regulation.”

  “I’m a civilian. I can put whatever I want on my armor.”

  “Bullshit you’re a civilian. You either earned the right to wear that or you didn’t. If you didn’t, you’re a fraud. If you did, you’re going to confuse the line doggies, because like you said, you’re a civilian and not acting in that capacity. Besides, by regs, a sergeant major can’t be in charge of an officer.”

  Reaper smiled, half-nodding as if she approved of Bull’s words and he’d passed some kind of test. “Fair enough.” Her eyes unfocused for a moment – she must have accessed her internal chipset and comlink to talk to the suit – and the symbol disappeared from the programmable paint. A moment later it was replaced by the shield and crossed staves of the Fleet Stewards, and the armor had turned a blinding white. “Better?”

  “Fine. Now you want to tell me why you’re busting my balls?”

  The woman looked up into his eyes. “Because you might be one in a million too, Bull, even if you don’t realize it yet. I’ve met enough warriors to know potential when I see it. But more than one young eltee never made it because there wasn’t a crusty old sergeant-major to put a boot up his ass when he needed it.”

  “So this is a test.”

  “Everything’s a test, Bull. Life is a test. You of all people should know that.”

  He didn’t know what to say to that.

  Two flight warrants waved at Bull from across the deck, and he nodded to Kang, who told the platoon to fall out. The pilots saluted him casually as he approached, a male and female in the Aerospace branch, with nametags reading Butler and Lockerbie. Their flight sergeants continued to prep the birds behind them.

  The blue-suiters glanced over at Reaper with a flick of their eyebrows – did they recognize her? – and then returned their attention to Bull. “Mission flight brief, sir, ladies and gentlemen,” the female pilot said crisply. “You will load in order, strap down all gear and take your seats. You will follow all orders from flight crew while in transit to and from the objective. You will point your weapons toward the deck at all times and you will not activate them or chamber rounds until the assault begins. You will maintain suit integrity at all times...” She recited the rest of the checklist from memory, or maybe she was reading it off her ocular implant.

  “Buckets on,” Bull said when the boilerplate was finished, seating his helmet and making sure it sealed. “Link check.”

  Thirty seconds of data and voice test later, he led First and Second squads aboard one assault sled, Reaper joining him. Boxy and resting on skids, the simple, rugged space vehicles provided room for troops and their accouterments of war, much as armored personnel carriers did for ground forces.

  Gunny Kang took Third and Fourth squads into the other sled.

  When the ramps had shut and twenty armored troopers had strapped into the jumpseats, Bull turned to Reaper and keyed a private channel. “Shouldn’t you be in the other vehicle?”

  “Why?”

  “What if we lose a sled? Only you and I have all the details of this mission.”

  “And Gunny Kang.”

  Bull’s voice hardened. “This mission is ‘need to know.’ According to the orders, that means you and me.”

  “He needed to know, so I told him. He’s your top noncom. Orders or no orders, you should have told him yourself. Don’t blame me for doing your job for you.”

  “I thought you said you wouldn’t be dicking around with my authority.”

  Reaper snorted. “Eltee, Gunny Kang has been fighting the Meme since your mama was changing your diapers. You’d better get used to the senior NCO network coloring outside the lines or you’re gonna be running into all sorts of brick walls. You may be an officer, but as a butterbar, you’re mostly a figurehead. You’re here to set the mission parameters, go through the motions and soak up knowledge in hopes that by the time your gold turns silver, you’ll actually be worth something. Dump the notion that you can control everything and everybody. Trust your people, stay out of the way, and they’ll take care of you.”

  Once again, Bull suppressed the urge to slap her down. Her smug, casual attitude toward proper procedure during a dangerous mission scraped his nerves. Yet, the voice of wisdom reminded him yet again that fighting with someone with the ear of senior leaders would be a lose-lose proposition.

  Instead, he cut the channel and recited to himself one of the many Hebrew prayers he’d learned as a child, based on a Psalm that cautioned against foolish pride. He wasn’t certain whether that prayer was aimed at her, or at himself.

  Reaper didn’t sit, but remained standing and clamped herself onto the now-vertical rear ramp, leaving the cockpit’s third seat, the traditional place for the Marine commander, to Bull. Set back and between the pilot and sergeant-copilot, it allowed him to see out the foot-thick crystal viewports, as well as the more important screens that showed space around them.

  “Sled One, ready,” Lockerbie said.

  “Sled
Two, ready,” Bull heard Butler reply.

  Gravity vanished as mechanical arms lifted the two vehicles from the deck and slotted them into the breeches of launch chutes. A moment later, Bull’s sled began falling toward the skin of the spinning, wheel-shaped assault carrier.

  “We’re exo,” Lockerbie said over the platoon net as they emerged. “Sit back and enjoy the ride, jarheads. As we’re remaining in stealth mode the whole way, our ETA is five hours forty-five minutes, give or take a smidge.”

  Good-natured grumbling broke out, mostly centered around the necessity of using the suits’ waste disposal systems, which never worked as well as the designers claimed. Ideally, Marines suited up no more than two hours before deployment, but this time, that wasn’t in the cards. The stealth approach mandated this extended insertion from the distant carrier.

  “Everybody shut up,” Bull growled, and awkward silence fell.

  A moment later he saw a private channel icon on his HUD and Reaper cleared her throat in his ear.

  “What?” he said. “More advice for the green loot?”

  “Yes. The one with the chip on his shoulder. You ever hear the saying, ‘the troops ain’t happy unless they’re bitching?’”

  “No.”

  “Well, now you have. What do you think it means?”

  “Why should I care if the troops are happy? It’s not their job to be happy.”

  “Oh, shit on a stick. Haven’t you learned anything since OCS?”

  “I know they don’t respect you if you try to be their friend.”

  “They won’t respect you if you’re a total jackass, either. We’re hours out with nothing to do but sleep and shoot the shit – which, if you check your HUD, they’re doing anyway. The only difference is, they’ve set up private channels. Now, instead of listening in and assessing the morale of your troops, maybe throwing in a jab every now and then to show you’re listening and not an uptight jerk, you’re well on your way to convincing them that’s exactly what you are.”

  “So I’ll listen in on them anyway.”

  “But then you’re an insecure, eavesdropping outsider instead of a casual but confident part of the team.”

  “I can’t win with you, can I?”

  Reaper sighed. “There’s only one way.”

  Bull waited for Reaper to go on and tell him how, but she didn’t. Well, he sure wasn’t going to look stupid by asking until he’d thought about it for a while.

  He cast his mind back to OCS, where the tac officers were, of course, unbeatable. By design, the entire training edifice was constructed to hammer square pegs through round holes so hard they either broke, or came out cylindrical at the other end. In other words, if you wanted to make it, you conformed to the model of Fleet Marine officership or you washed out.

  Maybe this was like that. Maybe he’d been reacting all wrong, based on her cockiness, her non-Marine status, maybe even her gender, treating her like an outsider or a threat.

  But what if instead he thought of her like an OCS instructor: posing as an opponent, but in reality a demanding mentor? Someone older, wiser, and a hell of a lot more experienced. Someone he could learn from. Someone with the admiral’s ear.

  Someone who could make or break him with one mission report.

  Better a bite of crow now than a whole plateful later.

  “Okay,” he said eventually, forcing a reasonable tone. “I’m listening.”

  “You sure? Because hey, I wouldn’t want to screw up your opinion of me by making sense.”

  “I’m sure. How should I recover the situation?”

  “Progress! If you don’t have an instinct for handling your troops, at least treat them as problems to be solved.”

  Bull waited, teeth grinding. “Still listening.”

  Another sigh. “Override and reset everyone’s private channels to the platoon push. Don’t explain, don’t apologize. When you do, tell them matter-of-factly that they can talk now, as if you had something important to think about and that’s why you told them to shut up.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then nothing. We got five hours. It may take five minutes or fifty, but pretty soon everyone will be bullshitting again and will have forgotten about it.”

  Bull grunted and did as Reaper said.

  Fifteen minutes later, as the chatter slowly ramped back up, she put a wink-eye emoticon onto his HUD and said, “I’m going to sleep. Wake me up if anything interesting happens.”

  Chapter 3

  “Ten minutes,” Bull said loudly at the mark. “Prep, check and sound off.” Acknowledgements rippled up the lines, accompanied by emphatic hand signals. One digger gave the double thumbs-down of a glitch, and Bull began to unbuckle.

  “Sit down, Bull,” Reaper said privately. “Let Sergeant Brooks do her job. You’re the platoon leader. Do officer shit and stay out of your NCOs’ way.”

  “Yes, mother.” He said it lightly.

  “There you go.”

  Brooks fixed whatever had gone wrong with the private’s integrated armor system and sat down again with a thumbs-up.

  Bull’s mouth dried as the chrono digits crawled lower and lower. He chinned a squirt of water and swished it around, pulse pounding. First combat insertion, and it was all getting real. Thoughts raced with the adrenaline. He fought the overload by reciting assault checklists and telling himself to treat it as just another exercise.

  “One minute, sir,” Flight Warrant Lockerbie murmured in Bull’s ear.

  “One minute!” Bull barked reflexively. How had the time gotten away from him? He should have been paying attention, but somehow he’d lost track. One minute from go. Would he become a statistic? The old saw about the short life expectancy of second lieutenants ran through his mind.

  Better that than failure. Should he shoot a battle cocktail? The stims would fire him up, and pretty soon he’d be raging to slaughter Purelings. He’d been deliberately juiced once before, a training exercise to show Marines what it was like. They’d had to shut down his cybernetics and let him burn out. That was why the heavy drugs were only for extreme situations.

  If he did that, he might as well hand in his bars, though. His job wasn’t to fight, no matter how much he wanted to. His job was to direct the battle, complete the mission and get his people home. Not for the first time he wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off enlisting as a line doggie, but his father had wanted him to go to OCS. What Colonel Gideon ben Tauros told you to do, you did, no questions asked.

  “Pinged,” Lockerbie said abruptly. “Stealth is blown.”

  “Won’t matter,” Bull growled, cinching down already wire-tight straps. “Ten seconds!”

  “Breaching missiles away.” The sled shivered with the launch.

  Bull was tempted to switch his HUD to the pilots’ godlike view, but he didn’t need the distraction. The heavy short-range rockets would be slamming home, their double shaped charges cutting and widening holes in the enemy base’s armored skin. The sleds would follow...

  Now.

  Marines bucked against their restraints, minimal gravplating absorbing the majority of the impact as the sleds corked into the gaps, brutally arrested. For a moment, all was still.

  “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, or close the wall up with our English dead!” some wag quoted, and then Bull popped his harness.

  “GO, GO, GO!” he roared as the quad clamshell nose of the sled opened, pilots still strapped into their seats swinging up and out of the way to create a clear channel into the interior of the base. He should have stood aside and let the diggers go first, but instead he stepped off the ramp and nailed the first thing that moved.

  The target turned out to be a squid, a repair creature, not a fighter, and little threat to an armored Marine. Troops rushed to deploy ahead of him, their pulse guns spitting high-velocity rounds at other biologicals.

  Reaper’s clapped him on the shoulder. “Good shot, Bull. Calamari on the barbie tonight. Now let’s get our peop
le.”

  “Laser team,” Bull called. “Start cutting!”

  Two Marines manhandled their crew-served beamer onto its tripod, more awkward than heavy in the low gravity. Without delay, an intense orange line crackled through the smoke of the thinning atmosphere to lick at the living interior wall of the enemy base. The material flashed with steam and drew back like the flesh it was, opening a hole into the next chamber.

  The digger nearest the entrance immediately disappeared in a deluge of puke-yellow goo, and a moment later emitted a horrified scream. The shriek died with him as acid found its way into the joints in his armor, burned through and ate him alive from the inside.

  In response, a blizzard of pulse gun fire battered the opening. “Grenades!” Sergeant Brooks called, and four launchers chuffed, throwing the short-range bombs past whatever lurked behind the opening.

  Another stream of gooey acid poured out, but the troops nearest had already moved to their flanks, away from the direct line of sight. As the grenades detonated, flashes of incendiary lit the enemy from behind, spreading oxygenated napalm.

  “Bugs!” Sergeant Acosta called as their opponents came into view. Of the several known varieties of Purelings, the big, tough insectoids were the most common.

  Three-meter-tall mantis-like creatures poured forward, forced out by the spreading flames. Hard-driven pulse gun projectiles hammered the leading two to their knees. Pieces exploded off their exoskeletons along with sprays of greenish ichor. The next two made it a short distance closer before being cut down by the heavy beamer.

  Unfortunately, the explosive heat generated by the laser created obscuring steam, allowing the bugs to spread out and attack the Marines hand to hand. Although Purelings could use firearms, in this soft, close-combat environment they stuck to melee weapons, in this case meter-long molecular-edged blades held in each forelimb.

  Bull saw three Marines hacked down before crossfire from the two squads obliterated the attackers. He brought up HUD sonar – he’d been briefed that IR was mostly useless within the hot guts of Meme bases – and made sure all the bugs were dead, putting rounds into the heads of any still thrashing.