Forge and Steel
Page 12
“As you say, keeping an eye on things.” Spooky’s gaze roamed the room, searching, she knew, for anything out of place.
Repeth wondered whether he was hunting traitors and spies again...ugly work, work she never wanted to have to do again. Guarded, she watched him for a moment more. “Good to see you on the job, but I have things to do. Look me up sometime.”
“Oh, you can be sure of that.” His look was unfathomable.
She ignored the comment and stood up, bowed formally to him as if they were back at the dojo, then put away her mug and went looking for her troops.
***
The all-hands assembly approached rapidly as the BioMed staff hustled to get everyone decanted and on their feet in time. Some of the last ones ended up listening to Admiral Absen’s address in the locker rooms, but most clustered around screens in their designated wardrooms and messes, sat in filled auditoriums, crowded into conference rooms or stood on the flight decks of assault carriers, staring at giant screens.
Cameras focused on the main auditorium podium so everyone throughout the ship would see and hear the admiral’s address. “Attention on deck!” Thirty thousand pairs of boots snapped together in unison across the ship as Absen entered its largest amphitheatre.
Front and center with the rest of the off-watch senior bridge crew, Master Helmsman Otis Okuda imagined he could feel the crash through Conquest’s deck plates. “Take your seats,” came next, and he was happy to sit. Okuda understood the need for artificial gravity to be set high, but disliked it nonetheless. His was the realm of trackless space, of piloting starships through the implanted cybernetics in his brain, not clomping around with his boots in the mud. Coal-black skin glistened with sweat at the unaccustomed effort.
“Good morning Conquest, and welcome to the year 2115,” Absen began, prompting a murmur of amusement from the audience. “A few of you have been out of stasis during the trip, but for the vast majority, you have been asleep since 2075, and as most of you already know, a powerful Meme fleet was due to hit Earth in 2110. Ladies and gentlemen, as I told those near me when I found out, there’s nothing we can do about it. Word of the outcome won’t even reach us here for thirty-one years.”
Absen cleared his throat. “If EarthFleet won, some of us might eventually return home, but even then it will be a different solar system. Those you know might be alive, but after a hundred years of separation, they won’t be the same people you knew.”
Sweeping the room with his pale sky-colored eyes, the cameras transmitted his craggy intensity throughout the ship. “And if we lost, then we might be the last true humans in existence. So just as I told you forty years ago when we started, I tell you again in all sincerity: Conquest is your world, and the people here are your family, your clan, your tribe, your nation. If we do not conquer here, there is no retreat, no surrender. If we do not conquer here, we cannot run. If we do not conquer here, humanity dies.”
Pausing to let that sink in, he turned to his senior officers sitting behind him. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Absen concluded, looking pointedly at his watch, “we are nine days out.”
***
Relieved that the All-Hands had been short, Master Helmsman Okuda settled comfortably into the sunken pit of the bridge’s helm station, surrounded by holodisplays. The 4D screens were nearly superfluous as long as his linked cybernetics functioned, but like the manual controls in a computer-directed airliner, they comforted him. Besides, regulations required them, and no one ever died from too many redundant systems.
He reached up to his medusa, slotting retractable plugs into the interface sockets in his skull. Soon he resembled the mechanism’s namesake, his ebony shaven pate a nest of snakelike wires.
Initiating the link opened his mind to a whole new universe. Godlike, he flew in the center of nothingness, perceiving the cosmos in all directions. He smelled the interstellar winds, tasted hydrogen atoms as the magnetic scoops swept them into fuel collectors, heard the radio sirens of pulsars and quasars and stars of every kind – Put out my hand and touched the face of God.
Magee’s High Flight stood enshrined in the heart of every helmsman, every pilot.
His sense of touch remained deliberately unaltered, essential for grounding a linked helmsman in the real world. Hands resting on the complex suite of manual controls, he brushed them lightly like a pianist, and though his nerves now transmitted impulses with the speed of fiber optics, nothing had ever really improved on the sensitivity of those ten digits.
Short of direct computer control, of course. Okuda had that option; he could turn any and all functions over to one of Conquest’s supercomputers, and he sometimes did, but ultimately, piloting had to come down to one helmsman.
Or woman. He thought of his wife Celia, Master Helmsman of the assault carrier Temasek, and the few days they would have together before Conquest initiated separation into its component ships. When it did, the massive mothership would spawn a fleet, and opportunities for visits would be rare. No doubt all those with lovers and spouses aboard – an unusually high percentage, since procreative ability was one criterion for the mission – were thinking the same thing: what will sex be like after forty years in stasis?
Thirty-seven minutes after his watch ended, Okuda found out it was still almost as good as piloting a starship.
***
Admiral Absen’s address still echoed across the crowded flight deck as she announced, “I am Sergeant Major Repeth.” Her amplified voice reached the whole formation as she stood in front of Second Marine Battalion, over one thousand enlisted troops. They were arrayed on the largest available open space of the assault carrier Temasek, which still clung like a remora to Conquest. Major ben Tauros and the other officers would arrive soon, she knew.
“Those of you who have served with me know I like to be called by my first name. Swede,” she asked, turning to her rawboned Alpha Company First Sergeant, “tell these diggers what my first name is.”
“Last time I heard,” First Sergeant Gunderson drawled, “it was SERGEANT MAJOR.” This elicited a few muffled chuckles from the newest Marines and groans from the oldest.
“How right you are.” She walked down the line, glorying in the precise ranks of well-trained troops. “Now some of you may have heard of some stunts I pulled in my younger days. I’m an old and crotchety woman now,” she said, drawing some laughter, as the Eden Plague kept everyone fit and youthful in body, “and I have no interest in showing you how tough I am. Back in the day, a woman had to prove herself to a bunch of stupid macho boys. Any more, I just let my record speak for itself. I’ve killed more squids and blobbos than you greenies got boogers in your noses, and I still ain’t got my fill.”
“Besides,” she smiled nastily, “I know the lot of you young studs and studettes have the latest upgrades, just like me. You have laminated bones, cybernetic nerves and muscles, nanite speed and strength and the Eden Plague to heal you up after you break yourselves. This task force was given the best of Earth’s limited resources, so I’m not going to let you waste it on stupid schoolyard games. I will say this once and once only.” She swept the ranks with machine-gun eyes. “Do not test me. I would rather cull this herd of troublemakers now than let one stinking shitbird among you besmirch Second Battalion’s good name.” She scanned up and down the ranks, searching for any smirks, any hint of attitude or challenge, determined to make her example right away, as she always did.
A man stepped out of the ranks and swaggered up to her. He was big, and young, a corporal with a permanent anger on his face. A mutter went through the ranks.
There’s always one, Repeth thought with resignation. She wondered how the man had made it past the psych evals that were supposed to detect problem personalities. Best to get it over with quick.
“Finner,” she read off his name tag. “You sure you want to do this, Corporal? Even if you win, you lose.”
“I watched recordings of your little demonstrations,” the man responded with a sneer. “It too
k you whole minutes to barely beat better Marines than you, only because you had fancier cyberware. Now we all have the same, and I say your reputation is bullshit.”
The whole assembly watched and waited in silence for her response.
Repeth’s answering smile did not reach her eyes. Prominent eyeteeth enhanced her wolfish expression. “Take your best shot then, Private.”
His shot was a good one. Had she not been ready, it might have connected. A low, vicious kick at her knee, at least it showed the kid had some combat skills and street savvy.
It didn’t matter.
Repeth kept her claws in. To use them would be to prove her challenger right, since those were a modification available only to covert operatives and Stewards. Instead, she simply demonstrated a lifetime of personal combat experience and training.
She slid her leg back just enough to avoid the strike, then snapped it forward to plant her heel in the patella of his weight-bearing leg. It bowed unnaturally backward at the knee with a sickening crunch. Before he could fall, she stepped forward to seize the other leg, still in the air. Her elbow came down on that knee to destroy it as well.
Finner’s crybernetics had already shut down the pain, fooling his body into thinking it still had a chance, so even as he collapsed, his fists were striking out with surprising power.
Repeth turned her thigh into the blows, accepting a few bruises before driving the knife-edge of her foot through his guard and into his jaw, knocking him down, half-conscious. She then stamped both of his elbows to ruin.
It was over in three seconds. Finner lay broken on the deck, with knees and elbows smashed and inoperable. Absent those joints, all the implants and augmentation in the world couldn’t get him on his feet again.
Repeth hadn’t cracked a sweat. Her voice rang out. “This man’s squad leader, front and center.”
A stocky female sergeant double-timed forward to report, looking justifiably concerned. “Sorry, Sergeant M-“
“Shut it,” Repeth cut her off. She reached down to strip the fallen man’s rank tabs from his uniform, placing them in the other woman’s hand. Then she ripped the squad leader’s sergeant’s tabs off and put them in her own pocket.
“You should have handled his attitude yourself before this, Corporal. Take him directly to the brig. Tell them to disable his cybernetics before they treat him. Get moving.” She deliberately turned her back on the newly demoted noncom, waiting until she and her squad had carried the miscreant off.
Raising her voice to address the battalion again, she said, “I hope this lesson is not lost on everyone here. Not the lesson that I can take any one of you, because military discipline is not based on who’s the best brawler. The lesson I hope you learn is that this never should have happened. That shithead should have been dealt with long ago by his squad leader and his platoon sergeant and his first sergeant – who will all report to me after this formation concludes. We’re gonna be in a fight to the death in just a few days. There’s no room in this battalion for weak links like that.”
She looked around, searching for further problems, or challengers. This time she found nothing. This time, she thought, they know it’s as real as it gets. Fear of death doth wonderfully concentrate the mind.
Repeth’s smile became genuine, almost warm, lighting up her bony triathlete’s face. “But for those of you who give me one hundred percent, I will back you to the hilt, and so will your NCOs. If you have a problem, you bring it to them and they will bring it to me. You do not bring your problems to officers, unless you mistakenly think the problem is me, which is proof positive you are hallucinating, at which time you will be sent to BioMed for psych-eval. Am I clear?”
A thousand throats roared as one. “Clear, Sergeant Major!”
“We have nine days to get ready before we climb into the sleds. The training schedule is posted and I expect nothing less than your best. The only easy day was yesterday.” She saw Gunderson motion with his eyes off to her right and she turned to see Bull, his company commanders and a gaggle of lieutenants watching the drama from a discreet distance.
“Battalion: tench-hut!” She marched precisely to the center front of the formation and turned it over to Major ben Tauros with a perfect salute that nevertheless managed to convey that certain worldly confidence common to all senior noncommissioned officers. The fact that her commander overtopped her by a full head and eighty kilos somehow did nothing to diminish her presence as she marched to her position to listen to Bull’s first pep talk.
Yeah, it’s good to be a Marine.
End of Starship Conquest excerpt.
Books by David VanDyke
Plague Wars: Decade One
The Eden Plague
Reaper’s Run
Skull’s Shadows
Eden’s Exodus
Apocalypse Austin
Nearest Night
Plague Wars: Alien Invasion
The Demon Plagues
The Reaper Plague
The Orion Plague
Cyborg Strike
Comes The Destroyer
Forge and Steel
Plague Wars: Stellar Conquest
Starship Conquest
Desolator: Conquest
Tactics of Conquest
Conquest of Earth
Conquest and Empire
Books by D.D. VanDyke
D. D. VanDyke is the Mysteries pen name for fiction author David VanDyke.
California Corwin P.I. Mystery Series
Loose Ends - Book 1
(Contains Off The Leash novelette)
In a Bind - Book 2
Slipknot - Book 3
The Girl In The Morgue - Book 4
For more information visit http://www.davidvandykeauthor.com/