Even with a diminished battalion of only 331 Marines, that was asking a lot, but as a commander, he knew when to push.
Manny Sif looked to Captain Walsh, his S4, who gave the slightest of nods in return.
“Yes, sir, we can.”
“Then let’s do it. Captain Whitehorse, Colonel Sifuentes, I would like to see you and your principle staff on board as soon as we depart the system.”
Colby didn’t need his implant to know they were both relaying instructions down the lines of their respective chains of command.
“Are we all good?”
“Yes, sir,” came the chorus of the gathered staff.
Colby stood up, signaling the end to the meeting, and the Marines rushed out, leaving the space to Colby and the sailors. Colby shook the hands with each of the Navy officers and the command master chief before they left.
Better get yourself ready, too, Edson.
He hadn’t even been issued a weapon yet. Time to find Mikhailov and rectify that situation.
He’d taken only two steps when he felt the telltale ping and his implant took an incoming call from Major Nkundlande-Siphers.
Hell, what does Dickhead want now? he wondered before accepting the call.
“You were right, sir,” the XO said. “Greenstein only made it through half of Corporal Mont Arif’s inspection before he gave up. Told me to finish it.”
That’s not even as long as I figured.
“Doesn’t surprise me. We’re embarking now, though, and you’ve got the vice-minister watch. Go tell him to get to the shuttlepad.”
“He thinks he’s taking his little Markus X, sir.”
“Last I heard, a Markus X’s a luxury corporate ship, not a military man-of-war. If he wants to come, he’ll join us on the Pattani.”
“Uh. . . sir. No disrespect intended, but I don’t think he’s going to listen to me. He still thinks he’s in command here.”
Damn, Edson. You can’t delegate every interaction with that bastard.
“You’re right, Major. Let me handle di. . . with the vice-minister. You’ve got more on your plate that you need to deal with now.”
Generals normally didn’t worry themselves with the details of getting individuals aboard ships, but this was a unique situation. Besides, the more he thought about it, the more he knew he was going to enjoy telling the vice-minister that he couldn’t take his fancy ride to Vasquez.
***************
“Any signs of life?” Colby asked. “Human life?”
The last two hours on and then in orbit around New Mars had been hectic, a case of controlled chaos as the Marines embarked aboard the Pattani. He’d had one last meeting with the Navy and Marine Corps staffs, but once they left orbit and headed to the Vasquez wormhole, the Navy took over, leaving Colby alone with his thoughts.
Those thoughts veered into territory he’d just as soon avoid, but once started, they wouldn’t let go. He’d left Topeka and Riordan on the planet when he’d commandeered the alien ship to get back to New Mars, and he couldn’t help but feel that he’d abandoned them. The planet hadn’t been secured from the alien threat, and for all he knew, the plants could have sprouted up armies of the daikaiju since he left.
“Not much, sir,” the sailor on the bioscans said. “I count just four-hundred and thirty-three humans.”
Four-hundred thirty-three?” Colby asked.
“That’s all. Sorry, sir.”
Vasquez had been a highly automated colony, and prior to the invasion, there had only been just over 2000 inhabitants on the entire planet. Sixteen hundred people killed was horrid enough, but over four hundred survivors was more than he could have hoped for.
“And at DeStaffney Station?” he asked.
“I’ve got forty-one, sir.”
That doesn’t mean Topeka made it, but if there were that many people there, he’d bet she was already in charge of them. He felt a load lift off his shoulders.
“Sir, do we proceed?” Manny Sif asked.
“Nothing else out of the ordinary?” Colby asked the rest of the Navy CCC crew.
The holovids showed Navy captains battling aliens from ships’ bridges, looking out through vast windows into space. There was nothing like that in actuality aboard a Navy ship. The Pattani was controlled from the CCC, the Combat Command Center, located deep in the center of the ship and heavily shielded from enemy attack.
All 15 of the scantechs shook their heads. Colby realized that none of the ships extensive scanners was set up to identify specific plant life, but several systems would notice 30-meter tall plants roaming the landscape, and with 433 humans still alive, the planet had to be relatively secure.
“Captain Whitehorse, are we ready?”
Her eyes lost focus for a moment in the manner of someone on her implant, then she was back, giving Colby a thumbs up and saying, “Shuttles and the gig are up and ready.”
“Very well. In that case, Colonel Sifuentes, let’s launch.”
He gave a quick order to his implant, and a moment later, a dedicated circuit was created, linking him directly to Captain Whitehorse.
“I’d like you to keep this circuit open,” he passed. “Just in case.”
If she was surprised at his voice suddenly sounding in her implant, she didn’t give any hint of that. She nodded once, then passed, “Will do, sir.”
“Well, you keep the Navy ready up here in case we need a ride off Vasquez.”
“Aye-aye, sir,” she passed as he turned to make his way to the hangar deck. “Go with God, sir.”
Colby stopped and slowly turned around, a smile on his face, before uttering the standard response, “Don’t need God for this. I’ve got my Marines.”
***************
Duke gave a yelp of joy as the captain’s gig hatch started to open and Vasquez air flooded inside. She broke past the Marines and bolted over the half-opened hatch to the sunshine, jumping around like a puppy.
I know what you mean, old girl, he thought as he started to push forward.
“Sir, you need to wait until we clear the area,” Sergeant Dela Cruz told him, his voice grave with the heavy responsibility of making sure nothing happened to him.
Colby wanted to order him to stand down—Manny Sif, who’d landed in the first wave up at Tennison, had already reported no sign of vegetable combatants, only some very relieved civilians, happy to see the Marines. It had been bad enough acceding to the lieutenant colonel’s insistence that he wait until the second wave, but to have a Marine squad, led by someone who looked like he should still be in secondary school, was very frustrating. He wasn’t an invalid, and he could still fight the fight, if it came to that.
And, surprisingly, he was excited to get home. Yes, “home.” He’d only been on the planet three years since his exile, but he’d gotten used to the pristine air and pace of life. He could see Duke cavorting around, stopping to roll in the dirt, and he wanted to get out of the gig and feel Vasquez’s sun on his face again.
He couldn’t do that to the sergeant and his squad, however. The young Marine was taking his mission seriously, and even a general had to bow to how the Marines conducted things.
He waited as the hatch fully opened and Sergeant Dela Cruz gave his orders to his squad. The Marines rushed out, weapons at the ready while Colby cooled his jets, still watching the deliriously happy Duke cavort before she suddenly looked up and bolted out of his view. He was just about to ask the sergeant what was going on when the Marine returned to the open hatch and said he could come out.
With a little more emotion than he’d have thought, he stepped out of the hatch and onto Vasquez soil, the good loamy aroma reminding him of just what made the planet such a perfect place to grow crops. A better place couldn’t have been created by all the agritechs in humankind. He almost knelt to touch the soil, to test if it was about ready for pyro berries.
Come on, Colby. You’re not a farmer anymore. You’re a Marine again, and you don’t need to be checking out soil co
nditions.
He raised his gaze from the soil and toward the station, where Duke was attacking one of about 40 civilians who were being held back by a fire team of Marines.
What the. . . he started to wonder before it came into focus. Duke was lunging at a familiar person’s face, to be sure, but to lick, not rend.
Colby strode across the field, two fire teams of Marines forming a wedge around him. Hopeful faces watched him approach, only a few he recognized. Lassie Heldreman ran a farm with her son Jack about 20 klicks farther from the station than his, and he’d helped them erect a new silo. He scanned the others, but he didn’t see Jack, which might account for the look of sorrow on her face. There was Father Demopoulos, the defrocked Orthodox priest with whom Colby had bartered snap beans for a decent wine. David and Jia Li Manus, with little Foster grasping his mother’s hand, stood smiling hopefully at him. He saw Lazer Montgomery, one of the planet’s four equipment techs, someone who’d probably visited most of the people on the planet at one time or another.
He didn’t recognize most of the others, which gave him pause. There hadn’t been many people on the planet to begin with, and he’d must have been living like a hermit not to know them.
But there was one other familiar face, and Duke was right there, her tail whipping back and forth.
“Took you long enough, Edson,” Topeka Watanabe said, her hand patting Duke’s head.
***************
“Well, he’s full of himself,” Topeka remarked.
“I call him Dickhead,” Colby said, as the vice-minister walked away after making sure he told the gathered civilians that not only was he in charge, but he’d ordered this mission to rescue them and they owed their very lives to him.
“Dickhead? Why General, I’m shocked and befluttered that you would stoop to such gutter language, and around my delicate sensitivities at that,” she said in a highly affected voice.
“You don’t know him like I do,” he said, unable to keep the bitterness out of his voice.
That took the smile off her face, and she said, “I think there’s more to the story here than meets the eyes, and you’ve got a history with him.”
“You could say that,” Colby said, leaving it at that.
He was not going to get into how it had been Greenstein who’d railroaded and got him kicked out of the Corps and exiled to Vasquez in the first place. That was too close to the bone, something that was personal. Somehow, some way, he was going to make sure that the vice-minister paid for his sins—not for screwing him over, but for the corruption that Colby uncovered that had led to Greenstein taking him out first.
“Well, if I wasn’t such a lady, I’d say that if that motherfucker messed with you, then I’ll be glad to kick his fucking balls so far up his ass he’ll need a mining permit to find them.”
Colby looked at Topeka first in shock, then in relief as he laughed out loud. At first glance, she looked innocent, a petite young woman with the face of an angel. By now Colby knew she was a kick-ass terror who would make a sailor blush with her language.
Whether she meant to or not, she reminded Colby to get to the task at hand, not worry about some pissant vice-minister whose days were numbered—hopefully, that is. Even that bastard couldn’t pull enough strings to cover his ass over ignoring the plant invasion after being warned about it.
Then again, he got away with stealing from the Corps.
He shook off that line of thought and said, “OK, you were telling me about the new growth.”
“Yes, sir,” Fiorio Slavas, a hop-bean farmer from the Thames Creek area, said. “The first plant-things, they stripped my fields bare, you know. Like what you said happened to you down here station-way. We barely got out ourselves, with those things chasing us until we got on the outcropping.”
Colby had never met Fiorio until 30 minutes ago, and he’d never known that north of DeStaffney Station, the terrain was dotted with close to 50 rock outcroppings that sprung out of the otherwise flat ground like kopjes.
“Me and Leda,” he said, nodding to a florid-but-smiling-faced woman who was looking on with interest, “we stayed up there for two days. We could see the smoke and all from station-way, but we didn’t know what was happening. Finally, we came down, ’cause we were mighty hungry, you know like.
“We went back to the farm to see what we could scrounge up, and our fields, they were covered.”
“Tell him how fast, Fiorio,” Leda said.
“I’m getting to that. Like Leda says, these weren’t no sprouts or nothing. They was like two meters high.”
“Three,” Leda said.
“Three meters high,” he corrected himself. “Only they weren’t nothing from Earth, that I can tell you. I didn’t want to touch them, so we left to come to the station here.”
“And what did we see?” Leda prompted him.
He looked a little puzzled, then said, “The station all destroyed like this?”
Leda rolled her eyes, then stepped in front of her husband, saying, “What he means is that while we were walking here, there were kilometers of the alien plant forms. They’d taken over the entire terrain. What had been a nice big pine forest was gone, an alien horticulture in its place, but one far more developed than our own terraforming could do in thirty years.”
Colby mentally counted out the days since the attack. It had been less than a week, either five or six days. His trip to New Mars and back had screwed up his calendar somewhat.
He looked to Topeka who nodded and said, “It’s like that all around here. Big swathes of land have been repopulated with non-native plants.”
Well, all of our crops and plants are non-native. We introduced them here, he thought, but kept that to himself.
“Hold on a second,” he said, raising his hand, palm out.
“Manny, I’m getting reports that new vegetation is taking over large areas here, supplanting Earth-vegetation. Is it the same thing up there around Tennison?” he asked over his link.
“Wait one and I’ll find out,” the lieutenant colonel passed back.
“And none of the new plants attacked you?” Colby asked Leda, ignoring her husband.
Several voices broke out, too many to hear what was being said, and Colby had to hold up a hand again to shut them all up.
“Leda, if you please.”
“None of them pursued us, if that’s what you mean, and some of them, you could touch without anything happening. But others, some of the smaller ones, the ones with the shiny trefoil leaves, they’re like guards. Touch them and you’ll regret it.”
“They burn!” David Manus said, holding up an arm with a wicked-looking red blotch that ran from his wrist to his elbow. “I barely got away with my life.”
“All hands, avoid contact with any shiny plants with trefoil leaves,” he passed to the Marines while he listened.
The entire force had been ordered not to come into contact with any non-Earth vegetation, but this little tidbit deserved greater dissemination.
“Did they chase you?” Colby asked David. “After you got burned.”
“We were coming in to the station with Kob ’Mbelle,” he said quietly. “I got burned, he started swinging a scythe he’d managed to make. We ran,” he said, pointing at Jia Li and Foster. “Kob stayed to fight, and they swarmed him.”
“There was nothing we could do,” he said, his eyes pleading for Colby to agree, to release the burden he’d been carrying.
Maybe David could have pulled Kob away, maybe he couldn’t. That was not for Colby to say, but he did understand the guilt. Every commander who’d sent men and women to die in battle had felt the same thing.
“You had to take care of Foster,” he said.
He didn’t expect David to accept that, and from his expression, he hadn’t. He’d have to deal with that demon himself.
“So, if you attack them, they will attack back. But they won’t hunt out people and chase them down?”
“Not that we know,” Topeka sai
d.
“I’d like to see some of these,” Colby said as Sergeant Dela Cruz came alert. “Can you show me?”
“There’s some not too far,” one of the women he didn’t know said. “I can show you.”
“Sir—” the sergeant started before Colby cut him off.
“Don’t worry Sergeant. You’re coming with me. And we’re just going to see them, not touch them.”
“General, what’s going to happen to us?” someone else asked as he started off to see these guard plants.
I guess I never told them that. Of course they want to know.
“For now, we need you all to hold tight. We’ll bring down some more supplies, but the first thing we need to do is to make sure the planet is secure. Once we’ve done that, the republic will send in a liner. All of you who want to leave will be taken to New Mars for transit onward.”
“But you said New Mars was hit, too,” someone shouted out.
“Only Hellasland was hit, so the rest of the planet is functioning. Besides, our wormhole only leads there, so that’s the only way out from here.
“I should also say that there will probably be a significant monetary incentive to stay here on Vasquez. That’s far above my pay-grade, so I don’t know the details. but the Republic wants the crops we’ve grown here.”
“I hope they like alien crops,” someone muttered as Colby turned to go see the guard plants.
They’d only gone a hundred meters when Major Nkundlande-Siphers came running up to them.
“What, Sergeant, did you rat me out?” Colby asked.
He knew the Marines thought he had to have protection, but this was getting ridiculous. He came to a stop and waited for the major, ready to cut the man off.
“General, I didn’t want to pass this over the net. But you know that plant-boss thing?”
“Yeah,” he answered, a sudden hollowness forming in the pit of his stomach.
“From how you described it, I think it’s back. First platoon saw it, or another one just like it, running away from the captain’s gig and into the trees. A couple of the Marines fired on it, but they think it got away.”
The Seeds of War Trilogy Page 21