Kingdoms Fury

by David Sherman

  "Ted Sturgeon is one of our finest field commanders, sir," Aguinaldo answered sharply.

  Tokis realized he was on thin ice and backed down. Not only was he jealous of his assistant commandant, he was afraid of him. The ass-chewing Aguinaldo had given the army three-star who bolluxed the Diamunde operation had become legend in the Corps, akin to the legendary tantrum thrown by Lieutenant General Holland "Howling Mad" Smith in 1943 when he'd been forced to relieve a dilatory army division commander. "Well, sure, Andy, I didn't mean . . . well, from what you told me it just sounded like . . ." He made a vague gesture of apology.

  "I trust Ted's judgment, sir. I recommend we take this matter to the Chairman."

  Tokis leaned back in his chair. "No. I don't think it's politically or militarily wise to make any announcements right now. Let's wait to see how Sturgeon handles the situation."

  "But, sir, the force on Kingdom could just be one of many these Skinks have dispatched into Human Space. For all we know, there could be vast invasion fleets on the way."

  Tokis remained leaning back in his chair, regarding Aguinaldo through slitted eyes. He is becoming part of the problem, he thought. "Again, no. Now, Andy, we have to move on to another more pressing matter."

  Aguinaldo started. Another "more pressing" matter? What the . . .?

  "Senator Barbara McSchroeder and the entire delegation from Dacowitz has signed a letter to the President complaining that there are not enough opportunities for women in the Corps. McSchroeder herself called me only this morning. She maintains women are unfairly prejudiced by promotion boards because we don't allow them to serve in the combat arms, blah blah blah. I know, I know." Tokis held up a placating hand as Aguinaldo started rising out of his chair. "Our Deputy Chief of Staff for Manpower is a two-star female. But Andy, let's give her a bone, okay? I'm having DCSM prepare a list of specialties we can open to female Marines. I want you to go over it and make recommendations." He paused. "One thing about that McSchroeder you've got to admit," he said. "She's got a great pair of tits."

  Back in his office, Aguinaldo felt deflated. Now what? He could not, he would not, sit by idly while two of his FISTs were engaged in a deadly fight with an inimical, sentient alien force. It was unconscionable how Tokis had just sat there and airily brushed Sturgeon's concerns aside. Aguinaldo felt his blood coming to a boil. "Gladys," he said to his computer, "please get me the Chairman's office."

  "General, this is highly irregular," Fleet Admiral Rafe Rackstra, Chairman of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, intoned, bidding Aguinaldo to take a seat. "Is General Tokis on travel or sick or something? I did not notice any travel projected on his calendar for this week."

  "No, sir, he is in his office. He does not know I am here."

  Admiral Rackstra's eyebrows rose. "Well, this is irregular, General. Why ever would you presume to come to me without going through the commandant?"

  "We disagree over the matter I wish to discuss with you, sir. And I must come to you because you can go directly to the President."

  "Oh?" Admiral Rackstra leaned back in his chair and regarded the Marine officer over the bridge of his nose. Aguinaldo knew it was the only bridge the admiral had seen in over forty-five years of naval service. "And that matter is?"

  Briefly, Aguinaldo explained Sturgeon's concerns about the Skink activities on Kingdom. "I know we all thought when 34th FIST was deployed to Kingdom it was to quell another schismatic war that had gotten out of hand. But Brigadier Sturgeon believes what he is up against there is only an advance element of what could be a full-force invasion by these Skinks. I think it's time we went on full alert and briefed the Council of Worlds on the threat. Sir . . ." He offered the crystal containing Sturgeon's report. "I suggest you read this for yourself."

  Rackstra took the crystal but only toyed with it for a moment before shaking his head and passing it back to Aguinaldo. "I don't have time to read this stuff. It should have come through channels anyway. Never have liked these back channels. Cut out intermediate commanders who should know what's going on. Does the President already know about the Skinks?"

  Aguinaldo did not bother to point out that Sturgeon considered his situation so grave he dared not slow it down by sending it through intermediate headquarters. "Yessir, I presume she does, from the events on Society 437, but I do not think she knows about them being on Kingdom. But I just ask you to bear in mind that so far none of us here, none of us in charge, have gone up against them. Brigadier Sturgeon has, and I trust his judgment. I am asking you to take me with you to her office. I believe it's time we put the matter before her."

  Admiral Rackstra was silent for a long time. He thought, This is the upstart bastard who got Wimbush fired and made a big name for himself in the process. "General, you go over the commandant's head and you come to me with the opinions of a field commander—a mere brigadier at that—that we're about to be invaded by bug-eyed monsters, and expect me to march into the President's office and ask her to start a goddammed panic? Do you have any idea what information like this, especially if it's ill-founded, would do to the economy of the Confederation, not to mention the psychological health of trillions of people throughout Human Space?" As he went on his voice began to rise. "You are insubordinate, General! You have committed a serious breach of military discipline, coming in here over General Tokis's head like this! No, I repeat, NO." Now he was screaming at Aguinaldo. "I will NOT refer this matter to the President! It can wait until the next regularly scheduled meeting of the Combined Chiefs! Now get out of here!"

  Back in his office, Aguinaldo considered his options. As he sat there, the vidscreen on his console blipped. It was the commandant. Aguinaldo sighed and activated the screen. "Yessir?"

  Tokis's face filled the screen. It was a bright red. His lips quivered as he spoke, "General, Fleet Admiral Rackstra has just informed me about a meeting you had with him a little while ago. Did you discuss Brigadier Sturgeon's message about events on Kingdom with him?"

  "Yessir, I did."

  "Why did you dare to go over my head on this, General?"

  Aguinaldo sighed. That fishing lodge of his up in the mountains would be a good place to hang out in for a year or two. "Because, General, you are a goddammed fool."

  With great difficulty Tokis controlled himself. "General, I want your retirement papers on my desk first thing in the morning." The screen went dead.

  "Well, shit!" Aguinaldo said aloud, and smiled. I should have known Rackstra was going to call whistledick as soon as I was out the door, he thought. He shrugged. I did what had to be done, he reflected. If I can't stand the fire, he told himself, I shouldn't be wearing this gold Nova. He thought: Tokis and Rackstra represent the fraternity of the REMFs, rear-echelon—well, rear-echelon officers who have not earned the right to command my Marines. So I guess it's time now to call upon the fraternity of fighting men. He turned to his computer. "Gladys, get me Marcus Berentus."

  "And so," Marcus Berentus, the Confederation Minister of War concluded, "I decided General Aguinaldo's information was important enough to warrant a meeting with you on such short notice."

  Madam Chang-Sturdevant, President of the Confederation of Worlds Council, regarded the two men sitting across from her. "General Aguinaldo," she began, "if it weren't for Marcus's intervention in this matter I'd never have agreed to see you under these circumstances. I expect you know what a serious breach of military discipline this is, your coming here over the heads of your superiors? You don't need to answer that question, I know very well how the chain of command works, General. Well, let's hear it, gentlemen."

  Quickly, Aguinaldo summarized the contents of Sturgeon's message. He handed the President the crystal. Without a word she popped it into her reader, and for the next ten minutes they sat there while she read Sturgeon's report. "Whew," she said at last. "Sturgeon. Sturgeon? I've heard that name before. What kind of commander is this Sturgeon?"

  "One of the best we've ever had, ma'am. I think Ted can handle the situation on Kingdom
, but very frankly, I think his fear that what he's up against is merely the thin edge of a general invasion is fully justified, and we would be taking a terrible chance if we waited any longer to prepare for it."

  "Marcus?"

  "Ma'am, speaking as an old fighter jock, never underestimate the opposition. Both Andy and Ted are old hands at commanding combat operations. If they see an elephant in any of this, we'd better start looking for his trunk. I recommend we alert the member worlds' armed forces if not the general civilian population."

  Madam Chang-Sturdevant reflected. "I'm well-aware of the threat the Skinks pose, gentlemen. I was advised, and I agreed at the time, to keep what happened on Society 437 quiet, at least until we could find out more about these creatures." She paused. "I'm going to take a big hit on this if we go public, gentlemen. Politicians can't afford to get caught withholding information from the people who elected them." She paused again, thinking. "But," she sighed, "if I didn't want to take the fire, I shouldn't have run for this office."

  She turned to her console and called up her chief-of-staff on the vidscreen. "I want the entire Combined Chiefs in the conference room in one hour," she told him. "It will last no more than thirty minutes. Half an hour after that, assemble my cabinet for a full session. If the ministers are away, have their deputies sit in for them."

  She turned to Aguinaldo. "I want you there with me, General."

  Aguinaldo cleared his throat. "Well, ma'am, you should know that I have been asked to turn in my resignation and—"

  "Why doesn't that surprise me, General?" She paused. "We'll address your future later. Marcus, take our troublemaking Marine to the cafeteria, and you two be back here in my office in forty-five minutes, so we can all three of us walk in on the chiefs in one grand entrance." She laughed. "I'm a woman and the goddammed President, so I got to have grand entrances—the more spectacular the better."

  In the corridor outside Berentus turned to Aguinaldo and said, smiling, "Andy, this is the last time I'm going to bail your ass out of trouble. I'm getting too old for this close-air support role." When Berentus had been a hotshot fighter pilot, he'd flown a mission in support of a Marine platoon pinned down by hostiles during a peacekeeping deployment on a godforsaken piece of junk known as Nyongnassa. His ordnance had been right on target, and the Marines, who'd been on the verge of getting overrun, were saved. Berentus was too late to save the Marine platoon commander. It was the platoon sergeant who'd taken over and called in the strike. That platoon sergeant had been Anders Aguinaldo.

  Madam Chang-Sturdevant's entrance into the conference room was spectacular indeed, flanked as she was by her Minister of War and the Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps in his dress reds. No one in the room was more astonished than Fleet Admiral Rackstra and General Tokis, both of whom looked at one another nervously. "That bastard's gone over our heads!" Tokis hissed into Rackstra's ear. The military representatives from the member worlds' armed forces, permanent members of the Combined Chiefs of Staff, looked at one another in surprise and then to Admiral Rackstra. Both he and Tokis experienced severe sinking sensations in their guts.

  Chang-Sturdevant sat at the head of the table, flanked by Berentus on one side and Aguinaldo on the other. "Admiral Rackstra, Commandant Tokis," she nodded at those officers, "I fully realize that by coming to me over your heads, General Aguinaldo has committed a grave breach of military discipline. But that is neither here nor there. We have a situation on our hands. Gentlemen, I am going to have a message flashed onto your screens. Read it and then we'll talk."

  Admiral Rackstra cleared his throat. "Madam President, I advise proceeding with extreme caution. We cannot make any definitive decision on this matter until we have confirmation that this so-called ‘invasion’ is in fact not some hoax sponsored by a group of religious fanatics. We all remember the destruction of that container ship some time ago . . ." The other chiefs muttered their assent. "I recommend a fact-finding mission to this place, so we can see for ourselves what's going on out there."

  "Madam President," Tokis spoke up. "Whatever we decide to do, I recommend against warning the general civilian population at this time. News of this sort, if it's genuine, would result in a panic of unparalleled proportions."

  Chang-Sturdevant allowed the discussion to go on for a few more minutes. "Gentlemen," she said at last, "I thank you for your frank comments and advice. I agree with Commandant Tokis that giving this information to the general population at this juncture would be a bad idea. A fact-finding mission would be a good idea if we could act on it swiftly, but we cannot. Therefore, to act on the possibility that Brigadier Sturgeon is correct in his assumption that events on Kingdom are a precursor to a general invasion of Human Space, I want you to alert your Fleet commanders at once. Summarize Brigadier Sturgeon's message. Order them to put their forces on alert immediately, but ensure a strict need-to-know about the reason for the alert. Otherwise our forces are to be told only that I have directed the creation of a task force to deal with a serious threat to the, shall we say, ‘stability’ of the Confederation. They are to remain in a high state of readiness until the crisis is past or until they are told to stand down." Chang-Sturdevant whispered something to her Minister of War.

  "Madam, who is to command this task force?" the Army Chief of Staff asked.

  "General Aguinaldo." She turned to Aguinaldo, but as she spoke she gestured at the assembled chiefs, indicating her orders to him were orders to them as well. "First order of precedence: Brigadier Sturgeon gets from you whatever he needs to resolve the current crisis on Kingdom. Make it clear to him that he makes the tactical decisions as the man on the scene and we back him up. I think he already knows this, but I want you to emphasize that we understand he and his Marines are on the very tip of the sword between these creatures and the rest of humanity."

  Rackstra and Tokis said nothing, waiting for the ax to fall. Now it did:

  "Admiral Rackstra, I know I have your full cooperation. I want you to put your entire staff behind this effort. Marcus," she nodded at the Minister of War, "will give you all the assistance you need, including emergency funding."

  Rackstra was almost perspiring with relief. "Yes, ma'am! You have it!"

  "General Tokis, I know you will support General Aguinaldo in every way possible. As far as his mission is concerned, there is no chain of command. He will confer with you as needed but his appointment is presidential and he reports directly to me, the same as Admiral Rackstra. But in all matters relating to these aliens, General Aguinaldo is the supreme commander."

  Tokis silently breathed a long sigh of relief. "Yes, ma'am! Fully understood! Brilliant decision! Excellent choice!"

  "General Aguinaldo, is there anything you want to say right now? Anything you can think of on such short notice that I can do for you?"

  "Yes, ma'am. I want to ask Sergeant Major Bambridge if he'd like to be assigned to my staff. He's the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps."

  Chang-Sturdevant looked at Tokis, who happily nodded his assent. To his way of thinking, the entire situation was turning up roses. He was getting rid of two troublemakers, one a flag officer and the other the Marine Corps' senior enlisted man, both recalcitrant "warriors" who could never grasp the big picture of life above the worm's-eye view of the infantryman.

  "One more thing, Madam, gentlemen," Aguinaldo said. "It'll be weeks before we can get this show on the road. Weeks before Brigadier Sturgeon even knows there's a show coming. In the meantime, Sturgeon and the two FISTs he commands on Kingdom are on their own. I have faith in Sturgeon and his men that they can hold out. But as potent as this alien force is, I just hope we aren't too late."

  Chang-Sturdevant nodded. She understood very well the problems of communicating over the vast reaches of interstellar space. So did everyone else in the room. "All right, gentlemen." She stood. "Go do it. Marcus, I believe you want to have a few words with General Aguinaldo before our cabinet meeting." She walked into her private chambers to prepare for the
meeting.

  Berentus took Aguinaldo aside. "Andy, you know the only reason she didn't relieve those stuffed shirts on the spot is because she does need them until this crisis is over. As we used to say in the old 97th Tactical Fighter Squadron, ‘Why change shovels in the middle of the shit?’ Besides, they're holdovers from the previous administration, and since those appointments run for five years, they both still have some time to go before they become eligible for retirement. You know, military officers are supposed to be political neutrals, and it doesn't look good for a new President to fire the chief appointed by a predecessor.

  "But I only have one thing to say that you don't already know. When the time is right, Madam President is going to advance your name as the next commandant." Berentus smiled and extended a hand.

  "Well," Aguinaldo began, shaking Berentus's hand vigorously, "this morning my career was over, and now . . . I'll tell you one thing, sir, I'm moving my task force headquarters way the hell out there, because with a few notable exceptions like yourself, I don't think I much care for the people I have to work with down here."

  Chapter Nine

  In a corner of the operations center of the Marine Expeditionary Forces, Kingdom, Brigadier Sturgeon stood quietly, arms folded over his chest. He wanted to watch the situation map develop as the patrol reports came without interfering with the work of the staff. He didn't like what he saw. Nearly all of the Army of the Lord platoons, each under the command of a Marine fire team or gun team, made contact with Skinks. In many cases the contact was so severe the patrols had to pull back before they reached suspected cave outlets they were sent to salt with surveillance devices. Kingdomite morale was even lower than he'd thought; about half of the soldiers broke and ran, or tried to, when they made contact with the Skinks. Stragglers would probably continue to dribble in for the next couple of days. Meanwhile, the Skinks continued to probe and raid the defensive positions around Haven and Interstellar City.