by Rick Partlow
“That might be for the best, though God knows, he deserves to get his dick slapped for this. Not just for the illegal order but letting it happen to begin with. He knew there were civilians in the warehouse and didn’t bother to detail anyone to secure them.”
“Maybe I should have done it, sir,” I admitted. “I was right there next to Freddy…Lt. Kodjoe. I could have sent a squad to go pin them in.”
“You already saved their asses from the bunker,” he pointed out. “Did he want you to hold his dick for him, too? It was his company, his responsibility.” He waved the subject away. “You’ll amend the report and hopefully Greg will man up and stop trying to make a big deal about this. I want to make sure we get the new squad leadership…”
There was a knock on the side of the soundproofed wall.
“Sir?”
The woman was a First Lieutenant, I could tell that from the insignia on her Fleet utilities. When she moved farther into the conference room, two NCOs followed her and all three of them wore pistols holstered at their waists. They were MPs. My gut fell out at the realization and I was suddenly, dolorously certain of their purpose here.
“Lt. Alvarez,” the woman said, the heel of her hand resting on the butt of her pistol, “I’m going to need you to turn over your carbine and come with us.”
Covington rose from his seat, a dark cloud passing over his face.
“You’d better have some orders to show me, Lieutenant,” he warned her, “or your career is about to take an unfortunate turn.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, her face turning pale at the words. She raised her ‘link and cast something over to his. “It’s directly from the office of the Judge Advocate General. Captain Cronje is pressing charges against Lt. Alvarez for insubordination, disobeying orders, dereliction of duty and threatening a superior officer. I’ve been ordered to remand him for custody in the Brigade HQ until a flight can be arranged up to the cruiser Trafalgar for return to Inferno for a court-martial.”
I didn’t move, couldn’t. I couldn’t think, could barely breathe, and probably would have sat there immobile until the MPs hauled me away if Covington’s voice hadn’t cut through my fugue with a tone of firm command.
“Give me your weapon, Alvarez,” he said, then motioned impatiently when I didn’t immediately respond.
I stood and unslung the carbine, not missing the hands tightening on the grips of sidearms as the MP’s watched me very closely. I handed the weapon to Covington and he slung it over his shoulder, glaring at the MP’s but talking to me.
“Fuck amending your report,” he told me. “The minute you get to Brigade, I want you to make a formal statement to the JAG Corps and the MP’s and get that moron charged with murder.”
One of the MP NCO’s pulled out a pair of restraints, but Covington shot him a glare that would have melted lead.
“Those won’t be necessary,” he said. The officer started to speak, but Covington interrupted her. “I said, those won’t be necessary. And if you wish to stay here and argue about it, I’m morally certain I can get Colonel Voss to see things my way.”
“It’s okay, Sergeant,” the MP officer said, waving the man off.
“Don’t worry, son,” Covington assured me. “Everything is going to be fine.”
He seemed very convinced of it. I wasn’t sure at all.
The woman blew into the room like an autumn wind, cool and dry and bringing portents of the killing frost to come. She wore a dress uniform, white and sharp and standing out like a sign that screamed ’please shoot me’ on an occupied enemy world, but I suppose the officers in Brigade did things differently.
She closed the door behind her and fell into a seat opposite me at the interrogation room table, glancing down at the loop on the table I should have been handcuffed to if the MP’s hadn’t listened to Captain Covington. She raised an eyebrow but didn’t mention it.
“So, you’re the infamous Lt. Alvarez,” she said. Her voice sounded like one of my Drill Instructors from Basic on those rare occasions when they’d been talking in a normal tone of voice, like someone who’d yelled a lot their whole life and had a hard time speaking normally.
“I didn’t realize I was infamous, Commander Hofstetter,” I replied, reading the info off of her name plate.
She was a Fleet Commander, which meant she was the equivalent of a Marine light colonel and I should be respectful, although she was also a JAG lawyer, which meant she’d received the rank at a more accelerated pace due to her training and was probably younger than most commanders, with less experience in the military.
“Well, let’s just say you’ve come quite close to meeting someone like me a few times in your short career. But you also have quite the list of commendations and awards, including a Silver Star, and you’ve participated in at least three of the most important battles in the war.” She shot me what could have been described as a smirk, but I had the intuition that it was just her way of smiling. “So, when someone with a record like that is accused of the crimes you are accused of by a company commander with a spotless record and a good reputation in the battalion, we tend to go to the source.”
“You reviewed our suit recordings,” I assumed.
“I did.”
“Pardon me for not knowing, ma’am,” I said, very cautiously, “but are you here as my prosecutor or my defense attorney?”
Now she laughed and it was a sound I didn’t expect from that voice, light and airy.
“Technically,” she said, “I’m your defense attorney…well, I was going to be your defense attorney until the Provost Marshall told me about your counter-charges. At that point, I met with him and we both reviewed the evidence.” She tilted her head to the side as if she was weighing up how to put what she said next. “Now, I have to tell you, there’s a lot of sentiment to just make all this go away.”
“Really, ma’am?” I raised my eyebrows, unable to contain my surprise. “I’d have thought Brigade would be all over this like stink on….” I paused, reconsidering my language. “…crap,” I finished. “I mean, either I’m right about this being an illegal order and Captain Cronje is guilty of murder, or he’s right and I’m guilty of insubordination. Either way, someone broke the UCMJ.”
“You left off the other possibility, Lieutenant,” she said, leaning across the table toward me. “That you’re both right and both wrong. Captain Cronje was dealing with a fluid situation where he couldn’t tell civilians from non-uniformed combatants, his people were dying, and he gave an order without knowing the situation. You were on the ground and tried to tell him the details, but his communications channels were overloaded by other chatter and he ignored you. You then ordered your platoon into a situation where they were pointing their weapons at friendly troops. Does this sound like a good summation of what happened to you?”
I let out a breath I’d been unconscious of holding.
“Yes, ma’am.” There was no point in denying it, she’d already seen the only evidence that mattered and drawn her own conclusions.
“In fact,” she went on, “if anyone is really culpable for this, it’s Lt. Kodjoe.”
“Freddy?” I blurted. “Why him? Ma’am.”
“Because he did know what was going on,” she said. “He did see the juveniles among the civilians and knew he was following what were either intentionally or unintentionally illegal orders, yet he did it anyway. And when you pointed it out to him, he still ordered his troops to fire on the civilians.”
“I didn’t want to get Freddy in trouble,” I said, squeezing my eyes shut and running a hand over the back of my neck. My head hurt, probably from the explosion. I wondered if I’d gotten a concussion. They hadn’t taken me to the medics after the battle, but there’d been so much else going on, I hadn’t thought about it.
“Neither do we, particularly,” she agreed. “You’re both officers because of OCS, and OCS exists because we need good officers with combat experience. Now more than ever. You may or may not have heard,
but we lost two full companies of drop-troopers on this mission before anyone touched the ground.”
“Shit,” I hissed. I had not heard that.
“And we have the Security Command siphoning even more recruits away from the Marines….” She sighed. “It’s all a fucking mess, Lieutenant. So, what we’d really like to do is get everyone to drop this. Just pretend it never happened.” She chuckled. “I know that sort of goes against my job description, but we have a war to win.”
“I never wanted to file a report in the first place,” I told her. “I only did it because of what Captain Cronje is trying to do to me.”
“If I can convince Captain Cronje to drop this whole thing,” she said, waving a hand demonstratively as if to show me what ’this whole thing’ was, “would you be willing to do the same?”
“Of course, ma’am.”
Being honest with myself if not her, I wasn’t happy about it. Maybe Cronje had panicked, made a bad call without having all the information, but the fact was, he was responsible for securing those civilians and if he’d done his job, a whole fire team worth of Marines would still be alive.
But like I’d told Vicky not that long ago, this was war, and shit happened in war, and I didn’t have to like it, I just had to do my job.
“All right then,” Hofstetter said, pressing her palms against the table and coming to her feet. “In that case, I don’t think there’s any reason you should have to stick around here any longer. Come with me, and I’ll have the MP’s give you a ride back to your unit.”
I rose to follow her, something between relief and disappointment warring inside my chest for supremacy. At least it was over.
Except of course, it wasn’t. Not even close.
6
The MP’s didn’t get the chance to drive me back: Captain Covington stalked into the waiting area the second I emerged from the interrogation room, the expression on his face deadlier than the business end of the pulse carbine slung over his shoulder. The two Military Police NCO’s who’d been escorting me stopped where they were, sensing now would be a good time to be somewhere else.
“How’d you know they were letting me out, sir?” I asked, trying to make sure he did know that and wasn’t just here to start busting heads. As much as I didn’t want to get thrown in the brig, I really didn’t want the Skipper thrown into the brig on my account.
“Commander Hofstetter sent word,” he said, the corner of his mouth curling into something between a smile and a snarl. “I happened to be in the area. Come on, let’s get you out of here before Brigade changes its mind again.”
I opened my mouth to say I didn’t think that was likely, but shut it again immediately. How the hell would I know what was likely after everything that had happened in what Hofstetter had referred to as my short career. It didn’t feel short. In fact, it felt as if it had lasted the better part of my life.
The MP’s in the Provost Marshal’s office stared at us as we left, as if the story had already filtered down through the ranks and become legend…or maybe it was just the Skipper who was a legend. I tried to see him as they did and found it was difficult to do it anymore. When I’d first come to the unit, he’d been unapproachable, a boogeyman both to the enemy and any Marine luckless enough to fuck up in his presence. I’d rarely spoken to him, and the few times he spoke to me, it seemed as if his words were the pronouncements of the prophets.
Now, of course, I worked with him every day, and while he still retained something of the larger-than-life nature, I’d grown accustomed to it and he felt more like the head of a family than a cartel crime boss. Sometimes, granted, the very testy and exacting head of a dysfunctional family of former criminals and misfits, but still a family.
Top was outside, leaning against the side of a lightly-armored utility rover, the pulse carbine propped on her hip daring any of the passing military cops to say anything about her parking. If Captain Covington was the father figure of our family, the First Sergeant was a real mother.
“How’d you get your hands on the rover?” I wondered. “I thought Brigade had all the ones we brought down locked up.”
“Don’t ask questions when you’d be better off not knowing the answers, Lieutenant,” Top told me, pulling open the driver’s door and sliding behind the wheel.
I got in the back and I expected the Skipper to climb up front with Top, but he clambered into the rear with me, then smacked the back of the front seat. Top didn’t acknowledge it, but she hit the accelerator and peeled away from the repurposed Tahni military base in a spray of gravel.
“Hey, slow down!” an MP NCO yelled at us, his whiney voice audible through the open windows over the hum of the motors.
Top sped up.
“That backstabbing, self-centered little prick,” Covington muttered, and I was fairly sure he wasn’t talking about the speed-conscious cop. “I can’t believe he’s pulling this shit after you pulled his balls out of the fire. He totally fucked up that operation, getting his people pinned down by the fixed defenses on that bunker. If he’d properly scouted the situation, he could have called in an airstrike before the drop-ships cleared the zone.”
I didn’t want to question Alpha’s performance on the objective because Vicky Sandoval and Freddy Kodjoe had both been part of it, and blaming Cronje would rub off on them, so I kept my mouth shut.
“Then to try to do this to one of my platoon leaders…,” he trailed off, jaw clenching. I don’t believe I’d ever seen him this angry before. He was a man who rarely showed emotion, and I sometimes thought it was because he’d seen everything you could experience in the Marines and nothing surprised him enough to make him truly angry. Not this time, though.
We were driving out of the secure area now, through what had been designated, for some reason, Route Tampa, a road from the military base, through the edge of the Tahni government sector to the industrial district and the spaceport. I didn’t understand the reference and hadn’t had time to look it up. There were young Tahni males out along the road, not quite of military age but close, the ones who’d have been going through their version of basic training within a year or two. They lined the route, hands filled with bits of cement block and bricks.
Through the ridged brows and the flattened nose and ears, through the shovel-like jaws and everything that made them different than us, the universal look of adolescence shown through, the smoldering fire of kids on the verge of adulthood who thought they were so much tougher than what life had to throw at them. I saw myself in those dark and angry eyes.
Top handed me a pulse carbine back over the top of the seat.
“If any of those fuckers start throwing rocks at us, shoot at their feet,” she told me.
I nestled the weapon into my shoulder and checked the safety, then propped the emitter in the open window. I hoped it didn’t come to that, because I wasn’t at all confident enough in my aim with the carbine to be sure I would miss them.
“They’re too stupid to know when they’ve been beat,” Top added, jerking the wheel to the left to avoid one of them who stepped partway onto the pavement. She slowed down as they crowded into the road, trying not to hit them.
“So are we, sometimes, Ellen,” Covington said quietly. I was a bit shocked to hear him use Top’s first name. It seemed akin to a child walking in on their parents having sex. “Maybe that’s why we wound up fighting each other.”
Something banged hard against the left side of the car and I twisted backwards, trying to find the one who’d thrown it, but it seemed like a signal to the others and debris began to rain down, most of the missiles bouncing off the pavement.
“Goddammit,” Top bit off, “I gotta turn this thing back in.”
I didn’t try to aim, just jammed down the trigger pad and swept the emitter sideways in a line about three meters from the side of the rover. The carbine shuddered against my shoulder, the HiPex chemical hyperexplosive cartridges igniting in the chamber and pulsing their heat energy through the lasing rod. The
pulses themselves were invisible, but the intense energy ionized the air around them into a crackling tube of plasma, like miniature forks of lightning. The light show did nothing, but the bursts of focused light blew spectacular holes in the road surface, spraying white-hot bits of debris backwards into the wayward juveniles.
They cried out, their yells sounding like someone had recorded a group of human teens shouting and then played it back at half-speed. The group scattered, rushing away from the roadside, some of them with their clothes still smoking from the splash of vaporized pavement. Top goosed the accelerator and the rover leapt like it had been shot out of a cannon, taking advantage of the opening. She stuck her head out of the open window and looked back down the side of the vehicle, swearing into the slipstream.
“Little bastards scratched the paint. Now I’m going to have to sneak this thing back into the motor pool at night and exfil tactically instead of just walking out like I signed the car out and was dropping it back off.”
“You know you were going to sneak it back anyway,” Covington told her. He hadn’t said anything during the incident with the rock-throwing juveniles, nor had he taken a shot with his carbine. “Makes you feel like you’re still a private walking point.”
I blew out a breath and settled back in the seat, switching on the safety. There was a pouch full of spare magazines on the floor, and I ejected the partially-spent one and reloaded.
“Do you think I did the right thing?” I asked, still staring at the road.
“You didn’t kill any of them,” Top assured me. “Maybe gave a few some nasty burns to remember the day by.”
“That’s not what I meant, Top,” I told her, and I was surprised at the impatience in my tone. I was a butterbar, and Second Lieutenants didn’t get mouthy with Master Gunnery Sergeants. Not if they wanted to keep their ass intact.
“I know what you meant, boy,” she said, not sounding angry. “You’ve been around this block. You’ve seen more than Cronje ever will, had to make decisions he’ll never have to face. So, you tell me. Did you do the right thing?”