Starfist FR - 03 - Recoil

by Dan Cragg

  “Damned by all the gods!” exclaimed the next man in line. He was stout and dressed in the style of a moderately prosperous businessman on one of the more settled worlds. “This is all the Confederation thinks of us, that all we rate is a tiny gaggle of fancy-dress soldiers?”

  “Mr. Miner, sir,” Daly said, dipping his head politely to the stout man, “I say again, we are not soldiers, we are Confederation Marines—Force Recon Marines.” He had to stifle a grin at Smelt Miner’s occupational name—the man controlled most of the ore mining and smelting on Haulover. Daly thought Miner could have been more clever in picking his name, as had the other directors, such as Manuel Factor, the manufacturing kingpin, or Rayl Rhodes, whose long-haul rail system already connected all of Haulover’s cities and was expanding to the secondary settlements. Even Agro Herder, whose industrialscale farming and ranching operations were aimed at ultimately providing exotic foodstuffs for export, had given himself a more imaginative name.

  Miner blinked at being addressed by name, but almost immediately realized that the Marines must have made at least some cursory study of the dossiers of the principal leaders of Haulover, and the dossiers surely included their pictures. He went on at a shout. “We need an army division, or at least a battalion, and those spy satellites of the navy’s, to find and destroy the pirates that are terrorizing our countryside. And all the Confederation sends us is an understrength squad under the command of a very junior officer! And a not very good officer, given your evident advanced age.”

  The squads stood easy in their ranks: feet at shoulder width, hands clasped behind their backs. While their bodies were still, their eyes were in constant motion, seeking eye contact with the other members of the greeting party—all of whom except for Mullilee were members of the Haulover Board of Directors. The directors quickly looked away when one of them happened to make eye contact with one of the Marines. Daly briefly let a smile crease his face. “Sir, you evidently

  aren’t very familiar with military capabilities. In a situation such as yours, a normal deployment would be one four-man Force Recon squad under the command of a sergeant. The fact that the Confederation sent two squads under the command of an officer demonstrates the very high esteem in which the Confederation holds Haulover. As for my age, yes, I am older than the typical navy ensign or army second lieutenant. That is because the Marine Corps commissions all of its officers from the ranks. I have fifteen years experience as an enlisted man and noncommissioned officer behind me. Before I went to the Marine Officer Training College and was commissioned, my last assignment was as a squad leader in Force Recon. I know a great deal more than a junior officer who received a direct commission.

  “Now, if we are through with the reception, my Marines and I have a job to do, and we need to get ready to do it.”

  “One question before we break up.” Daly looked at the speaker; it was Finn Bankley, Haulover’s finance and banking kingpin. “I know you Marines have a high opinion of your capabilities—I’m familiar with your reputation, and it seems your high self-opinion is at least somewhat deserved. But what happens if you find something out there that you can’t deal with on your own?”

  Daly nodded at him. “Thank you, Mr. Bankley, that’s a good question. If we find something bigger than we can handle ourselves, we’ll be able to determine exactly what it is and what it will take to defeat it. Then we can make a recommendation to the appropriate authorities on what they need to send here to resolve matters.”

  “And just how long would that take?” Bankley asked.

  “There is a FIST two days Beam Space travel away at Thorsfinni’s World, and Fourth Fleet Marines headquarters on Halfway isn’t much farther. The Confederation Army also has garrisons in this region. And the navy can get warships here in a short period of time.”

  “But how long will it take to get a request for assistance from any of those units to Earth and then for authorization for action to get to any of those units?”

  Daly gave Bankley a chilling grin. “Sir, when Force Recon finds a need for immediate action from a larger unit, we don’t have to send a request to Earth; we can contact the units we need directly. Such units rarely decline to grant our requests. And we have already emplaced an orbital station with interstellar communications drones in orbit so that we can send necessary requests in a timely manner.”

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  Marine House (Temporary Quarters), Sky City, Haulover The Marines were given quarters in a large, newly built house in Sky City that the town had originally constructed to house the offices of the Confederation of Human Worlds administration on Haulover, and to service Beach Spaceport, but had since been designated for use by visiting dignitaries. The Marines promptly renamed it “Marine House.” The house was in an area of large homes on larger lots. A big living room took up most of the front, with a fully equipped kitchen to the left. A hallway led to the rear of the house from near the living room’s junction with the kitchen. Two rooms and two baths led off each side of the hallway. Another shorter hall led from the middle of the living room to a bath and two bedrooms, the rear of which was windowless and must at one time have functioned as a walk-in closet or classified documents library. Another room, which could be either another bedroom or a meeting room, was on the right just behind the living room. Ensign Daly took the windowless bedroom so he could have the equipment to communicate with the Mark IX Echo satellite at hand and out of sight of the locals. Sergeants Kindy and Williams took the adjacent bedroom, and the other Marines occupied the two bedrooms closer to the living room on the long hallway. They went through the motions and chatter of unpacking and stowing their gear but mostly paid surreptitious attention to the bug-detection devices they put about—the “special”

  equipment Commander Obannion had so casually mentioned when he’d first told Ensign Daly that he was going on the mission. Every room in the house had multiple audio and vid bugs except for one bathroom, which only had audio. The Marines gravitated to the house’s living room once they’d located all the bugging devices, leaving all doors open behind them. The living room was well, if modestly, appointed, with sufficient chairs, sofas, and occasional tables to accommodate the nine Marines. It was bereft of decoration, but there was a reasonably well-stocked bar in one corner. For the moment, none of the Marines did more with the bar than look to see what it held. They’d also noted a goodly supply of a local beer in the kitchen.

  “I’m going to shower,” Daly announced. He held up a small overnight bag in his hand, a bit larger than needed to hold a change of clothes.

  “Good idea,” Sergeant Kindy quipped. “Can’t have our commander going around smelling like he just spent the past month confined to the cargo hold of a civilian freighter.”

  “He was in ossifer country,” Sergeant Williams shot back.

  “So if that’s what he smells like, what do we smell like?”

  Daly flashed a rude gesture at them and headed to the bathroom off the bedroom he’d picked for himself, the only bathroom that didn’t have a vid pickup, where he’d already put his toiletries. He left the door ajar. Corporal Nomonon sniffed his own armpit. “Whew! I know a certain corporal who stands in serious need of a serious cleaning.”

  Corporal Jaschke snorted. “Gonna take more than a shower to clean you up!”

  “Why you—!” Nomonon mock-swung at Jaschke, and the two grappled in mock wrestling while the others stood back and cheered them on.

  In the bathroom, Daly hummed off-key as he emptied his overnight bag. Not much seemed to come out of it—it some-

  times looked like his hand went in and came out empty. The apparent empty hands held, of course, his chameleons. The visible items he withdrew from the bag were innocuous in appearance, resembling ordinary containers of household products. Closer examination would reveal a tail on each of the items, tails of varying lengths and thicknesses. He put all but one of them into a chameleon bag. After emptying his overnight bag, Daly turned on t
he water in the shower, attached one of the items from his bag to the single audio pickup in the room, then stripped naked and pulled on his chameleons, including gloves and helmet with its chameleon screen lowered. Now invisible, he took the chameleon bag and slipped out of the bathroom. He padded through the living room to the first bedroom, where he attached devices from his bag to each vid and audio pickup in the room. Then into the adjacent bathroom where he attached more. Onto the second bedroom and its bath, then the third and the fourth and fifth, with their respective bathrooms, and finally the kitchen.

  When Daly was done with all the other rooms, he returned to the living room. Nomonon and Jaschke were no longer wrestling, but were collapsed on sofas, breathing heavily from their exertions. The others were scattered about the room, commenting on the wrestling they’d just watched or chatting about other neutral topics. Still invisible, Daly slipped behind Kindy and tapped him on the shoulder that faced away from the vid pickups.

  Kindy didn’t visibly react to the touch but stood up and announced, “All right, you scuzz-buckets, it’s time for everybody to hit the head and police your bodies.”

  Williams led the way, standing and heading for the room he was sharing with Kindy. Kindy stood, arms akimbo, looking in turn at each of the junior Marines until they were all on their feet and moving to their rooms. As soon as Kindy closed the door to his room behind himself, Daly went to work putting the spoofers on the living room’s pickups. When he finished, he returned to the bathroom off his bedroom, and stripped and stepped into the stillrunning water; let the listener think he took a long shower. Fully clean for the first time since transshipping from the CNSS Trumbull County to the SS Briny Stars at Aardheim, and changed into fresh garrison utilities, the Marines reassembled in the living room. The first one back, Ensign Daly, came by way of the kitchen, where he had filled a cooler with bottles of beer, which he deposited on a low table in the middle of the living room. Each of the Marines grabbed one before picking a place to sit.

  Sergeant Williams wasted no time getting things started. With only a quick glance at one of the spoofs, he said while opening a beer, “I’ve had an uncomfortable feeling about this board of directors from the first time they were mentioned in our mission briefings. And now that we’ve encountered them—”

  “I really don’t like them,” Sergeant Kindy cut in. He opened a beer and took a swig.

  “They give off bad vibes,” Corporal Belinski said.

  “Especially that Smelt Miner,” Corporal Nomonon added.

  “I’d like to take him behind a mine head and teach him a thing or three.”

  “I’ll help,” Lance Corporal Rudd said, wiping imagined foam from his upper lip.

  “What’s the deal with those names?” Lance Corporal Ellis asked. “I can understand people wanting to create new identities for themselves when they go to settle a new world, but those names . . .”

  “I think it’s a case of the big frog, small pond syndrome,”

  Williams said. When Ellis looked blank, he explained. “In a large pond, only the very biggest frogs are powerful. But take a medium-size frog from the big pond and put him in a small pond, he has a chance to be the big frog without actually being

  big. When I read the dossiers of the members of the board, I saw that none of them were important people on their home worlds—they were medium-size frogs. Here, with a small population and no resident big frogs, they get to be the big ones. So they adopted names that they think reflect their imagined size.”

  Rudd chuckled. “So they picked names that make them sound like a bunch of small-time con men, out to fleece the rubes.”

  Ensign Daly sat back in an armchair outside the circle of NCOs and junior men and smiled to himself. Kindy and Williams were both on just their second missions as Force Recon squad leaders, and their first as squad leaders on an (almost) independent mission, but they were doing exactly what he would have done when he was a squad leader—get everybody’s first impressions out in the open. He took a deep draft of his beer, then settled back to nurse the rest of it.

  “The planetary administrator doesn’t seem to be in charge,”

  was Lance Corporal Skripska’s first contribution. He’d barely touched his beer.

  Lance Corporal Ellis nodded. “He backed off in a hurry when Miner opened his mouth.”

  Jaschke looked introspective. “Not one of them was willing to look us in the eye,” he said softly, and took a thoughtful sip.

  “Except Miner and Bankley when they challenged Mr. Daly,”

  Kindy said.

  “How much you want to bet nobody at Diplomatic Services has any idea that their on-site man isn’t running things?”

  Williams asked. He got no takers. Daly listened with half an ear; he gave most of his attention to the spoofs he’d mounted on the pickups. They were clever devices that noted who was in a room and whether or not they were talking, then altered the transmissions of their movements and words to something that would seem innocent to the observers. The technology was new and hadn’t been fully tested, but Fourth Fleet Marines G2, intelligence, and G4, logistics, believed it was solid enough to spoof spy devices a generation or two beyond anything Haulover was known to have—and beyond the abilities of Haulover techs and equipment to override even if they managed to detect something amiss in what they were receiving from their pickups. Daly certainly hoped G2 was right; he and his Marines needed to be able to discuss all aspects of the mission without fear of being overheard. His men were right; there was something amiss in the governing of Haulover. He wondered just who was behind the bugging of Marine House. His ears perked up when he heard Rudd say, “The board of directors. Every member of the board is the richest, most powerful person in an industry or trade. Reading between the lines of the reports we have on Haulover, it seems pretty evident that each of them is intent on controlling all of his industry. Independent mines get bought up. Regional intercity transit systems get bypassed and forced out of business by lower rates offered by Rayl Rhodes. Small energy companies are eaten up by Alec Powers’s continental operation. Et cetera.”

  Kindy’s eyes grew wide. “The destroyed homesteads we know of were all farms or ranches. Could Agro Herder be behind it, forcibly putting small farmers out of business so he can take over their holdings?”

  “Possibly,” Williams said. “He has bought up their holdings.”

  “Damn,” Nomonon said, “are we dealing with an inside job instead of off-worlders?”

  “Wouldn’t that be a bitch,” Jaschke said; his beer bottle dangled from his hand, half-forgotten. Office of the Planetary Administrator, Sky City, Haulover Ensign Daly and the two squad leaders went to meet with Planetary Administrator Spilk Mullilee to get the details of the most recent raids on the homesteads. Chairman of the Board Smelt Miner was there, and so was another member of the

  board to whom the Marines hadn’t been introduced: Goode Sales, who owned all of the major goods distribution and sales operations on Haulover.

  “Our most recent information is a couple of months old,”

  Daly said. “What’s happened during that time?”

  Miner glared at Daly. “What’s the matter with you people that you can’t keep up?”

  Daly looked at him with the kind of blank expression that can be more threatening than a glare, then said calmly, “Sir, we were in transit for nearly four weeks; it wasn’t possible for us to receive updates during that time. Prior to that, our headquarters hadn’t received anything directly from Haulover, but only data that had been relayed from Earth. It took a month for the data to be transmitted from Haulover to Earth, be analyzed there, and forwarded to Halfway. Ergo, we’re two months behind on what’s happening here.”

  Miner glowered. “So, when a member world sends to Earth for assistance, it’s likely to be destroyed before the cavalry arrives.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s possible. It’s also possible that the situation will have resolved itself before the arrival of any milita
ry assistance. But usually help arrives before things have gotten too far out of hand.” He turned to Mullilee and ignored the anger radiating from Miner. “Now, sir, about incidents in the past two months.”

  Mullilee spoke hesitantly, with frequent glances at Miner and Sales, as though asking permission to continue. “There have been eleven more since the Montgomery homestead.”

  “All of them farms?” Kindy asked, leaning forward. Mullilee nodded. “Eight farms and three ranches. Seventyfive more people are missing.” He seemed shaken by the missing people. Neither Miner nor Sales seemed so much disturbed by the missing people as by the destruction of the properties. Except:

  “Dammit,” Sales grumbled, “those ranchers were good customers. Herding animals is hard on clothes.”

  Daly didn’t acknowledge Sales’s comment, but Sergeant Williams fixed him with a hard look. Uncowed, Sales returned the look.

  “Where were these homesteads located?” Daly asked. “The first dozen plus that we know about were scattered pretty widely.”

  Mullilee looked at Miner, who nodded curtly. “So were these,”

  Mullilee said. “They’re all over the continent.” He looked to Miner again, got another curt nod, and tapped the console on his desk. A map was projected onto the wall behind him, with the attacked homesteads marked on it.

  “Can you show them in the order they were attacked?” Daly asked.

  Mullilee again looked for Miner’s permission before touching his console again. Numbers appeared next to the markings for the homesteads.

  “Show which ones Mr. Herder has acquired.” Williams didn’t ask, he told Mullilee to put the data up.

  “Ah,” the planetary administrator said when Miner made a slight sideways movement of his head, “I d-don’t think I have that information in my database yet.”

  Kindy snorted. “Sure you don’t.”

  Mullilee put his fingertips to his throat, swallowed.

  “Now see here!” Sales snapped. Daly gave no sign he was aware of the byplay. He got out his comp and set it on Mullilee’s desk. “I’ll need all of the data you have on the homesteads. Then we will examine a few of the sites—particularly the most recent ones. There are two more things I’ll need: one is secure satellite communications; the other is two all-terrain vehicles.”