The War for Profit Series Omnibus

by Gideon Fleisher

  “No.”

  “Suit yourself.” Galen walked away and got back in the skimmer. “Let’s ride. Park five hundred meters away, out of the line of fire for that rail gun, and wait for the director to arrive.”

  As they rode Galen said, “No, go back. Park right by the gate.”

  Spike turned the skimmer back around and said, “Why?”

  “Well, those are our EPWs. Their decisions about any offer made by the Director will be made under duress, and that duress is being caused by us. I want no part of it.”

  Spike parked the skimmer. “So what?”

  “It’s a moral thing, that’s all. I’m going to cut these guys lose.” Galen dismounted and went to the entrance and called for the Tribunus again.

  He came. “What is it now?”

  “I’m done with you. You are free to go.” Galen smiled.

  “Well isn’t that nice.”

  “You can stay here as long as you like, I’ll deliver food and water for another week. And I’ll send you a personal communicator with your breakfast in the morning so you can call somebody.”

  “Just like that. A trick?”

  “No,” said Galen. “I don’t want you to feel coerced when you negotiate with the director.”

  “I see. Very well, call off your dogs.” He turned and walked away.

  Galen said to the guards, “Hand me that radio.”

  They did. Galen called the rail gun crew. “This is Command Sergeant Major Galen Raper. End of mission.”

  After a pause the gun chief said, “Authenticate One Charlie. Over”

  Galen looked at his personal communicator and looked up the proper reply. “Zulu seven niner. Over.”

  “Roger, Sergeant Major. Gun Three out.”

  Galen handed the radio back to the troops and then watched through his binoculars as the rail gun crew turned its turret to the rear and engaged the travel lock. Then the ground-mobile rail gun drove to the gate to pick up the two guards and headed toward the tunnel entrance twelve kilometers away.

  The Director’s sedan arrived, driven cautiously over the rough ground. The vehicle tracks it followed made it passable, but just barely, for the civilian vehicle. The Director dismounted, said hello and shook hands with the Legion commander and his two staff representatives. Galen stood back a couple of meters and listened to the conversation.

  The Director said, “Gentlemen, I need your help.”

  “And how may we be of service?”

  “I need to distribute thirty thousand inoculations of our latest product to human volunteers for our first test of this product on human subjects.”

  The Legion commander said, “And you want us to do what, exactly?”

  “Well, I need you to go back into Seventh City and re-establish the police force. Then, find the volunteers; provide security for my people administering the serum, and the weekly medical examinations that follow. And we’ll pay the volunteers, and your troops can volunteer as well.”

  “And what does this serum do?”

  The Director smiled. “It reverses the aging process. It makes you young again. It makes you practically immortal.”

  “So for the mission of establishing law and order, how much does that pay?”

  The director pulled a note from his pocket and wrote a number on it. The Legion commander read it. He frowned and swept his hand toward Galen. “Why don’t you have them do it?”

  “They aren’t welcome in Seventh City. You have some contacts there already.”

  The Legion commander said, “You have a deal. But I need a hard-copy contract before the end of tomorrow, of course.”

  “Of course. Transport will come pick you up tomorrow afternoon and take you back to your barracks in Seventh City.” The director shook his hand and got back in the sedan and left the area. Galen got in the skimmer and Spike drove.

  Spike said, “What was that all about?”

  “Mike hired them to be the police force in Seventh City. He wants to test his latest gene repair thing on the good citizens of that fair city, and he needs law and order to make it happen.”

  “Good thing he didn’t ask us, I’d have been very rude in my refusal. Seventh City can go straight to hell for all I care.”

  Galen said, “My thoughts exactly. But this works out just fine. Apparently, nobody else wants the Twelfth Legion of Doom.”

  “I kind of feel sorry for them.”

  “I don’t. Had it not been for that EMP, you’d probably be sending a message telling my mother how I died at their hands.”

  Spike concentrated on his driving all the way back to the hooch in the crater, and Galen read reports and messages on his personal communicator. He also put out the word for a meeting in the conference room, 1600 hours, the whole staff plus Sevin.

  ***

  Galen entered the conference room and took his seat at the head of the table. The staff members were there, seated along the sides of the table, Master Sergeant Sevin seated at the opposite end.

  Galen said, “Okay, here’s the deal. We’re just about done here, with five more months remaining on the contract. We’ll need to find something for our troops to do or they will get real bored, real fast, and that means trouble.”

  Sevin said, “Close Quarters Battle skills are highly perishable. We can run them through those lanes. And set up some more shoot houses and mock villages, and we can start defensive CQB, and we can shift the emphasis from center-of-mass shooting to headshot shooting.”

  Galen looked at Sevin, studying his eyes. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well what is it?”

  “I can’t say, because of my non-disclosure agreement with the Bonding Commission. You’d be in more trouble than me if I told you.”

  “Okay. So we set up shoot houses and mock villages and play laser tag for the next five months.” Galen looked around the room. “Anything else?”

  Karen said, “As much as I’d like to spend my time shooting Sevin in the face, my people have plenty of work to do. First of all, handing the Hellcats off to the indigs, that takes time. Then we’ll be salvaging all that captured Legion equipment. And the job of logistics is just as real for training as it is for combat. People need the same amount of support regardless.”

  Galen said, “Well let me put some perspective on this. EugeneX has cooked up a batch of thirty thousand doses of their latest inoculation for human trials and they hired the Doomed Legion to go into Seventh City and establish stability so that they can test their product on those guys. As a precaution, I want to maintain a sizeable maneuver force outside the crater: the light tank battalion, the mechanized infantry battalion, the cavalry squadron and the recon troop and the Hercules heavy tank company. Plus the Brigade support battalion, of course.”

  Sevin smiled. “I like that. We get out of this crater and go tactical. We can put CQB ranges up top and rotate through them between maneuver exercises.”

  Karen said, “I…oh, whatever. I like my new apartment.”

  Galen waited a minute before speaking. “Okay. Take this slow, take the next two months. Gradually hand off duties to the indigs, to include soldier quarters. Next month I’ll move up top and live in a tent behind my tank. The command center on the mountain, control of that will be handed off last. You all know the deal, transition from the bottom first so none of our people are ever taking orders from their people.”

  “Roger,” said Tad. “I’ll be the last one out. We’ll need to put up our own comms satellite so we can operate independently.”

  Spike said, “I’ll take care of that. We have a comms satellite with a sensor array on it, packed up in the warehouse right now. The command jump ship can put it in place.”

  Karen winked at Spike and looked at her noteputer. “I got it. It’ll be up in seven weeks.”

  Tad said, “Why wait?”

  Karen said, “The sooner it goes up, the sooner it can be detected. Best to not deploy it until it’s need
ed.”

  Galen said, “We’ll go with that. Now one more thing, and this is very important. No matter how great the drug trials go, none of our people, and I mean none of them, including the bar maids and drinky girls and prostitutes, anyone even vaguely associated with this Brigade having brought them here, no one takes that EugeneX youth serum.”

  Sevin said, “I like that, the ‘Youth Serum.’ Funny.”

  Karen said, “Why not?”

  “I did some checking,” said Galen. “Throughout human history, for tens of thousands of years, researches have been trying to unlock the secrets of eternal youth and immortality. Their attempts have always ended badly, and I have no reason to think this time will be any different. And here we are on a planet called ‘Fuente de la Juventud.’ That translates as ‘Fountain of Youth’ in Standard. That name goes all the way back to a quest by an explorer named Ponce de Leon who, on ancient Terra, lead a mercenary unit to find a fountain whose water was said to make a person young again. That ended very badly for all concerned. We will not repeat the mistakes of history, not on this contract. No youth serum for any of us.”

  “Okay,” said Spike, “now how about that alternate landing strip?”

  “Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Myung Jin will construct an alternate landing strip outside the crater, as specified in the original contract. We’ll use that landing strip to get off this planet, so once we’re out of the crater, we can be out of there for good. We’re even building a downtown along side its passenger terminal, so that our entertainers won’t be stuck down in the crater with the indigs. Anyway, the indigs want to take over the downtown area in the crater and bring in their own people.”

  Spike said, “Well the EugeneX people aren’t actually indigs.”

  “You know what I mean.” Galen stood, the staff stood. “All right, anything else? Dismissed.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  It had been tedious, the past two months, getting the Brigade out of the crater, but the process was complete. Galen stood in the security control room at the top of the tunnel and looked out the transparent armored window that faced the gaping tunnel entrance. A single skimmer came out, the driver and Vehicle Commander seated in the front, the laser gunner behind the weapon, Tad and Karen in the back seat.

  The control room supervisor, a Sergeant, said, “That’s it, Sergeant Major. All our personnel and equipment are out of the crater.”

  “Good. Thank you, Sergeant. You’re doing a great job.”

  Galen left the control room, went down the stairs and exited the reinforced concrete structure that was the left wall protecting the tunnel entrance and walked over to where Karen’s skimmer was parked. “Welcome to the land of dust and wind.”

  Tad said, “Well I hope it’s worth it. I was getting pretty comfortable down there.”

  Karen said, “My corporate apartment was nice.”

  Galen climbed over the tailgate of the skimmer and said, “I’ll ride with you over to your new ops center.” He sat on a duffle bag, recognizable as Tad’s from the markings on it. The skimmer took off toward the alternate landing strip’s terminal building. Galen looked around at the berms. The Hellcat tanks were gone, replaced by Hercules tanks. Galen saw his own tank, his sleeping area behind it a simple inverted half pipe of metal two meters high in the center. He’d attached corrugated metal to the front and back, and installed a door and window at each end. His bed took up almost half of the interior space; the bed was too comfortable to leave behind for the indig who moved into his old room.

  The terminal at the air strip was a low, simple building made from material salvaged from the EPW camp. A control tower stood beside it, its skeletal metal support frame and the adapted guard tower shack at the top showed that it was, indeed, a secondary, alternate landing strip. The only craft on it was the Command Jumpship, standing near the end of the tarmac, off to the side without a hangar. There were no hangars. But it met the requirement of the contract, and was adequate to facilitate the Brigade’s departure from the planet.

  Galen remembered the business class from the academy, the lesson about the relative value of compensation to the troops, and knew that if he kept them under austere living conditions for more than three months before they left Juventud, their pay would seem like an insanely generous amount of money when they got back to Mandarin, and the simple barracks on the Brigade’s home world compound would seem like a palace in comparison. The way a payee perceived the value of any compensation, both monetary and non-monetary, was always a relative matter. And for this contract, the shares for the troops would be generous in comparison with all but the most elite mercenary units.

  The skimmer stopped in front of the terminal and Galen and Tad dismounted. Karen tossed Tad’s two duffle bags down to Tad and Galen, and then told the driver to take her to her ALOC track. To the right of the entrance, Tad’s TOC command post vehicle was parked butt-up against the wall, its ramp lowered to stick through an opening that was cut out for it.

  Galen opened the entrance door and held it for Tad. “You’ll like it up here. We have the run of the whole place. And the shower house is only fifty meters away.”

  Tad looked around at the inside. The floor was a collection of pavestones pushed into low-grade concrete. Toward the air strip, the entire wall was non-ballistic clear plastic, little scratches making it opaque in places, distortion making the view through it unclear. “Lovely.”

  Galen led him to a thin door. “This is your room. Your ops chief is in the next one over, and your staff is in the two rooms across the hall. These would normally be the administrative offices for people running a spaceport.”

  Tad looked inside his room and chucked his bag on the floor. Galen handed Tad’s second bag to him, which he tossed in as well. “Moving in was never so easy.”

  “Well I’ll leave you to get settled in.” Galen left the terminal building and began his three kilometer walk back to his tank. He walked past the metal buildings of the ‘ville, the new party district built near the terminal, since the troops could no longer visit the downtown area of the crater. It wasn’t bad, and resembled a typical frontier town. Four bars, a snack stand, two junk food restaurants and a full-D theater, and the brothel, a two-story structure built to the same specifications as a hotel; a cheap hotel. Downtown in the crater had also been handed over to the EugeneX indigs and they brought entertainers from their own home planet to work there.

  Galen’s wrist chronometer buzzed a message from Chief Koa, We need to talk.

  Galen turned around and jogged back to the terminal. Inside he saw Tad and Koa and Tad’s driver/ops center operator standing inside the TOC command post carrier. Galen took two strides to step across the lowered assault ramp and stood inside. They shifted a bit to make room for him. Tad pointed at the flat screen above the terminal.

  Koa said, “Check this out. It’s a news feed from inside Seventh City.”

  Galen saw a parked vehicle smashed by a truck, both vehicles burning. The view swung right and two men were restraining a woman who kept biting their arms. The view swung left and a solid line of Legion troops the width of the street approached, stepping slowly and deliberately, armed with police riot gear. They subdued any civilians that didn’t get out of their way with numerous strikes of their clubs, then used disposable hand cuffs to hog-tie them face down and left them for follow-on troops to pick up.

  The scene changed to a view from inside a store that had bars and ballistic glass over its entrance door. A mob, a mass of people pressed against the glass, the frame of the door showing weakness against the sheer force of the large crowd. Finally the door and its frame gave way, flattened to smack down like a fly swatter. Then the scene went black. Another shift in scene to an overhead view, grainy and monochrome.

  Koa pointed at the letters at the bottom of the image. “According to that, it’s from a security camera mounted on the top corner of the bank building in the center of town.”

  A tightly-packed mob filled three stre
ets, gradually spreading to fill the fourth street leading away from the intersection. In the distance, it was possible to discern an organized line of people blocking the street.

  Galen said, “Zoom in on that.”

  “I can’t. It’s just a news feed,” said Koa. “But I can turn up the sound.”

  “Okay.”

  An uneducated young male voice, “…what’s going on, just so many people acting stupid, walking around biting people, it just don’t make no sense.”

  Another voice, and older female, “Well I just hope they get this mess taken care of before too long, I want to get home but I’m not going out in the streets, and anyone who’s listening, I need to say, you need to just stay where you are, the streets are not safe.”

  Galen said, “Okay, turn the sound back off. Those morons don’t know what they’re looking at any more than we do.”

  Koa muted the sound. “Well, I’m still waiting for Sevin to get here.”

  Tad said, “This in no place to talk. Let’s get the stage set up.”

  By ‘stage’ he meant the external display that normally would have been set up in the domed tent extension of the TOC track. Since the assault ramp was lowered into the foyer of the air strip terminal, they hung the screen on the wall and set the control panel on a field desk next to it. Tad and Galen moved half a dozen chairs from the passenger waiting area to the foyer, facing the screen in a half-circle. Karen’s skimmer stopped out front and she and Sevin dismounted and entered the terminal.

  Karen said, “What’s going on?”

  Tad said, “Have a seat and I’ll show you.” He motioned to his troop, “Play it again.”

  Sevin and Karen sat and watched, Sevin looking down, trying not to laugh. Tad and Galen also sat, the news feed going on the longer they watched. The line of Legion troops that was trying to stop the mob from moving down the street was pushed over and walked across by the slow-moving mob, some of the Legion troops seen trying to stand up. Then a few mob members surrounded a Legion troop and began biting him. The scene shifted away to another mob pressing against the barred gate of a private residence. Sparks showed that the gate was electrified, but the mob continued to press. Finally the gate’s left side hinges gave way and swung open on its right side hinges. The mob pushed on, slowly, shuffling forward.