“Who is Absalom?” the colonel asked.
“He was one of David’s sons. He rebelled against David and tried to take over the kingdom.”
The colonel turned and walked into the passenger cabin. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered to himself. “Had a son who tried to take over the kingdom…son of a bitch.”
I took my seat. A few minutes later we flew out of Earth’s atmosphere. In the old days we would have spent up to five hours flying to the Mars broadcast station, depending on where Earth and Mars were in their orbits, and many more hours flying from the last broadcast station to the fleet. Transferring in a self-broadcasting ship took mere seconds. We cleared Earth’s atmosphere and tint shields formed over our portholes. An instant later, we were approaching the Central Cygnus Fleet.
As I returned to my locker to stow my Bible and grab my sack, Colonel Grayson came up to me again. “So do you believe in God, son?” he asked.
“I’m a true believer,” I confessed. If God was a metaphor for government, then my enlistment in the Marines made me some kind of cleric. During my days as a colonel, I might have qualified as a high priest.
“You know what, Harris? You’re nothing like I expected,” Grayson said. “Admiral Brocius called me in the other day and told me to let you do whatever you wanted with your platoon. What do you want to do with it?”
“I haven’t reviewed my men,” I said.
“They’re good men. I run a tight operation.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, knowing full well that Marine colonels have little to do with the readiness of platoons. There were too many layers between the colonels and their grunts.
“Sounds like you and Admiral Brocius are great pals,” Grayson continued. “Having an admiral watching your back, now that’s a pretty good trick for a sergeant in the Marines.” His expression became more serious, and the old smile vanished. “You just remember, Liberator or plain old government-issue grunt, war hero or fresh recruit, it’s all the same under my command. And you are most definitely under my command, Master Gunnery Sergeant Wayson Harris. Screw with me, and I will bury you deep before your admiral can help you. Do you read me, Marine?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. It was a warning, and a fair one.
We traded salutes, and Colonel Grayson left the ship. I grabbed my gear and followed.
My orders placed me in charge of a platoon on the U.A.N. Obama, one of twelve fighter carriers in the Central Cygnus Fleet. The Obama was home to two hundred platoons. In all, over eleven thousand Marines lived on the ship. My platoon would stand out.
When Admiral Brocius gave me command of the platoon, he told me to “make things happen.” He gave me the license and the equipment to do just that. Of the two hundred platoons on this ship, my platoon would be the only one to which the admiral had assigned a self-broadcasting scientific explorer. The bird we transferred in on was to remain behind for my use.
No one met me as I entered the Obama. No surprise. During the old days, when the Broadcast Network let you talk to anybody almost anywhere in the populated parts of the galaxy, subordinates or commanders met you as you entered new posts. Now, without the Broadcast Network, transfers went unheralded.
Not that I needed an escort. Having served on two fighter carriers, I had no trouble finding my way around the Obama. I located the barracks, then found the unit that housed my platoon.
A sergeant approached me as I entered. “Can I help you?” he asked politely. Though we were both sergeants, I outranked the guy. He was a staff sergeant, an entry-level sergeant. I was a master gunnery sergeant, one rung from the top of the only ladder that enlisted men could climb.
“You can help me find my rack,” I said. I introduced myself.
“So you’re running the show?” the sergeant asked. He introduced himself as Sergeant Ross Evans, and said, “You know, we had a captain running the show before you.”
“From an officer to an enlisted man,” I observed. “That must mean you’re in for some action.”
“I like the sound of that,” Sergeant Evans said.
“Round up the men,” I said. Yes, I was already issuing orders. I did not come to make friends. Besides, Evans was a standard government-issue military clone. He was built to take orders.
I went to the back of the unit and found my space. I stowed my gear, kicked my rack a few times to make sure it was solid, then set off to review my platoon. What I saw gave me hope.
Marine platoons are divided into squads. Evans was one of my three squad leaders. Staff Sergeant Dave Sutherland and Sergeant Kelly Thomer ran the other two.
Every squad has three fire teams. Every fire team has four men—a team leader, a rifleman, a grenadier, and an automatic rifleman. The fire teams and squad leaders make up thirty-nine of the forty-two men you typically find in a platoon.
I quickly learned that Evans and Sutherland were by-the-book leaders who tolerated no nonsense in their squads. They made them run double time in drills. Either one of their squads would have made a good backbone for any platoon.
As the lowest-ranking squad leader, Thomer inherited the problem cases. Evans’s squad ran the obstacle course in four minutes flat. Sutherland’s boys did it in 4:20. All but one of Thomer’s boys ran the course in 4:10, but that last one shuffled in at 5:12. That was the first time I laid eyes on Mark Philips, the Marine Corps’ oldest E1.
An E1 was a buck private. That was the rank they assigned you the first day at boot camp. When you graduated from camp, the Corps automatically promoted you to private first class or E2. Philips, however, who looked to be in his forties, still held the rank of plain old private. When I checked his records, I saw that he’d once worked his way up as far as lance corporal—an E3, but now he was back down to E1.
I watched the rest of Thomer’s group dash across open ground. They flashed across rope bridges and other obstacles. Philips brought up the rear, trotting at a comfortable pace and not looking the slightest bit winded. He had no trouble climbing rope lines hand over hand. Monkey bars did not faze him. He simply felt no need to push himself.
“Who the hell is that?” I asked Sutherland as I watched Philips stroll to the end of the course.
“That’s Private Philips,” Sutherland said. “He’s the platoon asshole.”
“That’s why God invented transfers,” I said.
Sutherland smiled and nodded his agreement.
“Why don’t you send Thomer by my office,” I told Evans.
He smiled and left without a word.
“You might want to check his records before you transfer him,” Thomer said.
“We don’t need a slacker,” I said. “Not in my platoon.”
“If we’re going to see some action, Philips might be exactly what we need,” Thomer suggested.
“I’ve got his file,” I said.
“Have you read it?” Thomer asked.
“Not yet,” I said, feeling a shudder when I realized how much Thomer sounded like me talking about Ray Freeman to that Naval Intelligence officer. “Tell you what. You bring Philips here at 1500 hours. That will give me a chance to go over his record.”
“Thank you, Master Sergeant,” Thomer said. Enlisted men addressed master sergeants as “Master Sergeant.” Simply calling us “sergeant,” a name generally used for sergeants and staff sergeants, did not pay sufficient respect to the rank.
I had twenty minutes to read the Philips file. I only needed five.
Thomer and Philips showed up at my desk precisely on time. Thomer reported in his charley service uniform. Philips came in a government issue tank top and boxer shorts.
Philips and Thomer and every other member of the platoon, for that matter, looked approximately alike. They were all standard government-issue military clones. They all had brown hair, shaved along the sides of their heads, and brown eyes. Philips, however, stood out. Because he wore a tank top, I could see the scars on his arms and chest. He’d been shot twice in the right arm and once in the right shoulder. The sca
rs were closely grouped as if the bullets had been fired in a single burst. It was the kind of wound you got in combat.
“I watched you run the obstacle course this afternoon,” I said to Philips.
He gave me a lopsided smile and said nothing.
“I’ve read your record. You are a forty-six-year-old buck private. So far as I know, you are the only forty-six-year-old buck private in the seven-hundred-year history of the Marines.”
“The folks at the orphanage always said I would make something out of myself,” Philips said, his face bursting with pride.
“According to your file, you recently pissed on a sergeant while he was asleep in his rack,” I said.
Philips shrugged. “It was too far to walk to the latrine.”
“You glued a major’s grenades to his armor?” I asked.
“They never proved it was me,” Philips complained.
“Was it you?” I asked.
Philips shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe.”
“Are you hoping for a court-martial, Private?”
“Sergeant Harris,” Thomer interrupted.
“Yes, Sergeant?”
“Have you reviewed Philips’s combat record?”
“Are you trying to protect him?” I asked.
“I’m just making sure you’ve seen his record.”
“As a matter of fact, I have.” Philips had been in four major battles in the early part of the Separatist War. He’d been involved in several smaller actions before the war, too. He’d received and probably lost more medals than the three next-most-decorated men in the platoon. “Yes, Sergeant Thomer, Philips has a good combat record. That does not mean I want to babysit a burnout.”
“You talking about drumming me out?” Philips asked.
“That just about sums it up,” I said.
“Sergeant, you see, I horse around some, and I don’t take well to authority, but I love the Corps. My problem is, I came to fight. I get real fidgety when I have to sit around on a ship.”
“Are you saying you want to stay?” I asked.
“That’s what I’m saying,” Philips agreed.
“Maybe we can take care of some of that excess energy, Private,” I said. “I hate to lose a man with combat experience.
“But about pissing on that other sergeant…If I so much as see your pecker, Marine, I will cut it off. You read me, Marine?”
“I do,” Philips said.
“Now if you will excuse us, Philips, I would like to speak with Corporal Thomer for a moment.”
Philips looked from me to Thomer, then back to me. Neither Thomer nor I spoke as he left.
“I understand you and Philips are buddies,” I said, once Philips was away.
“He’s a good Marine,” Thomer said defensively.
“And you believe he can perform in combat?” I asked.
“I’d stake my life on it,” Thomer said.
“You just did,” I said. “That will be all.”
Over the next two weeks I tested my platoon. I took the men to the firing range and liked what I saw, particularly from Philips. Because of my Liberator genes, I could shoot better than any man I have ever known. I set unchallenged records in the orphanage and boot camp. No one ever outscored me on a firing range, until the first time I took my new platoon to the firing range. Shooting at targets three hundred yards away, I had a hit rate of 96 percent that day. Philips’s rate was 97 percent.
I did not know how well he had shot right away. As we left the firing range, I stopped to look at the board that listed our scores. I had known that Philips did well; but until I saw the score by his name, I had not realized that he outshot me. I stood there puzzled, trying to figure out why the highest number on the board was not next to my name.
“Still want to transfer him out?” Thomer asked as he walked past me.
At the moment, the answer was, “Yes. Absolutely.” No one had ever outscored me.
“He’s a good shot,” I conceded. I told myself that my marksmanship had deteriorated during the time I spent playing farmer. Had I taken the time to warm up, I would have easily outshot Private Philips. I normally scored a perfect 100 percent at three hundred yards.
Philips did well in hand-to-hand. I did not fight him, mostly because I did not want to take a chance of breaking his neck. He partnered up with the three men from his fire team and subdued each of them quickly.
Evans and Sutherland generally asked me if I wanted to go hit the noncom bar with them when we turned in for the night. I always said, “No.” I liked working with them, but I did not like them. They were too damned by-the-book for my taste. Also, I had a mission that I wanted to plan out.
One night, though, Evans and Sutherland brought Thomer along with them. “Hey, Master Sergeant, the whole platoon is headed out to the canteen,” Thomer said. “You want to come along?”
I smiled and closed down my computer. “I’m feeling a little parched,” I said. I got up and followed the men out of the barracks.
When we got to the bar, the place was chaotic. Five hundred, maybe even six hundred, Marines had crammed into a bar meant for no more than three hundred men at a time. The crowd was so loud that you had to shout to be heard, and everybody wanted to be heard. The din smothered the room and gave it life.
“We’re over there,” Evans yelled, pointing toward a corner of the room that was particularly crowded. My entire platoon had crammed in there, and it looked like men from a couple of other platoons had come to join them.
“Can I get you a beer?” Thomer asked.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll pick up the next round.” He nodded but probably did not hear me.
As I approached the table, I heard a harmonica. Somebody was playing an old folk tune. The music was fast and lively, like a square dance only faster. Peering through the crowd, I saw Philips wearing that same mangy tank top he had worn to my office. He had slung fatigues over his shoulders, but he didn’t bother fastening the buttons.
Philips worked that harmonica like a master. His head swayed one way then the other as his harmonica sawed back and forth across his lips. His face was bright red, and a vein ticked across his forehead. He had his right foot up on a bench and tapped his heel with the rhythm. The music whirled and spun. A few of the Marines clapped their hands with the beat.
When he finished his song, Philips tucked the harmonica in his pocket and smiled at me. The crowd thinned once people realized that Philips would not play another song.
“Hello, Master Sarge,” Philips said, mixing Marine slang and derogatory Army lingo.
“Philips,” I said.
Some of the other men greeted me. I shook a couple of hands. Enlisted men do not salute sergeants.
Thomer handed me a beer. He handed Philips a beer, too.
“You play a mean harmonica,” I said.
“Shit, no. I do okay for self-taught, I guess,” Philips said.
“He plays guitar, too,” Thomer said.
“I know a song or two,” Philips corrected. “That ain’t the same thing as playing.”
“How about you, Thomer. What are you good at?” I asked.
Thomer shrugged.
“He’s the one who keeps this platoon running,” Philips said.
Thomer glared at Philips.
“What about them?” I asked, pointing the top of my beer bottle at Evans and Sutherland. They were at the other end of the table, too far away to hear.
“Them?” Philips asked. “They do okay.”
“They run the show,” Thomer said. “At least they used to, before you came.”
“Like I said, they do okay,” Philips said. “Nobody likes them much. I guess they like each other plenty.”
Thomer, who had started to take a swig of beer, laughed and spit beer back in his bottle.
“You were asking me about the time I pissed on a sergeant. Well, I thought it was Sutherland,” Philips confessed. “I wish it had been the son of a bitch.”
“You have a problem
with Sutherland?” I asked.
“He’s all right, I suppose,” Philips said. “I like him the way a dog likes a fire hydrant. The good thing about Sutherland is that he can sleep through anything. If that had been Sutherland, I’d still be a corporal right now.”
“He pissed on Sergeant Edmonds instead,” Thomer said. He smiled, took another quick drink of beer, then added, “Edmonds is a light sleeper.”
“Son of a bitch,” Philips muttered. I did not know if he had just called Edmonds a son of a bitch or if he was referring to Thomer. “The bastard woke right up and started screaming. Probably thought he was being attacked by an albino boa constrictor.”
“He told me he thought it was a macaroni noodle,” Thomer mumbled.
“Are we going to see some action soon?” Sergeant Sutherland asked as he came to join us.
“Any day now,” I said. “I just need to clear it with Colonel Grayson.”
“You going to get me some Mogats to shoot?” Philips asked.
“That’s the general idea,” I said.
Given the mission that I had in mind, I would have traded half my platoon for an Adam Boyd clone, but Navy SEALs seldom ran with Marines.
“You want to what?” Colonel Grayson asked. “You must be specking with me, son. You can’t take a Cygnus Central platoon into the Perseus Arm. They have their own damn fleet and their own damn Marines. You do realize that Outer Perseus is halfway across the galaxy? Think about it, son. Think, why don’t you?”
“Colonel, Admiral Brocius has charged me to engage the enemy any way that I can.”
“So engage them in your own damned arm of the galaxy!” Grayson roared. He tried to look angry but a rogue grin played on his lips. I got the feeling that he liked the idea of poaching in another part of the galaxy. “What do you expect to get out of this raid?”
“The war,” I answered. “The whole specking war.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE
“I heard the last pilot you took out here got fried,” our pilot said as we glided into the space graveyard on our way to the Mogat battleship.
The Clone Alliance Page 15