The two teams moved in opposite directions, moved out one block, cleared and secured the buildings along the way as quickly as we could, and then swept counterclockwise, so the two teams were always going in different directions. Once we each did our half-circle, we moved out another block and then swept around again, making wider and wider sweeps each time. It was a good quarter-and-sweep routine for as few people as we had, and it had to be Wataski’s brainchild. I doubted that either Fong-Ramirez or Palaan had much small-unit tactical training, but the exec was smart enough to recognize good advice when he heard it.
The sweep gave me a chance to size up Borro, the Varoki security guy I was paired with—the envoy’s bodyguard. He knew his stuff, and he was sizing me up, too. I could tell, and he could tell I could tell. It’s one of those deals where, after a while, you’d start laughing if the situation wasn’t so bizarre and dangerous. I chuckled anyway. He looked at me for a moment as if I was nuts, and then he shook his head and smiled, too.
“You girls having a good time up there?” Wataski yelled from the other side of the alleyway we were working.
I turned back to face her, touched two finger tips to my lips, and then pointed at her.
Quiet.
That pissed her off, but she didn’t say anything else.
We found local inhabitants—a lot more frightened of us than we were of them. We also found survivors from the maglev who were hiding in some outbuildings, and once we got out into the open, we found some more hiding in patches of brush. We sent them back toward the house we’d made our temporary base of operations.
We found bodies, as well, a lot of them. It was as if God were a little girl, and her rag dolls rested in the tangled heaps they’d fallen into the instant She’d lost interest in them.
Did I mention that some of the officials on the train had brought their dependents with them? I think I did. We found some of them out in the ditches, too. Seeing those little, motionless bodies scared me—bad. Right then, I needed to look over and see Barraki and Tweezaa—yeah, and Marfoglia, too, I guess—sitting in the corner, safe. But I couldn’t, of course. They were back being guarded by two Varoki MPs who got the job because they’d be more of a liability than an asset in a fight. You can imagine how that put my mind at ease.
The local animal life looked to be crustacean—lots of sizes and shapes, but most of them with exoskeletons. Multi-legged “bugs” anywhere from two to ten centimeters across were crawling over some of the bodies, but none of them were feeding. Just as well—it was bad enough without that.
So we found a lot of things, but one thing we didn’t find was trouble; the bad guys had pulled back. Wataski and her Marines had left some marks, that was sure. The bad guys had taken all of their dead and wounded with them as well, except for a couple bodies hidden in ditches or behind walls, either overlooked or too dangerous to get to. I’m no expert on local fashion, but uniforms are uniforms. These looked a lot like the colonial troops I’d seen, but with some personal variation in minor kit. Maybe insurgents were using some captured gear, but these guys looked more standardized than any insurgents I’d ever seen, and a bit less than regulars.
“These are contractors—mercenary strikers,” I said to Borro when we paused to look at one of them, and he nodded. The colonial government was fighting an insurgency, and often as not you hired specialists to do that. So why were the hired goons shooting at us? The local government being at war with uBakaa had sort of complicated things, but this was more than just a “complication.” I had other things to worry about right then, but I knew that somebody higher up the food chain had better be worrying about this.
Less than half an hour after we started, we saw the upward-bound streaks of half a dozen SAMs—surface-to-air missiles—launched from no more than a dozen kilometers away. Then we saw the big intercept flashes a few thousand meters up, and a second or two later heard the crackling explosions of the multiple seeker heads. That’ll turn your stomach inside out, let me tell you. Of course, it’s not as if SAMs were a shock. SAMs are part of the expected threat envelope, and so the Mikes always come down in the middle of a swarm of decoys, and they have pretty good ECM action going, too.
Still . . . it was tough to stand there and watch those strings of explosions up in the sky. And fixed-site SAMs weren’t just some contractors gone nutty; this was the local government’s way of saying there were people—namely us—who needed killing.
Not long afterwards, the first of the Marine parasails began gliding down into the open fields we’d secured and marked with IR strobes. Quite a sight. They came down with a sharp angle of descent, then at the last second they flared the sail and slowed almost to a hover. As soon as their feet touched the ground, they released the sail harness, and it shot up and drifted for twenty or thirty more meters before collapsing. They were clear, down on one knee, and with their RAG-19s up and level before the shadows of the sails had glided away—blocky and angular, sexless and vaguely inhuman in their segmented body armor.
Everything about the spectacle was impressive in a graceful, lethal way, particularly the silence. There were tactical hand signs, but no voices. They didn’t need voices; they were all on the same tacnet, their embedded comms picking up low-volume subvocalized speech, enhancing it, and putting it in whichever ears needed it.
Possibly they had a platoon terminal, and so we could all get on the same net. But more likely—and much better in my opinion—they’d just tell those of us non-Marines playing expendable point guy to go back to our day jobs. Fine by me. I had my four hours in; I was ready for retirement.
* * *
I should have figured the Mikes were coming down. Why?
TheHon’s boss—if he really was his boss, which I was beginning to doubt. But think about it—the Cottohazz Executive Council’s Special Envoy Plenipotentiary for Emergency Abatement on K’Tok. Anybody with a job title that long rated a V.I.P. rescue effort. And that’s what he got—a full platoon of Mike Marines, under a captain named Rosetti, the top-ranking Marine officer left on the Fitz. Thank you very much, Mr. Naradnyo, and your services are no longer required.
But they had me keep the RAG-19 for now, and in its way that was a sign of changing times. The dozen or so Varoki MPs were under Rosetti’s authority, and all of them were still armed with gauss pistols or carbines. Why not give the extra RAG-19 to one of them, instead of leaving it with a civilian?
Because they were Varoki, and I was Human. That’s a distinction which would not have been so openly drawn a week ago. Maybe it was because Wataski gave Rosetti a thumbs-up report on me—she may not have liked me, but she knew I wasn’t either trigger-happy or gun-shy, and that counts. But neither was Borro, and he didn’t get a RAG.
Times change, and sometimes they do it in the blink of an eye.
As I started to leave, Fong-Ramirez saw me and held up his hand to stop me, and then made his way over to me.
“Mr. Naradnyo, I wanted to thank you for your help,” he said. “Commodore Gasiri downloaded your service jacket.”
“Commodore? When did she get the bump?”
“Standard procedure is for the senior surviving line captain in a task force to assume the acting rank of commodore upon taking command. I noticed that you’re still carried on the A.C.G. inactive reserve rolls.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I answered.
“Well, I just wanted you to know I made sure the commodore logged you as reactivated. That way, if you’re taken prisoner while armed, there will be no legal question concerning your combatant status.”
That was thoughtful. I wasn’t sure it would make any difference, but I was impressed he’d thought to do it.
“Thanks, Commander. So now I gotta call you sir, instead of the other way around, huh?”
He smiled, I think maybe to cover his embarrassment, and shook his head.
“I believe we can dispense with that.”
Not a bad guy.
When Borro and I got back to our “people o
f interest,” TheHon was hanging around my guys again, sitting down and playing with the kids, tickling Tweezaa, which I wouldn’t have dared—the Dark Princess had too much gravitas for me to tickle her. But she was screeching with laughter and writhing in his arms now, and he teased her with rough, guttural aGavoosh phrases.
I stood next to Marfoglia, watching them. She was smiling at their play; I was a little less enthused. Something about the guy wasn’t quite square. I don’t mean he was a wrong guy—he just wasn’t what he let on.
“I don’t like it,” I said to Marfoglia, and she knew what I meant right away, and shot me a hard, angry look.
“You should be more polite to him,” she told me. “He’s a good man.”
“Yeah, I like him a lot,” I answered. Her expression got even more sour at that.
“Look, for once I’m not being a wise-ass. I actually do like him. But here’s the thing—I’m not here to make new friends; I’m on the clock, and you need to remember that. If I thought being nicer to him would get you and those two kids to Akaampta safely, I’d give the son of a bitch a blow job . . . or, you know, whatever they do. But as it is, I’m not sure it’s safe to be anywhere near him.”
“You don’t think he’d hurt the children.”
“Nope. Not what I meant.”
Later I cornered him, away from the others, although I could feel Borro’s eyes on me the whole time.
“What’s your interest in those kids?” I demanded.
“I have no special interest. I just like children,” he said.
“Bullshit.”
He looked at me for a moment, trying to tell if another lie would work.
“It is complicated,” he answered reluctantly, looking away.
“That answer doesn’t exactly make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, either,” I said. “In my experience, things are never really complicated; they just look complicated when you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle. Once you do, though, it always gets simple. So I’ll ask you again, what’s your interest in those kids?”
“I knew their mother,” he answered after a moment.
Really? But we hadn’t told him the real names of the kids, which meant either he was stringing me along, or he knew who they were without us having to tell him.
“How long have you known who they are?” I asked.
“Since I saw them on the train. I recognized them from pictures Laraana and I exchanged of our children. They have never met me, however.”
I didn’t know their mother’s name, so I still wasn’t sure, but I was getting pretty strong truth vibes.
“You travel in those circles?” I asked cautiously.
“No. Well . . . yes. Sometimes,” he answered, frowning. “But I knew her before she was the Lady e-Traak.”
Bingo.
“Oh. She married up, huh?”
He straightened and looked down at me then, and there was a hardness in his look I hadn’t seen in him before.
“I do not view it that way. She married for passion, not position. The children—particularly Tweezaa—have more of her than their father in them. Much more. Aside from his money, Sarro was not really worth very much, you know.”
I thought about what Barraki had told me about the last year of his father’s life, what he was trying to do, and I wasn’t so sure about that, but I didn’t argue the point.
Did I say nothing is complicated? Nothing really is, except for people.
TWENTY-THREE
Captain Leona Rosetti’s Mike Marines were awfully good. By good, I mean they killed a whole bunch of uZmataanki mercenaries and didn’t have a single fatality of their own that first morning. There were three casualties, one of them pretty serious, but no KIA or Died of Wounds.
My hunch was confirmed by now—we were up against uZmataanki counterinsurgency specialists: mercenary strikers, not regulars. In theory, they could have been as good, or better, than the colonial regulars. Since I didn’t know how good the local grunts were, it was hard to make a comparison. What was clear, though, was they weren’t in the same league as the Mike Marines. Why they were trying to kill us was a little less clear.
Seeing all those dead hostiles was supposed to make me happy, I guess, especially since the uZmataanki strikers were trying to kill us. Part of me definitely felt more secure. A deeper part of me felt kind of sick. No part of me actually felt “happy.”
Sure, I know, better them than us. And you may have noticed that I’m not at all squeamish or hesitant about actually dropping the hammer when necessary—nor particularly narrow-minded about deciding when that might be the case. But I’ll tell you what might have made me genuinely happy—putting my fingers around the throats of the sons of bitches who made our choices come down to them or us.
Good luck figuring out who that was, though.
I’m willing to bet that half those young Marines had never heard a shot fired in anger before, but you’d never know it from watching them, that’s how good their training was. Training is everything, by the way. Experience is highly overrated. If your training is good, you learn what you need to know there. Combat experience—“seeing the elephant”—doesn’t tell you much more about surviving and winning. It tells you a lot about yourself, but that’s a different matter.
Now, if your training is only half-assed—like the strikers the Marines were fighting—then combat experience can help fill in the blanks. The trick, though, is living long enough in combat to figure that stuff out. For example, if you don’t know any better than to stick your head over the top of a wall—instead of finding an edge or break you can look around to the side without skylining—you’re probably not going to learn a valuable combat lesson; you’re probably just going to get your brains blown out.
I speak from some experience on this subject—the training part, not getting your brains blown out. The training we got in the old Piss-can Rangers was half-assed at best, and we learned the hard way. I survived, but not because I was smarter than anyone else; I was just lucky. Very lucky.
I read once that when Napoleon was picking guys to promote to Marshal of France, he looked for two characteristics: suicidal bravery and luck. Not brains, interestingly enough—I guess he figured he had brains enough to go around—just suicidal bravery and luck.
So I’d have made, like, half a Marshal of France.
* * *
“Sammies want a parley,” Rosetti told Fong-Ramirez in her booming voice. “Figure they want to surrender?” She laughed, and she said it loud enough to carry all the way through the warehouse we were using for a shelter. I imagine she intended it to. Sammie, I’d learned, was Marine slang for the uZmataanki. I’d also learned it wasn’t exactly polite slang, so no one had used it when the uZmataanki colonial troops were “partnered” with Cottohazz forces. Of course, all that had changed a few hours ago.
There were muttered translations of Rosetti’s words into aGavoosh, aHoka, aBakai, and other languages I didn’t recognize, by the civilians spread out through the open area, mostly sitting on low stacks of pallets. Then there were nods and smiles—mostly. A couple Varoki didn’t seem thrilled at the thought of Human Marines kicking Varoki ass, even if the Humans were on their side and the Varoki out there weren’t. I kind of knew how they felt. Back on Nishtaaka, I wasn’t always sure which side I wanted to root for . . . and I was one of the sides. Nothing’s complicated but people.
“Parley? Really? Okay, should we see what they want?” Fong-Ramirez answered.
“I’ll go, sir,” Rosetti said. “If we need more brass to close the deal, I’ll send a runner.”
So Captain Rosetti went to see what they wanted. She was gone for maybe twenty minutes when the runner showed up and gave a message to Fong-Ramirez, who then called over the tall, distinguished-looking Varoki special envoy. They spoke briefly, heads nodded, and then Fong-Ramirez left. The envoy came back and spoke to the bodyguard and to TheHon, who didn’t seem all that happy about the situation. He looked up and noticed me watch
ing him. He said something to the other two and then walked over to join Marfoglia and me.
“Hey, TheHon, what’s the latest bulletin from the High Command?”
“The uZmataanki colonial district military commander has arrived. He has relieved and arrested the commander of the striker cohort which has been in action against us, has apologized profusely for the ‘misunderstanding,’ and is supposedly arranging ground transport for us to T’tokl-Heem.”
Two words I didn’t particularly like hearing: supposedly and T’tokl-Heem.
“Not to Haampta?”
TheHon looked at me significantly and shook his head. “The commander says he cannot guarantee our safety near the uBakai border, as there are ongoing military operations there.”
“Has he heard of a temporary cease-fire to allow passage of neutral refugees?” I demanded.
He dipped his head to one side.
“But if they take us back to T’tokl-Heem, that’s better,” Marfoglia said. “We’ll be able to get back up the Needle.”
Only one word in that I didn’t like hearing: if.
“So, is Fong-Ramirez going to straighten them out?” I asked. That didn’t seem very likely to me. The lieutenant commander was a good, solid naval officer but didn’t strike me as a hard-nosed negotiator.
“I do not know. They wanted the commanders of all of the national contingents to personally certify the good conduct of their troops while in uZmataanki territory—apparently a prerequisite for allowing our troops to retain their arms while in transit. He and Lieutenant Palaan have both gone to do so.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
He just looked at me again. He definitely smelled a rat, but he didn’t look scared. Both of those facts were interesting.
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