The first sergeant nodded at Hondo, then opened the back door. A lanky, older civilian stepped out, stretched, and then took a moment to take in the view of the valley. The second was a younger woman. She looked familiar, and it took Hondo a moment to realize why.
“Doctor,” he called out, recognizing her even if he’d forgotten her last name.
Both the man and woman turned to him, as did another woman getting out of the second beetle.
“It’s me, Sergeant McKeever, ma’am.”
They all looked at him like he was crazy, and then he remembered that he was in a PICS, so how could she remember him?
“During the first battle with the Grubs, I carried you out of the fight. I was a lance corporal then. I was there when you got off Purgamentium, too.”
Recognition flooded her face, and she stepped around the beetle and walked up to him, saying, “McKeever, that’s right, I remember you. What are you doing here?”
I’m a Marine, so where else would I be? The question is, what are you doing here?
“I’m part of the rear area security, ma’am.”
“Wow! It’s a small universe.” She turned to the man and said, “Jack, this Marine saved my life.”
The man automatically held out his hand, saying “Glad to meet you, Sergeant,” before hesitating and dropping his hand back a few centimeters.
Hondo stifled a laugh. People tended to forget how big a PICS was, and when a huge gauntleted hand reached out, they suddenly wondered if their hand was going to be crushed. PICS’ fine motor-tuning was such that a Marine could hold a butterfly and not crush it. He took the man’s hand and gently shook it.
Thirty meters up the path, the gates to the monastery opened, and two monks came out, a brother and a sister. In their black robes, Hondo thought they could have stepped out of the 16th Century, Old Reckoning. Well, not totally. Back then, the Jesuits were only male monks.
“Sergeant, I’ve got to go meet the mother superior now, but I’m going to be here for a couple of days. I’d like to catch up with you if you’ve got the time.”
“Uh . . . sure, ma’am. At your convenience.”
“Foue, Norelco, shall we?” she asked the two who’d gotten out of the second beetle.
The four, along with a woman who had the look of a minder about her, turned and walked up the path to greet the two monks.
“So, you hobnobbing with the bigwigs?” the first sergeant asked, stepping over to stand beside him.
“Ain’t like that, First Sergeant. I just remembered her.”
“If you say, so,” the first sergeant said, rolling his fingertips around to meet the top of his thumb, then taking the “hole” and rotating it around his nose in the universal sign of a brown-noser.
Hondo rolled his eyes. He knew he wasn’t going to hear the end of this over the next few days. He knew the doctor had said to meet him, and she had to be pretty high on the food chain, but he swore to make sure he avoided her if at all possible. She’d probably forget it anyway.
“So, Sergeant, I see you’ve got yourself a girlfriend,” Hanaburgh said as he joined them.
“Oh, fuck you, too, Burger,” Hondo said, wheeling away to stalk off.
The first sergeant was bad enough, but now a lance corporal was giving him shit?
Two sets of laughter followed him down the road.
Chapter 34
Skylar
Skylar sat on the bench seat in the half-filled dining hall. Some of the monks had on lab coats or overalls, but most of the monks were in their black robes. After the modern labs she’d just toured, the hall seemed a throwback to years gone by. The image of the current pope did not fit with the painting of Christ at the head of the hall, nor with the many images of whom Sky thought must be famous Jesuits from over the last more-than-1200 years.
“Well, Doctor Ybarra, what did you think of our facilities?” the mother superior asked.
“I’m very impressed. They’re rather, uh . . . surprising, I guess I would have to say.”
“Which is not an unusual reaction, Doctor Ybarra.”
“I’m not much of a lab-rat, Mother Superior. I’ve made my living analyzing the data gathered by others. You would have to ask Dr. Pavoni what he thinks of your facilities. He’s climbed the academic ladder in some of the best labs in the Confederation.”
Sky had been impressed. The monastery grounds could be used for a 22nd or 23rd Century period piece, and the chapel looked like it was plucked from one of the 16th Century European cathedrals, but the research facilities would rival any she’d seen. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but it wasn’t she’d found.
“I have to say, I was surprised to see so many here who are not of your order,” she said.
“We don’t discriminate against those who are not guided by a higher power,” the mother superior said.
What?
Sky looked at the older woman in surprise before she caught the slight smile and twinkle in her eye.
She’s playing with me, she realized.
“Well, thank you for allowing others to bask under your guidance,” Sky said.
“It’s the least we can do. Actually, at the moment, we have . . . ” she started, before turning to a monk sitting across the table from them and saying, “How many visiting staff do we have now, Brother Thanh?”
“As of this morning, we have twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one,” the mother superior repeated to Sky. “We’ve had as many as seventy in the past, but with the current situation, some have been recalled by their governments. To be expected, I guess.”
Several young men and women, looking somewhat strange to Sky in robes with white aprons attached, pushed carts between the tables. Sky had expected the mother superior to be served first, but each monk was served based on how close they sat to the kitchens.
Sky hadn’t eaten since the ship bringing them to Destiny had reached the system. The Dictymorphs had yet to fire on a ship that wasn’t attacking them, but there was no use taking chances. Standing well off the planet itself, that had resulted in a four-hour shuttle ride to the planet. Add the two-hour tour at the monastery, and she was starving.
She looked up eagerly at the young monk making his way down the aisle, and when he put a covered bowl in front of her, she took off the lid.
Tempura? Really?
The shrimp and vegetable tempura on a bed of rice would have fit in at any fine Japanese restaurant.
“I didn’t expect tempura,” Norelco said.
“Did you expect gruel, Doctor Pavoni?” Brother Fa’ad, one of their guides, asked.
“We only have gruel on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Doctor Pavoni,” the mother superior added.
She’s enjoying this, Sky thought. I think I like her.
“It is Wednesday,” Norelco said.
“So it is, Doctor. So, you are doubly lucky the cooks made a mistake.”
Norelco reddened and picked up the chopsticks attached to the lid of his bowl.
Sky fumbled with her chopsticks but managed to lift a piece of shrimp to her mouth without dropping it. It was delicious, without the mealy consistency of the shrimp found so often in lower-quality fabricators.
“Tempura is Jesuit food, you know,” the mother superior said as she ate.
“It’s Japanese,” Sky objected.
“Fifteen-eighty, Old Reckoning, Nagasaki. The Jesuit brothers fried vegetables during Lent when they abstained from meat, using the term ‘tempora,’ as in ‘temporary.’ The Japanese acquired a taste for fried foods, and ‘tempura’ was born. Hence, this is a Jesuit dish. And you’re welcome.”
Sky didn’t know if the mother superior was pulling her leg or not, but she was going to look it up the minute she left.
“So, what’s on your agenda next?” the mother superior asked, changing the subject.
She kept eating, but Sky could see the woman was hanging on her answer.
“We are on to Gethsemane to see Archbishop Teluride.”
The meeting with the governor would be her first official attempt to bring the Brotherhood into d’lato status. The planetary governor knew why she was here, of course, and the back-channels had been heating up, but her meeting was also a bit of show for the Klethos. There had been no communications with the Klethos since the meeting in Brussels, so no one knew what they were thinking, but the secretary-general, with the full concurrence of the heads of the various states, felt that Sky had to proceed with her mission. This had been somehow thrust upon her shoulders, and she had to show the Klethos that the UAM was serious in maintaining honor.
“He’s a good man, Doctor Ybarra,” the mother superior quietly told her. “This is out of his hands, but he understands the role he has to play.”
Sky stared at her tempura, afraid to raise her head. The monastery was an independent enclave on a Brotherhood world. The Jesuits at the monastery were not Brotherhood citizens, but it was not surprising that the mother superior was well connected with the planetary government. What she’d just revealed was the first bit of intel she’d received, something she doubted that her side knew. As soon as she left the monastery, she had to relay that back to Earth.
She was trying to come up with a diplomatic way to acknowledge the advice when another monk entered the hall, searched the sitting monks, and hurried over to the mother superior. He bent over and whispered into her ear, and Sky saw her relaxed expression harden into something almost frightening in its determination.
She stood up, and in a surprisingly piercing voice, yelled out, “Everyone, leave the dining hall and report to your labs to await further instructions.”
Sky joined the monks in looking at the mother superior in confusion.
What’s going on?
The mother superior’s next words struck a primal fear into Sky’s heart.
“The Dictymorphs are landing in the valley. We are under attack.”
Chapter 35
Hondo
Hondo was still glowering over the razzing from the first sergeant and Hanaburgh when high in the afternoon sky, something caught his eye. He zoomed in, and his stomach lurched. He’d seen the orange-glowing spheres before, on Purgamentium.
The Grubs were landing.
Almost immediately, sirens started blaring, and his display lit up.
“Alpha Company, all hands to Checkpoint Golf,” the skipper passed on the command net.
Hondo had already started to run down to the camp, but he turned to go back uphill to rejoin the first sergeant and Hanaburgh. He skidded to a stop, then looked back down. Below him, one of the new plasma cannons—adjusted to become what was essentially a flamethrower on steroids—started to fire, reaching up to splash one of the spheres. The second cannon fired, hitting another, bathing it in a blanket of flame. Both spheres glowed brighter for a moment before they collapsed in on themselves.
“Get some!” the first sergeant said.
No one had known how the new cannons would work, but evidently, they were pretty effective. More and more spheres were appearing over the valley, though. Could two cannons hold them off?
PFC Pickerul pounded up the road to join them.
“What do we do?” she asked.
“Hold on, the skipper’s on his way,” the first sergeant said.
Hondo watched the cannons shift to more spheres, knocking out four more in a matter of ten or fifteen seconds. As on Purgamentium, the Grubs didn’t seem to be able to fire their light weapons while in their spheres.
“They’re sitting ducks,” Hondo said.
The gods of war are fickle, and as if listening to Hondo, they flipped the script. From the far ridgeline, a finger of light shot across the valley floor to strike one of the cannons. There was an explosion, probably the powerplant going up.
“What the . . .” Hanaburgh said.
The light tendril shifted, tearing up camp buildings as it walked across the camp. The buildings were collateral damage, Hondo knew. The target was the second cannon. He zoomed in his display, and he could see the gun tube start to traverse towards the origin of the Grub beam, but it had barely moved when the light tendril hit it. The tube sagged as if made of wax, then the powerplant erupted in flames.
“The Grubs put a team up there,” the first sergeant said. “How the hell no one picked that up . . .”
“We underestimated them again,” Hondo said.
“Let’s just hope they underestimated us, too,” Hanaburgh added, as the first of the spheres landed a couple of klicks outside the camp.
Within moments, the spheres started to dissolve, and the Grubs unrolled themselves. To Hondo’s surprise, they didn’t immediately launch into the attack, as if they were waiting for the rest of them to land. That didn’t bode well. The simple fact that they had somehow inserted a couple of them in the far ridgeline to support the landing told him they were developing coordinated tactics, and that wasn’t good news for the home team. Any human success so far had been due to better tactics, not more powerful weapons.
Coming around the bend, a flatbed appeared, flanked by four PICS Marines.
“Here comes the skipper,” the first sergeant told them.
Hondo zoomed in, and he saw the company commander and Gunny Gustav on the bed. They’d picked up Morales from the main gate as well. He pulled up his display and saw that the PICS Marines escorting them were Tony B, Joseph, the lieutenant, and RP.
By now, there were a dozen Grubs on the ground, and they started to move off, but not towards the camp. They were heading in the direction of Berea, some 30 klicks down the valley, but sharply visible in the clear air. At the edge of the city was the second refugee camp, and if the Grubs were going to attack, they’d go right through the camp.
“First Sergeant, Camp Bravo,” Hondo said.
“What about it?”
He’d forgotten for a moment that the first sergeant wasn’t in a PICS, and he couldn’t just zoom in.
“The Grubs are heading right for it.”
There was a pause, then the first sergeant said, “We’ve got more Grubs landing here. Just wait for the skipper.”
It didn’t seem right. Hondo pretty much hated the Brotherhood right now, but those were civilians, and they were going to get slaughtered.
From the city, an aircraft rose. Hondo zoomed in further. It was an Air Guard fighter, but an ancient one, which probably explained why it wasn’t on the other side of the planet fighting in the main action.
Except, is that the main action? Hondo wondered. Or was that a feint to draw all the fighting forces away from here?
There had been significant discussion about why the Grubs had attacked the more sparsely-populated eastern hemisphere instead of the western. Forty clicks from the assembly area in the other direction was Gethsemane, the planetary capital and largest city, and right behind him was the monastery, which was evidently a center of Grub research.
Hondo thought he might be reading too much into the Grubs, giving them too much credit. The Marines weren’t even here when the Grubs landed, so they didn’t have to be “drawn off.” There had been a strong Brotherhood force, though.
The old Brotherhood fighter rose up a couple of thousand meters, then gracefully turned on itself and started to dive back to the surface. On Purgamentium, a Navy Shrike had blown several spheres out of the sky, but the Brotherhood fighter looked to be three generations older, and instead of the spheres still descending, it went for the Grubs on the ground.
There were flickers of light as the fighter opened up on the Grubs. Hondo shifted his view. He could see the impacts on two of the Grubs, but he couldn’t tell if they were having any effect. Light tendrils from three of the Grubs reached out to meet with each other, then a stronger, straighter beam of light shot out from that confluence towards the fighter. Hondo shifted again just in time to see the fighter disintegrate, pieces spreading out as they fell to the ground.
“Shit,” Pickerul muttered.
The flatbed slowed down, and Captain
Ariç jumped out before it had come to a complete stop.
“Lieutenant Abrams, form your defensive line,” she shouted, before starting to run up the path to the gate of the monastery. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Sergeant McKeever, I want you on along the road on both sides of the crest here. Push your Marines out 2oo meters. Get someone else down the slope to the knob there,” he passed, pointing down the hill to the west, perpendicular to the road, where a protruding rock knob gave good fields of fire down the slope.
“Sir, that’s a big area. I don’t have the troops for that.”
“Just do, it, Sergeant,” the lieutenant snapped back. “When Sergeant Riordan gets here, you’ll shift, giving her from here to the north back towards the camp.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Hondo said, surprised at the lieutenant’s tone.
“Listen up,” the lieutenant continued, this time on the platoon net, which, for all intents and purposes, was now the company net. “We have one mission and one mission only: that’s to defend the monastery. Whatever happens below, to the camp, to the refugees, this is our mission. Understand?”
When no one answered, he repeated, “I said understand? I want a positive acknowledgment, now!”
The Marines entered their acknowledgments, both those in Hondo’s First Squad as well as Cara’s Second who were still donning their PICS back in camp.
“Get to it, Sergeant,” the lieutenant passed again on the P2P.
“Uh . . . sir? What about Lance Corporal Morales? He’s not in a PICS,” he asked hesitantly, not wanting to set his platoon commander off again.
“He’s a fucking Marine, Sergeant,” the lieutenant said, before cutting the connection.
Lieutenant Abrams had been somewhat moody since the fight with the Brotherhood, but this was the first time Hondo had ever heard him curse. It wasn’t like him.
Hondo shook it off and placed his Marines, putting Hanaburgh and his Weapons Pack Four on the knob down the hill, which was the most exposed position, and hence the most dangerous. He could have put RP there, but Hanaburgh had proven himself in combat where the more gung-ho but somewhat flighty RP had not.
The Price of Honor (The United Federation Marine Corps' Grub Wars Book 2) Page 19