Not surprisingly, he didn’t answer. Jodi bit her lip, wondering if he was even still alive. As puny as the thrusters were on those suits, they were still plenty powerful. At least it had finally burned itself out of fuel, she thought bitterly, wondering how such a thing could happen. The armored space suits the Marines used were probably the safest pieces of military hardware next to the common rock. While a thruster lighting off like that was not impossible, it was sure damn unlikely.
Behind her, Captain Markus Thorella sat silently.
The short time it took to close on Reza’s spinning form passed like hours, and their time was quickly running out. “Altitude, ten kilometers,” her ship’s computer reported in Nicole’s voice.
“I know, goddammit,” she hissed, trying to keep the fighter stable in the increasing buffeting from the atmosphere. She followed the little blip on her head-up display like a bloodhound, but she could not yet see Reza visually, and she could not go much faster for fear of losing Eustus. “C’mon, Reza,” she whispered to herself “Where the hell are you?”
There! A tiny speck became visible right off the fighter’s nose, tumbling against the backdrop of the rapidly approaching ground as Jodi dove straight down toward the planet surface.
“Got him in sight,” she said, easing the throttles forward a little more, but not too much: if she was going too fast when she reached him, her ship would overshoot, and there would not be time for a second pass before Reza hit the ground. “Stand by, Eustus.”
“Any time,” Eustus breathed. He was getting sick from being bounced around while hanging onto the fighter’s back like a parasitic insect, and his hands were beginning to cramp from holding on for dear life to the thin bar aft of the cockpit, even with the suit augmentation.
“Altitude, five thousand meters,” the computer warned. “Warning… warning,” it went on as a steady warbling tone sounded in Jodi’s headset. If she did not pull out soon, she never would.
Steady, now, she breathed to herself as she crept up on Reza’s windmilling form. Now!
“Go, Eustus!” she shouted.
Without hesitation, Eustus flung himself into the air stream screaming around the fighter, trusting that his suit’s screens would keep him from being smashed into jelly against the ship’s hull. At the same time, Jodi separated away in the opposite direction, leaving him tumbling in her wake.
“Holy Jesus,” Eustus breathed as he felt himself being grabbed and pummeled by the atmosphere. A beep was going off in his ear. Altitude. Quickly righting himself with his thrusters, he pointed himself like an arrow at Reza’s inert form and shot toward him, closing the dozen or so meters between them in only a few seconds.
“Gotcha!” he huffed triumphantly as he grabbed one of Reza’s flailing arms. Pulling his friend to him, he linked their suits together at the waist with the built-in safety tethers. Then, fumbling at Reza’s sides with his hands, he fought to separate the bulk of the equipment attached to Reza’s suit. If he could not get rid of it, they would be too heavy for his own suit’s jets to put them safely on the ground. “Come on,” he muttered angrily as the altitude warning tone sounded faster and faster. When the tone become a continuous sound, the suit’s thrusters would not have enough time to slow them to an acceptable landing velocity, and the most elementary laws of physics would take over. They would be splattered like eggs over the ground below.
With a sudden snap, the molded combat pack and the fifty or so kilos it represented popped away.
“Burn!” Eustus shouted into his helmet, initiating the preprogrammed firing sequence that Aquino had told him to use. Canted at a ridiculous angle to account for the asymmetrical thrust condition imposed by the weight of Reza’s body, the two jets of Eustus’s suit flared and fired at their full thrust.
Grunting at the force of the suit’s thrusters, Eustus kept his eyes glued to the suit visor and the scene beyond as he and Reza continued to plummet toward the ground. “Please, Lord of All,” he hissed through clenched teeth over the roar of the straining jets and all of six gees, “Come on… come on…”
The whirling numbers that indicated their descent velocity gradually slowed as the jets fought against the force of Quantico’s gravity. They flashed through one thousand meters, still falling like a rock. The trees and hills below, so beautiful from higher up, held all the beauty now of a trap of sharpened bamboo stakes.
Through his faceplate and his rapidly dimming vision, his blood drawn away by the force of the thrusters, Eustus caught a glimpse of Jodi Mackenzie’s fighter nearby as she brought it down in a matching spiral descent.
Well, he thought with a detached part of his panicking consciousness, they won’t have long to wait.
At five hundred meters, the fuel caution warning began sounding in his ears. The jets were going to run out of fuel before they hit the ground. “Shit,” he muttered bitterly. He closed his eyes.
A few seconds later, the jets flared one final time and died. Eustus felt himself seized by the sickening sensation of free-fall. They weren’t going to make it–
With a roar of snapping branches, he found himself tumbling through the middle of a stand of trees, their limbs tearing at his arms and legs, hammering his back, and whip-cracking against his helmet. Before he had any time to react, he found himself in a short free-fall again.
He hit the ground. Hard. The wind was knocked out of him like a child who had fallen from a swing, and Eustus fought back tears of surprise and pain.
But he mostly felt relieved. He was alive.
* * *
“How’s your head?”
Reza blinked away the stars that clouded his vision, only to see Eustus’s concerned face.
“Fuzzy,” he answered quietly as he took stock of his body. Obviously, they had survived their fall. “What happened?”
“I don’t know, exactly,” Eustus said as he removed the palm-sized mediscanner from Reza’s forehead. It did not register any damage more serious than a very mild concussion and some hellish bruising. “It looked like one of your thrusters went berserk and sent you tumbling. Sergeant Major Aquino came up with the idea of me hitching a ride on Lieutenant Mackenzie’s fighter to come pick you up. And, well, here we are.” He smiled sheepishly.
“I owe you my life, my friend.”
“Stow it, Reza,” he said, smiling more brightly now. “I promised Commander Carré I’d keep your butt out of trouble, remember?”
Reza nodded, tried to smile at his friend’s humor. “What are we to do now?”
Eustus snorted. “Well, I already reported that you looked like you were going to be okay, at least according to this thing,” he held up the scanner. “Captain Thorella said that unless you needed a medevac out of here, we’re supposed to move our butts back to the battalion op zone or we’d have to E & E through Second Battalion when they land.” A wry smile curled his lips. “A mere forty klicks away, and through Second Battalion’s training lanes.”
Reza frowned. “E&E” was better known as escape and evasion, a convenient acronym for one of the most hellish aspects of Marine training. As part of the ENDEX, all of the trainees would have to go through a ten-kilometer long stretch of “enemy territory,” doing whatever they could to keep from being captured by the mock enemy forces that would be gunning for them. Not surprisingly, very few ever made it through without being bagged. Everyone who was caught had to spend the remainder of the E&E exercise in a mock prisoner of war camp, undergoing unpleasant but harmless “torture” and lectures on how to do better next time, in the real world. The best motivator, however, was the fact that the Kreelans did not take prisoners. In combat, anyone who was caught was killed. Period.
“I take it then,” Reza said slowly as part of his mind began directing his body toward repairing itself as rapidly as possible for the long travel ahead, “that we had best move quickly and soon?”
“That would seem the prudent thing to do, if you’re up to it.” Despite the reassuring signs the mediscanner gave him
– apparently enough to satisfy Aquino, as Thorella could not have cared less – Eustus was not at all sure Reza was really up for this. They had a long way to go.
“Do not worry, my friend,” Reza said, sensing Eustus’s mood as he collected up his rifle – which miraculously had survived undamaged – and other gear. The now-discarded armored suits would be left where they were until one of the dustoff crews came to pick them up. “Come, Eustus. We are wasting time, and have far yet to go.”
* * *
“They’ve finally decided to get a move on,” Thorella muttered to himself as he watched the two icons representing Eustus and Reza move off toward their battalion’s drop zone. He frowned to himself as he stood up from the display and stretched his cramped back muscles. Aquino had gone back to the main base in a shuttle after determining that Gard was all right. Thorella knew that the little Filipino bastard was going to try and pin something on him, but there would not be anything for him to find. In the meantime, Thorella had to play out the game as it was scripted. It would not do to call too much attention to himself by trying to take Gard out again. For now.
“You know something, Thorella,” he heard a silky voice behind him, “you’re a real fucking sleazeball.”
“One of these days, Mackenzie,” he said just loud enough for her to hear, “I’m not going to have to take that from you anymore.” Unfortunately, Thorella did not have control over the cadre roster. Mackenzie seemed forever glued to him, a thorn in his side. But someday…
“Is that a threat, you ox?” she challenged in the comparative silence of the empty command post. Only she and Thorella were on duty right now, the rest of the cadre out wreaking havoc among the struggling trainees. She knew Thorella could probably beat her in a hand-to-hand match, but not by much. She was good, and had had a good teacher. She wished that Tony Braddock were here with her now. “You know, I just don’t understand why Tsingai doesn’t just send you to the rock pile where you belong. You hate your own people as much or more than you hate the Blues, and yet they just keep bailing you out of all the trouble you seem to make for yourself. Now, why is that?” She didn’t expect more than an epithet in reply.
But Thorella obliged her with what she had to consider an intellectual tour de force, at least for him. “There are a lot of things I wouldn’t expect you to understand, Mackenzie,” he replied calmly. “But I would think that the fact that our race needs people like me to survive against an enemy like the Kreelans would be self-evident, even to you. The trouble is that you’re soft and malleable, like wet clay. I realize that people like you would like nothing better than for the rest of us to just roll over or turn the other cheek as the Kreelans send in their seed to poison us, but that’s not how it’s going to be.” He turned to face her, his face a cold mask of hatred. “There are a lot of people who never wanted that half-breed to contaminate our population, to disgrace the Corps, and I’m one of them. Where there’s one, there’s more, and pretty soon we’ll be overrun with half-breeds spreading their ideas and their genes through our population.” He leaned closer to her. “And I’ll do anything I can to stop that from happening.”
Thorella’s use of “half-breed” was not lost on her. With black skin and blue eyes, her own racial lines were far from any measure of purity people like Thorella seemed to find acceptable. But her own personal anger took second place to her growing suspicions that Reza’s mishap had not been an accident. “Does that include murder, captain?” she asked quietly, waiting tensely to see if Thorella would attack her.
Slowly, he smiled. “I don’t know what you mean, lieutenant. And if you accuse me of anything, I certainly hope you have a lot of evidence to back it up. Because if you don’t,” the smile evaporated, “you can kiss your career goodbye.”
“No,” Jodi said as she casually began to step away from him, “just wondering.” He’s insane, she thought. But his warning struck a chord of truth in her. How had he managed to stay out of trouble, despite the numerous allegations of disgraceful conduct that had been levied against him, all of which eventually were dismissed? He must have some sponsorship from higher up the chain. The question was, how high? And could they get away with trying to kill Reza, or anyone else, for that matter? “I think I’ll just go and check on my ship, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” Thorella said flatly.
Watching her go, he knew she would have to be taken care of. When this little exercise was over, he would have to talk to his mentor again. He would know just what to do.
Smiling like the Dark Angel, he busied himself with the exercise unfolding around him, seemingly oblivious to Reza and Eustus. One of them he hated, the other was simply in the way.
* * *
Senator Strom Borge’s face was a mask of contemplation. It was the face he often wore while jousting with his colleagues over the many issues of state and war the Confederation Council faced each day. The men and women he secretly loathed. They were weak and foolish, leading the Confederation into genocide at the hands of the blue-skinned alien horde. But he knew better, and worked diligently each day to set things right, biding his time until the day that he would no longer feel compelled to conceal his true goals, his real ambitions. Power was his sole reason for existence, and to exercise unlimited power was his ultimate goal. Someday, he thought. Someday soon.
A small sheaf of genuine paper slipped from the slender fingers of his hands as he gazed out the window that took up the entire wall of his office suite in the Confederation Plaza, as his thoughts wandered among the myriad lights that shone in the evening darkness outside. The paper contained a message from his protégé in the military, Markus Thorella, requesting guidance as to how to pursue the matter of dealing with Reza Gard. Thorella’s initial attempt at quashing their unsuspecting enemy, while imaginative and seemingly foolproof, had nonetheless been thwarted, and the senator was not willing to put Thorella at risk again. At least, not yet.
Tapping a finger to his lips, an idea came to him. “Maria,” he said.
“Yes, senator,” the disembodied voice of his secretary outside answered immediately from unseen speakers in the room.
“Inform General Tsingai that Reza Gard is to be assigned to the Red Legion,” he told her, “on order of the Chairman of the Confederation Council’s Military Oversight Committee.”
“Immediately, senator,” she replied.
He sat back, smiling. Tsingai would protest, of course, but he would not press the issue after he, Senator Strom Borge, threatened to expose his little ongoing extramarital affair in public. Borge knew everything about everyone, and considered no one beyond his reach or influence.
Outside, his secretary carried out his instructions, silently wondering at the terrible fate that awaited Reza Gard.
Twenty-Six
The day Reza had looked forward to as a boy, and then again when he rejoined humanity, had finally come. He stood at parade rest, hands clasped behind his back, alongside his peers. The four companies of the graduating training battalion stood in mass formation on the parade ground as the post commandant gave his graduation speech, but Reza paid him little attention. His thoughts focused on the single stripe now on his sleeve that, lowly in rank as it was, signified that he was worthy to be a Confederation Marine. He had made good Wiley Hickock’s faith in him from those bittersweet days that he had once forgotten. Past that, he thought of the future, of the time – soon, now – when he would be cast into battle and his blood would again sing in time with his sword.
The pomp and ceremony of graduation finally came to a close, the last comments and speeches rendered. It was now time for the trainees’ last act as a battalion.
“Battalion…” he heard Eustus’s voice boom over the field. He had been chosen as battalion trainee commander for this final day, and had loved every minute of it.
“Company…” each of the trainee company commanders echoed.
“Atten-SHUN!” Over five hundred pairs of boots stomped the ground, heel to heel
, as the battalion came to attention.
“Dismissed!” Eustus’s final command was drowned out by a sea of jubilant cries as the former trainees voiced their thanks that the hell of the last weeks was finally over. Hundreds of hats flew into the air, and the once orderly formation broke down into a riotous mob that surged toward the barracks area to prepare for whatever Fate had in store for them.
No longer old or young, man or woman, rich or poor: they were Marines.
* * *
Reza’s platoon stood at attention before Sergeant Major Aquino in what they knew was a private ceremony he conducted for every platoon that graduated under his tutelage. Out in a far corner of the post, arrayed before an abandoned storage building that was away from any prying eyes, he began the ritual.
“Listen up, Marines,” he bellowed in the tinny, heavily-accented voice that they had all come to respect, a note of pride in his words that he was no longer addressing recruits, but young warriors ready for battle.
“Some of you now will be going on to more training, to be specialists of some kind. The rest of you will be going straight to a combat regiment somewhere. But all of you, sooner or later, will be out in the fleet. And in the fleet there is no room for petty personal problems or grudges. Life, as you will soon find, is too short for that, and there is no room for it on a warship or in battle.”
He held up an electronic notepad that they already knew was their unit roster. “When I read your name, you are to go into the building,” he nodded to the door behind him, “and wait. Then anyone who wants a piece of you will get their chance, and all of you can get any hard feelings out of your systems now and leave them here, where they belong. We want you to take out your aggressions on the enemy, not on each other.” He paused, surveying his audience, looking for squeamish faces. He saw none. Good. “When you’re done, come back out and take your place in formation, then we will go on to the next one. I will observe to make sure no one gets carried away. Any questions?”
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