He pushed the spot, and the tattoo disappeared again. Cpl Pallas reached out and grabbed the bigger Marine by the arm and pulled him closer so he could see the arm better. He ran a finger over the spot where the tattoo had been visible only a few seconds before.
“No shit!” Hu said, reaching out to touch Sams’ arm as well.
“I don’t know,” T-Rex said. “It looks like a tattoo, and I bet the first sergeant’s going to have your ass over it.”
“It’s not a tattoo,” Aesop said. “They had it all explained. This is brand new techno.”
“So where’s yours if it ain’t a tat?” T-Rex asked him.
“Well, they said it wasn’t a tattoo, but like you said, you think the first sergeant’s going to buy that? I’ve got seven more months in this green machine, and I’m getting out with the stripes on my sleeves. I need my
VSEB if I’m going to go to school.”
“Chicken shit excuse if you ask me. You’re out with your liberty buddy, and you let him do that if you think it might be illegal? Sams might be a busted-down private, but all that means is you still outrank him,” Pallas reminded him.
Marines and sailors were not allowed to wander alone while on ship’s liberty. Vegas was a safe haven—other than losing your money, not much else would happen as the police kept a pretty tight lock on the tourist spots on the planet. Almost “anything goes” in Vegas, but the police kept violent crimes at a minimum. They wanted tourists to come back again and spend more. It was common knowledge that for a place such as Vegas, the liberty buddy concept was more there to protect Vegas from Marines and sailors than the other way around.
The two newcomers grabbed seats as Sams ordered another round for everyone. Hu, Sams, and Wan continued to discuss the regulatory ramifications of Sams’ “refractive body art.” Hu was debating on getting one himself. Pallas and T-Rex were discussing the NFL and the upcoming season. Smitty, getting deeper into his cups was softly singing to himself. Ryck just leaned back to watch the dancers on the stage. To say they were hot was an understatement, and Ryck had been socially and physically celibate since leaving Prophesy. The tall redhead on the left was particularly stunning. Like all the rest, she had on bikini bottoms made with the same flashing LED fabric as Lysa used to wear while “working,” but while he hated Lysa wearing the fabric, on this undulating goddess, it seemed pretty natural. Of course, he rather liked the rest of her body better where nothing was left to the imagination. What he was able to imagine was what he would like to be doing with her.
“I see you enjoy what a woman can offer,” a soft voice said in his ear, startling him out of his reverie.
He looked back to where a blue woman was standing. Blue skin and yellow hair. Very little clothing.
“May I sit down?” she asked.
“Uh, uh, sure,” Ryck stammered out, pulling a chair from the next table to beside him.
“Your buddies seem to be interested in other things,” she said, pointing a long blue finger at them.
They might have been discussing other things a moment before, but as she sat, she had all of their undivided attention. When she smiled at them, her teeth dazzling white, before putting one hand on Ryck’s arm and turning her body to face him, they shrugged and went back to what they had been doing, even if glances kept being shot her way.
“So, what’s your name?” she asked Ryck.
“Private First Class Ryck Lysander,” he told her.
She leaned her head up and gave a trill of musical laughter. “So your mother named you ‘Private First Class’?”
“No, no. My mother and father named me Ryck. I’m a private first class in the Marines.”
“OK, Private First Class Ryck Lysander, sorry for teasing you like that. It is just that you are so cute!”
She put her hand back lightly on his arm. It was barely touching him, but he was extremely conscious of it.
Ryck stared at her hand for a moment, then followed the arm up to the rest of her. She was blue, all right. That was her skin color, not some tight-fitting clothing. She was a deep, almost incandescent blue. Her hair was bright yellow, and her eyes seemed to glow with the same shade as her hair. She had on a small v-neck halter and nancishorts, both the same shade of blue as her skin, but with the lights in the bar, it was hard to tell where fabric left off and skin began. Ryck thought back to his Grand Lit class back at school. They had spent a week on comic books, anime, and shorts, and one of the comics had been an old 20th Century volume of X-Men. This woman reminded him of one of the characters in that comic named Mystique. She didn’t quite look like what he remembered of the fictional character, but the blue skin color trumped other aspects of their respective appearances. He wanted to ask of her skin was a genmod, or if it was superficial. He knew he shouldn’t stare, but she didn’t seem to mind his attention.
“Are you enjoying Vegas?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah, sure. It’s great. We’ve only been here a few hours, though. We’re on the . . .” he started, then realized that he shouldn’t be talking about military details.
“You’re on the Adelaide, and you are just back from Atacama where they had a tax revolt. Yes, we know all about the comings and goings of ships here in Vegas,” she said as her face broke out in a dazzling smile.
That took Ryck by surprise. Was she grilling him on military secrets? He glanced back at the others. Cpl Pallas was sitting on the other side of him, and the NCO seemed to have heard her, because he was looking back at Ryck, smile on his face. He lifted up his bottle of Bud in a mock salute to Ryck, then turned back. The lack of security awareness seemed weird to him, but if Sparta didn’t think much about it, it had to be OK.
“By the way, I’m Purety,” she said, offering her hand.
“Uh, hi Purety.”
There were a few chortles from the others and one sarcastic-sounding “smooth move, there.” The other Marines had given him the field of battle, but they still had the two of them under reconnaissance.
“So, you boy’s have been deployed for awhile with nothing to do. Saved up all your pay, right?” she asked him.
“Yeah, you’ve got that right. Nothing we could spend it on there. But Vegas, you know, this place can suck it out of you. I’ve already contributed to your economy on the blackjack tables,” he said, trying to be funny.
He didn’t quite get the reaction he’d expected.
“Lost it already? Everything?” she said, pulling back ever-so-slightly.
“Oh no, nothing like that,” he said hurriedly. “It wasn’t much. I’ve got most of it here,” he added, patting his back pocket and wallet.
Seemingly mollified, she leaned back in to him, took his arm, and said, “Good. There are better things to do with your money. Much better.”
As she said the second “better,’ she leaned even further forward, pushing her left breast up against his arm.
Ryck wasn’t naive. He hadn’t needed the liberty brief where the sailors and Marines had been warned that while prostitution was legal on Vegas, as it was throughout the Federation, with a few exceptions, as a matter of civil rights, it tended to be a very costly proposition. There would be no pay advances for anyone who spent all of his money, so making sure it stretched out for the entire four-day liberty was up to each individual.
Still, it had been a long time, and she was a very sexy woman. Her blue skin added to the attraction. It seemed more appropriate, somehow, that if he was going to enjoy the company of a working girl in Vegas, she should be rather unique, and Purety certainly fit that bill. He hadn’t planned on doing anything other than drinking and gambling, maybe taking in a show. He hadn’t wanted to connect himself in any way to the men who used to buy Lysa drinks. But sitting next to Purety, he felt his resolve begin to falter. This was Vegas, after all, with their hundreds-of-years-old motto of “What Happens in Vegas, Stays in Vegas.”
She scooted a little closer, this time pressing her leg up against his. Her leg was bare, but he had on full Dekes
. Still, the heavy fabric of the Dekes did nothing to lessen the electricity that flowed into his leg.
“So, you interested in partying?” she asked him in a husky voice.
Ryck was just about to give in when the recall button on his collar sounded. Groans and curses sounded from other sailors and Marines as they realized what the buzzing buttons meant. Their liberty was cut short. Something was up, and they had to get back to the ship.
“You heard it, gents. Let’s get going,” Cpl Pallas told them as he stood, swiping his card to clear his tab. “Pay up if you haven’t already, and we’ve got 20 mikes to get back to the shuttle. Wan, you and T-Rex make sure Smitty gets back. OK, move it!”
Ryck stood up and looked back down at Purety.
“Uh, sorry, I mean, I wanted to, but I’ve gotta go.”
She shrugged indifferently. “I know. Go ahead.”
Her voice had lost some of the sultriness. Despite her still exotic looks, she suddenly sounded like anyone else at a humdrum job; bored and wishing she was someplace else. He wanted to say something more, but as the others started to rush off, he simply turned away and sprinted off to the shuttle port.
Chapter 18
The entire company was crowded into the ships mess, the only place large enough other than the shuttle bay where everyone could gather. The Adelaide was only a destroyer, not one of the larger troop transports. Major Paulan, the detachment commander, stood up to speak, and the room quieted. Something big was up.
“Listen up, Marines,” the skinny major said, his voice surprisingly deep for coming out of such a small frame. “We’ve got a real situation here. The passenger ferry Robin was hijacked two hours ago. We are at full throttle now to try and pick up the spoor. If we find it, we will track down the ship and rescue the crew and passengers.”
That caught their attention. Anti-piracy was part of the Navy’s mission, but that usually meant blasting pirates or their bases into their component atoms. Sometimes, though, that meant a rescue, and that required Marines. The Adelaide was probably the closest ship in the immediate vicinity with embarked Marines, so that had to be why the ship was given the mission.
If the pirated vessel was a bubble ship, then time was of an essence. When a ship entered bubble space, there was a warp in the fabric of real space, but one that faded with time. If a Navy ship could find that spoor, they could somehow follow the ship, even through bubble space, and track it down.
Ryck didn’t understand how they could do that. In a class back at recruit training, it was explained that it worked the same way as hadron communications. That confused him, though. He understood the concept of hadron comms. The physics of it was that the key components were split-manufactured by twinning. Up to 32 receptors could be made, and they reacted to any outside stimulus in unison, even when separated. Push one up, and the other 31 would instantaneously go up in the exact same manner, even if light years apart. Make communicators out of these receptors, send them across the galaxy, and camming was possible from one to the other. Cross-connect to other comm hubs, and a person could cam with pretty much anyone in the known galaxy, at least within Federation space. That was intrinsically obvious to Ryck and made perfect sense.
He didn’t, though understand how a Navy ship could sniff out the bubble spoor, “taste” it (the term used by the class instructor), then lock it in. They weren’t twinned, after all. There was no connection between them at the hadron level. It didn’t make any sense, and Ryck wondered if there wasn’t another explanation, one highly classified. Regardless, he just had to accept that this was within the Navy’s capabilities.
“It looks like the pirates are SOG,” the major added, eliciting a murmur from the Marines.
Soldiers of God were criminals, their religious-sounding name notwithstanding. They had rained terror on the Reaches, wiping out entire communities, recording their torture and rape and sending those flicks out over the open net. Their leader, who went by the name of All Seeing, narrated each flick, explaining that God told them to kill and pillage. When they entered the inner core, hitting planets, stations, and ships, the leeward edge of both the Federation and the Brotherhood started to panic. No one knew where SOG originated nor where they got their ships.
They were not always successful. Several ships were destroyed by Federation or Brotherhood Navy ships, and DNA regression studies on what human remains could be gathered showed that there was no single ethnic or regional source. It seemed as if SOG came from a wide variety of worlds and people, probably recruited from the flotsam of society.
The Reaches, by definition, were widespread and sparsely populated. Even with modern technology, the SOG’s homeworld remained hidden. That was until an SOG pirate mothership was purposefully damaged, but not destroyed, and allowed to “escape.” Two Shrike pilots, operating well beyond the range of the little fighters, followed in trace, stealth projectors at max output. One disappeared into bubble space, but the other found the homeworld and torped back the coordinates to the waiting combined fleet. The fleet arrived, and with the main guns of the FS Russia and the Brotherhood battleship Retribution slaved together, the admiral of the Federation fleet and the archbishop of the Brotherhood fleet jointly pushed the firing button, sending no less than twelve planet busters to destroy the homeworld of the SOG.
Unfortunately, within a year, SOG was back. All Seeing was probably killed when the planet was destroyed, but others rose in his place, and SOG was back in the space lanes. They started taking freighters, disappearing with valuable cargos. They took some planetary militia ships, and even a destroyer from the independent Greenworld. Finally, they had started taking some passenger ships. No ransom was ever requested. The rumors were that the men were made into slaves, the women into wives and breeders.
The major let the rumble die down before continuing, “I don’t need to tell you what happened three years ago with the SOG and the Mount Rainer.”
It had been widely publicized, so pretty much the entire Federation had followed the story. The SOG had gotten aboard the ship as passengers, then taken over the bridge while the rest of the pirates boarded from small shuttles. Over 600 souls were taken captive. The Ranier was not a bubble ship, but an old fabric ship. The FS Wuhan caught them before they could align for their jump. The Marines assaulted, but when they entered the Ranier, they found all of the passengers murdered, most horribly mutilated. The 30 pirates themselves had committed suicide.
“I was part of the boarding team, and I am not ashamed to admit to you that I broke down when I saw what they had done. Rest assured that this is not going to happen during my command.”
Several “oorahs” echoed within the mess deck, only to fade in an awkward silence.
“I’m going to turn this over to Lieutenant Silverton for a moment. He’s the ship’s intel officer, and I think we need to listen to this.”
Several Navy officers and crew had arrived with the major and Capt Light Chaser. One of them, obviously a heavy worlder from his physique, stood up to face the Marines.
“As the major said, I’m Lieutenant Silverton,” he started. “There has already been a release that the hijacking is the work of the SOG. However, a couple of things stand out. First, this is the furthest into Federation space that the SOG has ever struck. Second, the announcement that they were the SOG came quite early, sooner than what they normally do. They are still vulnerable, and usually the SOG waits until they are safely away. The Admiralty gives it a very high probability that this is not the SOG, but rather a copy-cat group that is using the Ranier incident to forestall pursuit.”
That elicited another round of rumbling, and the lieutenant had to hold up his hand to get everyone to quiet down.
“The decision has been made, and this is at the highest levels, that SOG or copycat, the Adelaide, if at all possible, will track down the Robin and take it back, no matter the consequences. The pirates, whether actually SOG or not, will be given the same summary treatment as authorized by Joint Communique 20
05.”
“Joint Communique 2005” was an official understanding between the Federation, the Brotherhood, and seven independent planets that all civil rights with regards to SOG members were suspended, and summary executions would be conducted on every captured member. The Federation had issued similar rulings before, but those were only in effect in Federation space. This was the first time, to anyone’s knowledge outside of it, at least, that the Brotherhood had done away with due process.
The lieutenant sat down, nodding to the major, who stood back up.
“To repeat what the lieutenant said, even if these are copycats, they will be treated like the real deal. You want to play with us, then accept the consequences,” he said.
This time, the chorus of “oo-rahs” was louder and sustained.
“According to what I’ve been told, we should arrive on station in about, uh . . .” he started, then looked down at his watch, “. . . about 45 minutes. Then our Navy brothers need to find the spoor and lock on the trail. Even if successful, the soonest we could possibly launch is in two or three hours. Not much time, so I’m going to turn it over to Capt Light Chaser for the op order. Listen up. We won’t have time for a real rehearsal, but we’re Marines. We make do, and do it in a most outstanding manner! So listen up and get it down, then we’ve got to get suited up and ready to go. Captain Light Chaser?”
Major Paulan was actually the battalion ops officer, but when the mission to Atacama came up, he’d been given command of the task force of the ground element, the single Stork of the air element, and the small logistics element. Captain Light Chaser was the Fox Company commander, and as such, commanded the company along with the arty and engineer detachment. Navy Captain Webber, the Aidelaide’s skipper was the overall commander, and Major Paulan the Marine commander, but Captain Light Chaser would lead the assault.
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