Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer

by David VanDyke

  “No excuse, First Sergeant!” The kid quivered like a half-trained dog told to sit and stay.

  Repeth slipped the packet into her pocket. Not about to jump to conclusions. It could be anything. It could be his, but I doubt it. It could be a setup, or just a place to stash something where Wingen takes the fall. It could be some kind of test for me.

  She’d begun leaving her cybernetic eye on permanent record, downloading the video every evening so that Rick could take a look, incidentally covering her ass against any sort of accusations. As her husband was not finding his duties here too strenuous, he was spending a lot of time cataloging people and suspicious actions. Maybe a look at this sequence would reveal someone reacting when she found the stuff.

  “All right. This barracks is finally looking shipshape. I might start believing I had Marines in this company instead of a bunch of Ground Forces wannabees. You’re gonna get a chance to prove it to me, because we’re going for a little run.” Repeth held up a “brick,” a walkie-sized box that held the command override codes for her people’s cyberware. “Muscles only.”

  Last week she would have heard muttering. This time, the disciplined silence cheered her up. “You got two minutes to get in PT gear and fall out in company formation, starting now. Move!”

  The barracks erupted into the controlled chaos of troops stripping out of their utilities and donning regulation physical training gear. She walked into the female head and quickly changed into her own, and then followed the rush of bodies as they flowed out the doors and onto the quad that gave them a place to assemble.

  Once they’d all fallen in, she punched in a number sequence on the brick, and watched for the sway as implanted cybernetics went inert. With the push of a button they’d gone from supermen to ordinary, if fit, Marines carrying an extra twenty kilos of laminated bones and servos.

  “Company! Right…’ace! For’ard…’arch!” Her commands came out more like the barks of seals than words. “Doub’ time…’arch!”

  Twenty kilometers later she found out what she needed to know. Half of the company enlisted was seriously out of shape and had fallen out, which was absolutely pathetic. Parts of the run hadn’t even been in full gravity. She kept everyone standing at attention in formation as the stragglers came in one by one.

  Over an hour later, the tram that Staff Sergeant Botkina had driven behind rolled up with those who couldn’t even make it under their own power.

  “Get off that tram, you pukes!” Repeth turned to the rest standing in formation. “At ease! I want you to look at these dirty stinking scumbags who can’t even walk twenty klicks.” Her voice dripped sarcasm. “They had to ride the tram. They made you stand here in formation for over an hour. They are now on my shit list. Staff Sergeant Botkina will write down the names on my shit list, and those on that list will remain on restriction and will pull extra duty until this happy horseshit ends. Do I make myself clear?”

  “YES, FIRST SERGEANT!”

  “You are also going to leave your cyberware off until you earn the privilege of using it again. Some of you have made it a crutch. You never know when it might fail, and it behooves every Marine to be in the best shape he or she can be, regardless of augmentation. So you will start hitting the gym, you will start running, and if that cuts into your drinking and whoring and gambling time, tough titties. Am I clear?”

  “YES, FIRST SERGEANT!”

  “One more thing. If you override and turn on your cyberware yourself, you had better have a damn good reason, because if you do not, that will constitute failure to follow a direct order. For any barracks lawyers among you,” she tapped her temple, “everything is being recorded, and the system backs everything up. So ladies, I suggest you all get some sleep tonight, because now that we have your barracks and your gear in shape, I will be making it my personal mission in life to kick your asses until your bodies are too.”

  Repeth’s face now lit up in a nasty smile. “Oh, and one more thing. Staff Sergeant Botkina will begin calling names. When she calls yours, you will fall out and go through the door behind me, where some medical technicians will be taking blood and hair samples. If I get any reports of illegal substance use, you will also be on my shit list, but! One time and one time only, I am going to forgive you, and not recommend disciplinary action. The second time…” She reached up and made a cutting motion across her throat.

  Staff Sergeant Botkina began to call names.

  During the drug testing, Repeth and her four platoon sergeants, whom she had already made sure were clear of such addictions, went through the barracks as thoroughly as they knew how to do, upending drawers and wall lockers, flipping bunks, unrolling clothing, unscrewing vent covers, looking for any sort of contraband.

  The dice and gambling chips and porn she didn’t even bother to confiscate, just scattered everything and ground it underfoot, but she and the others half filled a duffel bag with illicit booze and drugs. They took careful notes of where they found each item.

  They also went through the junior NCOs rooms, almost fifty squad and team leaders, as well as the orderly room staff. Repeth was disappointed to find serious infractions in almost half of them.

  At least I don’t have to worry about nanocrack…I hope. What with their official nanites set to kill off any such invaders and their cyberware detecting and reporting, that shouldn’t be possible. Too bad all that doesn’t make them immune to ordinary illegal drugs.

  ***

  Over the next few days First Sergeant Repeth personally interviewed everyone caught with contraband, or showing positive on a drug test, with Botkina in the background as a witness. What none of them knew was that Rick had tweaked her visual and auditory pickups, optimizing them for physiological changes, and everything fed back to recorders in their quarters.

  In simple terms, he had turned her into one big bug.

  In the evenings they went over the recordings of the interviews and divided the offenders into two categories: those that could be salvaged, and those that had to go. The former she whipped into shape in her own way. The latter began to receive unexpected transfers to certain remote stations, mostly back on Earth, where they were unlikely to do much damage, with minor disciplinary offenses appended to their records that would hopefully tip off the receiving commanders that they were trouble.

  Unlike Sergeant Major Tano, Repeth had no problem transferring her problems to someone else if she knew her chain of command would not back her up. Had they been willing, she would have had them brought up on charges, but in the current environment, that was too much of a crap shoot. Doing so might have gotten her sent away, leaving the place in a worse mess.

  No, it’s a dirty way to do business, but not half so dirty as covert ops, and in this case, the end has to justify the means. Especially when the end is survival of this base.

  Chapter 36

  The third time Vango found Stevie passed out before a scheduled exercise, half-filled needle stuck in her arm, he thought maybe he couldn’t keep his mouth shut anymore.

  Sure, the fact that she hadn’t shoved the whole load into her veins meant she had some kind of self-control, or at least some smarts within her stupid, like a diabetic who only eats half the cake instead of all of it. He was also starting to get the idea that great sex and a great relationship weren’t exactly the same things.

  But who could he talk to? If he reported her, she would never fly again, and he didn’t want that. Was it because he selfishly wanted to keep getting laid? He also wondered how she was beating the random drug testing.

  Wrestling with it affected his performance for the next week. He kept trying to talk to her, but every time he did she just dragged him into bed and told him how much she needed him, and that she’d lay off the stuff, that this time had been the last.

  He pleaded every day for her to go to the doctors or the chaplain and self-report. Doing so would avoid disciplinary action, though who knew whether she would keep her wings. Maybe they would put her in a treatme
nt program and give her another chance.

  Every day she refused.

  Five weeks into the training, they were ready to move on from simulators. Facing climbing into an actual ship and flying for real, no free respawns after crashing, was what pushed him into action.

  One email sent from an anonymous rented terminal in the Quarter was enough to prompt a half-assed raid on the flower shop, enough to show compliance with some kind of rules, but he heard later they had found only some traces of the drugs. The proprietors had cleared out hours before.

  They must have been tipped off.

  Vango was starting to get an idea of how pervasive the problem was.

  The next time he tried to go to eat at a restaurant in the Quarter, a couple of the security guards there told him he wasn’t welcome there anymore. After getting the same treatment from the next three places, he realized that he’d been blackballed from sin city.

  Somehow, someone had found out it was him from the “anonymous” e-mail, and that was that. They wouldn’t do anything serious to him; after all, the last thing whoever ran the place wanted was for the EarthFleet pilot son of Chairman Daniel Markis to come to some harm that could be traced to them. The hell that would rain down on the Quarter would be Biblical in proportion.

  Losing the privilege to eat and drink well didn’t bother him much, but it didn’t take long for Stevie to find another source from somewhere, and he realized that trying to cut off her supply was no answer. She was sick, and she needed help. If that cost him getting laid, or even her friendship…Vango decided he had to do it.

  “Come on, Stevie,” he begged her as they lay sweating in her bed after another athletic bout. “You gotta talk to someone before they catch you.” Right after she was done seemed to be the moment she was most amenable to hearing things she didn’t want to, but instead of responding she just snuggled, turning her face into his chest and away from his eyes.

  A few more attempts at conversation earned him an annoyed look as she slid out of his embrace and showered. “I’m gonna go to the casino. Wanna come?” she asked.

  “No. It’s almost midnight. I gotta get some sleep. Early go tomorrow,” he replied as he watched her dress in her civvies. He’d learned that what she was really asking was for him to be her chaperone and keep her out of serious trouble, while she pushed against his boundaries, acting wild and blaming him for anything that didn’t work out.

  Once she left, instead of sleeping he lay staring at the ceiling for over an hour. Eventually he made a choice he should have long ago, because if he let her, she was going to drag him down with her.

  Slowly he scoured her quarters for everything of his – underwear, toothbrush, a hardcopy letter from his mother – that had gotten left there over the past weeks. Throwing it all in his gym bag, after one final look around, he shut her door for good. Although he didn’t want to report her, the decision to break up with her turned out to be easier than expected.

  She came after him the next day, though she had the courtesy to wait until after training had ended. The beer she poured over his head and the attempt to slap him made her meaning plain. That look of angry betrayal on her face as she stormed out of the O club seared itself into his mind. He told himself she would get over it, and that he had to do it.

  When she didn’t show the next day he figured she was sulking, drunk or high and sleeping it off.

  He almost called it right. Stevie never woke up from her last and final high. He found out when he went by and a couple of cleaners were prepping the room for another occupant. Staggering away, he wandered the corridors with no idea of where he was going, until he found himself sitting on a bench in the central park.

  It seemed like serendipity, if not outright divine intervention, that Jill and Rick had shown up, and he was going to see them tonight. He never felt so in need of friendly faces as he did now. The only person that even came close was the chaplain, Captain Forman, but she was back on Orion. Besides, when he’d expressed interest in her, she’d made it clear she was way out of his league, or something like that.

  Everything confused him right now, when he just wanted to fly and fight the aliens.

  Women.

  That brought his mind back to Stevie, and his heart broke again. It was all he could do to force himself off of his bunk, dress in civvies, and go find his friends’ quarters.

  Three beers later he found himself sobbing on their couch, with Jill holding him like his mom used to, Rick with a hand on his shoulder. “I should have done something more,” he said as he set the empty on the coffee table. “I could have saved her.”

  “I doubt it,” Rick replied. “She was going to wreck herself eventually.”

  No one spoke for a moment, until Vincent pushed himself away with mild embarrassment. “Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” replied Rick. “Did she have family?”

  “All dead in the nukes. She spent a year living like an animal on the edge of the DC dead zone before the government came back and rescued her. She had nobody. At the end, she didn’t even have me. I failed her.”

  “Look,” Jill said in that matter-of-fact tone that seemed to promise everything would be all right. “This is a tragedy and it hurts, I know, but peacetime rules don’t apply. In a better, saner world, she would have gotten help. Maybe you should have reported her, but you made the call and now you have to live with it.”

  “Wow, you’re some comfort,” Vango retorted.

  “When I raised my right hand and took the oath of enlistment,” she said, “I really didn’t understand what that would mean. Now, almost three decades later, I’ve seen a lot of good people die. You wanted a warrior’s life. You have to take the bad with the good. If you think you made a mistake, then learn from it and do better next time.”

  “Maybe coming over here wasn’t such a good idea.” He made as if to stand up.

  “Your choice, Vincent Markis,” Jill said flatly. “I never treated you with kid gloves before. Why should I start now? You had a good cry, and you’ll have a few more bouts of grief, over drinks or locked in your room, but eventually you’ll get over it. Now if you want to keep drinking, we’ll be happy to get smashed with you and tell you it’s gonna be all right – because it will, after a while. I’m just not telling you it ain’t gonna hurt in the meantime.”

  “Things like this aren’t supposed to happen,” he protested. “Dad and Mom said the Eden Plague would fix humanity, but that was bullshit.”

  “Your parents aren’t infallible, you know,” Rick said gently. “And it did fix me. When your father released it, I had been in a wheelchair from the time the muscular dystrophy took hold. I would have lived ten, fifteen years more, tops, getting worse and worse. And it did get rid of a lot of problems – but not all of them. People still have free will.”

  Jill said, “Some people can get offered heaven but they refuse and make their own hell. You can’t be responsible for their choices.”

  Vincent shrugged, suddenly exhausted. “I think I’m gonna hit the sack now.”

  “You want the couch?”

  He shook his head. “No, that’s okay. I’ll be better back in my own bunk.”

  Rick stood up with him, throwing a brotherly arm across his shoulder. “I’ll walk back with you.”

  Chapter 37

  For three weeks First Sergeant Repeth drilled her company, always staying strictly within the letter of her authority to do so, always keeping a copy of the regulations handy on a pocket tablet. By and large Captain Rapplean stayed out of her way, as she thought he might; his MO seemed to be to avoid hard work and hard choices except when some superior officer was around, at which time he temporarily became a model officer.

  In that time she felt cautiously confident that she had cleaned out the worst rot from Bravo Company, and that she could rely on them.

  At least, the enlisted. Captain Rapplean and the company’s lieutenants were still suspect, but with decent NCOs in place, that could be han
dled.

  As she came back from Monday morning PT, Sergeant Major Tano intercepted her and pulled her aside in a far corner of the company formation pad, his two escorts thankfully elsewhere inside Battalion spaces.

  “You’re getting Bravo Company noticed,” Tano said.

  “Just trying to whip them into shape, Smaj,” she replied.

  “Not saying it’s a bad thing, but bad things are coming. Simms is going to do a surprise inspection tomorrow, at first formation after breakfast.”

  “No problem,” Repeth said easily. “We’ll be ready. Hell, we’re ready right now, except for a few little things.”

  Tano shook his head and scowled darkly. “No, you don’t understand. You’re ready for Simms to inspect the company, but afterward he likes to hold a kumbayah session with the lower enlisted.”

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “He’ll get the lower enlisted into the auditorium, kick out the NCOs and officers, post guards and then talk to them by himself.”

  Repeth looked away for a moment, staring at nothing. “That’s…weird.”

  “It’s worse than that. He tries to get them talking, tries to convince them he’s their best friend and pal, and they should open up to him about any perceived problems in the company. If that doesn’t work, he’ll get them talking about how far they are from home, how they miss their sweethearts, how scared they all are of the aliens…anything to get them emotional and blabbering.”

  Repeth turned to Tano in shock. “Oh. My. God.”

  “Yeah, in spades.”

  “A bunch of privates are too stupid to keep their mouths shut. They’ll start saying any damn thing that comes into their heads to try to please the big boss.”

  Tano smiled with absolutely no humor involved. “That’s only the start. Not only does he try to get them to talk bad about the chain of command, he records everything himself. And he forbids them to do the same. Sweeps the room for bugs, makes sure the troops’ cyberware is all shut down.”