Ryck listed each piece of information, each piece of Hogger’s life, as if reading a checklist.
“And he’s dead now. Why? Because I gave him Corporal Thomas’ M76. That’s why. I gave him the weapon, and he had it when I was picking who had to die. If I’d given the 76 to Private Joinovic instead, Hogger would be alive and Joinovic dead. But I didn’t, and Tessa and Derek lost their last son, because of my decision.
“I see him, you know? Hogger comes to me at night. Sometimes the others come, too. But always Hogger.”
“What about Joshua?” Bert asked.
“No, Joshua doesn’t come to me in my dreams. Never him.”
The two men sat in silence for a long minute before Bert asked, “Have you lost your nerve?”
Some men might have bristled at this. Ryck took it as it was intended.
“No, not really. Hell, I think I would welcome going like that. Like them. I haven’t lost my nerve. It’s numb, maybe. But I am not afraid of the fight, and I’d love to get some payback on those grubbing animals.”
“Then what are you afraid of?”
“I can’t take the responsibility. I can’t face playing God, deciding who lives and who dies,” Ryck said.
“That’s about what I figured. And so I’ll ask you, have you considered going recon?”
“What? Recon?”
“Yeah, recon. I’m not going to sit here and psycho-analyze you. I know the psychs have told you about survivor guilt and all of that, how you saved some of your men and civilians. I know what you’re feeling. I lost men on Helvelle, and on Pannigton. Those were my men, and I was in a damn ziplock for most of the fight.
“I just think you’re wrong, and I don’t think your resignation is going to be accepted. So what can you do about it? You can sit and refuse to accept orders, and you’ll be in the brig, war hero or not. You can accept the orders, but you won’t be as effective, and you could get more men killed. Or you can change jobs. You could probably swing a desk job somewhere. You’ve earned it. But if you’ve got fight in you, why not go recon? You’ll have some of the best Marines around, and you won’t be making tactical decisions. As a lieutenant, you’d be running interference with the infantry command staff and making sure your team is prepared, but when it gets down to it, you would be a fighter. At the most, you would have seven Marines with you, and in the field, you would probably only be with one other Marine. You’d be a fighter, not really a commander making command-type decisions.”
“But lieutenants are team leaders,” Ryck protested. “That means lead.”
“Listen to me. Not everything is by the infantry bible. In recon, you are in charge in training, you help form the reconnaissance plan, but once inserted, you are a fighter. The teams are too small for it not to be that way.”
Despite himself, Ryck felt a stirring of interest. He didn’t really want to leave the Corps. Yes, he wanted Hannah back. But he was a Marine. It was in his blood. He just needed a break. He couldn’t face ordering men to their deaths. If it really was as Bert described, then that horrible decision would be out of his hands. He could focus on fighting, on killing capys.
“But,” he started, lifting up his left arm, “I’m still in regen.”
“I used my own rehab time to get ready for the Sifter. It’s tough, no lie, especially coming off regen. But you’ve got two more months, right? Start getting in shape. Take your month’s convalescent leave and see to Hannah. Then get back and get in the next Sifter platoon.”
Ryck considered what his friend had said. It made sense. He still had two months left on regen, and he could put off any decision until then. Meanwhile, he could put in the papers for recon. If he still wanted to resign, he could do it after he was back on full duty. If he didn’t want to resign, then he had an option that just might work.
Tarawa
Chapter 15
Ryck was wheezing as he got to the top of Mount Motherfucker. He bent over at the waist, hands on his knees. Most of the class had already made it up, but at least three were still behind him.
Reconnaissance Training Course had been a kick in the proverbial ass. It was doubly difficult for Ryck as he hadn’t even finished his regen therapy, and his left side was still weak. But he had made it. The final run up the mountain was a tradition on the morning of graduation.
Ryck wasn’t dumb, though. Physically, he hadn’t been up to his own previous standards, much less that of recon. He knew he’d been cut some slack in that regard, given his medical condition and his proven combat track record. His ability to be creative had been particularly valued as something necessary in recon. He’d been pulled along where someone else, someone not wounded or someone without his record might have been dropped.
“You OK, L-T?” Sergeant June asked, coming over to stand beside Ryck.
Sgt June was a bright, earnest Marine. He was also one heck of a runner, and had probably been the first one up the mountain.
“Sure . . . I’m . . . OK. Just let . . . me catch . . . my breath.”
“Here, have some water,” June said, holding out his canteen.
Ryck waved him off. He had his own canteen, but he needed to control his breathing before he’d be able to drink. Ryck turned and flopped on the ground. As SSgt Lipsieg huffed his way to the top, Ryck clapped, but didn’t get up. It was still zero-dark-thirty, the sun only beginning to make its rosy presence visible off in the horizon. The 19 remaining members of RTC 315-03 would watch the sunrise and have a breakfast that was being brought up before trudging back down and getting ready for the 1100 graduation ceremony.
Ryck looked at the other 16 Marines who had finished the run. Bert had been right. These were the cream of the crop. It wasn’t that they were all superstuds. Yes, the course screened out those who were not fit, but Ryck had had more fit, better gym rats or runners in his infantry platoons before. But each one of the surviving classmates had a sense of drive, or purpose, of self-discipline that transcended the average Marine, much less the average civilian.
These elements had been necessary to get through the course. The academics had been difficult for many of the Marines, but they were really not that bad. The PT had been brutal at times, but certainly achievable. It had been the mental discipline that was the toughest thing to master. All the days without sleep, without food, in the cold, the heat, the most miserable conditions the staff could throw at them. Of the 49 drops in the class, 41 were DORs. They just quit after shivering in the cold for two days, or marching across the desert heat with 70 kg packs.
The physical discomfort had been easier for Ryck to endure. He had found a place to go where he could almost observe the situation without experiencing it. It was like he was having, not an out-of-body-experience, but an inner-body-experience, where he could wall off the cold, the heat, the hunger, the weariness.
Ryck’s two moments of truth were in the pool and in the medical facility. The one in the pool should not have been surprising. There were very few pools on Prophesy, and Ryck had never swum before getting to bootcamp. He was a mediocre swimmer at best, and when they had undergone shark training, he’d almost lost it. At the bottom of the pool, breathing through his BA,[34] he had watched warily as the “sharks,” the RTs
[35], circled above the class before diving down to tear off the BAs, pummel the candidates, and generally make life miserable for them. Ryck had to fight down the welling panic when he was the target, and he’d almost lost it twice. It had only been by an extreme force of will that he hadn’t shot for the surface.
The second precipice had been at the medical facility, of all places. Ryck was leery of medical facilities in general, given his misery during his two major regens. The antiseptic, mediciny smell of the places alone was enough to raise his stress levels. But the procedure that was to be done on him gave him the creeping jeepies.
Recon Marines were supposed to be invisible. No matter how proficient they were as warriors, they were out in two-to-eight-man teams, and even an eight-man team c
ould not hold off an enemy company. They had the finest cloaking technology available to them, but the best cloaking was to have nothing that could be picked up. Their special skins and chest carapace were both designed to deaden the tiny electrical emissions from the body. The heartbeat, in particular, was passively shielded. Recon Marines didn’t have normal AIs nor even normal displays. The small display monocle was a super-low emission screen that stayed off most of the time, with a mechanical on-off switch. The data it could display was not pulled from the net. It was downloaded before going into bad-guy country. One of the results of this was that the normal navigation system Marines employed was unusable to a recon Marine.
The mad scientists had come up with a solution: they would make recon Marines better navigators. First, the hippocampus would be stimulated to develop. This would allow recon Marines to have a much better sense of direction. Second, two Neulife bridges, one for each hemisphere, would be inserted from the hippocampus to the rest of the brain, to enable the Marine to make use of that input in a more cognitive fashion.
The bridge was essentially a bundle of KD crystal connectors, bundled much like dried spaghetti in the hand before putting it into the boiling water. But KD crystals cannot connect into brain cells. So on each end of the KD bundle, Neulife “caps” were attached which could take the input from the hippocampus, transmit it to the crystals, then interface back into the entorhinal cortex, bypassing the fornix, in a usable format.
Ryck had been almost petrified of having Neulife inserted into his brain. The thought of the artificial life sucking nutrients out of him, attaching to his brain, almost made him sick. The doctor assured him that this wasn’t a genmod, that it was related to what the Navy navigators had done to them, which didn’t help. He had even shown Ryck one of the bridges under his operating screen, and that was even worse. The Neulife caps looked like small, moldy, white worms.
Ryck had come close to DOR’ing right then and there. It had taken all of his self-discipline to go through prep and get on the table for the surgery. He might have had a change of heart as the anesthesia took over, but he wasn’t sure if he had actually objected or only thought he had in the cotton-effect of the drugs just before he went under.
When he awoke, he really didn’t feel different. He knew it would take awhile for the hippocampus to fully develop, but he did seem to have a better feel of where he was with relationship to his surroundings.
Not all of RCT had been onerous. Some of the training had been downright fun. Recon had lots of sexy toys for movement, fighting, and concealment, and learning to use them had been a blast. For example, while mastering the hover sleds Ryck had first seen back on Alexander during the birthday pageant, the class had been divided into teams to play world football against each other. Ryck’s team, Giant Ballbusters, had lost to the other team, Up Your Mamma’s, and had to run up Mount Motherfucker as punishment. Up Your Mamma’s along with all the RTs had joined in the run in a show of solidarity.
The rest of the Marine moved to the edge of the mountaintop, cheering and clapping. Ryck pulled himself up and joined them where First Sergeant Poulson was just arriving. The first sergeant was pretty old to be only now going through RCT, and he’d had the added handicap of going through regen for both legs and a good portion of his pelvis. But he had a steel will, and he never quit.
Several Marines ran down the last 150 meters to where, Capt Horsvatch, the Course Director, and Gunny Jiminez, the class senior RT, paced alongside the first sergeant. The rest of the class quickly followed.
“Ooh-rah! First Sergeant!” Marines called out as the entire class fell alongside him and escorted him up the final climb.
They got to the top, and the first sergeant yelled out, “If you ain’t recon, you ain’t shit!” much to the delight of the rest.
In his heart, Ryck was an infantry Marine, in particular, a PICS Marine. But as he looked around at his classmates, who were in a circle surrounding the first sergeant, chanting the “if you ain’t recon” mantra over and over, he knew this was a good crew. He could serve with them.
Ryck was back in the fight.
Zephyr-Hadreson
Chapter 16
First Lieutenant Ryck Lysander subconsciously straightened his gig line,
[36] then pushed open the hatch to his new office. He’d already been welcomed aboard by everyone from the Division CG on down to Captain Sverge, his platoon commander.
In an infantry company, a captain was generally a company commander. Recon tended to be rank heavy, though, with only experienced Marines being accepted. Captain Sverge had already commanded an infantry company, but instead of taking a staff job, he had volunteered for recon, where he was back to platoon commander.
Ryck, as a first lieutenant, was a team leader, in charge of seven other Marines. That was more than fine with him. Seven Marines, especially experienced Marines, was more than enough.
He’d been assigned to Fourth Team, Second Platoon, Charlie Company, Second Recon Battalion, back in his old Second Marine Division. The division had been beefed up since Ryck had gone to regen and then off to RCT. It was on a war footing, and the undercurrent was that action was imminent. The rumor mill had it that two planets had been found to have capy “infestations,” as it was being termed. The Navy and both Second and Fourth Division, with attachments from the Legion and with the Brotherhood Navy augmenting the Federation Navy, were to be tasked with eliminating the capy threat on those planets.
After the initial confrontation on G.K. Nutrition Six, the public had been up in arms demanding an immediate retaliatory strike, and the Federation powers-that-be would have ordered one, if there had been a target. The capys had simply disappeared from sight. With GKN on the edge of Federation space, the picket-skiffs and recon teams had been sent out further into the galactic arm. Several picket-skiffs had simply disappeared, but whether to the capys or to the normal perils of very deep space, no one knew. But after two-and-a-half years, two skiffs had returned with information of capy infestations. At least according to rumor. All of this was classified, so all or none of it could be true. The division temp, though, had risen to almost a fever pitch, so bets were heavily in the this-is-a-no-shitter camp.
Ryck felt nervous as he entered the office space. He hadn’t received a team list, so he didn’t know what to expect. Four Marines were lounging on the couch in front of his new desk, and one Marine was standing in the corner.
There was none of the “Attention on deck” that occurred elsewhere in the Corps. The four Marines on the couch simply stood up.
“Welcome aboard, Toad,” a gunny said, holding out his hand. “Klepto here.”
Ryck only slightly grimaced at the nickname. It would still take some getting used to. It could have been worse. His class had been relatively gentle, naming him for the E-559 “Toad” combustion devices he’d used as weapons in combat.
“Good to meet you, Klepto.”
A huge chested, short-necked staff sergeant, obviously a heavy-worlder, held out his hand and simply said “Buttercup.”
Ryck tried to choke back a laugh and failed miserably.
Buttercup?
Buttercup rolled his eyes, and Klepto offered, “That’s Staff Sergeant Honor Gilroy,” and when Ryck didn’t indicate comprehension, added, “Homer Gilroy, and You are My Buttercup?”
Then it sunk in. Homer Gilroy had written that sappy love song that had somehow become a hit four years ago.
Wow, sucks to be Buttercup, Ryck thought, his own nic seeming much better now.
“Shart, Toad. Glad to meet you,” a sergeant said.
“You don’t want to know, sir,” the gunny said.
Ryck did want to know, though. “Shart” had an old, but specific meaning.
Ryck looked at the other gunny and held out his hand.
“Rabbit, sir.”
It was only then that Ryck turned to look at the Marine still standing in the corner.
“My grubbing shit! Sams!” Ryck shouted t
o Staff Sergeant Bobbi Samuelson, one of the Marines in his very first unit.
Sams walked over to shake his hand, but Ryck pulled him into a bear hug.
“I didn’t expect to see you here, Sams,” he said, surprised but happy.
“It’s Bobbi,” Sams said.
“Yeah, I know your name, Sams. What the fuck? You think I forgot?”
“No, my name. Now. It’s Bobbi.”
Once again, it took a moment for Ryck to understand, and he started laughing. Sams’ real name seemed strange enough that his RCT class had kept it as his nic.
“Who’s the top shirt?” Ryck asked, still laughing.
“That’d be me, sir,” Klepto said. “I’ve got the personnel records on all of us on your desk. We’ve got one on emergency leave and one in at sickbay right now.”
“Emergency leave?”
“Having his first baby. That’d be Cpl Caruthers, Crutch. Wife’s local, so he can be here in an hour if need be,” his team sergeant, or “first shirt,” said.
Klepto had an odd, clipped way of speaking. Ryck couldn’t quite place from what planet the gunny might be. It would be in his records, though.
“How are the teams organized? I mean, who’s left out for now?”
“Uh, Ryck, I mean lieutenant, I mean Toad, you’ve got me for your teammate, if that’s copacetic. I’m the orphan now,” Sams said.
Sams—Bobbi—was an irreverent, cynical smart ass. He was also a helluva Marine.
“Well, I guess we’re stuck with each other, then, Bobbi!” Ryck told him, a smile on his face.
Things were looking up.
HAC-440
Chapter 17
Ryck came out of the head, glad his “Navy’s Revenge” seemed to be over.
“Everything come out OK, Toad?” Gunny Heang asked, the rest of the team dutifully laughing at the old joke.
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