“None at all, Max. None at all.”
Four hundred and ninety-seven women stood at parade rest, their ranks stretching out nearly to the horizon, awaiting his review. Accompanying him was Captain Tango, a cold grey-eyed woman who was half-a-head taller than he was, the commander of Easy Company. The two other company commanders followed them, Captains Kreuz and Mills, both of whom were slender, attractive women who carried themselves with the easy confidence of professional athletes. All three women were impressive, all three had done the battalion credit at yesterday’s press conference, and in other circumstances, Kruger would have been proud to have them serve under him.
As it stood, however, he wondered if the most straightforward solution would be to simply fry his brain with the Ikoni-17 service laser he was wearing on his right hip.
He walked past the ranks of uniformed women, who straightened and saluted as he passed them by. His eyes narrowed as he walked, taking in long legs in knee-high boots, ill-concealed swellings of firm, high-set breasts, and straight, attractive noses on one pretty face after another. Where were the squatty, foul-mouthed bull dykes, the hard women with faces like roadkill and chips on their broad, oxen-like shoulders? Then the unwelcome reality struck him. They hadn’t just given him an all-female battalion, the whole damn unit was made up of poster girls. Like a long-dead Russian Czar, who selected his elite regiments based on height, the Duke’s 11th Special Battalion was, to put it in marketing terms, an extremely media-friendly outfit.
Silently, he cursed the Duchess as he walked past one tall, attractive, fit young woman after another. A good one-third of them were taller than he was. What he was reviewing wasn’t a combat unit, it was a bloody Praetorian Guard!
After the review, he dismissed the battalion with a few meaningless words about their upcoming deployment, then retired to a conference room to meet with the three company commanders, as well as the lieutenant in charge of the battalion staff platoon and the battalion’s senior sergeant.
“Ladies, we have a problem,” he informed them. “I need to find out whether you’re in this to win, or if you’re here to go through the motions.”
“In it to win it, sir!” Mills, Kreuz, and the lieutenant, who was a pretty young blonde, chorused. Tango and the sergeant were more circumspect.
“What motions, Colonel?” Tango said.
He took a deep breath. “None of this goes beyond this room. Understood?”
“Sir!”
“I’ve gone over the briefings as well as everything I could find about the situation on Ulixis between South Grkas and the Foundation. And I’ve reached an inescapable conclusion. You’re being set up to fail. Correction: we’re being set up to fail.”
There was a long moment of silence. The women looked at each other. Tango sniffed contemptuously, as if his assertion was nothing new to her.
“Are you sure that’s not just the opinion of an insecure man who’s afraid an all-female unit might show up the rest of the Duke’s soldiers?”
It wasn’t, technically, insubordination. Kruger did his best to keep a straight face as he answered her.
“While that is certainly possible in theory, Captain, it is also the considered opinion of an officer who has participated in 37 combat deployments and commanded twelve of them. Every single one of those twelve contracts paid in full, Captain, eight of them with a performance-related bonus. I’ve read your record, Tango. Two off-planet deployments, neither of which involved so much as scratching your nail polish. So, what exactly do you know about the situation that I don’t? Precisely what am I missing?”
The other women were staring at the grey-eyed woman, who, much to Kruger’s surprise, laughed. It was a higher-pitched, more feminine laugh than he would have expected. “Not a damn thing, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Well. That was a surprise. He dismissed her apology with a gesture. “Never mind that. Here’s my read. You know the brass billed us at three times the usual rate, and they arranged to get paid half up-front. That means that even if we fail, they walk away with more than they would have gotten if they’d pitched 3rd Battalion. I did some asking around yesterday, and the scuttlebutt is that Lord Grey has been looking to disband this battalion for the last three years. Whether you realize it or not, you’re the Duchess’s darlings, so the Lord General can’t simply shut it down without coming up with a good excuse. A debacle on Ulixis will give him the ammo he needs, which explains why he pitched you instead of 3rd.”
“Why did they give the command to you, sir?” asked Kreuz. “We heard you were the best.”
“That’s exactly why. Because if the Duke’s best and most handsome lieutenant colonel can’t beat a few stone-throwing savages with you, what use can you possibly be to anyone? I’m their show pony, and they’re throwing me to the wolves just to make the fall look good. To cover up the fact that they’re running a scam.”
The women looked at each other again. Mills, who might have been pretty if she had a less prominent nose, appeared as though she was about to cry. “What are we going to do, Colonel?”
“We have two choices. One, we do what we’re supposed to do, we go through the motions, and we fail. Presumably with an eye to minimizing casualties, of course. Two, we figure out a way to beat the bastards and we come back here with their peckers in our hands.”
“Do you really think we can do that, sir?” Tango asked. “I mean, I thought you said we were being set up to fail.”
“We are!” The women jumped as Kruger slammed his hand on the table and roared at them. “But who said we have to? I’ll be damned if I’ll let them trash my perfect record just so some damned accountant can hand the Duke an excuse to keep his bloody wife from going mental!”
He glared at them. “You ladies may not be able to fight your way out of a paper bag, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find a way to get the job done. I just need to know that you’re willing to do what it takes. Whatever it takes.”
“We’ll do whatever it takes, Colonel,” Tango assured him frostily. “And don’t think the 11th can’t fight. We’ll show you we can.”
Kruger snorted bitterly. “No, you won’t. We’ll start with you, Captain. Have Easy Company on Field Bravo at zero eight hundred in their running gear tomorrow morning. It’s time for you parade ladies to start learning what combat is.”
Sergeant Hollis was, according to both Captain Tango and Lieutenant Cahill, the meanest, baddest brawler in Easy. She, and five other women that the captain had hand-selected, were standing in front of the rest of the company, stretching, throwing kicks, and shadow boxing, as Kruger approached them. He was followed by eight Marines from 3rd Battalion and a pair of Navy squids who looked though he’d just extricated them from the brig. Several of the men had broken noses and facial scars, five of them were over-muscled hulks with the swollen muscles indicative of genetic modification, and all of them looked like hardened killers.
“Hollis!” Kruger pointed to the sergeant. “The captain tells me you’re tough.”
“I can hold my own, Colonel.”
“We’ll see about that. Do you see Corporal Enz there?” Her ponytail bobbed as she nodded. “Well, I want you to do your damndest to take him out with your bare hands. Fight dirty. Do whatever it takes to win. Understand?”
She looked uncertain, but she nodded.
He glanced at Enz. “As for you, Corporal, don’t hold back. Just try not to kill her if you can avoid it.”
“Colonel!” Tango tried to interrupt but Kruger cut her off.
“We’re about to be deployed on a tech-seven planet, Captain. The enemy isn’t going to invite you to a tea party.” He nodded to the two assigned combatants. “Get to it!”
Hollis was game. Her face was a mask of pure determination, and she kept a good guard up to protect it as she warily circled the larger Marine. The sergeant was stocky and muscular, but even so, she was at least eighty kilos lighter than the corporal. For his part, Enz rotated to keep Hollis in front of him while holding his
hands carelessly just above his waist.
“Hai!” Hollis shouted as she suddenly rushed forward and threw a left jab. Her form was textbook-perfect, but Enz simply leaned back and slapped it aside with his own left. Hollis stumbled with the force of the deflection, briefly exposing her right side, but she quickly caught her balance and whirled around, her guard back in place. Unnecessarily, as it happened, since Enz hadn’t followed up on the momentary opening. He had merely rotated in place, a faint smile on his face, with his eyes still locked on her. Hollis resumed circling, and when she rushed in again, this time her jab was a feint, followed by a powerful right rear hand.
Again, her form was crisp. She kept her guard up and her hip snapped smartly. But the blow never landed. Hollis had barely begun to extend her arm when Enz’s right fist caught her chin in a half-cross, half-uppercut. There was an audible crack. The blow snapped her head back and sent her crumpling to the ground like a rag doll. The watching women, Captain Tango included, gasped.
“She’s out cold. Get her to sick bay,” Kruger ordered. “Make sure her jaw isn’t broken. Well done, corporal. James, you’re up next. Who you got for the private, Captain?”
Private James’s opponent was a Private Saipano, a tall young woman, lean like a panther, who had apparently been trained in some form of kickboxing. She threw a pair of beautiful high kicks with flawlessly crisp technique at James, who ducked the first one, then caught her foot on the second and jerked it forward as he twisted. Saipano screamed in fear as she was pulled off her feet, then thrown nearly four meters through the air as James spun around 180 degrees before letting her go. The woman landed hard on her side, but managed to roll over and rise to her feet, just in time to be kicked in the stomach by the much bigger man. James stepped back as Saipano curled up in a ball, and Kruger waved him off as the medic rushed to Saipano’s side and kneeled down beside her.
“She’s spitting up blood, Colonel. She may have broken ribs or other internal injuries.”
“Get her to sick bay,” he told her. Then he turned to Tango. “Who’s next?”
The captain grimly indicated the next woman, whose honed form showed the unmistakable sign of considerable time spent in the gym, but no sooner did she find herself squaring off against a big, scar-faced Marine who loomed over her than she lost control of her bladder. The Marine laughed, sparking cries of anger and outrage from the women of Easy Company.
Kruger waved the smirking Marine off and turned towards Tango. “Seen enough?”
“This is sadistic!” she hissed. “Sir!”
“No, Captain, this is combat, and it’s the gentle kind at that. What would be sadistic is putting these soldiers up against primitive warriors who are carrying swords and axes and spears, who are trained from childhood to use such weapons, and who outmass your troops on average three-to-one. They aren’t going to stop coming at you just because one of your frightened little girls pissed her pants, Captain.”
“That’s not fair!”
“War isn’t fair.”
“You are demoralizing these women before the deployment, sir!”
“Better demoralized than dead. What I’m trying to do is to knock some sense into you, Captain. Into all of you.” He raised his voice. “Hands up, Easy Company! How many of you thought you were ready to go into combat against men yesterday?”
A few dozen hands went up, some of them slowly and uncertainly.
“How many of you still think you’re ready?”
Only five or six remained up.
“Good. Now who wants to go next?”
Not a single hand remained aloft. Kruger turned back to Tango. She glared at him, but finally, she nodded.
“You’ve made your point, sir. We can’t fight them. Not hand-to-hand, at any rate. Are you going to report that the battalion isn’t combat-ready?”
“Hell no!” Kruger grinned at the company commander, whose pretty face was flushed with chagrin. “There’s more than one way to kill a man. And there are more ways to take a city than a frontal assault.”
The Ulixian sky had a faint purple tinge to it, particularly in the morning. No doubt there was some perfectly good scientific explanation for that, Kruger assumed, but he didn’t care why there was a purple sky, he just liked the way it looked. It was rather refreshing being on a low-tech planet; outside the spaceport anything that didn’t operate on pure muscle power, animal or human, was banned under both world and Ascendancy law. Life was considerably slower, and the population was more spread-out, lending a bucolic holiday air to the deployment.
But there were men living on Ulixis, and wherever there were men there were differences of opinion. And wherever there were differences of opinion, sooner or later, there was always war. Kruger didn’t know why South Grkas was warring against the Eighth-Day Foundation, nor did he care; what concerned him was that the contract required the 11th Special Battalion of the Rhysalani Marines to take the Foundation city of Noötrine within four months of landing. Nearly one month had already passed without the battalion doing much more than patrol some of the border villages and occasionally engage in minor skirmishes, skirmishes in which they usually came off considerably worse than either the Foundationers or the Grkese.
The Grkese were rapidly losing confidence in both Kruger and the Rhysalani Marines, which was entirely understandable in light of the minor engagements, and, more importantly, how the battalion had not yet made any sort of move towards Noötrine. But unbeknownst to their employers, the 11th Special Battalion was making substantial progress.
“Colonel, we have word that the first three girls have been spotted in the city,” Tango told him as she climbed the hill behind him. “Route Alpha is confirmed.”
“Do we have any word from them?”
“No, but there were no signs of visible mistreatment. Corporal McCall was wearing a blue ribbon in her hair.”
“That’s good.” The blue ribbon was the sign that everything was going according to plan. Prior to arranging for the infiltration, a series of codes had been arranged, but the simplest one was based on ribbons. The Foundation women favored long hairstyles that involved ribbons, so communicating in this manner was unlikely to raise any suspicions on the part of the Noötrinese.
“Do you want to increase the volume?”
“No, let’s play it safe. The reports have been consistent. We need at least 200 soldiers inside before we can act. Three hundred would be better.”
“That would make maintaining the visibility profile more difficult.”
“I know.”
Kruger wondered if he dared take the risk. Given how well-known the presence of the battalion was, the women couldn’t simply disappear. If they did, someone might make the connection between the shrinking battalion and the sudden appearance of a number of suspiciously fit young women in the city of Noötrine. No, the greatest risk to his plan was that it would be prematurely uncovered, not that their initial strike would be too weak. There was no reason not to stick to the plan.
Resisting the urge to meddle was sometimes the hardest part, he reflected.
“Thirty-seven more days, Captain.”
“I know sir. It’s going to be hard to keep the Grkese from complaining.”
Kruger shrugged. “I don’t know that we want to. The louder they complain, the more convinced the Foundation is that we’re not doing anything dangerous. Let them whine.”
Three more weeks went by. Kruger and the company commanders continued to go through the motions, hoping that their doubled-up duty schedules would conceal the fact that more than one-fifth of the battalion was now mysteriously absent. Kruger put up with twice-daily visits from the Grkese generals with an indifference bordering on arrogance, which only infuriated them all the more.
“You have done nothing, Colonel Kruger! Nothing at all! The city is not invested, you have not engaged the Foundation’s forces, and as far as I can see your poor excuses for soldiers have not left the barracks in more than one month!”
&n
bsp; “That’s a fair summary, General,” Kruger admitted. He was leaning back in his chair with his boots on his desk, a pose he’d learned seemed to particularly annoy the Grkese officers. “Sometimes the most efficient way to fight is to do nothing at all.”
“Nonsense!” shouted the general. “Do you think you will placate us with cheap aphorisms? I will have you know the king is seriously contemplating writing a complaint about your performance to your superior officers!”
“Is he? Well, tell him to give my best to the brass.”
“Do you think you’re going to get away with this, Colonel? Do you think we are so stupid that we don’t know you think you can just accept our money, then sit on your fat asses and do nothing! You are thieves, Colonel! Nothing but thieves!”
“You’re going to regret those words in a few months when you’re all falling all over each other to tell me what a strategic genius I am,” Kruger said.
“I find it very difficult to believe you are engaging in strategic anything,” the general said. “Unless you are strategically working your way through your soldiery one-by-one.”
“Eppure si muove.”
“What’s that?”
“One more thing you won’t understand.” Kruger spread his hands. “Look, General, you’ve admitted you don’t know what is going on. And you don’t. You’re government has already sunk a considerable amount of resources into me and my battalion. You did it because you couldn’t beat the Foundation on your own. So, why don’t you let the very expensive forces you hired, and their very brilliant commander, do our job the best way we know how to do it?”
The general stared at him. He was a tall, slender man like most of the Ulixians; the planetary gravity was two percent lighter than that of Rhysalan and four point two percent lighter than Ascendancy Standard. He tugged at his orange-striped mustache in a thoughtful manner, then nodded curtly. “Perhaps you are correct. There will be time enough for recriminations later. But so help me, Colonel, if your Duke has played us for fools, your mercenaries will never find employment anywhere on this planet again!”
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