by Jay Allan
He got up and spun the chair around. "We're not offering you a job, Darius. We're offering you a home. One you need to prove yourself worthy for. When you hit the dirt on that first drop you are reborn; your sins are washed away. It's in the Marine Charter...a full legal pardon. If you want, you can come back to Earth when your ten years are done. You can walk right onto that farm and tell the administrator you killed one of his supervisors a few years back. You can tell him to eat shit if you want. They can't arrest you, and if they tried they'd have a Marine strike force showing up to get you out."
He sat back in the chair, sitting closer, looking right at me. "When you muster out, if you want to settle on a colony world, you'll get a land grant or resource allotment. We take care of our own, and once you're one of us, you're always one of us." He slapped me on the knee and got up again. "Think about it, Darius. I'll have some dinner sent in here. Then sleep on it. We'll talk in the morning." He turned and walked out without another word, and the door slid shut behind him.
I sat for a long while just thinking about everything he had said. My first reaction was to tell him to forget about it. I was only sixteen - six years of training seemed like an eternity. And leave Earth? Fight on other worlds? It was just too much.
But then a lot of what he said came back to me, and I started to think about it. I had grown up on the lowest rung of the system. My parents were penniless Cogs with no prospects to improve their lives or mine. I got only a rudimentary education, little or no access to medical care, and barely enough food to survive. At the time, that just seemed to be the way of things. A Cog’s life is ruled by necessity, by the daily struggle to get by. There wasn’t time to think about anything else or to contemplate the inequities of the system or the failings of the government. The utter powerlessness and vulnerability made all that seem very far away. A Cog worries about getting food today, not a better life tomorrow.
When I ran from the farm, I started to become someone else, but only to a limited extent. My horizons had expanded, but not all that much. I stole because I didn’t have what I needed to survive, and later because I got better at it and could live a more tolerable life, albeit at the expense of my victims. I had my crew, but we were drawn together by necessity and opportunity, not by any great commitment to each other.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to be part of a group like he'd described, but it was just too much to wrap my head around. I put it out of my mind and drifted off to sleep determined to turn Captain Jackson down, to go back to my hideout and lay low and be more careful about picking my targets. For some reason, I believed him when he said they would let us go. But I thrashed around all night, my decision already made consciously, but still conflicted somewhere deeper inside myself. Something he said got to me on a level I couldn't entirely understand or control. When he came back the next morning I tried to say no, but all that came out of my mouth was, "Yes, I'm in." I was on my way.
Chapter 5
2253 AD
Firebase Delta-4
South of the Kelven Ridge
Delta Trianguli I
By the time I got to Tombstone, I was a different person. Marine training is long, longer than anything I’ve ever heard of for any military organization. Part of that is because our wars are complex. No uneducated conscript can survive on a 23rd century battlefield. The suite of weapons and equipment we utilize is extensive, and it takes considerable effort to master. But the Marine program is as much about evolving the individual as teaching him to shoot and walk around in armor, and that is what really takes time.
I adapted well and really excelled at training. I’d never felt a part of anything meaningful, and when I had the opportunity to join a team that truly worked together, I jumped at it. Some of the others in my trainee class took longer. Many of them had even worse backgrounds, and they’d sunk deeper into depravity than I had. Bitterness and hatred hadn’t entirely consumed me as it had with some of them. I was an outlaw, yes, but never a bloodthirsty one. I stole to survive, and later to live comfortably, but my crew didn’t murder the people we robbed. I'd killed the supervisor, but he had abused me for some time, and I was sure he had been responsible for my father's death. Some of the others in my class at Camp Puller were real hard cases, broken people who had been driven to do some truly horrible things to survive and to lash back at the world. It took time to repair that kind of psychic damage, and that’s part of the reason Marine training is six years.
Now I'd made my first drop, and I'd fought my first action. I was a full-fledged Marine. My crimes were gone, pardoned away in exchange for my service. I could go back to Earth when I mustered out if I wanted to, and I would be free from any consequences from my past. But even then, Earth was already starting to seem like something far away and long ago. I didn't realize it at the time, but the concept of home was changing for me.
We'd been on one mission that particularly made an impression on me. Three of our troopers were out on patrol, and they ended up cut off by superior enemy forces. The lieutenant didn't hesitate - he mustered the whole platoon, and we scrambled out to try to link up and get them back home. The Captain was in on it too, sending a group of snipers and a heavy weapons team from base Delta-3 to assist us. We fought for four hours, the lieutenant pushing us relentlessly the entire time. In the end we broke through, but too late to save them. They were all lost.
The mood was somber when we got back to base. We were in a profession where people got killed - there was no way around that. Yet we mourned every one of them, and every trooper in the platoon wondered how he'd failed, what he could have done differently. I felt the loss too, and the futility of our fruitless, costly fight to save them. But then I realized it wasn't fruitless. Mathematically it was, of course. Had we abandoned them we would have had three casualties instead of the eight we ended up with. But combat isn't decided solely by numbers or equations; it is a test of morale, of the willingness of men and women to fight, sometimes under impossible conditions. Those three Marines died on that plateau, but they were never abandoned by their comrades. They knew to the last that their brothers and sisters were fighting to reach them...and the troops struggling to break through saw how the Corps treats its own. If it was them next time, trapped and cut off, they knew at least that they would not be cut loose, that no officer was going to make a cold blooded decision that they were expendable. The Corps stood by its own...wherever, whenever, whatever the cost.
I'd been on-planet for five months, and I wasn't one of the new guys anymore. Combat on Tombstone wasn't cheap, and we'd lost eighteen of our fifty since we landed. Half of them were wounded, all thanks to the armor's impressive repair and trauma control mechanisms. Our suits were a hell of a lot better than the Caliphate's in that regard – their nanotech was way behind ours. In a place like this, a serious wound was pretty much a death sentence for one of them.
We evac'd the wounded on the transport that brought us replacements. We had eighteen fresh new faces wandering around the base, and I was in the unfamiliar territory of mentoring the new people. Somewhere in five months of serving in hell I'd become not quite a veteran, but at least seasoned. I knew my way around this miserable planet and how to survive its many hazards, and I was determined that none of these 18 newbs would go out and get themselves killed doing something stupid. Others had done that for me, and some of those people were now dead or shipping out to the hospital on Armstrong. It was my turn, my debt to start repaying.
We'd just celebrated the new year...the new Earth year, of course. A year on Tombstone was only 61 Terran days, and just over 20 of the 73 hour local days. I'd never celebrated the new year before I'd become a Marine, but we had a nice little party in base Delta-4 and welcomed the new additions to the platoon. Six of them were experienced and were transferring from other units or the hospital. The rest were fresh from Camp Puller, the class that was half a year behind mine.
There was a lull in the action as the new Earth year began. Both sides were
building up and replacing losses, and while we did frequent patrols there was little action. One interesting thing happened, though. We managed to intercept and decode a Caliphate message that gave the exact arrival date of their next convoy. I'd been with the patrol that caught the transmission, and we were pretty excited for a while. Taking out a couple hundred of their troops while they were still in the launch bays would save us a lot of trouble down here. But in the end nothing came of it. Alliance Gov considered engaging enemy forces in space to be an unacceptable escalation. Neither side had attacked the other's naval forces in the system, and they weren't looking to start now. Everyone knew that full-scale war was coming, but nobody was ready for it yet. It was frustrating fighting a war you weren’t allowed to win, but there was nothing we could do about that.
I ended up going out on patrols with most of the new people. The lieutenant was insistent that the fresh arrivals pair up with a more senior private any time they went outside. It was something that stuck with me years later when I was in command of my own units. You want to keep your new people under the command of the most experienced non-coms available, of course. But it really helps to have them paired off with an experienced private, regardless of how good a team or squad leader they have. Human psychology is complex thing, and there are considerable differences in how a person interacts with a command figure and how they function with a peer at their own level. I sometimes wonder how many of my own people the lieutenant had saved over the years by teaching me that lesson.
Chapter 6
2252 AD
McCraw’s Ridge
Day One
Delta Trianguli I
This was shaping up to be a significant battle. It started small, just two patrols running into each other. They exchanged some fire, and that would have been the end of it, but neither side backed down. The Caliphate sent in reinforcements and pushed back our forces, taking the main ridge.
It looked like worthless ground to us, but the captain wasn’t going to give it up without a fight, and we got the orders to suit up. We were the farthest away, and when we got there the entire company was formed up, covering a front stretching over five kilometers. They had already counter-attacked and retaken the ridge when we arrived, and we were fed into the line, allowing the units that had taken losses to condense their frontages.
The ridge was named after the megacorp that claimed the resource rights in the area. McCraw Resources was a huge mining concern that had a number of places named after it, including an entire planet on the Rim. It was one of several Alliance companies operating on Tombstone, though the only difference between them was which Corporate Magnate managers got the richest. A McCraw may have started the company centuries ago, but now it was essentially owned by the government, just like all the megacorps. The Magnates who ran it stole what they could, but in the end they answered to Alliance Gov.
We dug into our new positions, and the lieutenant directed the placement of our SAWs and SHWs. He was very careful about arranging them to maximize their fields of fire and also to provide mutual support. Any enemy attack against one of our heavy weapons would come under fire from at least two others. It made an impression on me how he obsessed over the placements himself rather than just ordering the teams to deploy. That stuck with me years later when I was in his position. I’ve always believed that low-level heavy weapons are a huge key to victory, and that belief started that day.
The enemy had fallen back but not withdrawn entirely. They’d fortified another ridge about five klicks north, and it didn’t look like they were planning to leave. Their position didn’t look quite as good as ours, but it was strong enough to discourage an attack, at least until we were heavily reinforced. We exchanged sporadic long-ranged fire, but it was mostly quiet for about six hours, with occasional excitement when someone got careless and was picked off by long-ranged fire.
It’s hard to stay alert for hour after hour, especially when nothing much is happening. The suit can keep you pumped up on stimulants, but you have to be careful and save that for when you really need it. Otherwise you end up strung out, and you lose as much effectiveness as you gain. But you still have to stay sharp. Snipers can pick off a target at five klicks, no problem, and we’d lost two people already because they let their guard down. Newbs were particularly vulnerable, but I’ve seen veterans lose their focus for a few seconds too, and that’s long enough to get scragged.
Finally, we got intermittent scanning reports on approaching enemy forces. Normally, we’d have a complete breakdown of anything so close, but on Tombstone you generally had less information than you wanted, and even that was unreliable.
Fresh troops meant they were planning another attack, and the lieutenant made his way all along the line, checking and adjusting our positions. Physical proximity really wasn’t necessary for communication, but still, it was a morale boost to have him crouching next to you while he spoke.
“How’s everything, Jax?” He put his hand on my back, a seemingly pointless gesture among armored troops, but one that was nevertheless somehow reassuring.
“I’m good, sir.” I turned to face him, another bit of instinctive body language that had dubious utility when suited up. In non-combat situations I would have saluted him, but the Corps dispensed with the clunky salutes among armored troops in battle. You could barely manage it in a fighting suit in normal conditions. No one wanted a casualty because a Marine was struggling to salute in armor and got his head blown off. And there was no point in advertising where the officers were.
“You’ve come along well, Darius.” His voice was gentle, sincere. “You were nervous as a cat when you first got here, but you are calm and cool now. You’ve been great with the new guys, too. You’re a valued member of this platoon. And you ended up with quite a first assignment. My first was a cakewalk, a quick raid that was over in six hours.” He paused for a second. “You’ve taken all Tombstone could throw at you. I’m proud of you.”
I got a little choked up. This was the first time anyone had really told me I was worth anything. Except my father, of course, but that doesn’t count. I already felt at home in the platoon, but this sealed it. “Thank you, sir.” I hesitated, trying, not terribly successfully, to keep the emotion out of my voice. “That means a lot.” I’d have followed that man anywhere. I’d drawn the short straw getting posted to Tombstone, but I swear there wasn’t a better commanding officer in the Corps than the one I got.
“Carry on.” He crouched down and started over toward Private Samms, about 100 meters to my right. He stopped for a second and turned back toward me. “And stay low.” His head snapped back forward and he was on his way. I had a minute or two to think about what he had said and then all hell broke loose.
My AI warned me about three seconds before the first explosions…grenade and mortar fire. I instinctively crouched lower just before I was pelted with dirt and shattered chunks of rock. The grenades weren’t too bad; we had good cover, and they had to drop one right next to you to cause serious damage. The mortars were another matter. The rounds coming in were heavier than the usual ones; if one of them hit within twenty meters, you’d better have good cover between you and it.
Fortunately for me, they were concentrating the mortar fire to my right, and the worst thing I had to deal with was a grenade landing behind me. It covered me with debris and caused some minor damage to my external sensors, but all things considered, I got off light.
We returned fire with grenades, but ours were no more effective than theirs against troops in heavy cover. They had the edge on heavier ordnance right now, and it occurred to me that mortars that big were usually battalion level assets. The Caliphate called their battalions tac-forces, and they were about 35% larger than ours. It was odd to see that kind of firepower in a company level fight.
“Ok, platoon…” The lieutenant’s voice, calm but urgent. “…we’re looking at a major attack incoming at any time. I just spoke with the colonel…” Holy shit, I thought…the co
lonel! He was the planetary theater commander…the top dog. Something big must be brewing. “…and we’ve got support inbound. But we might have to hold out for a while against tough odds.” He paused. “I told him he could count on us. Now you’re not going to make a liar out of me, are you Second Platoon?”
A chorus of “no, sirs” flooded the com, and mine was as loud as anybody’s. We were ready. Still, I figured if the colonel was getting involved, we were likely in for a rough ride. I was right.
Tactically, the ridge was of limited value, not worth a major fight to hold. We could have pulled back and actually enhanced our longer term positions. We held most of the surrounding hills, and any enemy penetration here would quickly become an exposed salient. But what we didn’t know…what we didn’t need to know…was under the ridge ran a rich vein of trans-urianic elements…not the fleeting scraps manufactured in labs that decayed in nano-seconds, but naturally-occurring stable isotopes that were non-existent on Earth and still not fully explained by physicists. These strange substances had been found on a small handful of worlds and, vital for high-yield spaceship drives, they were priceless. The deposits under the ridge were worth more than all of our lives - at least to Alliance Gov - and while the Corps generally had a different set of priorities, it followed orders. Where we were told to fight, we fought. And right now that was on McCraw’s Ridge. I was positioned almost dead-center, along a spiny Y-shaped rock outcropping…a spot that would later be known as the Cauldron.