Coalition Defense Force Boxed Set: First to Fight

by Gibbs, Daniel

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “You do think you’re special, then. Drop and give me fifty pushups, recruit!”

  As David dropped to the ground to do the pushups, he saw the smirk on Salazar’s face. Oh great. Ten weeks of this guy busting my balls because of my father. That’s just awesome.

  Fifty painful pushups later, Salazar ordered David to his feet. “I’ve got my eye on you, maggot. Back in line.”

  Walking down the line of recruits, he stopped in front of another young woman. “And why are you here?”

  “To, uh, figure out my life path, sir,” she got out nervously.

  “Do I look like a life guide to you, recruit? Do I look like your mommy?”

  “Sir, no, sir!”

  “Lucky for you, I am a life guide! I will lead. You will follow! You will do exactly as I instruct you at all times. Do you understand me, recruit?”

  “Sir, yes, sir!”

  “I don’t think you do. Drop down and give me twenty-five pushups!”

  Walking back around to the front of the line, Salazar continued his monologue. “Now give me a battle cry!”

  The body of recruits yelled a cry that was mostly ineffectual.

  “That was pathetic!” Salazar barked. “Sergeants! Give them a proper demonstration of a CDF battle cry.”

  The two drill instructors picked an unlucky recruit to scream at in both ears. “Waaagh!” they shouted.

  “Now try it again, recruits!” Salazar said.

  The recruits screamed much louder than the last time but nowhere near what the two drill instructors had managed.

  “It’s still pathetic! You wouldn’t scare a small dog with that noise. Never mind. I’ll fix that in the next ten weeks, and I will turn you filthy civilians into lean, mean fighting machines. Now fall in. We’re going for a run, ladies.”

  * * *

  Amy laughed as David finished retelling the story of his first drill formation. “Your drill instructor sounds like…well, a colorful character, David.”

  David laughed with her. “The truth is even though at first I couldn’t stand him, by the end of the ten weeks, I had grown to respect Staff Sergeant Salazar greatly. In fact, I doubt I’d be alive today if I hadn’t been given the training I received at his direction.”

  “I’m glad the experience ended up being positive for you, then.”

  “Me too.”

  “I’m afraid we’re almost out of time.”

  “Communications credits do come at a premium these days,” David said. “Thank you. Just talking about all this does make it somewhat better.”

  “Good. Let’s do it again soon, then.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Amy,” she reminded him with a smile.

  “Yes, Amy.”

  “God bless, and Godspeed, David.”

  “Godspeed.”

  4

  The following week, David was cleared to return to full duty. His presence had been requested by the commanding officer of the Artemis, Major Pipes. David had been told he was up for a commendation for his performance during the boarding action, but he didn’t want the recognition. He knocked on the rim of the CO’s hatch, as it was open.

  “Come in, Corporal,” Pipes boomed.

  David walked into the office and braced to attention. “Corporal David Cohen, reporting as ordered, sir.”

  “At ease, Corporal. Take a seat.”

  Across from the major, David sat ramrod straight in the nearest chair and locked his eyes forward. Retreating to what he had learned in boot camp seemed to provide some comfort.

  “Corporal, I wanted to speak with you earlier, but I was asked to wait awhile until you were cleared by the counselor. How’re you doing?”

  David furrowed his brow. That was a loaded question, but he sensed Major Pipes had genuine concern for his well-being. “I’m… okay, sir.”

  “Killing someone, even the enemy, isn’t an easy thing, son,” Pipes said with concern.

  “No, sir, it’s not. I never wanted to kill another person. I just wanted to do my duty for four years then continue my religious studies.”

  “Ah yes.” Pipes nodded to the flag of New Israel on David’s uniform shoulder. “Orthodox, yes?”

  David nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “Corporal, I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you to find out what your father did for the Terran Coalition. I understand you feel the best path for you is to be a rabbi, but I’d like you to consider the possibility of a different calling in life.”

  David raised an eyebrow. “Sir?”

  “You have clear command ability, son. Even though you lack advanced training in small-arms combat, your first instinct was to rush to the sound of the guns. Furthermore, once there, you made the right calls throughout the engagement.”

  David looked away. “With respect, sir, I had no business trying to fight off a League boarding party. I don’t know what was going through my head. I don’t know why I made the choices I did. I guessed, and my guesses cost a good man his life. He’ll never go home. He was under my command. It was my job to keep him safe.”

  Pipes leaned forward. “Corporal, I can see all over your face that you blame yourself for what happened. You can’t do that. The League is the reason Private Beckett is dead. Let me tell you something. If you really guessed your way through that engagement, then I’m even more impressed, because you innately made the right calls.”

  David forced himself to look back at Pipes. “Thank you, sir, but I’m struggling to make peace with the fact that I killed a bunch of people. It shouldn’t be so easy to do that. It’s not right.”

  Pipes stood and walked around his desk to sit down next to David. “No, it’s not right. But it’s something that soldiers like us have to deal with. It follows us around, and it’s a constant companion.”

  “How do you make peace with it, sir?”

  “You don’t, and if you ever become okay with killing someone else, then something very wrong has happened to you. It’s supposed to hurt. But if we don’t kill them, they’ll kill us. And after they do, they’ll kill our wives, our mothers, our families, and our children. So we stand on the line and ensure it doesn’t happen.”

  Pipes put his hand on David’s shoulder. “Son, you’ve got a gift to command. You’re good at this, better than many others I’ve seen in my career. If you’d like, I’ll sponsor you for officers’ candidate school. We need more people like you out here, or we won’t win this war.”

  David shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I have no desire to be an officer or to continue in the CDF after I have completed my required service.”

  Pipes nodded, frowning. “I understand, son. If that should change, I’d be glad to recommend you at any time. I have something else for you.” He paused, stood, and retrieved a case from his desk. “Please stand, Corporal.” Once David had stood, he snapped the medal case open and turned it around. “I am pleased to award you the Bronze Star with the V device for your actions in defense of this ship.” After closing the case, he handed it to David. “We’ll hold a formal ceremony later, but I wanted you to have this.”

  “Thank you, sir,” David said, unable to say anything else.

  “If you change your mind, you know where to find me, Corporal,” Pipes said, his easy smile returned.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Carry on, Corporal.”

  David stood quickly and braced to attention. “Yes, sir.”

  Taking his time walking back to his bunk, David wrestled with the CO’s offer. What if I am good at being a soldier? The possibility haunted him. He didn’t want to be good at killing people.

  I know my calling is to be a rabbi, he pondered, staring at the top of his bunk. What if Major Pipes is right?

  David turned over and tried to go sleep but found no rest.

  * * *

  The next few months passed quickly for David aboard the Artemis. He’d returned to his duties and split time between damage control and
backup helm operator. Focusing on his responsibilities and with a couple more sessions with Amy, he was able to work through the emotional toll of his first combat encounter. Over time, the nightmares faded, and he returned to some level of normalcy. The conversation he’d had with Major Pipes, however, refused to leave his mind. He lay awake many nights, thinking over his choices in life.

  The ship’s klaxon blared, jerking David out of his thoughts.

  “Attention, all hands. This is the commanding officer. General quarters. General quarters. All hands, man your battle stations. I say again, man your battle stations. Set material condition one throughout the ship,” Major Pipes said through the ship’s intercom.

  David jumped out of his bunk then made his way to his assigned damage-control station, where Rachel Munford was already waiting for him.

  “Ready to go?” David asked as he pulled the fireproof hood of his suit over his head.

  Munford nodded. “Yes, Corporal. Ready to go.” Munford’s wounds had healed, though David knew she was still greatly affected by Beckett’s death, even more so than he was.

  The first few minutes of the engagement passed with nothing more than some shocks and rumbles. Both David and Munford were knocked off their feet when the ship took a major hit. The intercom on David’s personal communicator chimed.

  “This is the bridge. We need damage-control teams and medical staff immediately,” someone David didn’t recognize shouted.

  “We’re only one deck down. Let’s get up there and try to help.”

  She nodded. “Aye, aye, Corporal.”

  They made their way to the bridge as fast as possible. The two sentries that normally stood watch were trying to open the hatch, but it was stuck. Using their specialized tools, David and Munford pried the doors open and stepped through.

  Before David was a perfect storm of destruction. The XO’s chair had a beam lying across it, pinning the woman in it to the seat. Several stations were destroyed, and a fire crackled in one of the substation control units. He surveyed the situation methodically, as he had done many times. “Munford, help me get this beam off her,” he said, rushing to the XO.

  Grunting, they lifted the beam off the chair, revealing the trauma sustained by the collapse. David knelt, feeling for a pulse, but they were too late. Looking at Munford, he shook his head.

  When he performed the same duty on Major Pipes, he was relieved to find that while the major had been knocked unconscious, his pulse was strong and steady.

  David put his commlink to his mouth. “This is Corporal Cohen on the bridge. We still need medical personnel immediately and additional damage-control teams. All bridge officers are incapacitated. We need someone to come take command here.”

  A cry for help came from the navigation and helm station. The ship’s navigator, Second Lieutenant Naomi Caldwell, a woman he had met several times before, struggled to stand with a piece of shrapnel lodged in her chest.

  “Lieutenant, hold still,” David said.

  As David knelt beside her, Caldwell grabbed his arm. “Corporal, you have to get the ship to safety,” she said in her slight Afro-Caribbean accent as she gasped for air.

  “Let me help you.” David frantically scanned the room for the emergency medical kit panel.

  “No! Forget me. Save this ship, or we’ll all be dead,” she said as loudly and as clearly as she could. Another round of weapon impacts underlined her point.

  “What do I do?” David asked in panic, caught between wanting to run away and doing his duty. He didn’t want to see yet another person die. He wasn’t sure he could handle that again.

  “The Lawrence drive is charged. You have to enter the coordinates and engage.”

  “Where should we go?”

  “Anywhere but here, Corporal,” Caldwell said.

  David cleared the debris away from the navigation console and stared at it. He had basic training in how to use the helm and navigation consoles but had never actually executed a Lawrence drive jump. He picked a space station near their location that he hoped would have medical and engineering personnel and entered the coordinates into the navigation system. When the drive was ready a few seconds later, he engaged it. Through the windows at the front of the bridge, he watched in fasciation as the multicolored maw of the artificial wormhole opened. While he’d seen them before in books and videos, something was different about experiencing it in person, a few kilometers away. Even in the middle of all this death and destruction, the beauty of God’s creation is all around us. The frigate rocketed forward, speeding through the tunnel between points in space, and thanks to his lack of piloting skills, the ride was extremely rough.

  Caldwell’s breaths became more labored as the ship exited the wormhole. “Are we safe, Corporal?” she whispered.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Let me get help.”

  As David turned, her eyes closed, and her breathing slowly came to a stop. David sprang up and rushed to the panel of emergency supplies, fumbling to get it open as the medical personnel rushed into the bridge.

  “The navigator is down. She needs medical treatment now!”

  One of the medical technicians knelt beside Caldwell, feeling for her pulse, and examined the hole in her chest. He used a portable defibrillation wand on her without effect. After a few more minutes of trying to revive her, he looked up. “I’m sorry, but she’s gone. There’s no coming back from that kind of a wound, Corporal.”

  As the technician turned away to treat another member of the bridge crew who was still alive, David’s knees went wobbly. He sat down on the chair next to the navigator’s body.

  I’ve got to keep it together. He stared down at her lifeless form. For the second time in six months, David said the traditional prayer for the dead. Quietly and in Hebrew, he recited it from memory. “God, filled with mercy, dwelling in the heavens’ heights, bring proper rest beneath the wings of Your Angels, amid the ranks of the holy and the pure, illuminating like the brilliance of the skies the souls of our beloved and our blameless who went to their eternal place of rest.”

  Munford came up behind David and whispered, “Corporal, are you okay?”

  Snapped out of his thoughts, he looked up at her in anguish. “No. But we have a job to do.” He stood and forced one foot in front of the other. “Let’s get back to it.”

  5

  That night, David took what was known as a Hollywood shower by those in the CDF. The term traced back hundreds of years. To where, David wasn’t quite sure. It referred to taking a long shower while in space, as opposed to a space shower, in which you turned the water on for thirty seconds, turned it off, lathered up, and finally turned it back on again to rinse. His bunk was empty because the rest of the men assigned to that berthing compartment were absent, finally giving him time to think. The idea of being a part of something larger than him embodied the motto of the CDF, which was Semper Paratus or Always Ready. If he was being honest with himself, it appealed to him.

  Lying in his bunk, he pondered his feelings for hours on end. What do I owe the Terran Coalition? Do I owe it anything? Does everyone have a duty to stand up for the freedoms we’ve received and fight against evil?

  Finding no solace, he decided to place a real-time comm call to a friend from boot camp, Sheila Thompson. It would cost his entire comm time ration for the next three months, but he had to talk to someone, and his mother wasn’t the right person to have the conversation with. As he reached for his tablet, he thought back to boot camp, where he’d met Sheila three days into the ten-week ordeal.

  * * *

  David was in the middle of doing his laundry when a girl walked up to him as she washed her clothes. He’d seen her a few times but hadn’t spoken to her.

  “David Cohen, right?” she asked.

  David stared at her. “Who’s asking?”

  “Look, I’ve seen you getting yelled at and PTed a lot the last few days. I thought you might want some advice.”

  David relaxed just a tad. “Well
, I’m tired of being yelled at. What’s your advice?”

  “The first thing is… lose the chip on your shoulder. It’s big enough that you’re visibly weighed down by it.”

  David’s shoulders went forward, and he snarled. “What are you talking about?”

  “See? That. You’re proving my point. I get it. Your dad was a hero. You probably hate being reminded of it. But you can’t show it. Right now, you do just enough to stay on the drill instructor’s radar, and he’s going to pound you into the ground until you quit pissing him off. There are plenty of people here who are going to screw up far worse than you. Let them do it and lie low.”

  The girl’s words made sense to David. “How do you know all this? Is your dad a big shot in the CDF?”

  “My parents are lawyers. They don’t even want me here.”

  David raised an eyebrow. “That’s interesting. What’s your name?”

  “Sheila. Sheila Thompson.”

  David extended his hand. “David Cohen. Nice to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” Sheila said as she took her clothes out of the dryer and began to fold them. “You don’t seem to be very excited to be here.”

  “I’m not. I want to be done with my enlistment and do my duty to the Terran Coalition, then I’m going to go off and become a rabbi.”

  “A rabbi?” she asked, scrunching her nose.

  “You know, a teacher. A clergyman. Like a pastor for Christians or an imam for Muslims.”

  “I know what a rabbi is. I didn’t grow up under a rock. I don’t understand why you’d want to be one.”

  “Because I’ve no desire to kill people, Sheila. I’d rather try to teach them to be better.”

  “Sometimes evil has to be opposed. When we’re up against a group as evil as the League, the only way to do that is by force of arms,” she said with conviction.

  “I get that, but that person isn’t me. I’m going to do my duty. I owe the Terran Coalition a four-year stint. After it’s done, I’m out. What about you?”