He took his right hand and pointedly tapped a forefinger against his social arm.
“What?” Patrice asked, not putting the dots together.
“I have a prosthesis.”
“Yeah. So?” Patrice asked. “Lots of folks have prostheses. Couldn’t regen until the war was over. Doesn’t mean you’re going to have a problem with that in the Home Guard.”
Rev sighed, ready to give up, but something about his fellow staff sergeant was rubbing him raw. He didn’t need to be making any enemies in the Guard, especially with his fellow Union Marines. But the “Not like what you provincials had to face,” still stung.
“An IBHU Marine is someone who lost an arm and has been fitted with the weapons system.”
“OK, so what does . . .”
Rev could see understanding come over his face.
“Yeah, I’m one of those IBHU Marines coming to the Guard. I’ve got seven tin-ass kills to my name, one before I lost my arm.”
The staff sergeant’s mouth dropped open, and he started to stammer out something, but Rev cut him off.
“And about the Mother? Yeah, I was there, too. You see, they wanted the best of the best to protect her, not some garrison Marines.”
That last dig was unfair. Patrice had faced combat, and he had to be good in order to be assigned to the Home Guard. It wasn’t his fault they were never ordered into battle. But Rev didn’t care. At least not at the moment.
He faced forward, leaned his seat back, and closed his eyes as if taking a nap.
It was a long, quiet, nine-and-a-half hours to Enceladus.
5
Rev stopped at the top of the steps and looked out over the famous Enceladus Commons. It was parklike, with the Roosevelt Stand, thirty soaring, 200-meter tall redwoods almost reaching the dome.
“Yeah, they took my breath away, too, the first time I saw them,” a subdued Patrice said. He’d been quiet for most of the flight over and going through immigration at Trieste Station. This was the first thing he’d said that didn’t have to do with getting Rev to the base.
Rev had seen holos of the stand before, of course, but seeing them just a klick away was breathtaking. With Enceladus’ lower pseudogravity, the trees had grown immense over the last nine hundred years, far outstripping their brethren down on the Mother.
The Commons had been the moon’s first dome. As the population had grown and the undergrounds developed, it had shifted from a crowded scientific community into a beautiful gathering place for the moon’s inhabitants.
“We can grab a shuttle to the station if you want. Or we can walk.”
“Walk,” Rev said immediately.
“Watch the steps. They can be tricky for newbies.”
Rev had been about to bound down the steps, but he heeded the warning. Enceladus’s natural gravity was about 1/10th of one percent of Earth Normal, barely enough to feel. The original humans to live in it had been limited to three-year tours where rigorous exercise was de rigueur to maintain muscle mass.
It wasn’t until the development of commercially feasible large-scale diamagnetic fields that people could live their entire lives on the moon if need be. With the public fields set at 70% Earth Normal, people still had to exercise or spend time in localized areas with higher pseudogravity.
Every planet Rev had been on had been close to Earth Normal, and Asteroid 6-067-442 was essentially Null-G, so this was something new to him. And for the moment, Rev felt like he could jump to the Roosevelt Stand—and he’d have probably stumbled and landed on his face if he had tried to bound down the stairs. So, he’d appreciated the warning.
He carefully descended the wide stone steps and went into the main area. Flowers bloomed in profusion. A tiny buzzing sound caught his attention, and he turned to watch a hummingbird, its iridescent purple throat flashing in the lights, hover over a flower, taking in the nectar. He stopped for a moment, wondering how the lower gravity affected eons of hummingbird evolution.
Patrice led him down curving paths crowded with people. Some seemed on a mission, head down as they walked. Others seemed to be just out for a stroll. Small alcoves with plants screening most of what was inside had couples sitting on benches. Rev tried to avert his eyes, giving them privacy.
Rev was disappointed that they didn’t head for the redwoods but rather off to the left. He’d seen redwoods before. Tall Trees Provincial Park had been one of his favorite places on New Hope as a kid, but those were saplings compared to the ones in the Commons.
The memory clouded his mood. It was above the park, where the Spizzo River started down from the high plains, that Prestor Nix and Tubba Badem had been killed.
Come on, Reverent. The past is the past. Move on.
He was a little more somber as they wended their way through what would put any botanical garden on New Hope to shame. Even the aromas seemed more intense. He wondered what combat engineers and sappers, with their augmented sense of smell, would think of the place.
On a whim, he switched his own sight to ultraviolet. He tended to avoid it as a matter of course as it made him a little queasy, and with his low-light capabilities, he’d never found the need. But as soon as he did, the flowers took on an entirely new aspect. It was as if they were all beaming beacons, directing the hummingbirds and bees to the sweet nectar.
Too soon, Patrice led him to an entrance to the underground. People were streaming in and out, and the two Marines descended at least a hundred and twenty-five meters down, passing two other levels before Patrice led him off the escalator.
Patrice looked up at a large board. “Three minutes for the next train. Track Two. Move it, Pelletier.”
Rev followed his fellow staff sergeant as they hurried past hundreds of people going about their daily business. There were more people than Rev had expected. Everyone on the moon was either working for the Council or providing services to it.
They reached a small gate manned by two soldiers—troopers, Rev reminded himself—dressed in uniforms Rev didn’t recognize. They watched as the two Marines leaned into the retinal scanners, then waved them through. They sprinted the last twenty meters and into the train ten seconds before the doors whispered closed.
Patrice leaned back as the train lifted off the rails and started forward, so smoothly that Rev could barely feel any apparent motion.
“Next stop, Fort Nkomo, Pelletier. Your home away from home for the next three years.”
* * *
“What do you think?” Second Lieutenant Milei Macek asked Rev.
“Not much to see so far. Like being on a ship, sir.”
Fort Nkomo was entirely underground, the entrance level two hundred meters below the surface. It had taken two direct hits during the Centaur—they weren’t supposed to call it an invasion anymore, but Rev was damned if he knew what the politically accepted phrase for it was. It had taken the hits, but except for some surface comms gear, it hadn’t suffered a single casualty.
It was home to the Home Guard’s Second Brigade—what the Marines would call a regiment. First Brigade was on Titan, while Third was at Fort Willis on the far side of the E, as some people stationed on the moon seemed to call Enceladus.
Being underground, it really was like being on a ship. A big ship, true. In the six hours he’d been there, he hadn’t seen a fraction of the place. But it had the same passages and decks that wouldn’t look out of place on any large ship.
The lieutenant lowered his voice to almost subvocalization. “You met any of the regulars?”
Rev knew he didn’t mean those Marines, about a dozen of them, who weren’t IBHU Marines. They might or might not be regular Corps. Some could be provincials like the two of them. The lieutenant meant the three IBHU Marines sitting in the back.
It was possible that they merely had prosthetic arms. Staff Sergeant Patrice had indicated that some of the troopers in the Guard had prostheses, and Rev had seen one with a prosthetic leg on the way to this brief. But as the saying went, “It takes one to know
one.” Rev knew the three, a gunny and two corporals, were IBHU.
“Not yet.”
“I guess we will soon enough,”
Rev and the lieutenant were the first two of the New Hope IBHU Marines to arrive. The first two New Hope anything, from what Rev could see from the name tags they’d all been issued as they checked in. The other four New Hope IBHUs would trickle in over the next three weeks.
Rev barely knew the lieutenant. They’d met a couple of times, and they both had the same problems with the IBHUs working loose during combat. But they’d immediately gravitated toward each other, two New Hopers. It shouldn’t be like that, Rev knew. They were all Marines, and those three in the back were IBHUs, just like them. But still, he and the lieutenant were hunkered together to the side of the briefing room as if everyone else was some sort of enemy.
“What about your berthing? You get a beehive-thing, too?” the lieutenant asked.
“Yes, sir. You, too? An officer?”
“Yeah. Sure did get one.”
Rev’s berthing might as well be a cell in a beehive. He was in a space with about thirty other hexagonal cells all linked together. The front was a door that was programmed for his retinal scan. It was clear when unoccupied but could be darkened for privacy. About three meters long, it was only two in diameter. In the front was a small space with a chair, desk, sink, and holoscreen. The back was a bunk with a shelf above and storage below.
It was clean and modern, but it rather sucked, in Rev’s humble opinion. The head and showers were at the end of the common space. The lounge area between the two double banks of cells was better, but it didn’t make up for the fact that he was in a coffin. Rev had hoped for something a little more comfortable, even a small stateroom. He was a SNCO now, after all. But he hadn’t been too surprised when he saw it. What did surprise him was that the lieutenant, an officer, had the same kind of thing.
“The damn thing is just three meters long. The shitter’s right there by the sink, too. I can brush my teeth and take a dump at the same time.”
Of course. Three meters long and a private head inside the space? My understanding of the military has not been shaken. Officers get what officers get, and we get what we get.
Whatever else the lieutenant might have been about to say was cut off when someone shouted, “Attention on deck!”
Rev jumped to his feet. Too hard. His feet left the deck a good ten centimeters, and he had to spread his arms to regain his balance. Judging from the laughs, he wasn’t the only one.
“At ease, at ease. Take your seats.” A Union Marine Brigadier General, followed by a civilian and a colonel of some sort, entered the space and made her way to the front.
“I’m Brigadier General Platte, the senior Marine on the E. My assigned billet is as the J3-Alpha, which means I handle ops for the two brigades here. But what I’m doing today is welcoming you here to the Home Guard. You are going to have a rewarding three years here, but only if you’re here with the right frame of mind. We aren’t here as Marines, as much as I hate to admit that. We are here for the greater good of humankind. We’ve just survived the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced, and the only reason we’re still around talking about it is because we banded together, without regard for where we were from.”
Like Frisians and us almost coming to blows over an asteroid?
“And that, Marines, is what we’re doing here. It’s a big galaxy and even a bigger universe. Who knows from where the next threat will come? But I can tell you this. It will come. Maybe not today. Maybe not during your tour here. But it will come, and the tactics and cooperation you will forge here will be the basis of how we will turn back the next threat.”
She turned to look at the civilian. “Right, Vice-counsel?”
Geeze, is everyone a deputy-this or vice-that?
“Right, General.”
“OK, now that I’ve said what I have to say, let me make one thing perfectly clear. You’re going to be swearing an oath in a bit, an oath to the Congress of Humanity. That’s a real oath, and your loyalty has to lie with it. If, the Mother forbid, the Council has to take action against the Union, you will be required to obey orders and take that action.”
There was an outbreak of protests, and the general waited them out. “I hope it never happens. It has before, just not with the Union, but it could. Even so, damn it, you’re still Union Marines. Every other trooper here will be watching you, dissecting you. Some, more than others,” she said, glancing at the three IBHUs in the back, then to Rev and the lieutenant. “So, you will deport yourself as Marines at all times, doing nothing to besmirch the title. There will be NO incidents of any kind. Am I making that clear?”
There was a weak ooh-rah. She rolled her eyes and repeated, “Am I making myself clear?”
This time, the ooh-rah shook the space.
“That’s better. Just understand this. Three years isn’t much. If you have a problem with drink, then maybe you’d better go on the wagon. If you screw around too much, then weld those zippers shut. If you like to fight, then zip tie your hands behind you. Get my drift?”
“Ooh-rah!”
She looked at each one of them, then smiled. “It really is a good tour. Just don’t make us sorry we sent you here. And with that . . . oh, you can wake your battle buddies now.”
They’d put their battle buddies to sleep before leaving new Hope, and Rev was surprised how relieved he was to wake up Punch.
“You with me?”
Rev frowned. He’d have to get to know just what was different with his battle buddy now.
“So, with that, I’ll have the vice-counsel say a few words.”
The man, in a natty dark blue ribbon-collar suit and CoH-blue shirt, stood and moved in front of the Marines.
“I am Assistant Vice-counsel for Military Personnel Screening and Acquisitions Djell Mortensen, and let me officially welcome all of you to the Home Guard. As General Platte said, I think you are going to have a rewarding tour here as the premier military force throughout humanity . . . and as it seems with the defeat of the Centaurs, in the galaxy.”
He waited expectantly with a sly smile and seemed taken aback when no one laughed.
“Uh, anyway. This is an opportunity for you to serve a greater good than pure national interests. But, make no mistake, you will be learning, absorbing from your fellow troopers, and that will not only help forge bonds with troopers from other services, but it will give you new insights when you return to the Alliance.”
The general pointedly coughed, and the assistant vice-counsel looked about confused until it dawned on him what he’d just said. “Oh, I’m sorry. Union. Perseus Union. I don’t want to make that mistake again in a room full of Marines, not if I want to make it to my next meeting.”
If he thought that would get a laugh, he was again mistaken.
“Well, well. Onward and upward. Where was I? Oh, OK.” He paused a couple of seconds to gather himself. “Like I said, you can learn things here that can benefit your Marine Corps, so please, go into this with an open mind.
“But, you may ask, with the war over and humanity at peace, what will there be for the Home Guard to do?”
He’d slipped into a pattern that Rev figured was because he’d said the exact same spiel hundreds of times over the last several months. His mistake with the Alliance-Union threw him off-balance, but now he was slipping back into his rhythm.
“The Scutum-Centaursian War had one benefit. It brought all the nations, territories, and multi-galactals together, united as one, for the first time in centuries. However, there are and have always been outliers, those scum who prefer to live outside of the norms of civilization.
“With the armies, navies, and police forces of humankind focused on the alien threat, that meant that these scum crawled out from under their rocks to pursue their own selfish goals. Since the year before the war, criminal events
have risen by an astounding 678%.”
Rev shook his head in shock, wondering if he’d misheard.
“Is that right? Almost seven hundred percent?”
“These events include but are not limited to piracy and mass kidnapping, but also armed takeovers of stations and resources such as mines and manufacturing facilities.”
“And now the multi-galactals want us to take them back,” the lieutenant whispered out of the corner of his mouth.
“We will clean up these dregs of humanity. If we could defeat the Centaurs, we can mop up these criminals. Most of the clean-up will be relegated to the local forces, but there will be needs for a highly trained, highly capable force to react to emergent situations where lives are at stake or for particularly difficult missions. While the major forces—including the Union Navy and Marines, of course—can handle most situations, the criminal elements have largely taken over areas where local forces are not as capable.
“To meet these needs, the Home Guard is transitioning. We will be adding another brigade over the six months, and that will allow us to forward deploy units, ready to react where needed.
“What does that mean for you? Well, I’m sorry to say, you will not spend the next three years in the Fort Nkomo Resort, with all its natural beauty.”
This time, there were chuckles, and the assistant vice-counsel gave a smile of relief.
“We are working out the deployment schedules now, but each of you can expect to spend between one and one and a half years deployed, being the tip of humanity’s spear. I have full confidence that you will reflect the Council’s mission of serving humanity and make the Union proud of your contributions.”
He stepped back and turned to nod at the general.
“Attention on deck!” the general said.
Rev stood to comply, making sure his feet didn’t leave the deck this time.
An Uneasy Alliance: Book 4 of the Sentenced to War Series Page 4