Fire Base (Drop Trooper Book 6), page 24
“Or at least until it becomes someone else’s problem,” Ogbah agreed. “But one thing is sure, that Tahni whacko won’t be getting his hands on it.”
“Where were you guys?” I asked Top. I finally glanced at her utility fatigue collar and noticed that she was no longer a Master Gunnery Sergeant. Instead, she wore the insignia of a Sergeant-Major. “Sergeant-Major,” I added. “Where were you guys while we were on-planet? You had to have been in-system, right?”
“For fucking weeks now,” she said, throwing back her head like she wanted to scream. “Sitting in the asteroid belt, trying not to let your man Dunstan spot us once he moved in. But we couldn’t make a move until we had an intelligence report, and we weren’t going to get one until Cunningham found out where Zan-Thint was holed up with that artifact.”
I winced like someone had slapped me, remembering Dunstan’s ship breaking up in mid-air, and I thought Ogbah might have noticed the expression.
“We found the cockpit section of your friend’s cutter,” he told me. “He’s alive, barely. You know those things have the same sort of protective emergency foam as a dual-environment fighter and they also float, lucky for him since he fell into the ocean.” Ogbah shrugged. “Oh, he’s pretty fucked up, but we popped him into an auto-doc and once he’s healthy again, we’ll keep him under until we can drop him somewhere, but how the hell he’s going to explain this to his bosses, I don’t know.”
“Or,” Sgt.-Major Campbell said.
“Or what?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer immediately, looking to Ogbah as if for approval. The little man waved a hand noncommittally.
“You’re the expert on Marines, Sgt.-Major.”
She snickered at the backhanded compliment.
“Or you come see the Orion,” she suggested. “You two really pulled our fat out of the fire on this one. If we’d had to count on Cunningham to be subtle and convincing, this whole thing could have fallen apart. We at least owe you an explanation. After that, we can figure out a way to get all of you, Dunstan included, back to your ship in orbit. Or.” She smiled thinly.
“Or what?” I repeated.
“Or we’ll see.”
25
The Orion wasn’t a cruiser.
I couldn’t have quite said what she was, but she was too small for a cruiser, lacking the armored, monolithic bulk of one of the capital ships. Instead, she had more of a pragmatic utility to her, armored and armed but not sleek and optimized for space combat. She had outsized fuel tanks, plated with BiPhase Carbide, a fusion drive bell large enough to have been mounted on a cruiser, and a cluster of equipment and weapons thrown together on her frame as if she’d been purpose-built. Her deflector dish was a blister on the hull just fore of the fuel tanks, and between it and the communications array on the opposite side of the hull was something I’d never seen on a military ship: a habitation drum.
You saw them on civilian and commercial ships sometimes, particularly if the vessel was meant to spend a lot of time in realspace in microgravity. In Transition Space, the drive field allowed for artificial gravity, but we’d discovered no such luxury for use in our own reality and having a section of the ship that could be rotated on a hub for centripetal gravity prevented bone loss, muscle atrophy and the general litany of misery that zero-g caused in a human body. They weren’t generally present in military ships because they required a lot of fragile machinery that could be damaged easily in combat just by violent maneuvering, not even mentioning that they were difficult to armor.
The most prepossessing feature of the ship, though, was her armament. Gatling laser turrets sprouted from every nook and cranny of the hull, as if some Fleet quartermaster had found themselves with a huge surplus of the things and needed to cram them all into one ship to get rid of them. They were just a side-show to the main events, the two weapons running the length of the ship from the habitation drum forward. The laser emitter was huge, the size of the weapons I’d seen on Tahni destroyers, while the railgun was something I had never seen before on a cruiser. Commonwealth ships didn’t tend to use them because the Corporate Council and the government bureaucrats in their pocket weren’t fond of sending potential navigation hazards like huge tungsten slugs careening through friendly systems at thousands of meters per second.
“Wow,” Vicky murmured, squeezing closer to me in her acceleration couch to get a better look at the forward screens.
“She’s something, all right,” Top agreed. “Neither fish nor fowl, nor good red meat if you ask the captain. But she suits our mission.”
The hangar bay was just as oddly out of place as everything else about the Orion, large enough to cram three full-size drop-ships into it along with two assault shuttles. Right now, the bay was empty except for us, which told me we’d been the first to return. I hoped the others were still patrolling to make sure they’d taken care of the last of the Skrela, but I was saving my questions until we boarded.
The docking bay and procedures were military standard that I’d gotten used to during the war but the uniforms that greeted us when we squeezed through the personnel lock weren’t Fleet blue. Instead, they were wearing Intelligence black. I’d seen one or two Intelligence officers during the war, but never a whole crew of them and I’d been glad of that since most of the black-hats I’d met were assholes. I knew they were supposed to have changed since General Antonin ‘Bulldog’ Murdock had taken over after the war, but they’d have to prove it to me.
“Sgt. Leroux,” Top snapped, hesitating in the hatchway of the personnel lock, “get my Vigilante and the two surplus suits taken into the maintenance bay and get them fixed up.”
The other Drop-Troopers would be walking their suits out of the cargo lock, but I guessed we had other priorities, or at least the Intelligence officer waiting for us just outside the lock seemed to think so. You can’t really fidget in zero gravity, but he was doing his best, his jowly, doughy face screwed up with impatience.
“Sgt.-Major Campbell,” he said, nearly stepping on Top’s orders to her subordinate, “Major Kyari, Colonel Hachette wants to see you in the Ops Center ASAP.”
“That’s why we’re here, Captain,” Ogbah assured him, and I wondered who Major Kyari was until I had the blinding flash of insight that a Fleet Intelligence undercover agent might not use his real name, and Ogbah was Kyari. “Do me a favor and get Sgt. Cunningham transferred to the medical bay. He’s in the auto-doc already so don’t do anything stupid and try to take him out, just take the whole damned rack, nanite tanks and all, down to the med bay. You copy?”
“Yes, sir, I’ll see to it.”
Ogbah, or Kyari, or whatever his name was, was apparently a big deal. And given what he’d done for us down on Bathala, I guess he deserved to be.
“This way, you two,” Top said, waving for us to follow.
The crew looked busy, which spaceship crews are known to be good at, since someone who doesn’t look busy will likely be given something to do by prowling Chief Petty Officers, though in this case, I wasn’t sure if they had CPO’s, since Fleet Intelligence used Marine ranks. Either way, busy or just faking it, they got out of our way, maybe from Ogbah’s rank or maybe from Top’s.
I supposed I should stop calling her Top since she was a Sgt-Major now, but it had become her identity in my head over a space of nearly seven years and it wouldn’t be shed so easy. She moved in microgravity with the ease of a lifelong spacer, which I guess she was, since most Marines spent more time on starships than they did planets, and I struggled to keep up. I’d spent a good bit of the last few weeks on a starship, but the Yantar was miniscule by comparison with the Orion, and I was out of practice.
Thankfully, we proceeded straight to the habitation drum, which, after an awkward insertion through a slowly-moving hatchway, down a ladder with the apparent gravity increasing every rung, deposited us in a fair approximation of Earth-normal. The ship was clean, neat, tightly-run, everything the Yantar was not, and sneaking a peek at ranks, I got the impression they were inflated from the normal complement of a vessel this size. This was something special, an operation that had siphoned off high-ranking, experienced officers and NCOs and stuck them all on the same assignment.
When we reached the Operations Center, a large compartment that turned out to be something of an auxiliary bridge except located in the habitation drum and used when the ship wasn’t actually under way, I wasn’t surprised to see that the officer waiting for us was a full-bird colonel.
He was a tall man, I could see that even though he was leaning over a holographic projection, staring down into an active map of Bathala City like some Greek god looking down from Mount Olympus. He had the features of the lower class, of someone born naturally, their genes not tinkered with by rich parents for engineered perfection, and I judged he was from one of the colony worlds just from a gut feeling, by the way he carried himself.
He rose to meet us as we entered the room, hands clasped behind his back, his dark eyes regarding us evenly, any judgements he’d made of us hidden behind a poker face.
“Sgt-Major,” he said, nodding to Top. “Major. Textbook operation down there. Well done. Captain Solano just reported from the mop-up and he’s one hundred percent certain they’ve killed the last of the Skrela.”
“I’m not sure what we did down there was covered in any textbooks, sir,” Top said. “But I’d say my boys and girls handled it about as well as I could have expected. But a lot of that was thanks to these two.” She waved at Vicky and me.
“Lt. Alvarez,” Hachette said, nodding to us in greeting. “Lt. Sandoval. I’m Marcus Hachette, Fleet Intelligence. I’ve audited your service records from the war. Very impressive stuff. Lt. Alvarez, I’m rather amazed you didn’t receive the Medal of Valor for Brigantia.”
“The Resistance did the heavy lifting,” I told him, not wanting to discuss it at the moment.
“This time it seems that the two of you and, of course, Sgt. Cunningham did the hard part. Is he going to recover?” The last asked of Ogbah.
“Oh, yeah.” The undercover agent shrugged as if it was a small thing. “I mean, the worst of the burns will have healed up in a few days according to the readout on the machine. The hard part is going to be his leg, but we have the medical facilities on board to put together a new one for him within a week or two. I mean, we can clone the flesh and bone, but the ligaments and tendons will be a byomer blend and the nerves will be replaced by superconductive fibers tied into a headcomp, but it’ll function and feel just like his old leg, except the bones will be harder to break.” He grinned at Vicky and me. “They really can do some remarkable shit nowadays. I remember when your only choice if you got hurt that bad was cybernetics.”
“You can?” I asked, staring at him with new eyes. “How old are you?”
“Older than he looks,” Top assured me. And since she was over two hundred, I decided to drop the subject.
“I have some things I’d like to tell you,” Hachette said, with a firm tone that said he was retaking control of the conversation and no one should think about interrupting him again. He paced across the compartment, his eyes never leaving us. “Ideally, we would have waited for Sgt. Cunningham to be here, since he’s intimately involved in this situation, but we lack the time for that. Decisions have to be made now, and you have to make them.”
His gaze shifted from us to the rest of the crew in the compartment and his jaw worked as if he was chewing on something.
“Listen up!” he barked and every head turned to face him immediately, as if there were no question who was in command of this operation. “Transfer all functions to the primary bridge and clear the compartment.”
There were a few curious frowns, but none of them hesitated, a few staying to accomplish his last order and then hurrying out to join the others heading out the hatchway. I thought maybe they’d just stand outside in the passage, waiting like children trying to listen in on their parents arguing, but they kept going. Coffee break, I supposed.
Once they were gone, Hachette touched a control beside the hatchway and a security shield slid out of the overhead and hissed into place with pneumatic certainty.
“Aren’t they read in on this?” I asked him. “Holy shit, sir, how do you keep something like this from the crew when you got Marines going down there fighting ancient alien creatures hatched from a big space egg?” I spread my hands. “I mean, Marines can’t keep secrets for shit.” I glanced at Top. “Am I right?”
Vicky elbowed me in the bicep and I grunted. I was, I knew, being a little flippant with a man who was fairly high up in an intelligence agency and could probably have me disappeared if he wanted, but I was also coming down from way too much combat crammed into way too short a period of time and the only thing keeping me from collapsing into a pool of gelatin on the deck was snark, and I grabbed onto that lifeline with both hands.
Hachette didn’t seem to take offense, just smiled at the remark.
“They’re read into the big picture,” he acknowledged. “They know about the artifacts, that they’re from a previous civilization, that they’re dangerous and have the potential to spread if we let them. What they don’t know, and I don’t yet have clearance to tell them, is what you and Cunningham were told about their origins by Zan-Thint.”
“So, we’re the security risk.” I nodded. “Understood.”
“Can we start with Zan-Thint?” Vicky asked, glaring at me sidelong. “You know about him, which I guess means the government knows about him, so why haven’t you taken him out yet? Why are you fucking around putting spies in the Corporate Security Force instead of just stomping the shit out of the sore loser?”
“Because he’s damned smart,” Ogbah answered the question for Hachette, not seeming as awed by the colonel as the rest of the crew. “He doesn’t keep his entire force in one place. And unless we know we’re hitting the base where he keeps the last artifact, if we take out one of his outposts, he might just take that thing straight into Commonwealth space and hatch it on Eden, or Hermes. We need intelligence first, if you’ll pardon the pun.”
“And that’s where you come in,” Hachette told us. “If you’re willing.”
“Willing to do what?” Vicky asked, squinting at the man.
“We’ve brought you here to offer you a job,” Top explained, arms crossed. She wasn’t exactly grinning, but it looked as if she wanted to. “A government job. We want you to work for us. We want you back in the Corps.”
“Detached duty to Fleet Intelligence,” Hachette added. “But you’d be paid retroactively for the whole time since you resigned your commissions. And you wouldn’t be required to repay your separation bonuses.”
“Shit,” she moaned, rubbing at her eyes. “The last time someone offered us a job, we wound up here.”
I was wired and exhausted and I hurt, despite the painkiller the corpsman had given me on the way up, and that’s the only excuse I had for things not clicking earlier. But at Vicky’s words, something seemed to snap inside my brain and things that had been fuzzy abruptly came into sharp clarity.
“Something’s wrong here,” I said, holding up a hand as if to pause the conversation. Vicky was staring at me, but I hesitated, trying to bring the thoughts that seemed so clear now into an argument. “Okay, Wade was working for you guys as a double-agent in the CSF. He comes to Hausos following Zan-Thint. That’s a hell of a coincidence, but I could buy just one like that. Shit happens. And then there’s a fucking Skrela artifact on Hausos. Okay, maybe.” I shrugged. “After all, there had to be a reason for Zan-Thint coming to Hausos in the first place. But then you.”
I pointed at Top. It was something I never would have done even as an officer, but I was a civilian now and a fairly strung-out civilian at that.
“You being here, too. That’s too big of a coincidence. The Skipper told me, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.” I looked between her and Hachette. “What the fuck does that make this?”
Top shook her head and I thought she was about to berate me for turning into a typical backwoods agro-colonist, sitting on my porch at night, getting drunk and swallowing every bullshit conspiracy theory that came down the pike. But when she spoke, it was to Hachette.
“I told you he was a bright one, sir.”
“Wait a damned minute,” Vicky said, scowling. “You mean, he’s right?”
“You two didn’t originally apply to emigrate to Hausos, did you?” Ogbah asked, but it wasn’t really a question.
“No,” Vicky said, answering it anyway. “We were trying to get a land grant on Demeter, but they were full.”
“No, they weren’t,” I said with absolute certainty. “Someone wanted us on Hausos.”
“Not Hausos specifically,” Top corrected me. “But that’s more Major Kyari’s area of expertise.”
“We knew there was some reason those worlds were off limits to Tahni colonization,” the man I’d know as Ogbah explained, “and while we hadn’t heard the story about the Skrela, we had a sense there might be something…interesting on those planets. The decision was made at the highest levels to try to steer military veterans to those worlds, hoping they would be more likely to report anything out of the ordinary.” A darkness passed over his expression. “Unfortunately, some of the highest levels of our government are in the pocket of the Corporate Council, and they heard the same rumors we did. Only their first thought was that if there was something out here, maybe Predecessor technology, they wanted to be the ones to find it.”
“They spread bribes, donations, and influence as far as they could,” Hachette took up the story. “And they got the CSF installed as the official law-enforcement arm for those colonies, so they could make sure they’d get any reports before the military did.”
“Which was why you recruited Wade,” Vicky assumed.
