First To Fight Read online

  "See if you can raise anybody," Bass said. When he left the platoon, he had turned off the all-hands channel so he could concentrate on finding a way up the ridge. Now he flipped it back on while LeFarge set up the UPUD and started talking into it. But the steep-sided valley wound from side to side, and they had taken a couple of turns following it—there was too much rock between him and the platoon for clear communications. Bass heard enough to know that two or three more Marines were down and that only a few of the men in the open had managed to get back and join the fight. Most of the others, including the gun team, were still pinned in the open, unable to engage the bandits. He cursed silently as he fought his rising anger and frustration.

  "I've got Battalion!" LeFarge exclaimed.

  Bass shook his head. Battalion headquarters was more than a hundred kilometers away. How could they raise them but not get the company command unit, which was just a ridge or two away? "Let me talk to them."

  LeFarge said something into the UPUD and handed it to him.

  "Red Roof, this is Purple Rover Bravo Five," Bass said into the UPUD, giving the battalion call sign and identifying himself as the senior enlisted man of a group split off from Company I. "We are at," he rattled off their map coordinates, "in contact with more than two-zero-zero bandits. Bandits are wearing chameleons and have blasters. We are taking heavy casualties. We need air support. Over."

  "Purple Rover Bravo Five, that is not where your UPUD says you are."

  "Red Roof, UPUD malfunctioning. Visual confirms our location. Over."

  "Ay, Pancho, you think you're smart, don't you?" the battalion communications man said, and laughed. "You're not going to lure us into a trap that easily."

  Bass's jaws clenched. The battalion comm man thought he was a bandit who'd managed to break into the net and was trying to get a mission launched to lead some of the FIST's aircraft into an antiaircraft missile ambush. "Negative on that shit, Red Roof!" Bass shouted.

  There was a slight pause and the battalion communications man said, "Hey, Pancho, use proper radio procedure."

  Bass drew in his breath sharply and cut off a withering response. "Red Roof, this is Purple Rover Bravo Five. I say again, this is Purple Rover Bravo Five. Purple Rover Bravo is at coordinates given and needs help now. Please provide. Over."

  "I'll pass it up, Pancho. Red Roof out."

  "Use the voice identifier, Red Roof. That'll confirm my ID," Bass said, but there was no response. The battalion comm man wasn't listening anymore.

  LeFarge swallowed. If they didn't get help soon, the Bravo unit could be wiped out. "It's routine to use the voice-recognition identifier on all suspect calls," Bass said in a reassuring voice. "Let's go back and hold on until the air gets here." But he didn't feel as confident as he sounded.

  "We'll hold out, that's all," Procescu said when Bass reported his contact with battalion. "We're hitting them harder than they're hitting us. Pancho'll probably cut and run before air can get here anyway."

  Bass flipped down his goggles and scanned the slope. Working from the ends toward the middle, the Marines had slagged nearly half of it. But bandits in the unslagged rock had re-formed onto a line facing the Marines, and the line's lower end was on the bottom of the gorge, not higher on the slope where the Marines were concentrating their fire. He also saw that the far end of the ambush hadn't been thoroughly slagged; many targets were still fighting back. He wasn't as sure as Procescu that the bandits would run. There were probably more than 150 of them still in the fight, maybe closer to two hundred.

  Bass raised his goggles to study the terrain and the eerie modern infantry battle with his naked eyes. Around him, effectively invisible men howled insults and tiny bits of star-stuff at each other, and he heard the snap of superconducting capacitors discharging, the louder cracks of ancient rock being split at sun-heat, the hiss of solid stone turning briefly liquid from the plasma bolts. But most of his mind was occupied with the tactical aspects of what he was looking at.

  If the bandits extended their line across the gorge, they would be in position to assault the Marines; the Marines would have too many individual targets and they could be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. While Bass examined the ground the bandits would have to cross if they did assault, he saw gray flicker against the darker rock in the distance, moving to the left—the bandits were getting on line for an assault! He scuttled over to Procescu.

  "Do you see what they're doing?"

  The lieutenant nodded. "They're brave men, if they're going to stand up and charge," he said. "Or maybe they don't realize we can see them," Procescu added.

  jvianne:

  "That's where Pancho is. Do him before he mingles with my positions in the trees."

  "Too late for that, Purple Rover. Either you've got him so badly outnumbered you don't need us, or he's already in your position."

  The bandits were indeed among them. The thud of a running foot hit the ground near where Bass lay. He looked up into a wild-eyed face above an out-of-focus area of green and brown. A blaster in the unclear area was pointing at him. He rolled toward the bandit as the heat of a plasma bolt passed over him. He rolled into the bandit's legs, knocking him over, then groped with one hand for the enemy soldier while his other reached for his combat knife. The two struggled briefly—the bandit tried to bring his weapon to bear, but Bass's knife proved to be better for infighting, and red spread freely over the bandit's chameleons. Bass rolled away to retrieve his blaster as the dead man's entire uniform turned red, as it mimicked the color of his blood.

  "How close to the trees can you flame without scorching us?" Procescu said into the UPUD. Bass realized the lieutenant hadn't been aware of the hand-to-hand fight he'd just concluded only a few meters away. "That's too far away to do any good," Procescu said after a pause. "Bring it in closer." He listened, then said, "The only people standing are Panchos. With any luck the heat'll pass over us and hit them. Do it now."

  A squad of bandits was directly in front of them. Bass gritted his teeth as he fired at the enemy.

  "Bring it in closer!" Procescu shouted into the UPUD. Bass knew what that meant—they were going to be crisped by their own fire. Either way, from bandit fire or from their own Raptors, they were dead. At least it'd be fast, and they'd take most of the bandits with them.

  Suddenly the screams of diving turbojets smothered all other sounds and briefly stunned the combatants. Bass flicked on the all-hands channel. "Everybody down, now!" he ordered.

  "Get as flat as you can," Procescu added, "get behind a ridge or a rock. This is going to be close."

  The double-mach-plus Marine Raptors screamed almost straight down from the heavens. When the lead aircraft was still little more than a rapidly growing, shiny speck in the sky, it was stitching a line of plasma bolts from the bottom of the gorge to halfway up the left slope, barely fifty meters from the trees. Just when it looked as if it was going to follow its bolts into the holocaust in the gorge, its forward vernier jets flamed, bouncing it back skyward. Before the lead aircraft finished its maneuver, its wingman twisted to stitch bolts up the right side of the gorge.

  The bolts from the Raptors' cannons were to the bolts of the assaulters what the assaulters were to hand-blasters. Each bolt vaporized whatever it struck, leaving a steaming hole nearly five meters in diameter. Molten rock pooled at the bottom of each crater. Gouts of lava flew everywhere; some landed harmlessly on rock and quickly solidified, some charred trees or set them ablaze, some killed men.

  The wave of heat expelled by the explosions washed across the open and incinerated anyone in its path. The foliage on the nearer trees flashed vapor and the outermost line of trees burst into flame. For twenty-five meters into the trees, anyone standing was hit by a wall of superheated air that seared lungs and peeled off skin. Most of the bandits were in the open or standing in the first twenty-five meters of the tree line. Not all of the Marines were behind something that could deflect the heat wave.

  The stunned survivors picked the
mselves up and took stock. The few bandits who survived were in full flight. But Procescu was dead, as were Lieutenant Kruzhilov and Staff Sergeant Chway and everybody who had been on the right flank with the platoon sergeant and the assaulters. LeFarge was gone—instantly vaporized—and the UPUD lay on the ground, now a thoroughly useless, half-melted chunk of slag. Half the Marines who began the day with the Bravo unit were dead. A quick survey told Bass ten times as many bandits had died in the fight.

  "That's too damn many good Marines died today," Bass said to himself.

  Third platoon's comm man had hidden behind a good-size boulder during the air attack, so both he and his UPUD survived. Bass used it to report the results of their fire mission to Flamer and to request pickup. While awaiting it, he looked at the black box with disgust. If the damn thing had worked right, they would have had air support before the bandits made their assault, and not so many Marines would have died.

  Half an hour later the survivors of Purple Rover Bravo and the corpses of their dead—as much as could be found of them—were aboard hoppers, flying back to Battalion.

  "You what?" Daryl George exclaimed in amazement. "No, no, no-no-no, you can't blame me for your incompetence! No wonder the you-pud didn't operate the way you expected it to. You aren't supposed to separate the satellite units from the company you-pud."

  "Say again?" Bass demanded. His fists clenched and he took a step toward the manufacturer's rep.

  George spoke quickly. "Only the company command unit Universal Positionator Up-Downlink uplinks to the string-of-pearls. The others communicate through it. Once you got a ridgeline between the company headquarters and your Bravo unit, you lost satcomm. It became just a line-of-sight radio. It's in the manual, right there for anyone to see: Appendix F, Annex Four, Section Q, Sub-note Seventeen. All there. It's all right there," he shrilled. "What's wrong with you people? Didn't you read the manual? You would have known that was going to happen when you split groups if you'd read the manual." George emphasized each word, pumping his fist up and down in time to the words. His normally sallow complexion reddened.

  Sergeant Major Tanglefoot saw red but still put out a hand to restrain Bass. There was something more he wanted to know. "How did it give coordinates if it was 'just' a radio?"

  "Through its inertial tracking system," George answered quickly. "I don't understand why it gave the reading it did—it's a very reliable inertial system. Maybe your comm man wasn't maintaining a regular pace. Maybe—"

  Daryl George barely got out his second "Maybe." Bass knew every man in his platoon by name, knew their personal histories. They were more than just faces to him, they were his men. Bass remembered the ashy deposit on the ground that had been LeFarge, who had wanted only one thing out of life: a commission in the Marines. And Bass knew he would have made a good officer. And Lieutenant Procescu. Bass had known him for fourteen years, since the young Procescu had first joined Bass's squad as a PFC. The lieutenant hadn't gotten his head down quickly enough and his brain had been cooked instantly, the skull cracked open like an overboiled egg, brain matter swollen several times its normal size protruding obscenely through cracks in the glaring skull.

  "I told you you'd personally pay if one man was lost because this Mark One didn't work as advertised," Bass cut in, his voice like a blaster bolt. "It didn't work and we lost a good many more than one man because of it."

  It took Sergeant Major Tanglefoot, three first sergeants, and two gunnery sergeants to pull Bass off George. But they'd given him a few seconds to work off his steam on the manufacturer's rep before they'd intervened.

  It ultimately took three operations to fully restore vision in George's left eye, but the doctors declared him fit to be released from the hospital after only a week. Almost a year of intense physical therapy passed before he regained a reasonable degree of use of his right arm, though. His limp didn't last quite that long. And nobody ever notices his oral prosthesis. When the Marine Judge Advocate explained the civil charges that could be brought against him for failing to ensure that the Marines were properly informed of the deficiency inherent in the UPUD Mark I, George decided to drop criminal charges against Bass.

  So Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass wasn't charged with attempted murder, which was precisely what he'd attempted; he was court-martialed for something many in the Confederation Marine Corps considered a much more serious offense: Article 32A(1) (b) of the Confederation Armed Forces Uniform Code of Military Justice, Conduct Unbecoming a Noncommissioned Officer. The court took extenuating circumstances into consideration before delivering its verdict. Gunnery Sergeant Charlie Bass was reduced one grade in rank. Staff Sergeant Charlie Bass was then assigned to duty with the 34th FIST on Thorsfinni's World, a hardship post somewhere out in the nether reaches of Human Space.

  Chapter One

  "What does your middle initial stand for?" the recruiting sergeant asked. "I've got to have your full name."

  From the age of eight, Joseph F. Dean despised the middle name his parents had saddled him with—Finucane, after his maternal grandfather. It was in that ill-starred eighth year of his life, on the first day of his enrollment at the New Rochester School for Gifted Children, that a ten-year-old upperclassman took to chasing him during recesses and after school, boxing his ears and kicking his rump, singing, "Fin-u-can, Fin-u-can, I can kick your new can!" Dean endured the torment as long as he could, and then one day he laid the bully's head open with a field-expedient cosh made from a sock and a piece of concrete he'd found in the street. The next day he was expelled from the prestigious school. Joseph Finucane Dean was not only an intellectually gifted child, but in the art of attack and defense, a precocious one.

  "During your initial interview, Mr. Dean, you did not give your full name," the recruiting sergeant explained.

  "Uh, Finucane, sir."

  "Is that with an E?"

  "Yessir," Dean answered, "terminal E," he emphasized, and then felt embarrassed at maybe sounding too pedantic.

  Joe Dean was sitting in the Confederation Marine Corps recruiting office as the result of a spontaneous decision on his part—especially since he'd always dreamed of joining the army, in the footsteps of his late father, who had been a highly decorated veteran of the First Silvasian War. He had lived and breathed army and could hardly wait until he finished college to enlist.

  On a cold and blustery day, a too-familiar kind of day in the bleak and inhospitable city called New Rochester by its wearily cynical inhabitants, Joe Dean had felt good for a change. He walked lightly through the portals of the Federal Building and slipped into one of the interview booths reserved for the army recruiting office. Immediately, a computerized display activated and he found himself staring into the face of a young woman dressed in a pale green army uniform. She was very pretty, and he wondered idly if it was the image of the recruiter herself or one generated in cyberspace.

  "My name is Sergeant Sewah Fernandez-Dukes of the Confederation Army Force," the image on the screen announced. "May I have your full name?" Dean felt a twinge of doubt, almost dismay. Somehow, the beautiful woman with the alluring voice just didn't fit his idea of what it was he wanted to be if he donned a uniform. "Uh, yes, ma'am: Joseph F—"

  "Gawdamn, Bulldog, I was so hungry I could've eaten the north end of a southbound kwangduk!" a powerful voice announced from the corridor at just that moment. Joe Dean stuck his head out of the booth and instantly the image of Sergeant Fernandez-Dukes disappeared from the screen. Two men, one short and squat and the other, the one who had just spoken, big—Dean estimated his height at about six-four and guessed he must weigh fully 250 pounds—were passing by. Both were dressed in impeccably tailored uniforms, bloodred tunic with a stock collar over navy-blue trousers. The bigger man's sleeves were adorned by huge gold chevrons worn points up with rockers underneath, so many Dean couldn't remember moments later how many there were. Other stripes marched up from the cuff in diagonal slashes to meet the lowermost rocker of the man's rank chevron. A bloodred s
tripe slashed down the outside seam of the big man's trouser leg, and a bronze collar device—an eagle rampant on a globe floating on a river of stars, a ribbon scroll in its beak—glinted powerfully in the light. Tucked under the big man's right arm, the one closer to Dean, was a plain ten-inch stick of black ebony capped by the same eagle device. He carried the stick wedged tightly in his armpit, his right hand grasping the stick just below the eagle's head.

  The other man was short and squat with broad shoulders and thick arms on a short torso mounted on short, bow legs. He walked bent forward aggressively, his head thrust out while his arms pumped energetically back and forth, his hands balled into huge fists. Dean could see he talked out of one side of his mouth, and when he laughed, it sounded like a dog's rank! rark! rark!

  The two men passed on down the corridor, talking and laughing loudly, their footfalls echoing sharply on the marble floor. They disappeared through a door marked MARINES.

  Slowly, Joe Dean got up and followed them. Later, when he thought about that moment, it seemed as if scales had fallen from his eyes and everything he'd ever learned about the army, and all his dreams of joining it, just floated right out of his head. A man mesmerized, he drifted down the hallway past a long row of booths. Some were filled with young men and women earnestly talking to the computerized recruiters. He didn't bother to look to see which services they were talking to. The three booths at the end marked MARINES were empty. Joseph Finucane Dean slipped quietly into the first one.

  "Gotta get all these details straight," Master Sergeant Riley-Kwami said, leaning back in his chair. He was the bigger of the two men Dean had seen in the hallway. From his neck hung a gold pendant on a midnight-blue ribbon speckled with silver diamonds, just like the one Dean's father had won—except the Marine's pendant bore the face of what looked like a Norse god instead of the Greek goddess on his father's. He could not help staring at the decoration. The recruiter was being patient with Dean because the scores on Dean's intelligence tests were among the highest he had seen since going on recruiting duty two years earlier.