Lazarus Rising Page 3

  "Remember: no noise, no move, you understand? Be quiet, like death, or you will die." He stood there, looking down on the pitiful pair. "Lady, I'm finished, you hear? I'm putting in for a transfer before that asshole can fire me." He paused. Evidently she didn't care about his personal problems. "Woman, put your trust in God, the protector of orphans and widows."

  Outside, the other two soldiers were waiting. "We got some!" one gushed. "They were hiding back in there! We cut them up like sausages!" He began to laugh in a high-pitched cackle.

  "We lit them up," the other added. "Swordie, we saw flashes from your cave and tried to get you on the horn. You must've got some too, huh?"

  "You bet," Raipur answered. "Let's go back and tell the acolyte. We're all done up here."

  Hours later the woman removed the ground sheet the soldier had given her. Dimly, the light of day illuminated the cave entrance far from where she lay hidden. There was no sound save the steady dripping of water. Were the killers gone? Wrapping the ground sheet about her like a cloak, she gathered up her child and the sundry pack and stumbled toward the light. Her name was Emwana Haramu, and her child, a boy, was named Chisi.

  Chapter 3

  Interstellar communications were slow. Messages couldn't travel any faster than a starship or drone traveled through Beam Space—some six and a fraction light-years per day. When a message sent via starship went from the point of origin of a message to the message's destination, it didn't necessarily travel in a straight line. The message might travel on several ships before it got where it was going, and could take a year or more to get there. If no starship routing was available in reasonable time, or the message was time sensitive, it was sent by drone—if a drone was available and the cost justifiable. The Confederation Diplomatic Service, the military, and the Bureau of Human Habitability Exploration and Investigation, and planetary governments, along with the larger interstellar corporations, were generally the only entities that used drones for interstellar communication.

  Second Associate Deputy Director for State Affairs Lumrhanda Ronstedt knew this when he overstepped his authority a skosh by stamping a request for Marines from the Confederation Ambassador to the Kingdom of Yahweh and His Saints and Their Apostles "Approved, Office of the President." After queuing it via fast channel for the offices of the Combined Chiefs of Staff—he hadn't been prepared to exceed his authority far enough to queue it "urgent"—he made an entry in his tickler and forgot about the matter.

  Ronstedt did such a good job of forgetting that he had no idea why his tickler saw fit to remind of it nearly a year later, when the first report came in from the Marines dispatched to Kingdom. He looked at the header, saw that the message was from the Commander, 34th FIST deployed to the Kingdom of Yahweh and His Saints and Their Apostles. He recognized the name of the planet, of course—the history of the lesser human worlds was a hobby of his—but had no idea what a Marine FIST was doing there. Being a methodical person who disliked going into anything without as much background information as possible—except when it suited his fancy to see what foolishness humanity was up to next—he went back to his tickler to see if he'd put any notes in it to clue him as to what this was about.

  There were notes, and bing! he remembered. An "urgent" dispatch had come from Friendly Credence, a dead-end diplomat with no experience beyond diplomatic circles, who was Confederation ambassador to Kingdom. Credence had put in a request for Marines to put down a peasant revolt. Absurdly enough, the ambassador had claimed the peasants were armed with weapons more powerful than anything in the arsenal of the Kingdom army. Even more absurdly, he claimed—well, "hinted" might be the better word—that the revolting peasants were actually an alien invasion! Nonsense! Everybody knew H. sapiens was the only sentience in the known universe. Ronstedt made a quick check in The Atlas of the Populated and Explored Planets of Human Space, Nineteenth Edition, and saw that Credence had been replaced by Jayben Spears. He looked up Spears in the Blue Line of Ambassadors, Ministers, and Consuls, puzzled for a few moments over Spears's checkered career, and concluded he was either an incompetent or a troublemaker who'd been shunted aside to a nowhere backwater to get him out of the hair of his betters.

  This should be interesting, he thought. He smiled and settled back to read the dispatch, despite the fact that it was classified "Ultra Secret, Need to Know" and he wasn't cleared to have the need. He was confident he would get a few chuckles out of the human follies he would read about in the dispatch.

  A paragraph into it, his smile was gone. He began swallowing and massaging his suddenly constricted throat. Two paragraphs in, he used a tissue to pat his suddenly damp forehead. A paragraph later a bead of perspiration actually did pop out on his forehead. By the time he finished reading the three pages, sweat was dripping from his brow and flowing from his armpits, his eyes were wide and his pupils dilated, he was mildly hyperventilating, and his heart rate was elevated.

  There was nothing remotely amusing in the dispatch. There was an alien invasion on Kingdom, and the Marines had suffered heavy casualties and were hard pressed to hold.

  Ronstedt was afraid. Had he routed Ambassador Credence's original request for Marines to the analysts in the Office of Senior Military Advisers to the President, as he properly should have, they would have sent an investigation team to Kingdom to determine the degree of need. Given an actual alien invasion, the Confederation would have assembled a major force to deal with it—after sending a diplomatic team to attempt to open communications and bring about a cessation of hostilities in an attempt to avoid military intervention. Instead, an entire Marine FIST was in danger of being wiped out and a human planet completely taken over by a previously unknown alien sentience.

  Because of him.

  The unpreparedness on the part of the Marines was completely his fault. Because he wanted to privately enjoy a minor amusement. It wouldn't take much investigation to track the routing of the presidential authorization to dispatch Marines back to him. Then where would Second Associate Deputy Director for State Affairs Lumrhanda Ronstedt be? At the very least, a letter of reprimand would be put in his file and he might never be promoted to First Associate Deputy Director for State Affairs. He could even be demoted! Why, he could be dismissed! If someone high enough decided a scapegoat was needed, civil—or even criminal—charges could be brought against him!

  Lumrhanda Ronstedt was afraid, he was very afraid.

  He would have prayed that nobody ever undertook an investigation of the routing of the message that sent 34th FIST to Kingdom, that nobody ever discovered that he'd exceeded his authority in the initial authorization to deploy Marines without more information than was contained in the initial ambassadorial request. But though human communities on far-flung worlds worshiped a variety of gods, he didn't believe in any of them. And since he didn't believe in any of those gods, he suspected none of them—if any of them did indeed exist—believed in him either, so praying was out of the question. Instead, he merely hoped nobody would look and find him.

  The Marines of 34th and 26th FISTs were unhappy—in their spare moments when they weren't outright angry. They were Marines, for Cthulusake, not squids! When they were traveling back to home base after a deployment, especially a major campaign like the one they'd just been on, they were supposed to spend their time cleaning and maintaining their uniforms and gear, and filling out "Replacement of Uniform and Gear" chits. Mostly, though, they were supposed to be healing their wounds, resting, eating, and exercising to regain their strength. There was supposed to be a lot of slack on the voyage back after a deployment.

  So why were they spending most of their time polishing brightwork, waxing wood, and scraping away imaginary crud and corruption from the decks of passageways and troop compartments? Why were they painting bulkheads and overheads that didn't need painting? Why were they working under bosuns mates, stripping down and reassembling everything in the troop compartments? Why were they doing all that and everything else that was properly squi
d work?

  Oh, the shame of it! Marines working under the supervision of squids!

  And here they'd all thought Brigadier Sturgeon was such a good commander. If he was as good as they'd thought, he'd go straight to that squid commodore, tell him Marines weren't a ship's maintenance crew, and make him stop misusing Marines!

  Corporal Claypoole put down the stripper he'd been using to clean away the thin layer of floor wax that had accumulated where the deck and bulkhead of a passageway joined—he'd just reached the airtight hatch that marked the end of the area assigned to him. Pushing himself up from all fours to sit back on his ankles, he clamped his hands over his kidneys and groaned as he twisted the kinks out of his spine. Then he leaned forward onto his hands again and levered himself up to shake the kinks out of his hips and legs. It took some effort, but he managed to ignore the quietly snickering squids who briskly walked past as he looked back at the twenty meter stretch of passageway he'd just scraped, both sides, and decided it was good enough—as if it wasn't good enough before he started. If he didn't ignore the snickering squids, he'd be obligated to do something about their snickering. He was a corporal, he wasn't supposed to do scutwork, he was supposed to supervise scutwork. And all those snickering squids were prime candidates for doing scutwork. Which would just get him in trouble with the ship's command—Sergeant Linsman had made that perfectly clear.

  So instead of putting the snickering squids to work doing what was properly their work anyway, he ignored them and quickly used the suction hose to clean up the... the... Well, there might be something on the deck after all the stripping he'd just done. That finished, he started to bend over to pick up the scraper, thought better of further tormenting his back, and squatted to pick it up. Standing again, he began to step through the hatch to make his way to Company L's mess for a drink and some rest. Hey, the squid who put him to work told him when he got the job done he was free.

  "You missed a spot, Marine."

  The words brought him up, rigid. He knew that voice and hated it. Slowly, he turned around and glared at Bosun's Mate First Giltherr. Giltherr looked back with an evil smirk.

  "What did I miss?" Claypoole snarled.

  "Right there." Giltherr pointed.

  Claypoole clomped stiff-legged to him and looked. "I didn't miss anything. There's nothing there to strip."

  Giltherr shook his head. "It's a good thing they give you jarheads blasters instead of masers," he said. "You can't see well enough to hit a man at fifty meters with a maser. Now do it again. This whole section of passageway. If you missed that spot, I'm sure you missed more."

  Claypoole glared at Giltherr again. He wanted to tell the squid to shove it, there wasn't anything to strip, and then help him shove it because the squid was probably too damn dumb to be able to find his own ass with both hands. But the squid was a first class, the navy equivalent of a staff sergeant, and technically outranked a corporal. As if any squid could outrank a Marine!

  Snarling, he twisted past Giltherr to the far end of the passageway and dropped back to all fours to strip away once more at something that didn't need any stripping.

  Staff Sergeant Hyakowa's going to hear about this, he promised himself. I'm going to take this all the way to the brigadier if I have to! It's time somebody told him what's happening. But he stripped the entire section of passageway, all twenty meters on both sides, and the ends. Again.

  Brigadier Sturgeon, of course, didn't need to be told what was happening—after all, the "squid work" the Marines were doing had been his idea. He not only knew what his Marines were doing, he knew what they thought about it—the same thing he'd thought about it a long time ago when he was a junior enlisted man and his FIST commander made a similar arrangement with the captain of the ship on which they were returning to Camp Smutter on the curiously named Falala at the end of a particularly brutal campaign. Thirteenth FIST had lost a lot of Marines—he'd lost a couple of friends himself—and the Marines were dwelling on it. Morale was sinking fast and there was serious risk that 13th FIST would wind up irreparably combat-ineffective. Almost as soon as they were assigned to the heavy duty make-work on the ship the dwelling on injury and loss was turned into anger over what they perceived—rightly, he had to admit—as a misuse of Marines. It was hard, physically and mentally, to do that work. But it accomplished what it was meant to—it gave their bruised and bloodied psyches relief, let them put some distance between their injuries and losses, and allowed their psyches to begin to scab over.

  He could see the same thing happening in his Marines. When he went through the troop areas, as he did at least twice a day, everything was more shipshape than it had been following liftoff from Society 362 and until the make-work began. The Marines were standing more erect, they looked more determined, and hardly any of them appeared depressed. Angry, most certainly, but not depressed. That was all he asked for. A rueful smile flickered across his face and he wondered how long it would take for his Marines to figure out he was behind the "squid work" they were doing and transfer their anger to him.

  Well, nobody ever said a commander had to be loved by his troops.

  Corporal Claypoole wasn't the only Marine in third platoon's second squad who promised himself he was going to take the matter up with Staff Sergeant Hyakowa. He was the second-to-last man to make it back to the squad's compartment, and had to get in line behind Corporals Kerr and Chan and then elbow Lance Corporal MacIlargie out of his way—they were already chewing on Sergeant Linsman, the squad leader, about the squid work they were doing and demanding to see the platoon sergeant.

  Claypoole warily looked at Lance Corporal Schultz. Surely Schultz would have blood in his eyes about what they were doing. But no, Schultz was calmly lying back on his rack, plugged into the ship's library, reading who knew what, seemingly oblivious to the indignity of the squid work he'd spent his day at. The tip of Claypoole's tongue peeked from between his lips as he considered Schultz's uncharacteristically mild behavior. It worried him. He sidled a half step away from Schultz, a half step being as far as he could go in the cramped confines of the squad compartment, and turned his attention to the squad leader and the two fire team leaders already chewing on him.

  "I'm not putting up with any more of this shit!" a loud voice declaimed from the entrance to the compartment. Everybody—except Schultz—looked at the voice in surprise. Not in surprise at the words, surprise at the speaker. It was Corporal Doyle. Corporal Doyle hadn't been heard to raise his voice since he'd come back from his premature transfer out of 34th FIST when Company L's first sergeant, Top Myer, wanted to court-martial him for insubordination following the Avionia deployment. Before the premature transfer, he'd been the company's chief clerk; after it, he filled a PFC slot in third platoon. And he'd never been known to raise his voice in the face of a blaster squad.

  "What's your problem, Doyle?" Linsman snapped.

  "I just spent the day cleaning heads for the damn squids, that's what!" Doyle snapped back. "I left those heads clean enough to eat off. They're probably cleaner than the squids' galleys!"

  "I doubt it," Kerr grumbled. "Chan and I spent the day cleaning their galleys."

  "See! They're treating us like galley slaves," Doyle declared, unaware of the pun. "I'm surprised they don't have us painting this scow!"

  Wordlessly, Linsman pushed back a sleeve and held up his arm to show Doyle the drops of paint spattered on the back of his hand and wrist.

  Doyle's eyes popped wide. "You too?" he squeaked. "They've got a squad leader doing squid work?"

  Linsman nodded. "Rabbit and Hound too," he said, naming the first- and gun-squad leaders. "I'm not sure, but I think the platoon sergeants were doing squid work in the chiefs' quarters and officer country."

  There were gasps, and everybody—except Schultz—looked at their squad leader, horrified at the very thought of platoon sergeants doing menial labor.

  There was a sudden, albeit restricted, surge of movement away from Schultz when everyone simultaneou
sly realized he hadn't reacted. Surely, Schultz was about to go on a rampage, and nobody wanted to be standing in his path when he launched himself. But, no. Schultz was totally immersed in his reading.

  "Then it won't do us much good to go to Staff Sergeant Hyakowa, will it?" Chan asked.

  Linsman shook his head. "I don't believe so, no."

  "We have to request mast straight to the brigadier," Claypoole said. Every Marine, regardless of rank, had the right to "request mast"—speak to the commander at whatever level, all the way up to the commandant. He had to go through the chain of command to do it, and every level of command along the way would try to resolve the problem and talk him out of going higher—but he had the right, and didn't have to discuss his problem with any lower level on the chain of command.

  Linsman looked at him coldly. "Do you really think the brigadier doesn't know what's going on with his FIST?"

  Claypoole wasn't going to give up that easily. "Then we request mast to the next higher command."

  "That's Fifth Marine Expeditionary Force," Linsman said calmly. "By the time any of us can get to Fifth MEF headquarters, the FIST will have been back at Camp Ellis for weeks, maybe months, and the problem will be over. Do you think Fifth MEF will bother to make the navy issue an apology and promise not to do it again? Would you believe the navy if they did promise?"

  "Promise not to do it again until the next time," Kerr added, which elicited some weak laughter.

  "But we've got to do something," Claypoole insisted. "I mean we can't just lay back and—"

  "Found it," Schultz interrupted. Everyone shut up and looked at him as he rolled to a sitting position. He looked around, holding his reader where he could easily refer to it as he spoke to his squad mates. Satisfied that he had everyone's attention, he said:

  "Third Silvasian War?" The question, sparsely worded in Schultz's normal conversational manner, was mostly rhetorical. Not a lot of Marines had fought in the Silvasian wars, but some of them were still around, and their exploits were legendary in the Corps.