Starfist: Kingdom's Swords Read online

  Myer looked through the entry door and caught Humphrey’s nod. “COMP-ney, a-ten-HUT!” he roared.

  There was a cacophony of scraping chairs, shuffling and clicking boot heels as the Marines jumped to their feet and snapped to attention.

  Lieutenant Humphrey strode into the classroom, followed by the platoon commanders, who peeled off and took station next to their platoon sergeants.

  “As you were!” Humphrey called when he was halfway down the aisle between the chairs. The men relaxed from their stiff postures but remained standing under the glares from Top Myer and Gunny Thatcher.

  Humphrey reached the stage and stood at the lectern, looking out at the Marines for a moment. It wasn’t formally necessary for him to make the appearance, and he had nothing to say that Myer and Thatcher wouldn’t, but almost none of the men had known a commander other than Captain Conorado during the time they’d been with Company L. He needed to get them accustomed to seeing him as the commander until Conorado returned or another captain replaced him.

  “Sit,” he ordered.

  When the Marines were seated, he began. “You know we have a mission. You know it’s a civil strife response action. All of you have had training in civil strife response actions, but Company L hasn’t trained in it for quite some time. On Kingdom, Brigadier Sturgeon expects us to function in company-, platoon-, and squad-size actions. Therefore, during the short time we have before we mount out, we will train accordingly. The training will continue as conditions allow while we are in transit. By the time we make planetfall, I expect every man jack in this company to be so well versed in civil strife response actions, he’ll be able to take a squad or larger unit of the Kingdom army and train it into proficiency.”

  Humphrey cracked a smile, knocked it off his face. “Don’t misunderstand, we won’t integrate with the Kingdom army as we have with some other planetary armies. I don’t think the ruling theocracy would allow such contamination of their true believers.” This time he couldn’t keep a wry smile off his face. A few of the Marines got the joke and chuckled. “We won’t be training the Kingdom army, but I expect all of you to achieve that level of expertise. With good fortune, and a few Marines, this mission should be wrapped up in a matter of weeks. We should be back on Thorsfinni’s World in time to undertake training with the flies and mosquitoes of high summer.” That elicited groans from the Marines who had trained at Camp Ellis during the local summer.

  “Now I’ll turn you over to the good graces of First Sergeant Myer and Gunnery Sergeant Thatcher.” He stepped away from the lectern and strode down the aisle to the exit.

  “COMP-ney, a-ten-HUT!” Top Myer barked, and the men snapped to attention. He took station at the lectern and glowered at the men for a moment, then snarled, “Siddown and listen up. You heard the Skipper.” He too would reinforce who was in command during Captain Conorado’s absence. “You’re going to learn, and you’re going to learn well. You will train so hard you’ll be able to do it all in your sleep. You’ll need to be able to do it in your sleep, because even a whole FIST isn’t big enough to deal with a planetwide uprising. Don’t expect to get any sleep while we’re on Kingdom. Everybody’s going to have to do double and triple duty.

  “Now, to get started on this. Gunny.” He nodded to Gunny Thatcher and left the stage to join the platoon sergeants at the rear of the room.

  “There’s something I want to get out of the way immediately,” Thatcher began, “because I don’t want anybody worrying about it instead of paying attention. No nonlethal weapons. We don’t know how the rebels are armed, so we go in with blasters and assault guns fully charged and at the ready.”

  He paused to let the murmurs run their course. On their last mission, the men of Company L had been armed with nonlethal weapons. That had caused quite a bit of upset among the Marines, and might have led to a degree of laxity. Even though they hadn’t suffered any fatalities as a result, there were a few casualties that might have been caused by overconfidence—if their opponent wasn’t dangerous enough to require lethal force, the opponent couldn’t be dangerous enough to harm them.

  “The Rules of Engagement for this mission are still being developed,” Thatcher said when the murmurs had gone on long enough, “but I can tell you what some of them are likely to be. Given the nature of Kingdom, one of the top rules will be no contact with the native population except under clearly prescribed conditions. Here’s one way of interpreting that rule: any of you who believes in a girl in every port, tie a knot in it. You don’t get a girl in this port.” He went on for several more minutes. Most of the probable rules he discussed had to do with restraints on contact with the Kingdomites. Then he got into the training regimen.

  “We’re going to train in small unit ops, platoon and smaller, with heavy emphasis on squad and fire team actions.” He cocked an eyebrow at the squad and fire team leaders, who grinned at the news; the junior NCOs relished the opportunities to act independently. Time to stabilize their excitement, he decided: “Many of you squad leaders and fire team leaders have been on operations before where you functioned as leaders of independent units. There’s a difference in this one.” He paused, satisfied to see the grins slipping. “A probable ROE that I didn’t mention is—no firing until fired upon.” That was met with muted exclamations of disgust. No firing until fired upon sometimes caused casualties. Thatcher smiled inside. “You have to challenge any armed people you come across. These are peasants, not soldiers; you have to give them a chance to surrender.” All the grins were gone; the mission had suddenly become more difficult.

  Thatcher talked a little longer about the training, then dismissed the Marines with, “All right. Make a head call. Even if you don’t need to go, go anyway. It’ll be several hours before you have another chance. Form up behind the barracks in fifteen minutes. Go!”

  There was clattering, shuffling, and shouts as the Marines left the classroom.

  CHAPTER

  * * *

  SIX

  Thirty-fourth FIST began boarding the Amphibious Landing Ship, Force, CNSS Grandar Bay three days after it arrived in orbit around Thorsfinni’s World.

  The Grandar Bay was a Mandalay class ship, modern in all respects, including its berthing and the training spaces for the Marines it carried. Mandalay ships had the same troop-carrying capacity as the Crowe class Amphibious Battle Cruiser, but lacked the Crowe’s planet-busting armament. The integral weaponry of the Mandalay class was purely defensive. Given the generally slight capability for space combat of most planets, and the fact that amphibious landing ships normally traveled in convoy with fighting ships, the class was effectively unarmed.

  The first thing Lance Corporal Schultz did when his weapons and other gear were secured in second squad’s compartment was hook into the Grandar Bay library. The little he’d learned about Kingdom from the resources available on Thorsfinni’s World had only made him more curious about why 34th FIST was assigned to this mission. Neither could he find anything in the very extensive Grandar Bay library to explain why a FIST with a specialized and classified mission would be sent to put down a peasant rebellion. He would have scoffed had anybody suggested to him that routine bureaucratic machinations and ineptitude might be the reason.

  Midway through the second day after the first elements of the FIST launched into orbit to board the Grandar Bay, the last of its supplies were secured in the ship’s holds and the starship eased out of orbit and headed in a direction perpendicular to the planetary plane. Mandalay class ships were fast, and she reached jump point only three days after leaving orbit.

  Klaxons blared throughout the ship. “All hands, now hear this,” a melodious female voice intoned. “All hands, now hear this. All hands not at required duty stations, secure for jump. All hands not at required duty stations, secure for jump. Jump is in zero-five minutes.”

  None of the Marines had required duty stations. They’d already been restricted to their compartments in preparation for the jump into Beamspace. Fi
re team leaders made sure their men were properly strapped into their racks, then strapped themselves in. Squad leaders checked their fire team leaders, and platoon sergeants followed up on the squad leaders.

  Everyone was ready before the computer’s female voice announced, “Jump in one minute. All hands not in required duty stations, secure for jump.”

  Jump into Beamspace was routine for the Marines. Even the greenest Marine, fresh from Boot Camp, had jumped from Space-3 into Beamspace and back no fewer than half a dozen times. Navigation between stars wasn’t a precise science, and on a typical voyage a ship would have to return to Space-3 two or three times to recalculate its course.

  There was a moment of vertigo when the ship’s gravity was turned off, then the female voice counted down the final seconds to jump. “. . . three, two, one, jump.”

  Abruptly, the entire universe turned gray or black or red or purple. It shattered into colors so fragmented they couldn’t be identified. Weight vanished; it wasn’t a floating sensation like null-g had been, but a total absence of weight, as though mass had been turned off. All the weight that ever was, was now, and ever would be, settled onto every individual on the ship. There was no sound, yet there was such a volume of sound it seemed the universe must be ending in the collapse of everything into a primordial speck that instantly exploded in a Big Bang.

  Then the transition from Space-3 into Beamspace was complete. Colors returned to their proper places in the spectrum, sounds resumed normal audibility, and Newtonian mass reigned once more. The ship’s gravity was turned back on.

  “Aargh!” PFC MacIlargie cried out as he unstrapped himself from his rack. “Does anybody ever get used to that?” He lay supine in a top rack.

  Corporal Linsman, his fire team leader, stood up from his middle rack and smacked MacIlargie on the top of his head. MacIlargie yelped indignantly.

  “Nobody ever gets used to it so there’s no point in complaining.” Linsman checked the time. “Who’s for chow?”

  “How can you think of food after that?” MacIlargie said.

  “The galley’s open, that’s how,” Corporal Kerr said, standing up. “Let’s go eat,” he said to his men. “We’ve got time before we hit the classroom.”

  Corporal Doyle shakily hauled himself out of the bottom rack. He looked more than a bit green, but if his fire team leader said “Let’s eat,” he’d get something down and try to keep it there.

  “Later,” Schultz grunted. He had already plugged his reader back into the library jack.

  Everyone but Schultz filed out of the compartment. A couple of them glanced oddly at him, wondering what it was that interested him so much, but none dared disturb the big man by asking.

  One modern convenience of the Grandar Bay was its galley arrangement. The main galley was large enough to accommodate two infantry companies at a time. The FIST’s elements rotated through it three times a day, and each had an hour for each meal—not that any unit had an open hour for dining in its training and study schedule. Two smaller galleys were open around the clock except during the half hour prior to a jump into or out of Beamspace. Those satellite galleys doubled as lounges for Marines who might find themselves with some unexpected leisure time. But once in a while they did.

  “How are you holding up, Dorny?” Corporal Kerr asked when he and Corporal Dornhofer found themselves relaxing over mugs of real coffee.

  “I’m doing fine,” Dornhofer replied. “Why not?”

  “You were almost killed on Avionia. For a little while after you got shot we thought you were dead.”

  Dornhofer laughed. “Yo, Kerr, I understand where you’re coming from. But I wasn’t almost killed the same way you were. I got drilled pretty bad, but it didn’t tear up my insides like what happened to you.”

  “You sure?”

  “Hey, I’m a Marine. Gotta expect to get dinged once in a while.”

  “That was one hell of a ding you got.”

  “Want to compare scars? I’ll bet yours is a whole lot bigger than mine.”

  Kerr grunted. If Dornhofer had a scar, it was bigger than his own. After the doctors reconstructed the inside of his chest, they did just as good a job on the outside; he didn’t have any scars from that wound. No visible scars anyway.

  After four days the Grandar Bay returned to Space-3, got its bearings, and jumped back into Beamspace on a slightly different heading. The Marines continued their civil strife response action training.

  During the downtime at the end of a training day of the second period in Beamspace, Schultz jacked out of the library and announced, “No peasants.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no peasants,’ ” Kerr asked idly without taking his eyes from the novel he was reading.

  “Kingdom. Not a peasant rebellion.”

  “Then what is it?” Kerr kept reading.

  “Don’t know.”

  Kerr grunted and hoped Schultz would drop it. He was just getting into a tricky section of the novel’s plot and it demanded his attention.

  When Schultz didn’t reply immediately, Doyle nervously asked, “What is it, Hammer?”

  Schultz just looked at Doyle. Doyle might have more rank than he did, but he had no experience. Well, not much experience. He knew that Doyle wouldn’t understand if he told him. Schultz jacked back into the ship’s library, not to do more research, but to wall himself off from the other men in the squad so he could spend time thinking.

  Corporal Doyle, former company senior clerk now filling the billet of an infantry PFC, was headed into an unknown danger. He felt a lump of cold in his chest. The lump grew into a bar that fused to the ventral side of his spine and grew toward his sternum. He spent a paralyzed moment wondering whether he could move without shattering, then crawled fully dressed into his rack, pulled the blanket over his shoulders, and hugged himself tightly. He hoped his violent shivering wasn’t visible to the other Marines.

  Doyle’s shivering was visible, but those few who noticed it misinterpreted the movement and thought he should have waited until lights out.

  During the second jump, the Marines were introduced to a new piece of equipment they’d be using on Kingdom. The Grandar Bay didn’t have a space large enough to gather the entire FIST, so each unit assembled in its normal classroom, where the men watched the introduction given by Brigadier Sturgeon and the equipment technician over the ship’s trid system. At first Gunnery Sergeant Bass wondered why Top Myer was watching him instead of the trid projection. But when the presentation started, he forgot all about the first sergeant and concentrated on not erupting in a compartment-mangling fury.

  “What the hell is with those people?” Bass roared when the company’s officers and senior NCOs assembled in the company office after the all-hands briefing. “Who in Fargo is getting paid off?”

  “Now now, Charlie,” Lieutenant Humphrey said placatingly. He patted the air for Bass to lower his voice.

  “Are they getting money, women, are they being blackmailed?” Bass continued in a hardly lower voice. “That’s it! Terminal Dynamics has something on someone high up in procurement and is blackmailing him into buying this piece of shit!”

  “Charlie,” Top Myer said quietly, “calm down.”

  “No I will not calm down! That thing kills Marines!”

  “Gunnery Sergeant!” Myer roared. “You will belay that shit!”

  Bass’s teeth clacked together as he shut his mouth and snapped to attention. His face was so deep a red it verged on purple, and his chest heaved with each deep, fast breath he took.

  Bass’s eruption was caused by the introduction of the Universal Positionator, Up-Downlink, Mark III. The first two UPUD Marks had been a combination radio, geographic position system, and motion detector—one piece of equipment designed to replace three. The Mark III also had the capability of data and detailed mapping reception.

  It had been Bass’s misfortune to field-test the first two versions of the UPUD under combat conditions. The first, on Fiesta de Santiago, had expo
sed a design flaw the manufacturer had glossed over. That flaw had gotten fifty Marines lost and out of communications. More than half of them died before they were able to reopen communications. Over his protests, Bass field-tested the Mark II on Elneal. It turned out to be too sensitive and burned itself out, again leaving Bass and his Marines isolated, with no communications or means of knowing exactly where they were.

  Now, after Bass thought the demon was dead and buried, its latest incarnation was being given to 34th FIST to field-test on a live operation.

  “I understand your feelings, Charlie,” Myer said when he saw Bass had regained a measure of control. “This isn’t Fiesta de Santiago, it isn’t Elneal. It’s a Mickey Mouse peasant revolt. The thing can die the first time you power it up and it won’t hurt a thing.”

  Still at attention, eyes fixed on the bulkhead above and behind Humphrey, Bass said in a strained voice, “Elneal wasn’t supposed to be Elneal either.”

  With two days remaining in the third and final jump, Company L assembled in a classroom compartment for its final briefing before making planetfall on Kingdom. Communications with a ship in interstellar transit could only be accomplished by physically intercepting it at a jump point. Such interceptions had to be planned well in advance and were used only in the event vital information had to be passed on. Nobody in the Confederation government thought there was any information regarding this deployment that 34th FIST didn’t already have, so there was no attempt to intercept it. Lieutenant Humphrey merely reiterated what the Marines already knew; he had nothing new to impart to them. He could have given them a pep talk about the importance of the mission, but he had misgivings and couldn’t come up with anything that justified it in his own mind. Besides, he knew First Sergeant Myer would do a much better job of, as Top put it, “Tuning up the troops,” than he could. So when he finished repeating what everybody already knew, Humphrey handed the company over to the first sergeant for his unofficial briefing. Then he and the platoon commanders retired to the company office to listen in on the ship’s intercom. Top Myer’s unofficial briefings were supposed to be restricted to the enlisted men, but everybody knew the officers listened in.