In Every Clime and Place (3 page)

“Sgt Hernandez and one of his fire teams will guard the assault shuttle and the airlock. Sgt McCray and Pilsudski, along with Hernadez’s other team, will continue to the legation and collect our people. I think we will take this route,” he traced a road on the map, “as it is the most direct. Ski will lead the way, McCray’s squad will follow. We won’t take any vehicles in, the roads are probably barricaded. If we are attacked, Ski’s squad falls back to the main body and we fight our way through. Keep under control. Don’t blow up any more of this rock than we have to.”

He turned to Sgt Pilsudski. “You’re the guide, Ski. If you want to detour around anything, just say so.”

“Aye aye, sir,” the sergeant replied, a nasty smile forming on his lips. He was a damn good Marine, but something wasn’t quite right about that man. He really enjoyed this shit. I was glad he was on our side.

“When we reach the legation,” the lieutenant went on, “we will assess the need for transport. If necessary, we will obtain it. Lt Evers has information that a few light vehicles are within the embassy gates, and if we need more, we’ll borrow them from corporate or take them from somebody.”

Gunny Taylor walked in carrying an ammo can. He placed it in front of Lt. Mitchell, who reached in and grabbed a handful of rounds. He passed them to the sergeants, who kept one and handed four to each corporal. I looked at the cartridges in my palm when Sgt McCray gave them to me.

They were beanbag rounds. Engineered to fit in the 20mm grenade launchers under the barrels of our rifles, they were designed to knock a man down without killing him. In theory. The human body is a tricky thing. One man will die from a kick in the stomach, and another will keep coming with a bullet in his head. People have died from “nonlethal” projectiles. The fact that we were being handed them now indicated that we were to expect lightly armed crowds.

“Orders are that we carry nonlethals,” Lt Mitchell went on. “Give each Marine in your fire team one of those. That covers my ass when I have to tell HQ that all my Marines carried them in addition to ball ammo. We don’t want a fight, but I will not take casualties to protect corporate property or civilian rioters. We carry full weapon and ammo load. The corporate guards have real weapons, and some of them might have been captured. If anybody aims a weapon at your Marines, cap the bastard.

“We shove off at nineteen hundred. The ride in the assault craft should be one hour. Any questions?”

I had none. It was the same old shit to me. Keep your Marines in formation, stay alert, keep your interval, spot the enemy before he can hit you, and shoot straighter than he does. Immediate action drills to respond to ambushes, mines or attacks from any given direction had become second nature to us. Half of the platoon had been blooded in the Wars of Stabilization in Africa before heading for the stars. The routes, equipment loads, negotiations and so on were for those of more exalted rank than my humble self.

After we were dismissed, I made my way back to my fire team’s bunk area. Each team shared a room with four racks that folded into the bulkheads, two to a side, four wall lockers, and four foot lockers. Cpl Chan’s team had an identical room separated from ours by a shower room, head and Sgt McCray’s office and bedroom.

My team had their weapons and armor ready for inspection when I came in. I looked Johnson over carefully. This was his first “hot” deployment with us, maybe his first ever. He had everything picture perfect out of the Guidebook. I reached out and unpinned his PFC insignia from his collar.

“We don’t wear rank in combat,” I explained, removing my own double chevron pins from my faded olive drab utility jacket. “Don’t advertise the leaders to enemy snipers. For Christ’s sake don’t salute either of the L-Ts either.”

“Got it, corp.” He nodded eagerly.

Other than the chevrons, he looked fine. His Team Automatic Rifle was spotless, ammo can hooked to the side, but the belt not yet loaded.

O’Rourke and Sabatini were locked on, but I checked them over anyway, just so Johnson wouldn’t feel singled out.

“Set your sight elevation for zero-point-eight G,” I told them, unfastening the combination lock on my Advanced Combat Rifle where it was fastened to my rack. I slipped the chain through the weapon, then made the adjustments to the sights.

The ACR was a stubby little weapon, with a five millimeter rifle barrel on top and a twenty millimeter grenade launcher underneath. Both were magazine fed, the fifty round mag for the caseless 5mm rounds bullpup fashion behind the pistol grip and the ten round mag for the grenades just in front of the trigger guard. The sight was a scope capable of magnification up to 10X, low light, or infrared sighting, with a laser rangefinder. If that marvel of technology failed, it could be folded over to the side to expose low-tech iron sights. It was a good weapon, but Chesty Puller, patron saint of the Corps, would have been disappointed; there was no bayonet attachment.

The adjustable G settings on the sight were a quick fix to make the weapon serviceable in space. All projectiles, in normal gravity, follow a parabolic trajectory. Once a round leaves the barrel, it starts dropping. In the constant gravity of Earth, it’s a nice predictable drop of so many centimeters for so many meters traveled, so the elevation settings on the sights were calibrated to range: at so many meters the point of aim through the sights would intersect the point of impact of the projectile on the downward leg of its arc.

But if you change the gravity, you change the whole equation. Leave the weapon on the default elevation settings and in low G you shoot too high, and in high G your rounds drop faster and hit low.

Several truly recoilless weapons designed for zero G were in development. The Army was issuing one on a trial basis right now. Maybe when we got back to Mars Station we could swipe some from the division at Fort Schwartzkopf.

I took the heavy body armor from my footlocker. I slipped my head through the neck hole, then zipped up the sides under my arms. I would zip up the neck later; the thing was heavy as hell and I don’t like to sweat more than I have to. The armor was made of layers of ballistic nylon with ceramic plates sewn between them to protect the vitals. A blunted triangle of armor hung down over my family jewels, giving me a feeling of added security. I donned my helmet, lowered the plexi visor to test the fit, and keyed the internal mic.

“Fire team check. Johnson, you read me?”

“Five by five, corp.”

“O’Rourke?”

“Check.”

“Sabatini?”

“Yo!”

Satisfied, I removed the helmet. “Uncover, Marines. OK, here’s the plan...”

USS
TRIPOLI
, ASTEROID BELT PATROL

I breathed a short prayer as I descended into the assault shuttle. I had a platoon of the world’s finest warriors around me, but I hated the ride to the target. Once we got to the beach, we knew what to do, we were armed and equipped to deal with threats. Out here, all we could do was wait and hope nobody took a shot at the landing vehicle. That wasn’t real likely in this case, and it was armored, had anti-missile chaff, decoy flares, a 25mm rapid-fire cannon and a pair of old Browning .50 caliber machineguns. The ammo was a mix of depleted uranium, tracer, and flechette. It made a pretty intimidating target for anybody who wasn’t sure his first shot would knock it out.

We didn’t expect a hot landing. The mining company had agreed to let us land and take off our people, so we figured we’d probably proceed to the airlock without hostile action. That didn’t mean the rebels hadn’t seized control.

Another thing I hated about the assault vehicle was zero gravity. I frigging hate zero gravity. The main patrol ship created its own gravity by rotation. I didn’t really understand the fine points, but that was for the Navy to worry about. The Navy engineers were some bizarre cross between mechanics, physicists and witchdoctors. Somehow, they calculated the spin required to approximate Earth’s gravity and factored all that into the ship’s course. I understand the theory, but there are more variables than I can keep track of. I don’t want to come across as a dumb jarhead. I can drop a mortar round into a six-foot fighting hole at a thousand yards in a high wind. There’s enough math involved in that. But I don’t have the patience for the abstract formulas the Navy boys use. Trajectory and projectile motion make perfect sense to me. You can see the effects pretty clearly.

We settled in for the one-hour ride. I used part of the trip to double-check our equipment load. All of us wore body armor over our OD utilities. Our web gear consisted of a waist belt and shoulder straps which crossed in the back, held magazine pouches, a knife, a flashlight, canteen, first-aid kit, and four hand grenades: two fragmentation and two tear gas. We wore small packs on our backs containing some foil-sealed, dehydrated FMs (Field Meals or Fucking Misery depending on our mood), a few concentrated nutrition bars, ten meters of thin nylon cord, and a collapsed stretcher pole or the rolled canvas for the stretcher (between Sabatini, O’Rourke and me, we had a complete one; Johnson had enough extra ammo weight without it). I had an extra pressure bandage stuffed in the cargo pocket on the right side of my trousers; if I needed one, I didn’t want to have to rummage around in my first-aid kit.

As far as weapons go, Sabatini and I carried ACRs, with six magazines of rifle ammo and two mags of grenades. Johnson carried the TAR with three two-hundred-round boxes of ammo. O’Rourke had a light ACR with no 20mm launcher. He carried our heavy artillery on his back: an LG/BW (Laser-Guided / Ballistic Weapon) or Longbow rocket launcher. It was a tube about a meter long with a sight and trigger assembly which fired 50mm missiles from a five-round magazine.

This weapon was the great-great-grandson of the bazooka. With a wide variety of projectiles, it was the grunt’s ultimate argument against armored vehicles, buildings, bunkers, and anything else you cared to blow up. All you needed to do was activate the laser, put it on the target, pull the trigger and keep the target lased until impact. The missiles had a tiny chip in the nose which homed in on the laser. The “/Ballistic” part of the weapon was what I liked. If you couldn’t use the laser, due to dust, signal jamming, or just not wanting to advertise your position with a beam of light, you could flick a selector, and it became a simple aim-and-shoot point-detonating rocket launcher. It was pretty much the balls.

We each carried a machete across our back with the handle over the right shoulder. These were beautiful tools. A Marine could clear brush, cut through tangled cargo netting, use the butt as a hammer, or the blade as a pry bar. It was a good way to open locked interior doors without expending ammo, and it had a fairly obvious anti-personnel application. That didn’t happen often, but in close quarters, like a shipboard action or in a city or jungle, you might just meet an enemy at a range of a few yards, and the ACR was ill suited to bayonet fighting, and too delicate and sophisticated a weapon to just beat someone to death with.

Whipping out a machete also had a tremendous effect on enemy morale.

The Corps issued machetes with a black anodized blade and a camouflage-patterned fiberglass handle. Mine was a memento from Zaire. The blade was naked steel and the handle was wood. It might have been the only piece of wood on the assault craft. I saw Johnson eyeing it covetously.

“Like it?” I drew it and presented it over my forearm.

“It’s a beauty.” He held it reverently. “Where did you get it?”

“One of N’Gaba’s rebels,” I replied. N’Gaba was a vicious warlord who’d managed to slaughter his way through central Africa, wrecking most of its culture and economy until we wiped his useless ass out. “Bastard took a cut at me with it. I ducked and stuck him with my Ka-Bar.”

“Yeah,” Sgt Pilsudski called from his position aft. “That dumb guerilla should’ve known it wouldn’t dent your thick Irish skull.” He’d been standing about ten feet from me when it happened.

I donned an expression of long-suffering patience. “I gotta take that from a Polack from Jersey? Why didn’t you shoot the prick before he closed with me?”

“I knew you could take him.” Ski smiled. “If you were any kind of Marine. Why waste ammo? I’d’ve been pissed if anybody shot my first opponent for hand-to-hand combat.”

He probably wasn’t lying. He came from a long and distinguished line of head cases. His family had a cavalry tradition in the Old Country. His great-great-great granddaddy was in the regiment that drew sabers and charged a German armored column in World War II. He was actually proud of that.

I was just happy to have survived my one hand-to-hand fight. I shuddered at the memory.

We had been advancing through thick brush in one of Ski’s flanking adventures. Suddenly a rebel came lunging out of the undergrowth swinging his blade at my head. I blocked with my rifle, lost my balance and went over. He jumped on top of me, raising his weapon for my last haircut. I twisted away, caught his wrist in my left hand and kneed him in the balls. When he folded up, I rolled him off me, pinned his right arm to the deck, kept my knee across his legs and drew my USMC Ka-Bar fighting knife. He grabbed at my throat with his left hand, but I kept my chin on my chest and stabbed him in the ribcage.

I had seen the movies. He was supposed to stiffen up for a second, curse me, then go limp. Apparently he hadn’t seen the same films. He shrieked like a banshee and thrashed wildly. He almost got his right hand free.

When I pulled my knife free, a gout of blood sprayed all over me. I poised my weapon and held on for dear life.

I stabbed again.

That time my blade went into his heart. I felt it scrape along his sternum on the way in. He gave a convulsive heave, then his energy drained away. I actually saw the life go out of his eyes. He struggled, weaker and weaker. I held him down until Ski pulled me off and called up a corpsman. It took me a while to convince them that all the blood on me was his. When we searched the area afterward, we found his rifle, an old Armalite with a round stovepiped in the chamber.

“Luck of the Irish,” Ski had said. He picked up the machete and handed it over. “To the victor go the spoils.”

I thought he was nuts. I still do, actually, but I’m glad he made me keep it. At that moment I would have thrown it into the bushes, but when I calmed down I came to accept it. Not as the trophy Pilsudski thought it was, but as a reminder that in the most dangerous moment of my life, despite stark raving terror, I didn’t freeze up. I kept my head, remembered my combat drills and survived. Now, whenever I feel doubt, I look at the machete and tell myself nothing can be worse than that.

In everyone’s life, there is a moment of truth. Once you get past that, everything is easy. Mine came in a vicious close-quarters brawl in central Africa. I wondered about my Marines. What was the hump O’Rourke had to get over? What about Sabatini? Had Johnson even been there yet?

I knew my two veterans pretty well, but this wasn’t the kind of thing we talked about. We swapped more stories of adventures we had on leave than on duty. If we told war stories at all, they were abbreviated. Like the sentence I handed Johnson about my machete. You never want to mention your fears and doubts to your buddies. I didn’t want my team to know how much killing that bastard in Africa bothered me. They might wonder if I would hesitate if it came down to steel again. I knew I wouldn’t. I got cold sweats when I thought of the awful strangled noise he made, and the pleading and despair in his eyes as he realized he was going to die, but if I had to cut a man’s throat to save a brother Marine, I would do it in a heartbeat and worry about the nightmares later.

I trusted my life to my teammates. I didn’t want to know if they had doubts.

If they did, they handled them well enough. They were as calm and professional as could be expected on the ride to the asteroid. I knew the signs of nervousness. O’Rourke stopped grumbling and followed orders instantly. Sabatini was smiling, but was too distracted for flirting or double entendres. Johnson kept his face blank, but his eyes kept flicking between us, looking for reassurance. If we didn’t look nervous, he probably thought he didn’t need to be, either.

That was another reason we played the fearless leatherneck. New Marines like Johnson felt brave by association.

Cpl Chan led the other fire team in our squad. At one time, each squad had three teams, but three-team squads were too big for the new armored personnel carriers we used Earthside. Rather than redesign the damn vehicle, the Pentagon, in its wisdom, changed the size of the squad, giving tactical concerns a backseat to logistics. Or maybe the plant that built them was in a district of some Congressman whose vote the President needed.

In addition to the three squads, the platoon was accompanied by a Navy hospital corpsman. To remain inconspicuous, they dressed exactly like we did and carried ACRs along with their big med kits. They might be Navy, but they ate the same dirt and dodged the same bullets we did; they were accepted into the band of brothers. Ours was a curvy little blonde called Doc Roy. Being of French Canadian ancestry, she pronounced it “Roo-Ah.” Very cute, but also very attached. Oh well.

She caught my eye.

“Hey Mick?”

“Yo!”

“You think this is gonna be a rough one?” Not being a Marine, she could openly fish for reassurance.

“Hell, the frigging quartermaster’s lugging his ass along. How dangerous could it be?”

Chief Petty Officer Kelly smiled at my comment. He oversaw the ship’s supplies, and had decided to tag along. He’d probably figured there would be terrific opportunities for larceny on this mission. He was the perfect supply NCO: a born thief. If we were short of anything and couldn’t get it through regular channels, we talked to Kelly, and it would appear by some kind of black magic. Sometimes he charged a bit steep, but he was a good guy for a squid. We figured that he and Staff Sergeant DeMers, our company supply sergeant back on the
Halsey—
the HQ for Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines—probably cleared more in a year than the Secretary of the Navy.

I looked at the watch on the inside of my left wrist. “Any minute now.”

Lt Mitchell gave Gunny Taylor a curt nod. The tall, lean gunnery sergeant stepped into the middle of the craft, effortlessly maintaining his balance and position despite the lack of gravity. “Listen up, Marines! We will be entering the airlock shortly. The gravity should kick in any minute. Once it stabilizes, lock and load.”

Presently, we felt the ship turn as it entered the docking bay. We all caught ourselves against the bulkheads except for the gunny, who stood like he was carved of stone. I felt the weight of my gear press down on me as we entered the artificial G of the station. The craft slowed and came to a halt.

The white light of the cabin turned red. The platoon bay echoed with a chorus of low metallic clicks as magazines were slipped into weapons and bolts pulled back and released. We made the trip with weapons empty in case a rough ride jostled us around and some shitbird had a finger inside the trigger guard.

When we had loaded up, we clicked the quick release straps on our harnesses and detached from the bulkhead.

The light turned green. A large section of the hull fell open, forming a ramp. Pilsudski’s squad was out the hatch, splitting left and right in a matter of seconds. A heartbeat later, I heard Sgt McCray’s voice in my helmet speaker.

“Go!”

We sprinted out the hatch. My fire team broke left, running past some of Ski’s Marines who were prone around the craft, covering the area. Sabatini was in the lead, O’Rourke slightly behind and right, then me behind and left, and Johnson, with the automatic, bringing up the rear. If we took fire, he would be least likely to be hit. He could then engage the enemy with automatic fire while we assaulted them.

We rushed to cover behind the landing legs of a docked shuttle. We crouched behind them, covering the left side of the landing bay with our weapons. I felt my heart beating faster than usual, and the sweat of nerves was starting to bead on my face.

“Three-one in place! All clear!” I whispered into my helmet mic. We were fire team one in third squad. Corporal Chan led fire team two.

We treated this like a hot landing because we were at our most vulnerable when exiting the assault craft. If the rebels had seized the airlock, and considered us a threat, all they had to do was set up one crew-served weapon, a machine gun or grenade launcher, to cover the ramp. If we filed off parade-ground style, they could mow us down like wheat. We had learned a lot about amphibious landings in the last few centuries.

I know there was no water, so “amphibious” isn’t exactly right, but this was an assault from one environment into another all the same. And the term stuck. Three centuries of tradition unmarred by progress.