Major (The United Federation Marine Corps Book 5) (17 page)

Chapter 27

Four days later, Ryck,
Çağlar, and eight other of his Marines were sitting in the general holding cell along with from ten to twelve other prisoners who rotated in and out.  By common understanding, none of the Marines spoke to each other outside their team.  No one had the slightest belief that the other prisoners were all legit.  In a way, the charade was just wasted time.  Right after their arrest, each Marine had been arraigned before a judge, and by name, sentenced to 15 days in jail to be followed by an expulsion from Alliance space, so the Alliance knew who they all were.  Still, they pretty much ignored each other, just waiting for their short time to be served.

Ryck wanted to ask the others how they’d been picked up, and he wanted to ask his jailors who else had been arrested, but that would have to wait.  For now, he’d just vegetate.

The first evening, after their sentencing, a public representative, which was evidently something between a legal aid and a social worker, arrived to check on them and let them all know the Federation consulate had been informed of their arrest.  Not surprisingly, no one at the consulate had come.  The Federation had washed their hands of the Marines.

They were treated well as could be expected, given the fact that they were prisoners and not free to go.  They had decent enough food, and plenty of it.  They had a battered 2D screen embedded in the wall and protected a by a ferrocrystal security guard, and sports and flicks ran non-stop.  Ryck just wanted to end the political game and get sent on his way.  He knew he’d have to explain getting picked up, but he was confident that the problem was not caused by operator mistake, but rather of a systemic problem.  If only one or two of them had been picked up, that could be the team’s fault.  But not everyone.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, a single guard came to the cell and called out, “All Federation prisoners, follow me.”

He opened the cell door and waited.  The others looked to Ryck, wondering what they should do. No one had admitted that he was a Federation Marine yet, even if they had been identified dead to rights.

Ryck shrugged, then stood up and moved to the door.  They might as well cooperate, and the guard had said “Federation prisoners,” not “Federation Marine prisoners.”

The ten Marines followed the lone guard out of the cell and down a corridor.  Ryck thought that it was somewhat dismissive that the Alliance thought that ten of the most highly-trained warriors in the Federation could be guarded by one portly Livingston jailer.  But then again, Ryck guessed they could.  No one was going to make some sort of bondian escape attempt.

They followed their guard down two passages until he indicated a low bench along the bulkhead.  Ryck obligingly sat down and waited.  And waited.  It was at least 45 minutes before a hatch opened up, and a clerk-type told the guard to bring in the prisoners.

The ten Marines entered the courtroom and sat in what looked to be the spectators’ seats.  Their guard stayed by the back hatch while another stood up in front by the judge’s bench.  The clerk took his seat in front of the bench.

After another five minutes or so, the front guard shouted out, “All rise!”

The judge came in and sat down.  He was all business as he looked at the forms in front of him, forms in which Ryck was positive the judge was already well-versed.  He was a young man, possibly in his early 30’s, but he was looking grave as he looked over the forms and nodded.

He slowly took a large metal seal out of a black pouch and set it down.  Taking each form, he signed it, and then stamped the seal over his signature. 

When he was done, he neatly aligned the stack of forms, then said, “Clerk of the Court, you may begin.”

The clerk picked up the stack of papers and brought them over to the podium where the lawyers and the accused addressed the court, at least as that was how Ryck understood the podium’s purpose from various flicks.  He moved the stack to one side, then took the top piece of plastisheet and placed it beside the stack.

“Major Ryck Lysander, United Federation Marine Corps,” he announced.

Ryck stood up and approached the podium.  He looked down at the paper on official Confederation letterhead and read the body of the text:

Major Ryck Lysander, United Federation Marine Corps, Federation Citizen FP8785678, a native of the Federation World Prophesy, is as of the below marked date expelled from Livingston and all territory within the Liberty Alliance for a period of ten GMT Years.  Failure to comply with this order will result in sentence of no less than ten GMT years at hard labor at a detention facility of the local magistrate’s choice.

It was simple and to the point.  It was signed and stamped by the judge, and there was a signature line with Ryck’s name and the date underneath it.  The clerk handed Ryck a pen.

“And if I don’t sign this?” Ryck asked.

The clerked looked up at the judge, who nodded back.

“Whether you sign it or not does not matter, Major,” he told Ryck.  “As long as Section Judge Allison signed it, it is in full force.  You are being expelled and blacklisted.”

Ryck put the pen down and said, “In that case, it does not need my signature.  I choose to decline to sign it.”

The clerk nodded, handed Ryck a copy of the order, then motioned for Ryck to take his seat.  He then proceeded to call each of the other nine Marines forward and had each one read his document.  He offered each Marine a pen, and each Marine declined to sign. 

Ryck knew the clerk was right.  This was Alliance space, and whether he and his Marines signed their docs or not didn’t matter.  But by not signing, they were showing just a little defiance, that they may have been captured, but they were not defeated men.

After Çağlar, the last Marine called forward, signed, the clerk took the forms and stood up, looking at the judge. 

“All rise!” the guard said as the judge got up and left out his private door without saying another word. 

Their jailer came forward and motioned for the Marines to follow him.  Ryck led the way as they left the court section of the jail and were each handed a package.  Ryck didn’t open his, but it felt like his PA and probably some personal effects.  His was not an ordinary PA, and he was sure the Alliance techs had examined it pretty closely, but that was water under the bridge.

Twenty minutes later, they were on a jail hover bus, complete with barred windows.  They were driven right to the spaceport and held there for an hour in a secured lot.  Finally, they were told to leave the bus and were led to a waiting shuttle.

“I hope you enjoyed your stay on Livingston,” their jailer said, a smug smile on his face.

Ryck looked around at the city outside the spaceport.  He wondered if he could get his expulsion order changed.  Twenty years being banned from Alliance space sounded much better than only ten years.

TARAWA

Chapter 28

Sitting in the battalion briefing room with his officers and senior staff, Ryck felt wrung out.  The last seven hours had been pure hell, and now they were cooling their heels waiting for the verdict.  There wasn’t an armed guard on them, and that was one thing in their favor, Ryck guessed, but what were they going to do even without one?  Stage a breakout?

From the moment their shuttle touched down, the Marines had been isolated and driven directly to Camp Donahue and into the battalion briefing room where they met up with Siomai, the only member of the mission who had escaped being arrested.  The more junior enlisted (no one on the teams was really junior in the Marine Corps sense) were taken somewhere else, and then each remaining individual, starting with Ryck, was taken aside and grilled.  It may have been called a debrief, but it was more of an interrogation none-the-less.

In his 18 years as a Marine, Ryck had never failed to complete a mission, even if the one on G.K. Nutrition Six had cost him most of his Marines.  This was the first time he’d failed to do so, and that felt like a defeat.  The fact that everyone had been picked up except for Yancy Lee was indicative that it wasn’t any of their faults, but would the higher-ups see it that way?

One thing that struck Ryck was that Siomai had only joined the company a little over a month ago, which was why he went into the mission as a singleton.  And Piggy, Sgt Joffrey Nunci, had joined only a month-and-a-half ago, and the Alliance cops had evidently seemed surprised to haul him in with his team.  They didn’t even know who he was, and they had to threaten to keep him as an “undocumented detainee” until the embassy gave up his identity.

However the Alliance had nabbed them, it was obvious to Ryck that their knowledge of the battalion and the mission was no more recent than just prior to Piggy’s arrival.  And from what he was able to glean by the questions asked of him, the Marines of three of the companies had been arrested as well.  Ryck didn’t know yet which company had managed to complete the mission nor why it had when the other three had not.

Ryck looked over at the landline in the room.  He wished he could use that to call Hannah and tell her he was back.  She had to be worried.  This had supposed to have been a routine training exercise that had been scheduled to end over a week ago.  He didn’t see why they were on a comms lock-down.  It wasn’t as if letting family know they had arrived safely would affect the debriefs or any consequences of their failure, after all.

“So, sir, what do you think?” Sandy said, taking the empty seat beside him.  “It’s pretty obvious that this was screwed up before we even left, right?”

“You would think so,” Ryck said non-committedly.

“I mean, nothing was our fault, so they can’t hold us responsible.”

Sams, listening in, snorted his disbelief that Sandy could be so naive.

“Colonel Asherton,” Ryck said succinctly.

Sandy grimaced and sat back as Ryck brought that sad piece of Marine Corps history.  During the War of the Far Reaches, Colonel Derek Asherton had led a special task force against a Fordham forward installation on an unnamed asteroid in the Pellas system.  He was able to take the installation with minimum casualties, but without any naval support (which fled the system), he’d been a sitting duck when the Fordites mounted a large-scale counter-attack.  Outmanned by four-to-one, without heavy weapons, and running out of ammunition, the Marines had suffered 75% casualties before the colonel surrendered to the inevitable. 

With the combat deaths of some 2,600 Marines, this was the single largest loss of Marines—other than those on entire ships that were lost—during the entire war.  The defeat had been a huge propaganda victory for the enemy.

After the peace, the surviving Marines had been repatriated.  Col Asherton, who had lost a hand in the fighting and was in poor health, was immediately arrested and court-martialed.  He was found guilty of a laundry list of charges and sentenced to death.  Three days after arriving back in Federation space, Colonel Derek Asherton, United Federation Marine Corps, was executed.

This dark piece of Marine Corps history had one important lesson:  the Federation does not suffer defeat lightly.  The fact that Asherton’s Marines fought valiantly and effectively until they no longer had the means to fight was inconsequential.  No sane tactician could have expected the task force to defeat the Fordites given the situation, but the Federation expected its Marines to succeed no matter the odds.

And Ryck was very well aware of that lesson.  He knew his Marines had done nothing wrong, but sometimes, the Federation demanded scapegoats, and even Ryck’s hero status might not be enough to keep him off the sacrificial altar.

Ryck just wished that a decision would be made and made soon.  The wait was killing him.  But when the hatch to the briefing room finally opened and Bert and Colonel
Lipper-Mendoza
came in, accompanied by the OpsO and the SJA, Ryck almost wished they’d had more time.  It wasn’t until Bert caught his eye and gave him a slow wink that Ryck began to relax.

The officers were followed by the rest of the company, which made the huge conference room seem small.  It was standing room only.  Completely out of context of the situation, Ryck wondered if they should have built a larger secure room on the camp for briefings of company-size or larger groups.

When everyone was in place as best they could squeeze in, the group commander cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry for what you’ve all been through. But we, as Marines, had to cross every T and dot every I in our investigation.  There could be no accusations that we covered up anything on our side, and we’ve had FCDC and DIS
[15]
looking over our shoulders every step of the way. 

“The Three will give you a little more information, but I wanted you to hear it from not only me, but from General McDonough as well.  None of you are accountable for what happened, and the Corps is not going to let any of you take the blame for failures in the DIS, is what it looks like.  To put it more directly, General McDonough said ‘No fucking way in hell.’”

Ryck felt a huge weight lift from his shoulders.  He knew they’d done nothing wrong, that it was the operation itself had been compromised.  But with the interior politics within the Federation, facts weren’t always considered when fingers started getting pointed. 

“Colonel Gladsen, you’ve got it,” the group commander told the group OpsO as he took the seat at the head table previously occupied by Ryck.

“Marines of Bravo Company, as the colonel said, no one is blaming you for what happened on Livingston.  I can let you know now that of the four companies sent on the mission, only Alpha on Indigo Freehold completed the mission.”

That made some degree of sense to Ryck.  Of the four planets to which Marines had been sent, Indigo Freehold was somewhat of an outlier in the Alliance.  Fiercely independent, it was barely a government in good standing within the Alliance, and it was not surprising that it may not have shared the same degree of cooperation with the other planets with regards to intelligence.  Some in the Alliance had managed to gather Federation intelligence on Marine operations, but that Intel was not shared with everyone.

“Delta is inbound now from Tienjing, and we’re going to go through the same procedure with them. Alpha and Charlie are in the barracks now.”

Barracks?
Ryck wondered.

“So here’s the good news.  You are all under lock-down,” he said as a murmuring broke out among the Marines of Bravo.

“I know, I know.  It sucks ass smoke.  But it is what it is.  You will be under lock-down with armed guards at the entrance to the barracks.”

The murmuring got a little louder.

“Please, hear me out, men.  This is an opportunity for us, one we are going to snatch.  It was no coincidence that your recent mission was to the Alliance.  This was a test run.  We’ve got good intel that there are several Alliance governments that have been not only allowing SOG to operate from within their space, but are cooperating with them.”

Ryck wasn’t easily shocked, but this news was more than merely surprising.  How could any sane government cooperate with the SOG?

But then his rational mind churned the facts.  The Alliance did not have a sphere of space as did the Federation, the Brotherhood, and the Confederation.  It was more like Greater France with scattered planets throughout human space.  Some Alliance planets were within both what was considered Federation and Confederation space, and others were on the fringes of human space, beyond the soft “borders” of control by the bigger governments.  And while the Big Three were true governments in the classical sense of the term, the Alliance was more of a cooperative of like-minded, but independent planets, for security and economic reasons.

Yet, with few exceptions, the SOG had not hit Alliance targets.  With their relatively weaker defenses, that did not make too much sense—unless they had some sort of arrangement with the SOG.  And the few piracies of Alliance vessels could be smoke screens or against Alliance targets for planets that were not as cooperative with some sort of agreement.

A sudden thought struck him, and he asked, “Did that intel come from the Ferret, sir?”

The surprised look on the Three’s face as he scrambled for an answer confirmed Ryck’s suspicion.

“Uh, I can’t confirm where the intel originated, just that it has been vetted at highest levels,” the colonel stammered out.

An image of Michiko MacCailín, her abused, naked body lying on the metal table in the jail on Kakurega, waiting for the Propoxinal that would break down her mind, inserted itself in Ryck’s thoughts.  Propoxinal, when used by a skilled interrogator, could reveal the victim’s deepest secrets, and the FCDC chief warrant officer about to interrogate her most certainly was skilled.  Propoxinal could pull out information, but it also had the side-effect of destroying most of what made a person who he or she was.  MacCailín had been a uniformed enemy, a POW, so Ryck had stepped in and blocked its use on her.  He wasn’t going to allow anyone to break an interstellar treaty on a prisoner captured by the Marines.  The Ferret, on the other hand, was a pirate, and Propoxinal was legal for use on the SOG.  The Ferret probably revealed the Intel that implicated the Alliance, and now, she’d be a slobbering, mindless vegetable in some deep, dark hole of a prison cell somewhere—that is, if she hadn’t simply been put down and recycled into fertilizer by now.

Ryck didn’t feel any regrets. 
Screw her!

“Now we are aware of Alliance operatives or Federation traitors, and in that sense, your mission was a success,” the OpsO continued as he went back on track.

It doesn’t feel like a grubbing success
, Ryck thought.

“And we intend to use that knowledge.  The commandant had a meeting with the Chairman himself, and our next mission is known by only a very few at the highest levels.  We are going to take it to the SOG’s home base.”

There was a loud chorus of oo-rahs from the gathered Marines.  They’d been embarrassed, and this would give them a chance to hit back at the source of that embarrassment.

“Now the bad thing is that all of you are to be discharged from the Marines,” he told them as the oo-rahs died down.

There was dead silence for a moment as they took that in before erupting into protests.

“Hold it down!  This is not permanent.  This is part of the plan.  You are all to be given dishonorable discharges and receive sentences at Joffrey,” he continued, naming the federal prison on Halycon’s moon.

He had to raise his voice to be heard over the protests, “We need to give the appearance that the battalion has been disbanded as an experiment gone bad, and we have to have a reason for all of you to leave Tarawa.  We still don’t know how deep the Alliance operatives are embedded, but we have to assume that we are under observation.”

Discharged from the Corps.  What the hell’s up with that?
Ryck wondered, totally shocked.

He didn’t like this one bit, and he realized that with them out of the Corps, the Federation had just created deniability should whatever op they had dreamed up go bad.  The Marines, or ex-Marines, as hard as that was to fathom, would be hung out to dry on their own.

“We’re working out the plan now, but it entails the entire battalion going duck-egging it onto their home planet from a commercial vessel.  The Confederation will be sending a full cohort of
Exploratores
to take out an SOG base on the planet’s moon.”

“Uh, sir, the Confederation?  I thought you said this op was only known by those at the highest levels,” Ryck interrupted.

“Yes, that’s right, Major.  But, we don’t want to be going at this alone.  If we succeed, I mean, after we succeed, it would be best if there were more than one government involved.”

“But the Confeds, sir?”

“We didn’t have a lot of choice there.  It can’t be Brotherhood, for obvious reasons.  And Greater France doesn’t have large mission-capable special ops, while the independents don’t carry the same political weight.”

It was not surprising that the Brotherhood was off the table.  They had cooperated with the Federation in interdiction of the previous home planet of the SOG, but they had since come out and said they would ever destroy another planet, and it was likely they would protest an armed incursion onto an Alliance planet.