Solfleet: The Call of Duty (27 page)

Of course,
the way that God-forsaken sardine can of an armored personnel carrier was
bouncing him around on its inadequately cushioned bench seat as it tore down
the rocky, ditch-ridden dirt road at break-neck speeds wasn’t helping any,
either. He’d already slammed the back of his head against the hard plastisteel bulkhead
behind him at least ten times, and the god-awful noise was enough to drive a
man insane!

Not that the
APC itself was all that noisy. On the contrary, as heavily-armored tactical
vehicles went it was actually fairly quiet. At least from the inside. It was
well insulated, both to protect the Marines inside from the elements and to
mask their heat and sound signatures from enemy scanners. But the ungodly road
noise that the vehicle’s four squealing plastisteel tracks created as they
plowed through deep ruts of hard-packed dirt and rolled over thousands of
loose, sedimentary conglomerates was almost deafening. Those rock clusters had
an annoying tendency to explode like grenades under the vehicle’s incredible
weight and spatter the resultant shrapnel-like fragments against the underside
of the deck plate.

Road noise.
Hah! That implied the presence of an actual road, and this just didn’t qualify.
This was nothing more than a dried up old riverbed that happened to snake
steadily downward through the deep mountain draw in the general direction of
Solfleet’s Grainger Army-Aerospace Base, winding its way through a narrow
clearing in the dense evergreen forest. Correction—the dense ever
blue
forest.
Blue trees. They were beautiful to be sure, but after growing up on Earth would
he ever really get used to that?

Left behind
by fresh mountain waters that had carved the 580-kilometer long draw into the
eastern slopes over thousands of years before they dried up, the old riverbed
had reportedly remained unspoiled until the Veshtonn invasion of ‘68, when the
occupying alien forces had apparently matter-sprayed it from low orbit in an
attempt to render it impassable to ground vehicles. So, even after four years
of fairly steady use as a tactical deployment route by Solfleet’s ground
forces, it still didn’t make for much of a thoroughfare. But the dual-drive
M450-A3 quarter/quadtrack APC’s with their accordion bodies, heavy-duty
shock-suspension assemblies, full meter of ground clearance, and front-mounted
obstacle deflectors, hefty as they were, could make a road out of just about
anything if they had to, as long as the ground wasn’t too soft. Unfortunately,
that made for some very rough rides, despite those very same heavy-duty shock-suspension
assemblies.

When? When would
those rear echelon brainiacs at R&D ever figure out how to build an armored
personnel carrier that could float above the ground, nice and smooth, like a
comfy little street skimmer? When? Probably never.

He felt a
light tap on his left shoulder. “Go away. I’m sleeping,” he said, just loud
enough to be heard over the clamor. Talking made his head hurt even worse.

“I have
something for you, Sarge,” someone said.

He opened
his eyes and raised his heavy head, and became suddenly aware of the fact that
the over-taxed ventilation system was losing its battle against the dank, musky
odor of the dozen sweaty, dirt-caked Marines who filled the cramped troop
compartment. Because there were no open air slots or other compromises to the
armor’s integrity, ventilation was generally poor to begin with, dependent
solely on twin circulators that sucked air in through heavy filters from the outside,
provided that air didn’t contain dangerous levels of any toxic substances. It
didn’t take very many people to heat things up inside, so an entire squad of
hot, sweaty Marines tended to put quite a strain on the system. Even the air in
the base gym’s locker room had rarely ever been so offensive.

The
compartment was poorly illuminated as well, lit by just a single adhesive cold-light
strip that ran down the center of the low ceiling. But the ghostly blue-green
glow it gave off was sufficient enough that he could see one of the squad’s
four females standing in the center aisle just to his left, between the two
facing rows of seated Marines, several of whom had taken off their camouflage
tunics and black tee shirts in what was probably a futile attempt to find a
little bit of relief from the sweltering heat. She was fairly tall, had shed
her tunic and knotted her tee shirt up around her midriff, and was swaying from
side to side as if dancing in time to the APC’s motion, holding tightly onto
the overhead safety bar with one hand and reaching out to him with the other.
She was still wearing her black Ranger beret—why, he couldn’t even guess—but a
long lock of her jet black hair had fallen loose on one side and was swinging
back and forth across her cheek, so he could tell easily enough who she was.
Corporal Marissa Ortiz, whom some would argue held the destinction of being the
sexiest, most beautiful woman in her entire branch of the service. Or, to put
it into typical ‘Marinespeak’, the hottest damn piece of ass in the whole
friggin’ Marine Corps.

“Here,
Sarge. Take this,” she said.

He focused
on the hand in front of him. “What is it?”

“Liferin.”

He raised
his hand and let her drop the pill into it. “Thank you, Corporal,” he said as
he watched the little white tablet already beginning to dissolve in his sweaty
palm. “You’re a life saver. My head is really killing me.”

“You should
have asked me for one a lot sooner.”

With a
little more effort than it usually required, Dylan filled his hot, pasty mouth
with warm saliva and tossed the pill to the back of his throat and swallowed.
Then he said, “I thought you didn’t carry these things anymore.”

“Never hurts
to have a backup plan.”

“Good point.”

“Anyway,
that’ll fix you right up.”

“I hope so.”

“Did you at
least try the discipline?”

Dylan nodded...slightly.
“Only about half a dozen times since we left. It worked a little bit, but this
one’s a major skullquake.”

“Aw come on,
Sarge. You oughtta know by now size doesn’t matter,” she said, shaking her
head.

Dylan eyed
her suspiciously as several of the others broke into laughter. He couldn’t be
sure if she’d intended the pun or not, though she most likely had—it was hard
to tell with her sometimes—but jokes like that were always good for a laugh
when the leader of the group was made the butt of them, and the squad was so
over-tired and giddy right now that they would laugh at just about anything...with
one exception.

Lance
Corporal Frieburger. He was too preoccupied to laugh, still holding his helmet
upside-down between his knees and trying his damnedest not to lose his last
meal into it. Poor kid had suffered from motion sickness his entire life.
Corporal Daniel ‘Doc’ Leskowski, their primary corpsman, had twice given him
something for his upset stomach just since wake-up and probably didn’t want to
risk another dose so soon.

Ortiz raised
her free hand to stop whatever comeback she might have thought Dylan was
preparing to throw at her and said, “Just keep working on it whenever you have
a chance, Sarge. You’ll get the hang of it eventually.”

“I hope so,”
he said. “I don’t like taking pills.”

“So I’ve
noticed.”

As she
turned away and started back toward her seat, the APC lurched hard to the left and
then dropped violently too far back to the right in one swift motion. She lost
her grip on the safety bar and fell backwards into Private LeClerc’s lap,
smashing him in the face with the back of her head as the entire compartment
echoed with the rapid-fire
bang-bang-bang
of hundreds of attacking rock
fragments. A chorus of colorful expletives shouted in the background and an
arrangement of tumbling weapons and gear crashing to the deck accompanied the thunderous
percussion symphony of stone while LeClerc’s profanity-filled pronouncements of
pain provided the lead vocals.

But LeClerc
quickly shook off the sudden, painful blow to his face and wasted no time in
grabbing hold of Ortiz’s slender waist with both hands. Just to help her up, of
course...which he didn’t rush to do.

As everyone
began to settle down again, the green, roughly coin-sized indicator light on
the intercom panel to Dylan’s right winked on. “
Sorry about that, back
there,
” the driver’s voice said. “
Is everyone all right?
”

“We’re fine,”
Dylan answered. “But why don’t you slow this thing the hell down, Lance
Corporal!”

“
Hey,
Squad Sergeant, sir! It’s dark as all fucking hell outside and we’re only
running on blackout markers! If I lose sight of the A-P-C. in front of us...
”

“Then comm
ahead and tell
them
to slow the hell down, before you
kill
somebody!”

The intercom
light winked off.

“I enjoyed
that very much, Corporal. Thank you,” LeClerc shouted with a mischievous grin,
grabbing hold his crotch as the woman escaped his grasp and bounced back to her
feet.

“I guess it’s
a good thing for you that size really doesn’t matter, hey, Jean-Pierre?” Lance
Corporal Margaret Sweeney jibed, never hesitant to jump right in and help out a
fellow female Marine. The laughter that had so abruptly stopped when the APC
started tossing them around returned just as quickly.

“Yeah, fuck
you, too, Maggie!” LeClerc shouted angrily.

“Hey!” Dylan
hollered, causing that small burning sun in the middle of his brain to go nova.
“Stow the attitude right now, LeClerc!”

He glanced
over at Sweeney and wasn’t at all surprised to find that she’d joined those who
had stripped down to their waists. She’d folded her tee shirt into a roughly square
pad, had apparently soaked it with water from her canteen, and was using it to
give herself a sort of sponge bath, making no effort at all to hide her bare
breasts from anyone’s view. He almost told her to put her shirt back on, but
stopped himself. This wasn’t one of those old-fashioned thinking military
services that still employed a publicly popular but counterproductive...not to
mention inefficient...‘modify-for-training-environment’ regulation. This was
the Solfleet Marine Corps, and Solfleet Marines in a field training environment
did everything exactly the way they would in a real combat situation, regardless
of gender. They fought together, bathed in lakes, ponds, or puddles together,
decontaminated after a chemical attack together, and even slept together if and
when circumstances so dictated. Simply put, they weren’t men and women when
they were in the field. They were Marines. Nothing more and nothing less.

On the other
hand, for the good of the unit, certain types of behavior on the part of
certain individuals probably shouldn’t have been allowed, at least in Dylan’s
opinion. It was common knowledge within the squad, for example, that the two of
them—Sweeney and LeClerc—had recently enjoyed a passionate weekend fling together.
In fact, over the last eight months since she arrived, Sweeney had spent such
weekends with several of the other men and at least one of the women as well.
Officially, her sordid activities, unlike her current state of partial undress,
were in violation of Solfleet regulations. But because enforcement of such
regulations brought into question a person’s own morals and upbringing, it was
one of those kinds of violations that no one ever really talked about and the
leadership usually tended to ignore, as long as the offending parties committed
the violation off base and the unit’s health and morale weren’t adversely affected.

Which, to a
small extent, it unfortunately had been. As far as Dylan knew, LeClerc had been
the first of Sweeney’s partners to have any problem with ending their brief
tryst. Theirs was the first conflict of that kind that he’d been forced to get
involved in, at least. He’d had Ortiz talk to Sweeney about putting a lid on
her ‘recreational activities’ for a while, at least those that involved her
squad mates, while he’d talked to LeClerc. LeClerc had told him that he’d
believed their rendezvous to be the beginning of something more permanent. But
she’d rejected that idea, rather abruptly if he was to be believed, and he’d
had a hard time dealing with that.

From the sound
of it, it was time to have another talk with LeClerc.

God his head
hurt.

“Fuck you,
too, Maggie?” Ortiz questioned, still standing in front of LeClerc and looking
down at him. “What do you mean, ‘you
too
’, Jean-Pierre? I sure as hell
didn’t feel anything.”

The laughter
grew even louder.

LeClerc
gazed up at her with that same mischievous grin. “Maybe you didn’t, Corporal,
but me and my perma-woody sure did.”

“Oh, is that
what that was?”

“Yes, ma’am!”
he answered, smiling proudly from ear to ear. “I guess you felt something after
all, huh?”

“Yeah, come
to think of it, I did! Whew! God, what a relief! I thought I sat on one of
Greenburg’s little killer darts!”

The laughter
graduated into a roar.

“Oh yeah?
Well...” He was obviously trying, but it looked like he wasn’t going to come up
with a comeback for that one anytime soon.

“Are you
bleeding, Jean-Pierre?” Sweeney asked.

LeClerc
glanced across the aisle at her, then touched a hand to his face and brought it
away bloodied. “Oh, shit!” he cried. “She broke my fuckin’ nose! Sarge,
Corporal Ortiz broke my fuckin’ nose!”

Dylan looked
over at him again. Sure enough, a dark smudge of thick, oozing fluid nearly
covered the lower half of his face and was dripping onto the deck. “Doc!”

“I got it,
Sarge,” Leskowski answered as he pressed his harness release and grabbed up his
med kit. Ortiz moved out of his way and returned to her seat, while Dylan, his
anger renewed, nearly punched the back of his fist through the intercom panel. “Driver!”
he barked. “Slow this fucking tin can down before I come up there and kick your
mother-loving ass!” He didn’t particularly enjoy talking like the stereotypical
ground-pounder, but sometimes a sergeant just had to explain things in such a
way as to make his point unmistakably clear.