An Uneasy Alliance Read online

  “What about the other . . . uh, what do we call everyone we serve with?”

  “Troopers. We’ve got soldiers, Marines, militia, centurians, the Frisian color-masters, guardsmen, soldats, Legionnaires, guardians, vojniks . . . yeah, the fitafitas from Uafu—tough sons of bitches, you’ll see. Anyway, we’ve got a shitload of different types here, so the generic term is just troopers.

  “They told you about the ranks, right?”

  Rev nodded. “We’re all based on the old USA Army ranks from what I understood.”

  “Yeah. Doesn’t affect us much. No more lance corporal and gunny. PFC is an E3 instead of a lance coolie, and private is E1 and E2—not that we’ve got any E1 privates here, and not many E2s, either. You and me, we’re still staff sergeants. Warrants and officers are all the same. You’ll still wear your rank insignia, but you’ll get a colored rank tab to put under it so everyone can see what you are in Home Guard ranks.”

  “I guess the Fries like that,” Rev said.

  “Hate it. The colors aren’t the same. So, for them, they’ve got to wear the official colors over their color-master whatever.”

  A trundlebot came down the aisle with snacks. Rev had eaten three burgers and tots at the USO, so he just took a Coke.

  “What sucks the most, though, is that when the home system got invaded, we sat back with our thumbs up our asses. The navies took it to the tin-asses while we hunkered down in the bunkers. Lost a lot of us, but we never fired a shot.”

  “That would suck,” Rev said. “But with them pounding Titan, I’d think it would have to be a Navy battle.”

  Patrice said, “We knew that. But when the bastards landed on the Mother, we were geared up and ready to go. No matter our differences sometimes, that had us all banded together. But what do they do? They send in Mad Dogs and Marine Raiders. I mean, what the fuck? We’re supposed to be the best, right? And we’re here already. So why bring in anyone else?”

  Rev shifted uncomfortably in his seat, glad that the Marines didn’t have special patches or insignia for their direct combat specialties, like the Union SEALS or Frisian Army Commandos had.

  “Not that there was much fighting with them coming to surrender. But it was a big dis to all of us.”

  “Coming to surrender” was not how Rev would have described it. Maybe in a sense, but they’d come within losing two of their Threes to destroying Earth.

  “How much longer do you have with the Home Guard?” Rev asked, hoping to change the subject.

  “Me? Hell, you’re my relief. I’m gone in two weeks, and I can tell you, it couldn’t be too soon. No, no more of the Council bullshit. No more blue pauldrons to make us stand out like targets. I’m back to New Mars and the Fighting First. I saw a lot of action there before I came here. Holbert, you know. I was there. Deep in the shit, that one was. Not like what you provincials had to face. No insult intended,” he added as if he just remembered that Rev was a provincial.

  Rev was vaguely aware of Holbert, and nothing he’d heard indicated that it had been a particularly bad fight. Not as bad as Preacher Rolls, certainly. But the other staff sergeant’s tone was such that he expected Rev to know all about the battle there. The more time Rev spent in the Corps, the more he wondered how closely aligned the planets in the Union really were. He knew that the regular Corps looked down upon the provincial Marines, but did they know what the Safe Harbor Marines, for example, even did during the war?

  Staff Sergeant Patrice and Rev were both Union Marines, and the other Marine was confiding in him now as an equal. But if they were back within Union space, would he be acting the same? Rev would bet against that.

  Patrice leaned closer and, in a conspiratorial whisper, said, “Speaking of provincial units, and you being from Safe Harbor and all, what’s the scoop about these IBHO Marines we keep hearing about. They said some came from your planet.”

  “IBHU.”

  “What?”

  “IBHU Marines. Not IBHO. Integrated Bionic Hoplological Unit Marines.”

  “OK, IBHU. What’s the deal with them? I heard some of them and some of the Mad Dog super-soldiers are coming to the Guard. Are they really that good?”

  Rev didn’t know what to say. He looked at his left arm, all bright and shiny. It should be a dead giveaway. The presence of IBHU Marines was no longer a secret. Hell, Pierson and Tsao had been paraded around the Union to show off their Platinum Novas.

  He took his right hand and pointedly tapped a forefinger against his social arm.

  “What?” Patrice asked, not putting the dots together.

  “I have a prosthesis.”

  “Yeah. So?” Patrice asked. “Lots of folks have prostheses. Couldn’t regen until the war was over. Doesn’t mean you’re going to have a problem with that in the Home Guard.”

  Rev sighed, ready to give up, but something about his fellow staff sergeant was rubbing him raw. He didn’t need to be making any enemies in the Guard, especially with his fellow Union Marines. But the “Not like what you provincials had to face,” still stung.

  “An IBHU Marine is someone who lost an arm and has been fitted with the weapons system.”

  “OK, so what does . . .”

  Rev could see understanding come over his face.

  “Yeah, I’m one of those IBHU Marines coming to the Guard. I’ve got seven tin-ass kills to my name, one before I lost my arm.”

  The staff sergeant’s mouth dropped open, and he started to stammer out something, but Rev cut him off.

  “And about the Mother? Yeah, I was there, too. You see, they wanted the best of the best to protect her, not some garrison Marines.”

  That last dig was unfair. Patrice had faced combat, and he had to be good in order to be assigned to the Home Guard. It wasn’t his fault they were never ordered into battle. But Rev didn’t care. At least not at the moment.

  He faced forward, leaned his seat back, and closed his eyes as if taking a nap.

  It was a long, quiet, nine-and-a-half hours to Enceladus.

  5

  Rev stopped at the top of the steps and looked out over the famous Enceladus Commons. It was parklike, with the Roosevelt Stand, thirty soaring, 200-meter tall redwoods almost reaching the dome.

  “Yeah, they took my breath away, too, the first time I saw them,” a subdued Patrice said. He’d been quiet for most of the flight over and going through immigration at Trieste Station. This was the first thing he’d said that didn’t have to do with getting Rev to the base.

  Rev had seen holos of the stand before, of course, but seeing them just a klick away was breathtaking. With Enceladus’ lower pseudogravity, the trees had grown immense over the last nine hundred years, far outstripping their brethren down on the Mother.

  The Commons had been the moon’s first dome. As the population had grown and the undergrounds developed, it had shifted from a crowded scientific community into a beautiful gathering place for the moon’s inhabitants.

  “We can grab a shuttle to the station if you want. Or we can walk.”

  “Walk,” Rev said immediately.

  “Watch the steps. They can be tricky for newbies.”

  Rev had been about to bound down the steps, but he heeded the warning. Enceladus’s natural gravity was about 1/10th of one percent of Earth Normal, barely enough to feel. The original humans to live in it had been limited to three-year tours where rigorous exercise was de rigueur to maintain muscle mass.

  It wasn’t until the development of commercially feasible large-scale diamagnetic fields that people could live their entire lives on the moon if need be. With the public fields set at 70% Earth Normal, people still had to exercise or spend time in localized areas with higher pseudogravity.

  Every planet Rev had been on had been close to Earth Normal, and Asteroid 6-067-442 was essentially Null-G, so this was something new to him. And for the moment, Rev felt like he could jump to the Roosevelt Stand—and he’d have probably stumbled and landed on his face if he had tried to bound down the stairs. So, he’d appreciated the warning.

  He carefully descended the wide stone steps and went into the main area. Flowers bloomed in profusion. A tiny buzzing sound caught his attention, and he turned to watch a hummingbird, its iridescent purple throat flashing in the lights, hover over a flower, taking in the nectar. He stopped for a moment, wondering how the lower gravity affected eons of hummingbird evolution.

  Patrice led him down curving paths crowded with people. Some seemed on a mission, head down as they walked. Others seemed to be just out for a stroll. Small alcoves with plants screening most of what was inside had couples sitting on benches. Rev tried to avert his eyes, giving them privacy.

  Rev was disappointed that they didn’t head for the redwoods but rather off to the left. He’d seen redwoods before. Tall Trees Provincial Park had been one of his favorite places on Safe Harbor as a kid, but those were saplings compared to the ones in the Commons.

  The memory clouded his mood. It was above the park, where the Spizzo River started down from the high plains, that Prestor Nix and Tubba Badem had been killed.

  Come on, Reverent. The past is the past. Move on.

  He was a little more somber as they wended their way through what would put any botanical garden on Safe Harbor to shame. Even the aromas seemed more intense. He wondered what combat engineers and sappers, with their augmented sense of smell, would think of the place.

  On a whim, he switched his own sight to ultraviolet. He tended to avoid it as a matter of course as it made him a little queasy, and with his low-light capabilities, he’d never found the need. But as soon as he did, the flowers took on an entirely new aspect. It was as if they were all beaming beacons, directing the hummingbirds and bees to the sweet nectar.

  Too soon, Patrice led him to an entrance to the underground. People were streaming in and out, and the two Marines descended at least a hundred and twenty-five meters down, passing two other levels before Patrice led him off the escalator.

  Patrice looked up at a large board. “Three minutes for the next train. Track Two. Move it, Pelletier.”

  Rev followed his fellow staff sergeant as they hurried past hundreds of people going about their daily business. There were more people than Rev had expected. Everyone on the moon was either working for the Council or providing services to it.

  They reached a small gate manned by two soldiers—troopers, Rev reminded himself—dressed in uniforms Rev didn’t recognize. They watched as the two Marines leaned into the retinal scanners, then waved them through. They sprinted the last twenty meters and into the train ten seconds before the doors whispered closed.

  Patrice leaned back as the train lifted off the rails and started forward, so smoothly that Rev could barely feel any apparent motion.

  “Next stop, Fort Nkomo, Pelletier. Your home away from home for the next three years.”

  “What do you think?” Second Lieutenant Milei Macek asked Rev.

  “Not much to see so far. Like being on a ship, sir.”

  Fort Nkomo was entirely underground, the entrance level two hundred meters below the surface. It had taken two direct hits during the Centaur—they weren’t supposed to call it an invasion anymore, but Rev was damned if he knew what the politically accepted phrase for it was. It had taken the hits, but except for some surface comms gear, it hadn’t suffered a single casualty.

  It was home to the Home Guard’s Second Brigade—what the Marines would call a regiment. First Brigade was on Titan, while Third was at Fort Willis on the far side of the E, as some people stationed on the moon seemed to call Enceladus.

  Being underground, it really was like being on a ship. A big ship, true. In the six hours he’d been there, he hadn’t seen a fraction of the place. But it had the same passages and decks that wouldn’t look out of place on any large ship.

  The lieutenant lowered his voice to almost subvocalization. “You met any of the regulars?”

  Rev knew he didn’t mean those Marines, about a dozen of them, who weren’t IBHU Marines. They might or might not be regular Corps. Some could be provincials like the two of them. The lieutenant meant the three IBHU Marines sitting in the back.

  It was possible that they merely had prosthetic arms. Staff Sergeant Patrice had indicated that some of the troopers in the Guard had prostheses, and Rev had seen one with a prosthetic leg on the way to this brief. But as the saying went, “It takes one to know one.” Rev knew the three, a gunny and two corporals, were IBHU.

  “Not yet.”

  “I guess we will soon enough,”

  Rev and the lieutenant were the first two of the Safe Harbor IBHU Marines to arrive. The first two Safe Harbor anything, from what Rev could see from the name tags they’d all been issued as they checked in. The other four Safe Harbor IBHUs would trickle in over the next three weeks.

  Rev barely knew the lieutenant. They’d met a couple of times, and they both had the same problems with the IBHUs working loose during combat. But they’d immediately gravitated toward each other, two Safe Harborrs. It shouldn’t be like that, Rev knew. They were all Marines, and those three in the back were IBHUs, just like them. But still, he and the lieutenant were hunkered together to the side of the briefing room as if everyone else was some sort of enemy.

  “What about your berthing? You get a beehive-thing, too?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Yes, sir. You, too? An officer?”

  “Yeah. Sure did get one.”

  Rev’s berthing might as well be a cell in a beehive. He was in a space with about thirty other hexagonal cells all linked together. The front was a door that was programmed for his retinal scan. It was clear when unoccupied but could be darkened for privacy. About three meters long, it was only two in diameter. In the front was a small space with a chair, desk, sink, and holoscreen. The back was a bunk with a shelf above and storage below.

  It was clean and modern, but it rather sucked, in Rev’s humble opinion. The head and showers were at the end of the common space. The lounge area between the two double banks of cells was better, but it didn’t make up for the fact that he was in a coffin. Rev had hoped for something a little more comfortable, even a small stateroom. He was a SNCO now, after all. But he hadn’t been too surprised when he saw it. What did surprise him was that the lieutenant, an officer, had the same kind of thing.

  “The damn thing is just three meters long. The shitter’s right there by the sink, too. I can brush my teeth and take a dump at the same time.”

  Of course. Three meters long and a private head inside the space? My understanding of the military has not been shaken. Officers get what officers get, and we get what we get.

  Whatever else the lieutenant might have been about to say was cut off when someone shouted, “Attention on deck!”

  Rev jumped to his feet. Too hard. His feet left the deck a good ten centimeters, and he had to spread his arms to regain his balance. Judging from the laughs, he wasn’t the only one.

  “At ease, at ease. Take your seats.” A Union Marine Brigadier General, followed by a civilian and a colonel of some sort, entered the space and made her way to the front.

  “I’m Brigadier General Platte, the senior Marine on the E. My assigned billet is as the J3-Alpha, which means I handle ops for the two brigades here. But what I’m doing today is welcoming you here to the Home Guard. You are going to have a rewarding three years here, but only if you’re here with the right frame of mind. We aren’t here as Marines, as much as I hate to admit that. We are here for the greater good of humankind. We’ve just survived the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced, and the only reason we’re still around talking about it is because we banded together, without regard for where we were from.”

  Like Frisians and us almost coming to blows over an asteroid?

  “And that, Marines, is what we’re doing here. It’s a big galaxy and even a bigger universe. Who knows from where the next threat will come? But I can tell you this. It will come. Maybe not today. Maybe not during your tour here. But it will come, and the tactics and cooperation you will forge here will be the basis of how we will turn back the next threat.”

  She turned to look at the civilian. “Right, Vice-counsel?”

  Geeze, is everyone a deputy-this or vice-that?

  “Right, General.”

  “OK, now that I’ve said what I have to say, let me make one thing perfectly clear. You’re going to be swearing an oath in a bit, an oath to the Congress of Humanity. That’s a real oath, and your loyalty has to lie with it. If, the Mother forbid, the Council has to take action against the Union, you will be required to obey orders and take that action.”

  There was an outbreak of protests, and the general waited them out. “I hope it never happens. It has before, just not with the Union, but it could. Even so, damn it, you’re still Union Marines. Every other trooper here will be watching you, dissecting you. Some, more than others,” she said, glancing at the three IBHUs in the back, then to Rev and the lieutenant. “So, you will deport yourself as Marines at all times, doing nothing to besmirch the title. There will be NO incidents of any kind. Am I making that clear?”

  There was a weak ooh-rah. She rolled her eyes and repeated, “Am I making myself clear?”

  This time, the ooh-rah shook the space.

  “That’s better. Just understand this. Three years isn’t much. If you have a problem with drink, then maybe you’d better go on the wagon. If you screw around too much, then weld those zippers shut. If you like to fight, then zip tie your hands behind you. Get my drift?”

  “Ooh-rah!”

  She looked at each one of them, then smiled. “It really is a good tour. Just don’t make us sorry we sent you here. And with that . . . oh, you can wake your battle buddies now.”

  They’d put their battle buddies to sleep before leaving Safe Harbor, and Rev was surprised how relieved he was to wake up Punch.

  “You with me?”