Song of Redemption Read online

  “Neesy, I wanted to start it!” Kat protested, but the music began and cut her off.

  It was about as expected—bright and mind-numbing.

  The girls sang along, raising their voices almost to a scream for the final four lines line of each stanza:

  Sorry, Mommy. Sorry, Mommy,

  So the little bear said.

  That’s OK, my little one.

  And she kissed him on his head!

  Screams of laughter followed.

  Rev did his best to follow along. He could have had Punch feed him the lines, but for some reason, this had to be just between the two girls and him. At least he got the final line, singing out, “And she kissed him on his head,” with them.

  As they started the song for the fourth time, his mother came to the rescue and told them that was enough.

  “But Rev says it’s his favorite!” Kat said.

  “Why don’t you go get the shirt Dad gave you,” his mother said.

  “Oh, OK!” Kat said, sliding off the couch and running back to her room.

  Neesy snuggled closer and put her hands around his social arm and squeezed it tight.

  “Can I get you something more to drink? Another beer?” his mother asked.

  Rev looked at the drink on the table. He was going to meet Mala for dinner and drinks in an hour, and he probably should be sober before he started.

  “Maybe a coffee?”

  “Coming right up.”

  As soon as she stepped into the kitchen, Neesy gave his arm a tug and looked up at him.

  “What do you want, little one?”

  She hesitated, her face screwed up in concentration. “Do you love Kat more than me?”

  “What? Whatever gave you that idea?” Rev asked, completely taken by surprise.

  “I don’t know. You spend more time with her when you come.”

  Rev’s heart fell. “I spend time with you, too. Neesy, are you having problems with her? Don’t you like her?”

  “No, I love her. I like having her here. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Am I still your favorite sister?”

  Rev’s heart was breaking, but he forced a laugh and pulled Neesy around to face him. “Neesy, Neesy, Neesy. You’ve been my favorite since I first saw you almost ten years ago. And now, with Kat joining us, you’re my favorite big-little sister, OK?”

  “Really? And Kat is your favorite little-little sister, right?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  Neesy threw her arms around his neck and squeezed just as his mother returned with the coffee. “What’s going on,” she asked.

  “Nothing,” the two siblings said, laughing.

  “I don’t know; my mother-radar is going off.”

  “Some things are just between brother and sister, Mom. Right Neesy?”

  “Right.”

  Kat chose that moment to come running back into the room. She’d changed her shirt to a green one with “My Big Brother Is A Marine” emblazoned across the front. She stepped in front of him and preened like a model on the catwalk.

  “Come here, munchkin,” Rev said, as he gathered her up and pulled her to his right side. Sitting there, with his sisters on either side, he felt a sudden wave of . . . domesticity? No, that couldn’t be it.

  “So, I know I don’t need to ask, but are you staying for dinner?”

  He was about to tell his mother he had other plans, but he realized that he’d rather stay, not just for the girls, but to catch up with his father, and Grover was supposed to come over that evening from the dorm, too, probably to get clean laundry. He could call up Mala and give her his regrets, maybe promising something else later on.

  “No, I think I’ll stay, if you don’t mind?”

  “Well, will wonders never cease?” his mother said, a smile breaking over her face. “I was going to dial up something quick, but if you’re staying, I’ll make your favorite.”

  “No, no! Don’t go to any trouble. Just dial up something!”

  “Are you kidding? When my firstborn is eating with us?” She rushed off to the kitchen.

  Rev’s mother had somehow come to the conclusion that one of her dishes from scratch, shepherds pie, was his favorite. Truth be told, his mother wasn’t a good cook, and the meal, while supposedly an Earth classic, was mostly a gooey, tasteless mess. Rev would far rather just get something dialed up on the family’s meal fabricator, but he knew it was a lost cause. When his mother got up a head of steam, there was no stopping her.

  If Mala is still willing to meet later, maybe we can grab a bite of something.

  “Hey, since Mom is busy, how about we sing some more “Selfish Little Bear.”

  The girls squealed with delight, and they started another round of the song. Rev even started picking up the other lines.

  Rev never did get that shepherd’s pie, though. After the fifth “And she kissed him on his head,” his quantphone sounded with an emergency recall back to base.

  8

  “There’s Ether,” McAnt said as the two entered the briefing room deep in the bowels of the First Division headquarters.

  They made a beeline for her in the back of the room. After being screened no fewer than six times, Rev just wanted to fade into the background. Too much brass, and like elephants, they had a tendency to trample all the little mice in the grass.

  “Hey, glad to see you could make it,” Randigold said, jumping to her feet and giving the steel tap to them both—still a little too hard, but better than that first time on Mistake. The woman was a live wire, full of energy. Rev hadn’t really spent time with her during the brief at Kamachi and only spent the forty minutes with her on Mistake before she and her team were whisked away, but they had been an intense forty minutes, not the least because she was already amped from taking out two Centaurs. Where McAnt had been somewhat retrospective after his first mission, Randigold had been flat out ecstatic.

  “What do you think they’re gonna say?” she asked as the two sat down beside her.

  “I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” Rev said.

  If he had to bet, it would be connected with the last brief, the one at Camp Kamachi, and it had to do with biological weapons. This was the second brief in a month where Rev had to leave Nguyen. That was more than odd. They had remote briefings for a reason, after all.

  “I bet we’re hitting the tin-ass homeworld,” Randigold said.

  “You’d better hope not,” Rev said.

  It was one thing to start using bioweapons in a battle somewhere, but an all-out attack on the homeworld? That was an entirely different kettle of fish.

  “Why not?” she asked, frowning just a bit.

  “Because if we have that much of a problem with two-hundred-whatever-it-was on Mistake, can you imagine what would happen on their homeworld?”

  “But we gotta go there sometime, right?”

  “Not us. The Navy. Or the Heg Navy. Let them blow the place out of space.”

  “Just molecules left,” McAnt added.

  Randigold seemed to consider that for a long moment before she grudgingly shrugged her acceptance. Rev just shook his head. She was so enthusiastic. He just hoped that wouldn’t be beaten out of her by reality.

  But he knew he was right. Sending ground troops down to their homeworld would be devasting. Let the Navy, or as he suggested, the stronger Hégémonie Liberté Navy, reduce the planet to molecules, as McAnt suggested.

  Not that he thought the Centaur homeworld was on the docket. But whatever it was, it was big, if he went by the brass crowding the room. The question he had was why the three of them—a sergeant, a corporal, and a PFC—were here as well. Yes, they were the only three IBHU-ready Marines, as far as he knew, but they were still pretty low on the totem pole.

  “I could use some coffee,” McAnt said, pointing to a line of urns on a table in the back corner of the room.

  “And I could use a beer,” Rev said.

  Not likely, but true. A beer or something to munch on would have been welcomed. Rev and McAnt had been whisked away with no warning, flying to Falcon with General Sirirat, Colonel Destafney, and some of her senior staff, and he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since then.

  “Think I can go over there and get some coffee?” McAnt asked Rev.

  “Sure. That’s what it’s there for.”

  “But all the brass. That’s a one-star helping herself now.”

  “She’s just a Marine,” Rev said, more than half-facetiously.

  “OK, then, why don’t you get some?”

  Rev was about to make some crack about him being the sergeant and not them, but he could see both of them waiting for a reaction. He wasn’t technically their leader, but in a way, he was, and sometimes, you had to lead from the front.

  Without a word, he stood up and started down the aisle. “With cream,” Randigold said.

  He made his way to the table and picked up a plate. “Ma’am,” he said when the general started eyeballing him and reading his name tag. He could see she was questioning why a sergeant was in the room, and she might have frowned ever-so-slightly, but she didn’t say a word and left with her coffee back to the front.

  “She doesn’t know who I am.”

 

  Having been on two combat missions as an IBHU Marine, Rev would have thought that all of the flag officers would have been briefed on them. Either this brigadier general hadn’t been, or she didn’t put his name together with the program.

  A colonel came up and looked pointedly at the trays of food.

  “Oh, sorry, sir.” Rev loaded up the plate with donuts, fried Maku balls, and baby carrots.

  The colonel frowned at him.

  “Haven’t eaten, sir.”

  “A lot of us haven’t eaten, Sergeant.” But he didn’t tell Rev to put some back.

  Rev filled three cups of coffee and grabbed sugar and creamer, then did his best balancing act going back down the aisle to the waiting Marines. He handed out the coffee, gave McAnt the plate of food to hold, and took his seat.

  “Don’t say I’ve never done anything for you.”

  “No, Sergeant. Wouldn’t think of it,” Randigold said, grabbing both a donut and a Maku ball. “And I don’t care what your general says, I think you’re a good sergeant.”

  “Bite me, PFC.”

  “You didn’t get napkins,” she said.

  “Again, bite me.”

  Up front, the generals and colonels were milling about, shaking hands and chatting. Right behind them were the sergeants major and master gunnery sergeants. Not many of them, maybe five or six. And next back were the lieutenant colonels and majors, all sitting quietly and waiting to find out what this was about. Some of them were sipping on coffee or tea, but not many of them had any of the food.

  All the more for us.

  Ladies and gentlemen, General Begay will be in here ten minutes, so if you have to make a head call, do it now. We may be here for a while. And please be in your seats in five,” a major with a gold aiguilette hanging from his shoulder shouted into the room.

  “Eat up,” Rev said before stuffing a dazzleberry donut into his mouth and chasing it down with the coffee.

  Throughout the room, Marines were taking their seats, waiting for the Safe Harbor Marine commanding general. Colonel Destafney turned around before sitting, looking for Rev, when he caught sight of Randigold. He gave her a little half-salute and a smile, and she stood and returned it before they both sat down.

  “First time you’ve seen him?” Rev asked, realizing that if they all had the Brothers in Steel bond, the two of them had a little more in common.

  “No, not the first time. He came to see me in my ward after my first set of operations. You know. Pep talk and all of that stuff. Came a few times after that, too.” She paused, then in a more subdued voice, said, “Helped me through some rough times.”

  The revelation that the colonel had visited her surprised Rev. Randigold wasn’t in his regiment, and they weren’t located in the same camp, but he took the time to give emotional support to her?

  “You’re lucky to have him as your CO,” she said. “He’s good people.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Rev put that in his mental file under “leadership.” He had no expectations that he’d ever be in that type of position, but, if nothing else, it gave him a baseline on what a leader was.

  “General Begay has entered the building. Stand by.”

  There was a rush to silence as Marines sat straighter in their chairs. The brigadier general, the one who’d given him the weird look, was ramrod straight. To Rev, a major, much less a one-star general, was next to godhood, but there she was, acting like a recruit at boot camp. It was mind-boggling, in a way.

  “Attention on deck!”

  Immediately, everyone jumped to their feet as the great man himself entered the room, followed by his posse of a couple of Marines and a civilian.

  “Take your seats,” he told them as he reached the front.

  The general paused at the first row and shook hands with the two major generals and the Second Division Sergeant Major, then pointed and gave the one-star a small wave as one of his group, a full colonel, stepped forward.

  “This brief is classified One-B.”

  Rev looked at the other two enlisted Marines. He’d been temporarily given a One-A with regard to the Centaur body he and Tomiko had found on Roher-104, and all three of them were conditionally cleared for anything concerning their IBHUs, but he didn’t think this brief was about them. He wondered if the three of them were cleared for whatever this was going to be. But they were here, and he wasn’t about to ask anyone. Plus it was too late. General Begay was already walking to the stage.

  The colonel sat down, and the general faced the gathered Marines. “General Sirirat, thank you and Second Division for coming down to Falcon, but I wanted to do this face-to-face.”

  He had a naturally commanding voice, and he probably didn’t need the mic aimed at his throat to reach everyone in the room, especially when forty or fifty eyes were locked on him.

  “I’ll be turning this over to Colonel Tiergarten from PUMC Headquarters, but I wanted to give you an overview of where we are first. Some of you have been in the loop, but for others, much of this is going to be new. If you were not directly involved with any of this, then you didn’t have the need to know.

  “As a consequence of the battles to dismantle the Children of Angels, we captured many high-level personnel. Interrogations of these prisoners has been quite an undertaking, and it has been time-consuming. Adding to the problem is that due to their organization, or lack thereof, it was sometimes difficult determining just who we needed to be interrogating. When that happens, sometimes we have something right in front of us, and we just don’t recognize it. And that’s what happened at the Joint Interrogation Center on Donder Hide.”

  He paused for a moment, letting that sink in.

  Donder Hide was a Congress of Humanity-controlled trust world in the Orion Arm, independent from all the major nations and a site for CoH business.

  “During what was thought as a routine interrogation of a mid-level manager, a vital piece of information was revealed. The Centaurs have created an artifact in an installation inside the Perseus Arm. What the installation is, we don’t know, only that the Centaurs place significant importance to it. Where, we aren’t sure, but we’ve narrowed it down to three asteroid belts that fit the parameters based on the information we’ve received. One is well within our area of control, one is in claimed space, and one is within unincorporated space.”

  He stopped again, gauging the room. Rev didn’t know what to think about the news. What did he mean by “an installation?” A military base? A listening post? And how was that different than what they’d been doing every time they took a planet?

  “We have reason to believe two things. First that this is a clandestine project and, as such, has a minimal footprint. Second, that it represents a technological leap forward. With that in mind, and this is straight from the Director Prime’s mouth, we are going to take it.”

  Rev, McAnt, and Randigold huddled back near the now-empty coffee urns. After three hours listening to the headquarters colonel and a civilian analyst, the bathroom break had been welcomed. Despite just sitting in the brief for that amount of time, however, Rev still didn’t know much of what was going on, and in his opinion, no one else did, either.

  Basically, the Centaurs built something on the sly. It might be in an asteroid belt within Union space, it might be within an area to which the Union had claimed, or it might be in unincorporated space. Or it might be somewhere else altogether.

  The installation, as the colonel referred to it, might be vitally important, or it could be merely of interest. No less than nine different possibilities had been presented, and even they were vague. It was obvious that if the source was being forthright, then he didn’t have a clue as to what this thing was.

  The bottom line was that the Directorate wanted it and had every intention of grabbing it, no matter what it took. There was a fly in the ointment, however. The interrogation had been done in a joint center on a trust world, and while the subject had been captured on Tenerife, the interrogation lead had been a Congress of Humanity employee from a Frisian Mantle-allied world, and one of the team was from the Hégémonie Liberté. The lead, as an employee of the CoH, was supposed to maintain secrecy, but not many thought he would, so the betting line was that the Frisians knew about the installation as well.

  And that meant speed was of the essence, and Operation Klondike, which had only been authorized eight hours before, was in full swing. An agreement had already been reached with the Heg, which would be providing Naval support in return for the sharing of whatever was discovered.

  But after three hours, Rev still had no idea what he and the other two IBHU Marines were doing in the room. Nor why the Safe Harbor Marine Corps was being briefed, for that matter. There was no way that headquarters was going to send a planetary Marine force on a mission of this evident importance. That was going to go to a regular PUMC unit, maybe with Navy SEAL support. The colonel had even hinted as much when he said that units were being readied for deployment.