Pointblank, p.12
Pointblank, page 12
Ubrik laughed. “That’s a good philosophy of life.”
A waitress came and took their orders. “Jak, where’s this ‘Havelock’ place you mentioned?” Felicia asked.
“Oh, that’s the liberty town just outside Camp Howard—that’s part of Marine Corps Base Camp Basilone, on Halfway, my home station. Fourth Force Recon Company,” he added.
“Force Recon?” Felicia nodded appreciatively. “Confederation Armed Forces Organization” was a class they’d all had, and Felicia knew just how Force Reconnaissance fit into the Marine Corps’ mission.
“Yeah. Princeton Street in Havelock, Felicia, that’s where we go on liberty to eat and drink.” Daly looked around at the luxurious dining room that was slowly beginning to fill up. “Nothing like this place, though.”
“I was reading in this brochure that UCR is famous just about everywhere for its food, hotel management, and recreational services. They run those theme parks on Havanagas now, you know, where you can live back in the Roman Empire and all that stuff. All their places got five-star ratings in Honiger’s Guide to Dining and Dancing in the Galaxy.”
The waitress returned with a cart heaped with their breakfast order, and they fell to consuming it with gusto. “Boy, this is first-class chow, compared to the slop we get back at OTC, right?” Felicia asked around a mouthful of scrambled eggs. She snatched a strip of bacon from a tray and dropped it into her mouth like a baby bird receiving a worm from its mother.
Daly and Ubrik exchanged glances. “Ah, Felicia, just what is it you do, back in the army?” Ubrik asked.
“Me? Oh, I’m in fucking graves registration. That’s a quartermaster MOS. I’ll be a second john, er ‘johnette,’ if you prefer, in the QM Corps when I graduate. Remember that girl, I think she was in your battalion, Jak, the one who drowned during zero month? I’ve pulled many a body out of the water in my time, and let me tell you, they ain’t pretty. Boys, you ever see a corpse that’s been in the drink as long as that girl was, you’ll flip your cookies from breakfast to midnight snacks. Anybody want that last sausage patty?” She speared it with her fork, plopped it on her plate, then cut it into four neat pieces, which she began popping into her mouth.
By the time both men shook their heads no they didn’t want the sausage, it was already gone. “Hey”—she looked up at the pair—“I’m a woman. I can deal with stiffs, dead or alive.” She laughed around a mouthful of sausage, pleased at her pun, and winked suggestively at Ubrik. His face reddened perceptibly.
“How’d you get sent to Marine OTC?” Daly asked Felicia. “Manny here, he was too smart for army OCS.”
“They sent me here because I was too tough for army OCS,” Felicia answered around a piece of sausage patty. “The army figured Marine OTC would take some of the rough edges off me.”
“Has it?” Daly asked. “Doesn’t look like it to me.”
“Oh, sure! I used to piss standing up, now I have to do it sitting down.”
Ubrik stiffened. “Oh, Christ,” he whispered, and nodded toward the door.
Daly turned and looked in that direction. “Oh, boy, oh, boy,” he whispered.
“What?” Felicia asked, looking questioningly at each man in turn. “What? You seen a ghost? I’ve seen them. I can handle them.”
“No, worse than anything supernatural, Felicia, it’s old Rumple Stiltskein, our PT officer.” Daly groaned. “He’s coming right over here!” he hissed.
“Are we supposed to come to attention when he gets here?” Felicia asked. When in the presence of OTC cadre, candidates were obligated to assume the position of attention, something that now came automatically to them, on campus, that is.
“No, no, we’re off duty. Oh, boy, here he comes.”
Lieutenant Stiltskein took a chair and sat down at their table. “May I join you?” he said cheerily. “Ah, looks like you gentlemen have enjoyed a hearty breakfast. Maybe tomorrow, to work it off, we’ll run twenty klicks instead of the usual ten. I don’t know this lady, do I?”
“No, sir, she’s in another battalion.”
“Well, I’ve seen you Miss…?”
“Longpine, sir.”
“Miss Longpine. Yes, I’ve seen you. Your PT officer is Lieutenant Wakefield, right?”
“Yessir.”
“Um. Well, when you get your commission, Candidate Longpine, you stop by and see me. You’d make a good PT instructor. Maybe we can get you on loan from your gaining command.”
“I don’t think the army would let me go, sir.”
“Army, huh? Well, nobody’s perfect, Candidate Longpine. No reflection on you. Gentlemen,” he addressed Daly and Ubrik, “you I know, very well, very well, I know you very well indeed. May I have a cup of your coffee?” he poured himself coffee from the carafe. “Have you people been keeping up with the news lately?” He looked at them over the rim of his cup.
“Ah, we haven’t had much time for that, sir,” Daly answered.
“Well, this just in: we’re in a pretty desperate pickle in our war with the Coalition. And here we are, stuck in beautiful downtown Oceanside with all the feather merchants and their offspring. This session has, what, seven months left to graduation? The war’ll be over by then, one way or the other. Guess none of us will meet the enemy on the Plains of Philippi, huh? Well, thanks for the coffee. Daly, Ubrik, see you tomorrow at oh-dark-thirty. Candidate Longpine, pleasure to meet you.” He stood up to go. “Oh”—he put his credit card into the Billpayer device—“your hospitality is appreciated. Breakfast is on me.”
“So what’s wrong with him?” Felicia asked after Stiltskein had departed. “I sort of like the guy.”
Daly only shrugged. “He beats your legs down into stumps,” Ubrik volunteered. “But, damn, maybe there’s actually a human being in there somewhere?”
“Where in the hell is this ‘Plains of Whatever’ he was talking about?” Felicia asked.
“Oh, that’s a reference to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar,” Manny said. “Philippi was where Brutus was defeated by Mark Antony. Well, I mean it really happened, the Battle of Philippi. I never figured him for knowing the classics.”
“We never figured you for knowing them! We got a real scholar among us, Jak.” Felicia laughed and gave Daly a big wink.
They rented beach clothes and equipment and spent the day on the sparkling strand for which Oceanside was justly famous. That evening they had dinner in a restaurant that featured a dance band. “Come on, Manny,” Felicia urged after dinner, “let’s us hoof around the floor a little bit.”
“Ah, I—”
“Whatsamatter, Manny, you got two left feet or something?”
“Well, it just is, I don’t dance very well, Felicia. I’d step all over you and embarrass the both of us. Now Jak there, he’s a ballroom dancer.” He nodded desperately at Daly, hoping he’d take the bait.
“The hell I am!” But Daly was a little disappointed Felicia hadn’t asked him first.
“I don’t want to dance with Jak”—Felicia pretended to pout—“even if he is a devilishly handsome and virile Marine. I want to dance with you. I want to dance with a guy who’s got some brains. Come on, Candidate Ubrik. We’ll do the Mess, it’s got real simple steps to it.”
“The Mess? Never heard of it,” Daly said.
“Yeah? You just stand in the middle of the floor and nothing moves but your bowels!” Felicia’s laughter, fueled by several strong alcoholic after-dinner drinks, caused heads on the dance floor to turn in her direction. She covered her mouth in embarrassment. “Okay, Manny, sit here if you want to.” She stood and grabbed Daly’s hand. “Candidate Daly, show me your stuff.”
Felicia proved to be a good dancer, so good she wound up leading Daly across the floor, which he didn’t mind one bit. Her strong, hard, athletic young body pressed closely against his felt good. It’d been a long time. “Felicia,” he whispered, “let’s hit the beach afterward, watch the waves in the moonlight.”
“You bet, Marine,” she whispered back, “if you can rise to the occasion.” They both laughed. “But what about Manny?” She nodded in the direction of their table.
Daly glanced back at the table. Ubrik was conversing with a pretty young woman. Daly smiled. “Manny’s going to be out for the duration.” They moved gracefully across the floor for a while, comfortable in each other’s arms, then Daly chuckled and said, “Felicia, you remind me a little of someone back at Camp Howard,” and he told her about Bella Dwan.
“‘Queen of Killers,’ eh?” Felicia murmured. “Sounds like the kind of woman I would like to meet. Does she also shit standing up?”
Daly couldn’t help laughing. “Felicia, you don’t have any soft edges at all, do you?”
“Yes, Candidate Daly, I do, but only the privileged few ever get to see them. But, Jak, remember this about your Bella. When she dies, she’ll rot, just like anybody else.”
Universal Catering and Recreation Inc. did not permit gambling, prostitution, or any activity at its resorts that wasn’t appropriate for the entire family, but it also did not interfere with what people wanted to do in private. The pretty young woman Daly had seen talking to Ubrik introduced herself when they got back to the table as Julia, an off-duty waitress at one of Oceanside’s exclusive nightclubs. She frankly admitted to being single and currently unattached. “I saw Manny sitting alone and thought he might like me to join him. I didn’t know you were all together,” she apologized.
“Hell, Julia,” Felicia said, plopping herself down in her chair and mock-wiping perspiration from her forehead, “I’m madly in love with my Marine here so you came at just the right time for Manny. Now we’ve got some balance to the evening.” She grinned over at Daly. “Hey, Julia,” she said as an idea suddenly came to her, “doesn’t this place have a seamy side to it? I mean, Arsenault, military personnel all over the place, doesn’t Oceanside have a ‘strip’—you know, clip joints, all that?”
“You’re on it now.” Julia laughed, gesturing with her head at the sedate surroundings. “This is about as ‘seamy’ as it gets in Oceanside. But people still get it on, just not where everyone can see them.” she smiled at Ubrik.
“Well,” Ubrik said brightly, “shouldn’t we be catching the bus back to OTC?”
“It’s only twenty hours, Manny! Keep your socks on!” Felicia said. “I want to snuggle a bit with Jak here; besides, the last bus is at zero-one hours, and if we miss that one, they’ve got twenty-four-hour taxi service. We can sit here until first light if we want to and still be in time for roll call tomorrow.”
“Yeah, if you stay sober,” Ubrik muttered.
“Hey! Fuck you, GI!” Felicia said, loud enough so people at the nearby tables winced.
Oh, shit! Daly thought. There goes the evening. “Well, I think what Manny means, Felicia, is that our dear old Rumple Stiltskein gets up early in the mornings.” Daly turned to Julia. “When we come in next time, how can we get in touch with you?”
She did not answer at once but stared coldly at Ubrik for a moment. “You can’t, thank you very much,” she answered, voice glacial. Throwing Felicia a killing look, she got up and stalked off.
The bus ride back to OTC was endured in stony silence.
“Muhammad’s tits!” Daly raged when he and Ubrik were finally back in their room. “Why the hell did you have to piss Felicia off like that? She was ready to spend the night on the freaking beach with me. Damn! And that Julia? She was for you, Manny, any fool could’ve seen that. Damn! Damn! Damn!”
“I’m sorry, Jak, I-I’m really sorry,” Ubrik stuttered. “I don’t know what came over me! I just blurted that out! Besides, Felicia, she’s such a-a—I don’t know, rough. I guess—I guess if anybody had her job, they’d get rough around the edges too.”
“Well, she is that,” Daly admitted, calming down a bit. “But, Manny, you’re a disaster with women. What are you, a misogynist or something like that? You don’t like them? We could have had a foursome on the beach until you had to go and screw it all up.”
“Jak…okay, I’ll tell you.” Ubrik looked up at Daly, eyes pleading. “Back home on Solden I’ve got someone, and I believe a promise is a promise, and when you promise yourself to someone you love, you’ve got to keep your word. A man who breaks his word to a loved one is—is not a gentleman.”
Daly almost laughed. He shook his head. “Manny, you are a frigging piece of work, a literal throwback to Victorian times! But by golly, okay, buddy, I understand.” He extended his hand and they shook. “I apologize, Manny. That girl of yours back on Solden is one lucky lady to have a guy like you. But I tell you what, old buddy mine, next time I get that Felicia Looonggggg-pine”—he drew out her name—“to go out on liberty with me, I’m going to give her some ‘long pine,’ you betcha!” He smashed a fist into his wardrobe door.
Ubrik laughed. “Go to it, buddy mine! But I guess I’ll just stay back here in the old room and read my Shakespeare.”
CHAPTER
* * *
FOURTEEN
West of a Staging Area, Four Hundred Kilometers Northwest of the Bataan Peninsula, Ravenette
The sniper teams didn’t have specific targets, they were merely inserted near locations that might have targets worth taking out. A military staging area was such a location. Even if they didn’t find a high-value target, it would only take a couple of hits from a sniper to begin eroding the morale of the troops being staged.
“Target,” Lance Corporal Dwan murmured. “More targets!” They’d been in their initial security position, half a kilometer from their insertion point, for three-quarters of an hour, standard.
“Where?” Sergeant Gossner asked, looking around for an enemy patrol coming to look for them.
“Up there.” Dwan slipped off her glove and pointed.
Gossner followed her pointing finger and saw the streaks of light left by two Essays making a combat assault planetfall some distance away, probably right at the staging area. Surprised, Gossner wondered if Thirty-fourth FIST was making an assault on the staging area, but he only wondered briefly. Surely the Marines on the Bataan Peninsula would clear any offensive operations with Admiral Hoi’s operations center, and the admiral wouldn’t let them make an assault in an area where a Force Recon squad and sniper team were active without notifying the Marines already on the ground. Dwan was right, these had to be reinforcements for the Coalition troops in the staging area. Besides, the Marines would come with more than two Essays—and they wouldn’t land right in the middle of the staging area. He slowly shook his head. During the pre-insertion briefings on board the Admiral Stoloff, he’d studied the display showing the Confederation cordon around Ravenette. The captain of the starship that had brought these Essays had to be a brave man—or suicidal—to run that gauntlet. Gossner wondered how long the enemy starship survived after making its drop—and how many Essays were still in the starship’s well deck when she died.
He shook that thought off, it didn’t pay to dwell on enemy losses.
“Yeah, more targets,” he murmured back. He burst-transmitted to the security squad, “Let’s move out. I’ve got point.” They’d checked their UV tags on the AstroGhost before they were inserted and again immediately after they assumed their initial security position, so he knew everyone would be able to follow him.
Second squad and the sniper team had been inserted into a nature preserve, a place where urban dwellers could come to observe and relax amid trees and other flora, or take tours to see wild animals in their natural habitats. According to the materials Gossner had studied while en route to Ravenette, and again after getting this assignment, some of the animals were predators big enough to take on a human being—and none of the animals had yet learned fear of man. In normal times, the park was thick with rangers, charged with keeping people from molesting the flora and fauna—or being molested by them. Neither Admiral Hoi’s nor General Billie’s intelligence sections knew whether the rangers were still patrolling the preserve. So the patrol had to be triply on the alert, watching not only for enemy soldiers, but for rangers and potentially dangerous animals as well.
Gossner knew this wasn’t the first time he or Sergeant Kare had gone someplace where they’d had to be wary of the fauna; most Force Recon Marines had to deal with dangerous predators at one time or another. And Gossner himself had even gone where he’d had to be wary of carnivorus flora.
Because of the possibility of rangers in the area, they couldn’t use puddle jumpers, but had to walk the thirty kilometers to the staging area. Nobody knew how much time they had before the Coalition began its big push to overrun the forces pinned on Bataan, or when the troops in the staging area would begin to move out. That lack of knowledge lent an urgency to this patrol, so they couldn’t go as slowly as Force Recon normally moved on the ground behind enemy lines. But they couldn’t go so fast they would accidentally spook the local animals and thereby possibly alert any rangers or enemy troops in the preserve. That was why Gossner wanted to take point, he was sure he could lead the patrol fast enough to reach their objective before the troops there moved out, while avoiding disturbing the fauna. The animals might not have fear of man, but they’d likely run from men they sensed but couldn’t see.
The nature preserve wasn’t a totally natural landscape. It had been sculpted and planted to provide a wide variety of habitats. There were temperate and boreal forests, meadows, plains, a desert, and even small mountains. Creeks, rivers, ponds, and lakes watered it. Gossner led the way along interstices between the forests and the open areas—he calculated those were the places the Marines were least likely to encounter animals.
After a few hours of walking, he thought either his assumption was wrong or there were far more animals than he’d expect to find in such relatively small areas. Grazers wandered unconcerned between meadow and wood, from forest to savanna. Rodentlike animals darted or hopped underfoot, in and out of burrows in the grasses and between the roots of trees. Avians swooped to gobble insects in the open, then perched deep within the trees. At one point they passed less than fifty meters from a two-hundred-kilogram predator of a type they’d seen prowling under the trees; it was in the grass, dining on a grazer half its size. Catlike, the beast lifted its head and sniffed in their direction as they passed, then shook its massive shoulders and returned to its repast.
