Pointblank, p.8
Pointblank, page 8
Female candidates trained alongside the men and were subject to the same physical demands as the men.
Introduction, Marine OTC
“Gentlemen,” a tall, painfully thin tactical officer greeted Ubrik and Daly as they signed in to the student officer orderly room, “your first duty after quarters assignment will be to draw utilities and tactical gear plus a whole issue of other junk you’ll need while you’re here. You will wear only utility uniforms, I emphasize only, until your graduation parade. If, and I emphasize if, you go on liberty to Oceanside, you will wear your respective service dress uniform—dress reds for you, Marine.” He nodded at Daly, who bristled. Of course he knew what his dress uniform was. The tac officer, a first lieutenant, was not much older than Daly, and it was obvious from the few service medals he wore on his chest that he hadn’t been around the Corps as much as Daly had. But he was a tac officer, a little god to the officer candidates.
“Formations twice a day, gentlemen,” the tac continued, “zero-six and nineteen hours, rain or shine. We march or run, I emphasize run, to every class. You will start each day with thirty minutes of physical training. PT is my job,” he announced proudly. “You will be seeing a lot of me while you are here. My name is Lieutenant Stiltskein.” It did not take long for the officer candidates to start calling him, behind his back, of course, Rumple. “Now hurry it up,” Lieutenant Stiltskein continued. “There are plenty more of you to check in today. I will see you tomorrow at zero-six hours in the company street, ready for roll call and PT. Mess at zero-seven hours, first orientation at zero-eight. Now get a move on!”
Probably because they reported in together, the two were both assigned to the First Company of Bravo Battalion. Their company first sergeant, a real master gunnery sergeant, growled at them around a foul-smelling Clinton. He owned heavy, bushy eyebrows that met in the center of his forehead; he was totally bald and the top of his head showed numerous scars; his hairy fingers were as big as sausages; and thick, black hairs sprouted from his nostrils. He wore no campaign medals or decorations on his uniform. The plain brass nameplate on his desk announced only FIRST SERGEANT, and for all the time they were in OTC, none of the candidates ever used his last name, which someone learned later was Beedle. Inevitably, the candidates dubbed him Beetle, but of course never within his hearing. “You’ll meet yer comp’ny commander when he’s damn good and ready to meet you,” the first sergeant announced. “Now, the officers round here call you birds ‘gentlemen’ and defer to you even when they’re running your asses into the ground. But for me, you ain’t even NCOs ennymore, yer ‘in betweens,’ and you ain’t gettin’ any deference from me until you put on your pips or whatever passes for an ensign’s insignia where you come from. That is, if you make it. I can see now you two pussies droppin’ out. And where do you come from?” He glared up at Ubrik.
“Solden, First Sergeant!” Ubrik replied.
“Never heard of it. You, Marine?” He cast his baleful gaze at Daly.
“I was in Force Recon, Top—”
“Aw fuck.” The first sergeant imperiously waved Daly into silence. “Go see the billeting NCO and get your room assignments. On the way out see my clerk and he’ll download your personnel records and tell you where else you gotta go to complete check-in.” He returned to the paperwork on his desk.
“First Sergeant—” Daly began.
“You ain’t gone yet?” the top growled.
“Top, any chance Sergeant Ubrik and I can get the same room assignment? We sorta know each other,” Daly added lamely.
The first sergeant glared up at Daly as if he were some form of disgusting insect. “You two are buddies awreddy?” he almost shouted. Then, shaking his massive head: “I don’t give a fuck, if it’s okay with the billeting sergeant. Just”—he glared balefully at the pair, shaking a massive forefinger at them—“don’t let me catch you two lovebirds in the same bed together.”
Orientation, Marine OTC
The orientation for new officer candidates was given in an auditorium large enough to accommodate them all. It lasted the entire day and consisted of overviews by members of the staff of the training they would receive. The introductory remarks were delivered by the commandant, a grizzled brigadier named Beemer. Beemer was short, with the physique of a long-distance runner. His remarks were brief and to the point.
“I’ll have no Marine do anything I can’t do myself,” he began without preamble. “When you do your runs in the morning, I will be there with you. In the field, I will be there too. I’ll be sitting in on your classes also. You will get to know this ugly face as well as your own.” Nobody laughed.
“You are among the best in the Corps, that is why you are here. I know many of you have not carried a gun in some time. You may have come here from the staff or some special assignment. But you have performed those duties so well your commanders have recommended you for a commission.
“While I speak of the ‘Corps’ and ‘Marines,’ I know full well that some of you are Confederation Army people and others represent the armed forces of Confederation Worlds, twenty of the former and ten of the latter. I want you to know that I consider you the same as my Marines, and when you get your commissions, you can be proud that you have made the grade and will be standing with the very best.
“Some of you will wash out. Our attrition rate is about ten percent. We will lose some of you through injuries or failure to live up to our physical or academic standards. We will tax your brainpower to the limit while you are here, but we emphasize physical fitness. A Marine officer cannot be out of shape, no matter what his duties! You set the example for every enlisted Marine, you will always be on parade.
“Liberty. After you have completed zero month and whenever we are not in the field, you are authorized liberty after you are dismissed by your instructors or tactical officers. Remember, though, you are each individually responsible for your grades and performance, and if you let liberty nights interfere with your progress as officer candidates, you and you alone will suffer the consequences.
“Fraternization. There will be some of that here. We can’t deny human nature. But—and this is a very big but—there will be none, repeat, none while on duty or within the confines of Camp Upshur and the training areas, on or off duty. No ‘public display of affection’ by any candidate to any other candidate, cadre, staff, or civilian employee inside these gates. You get caught doing it and you’re out, no appeal. Now, when you go on liberty, that’s another matter. What happens on liberty stays on liberty. And when on liberty, we expect each of you to conduct yourselves as officers, not swabbies on a binge in from a six-month cruise. Enough said on that subject.”
Beemer paused for a long moment, taking in the sea of faces staring back at him from the auditorium. “People, our forces are now deployed in a desperate battle on a place known as Ravenette. No Marine worth his salt wishes to be anywhere except with his comrades when they go in harm’s way. But you are here and most of you will remain here for the next ten months, and I guarantee you will not have much time to think about events elsewhere. My staff and I are going to see to it that when you receive your commissions and rejoin the fleet, you are capable of leading your Marines into battle, winning the fight, and bringing them back alive.”
The auditorium had gone totally silent, even the ventilation system seemed muted, the hundreds of candidates rooted to their seats, when suddenly, a staff sergeant sitting in the rear stood up and shouted, “Urrahhhhhh!” Instantly everyone was on his feet shouting urrahhhhhh until the rafters shook with the acclamation of four hundred years of esprit.
The brigadier let the roar sound out three times, and then he held up his hands for silence. “People!” he thundered. “I will see you tomorrow at six hours!” A slight smile crossed his face. He nodded at the candidates. “That is all.”
CHAPTER
* * *
NINE
Planetfall, Ravenette
The AstroGhost with its thirty-two embarked Force Recon Marines plummeted toward an ocean on Ravenette’s night side. The Marines all wore the version of chameleon uniforms issued specifically to Force Recon, which were even more effective at making their wearers invisible than those worn by infantry Marines and, additionally, had a seriously damping effect on the infrared signature of their wearers. Had they been visible, the thirty-two Marines would have looked bulky, as though they had been bred for life on a high-gravity planet. Part of their extra bulk was due to the packs they all wore on their backs, some packs larger than others. Pockets on the fronts and sides of their chameleons, from shoulder to knee, some on the outside, others on the inside, of their shirts were filled with gear and equipment, water and rations. The pockets and packs of most of the Marines did not carry much by way of weapons and ammunition, the mainstays of infantrymen. The Force Recon Marines were lightly armed; three out of four carried only a knife and a sidearm. In only two of the squads on the AstroGhost was each Marine carrying a blaster in addition to the knife.
The job of most of these Marines wasn’t to fight, it was to gather intelligence. The thinking was, if they carried proper fighting weapons, they might decide to fight rather than silently slip away if they thought they were on the verge of discovery. But if armed only with defensive weapons, they’d be more likely to try harder to evade discovery and capture. Six of the eight squads on this flight were there strictly to gather intelligence, and perhaps commit incidental acts of sabotage. Only two of the squads were there to fight if they found the right targets.
The AstroGhost’s heavy refrigeration and trailing heat-bleeding filaments controlled its visible heat signature to such a degree that an observer would have dismissed its passage as just another minor meteorite’s. When it was low enough, it used acrobatics and drogue chutes to arrest its plunge and went into nape-of-the-sea flight, headed for the west coast of North Continent. It dropped to subsonic speed before crossing the continent’s horizon and commenced a jinking course as soon as it went feet-dry in order to avoid populated areas. The AstroGhost dropped the eight squads in as many spots, each over the horizon from populated areas inland from the Bataan Peninsula on Pohick Bay.
Planetside, Seventy-five Kilometers Northwest of the Bataan Peninsula
Second platoon’s first squad got landed in a clearing on the reverse slope of a medium-size hill in a forest fifty kilometers to the rear of the closest known Coalition position, which was outside a town called Cranston, and two hundred meters from a road leading toward Ashburtonville, at the base of the peninsula. The AstroGhost’s sensors hadn’t picked up any sign of people in the area, but the four Marines quickly moved off the hillside at an angle toward the road—it was still possible that someone nearby had been in a sensor-shadow and invisible to the AstroGhost. They moved almost as silently as they did invisibly.
A hundred and fifty meters from the drop point and still more than a hundred meters from the road, Sergeant Wil Bingh called a halt and the squad went to cover, lying in an outfacing circle covering their entire perimeter. They waited fifteen minutes, with their ears turned all the way up and each of them rotating through his vision screens. They neither saw nor heard sign of people, land vehicles, or aircraft. On Bingh’s signal, they rose to their feet and removed the puddle jumpers from the chameleon cases on their backs. They rolled the cases up and stowed them in their packs, then donned the puddle jumpers—one-man backpack units capable of carrying one fully equipped combat Marine several hundred kilometers at low altitude; they had a range in excess of six hundred kilometers.
Bingh looked for a break in the forest canopy. When he found one, he jumped straight up through it a hundred meters to get a visual fix on the road. No traffic was in sight.
He dropped back down and raised his screens so his men could see his face. “Nothing’s in sight,” he said. “We’re going to follow the road at low altitude for thirty-five klicks, then secure the puddle jumpers and go the rest of the way on foot. I’ll pop up every klick to make sure we still have the road to ourselves. Now turn around.” He lowered his ultraviolet screen and looked at his men’s puddle jumpers. The UV tag on each of them was clearly visible. “All right. Now check me.” He turned his back as his men turned to face him.
“Bright and clear,” Corporal Gin Musica told him.
“Let’s go.”
They rose through the opening in the canopy until they were just above the treetops, then headed for the road. There, they dropped below treetop level and headed southeast, toward Cranston. The Twenty-third Ruspina Rangers were bivouacked at Cranston; first squad’s mission was to gather intelligence on their numbers, armament, and morale.
The road through the trees didn’t travel arrow-straight but rather wound along the landscape, which was why Bingh popped up every klick, to see what was around the next bend or two. He had to be careful where he jumped, as the canopy arched over the road from both sides, frequently completely roofing the roadway. The overhead was dense enough to give them almost complete concealment from the instruments on any enemy aircraft that might be flying surveillance in the area.
The squad covered about twenty kilometers before Bingh saw a landcar approaching. He signaled, and the squad darted fifty meters off the road, ducking below the lowest branches of the trees, and went to ground behind tree trunks. There was no need for concern; the landcar was civilian, carrying what looked like a family unit. Seven kilometers farther…
“Left!” Sergeant Bingh suddenly ordered into the squad circuit—the first word anyone in the squad had spoken over the radio since they’d made planetfall.
As one, the four Marines dropped from the three-meter height they’d been flying to less than a meter between their feet and the ground and swooped under the trees at the left side of the road. By the time they reached the deeper shadows, they all heard what Bingh had heard through his helmet’s amplified aural pickups—the soft whoosh of many vehicles rapidly approaching from their rear.
Fifteen meters in—they didn’t have time to go farther—Bingh ordered them to cut off the puddle jumpers’ power and they dropped the last meter to the ground, then froze in place.
Bingh and Lance Corporal Stanis Wehrli were the only ones facing the road; Corporals Musica and Dana Pricer were looking deeper into the forest—they fell onto their faces so the UV strips on their puddle jumpers weren’t visible from the road. None of the Marines spoke, none of them moved. That many vehicles, moving that rapidly along a little-used country road, could only be a military convoy. The Force Recon Marines couldn’t talk over their helmet radios and they didn’t dare move; they didn’t know what kind of sensors the convoy might have active. The sensors the Marines didn’t have to concern themselves with were visual and infrared; the Force Recon chameleon uniforms rendered them effectively invisible in those parts of the spectrum. This deep in their own rear areas, the approaching Coalition vehicles probably didn’t have anything searching for enemy forces, but there was no need to take chances.
Bingh began recording. He counted: A staff car, bristling with assault guns, led the convoy. An open-sided six-tonne lorry, loaded with infantry, followed close behind. Then another infantry lorry, and another and another, until twenty of them had passed. Each of them appeared to have more than thirty soldiers crammed into it—an entire battalion. A battery of self-propelled artillery followed the lorries. A vehicle of a type Bingh didn’t recognize brought up the rear of the convoy.
Bingh leaned close to Wehrli and touched helmets with him when the convoy disappeared from view. “Any idea what that thing was?” he asked.
“Not a clue,” Wehrli answered. He sounded a bit awed by the Coalition vehicle.
The vehicle was about the size of a self-propelled artillery piece, but had protuberances on all sides, and what looked like a rack of antiaircraft rockets on top. Some of the protuberances were obviously barrels for projectile weapons, but the purposes of the rest were less obvious. Bingh suspected they were energy weapons of some sort, though they didn’t look like any he had ever seen before.
Bingh turned about and looked for Musica and Pricer. Standing, he was able to spot the UV markers on their puddle jumpers. “On your feet,” he said in the open. “Look at this,” he told them when they stood, and transmitted an image of the last vehicle in the convoy.
“What the hell is that?” Musica asked after looking at the image on his heads-up display.
“I was hoping you could tell me. Pricer?”
“I never saw anything like it, either.”
“Damn,” Bingh muttered. Marine Force Recon was supposed to be up-to-date on all weapons and weapons systems in Human Space. Indeed, Force Recon Marines routinely oriented on weapons and weapons systems they might encounter on reconnaissance and raid missions, so they could use them if necessary. It was the first time Bingh had encountered a completely unfamiliar weapon system. What did the convoy have to do with the Twenty-third Ruspina Rangers? Was that weapon system somehow connected to them?
He wondered what other surprises his squad might encounter. He didn’t like surprises; surprises could kill Marines.
“I’m going to uplink,” he said out loud. “Stand alert.” His men moved into an outward-facing triangle and lowered themselves to one knee. Bingh looked for the tallest tree in the immediate vicinity, stood under it, and used his puddle jumper to rise until the branches came too close together for him to continue comfortably. Then he grabbed hold and climbed.
The trunk and branches of the forest giant remained sturdy enough to support him until he was nearly at the canopy’s top. He checked the timeline; the Admiral Stoloff should have reached orbit and been below the horizon on its second orbit, but should come into view in a little more than fifteen minutes. He used part of the time to prepare a message, including his squad’s location and the recording he’d made of the convoy. He appended a carefully worded request that company headquarters downlink to him any data they had on the strange vehicle. A weapon system that he didn’t recognize bothered him more than he wanted to admit.
