Starfist: FlashFire (39 page)

The convoy had only proceeded a short way toward the Bibbsville aerial port when it stopped without warning and the vehicles, which stretched along the road for more than three kilometers, just sat there in the sweltering heat. The minutes ticked by into an hour and the troops in Donnie’s bus became restless. A sergeant got out and walked toward the head of the convoy, to see what the delay was, but nobody he could reach knew.

“Hurry up and wait!” some wag shouted and everyone laughed. Charlette had heard that before but she wasn’t about to let on that she’d had prior service on the enemy side.

At last Captain Carhart stepped up into their bus, perspiration dripping from the ends of his mustache. “Listen up!” he announced. Instead of silence his words were met with a hubbub of voices and catcalls. “Goddamnit! Clean the crap out of your ears and shut your traps!” he shouted, obviously in a very ill humor. That brought silence. He passed a hand across his forehead to catch the sweat. “Get your asses out of this vehicle and into that field over yonder! The colonel wants to talk to everyone.” The troops groaned and groused and obeyed reluctantly. “Come on! Come on, get a move on! You want to stay in here and fry, that’s all right with me,” he said over his shoulder, turning disgustedly and stepping off the bus. When the whole company had dismounted from their vehicles, Captain Carhart led them into the field, where the rest of the regiment was forming a huge circle.

“Must be the regimental commander is going to talk to us,” Charlette whispered.

“I don’t even know what he looks like,” Donnie whispered back, “hell’s bells, I never even
seen
a colonel before!”

The commander of the Loudon Rifles stood on a ration box inside the circle formed by his troops. He was an older man with a pot belly and a disheveled uniform. His forehead ran with sweat that dribbled down over his nose and chin as he spoke. His voice was high-pitched and penetrating. “This here is the first time this whole regiment has been together at the same time,” he began, “so some of you new troops prob’ly ain’t never seen me before. I am Colonel Cosiatani Francis, your regimental commander, so take a good look at me and remember this handsome face.” As he looked around at the men staring up at him the sweat on his uniform was visible as little dark spots.

“We just got a advisory from the Bibbsville Aerial Port that no flights, repeat, no flights to Ashburtonville are available at this time.” A huge groan rose from the assembled troops. “That’s due to their diversion to higher-priority commitments, and the fact that the enemy has air superiority in certain areas in and around the seat of the war, which makes flying in there hazardous to life and limb.” This information was greeted with silence. Until then, most of the troops had not thought very seriously about the fact that there was a real war in progress and they were headed into it.

“Now,” Colonel Francis continued, “I also got a priority message from Gen’rel Lyons’s chief of staff that they want us at Ashburtonville as soon as possible, and we are going to obey that order. This poses a dilemma, don’t it? Goddamn, men, what this army don’t screw up it shits on.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” someone muttered loudly.

“Now how do you suppose we’re gonna comply with this order, huh?” Colonel Francis shouted, narrowing his eyes and searching in the crowd for the man who had made the insolent remark. Everyone just stared back at him innocently. “Well, how’dye ’spose, you Mr. Wiseass?” Colonel Francis demanded.

“Gonna swim over, Colonel?” someone asked. Everyone laughed.

“Goddamn, boy, you is either gonna be a goddamn gen’rel someday or remain a buck-assed private forever, I ain’t decided yet,” Colonel Francis shouted, “but you guessed it! We’re going by ship! Now, it’s going to take me a while to scare up the transport, so battalion and independent company commanders, break out your tentage and set up by units in this here field. Company commanders, see to your training schedules, ’cause I suspect we’ll be here a spell. Well, okay, don’t just stand there scratching yer behinds, get to it! Captain Carhart, you come with me!” He stepped down from the ration box shaking his head in disgust and motioned for his operations officer to join him, and shouldering his way through the troops, he headed for his command car. The last anyone saw of him for a long time, he was driving off in the direction of Bibbsville.

“Geez,” Donnie muttered, “this is bad news, Charlette. Damn, we thought we’d be quit of this place! Now what if that damn Flannigan finds out we’re here? Damn!”

“Don’t worry, Donnie,” Charlette smiled, gesturing at the troops dispersing to set up their tents, “we’re surrounded by a whole regiment of men trained to kill.”

“Yeah,” Donnie groaned, “that’s just what bothers me, ’cause from what I seen of this screwed up outfit, it’s hard to figure out just who they are gonna kill!”

After only a few minutes into their first meeting, Lionel C. Ifrit, captain of the containership
Bullwhip,
began thinking of killing his visitor, powering up his vessel, and steaming off into parts unknown, cargo or no cargo. “You, my dear chap, are going to ruin the merchants of Loudon County, you know that, don’t you?” he seethed.

“I don’t give a flying fuck about the merchants of Loudon County, Cap’n. For Chrissakes,
I’m
a goddamn merchant! But I am commandeering this ship, you are loading my men and equipment on her, and we’re proceeding under full power north to Phelps where you’ll unload us and we shall proceed direct to Ashburtonville and join Gen’rel Lyons’s army. You’ll be compensated by the Coalition.”

The
Bullwhip
had only been in port a few days when Colonel Francis stormed aboard with his men and demanded of her captain that she be turned over to the service of the Coalition and set sail for the war zone. For weeks before her arrival the merchants of Loudon County had been bringing their crops and goods to the port, and the warehouses were full. “You will have a revolution on your hands, Colonel, when the businessmen of this region discover you are preventing them from shipping their crops and goods to market,” Captain Ifrit said.

“We’ll deal with them when the war is over, Captain. Now, tomorrow, at three hours sharp, my troops will begin arriving and you will load them and their equipment on board this ship. To be sure of yer cooperation, I am leaving a squad of my men on her until then. If you try to pull any funny stuff you’ll be shot, and your first officer will be promoted to captain of this vessel.”

Captain Ifrit blanched and puffed out his cheeks. “The men who own this shipping line will not be pleased at this—this—act of piracy, Colonel! You know there’s a good chance we’ll be attacked and sunk on the way to Phelps, don’t you?”

Colonel Francis sighed and nodded his head wearily. Then he straightened up and pointed his finger at Captain Ifrit and said, “Cap’n, you send a message to the owners of this tub and tell them you bin drafted into the service of the Coalition. And don’t feel so bad about maybe being sunk. If this scow goes down, I’ll be standing there right next to you and we can sing ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ together as the waves roll over us. See you in the morning.”

Since the
Bullwhip
was not designed to carry passengers, the accommodations for Colonel Francis’s troops were makeshift at best, but because the weather was good and the seas calm at that season, they spent most of their time topside. Donnie and Charlette, as a married couple, were assigned a tiny stateroom for the voyage, but since they had not yet been fully integrated into their company’s roster, they spent their waking hours in the ship’s galley. “Don’t worry,” Lieutenant Tamle had told them jovially, “KP builds men, as we say in the army.”

Their “stateroom” was actually the tiny quarters belonging to the ship’s engineer, a man known to the crew as “Gabby,” probably because he seldom spoke to anyone and then only to insult them with nasty vulgarities. The only exceptions were the captain and the first mate, but otherwise everyone was subject to his outbursts, particularly the unwelcome military personnel and especially Donnie and Charlette for evicting him from his quarters per Colonel Francis’s orders and over Captain Ifrit’s objections. Gabby went out of his way to harass the couple when they were on duty in the galley. He even came by their stateroom at night, pretending to be looking for things he’d left behind when he moved into a bunk in the crew’s compartment. His favorite greeting was “Gettin’ any yet?”

Kitchen police was grueling duty, but Donnie and Charlette soon fell into the routine of the scut work in a ship’s galley feeding a crew of twenty and the 661 troopers of the Loudon Rifles. They were too tired when off duty to complain about the work. Besides, it took Charlette’s mind off what she was going to do once they arrived in Ashburtonville, where she would be forced further into her role as a reluctant traitor. At any event, the bouts of morning sickness subsided during the voyage. Maybe it was the salt air or maybe, she prayed, they were due to a false pregnancy.

Within ten days of her departure, the
Bullwhip
’s powerful turbines had brought her to within sight of the coast about a hundred kilometers south of Phelps. That put her well within range of the subatmospheric fighter-bombers supporting the Coalition forces on Pohick Bay, and Colonel Francis therefore ordered everyone below decks during daylight hours. All efforts were taken to disguise the fact that the vessel was transporting military personnel and equipment.

On the eleventh day at sea, just at dawn, Donnie and Charlette were at their posts in the ship’s galley, Donnie setting up the mess line and Charlette already cleaning pots and pans the cooks had used to prepare breakfast. The troops ate their meals in three shifts because the galley was too small to accommodate them all at one time, but the
Bullwhip
’s crew ate first and that was the worst time of the day for the military KPs because the civilians resented the army’s having taken over their vessel.

“Hey, Donnie, you screwed your wife yet today?” Gabby bellowed that morning, as he did every morning when he was waiting for the serving line to begin. The routine was beginning to wear thin on Donnie, but Gabby was a big, burly man whom no one felt moved to challenge. His arms were decorated with big tattoos of naked dancing girls. By flexing his biceps he could make their private parts seem to move and he enjoyed teasing Donnie with the display whenever he could.

But that morning Donnie decided he’d had enough of Gabby’s teasing. When the big man appeared in front of him in the serving line, holding out his tray for the scrambled eggs, he flexed his biceps and said, “When you gonna give me some of that quail, boy?” Donnie seized a long aluminum serving fork and thrust it straight into Gabby’s face. One hand clapped to his cheek, Gabby dropped his tray in astonishment and was about to climb over the serving line when the first plasma bolt from a Confederation fighter-bomber ripped through the galley. The last thing Donnie Caloon saw of Gabby replayed over and over again in his mind afterward in slow motion: the naked dancing girl on his left bicep seemed to flex her hips up and down as the bolt sizzled through Gabby’s left elbow and cut him in two just below the ribs. It continued on down the serving line, killing three more men before burning its way through the bulkhead and out onto the deck. The following aircraft put its fire just below the
Bullwhip
’s waterline.

Charlette stood frozen at the sink staring in horror at the steaming mess all over the galley deck. Donnie seized her by an arm. “We gotta get outta here!” he shouted, dragging her toward a hatch leading onto the port side of the ship. The air all about them was filled with screaming and explosions as the ship suddenly lurched forward and then stopped dead in the water, its power plant out of commission. It seemed like only seconds before the two fighters made their second pass on the stalled vessel, raking her with high-energy cannon fire fore and aft. The deck under their feet began slowly tilting to port as the galley filled with choking black smoke.

Most of the regiment had been caught below decks when the attack commenced. As the survivors began making their way topside they were horrified to see the crewmen abandoning ship! Since the
Bullwhip
was a commercial vessel not rated to carry passengers, she only had escape gear for her crew. A riot was in full swing between the soldiers and the crewmen for control of the ship’s two lifeboats when the
Bullwhip
rolled to port and capsized. She lay there upside down for less than a minute before going down by her stern.

No one ever knew if Colonel Francis and Captain Ifrit got to sing “Nearer My God to Thee” before descending with the
Bullwhip
to the bottom of the sea. For days after she sank bodies mixed with wreckage washed ashore. But some of those who drifted onto the beaches were not dead.

Even in the most disciplined armies, especially in wartime, when commanders’ attentions are focused elsewhere, individuals, occasionally whole units, will get out of hand. Such a unit was the 7th Independent Military Police Battalion from Lannoy, a world on the fringes of the Coalition’s quadrant of Human Space. The 7th was known informally as the “Vigilante Battalion.” Lannoy, a world only recently settled, was typical of the frontiers of space, wild places where wild men and women gathered, generally to avoid prosecutions awaiting them in more civilized places. The commander of the division to which the 7th Independent MP Battalion was assigned when war broke out on Ravenette soon determined he could do without them, so the unit was assigned “coast watch” duty to get them out of the way and put them in some sparsely populated, remote location where the only trouble they could cause anybody would be to themselves.

Nothing ever happened along that stretch of the coast and the men of the 7th soon became bored with their duty and turned to their favorite pastimes: drinking, gambling, and fighting with each other. Occasionally someone would glance out to sea or make a report to higher headquarters, but usually the men of the 7th, when not sleeping off a drunk, wandered the beaches conducting desultory “patrols.” Donnie and Charlette had the great misfortune to be “rescued” by one of those patrols.

“Come on, admit it,” the lieutenant was saying to Donnie Caloon, “you’re an invasion force. We found dead bodies all over the beach down there. They aren’t dressed in any kind of uniform we recognize. Tell us what you know and we’ll go easy on ya.” The lieutenant hadn’t bothered to shave in days and his breath reeked of stale whiskey.

“We were part of the 441st Transportation Company of the Loudon County militia, going to Ashburtonville when enemy planes sunk our ship.”

“Yeah? Who’s the bitch?”

“My wife, gawdammit!”

The lieutenant turned to his disheveled sergeant and grinned. “Sure. Man and wife in the fuckin’ army! How cozy! You oughta know she’s confessed everything. Now tell us your mission or I’m gonna have to get rough with ya.”