Starfist: Lazarus Rising (4 page)

Ronstedt was afraid. Had he routed Ambassador Credence's original request for Marines to the analysts in the Office of Senior Military Advisers to the President, as he properly should have, they would have sent an investigation team to Kingdom to determine the degree of need. Given an actual alien invasion, the Confederation would have assembled a major force to deal with it—after sending a diplomatic team to attempt to open communications and bring about a cessation of hostilities in an attempt to avoid military intervention. Instead, an entire Marine FIST was in danger of being wiped out and a human planet completely taken over by a previously unknown alien sentience.

Because of him.

The unpreparedness on the part of the Marines was completely his fault. Because he wanted to privately enjoy a minor amusement. It wouldn't take much investigation to track the routing of the presidential authorization to dispatch Marines back to him.

Then where would Second Associate Deputy Director for State Affairs Lumrhanda Ronstedt be? At the very least, a letter of reprimand would be put in his file and he might never be promoted to First Associate Deputy Director for State Affairs. He could even be demoted! Why, he could be dismissed! If someone high enough decided a scapegoat was needed, civil—or even
criminal
—charges could be brought against him!

Lumrhanda Ronstedt was afraid, he was
very
afraid.

He would have prayed that nobody ever undertook an investigation of the routing of the message that sent 34th FIST to Kingdom, that nobody ever discovered that he'd exceeded his authority in the initial authorization to deploy Marines without more information than was contained in the initial ambassadorial request. But though human communities on far-flung worlds worshiped a variety of gods, he didn't believe in any of them. And since he didn't believe in any of those gods, he suspected none of them—if any of them did indeed exist—believed in
him
either, so praying was out of the question. Instead, he merely hoped nobody would look and find him.

The Marines of 34th and 26th FISTs were unhappy—in their spare moments when they weren't outright angry. They were
Marines
, for Cthulusake, not squids! When they were traveling back to home base after a deployment, especially a major campaign like the one they'd just been on, they were supposed to spend their time cleaning and maintaining their uniforms and gear, and filling out "Replacement of Uniform and Gear" chits. Mostly, though, they were supposed to be healing their wounds, resting, eating, and exercising to regain their strength. There was supposed to be a lot of slack on the voyage back after a deployment.

So why were they spending most of their time polishing brightwork, waxing wood, and scraping away imaginary crud and corruption from the decks of passageways and troop compartments? Why were they painting bulkheads and overheads that didn't need painting? Why were they working under bosuns mates, stripping down and reassembling everything in the troop compartments? Why were they doing all that and everything else that was properly squid work?

Oh, the shame of it! Marines working under the supervision of squids!

And here they'd all thought Brigadier Sturgeon was such a good commander. If he was as good as they'd thought, he'd go straight to that squid commodore, tell him Marines weren't a ship's maintenance crew, and make him stop misusing Marines!

Corporal Claypoole put down the stripper he'd been using to clean away the thin layer of floor wax that had accumulated where the deck and bulkhead of a passageway joined—he'd just reached the airtight hatch that marked the end of the area assigned to him. Pushing himself up from all fours to sit back on his ankles, he clamped his hands over his kidneys and groaned as he twisted the kinks out of his spine. Then he leaned forward onto his hands again and levered himself up to shake the kinks out of his hips and legs. It took some effort, but he managed to ignore the quietly snickering squids who briskly walked past as he looked back at the twenty meter stretch of passageway he'd just scraped, both sides, and decided it was good enough—as if it wasn't good enough before he started. If he didn't ignore the snickering squids, he'd be obligated to
do
something about their snickering. He was a
corporal
, he wasn't supposed to
do
scutwork, he was supposed to
supervise
scutwork. And all those snickering squids were prime candidates for
doing
scutwork. Which would just get him in trouble with the ship's command—Sergeant Linsman had made that perfectly clear.

So instead of putting the snickering squids to work doing what was properly their work anyway, he ignored them and quickly used the suction hose to clean up the...

the... Well, there
might
be something on the deck after all the stripping he'd just done. That finished, he started to bend over to pick up the scraper, thought better of further tormenting his back, and squatted to pick it up. Standing again, he began to step through the hatch to make his way to Company L's mess for a drink and some rest. Hey, the squid who put him to work told him when he got the job done he was free.

"You missed a spot, Marine."

The words brought him up, rigid. He knew that voice and hated it. Slowly, he turned around and glared at Bosun's Mate First Giltherr. Giltherr looked back with an evil smirk.

"What did I miss?" Claypoole snarled.

"Right there." Giltherr pointed.

Claypoole clomped stiff-legged to him and looked. "I didn't miss anything.

There's nothing there to strip."

Giltherr shook his head. "It's a good thing they give you jarheads blasters instead of masers," he said. "You can't see well enough to hit a man at fifty meters with a maser. Now do it again. This whole section of passageway. If you missed that spot, I'm sure you missed more."

Claypoole glared at Giltherr again. He wanted to tell the squid to shove it, there wasn't anything to strip, and then
help
him shove it because the squid was probably too damn dumb to be able to find his own ass with both hands. But the squid was a first class, the navy equivalent of a staff sergeant, and technically outranked a corporal. As if
any
squid could outrank a Marine!

Snarling, he twisted past Giltherr to the far end of the passageway and dropped back to all fours to strip away once more at something that didn't need any stripping.

Staff Sergeant Hyakowa's going to hear about this, he promised himself. I'm going to take this all the way to the brigadier if I have to! It's time somebody told him what's happening. But he stripped the entire section of passageway, all twenty meters on both sides, and the ends. Again.

Brigadier Sturgeon, of course, didn't need to be told what was happening—after all, the "squid work" the Marines were doing had been his idea. He not only knew what his Marines were doing, he knew what they thought about it—the same thing he'd thought about it a long time ago when he was a junior enlisted man and
his
FIST commander made a similar arrangement with the captain of the ship on which they were returning to Camp Smutter on the curiously named
Falala
at the end of a particularly brutal campaign. Thirteenth FIST had lost a lot of Marines—he'd lost a couple of friends himself—and the Marines were dwelling on it. Morale was sinking fast and there was serious risk that 13th FIST would wind up irreparably combat-ineffective. Almost as soon as they were assigned to the heavy duty make-work on the ship the dwelling on injury and loss was turned into anger over what they perceived—rightly, he had to admit—as a misuse of Marines. It was hard, physically and mentally, to do that work. But it accomplished what it was meant to—it gave their bruised and bloodied psyches relief, let them put some distance between their injuries and losses, and allowed their psyches to begin to scab over.

He could see the same thing happening in
his
Marines. When he went through the troop areas, as he did at least twice a day, everything was more shipshape than it had been following liftoff from Society 362 and until the make-work began. The Marines were standing more erect, they looked more determined, and hardly any of them appeared depressed. Angry, most certainly, but not depressed. That was all he asked for. A rueful smile flickered across his face and he wondered how long it would take for his Marines to figure out he was behind the "squid work" they were doing and transfer their anger to him.

Well, nobody ever said a commander had to be loved by his troops.

Corporal Claypoole wasn't the only Marine in third platoon's second squad who promised himself he was going to take the matter up with Staff Sergeant Hyakowa.

He was the second-to-last man to make it back to the squad's compartment, and had to get in line behind Corporals Kerr and Chan and then elbow Lance Corporal MacIlargie out of his way—they were already chewing on Sergeant Linsman, the squad leader, about the squid work they were doing and demanding to see the platoon sergeant.

Claypoole warily looked at Lance Corporal Schultz. Surely Schultz would have blood in his eyes about what they were doing. But no, Schultz was calmly lying back on his rack, plugged into the ship's library, reading who knew what, seemingly oblivious to the indignity of the squid work he'd spent his day at. The tip of Claypoole's tongue peeked from between his lips as he considered Schultz's uncharacteristically mild behavior. It worried him. He sidled a half step away from Schultz, a half step being as far as he could go in the cramped confines of the squad compartment, and turned his attention to the squad leader and the two fire team leaders already chewing on him.

"I'm not putting up with any more of this shit!" a loud voice declaimed from the entrance to the compartment. Everybody—except Schultz—looked at the voice in surprise. Not in surprise at the words, surprise at the speaker. It was Corporal Doyle. Corporal Doyle hadn't been heard to raise his voice since he'd come back from his premature transfer out of 34th FIST when Company L's first sergeant, Top Myer, wanted to court-martial him for insubordination following the Avionia deployment. Before the premature transfer, he'd been the company's chief clerk; after it, he filled a PFC slot in third platoon. And he'd
never
been known to raise his voice in the face of a blaster squad.

"What's
your
problem, Doyle?" Linsman snapped.

"I just spent the day cleaning heads for the damn squids, that's what!" Doyle snapped back. "I left those heads clean enough to eat off. They're probably cleaner than the squids' galleys!"

"I doubt it," Kerr grumbled. "Chan and I spent the day cleaning their galleys."

"See! They're treating us like galley slaves," Doyle declared, unaware of the pun.

"I'm surprised they don't have us painting this scow!"

Wordlessly, Linsman pushed back a sleeve and held up his arm to show Doyle the drops of paint spattered on the back of his hand and wrist.

Doyle's eyes popped wide. "You too?" he squeaked. "They've got a
squad leader
doing squid work?"

Linsman nodded. "Rabbit and Hound too," he said, naming the first- and gun-squad leaders. "I'm not sure, but I think the platoon sergeants were doing squid work in the chiefs' quarters and officer country."

There were gasps, and everybody—except Schultz—looked at their squad leader, horrified at the very thought of platoon sergeants doing menial labor.

There was a sudden, albeit restricted, surge of movement away from Schultz when everyone simultaneously realized he hadn't reacted. Surely, Schultz was about to go on a rampage, and nobody wanted to be standing in his path when he launched himself. But, no. Schultz was totally immersed in his reading.

"Then it won't do us much good to go to Staff Sergeant Hyakowa, will it?" Chan asked.

Linsman shook his head. "I don't believe so, no."

"We have to request mast straight to the brigadier," Claypoole said. Every Marine, regardless of rank, had the right to "request mast"—speak to the commander at whatever level, all the way up to the commandant. He had to go through the chain of command to do it, and every level of command along the way would try to resolve the problem and talk him out of going higher—but he had the right, and didn't have to discuss his problem with any lower level on the chain of command.

Linsman looked at him coldly. "Do you really think the brigadier doesn't know what's going on with his FIST?"

Claypoole wasn't going to give up that easily. "Then we request mast to the next higher command."

"That's Fifth Marine Expeditionary Force," Linsman said calmly. "By the time any of us can get to Fifth MEF headquarters, the FIST will have been back at Camp Ellis for weeks, maybe months, and the problem will be over. Do you think Fifth MEF

will bother to make the navy issue an apology and promise not to do it again? Would you believe the navy if they did promise?"

"Promise not to do it again until the next time," Kerr added, which elicited some weak laughter.

"But we've got to do something," Claypoole insisted. "I mean we can't just lay back and—"

"Found it," Schultz interrupted. Everyone shut up and looked at him as he rolled to a sitting position. He looked around, holding his reader where he could easily refer to it as he spoke to his squad mates. Satisfied that he had everyone's attention, he said:

"Third Silvasian War?" The question, sparsely worded in Schultz's normal conversational manner, was mostly rhetorical. Not a lot of Marines had fought in the Silvasian wars, but some of them were still around, and their exploits were legendary in the Corps.

Some of the Marines exchanged nervous glances. There were unconfirmed rumors that an army division had mutinied aboard ship on the way back to their base at the end of the Third Silvasian War. Was Schultz about to propose that they mutiny?

"Sturgeon was a lance corporal, 13th FIST."

"Yes?" Linsman drew the word out.

"Heavy casualties." Schultz looked each man in the eye. "Like us."