Strong Arm Tactics (3 page)

But not everyone was happy with the status quo. Because the current government found itself loath to lean too heavily on individual worlds’ administrations, sometimes excesses grew unchecked into abuses. TWC found itself having to send in troops to defend beings’ rights or extract diplomats from a deteriorated situation. Word spread that TWC’s overgovernment was attempting to conquer member worlds and run them under a local governor from a central location, as had been done in the bad old days of the Empires. Out of this misunderstanding insurgency had flared up, a movement seeking to overturn the galactic government. TWC had been trying to quash the rebellion for years. Where diplomacy failed, armed intervention became necessary, to prevent noncombatants from becoming prey to the rebel forces, and to prevent trade routes from being cut off. The main problem was that no matter how many ships or troopers that TWC had, the space service could be and was always being stretched too thin over too many fronts. Daivid had only been in the Space Service for three years, but even he saw that the galactic government was always fighting too many battles at once. X-Ray had fallen victim to this latest round of bad planning.

They’d been sent into a location that had not been adequately scouted or even scoped, with insufficient firepower to protect them while they tried to accomplish their task.

“It ought to have been pretty straightforward,” Lin said, her small face concentrated. “We were sent in to do a surgical shutdown of a major power plant. Not to destroy it, but to close it down. The Insurgency had taken over a factory in this city and was regearing it to use as a munitions plant.”

D-45 made a disgusted gesture. “They weren’t making weapons there, they were making flitters. The trick is it was in a city sympathetic to the rebels, and they had plenty of notice that we were coming. They were ready for us. We started taking fire almost as soon as we were inserted.”

“It turns out we were only a diversion,” Thielind added bitterly. The normally cheerful adjutant wore a grim expression on his thin face. “Halfway around the globe, the big ships were pulling prisoners out of a bunker. They’d sent us in to draw the fire from the insurgents. It worked. We had half the local army on our asses. If they’d only told us we were the stalking horse we could have dug in and given a good show, potshotting at the power plant without exposing ourselves. As it is, we lost Captain Scoley, who was a damned good officer.”

“They wanted us all to die.” Round-faced Jones clamped his lips shut after delivering his single opinion. All of them crossed their arms and looked at Wolfe. He looked back, uncertain what to say.

They obviously didn’t care if he reported the gossip up the line. Apart from being sent to the brig or a prison ship, what worse thing could happen to them? They were already being sent on death missions. Mustering out would be a favor, compared to what he was hearing.

“Tell me more,” Wolfe said. They hardly needed further encouragement. The cork was out of the bottle. They were dying to tell him more. The Cockroaches got all the bad duties: garbage detail, prisoner escort, munitions guard, hazardous waste cleanup.… Name the task; if it was dangerous or disgusting the Cockroaches had had to deal with it. And, Wolfe thought as he listened, they dealt pretty admirably. They didn’t complain about the task itself, just about the lack of respect and support from the brass. And they were absolutely right. No one cared if they lived or died. By the reckoning of the powers that be, they had already been discarded. They caught hell if they failed or wasted navy resources, and got precious little praise if they succeeded. They had to be their own cheering section. And now he was in the dumper with them. He was determined to raise their stock somehow. Let someone else be Brand X for a change. These were good people. He’d certainly met worse in his lifetime.

“… And that’s how we got started with the bulkhead,” Borden explained, at the end of a long narrative, interrupted along the way by half her fellows. “It’s our way of coping.”

“So’s the still,” Jones added, in his lilting baritone. Wolfe hated to admit it, but he was almost one hundred percent sure he could place the heavyset trooper’s planet of origin. Cymrai had been settled thousands of years ago by people named Jones. Most of them were of Terran-Welsh descent, but the rest had assumed the name somewhere along the way or had it imposed on their ancestors by others. In the long run Cymrai’s culture had taken a Celtic turn, preserving ancient arts and music. The communications directory was strictly arranged by given names.

“And our interest in advanced education,” put in D-45. He was a very tall man with sallow skin and shining black hair, with a prominent, pointed chin. Wolfe recognized the style of naming. It came from a world named Egalos on TWC’s fringe where the liberal government, in an effort to put behind its people any of the disadvantages or bad memories of the past associated with their names, abolished all family cognomens, instead giving each regional cluster a designation based upon the location of their city, town or neighborhood. One of Daivid’s teachers had been Sarah N’Diya Q-333. He’d had a mad crush on her when he was eight years old.

“And our weekly smokers,” said Thielind.

“And the ritual scarification …”

“And the limerick competitions …”

“All right,” Wolfe laughed. “Now I know you’re making these up to impress me. Come on! Limericks? Ritual scarification?”

“Yeah,” Ambering said, rolling up her sleeve. She was a meaty woman with warm brown skin and gray eyes. She pointed to an irregular mass on the inside of her forearm, an oval with three or four little lines sticking out of one side. “There. You lift the skin with a knife. When it heals you lift it again. The color’s office ink—very permanent. It’s supposed to be a cockroach, but I was never very good at art.”

“All right,” Daivid said, shaken. “Now I am impressed.”

“Ahem.” Jones cleared his throat and raised a hand theatrically. “‘A surveyor in space, grade E-4 / went out with an antigrav whore. / Ten klicks over the ground, / he spun her round and round, / and centrifugally plumb-bobbed her core.’” The others broke into applause and raucous cheers. Wolfe joined in. Jones rose and bowed, a thick hand across his round belly. “That’s one made up by Toco Bradon. She left us about four years ago. What a mind on that girl! She had a flair for the rhyming word. I can still recall a few more of her ditties.…”

BLEE-ble. BLEE-ble. BLEE-ble.

Everyone immediately fell silent. Wolfe glanced around for the communications unit. Thielind clapped down his glass and looked at his wrist screen.

“Ancom!” he chirped, the signal to answer an incoming transmission on his personal communications unit. The noise ceased at once. Thielind listened for a moment then tapped at the bright yellow stud in his ear lobe. “Gotcha. I mean, aye aye, ma’am!” He looked up at Wolfe. “Inspection tomorrow morning at eleven hundred, sir. The commander wants to make sure you’re checked in and ready, and everything’s under control.”

“Of course. Thanks, ensign,” Wolfe said. He glanced at the rest of his command. “Okay, company, you heard it. I want this place ship-shape by eleven. That’s an order.”

Thielind’s large eyes went around the room. He picked up the laboratory flask and filled Wolfe’s glass with it. “Have another drink, Lieutenant.”

O O O

“Here’s to fallen comrades,” Borden said, as the chronometer clicked over to 00:00. By now the booze had been joined on the battered table by mixers, cards, and pows. Wolfe selected a caffeine pow two millimeters across and tucked it into the space between his cheek and gum. The heat and saliva melted the coating instantly, releasing a jolt of bitterness into his mouth. It’d be good to keep his wits alert. He held two pairs, jacks and sevens, in a game so ancient that he never even questioned why the guard card was called a jack, and fervently hoped no one else had anything useful in his or her hand. His luck was usually pretty good, but it was being sorely tested. He signalled for one card.

“Why do you have so many customs?” he asked, watching Jones deal. The Cymraeg’s thick fingers were surprisingly deft. “I’ve been with a few units since I joined up. No one else seems to do it. Apart from the usual ones, breaking in new swabs by making them drink burning cocktails or ramming their new insigne into bare skin, that kind of thing.”

They all looked at one another. “What, you writing a book?” Mose asked, a sour expression on his creased, pale face.

“No, officer-sir,” Injaru called, his eyebrows high on his chocolate-dark forehead. “You don’t want to do
that
.”

“Shut up,” Mose growled. “Huh, lieutenant?”

A little puzzled, Wolfe watched the byplay. “No. Just curious. Where’d these all come from?”

“Boredom,” Boland announced. “Boredom, maybe. Some of ’em we do for the hell of it, but a few do come from remembering old colleagues-in-arms. We’ve got nothing to do in between missions or on long space hauls except drink. In case you haven’t noticed, they keep us pretty isolated out here. No one wants to associate with us. Afraid they’ll get the stink, I don’t doubt. We come up with things to keep our brains from dying in the isolation. We can’t think ahead. We don’t know where we’re going, where they’re sending us next. We
don’t
want to think about the past. You wouldn’t, if you had been through what we have. So we have our own ways. Keeps people guessing when they overhear us.”

“Keeps us out of trouble,” Meyers said. The curvaceous woman gathered up three cards with careful fingers. She looked up at him with a provocative eye. “In case you were wondering, we don’t try to get into trouble.”

“Maybe we have a little more imagination than most of those bobble-heads,” Lin said fiercely.

“Hah!” Thielind barked. “That’s how you ended up here! Well,” he turned to Wolfe, “that’s how I ended up here, anyway. Imagination.” He poured another tot into Wolfe’s glass. “Have a drink, lieutenant.”

Wolfe eyed the glass, wishing there was a potted plant within reach. He didn’t know how many more applications of that flensing acid his system could take before it shut down. “Maybe a little more,” he agreed. “Thanks, ensign.”

A few eyebrows were raised. “Don’t you say ‘enswine,’ like the rest of them?” Thielind asked, curiously. “I’m used to it.”

“Yeah. We even let him drink with us,” Boland joked, bringing a huge hand around to impact jovially between the slight junior officer’s shoulder blades. Thielind bounced into the table and fell back, but his eyes never left Wolfe’s.

Daivid squirmed a little. “I know it’s not corps practice, but I got so sick of it when I was an ensign that I promised myself I wouldn’t use it. Er, it’s just respect. You’re on the line, same as the rest of us.”

“Respect, huh?” D-45 asked, with a sound of the same in his voice. To cover up what for the moment sounded like marshmallow-gooey sentimentality, Daivid took a huge swig of the company’s rotgut, and let out an audible gasp as it hit the back of his throat.

“Too strong for you?” Jones asked. He emptied his own beaker, smacking his lips.

“It’s fine,” Wolfe assured him, trying not to gasp as the next sip found a portion of his esophagus that hadn’t yet been cauterized. “Nice, but a little too rough to go to sleep on.”

“Dilute it,” Borden said, tossing him a beaker of mild mixer. To his own surprise Wolfe caught it one-handed. Coordination was not yet completely gone. “It’s about 150 proof. What do you normally drink? Wine?”

“Yeah,” the lieutenant admitted sheepishly, hoping he wouldn’t sound like a wimp, but it was better to admit the truth than to pickle himself just to try and fit in.

“That’s okay,” she said with more friendliness than before. “We like wine, too.”

“Yeah,” Boland said, raising steadily reddening eyes from his current hand. “Do we ever! How come we can’t get assignments escorting vintage booze, like the guy they caught with an unlicensed shipload of Earth wine the other day?”

“Yeah, that guy!
His
name was Wolfe,” Injaru said thoughtfully. “Nicol Sambor some-other-middle-names Wolfe. One of that big-time Family with all them connections.
You
know what kind I mean.” The others nodded knowingly. “I bet that stuff they confiscated was pretty fine. Too bad we couldn’t get a hold of some of that. He wouldn’t be any relation to you, looey?” he joked.

Daivid cleared his throat, and shifted uncomfortably. “As a matter of fact, he’s my cousin.”

“Yeah, right,” Boland said, scornfully. He caught a yellow-eyed glance from his new commanding officer. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Uh, yeah. I am. Nicol’s a second cousin.”

“
You’re
one of
that
Wolfe Family?” the long-legged lieutenant asked, staring at him.

“Well, hell!” Lin said, as if everyone ought to know that. “They have connections all over!”

And indeed they did, as Daivid was all too aware, in shipping, gambling, smuggling, commodities trading, every moneymaking venture known to civilization. ‘Whenever there’s big money inside, there’s a Wolfe at the door,’ as the tired old joke went. Daivid tried to console himself with the thought that his family didn’t commit murder for hire, or slaughter innocent people in pursuit of credits. They specialized in what were known as ‘bloodless crimes’: games of chance, control of shipping rights, exclusives on certain goods, influence with government officials, transport of desirable items or people who wished to go from point A to point B without drawing attention. Since the bad old days, when space had been totally lawless and a crackdown had ensued that left few members standing from any Family, the Wolfes had sworn off involvement with drugs, prostitution, animal smuggling, or anything that would trigger a quarantine or give the Thousand Worlds Confederation galactic government an excuse to toss one of their warehouses. Occasionally, some law-and-order candidate would shake things up upon coming into office, impounding ships whose ownership could be traced back to a family. But while the Wolfe family played rough to survive, its business practices were clean. They had a policy of charitable contributions, no strings attached, and ran a fine string of soup kitchens as well as their fabulous chain of restaurants. Wolfe took a perverse measure of pride in that; few of the other families could say the same. But rumor tarred all of them with the same brush.