The Reaper Plague (13 page)

“
It’s hard for a woman,
isn’t it?”

“
Don’t you start too, I
just got an earful of that from my CO. I’m not torn between my
womanhood and the Corps. Every Marine loves the Corps, but the
Corps does not love every Marine. It’s the Corps that has a problem
with women. All I’ve ever wanted to do was be a Marine.”

“
No, but you have to hide
your femininity because of the Corps’ attitude. Keep it under lock
and key, only let it out in private.”

“
Sure. Just like you don’t
like to show anyone your poetry because you think it’s not
manly.”

He blushed. “I guess so.”

Jill took his hands in hers. “Everyone plays
roles, all the time. That’s okay, as long as they’re honest. When I
play Master Sergeant Hardass, it’s an honest part of me, and it’s
to prepare and lead my troops the best I know how. And I hope you
realize that’s who I am when I’m out there.” She pointed
emphatically in the direction of the barracks. “Out there, you’re
not my…boyfriend.”

“
Right,” he responded with
an agreeable smile, “I got it. I won’t embarrass you. But speaking
of sex, and roles, and poetry…” He slid off the bunk onto one knee.
At first she thought he was tying his bootlaces but he reached into
his pocket and brought out a velvet-covered box. “It’s not much,
just a little thing I picked up in South Africa…”

Her breath caught and her heart almost
stopped as she beheld the biggest diamond she had ever seen outside
of a museum, set in a pure gold ring. “Oh, my…”

Rick cleared his throat and recited,

Camouflage and calling cadence

Kicking ass and taking names

All that tough stuff seems to make sense

As long as you remain my flame

Through the days and through the dark
nights

I’ll endure most anything

Through the battles and the hard fights

As long as you will take my name

“
So…will you marry me? You
be Mrs. Jill Johnstone and I’ll be Mister Master Sergeant
Hardass?”

“
Yes!” She stuck out her
shaking left hand and melted into his embrace as the ring slid onto
her finger.

“
I know I’ve said it
before,” Skull complained, “but I am bored out of
my…skull.”

Raphaela giggled. Responded coyly, “You want
to suggest something, be my guest.”

“
I already am.” He stood up
to pace.

“
My guest? Wow, that was
almost a joke.” She stood up too, stepping in front of him, forcing
him to stop. “It’s just cabin fever. Let’s do something else.” She
stepped closer to him.

“
Like what?”
I know
what, and I’m not playing
.

“
I don’t know. A game? I
have some programmed into the ship. Or I could make a sniper
simulation using your rifle and some interactive
components.”

He roughly seized her upper arms. “A game?
Killing people isn’t a game. It’s a necessary evil.” He shoved her
back.

“
You can say that,” she
said as she rubbed her arms, “but you don’t believe it. That’s just
an excuse so you can keep killing people and not feel the weight of
it on your soul.”

“
And that’s
bullshit.”

“
What’s bullshit is how you
start hitting and grabbing and pushing me whenever I say something
that strikes too close to an inconvenient truth. When did you turn
into a woman-beater?”

He raised his clenched fist as his anger
surged, then froze as she stared unflinchingly at him, at the blow
ready to fall.

She’s right. It’s true. But it’s not the
only truth here
. He uncurled his fingers, put his hand down,
deliberately relaxing. “You know what? You’re right. I’m letting
myself be provoked. Because you’re provoking me. Testing me. ‘Is
Skull a good guy? Can he prove it by not hitting me when I prod
him? What’s he going to do next?’ So is that from the Meme side or
the human?
He loves me, he loves me not
? Or am I just some
kind of lab experiment? Trying to figure out the effect of the
nanos?” He held his arms out to the side in an exaggerated shrug, a
whatever
gesture of frustration and contempt.

“
Alan…I just want to know
who you are.”

“
There are better ways to
do that than jabbing me with emotional cattle prods. Just talk to
me like a normal human being.”

Raphaela choked with laughter then, gasping
until Skull turned away, certain she was deliberately provoking him
again. She held up a hand, forfending. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It
was just so funny, what you said, since neither of us is anything
like a normal human being.”

He stared at her, and suddenly couldn’t help
himself as laughter bubbled up inside and burst forth. Soon they
both collapsed on the deck holding their sides, struggling to
breathe in violent shared amusement.

She reached across the deck with her hand to
take his, and he didn’t pull away. “Alan…I want to like you. I want
to be your friend – or, whatever, maybe more. But that’s this body
and this biology talking, I think. We don’t make sense, you and me.
It’s only because we’re trapped here in this ship that anything
like this could happen. But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. We
are
here, after all.”

Skull stared at her with his head resting
sideways on the deck, a strange perspective, a child’s experimental
viewpoint. His fingers twined with hers, and it felt good in a way
he hadn’t felt in forever.
Since Linde
…he jerked his hand
out of hers, standing up suddenly. “You’re right. It doesn’t make
sense. You’ve just got, what is it, Stockholm syndrome or whatever.
Identifying with the captor.”

She sat up on the deck, put her arms around
her knees. “That only works if you’re really my captor. But you
aren’t. My fate is not in your hands.”

“
Then it’s wounded bird
syndrome. Women see some tragically damaged man and want to fix
him.” Skull growled, “I don’t need your fixing.”

Raphaela sighed, exasperated. “Can’t you just
accept that someone might like you? Think you’re an interesting and
unique man? Might see the possibilities?”

“
No. I’m really not that
likable.” He reached over to start the Firefly video again. “Shut
up and watch.”

Oh-dark-thirty. I used to say I wasn’t
going to do this, yet here I am
, Repeth thought.
When I was
a lower-enlisted Marine I swore I wouldn’t make my troops hurry up
and wait all the time. When I got to the exalted position of senior
NCO I’d do away with all that nonsense. Yet here I am, making them
hurry up and wait. And why? Murphy’s law. Something always goes
wrong, and the smart leader is the one who gets everything done
early, builds extra time and flexibility into the schedule.

But she had to admit her people were handling
it well as they sat on the edge of the runway with their backs
against their rucks, smoking and joking. Their duffels and sea bags
and hard cases were palletized and getting loaded right now into
the C-17 Globemaster transport planes, visible in the glare of the
portable generator lights half a mile down the runway. She looked
upward but because of the harsh lamps she couldn’t see the usual
desert-sky spray of the Milky Way. The moon was bright, half-full
and setting in the west.

A breeze brought the aroma of jet fuel from
the tanker trucks topping the big planes off, along with the sharp
smell of exhaust from the aircraft’s auxiliary power units already
burning gas and supplying power. She knew loadmasters were
arranging their cargo as maintainers, pilots and copilots ran
preflights and safety checks: endless rituals to propitiate the
unforgiving gods of the air.

She knew the fifteen aircraft here
represented almost half of the remaining C-17s in the entire United
States Air Force. Once there had been almost two hundred and fifty,
but most of them had been destroyed by the
Nebraska’s
nukes.

Nukes I launched. Keys I turned, God
forgive me
. She bit back tears.

Her heart ached for her country and her
once-proud military forces.
I should be glad we are getting this
kind of priority. Fifteen sorties to lift the entire battalion –
thirteen platoons and enough vehicles and supplies to operate for
two weeks. After that, we’re on our own. Still, there should be
plenty of salvage where we’re going.

She mused on the bombs, forcing herself to
think about it. Each miniature sun had created a circle of
destruction, a dead zone. Each ground zero marked the heart of a
city, or a military base, sometimes a piece of both. About half of
the bombs had fallen on the great population centers and bases of
the Eastern Seaboard. The oval encompassing Washington, DC and
Baltimore had hosted a dozen fireballs as far south as Quantico and
as far north as Charm City itself. The Capitol and the White House,
the Pentagon, Langley, Andrews, Fort Belvoir, Fort Meade, Dulles
and Reagan and BWI airports, all were irradiated, vaporized,
sterilized.

Even that might have been a horrible but
manageable crisis, with the states of Virginia, Maryland and West
Virginia mobilizing to reestablish order and provide relief, had
the alien Demon Plagues not been cast like a deathly blanket upon
the fragile surviving societies and institutions, crushing them
under the weight of chaos and tragedy. As far as anyone could tell,
nothing functioned in the death zones more organized than a
volunteer fire department.

She and her troops faced enough work for a
hundred battalions for a hundred years, helping the medics to get
the survivors inoculated. The priority airlift was a tribute to the
importance of their mission, to begin reclaiming the national
capital region. They could have started anywhere, but the
symbolism, President McKenna felt, was important.

It just wasn’t the United States without the
city that bore George Washington’s name.

When times are tough, people need symbols.
God knows I do, and right now it’s Old Glory flying above the
Battle Color. We’ll raise them on the banks of the Potomac yet.
She squeezed and surreptitiously wiped her eyes.

Repeth walked among her people, greeting most
by name. She walked over to the other platoons of First MP Company,
saluting their officers, conferring with their senior NCOs, taking
the pulse of the whole unit. In her estimation, morale was high and
the troops were eager to get on with it.

The faint and far-off tones of the aircraft
down the runway changed as they fired up the first of their jet
engines. Battery power had already started the Auxiliary Power
Units, tiny turbines that generated electricity for the aircraft.
Now the power from the APUs drove electric motors to turn the huge
turbofan engines that would lift their enormous loads into the sky.
First one started, then another, each in turn supplying more juice
to the system until all four house-sized propulsion units on each
bird sang their songs of power.

“
All right, Fourth Platoon,
on your feet
! Ruck up, ladies and gentlemen, those birds
aren’t coming to us! ‘Platoon, tench-hun! Right,
hace
!
For-ward,
harch
! At ease,
harch
!” In four files the
platoon marched easy down the edge of the tarmac, Third Platoon
dimly visible in front of them as a mass of bobbing heads,
shoulders and rucks. She looked behind at the company of Homies
gaggling after them. She knew that in back of them, the clerks and
lawyers and doctors and nurses and morticians and engineers and
many other experts, the professionals that were the heart of Civil
Affairs, were loading buses. Rick would be back there, probably
embarrassed to be with the pogues, but he was no soldier, and it
would send the wrong message for him to be here at her
side.

She had laughed when Transportation had asked
her when she wanted the platoon to be picked up. “It’s less than a
mile from the barracks to the airfield,” she told them. “Don’t
waste the nation’s gasoline.” When the other MP platoons had heard,
they cancelled their rides too.
I guess the Homies couldn’t let
us show them up. Good for them. At least they have some
pride.

The mass briefing the night before had
finally given them some details on the landing zone. Fort AP Hill,
south of Fredericksburg, Virginia, possessed the airfield closest
to DC that could take the C-17s on the south side. Other units
would work the west and north.

The landing zone was also well outside the
direct blast zone, though not outside the radiation plume or the
reach of the Demon Plagues. As a US Army installation not open to
the general public, it might have retained some semblance of law
and order. Or at least be safely deserted.

Unfortunately, no one had been able to
contact any units stationed there. Reconnaissance drones had shown
some human activity but no vehicles moving, and the base power
plant revealed no heat signature. As far as they could tell the
place was dead, as were most of its people. However, there did
appear to be some organization in the city of Fredericksburg
immediately to the north.

The briefing officer had said, “We’ve got a
pair of Super Hornets off the
Harry Truman
that will give
you some air cover and surface suppression as you land, and there’s
a Force Recon team from the
Somerset
that is supposed to be
moving in right now on foot. They’ll give the planes the final call
via UHF about conditions on the ground, then they’ll attach
themselves to the battalion after you land. The MP company debarks
first in platoon order to set up dismounted security, then
Homeland, then Civil Affairs and Medical. The aircraft will offload
hot and extract immediately. After that you’ll be pretty much on
your own for one to three weeks, until the ground forces pushing in
from the west link up.”