The War for Profit Series Omnibus (59 page)

Galen stood in the front of the chapel wearing his full dress uniform. The saber at his side was necessary, for cutting the cake at the reception later; otherwise Galen wouldn’t have worn it. The gold Commander’s epaulets were distracting him, shiny objects just out of view of the corners of both eyes at once, but he’d managed to ignore them so far. The red sash of the Order of Distinguished Mercenary Colonels looked impressive, but made Galen feel awkward; he was the only member of the Jasmine Panzer Brigade to ever have that honor bestowed, and he felt he really hadn’t done anything to deserve it. He was proud of the nine battle stars on his campaign ribbons. After much debate and fuss, Tad had convinced Galen to wear the Victory Medal awarded by the Tuha. Actually, Tad threatened to refuse the honor of Best Man if Galen didn’t wear the medal. But Galen placed it on his rack as his lowest award, arguing that it was awarded by an entity not recognized as a professional military unit by the Bonding Commission.

Tad stood to Galen’s right, the Chaplain stood a full step behind to Galen’s left, behind the Alter. Farther to Galen’s left were two bride’s maids, Karen’s combat skimmer driver and Major Polar’s sixteen year old daughter. Mozart’s “Nachtmusik” played softly on the chapel sound system. Karen’s mother sat in the front row, along with her sister and Karen’s two sisters. Galen’s mother and her husband was in the front row as well, and the chairman of the board, Karen’s grandfather. In the second row sat the rest of the board members and their spouses. Behind that, more friends and family members and mercenaries; Galen’s tank crew, along with troops, NCOs, and officers from across the brigade, as well as a half a dozen Mandarin soldiers.

The chapel was full. The ushers,
Major Sevin and Major Polar along with four Captains stood flanking the entrance, three on each side. The crowd, the guests come to witness the wedding, sat quietly, a profusion of military uniforms dotted here and there by the few women who were not military members. Even the Board members wore their dress uniforms, and Galen recognized three female troops in dress uniform seated among them. Perhaps they were Board Member’s daughters, surely too young to be the wives of the doddering old men. Galen would look into it some day…

The doors to the chapel opened and “Wedding March” replaced the Mozart on the sound system, louder and more clear. Karen walked with Spike at her side, her arm looped through his. The Chaplain had made it clear that since Karen’s grandfather was also in a position of authority over Galen, he could not give the bride away. Galen was the groom as well as Karen’s commanding officer, so certainly he couldn’t give her away. That left Spike, the Executive Officer, to perform the duties of the Commanding Officer when he was not able. Behind Karen walked Polar’s eight year old daughter holding up the hem of the wedding gown.

Galen smiled. Karen’s gown did nothing to hide the fact she was seven months pregnant with twins, and in fact it seemed modified to emphasize the pregnancy. Even the low cut on the front, although covered with gauzy fabric, emphasized a pregnant look. And her face, thinly veiled at the moment, showed the glow of impending motherhood. In just a few moments Galen would be able to say, “That’s my wife.”

Spike led Karen to the Alter, handed the wedding rings to the Chaplin, and then stepped away to sit at the far end of the front row. Galen executed an about-face, mindful of the swing of the scabbard on his right side. The Chaplain, a Master Sergeant who had served in the Brigade for twenty six years beginning as a Chaplin’s Assistant, signaled for the music to stop. The Chaplin couldn’t take a commission because his degree was with a seminary university rather than a military academy. He cleared his throat and began the blessing.

“Friends, family, and comrades at arms, we are gathered here today to witness the joining in holy matrimony of these two souls, Colonel Galen Raper and Lieutenant Colonel Karen Mitchell.”

The Chaplain slipped a simple 22K gold wedding band first on Karen’s ring finger, then on Galen’s.

“Galen and Karen, you have come here today to seek the blessing of God and of his Church upon your marriage. I require, therefore, that you promise, with the help of God, to fulfill the obligations which Christian Marriage demands.”

The Chaplain turned to Galen and said, “Galen, you have taken Karen to be your wife. Do you promise to love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, to be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?”

Galen looked the Chaplain in the eye and said, “I do.”

The Chaplain turned to Karen and said, “Karen, you have taken Galen to be your husband. Do you promise to love him, comfort him, honor and keep him, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, to be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?”

Karen said, “I do.”

The Chaplain raised his voice and said, “You who have witnessed these promises will do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage.”

The assembled group said, “We will.”

Karen and Galen extended their left hands toward the Chaplain, who clasped their hands together. The wedding bands made a click.

The Chaplain said, “Lord, bless these rings to be a symbol of the vows by which this man and this woman have bound themselves to each other; through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.”

The Chaplain then joined the right hands of Karen and Galen and said,
“Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder.”

“Amen.”

Karen and Galen faced away from the Chaplain, towards the exit. Tad handed Karen a bouquet of flowers, and she looped her arm through Galen’s.

The Chaplain leaned forward and whispered, “You may kiss the bride.”

Galen reached to lift Karen’s veil and pulled a little too hard. It fell to the floor, but he ignored it and pulled her close and gripped the back of her neck and kissed her full on the lips.

The ushers marched outside and assembled on the steps, facing inward, their sabers drawn and held forward overhead to form an arch. Karen tossed her bouquet over her shoulder to the bride’s maids. Major Polar’s sixteen year old daughter caught it. Galen and Karen walked arm in arm out of the chapel. Major Sevin was the last saber-wielding usher on Galen’s side of the arch, Major Polar the last saber-wielding usher on Karen’s side of the arch. As Karen and Galen went by them Sevin said, “Have fun.”

Major Polar brought down her saber and lightly swatted Karen across her ass with the flat of the blade. “Welcome to wifehood, sister!”

Galen and Karen climbed into the back seat of the tactical skimmer and sat holding hands and waving back to the wedding guests who’d spilled out onto the lawn of the chapel. Karen’s bride’s maid got in the driver’s seat and drove them away. The reception took place at the lake house, at sunset.

Stallion Six

by

Gideon Fleisher

Copyright © 2012 Gideon Fleisher

Kindle Edition

All rights reserved.

The Jasmine Panzer Brigade museum curator felt that the story of Stallion Six could best be told by me. Because my duty position put me close to Stallion Six but from an objective vantage point, because I had the bad habit of forgetting to shut off my personal communicator and it recorded a lot of things, audio for the most part. Regardless, I was able to dig through its archived files to help me remember many parts of the story more accurately. Plus I had access to initial reports because it was my job to screen and file them, and it was my job to track battlefield movements in real time. So the curator was right. And now I’ll start at the beginning.

I first met Lieutenant Colonel Guillermo Camacho, comms call sign Stallion Six, right before my first Battalion staff call. I’d been assigned as the assistant operations Non-Commissioned Officer In Charge of Tasking, Training, Schools and Movement for the Stallion battalion two months before. Stallion Six had been on convalescent leave, and then ordinary leave, for a total of three months and this was his first day back and he wanted to hold staff call. I sat at my desk and dug through a plethora of data, sculpting it into what I hoped would be a presentable snapshot of the status of the Battalion’s tasking, training, schools and movement at that point in time. I felt a hand on my left shoulder and swiveled in my chair and saw Lieutenant Colonel Camacho. I stood and faced him. He was about twenty centimeters shorter than me and muscular, his upper arms bigger around than my thighs. And he was bronze, square-faced, with a full head of close-cropped coal-black hair and a dense mustache that covered his upper lip. He wore combat coveralls, his side arm in the holster of his pistol belt. I wore my class B dress uniform, appropriate for my assigned duties as a desk jockey.

“Sergeant Slaughter, how you doing?”

“Fine, sir.” I shifted my posture to rigid attention. I looked over his head and he spoke into my chest.

“So you were the Colonel’s gunner for three years. You like that job?”

I did. It was a sweet job. “Yes sir.”

“As much as I could use a good gunner in my tank, I need you right here. This job takes brains and you have brains. Relax.” He extended his right hand and I gripped it firmly. He shook once, then released. “We’re cool. Only time you have to stand like that is if you’re in trouble or someone who outranks me is around.”

“Roger, sir.” I relaxed.

He turned and strode off toward the conference room. As he passed through the doorway I overheard his boisterous voice, “Hey! A-Three! Get some doughnuts in here!”

The assistant operations officer, a Captain, moved briskly out of the conference room and used his personal communicator to call the chow hall, then stood in front of the battalion headquarters building and waited for the delivery of doughnuts to arrive.

Calling it the ‘
Battalion Headquarters Building’ makes it sound like some grand structure, but really it’s a converted old motor pool maintenance bay. Along its back wall is the new motor pool fence and the back wall was the bay door, the opening bricked up with concrete blocks now. Interior walls were put up to sector off the work areas and offices, space set apart for S-1 Personnel, S-2 Intelligence, S-3 Operations and S-4 Logistics. Plus office space for the Executive Officer and the Commander. A drop ceiling three meters above had been put in over all that framing. The floor was still bare concrete. All that work was done twenty years before, when the Brigade first came to the planet Mandarin. The restroom was an attached structure around the side, which meant going outside to get to it and then knocking on the steel door to determine the gender of its occupant, if any, before entering. But overall, it was a comfortable place to work.

I’ll take this opportunity to explain the rank structure of the Jasmine Panzer Brigade. Troops, or Troopers, are the same as Privates. That’s the lowest rank, bearing the least amount of responsibility. Next up are Corporals, generally in charge of fire teams or tactical vehicles, and then the Sergeants, usually in charge of a squad or team or patrol, generally, or a sophisticated piece of equipment. Sergeants are commonly assigned as tank commanders.

Now here’s the part of the rank structure that confounds Government troops and causes confusion for indigenous armies, and often drops a jaw amongst other mercenary units as well. The commissioned officer ranks have enlisted equivalents. Okay, I’ll explain that. A Chief is enlisted, a Lieutenant is commissioned. They are of equal rank in this Brigade. In most other units, a Lieutenant will have an enlisted platoon sergeant assigned as his sidekick, his little buddy, his executive assistant, a whipping boy to be used and abused at the whim of the Lieutenant. And so on up the chain; a Captain has his own little Master Sergeant at his beck and call, a Major would have a Senior Master Sergeant to assist him, and a Lieutenant Colonel would have a Sergeant Major to advise him, that sort of thing. But not here; it’s a luxury the Jasmine Panzer Brigade would rather not provide. Why have two mercenaries assigned to basically do the same job?

This continues all the way up the chain. A Master Sergeant is the enlisted equivalent of a Captain, and like a Captain, outranks a Lieutenant. A Senior Master Sergeant, equivalent to a Major. And a Sergeant Major, the equivalent to a Lieutenant Colonel. A Command Sergeant Major is the designation for a Sergeant Major in command of the entire Brigade, but that rarely happens. It only happened once in this Brigade and that Command Sergeant Major was later commissioned by the Brigade’s Board of Directors as the current commander, Colonel Galen Raper. As for commissioned officers who don’t like the rank structure, they can go ahead and buy back their contracts and seek employment elsewhere. Some have, and I was glad to see them go.

For pay, that’s simple. All enlisted mercenaries receive the same pay regardless of rank. Those bearing greater responsibility face less personal risk. Look at a list of casualties and the obvious pyramid of the dead sorted by rank proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt. Over the past twenty years, 87% of the Brigade’s casualties have been Troops. 6% Corporals, 4% Sergeants, and the remaining 3% were Chief/Lieutenant and above. But then again, the Brigade has kept its casualty rate for combat contracts below the 5% mark. So a Trooper who spends a full twenty years as a Trooper and goes on an average of ten combat contracts during that twenty years stands a 67% chance of making it to retirement without being disabled or killed. Pretty good odds compared to most units.

When not on a contract, the enlisted receive a subsistence allowance geared toward matching the median entry-level working-class income of the host planet’s population residing near the installation. Here on the planet Mandarin, that’s cheap but adequate. More like an allowance than a paycheck, since the Brigade provides chow and billeting. But for deployment on a unit contract, mercenaries receive a share of the contract’s revenue. One half goes to the unit and the remaining half is shared equally by all the enlisted personnel participating in that contract.

The Brigade uses an insurance agency to handle death, disability and retirement benefits. That’s required as part of the unit charter with the Bonding Commission. Sort of ensures the benefits will still be available in the event the Brigade ceases to exist. Commissioned Officers are paid a competitive monthly salary on a graduating scale that goes up with each promotion. And that’s it. Real simple.

I went into the conference room and took my place to the left of the Operations Officer, Major Deskavich, the S-3. The A-3 sat at the front of the room next to the screen to operate the display controller. The A-3 was all right, a career officer who had managed a direct commission with the Brigade. Most Academy graduates had to enlist as a Sergeant and serve a year as enlisted before applying for a commission, but Captain Blythe managed to slip in without doing that. Perhaps it was because he’d attended a military high school and because he’d later graduated top of his class at a two-year academy. But anyway, he was a short guy who seemed slender at first glance. But not really. Strong, tough, thick skin. Nothing seemed to bother him. The A-3 job is a spring board to Company command. A recently promoted Captain or Master Sergeant is brought up to see what a Company looks like from the Battalion’s perspective. They already saw a Company from the inside, as a Platoon Leader and a Company Executive Officer. So the A-3 is treated more like an intern, just here to observe and learn and perform menial tasks. Like run Audio-Video gear and fetch donuts and coffee. Generally a Captain or Master Sergeant gets stuck working A-3 for three to six months, waiting for a Company command slot to open up.

Major Deskavich is my boss on the organizational chart, being as I’m assigned to the S-3 operations shop. However, as the Tasking, Training, Schools and Movement NCO for the Battalion, I’m really the primary watchdog for Stallion Six. I gather reports from subordinate units and bounce them off my data from Brigade. Who qualified at the Brigade’s ranges, who completed what schooling and who needs to attend a school and who gets to go next, which elements performed to standard in the field and who didn’t. I track corrective training verses incidents of indiscipline, seeing which unit had repeat offenders and which didn’t. I keep track of all that and more, and I report it and make recommendations in accordance with doctrine and disciplinary regulations. Directly to the Battalion Commander. Yeah, I’m the bad guy. It’s my job and I like it.

Alpha Company requires the most tracking, its ranks full of ‘Type A’ personalities. Bold, aggressive, eager for promotions, competitive, with the attitude that whatever they have to do to get ahead is a ticket punch to get up to a higher level. Tracking them to ensure they are qualified for the promotions they seek takes up much of my time, as well as fending off their coercions and bribes to just let them slide. For example, they’re the ones who try to avoid small arms ranges and then later complain that they didn’t get the highest scores because of defective equipment, of course. The Alpha commander is Captain Fiaco, a busty, dusky woman with jet-black hair and mysteriously dark eyes. Her Executive Officer is Lieutenant Rother, a tall skinny man with the deportment of a dispossessed aristocrat. Pale brown eyes and close-cropped yellow hair do nothing to soften his superior attitude.

Bravo Company is made up of ‘Type B’ personalities for the most part, although some of the troops display some characteristics of A and C personalities from time to time. But mostly, they compete against themselves and are happy as long as they can beat their earlier personal bests. They’re the ones who accept awards and promotions with humility and surprise. The Commander is Captain Stovall, a relaxed and friendly man, his Company XO, Chief Logan, the woman sipping iced tea, seated on his left. Seated across the table from them are the Commander and XO of Charlie Company, Master Sergeant Gates and Chief Stone, respectively.

Charlie Company presents the least amount of challenge to me as the Battalion Bad Guy. Made up entirely of ‘Type C’ personalities, the troops in Company C have the most experience. All of them have reenlisted beyond their initial five year commitment and most of them have served in their currently assigned duty positions for more than ten years. They are content to stay where they are and revel in their own high levels of expertise. A machine gunner, for example, is more than happy to spend an entire twenty years as a Trooper, if only allowed to continue to be recognized as one of the best machine gunners in the Brigade. Promotions are slow for ‘C’ types, and they like it that way. They see promotion as necessary evil, a time of transition to new skill sets, new duties. They see change as a chance at doing something wrong, in other words.

The Charlie commander nearly resigned when I brought it to his attention that he’d have to either take a commission or retire after this contract. Those are the rules, enlisted can’t serve beyond twenty years. If he wanted to serve longer, he’d have to take a commission. And that means taking staff rather than command positions for a while, and seeking another promotion before getting a higher-level command. But I did manage to squeeze through an exception to policy waiver, approved through the Bonding Commission itself, to allow Master Sergeant Gates to go on the next contract as a Master Sergeant and not have to retire until that contract was complete. So he’s happy for now. At least until we get back from our next contract. Then he’s retiring. He’ll be past the twenty year mark then, no time to take a commission. Have to do that before the twenty year mark.

Also seated around the conference table are the staff section heads. Captain Shuttler for S-1, a Master Sergeant Payne for S-2 and the Senior Master Sergeant in charge of S-4, along with a Captain and Master Sergeant, Commander and XO of HHS, the Headquarters and Headquarters Service Company. On the battlefield, the Battalion Headquarters shows up as seven Stallion tanks and is labeled HQ. And I have the privilege of commanding one of those tanks, tracking battlefield movements with the tank’s auxiliary status screen, when we’re out on contract. Well, the BN HQ is actually five tanks, with two spare tanks placed with HHS. I command one of the spares, kind of, keeping it functional until another crew in the Battalion needs it to replace theirs, if one breaks down or is damaged, that sort of thing. HHS is a company of service and support and includes wheeled and tracked vehicles. Ambulances, mortars, food, comms, cargo haulers, recovery vehicles, maintenance and repair assets, air defense, stuff like that. A real mixed bag of things to support the Battalion, forty four assorted vehicles and nearly a hundred personnel. The most senior of Captains tend to be put in command of it, after commanding a line company and before taking on the rank of Major. Enlisted commanders are never handed that sort of sandwich. Sort of an initiation reserved for Captains bucking for Major, I guess. A difficult, demanding, thankless job for sure.

Major Wood, the Battalion XO, stepped into the conference room and said, “Gentlemen, the Battalion Commander.”

We all stood. Stallion Six took his seat at the head of the table. Major Wood, the XO, sat to his left. “Take your seats.”

We sat.

Captain Blythe, the A-3, stood and said, “Sir, on behalf of all the members of the Stallion Battalion, welcome back.”

“Thank you A-3. Now what’s been going on while I was gone? You mess up my unit or what?”