4
“Any bets on what this is about?” Tomiko asked Rev as they sat in the small theater in the bowels of the Second Division Headquarters.
“Maybe we’re finally getting another mission,” Rev said.
“They could have briefed us that back at Nguyen,” his fellow sergeant said. “No reason to drag us to Kamachi.”
Rev looked around the theater. There were the three IBHU Raider Teams: the two from Second Division and the one from First, each one with a single Integrated Bionic Hopological Unit Marine—Rev, McAnt, and Randigold. The rest were a handful of senior Marines. No Sieben employees, not even Doctor Chakrabarti, the IBHU civilian project lead, which was telling. Of the Marines, there was Colonel Destafney, another bird colonel who Rev figured was from First Division, two lieutenant colonels, four majors, and four sergeants major. Rev was more impressed with the sergeants major. One of them was Sergeant Major O’Hara, the Eighth Marines senior enlisted advisor. But Rev had never seen two of the rank in one place before, much less four.
“Hey, what do you call a group of sergeants major?”
<Is this a joke?> Punch, his battle buddy, asked.
“No. Well, maybe a little humor. I was just wondering. I mean, didn’t you tell me a couple of weeks ago that a group of crows is called a murder?”
<Yes, I did.>
“Well, I’d hate to run into a murder of sergeants major some dark and stormy night.”
<A murder might be appropriate. But how about a death?>
Rev couldn’t help it, and he laughed out loud.
“What? Being hauled all this way only to sit on our asses is funny?” Tomiko asked.
“No, nothing. Just thinking.”
“That’s your problem, you thinking.”
Rev didn’t have a quick comeback, so he didn’t say anything. Tomiko was much better than he was with trash-talking, so unless he had a zinger, it was better to abandon the field of battle and live to fight another day.
“Think they’ll ship us back to Nguyen right away after this brief?” Tomiko asked.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“BBQ, of course. Where did Bundy and Udu say they went? Fat Alice’s?”
“Fat Alicia’s. And yeah, that sounds primo,” Rev said, his stomach suddenly growling at the thought.
Anastasia, which was the city outside Camp Kamachi’s main gate, prided itself on having the best BBQ on the planet. And while Rev had been to six other planets so far, the only time he’d been to Anastasia or Kamachi was when he was in the hospital.
“OK, it’s a date,” she said, squeezing his arm.
“Did I hear you say Fat Alicia’s?” Hussein asked.
With their augmented hearing, it was difficult to have a private conversation around others.
“Hey, Rev and Miko are going to Fat Alicia’s. Who else is up for it?” he said without waiting for an answer.
There was a quick rush of hands shooting up.
“OK, then. If they give us some time before we go back, it’s BBQ,” Rev said, raising an eyebrow to Tomiko. She shrugged her acceptance.
If she was going to say something else, it was lost when someone yelled, “Attention on deck!”
All the Marines and Navy corpsmen jumped to attention with a clatter of seats. Rev kept his head oriented forward but with his peripheral vision, he caught sight of several Marines descending from the door in the back and making their way forward to the front row.
“The big brass is here,” Tomiko whispered.
She was right. Two three-star generals, one more than existed in the New Hope Marines, led the group. He’d met Lieutenant General Trejo before, the Director of the Union Marine Corps—the Big M—Research and Development Division back at Marine HQ on New Mars. The general had been a fixture during Rev’s initial prep, fitting, and training with his IBHU, but this was the first time he’d seen him since the hotwash for his first mission as an IBHU Marine. The second three-star was Lieutenant General Begay, the commanding general of the New Hope Marines. Major General Sirirat was the Second Division commanding general, and the other two-star had to be Major General Van Allen from the First Marine Division over on the mainland.
And that wasn’t all. There were a couple of one-star generals, a few more colonels, and some captains and majors with the gold aide-de-camp aiguillettes hanging from their shoulders. And one civilian, who was looking very out-of-place among all the uniformed Marines.
“At ease, and take your seats, Marines,” General Trejo shouted out.
“And sailors,” Doc Paul, the platoon corpsman, muttered quietly as he always did.
Rev took a quick look around the theater. “That’s a lot of brass for a couple of Raider platoons.”
“Best platoons in the Corps, though,” Tomiko said.
General Trejo centered himself in front of the seated Marines and faced them. “I’m here on New Hope for a series of meetings concerning our employment of the IBHU units. As you know, your two platoons make up the first operational unit in the Corps.”
Rev didn’t know that, and he sat up straighter in his seat. He’d been the first IBHU Marine, the test case. And now, with Backstop and Ether certified for combat and with a mission under their belts, he knew they had to have been among the first. But in the entire Marine Corps? Big M and the other planetary corps?
The Perseus Union Marine Corps, the PUMC, was the “premier” corps with its twelve Marine Forces, each comprised of a division, wing, and support group. They had the latest and greatest weapons and equipment and were first in line for every new innovation. To think that one of the planetary corps, in this case, the New Hope Marines, had something first was more than a little surprising.
“One of those meetings yesterday was your hotwash of Mistake. Good job, there, really good job. I’m proud of you all. But that’s not what we’re covering now, and this morning, when we sat down for the next brief, General Sirirat suggested that we bring you into this. And I think she was right. If you’re going to be the tip of the spear, maybe you need to know more about the tin-asses than you do now.”
Rev raised his eyebrows in surprise. First that a three-star general used the term “tin-asses.” That was just slang, and most officers tried to use Centaurs at best or the official Scutum-Centaursians. Second, and this was more important, a two-star general stopped a meeting to ask that the grunts be briefed as well.
Is it snowing in hell? Are pigs suddenly launching themselves into the air? Who stole my Marine Corps, and what are they doing with it?
“So, sorry for the short notice to get you here, but I’m going to turn it over to Doctor Saeed so we can get on with this and get you back to training.”
“I hope not before we can get that BBQ,” Hussein whispered loud enough for the augmented Marines around him to hear but hopefully not loud enough for the brass to pick up.
“Record this.”
<I’m on it.>
The civilian stood up when one of the colonels with the generals’ entourage stood and stopped her. “Before we start, I just want to remind everyone in the room that this is a One-C class briefing. All of you,” he said, sweeping an arm to indicate the gathered Marines, “have been given a mission-specific clearance for this. But there is to be no dissemination beyond this room and no recording.” He looked around the space to make sure that sunk in before he turned back to the civilian and indicated that she could continue.
<What do you want me to do?>
Rev pondered that for a moment. He’d never been at the top of any of his classes in school, and he knew that not all of what he’d be told would sink in. He’d need to go over it again when he had more time. And was he technically asking Punch to make real recording? Punch was in his head, after all.
He knew this was against about a million different regulations, but he chose to go with it.
“No change. Record it. We can delete it after I review it all.”
The civilian was an older, dark-skinned woman with short hair that had a purple swatch going front to back across her right temple, a pink swatch across her left temple. Both swatches seemed to glow with luminescence as if they were ocean plankton disturbed by a boat’s wake.
“Me like,” Tomiko said.
From what Rev had gathered, Tomiko had been the type to push the limits of social norms before she was conscripted, so the hair was probably up her alley.
“Hello,” the woman said. “I’m Doctor Lily Saeed, and I run J2-X. I’m happy to be here to talk to you today.”
“What’s J2-X?”
<It’s an unnamed division with J-2. She’s a CES-4.>
“OK, J-2 is intelligence at Big M headquarters, but what’s a CES-4?”
Rev knew about the Civilian Executive Service, but they were so high above him on the food chain that he didn’t know one from the other.
<It’s the equivalent to the three-star rank.>
And that impressed him. Along with the two lieutenant generals, that was three of them in this room, all to brief three platoons of Raiders.
The doctor hesitated as if choosing her words, and Rev got the impression that this lady never misspoke. She looked over at General Trejo as if for confirmation. Rev couldn’t tell from his vantage what the general might have signaled back.
“I’m not sure how much of this is common knowledge, but given the classification of this brief, I think I can go into this. I’m sure that you’ve all heard that the Frisians have accused us of having a Centaur prisoner. Well, that is just that, a rumor, but we have been able to recover Centaur tissue.”
There was an audible gasp from the theater, and Tomiko gave his leg a nudge with hers.
“I am not going into the details beyond that, but I wanted to use that as a basis of how we have been able to make some of what I am going to theorize to you here today. And I must stress that while we are fairly confident on what I am about to reveal, this isn’t proven fact. The Centaurs have been, and they remain, a mystery in too many ways.”
Every single Marine and corpsman in the room had their eyes locked onto the woman. An attack by a paladin outside the door wouldn’t have been able to shift their attention from her.
“First and foremost, the Centaurs are dying.”
Say what?
“I don’t mean the individuals, but as a race, they are slowly dying out. The signs are clear.”
“What are the signs?” General Sirirat asked. Evidently, this was as new to her as it was to Rev and the rest of the Raiders.
“I’m not sure how much you want of the science behind it, but let me summarize, if you don’t mind. And if this doesn’t suffice, I’ll be happy to show you in greater detail in a secure lab.”
The division CG nodded, and the doctor continued. “Centaur C-DNA, as we are calling it, is surprisingly similar to human DNA.”
There was another audible gasp, but something clicked with Rev. He’d seen the dead Centaur, which had to be the “Centaur tissue” to which she was referring. It had been wizened and much smaller than a human, but it had the same general features—a head, a torso, two arms, and two legs.
“Chimpanzee DNA is much closer, but the C-DNA works in the same general pattern and has the same function as our DNA. And within those C-DNA strands, there are similar C-RNA. We haven’t unlocked all of its secrets, but there are some things that are evident. And the first is that there are signs of degradation, and not just that of environmental pressures on the individual. With linear regression analysis, we can see that the mutation rates have been increasing over time, and not in ways to benefit the race. They are breaking down to where reproduction is becoming problematic. The Centaurs have a similar method as ours to fertilize their eggs. But their version of sperm, if I can use the term for simplicity’s sake, is misshapen and malformed.”
Rev grimaced. They’d taken sperm out of his and Tomiko’s Centaur? And how do they know this wasn’t just a sickly Centaur, one exposed to radiation or something? Unless they had more bodies?
“Punch, can we have more tin-asses on ice besides the one we found?”
<It is entirely possible.>
“The similarities of what can happen with devolution are too evident to ignore. Every analysis we run shows the same thing. As a race, they are dying out. A hundred years, two hundred, maybe three hundred years, and the Centaurs will be extinct.
“Now why this is happening, well, there are two trains of thought. The first is that they are simply an older race than ours, and they’ve reached their sell-by date. The second is that we are about the same age, but they are from a world or worlds where their magnetic field isn’t as strong as ours is, so they’ve been continually bombarded with their sun’s ultraviolet radiation, resulting in far more long-term damage.
General Sirirat looked over to General Trejo, who nodded, giving her the OK to question. “Doctor Saeed, that is all well and good, and yes, it is interesting. More than interesting, I guess. But we can’t wait a hundred years for them to go extinct. They may be dying, but their paladins keep killing Marines. Their ships blow our Navy’s most powerful ships out of null space. How is this going to help us live long enough until they die out?”
Doctor Saeed smiled then, a smile that made Rev hope he never got on her bad side. It gave him the shivers.
“Oh, we have no intention of letting them die out naturally. You see, with what we have uncovered, we are developing some species-specific weapons to speed up their march to extinction.”
“Are you inferring that we’re going to use bio-weapons against them? What about the Torinth Accords?” General Sirirat asked.
“Last I heard, the Centaurs are not signatories,” she said with a casual shrug. “But yes, we’re developing bio-weapons. And you,” she said, pointing to the Marines in the theater, “you are going to be our applicators.”
* * *
“So, what do you think?” Tomiko asked, reaching up to wipe a splotch of BBQ sauce from Rev’s cheek.
“Think about what? Our brief or the BBQ?”
“Ah, both, I guess.”
“Damn fine BBQ. These ribs are the bomb, and I can’t believe I was here at the hospital for so long without ordering delivery. Glad the colonel convinced the pilots to delay our return.”
“Well, when a full bird asks you to find a reason why one of the Buzzards can’t take off, you find it.”
“That and bribing them,” Rev said, pointing to where the crews of the two Buzzards were chowing down on Fat Alicia’s finest, courtesy of Colonel Destafney.
“And . . .” Tomiko pressed.
“Knowing they’re dying was surprising, but like the CG said, we can’t wait a couple hundred years for that to happen. About the bio-weapons?” Rev said with a shrug. “That’s way above my pay grade.
“What I really wanted to know is what makes them tick. You know, like know your enemy and stuff. Like Sun Tzu said. We still don’t know shit, and how can we figure out what they’re going to do unless we know how they think? That’s why we got slammed on TRT-36. ‘No, tin-asses wouldn’t set a trap. No, not them.’ Until they do, and Yazzie and the rest get killed.”
Rev threw one of the ribs, half-eaten, on the ground as the familiar anger at losing so many friends returned.
“Hey, pick that up, Pelletier,” Staff Sergeant Delacrie told him. “We’re guests here and not freakin’ barbarians.”
Rev nodded and picked up the rib. He was embarrassed that he’d let his emotions get the better of him, and he had to admit it was stupid to waste good food because he was still angry. He took a couple of deep breaths to calm back down.
“Sorry about that. But I really wish that doc had given us something more on how to fight them.”
“What do you think new weapons are?” Tomiko asked.
“Just tools. I want to know how to fight them, not with what.”
He knew he had to get over the deaths of his fellow Marines. Being a Marine was inherently a dangerous proposition, and it wasn’t up to some CES with probably a dozen PhDs to come up with a secret formula to make killing Centaurs easy. What it boiled down to was that it was still up to the individual Marine to get it done. And until then, just live life because who knew what tomorrow would bring?
He stood there for a moment, looking at the rib in his hand. Tomiko pointed to a trash can at the edge of the tarmac, but he just brushed off a few pieces of grass and bit off another chunk of meat.
Tomiko rolled her eyes.
“What? It’s still good.”
And it was. According to the flyer that came with them, all of the pork was vat-grown from “Blue Belly Argonaut,” an heirloom donor hog from Weller’s World. Rev had never heard of this super hog, but the meat was better than any manufactured pork he’d had back on Swansea. He hadn’t even tried the brisket yet to check out the beef, something he was about to rectify.
He started to walk over to get some when the sergeant major shouted out, “OK, that’s it. Let’s get loaded.”
Rev turned to see the Buzzard crews wiping their hands and getting back on board. He ran to where the BBQ was laid out and grabbed a container that still had a few pieces of brisket left as everyone else cleaned up the trash.
It would have been a shame if he and Tomiko had left before finding out if “Sir Regis Gold Lake” beef matched the quality of Blue Belly Argonaut.