18
The PUNS LaSalle was an N-Destroyer Escort, an unassuming, small cylinder that packed a serious punch—the “N” designation for null space. Its mission was to protect larger vessels, and most of the interior space was made up of weapons and its powerful Kaijung reactor. What it wasn’t designed for was to carry Marines. Between the LaSalle and the Alacrity, Rev missed the troop compartments of the Hobart Bay. But with the scope of the Centaur push, there simply weren’t the platforms needed to move Marines around, and if it was space-worthy and had a few cubby holes, the Navy was going to dual-use it to fight naval battles and transport Marines.
With the Raider and Recon platoons and Alpha Company, that was close to 270 Marines and corpsmen, so they needed more than a few cubbyholes. Any deck space became a place to lay down and sleep. The Raiders claimed the access grates running alongside the tube that made up the ship’s main weapon, an algorithmic twenty-giga-joule discontinuity cannon capable of firing in null space.
“Nice to know I don’t want kids with this thing radiating my cajones,” Hussein said, patting the tube.
“You’d have to find a willing partner to get that done, so no harm, no foul,” Tomiko said.
“You wound me, Miko. And here I was about to ask you to tie the knot with me.”
“In your dreams, in your dreams.”
“How about you, Carp?” he asked Lance Corporal Porter.
“I don’t swing that way, and even if I did, you’re hardly marriage material.”
Tomiko laughed and high-fived the other Marine. “You tell him, girl.”
Rev leaned back on his assault pack, crunched under the curve of the cannon tube, as he listened to the give-and-take. The trash-talk tended to increase as they were going into battle, and it always marveled him how the human brain reacted in this kind of situation. They may be heading to their death, but there was still the humor of military life.
Even if they might not have long in this plane of existence, nature still had to be answered, though. A harried-looking sailor entered the space, spotted them, and dropped off a case of D-rats.
Sergeant Nix shook his head and opened the case. “I kinda expected this. Not like they’ve got the facilities to feed us. Radić, Badem, pick your chow.
The Corps always fed the junior Marines first, and Rev perked up. All D-rats sucked, but some sucked more than others. And now, as a corporal, he’d just jumped in line.
“You better not leave me Rotted Dicks,” Tomiko told him.
“Would I do that, Sergeant?” he asked with mocked sincerity. The Trieste Sausage—Rotted Dick—was considered the worst D-rat of them all.
“You know you would, asshole.”
Rev still had to wait until the two PFCs, Strap, and Porter selected, and while the two D-rat creams of the crop, spaghetti and sloppy joes, were immediately taken, there were still some passable choices.
Rev made a show of hemming and hawing over his choice until Tomiko yelled,
“Just fucking choose already!”
He’d already known he was going to take the Fornician Stew, but it felt good to finally get over on her.
Call me an android, why don’t you?
She gave him a dirty look as he sat back down on the grating, and he said, “You know you love me, Miko.”
“Not when you’re screwing with my chow, big boy. All other times, sure.”
Rev wasn’t hungry yet, so he stowed his stew in his pack and stretched out his legs. He thought about trying to catch a few winks, but the master guns said he’d be back with their plan of the day, so he decided to wait.
“What do you think’s going to happen,” Badem asked, scooting over closer to Rev.
“What do I think? I think we’re going to kill some Centaurs,” Rev said with a snort. “What do you think’s going to happen.”
But then he saw the hurt look on the PFC’s face, and he changed his tone. “What I mean is that the tin-asses have invaded Beacon, and from the looks of it, they’re in control. That’s something like how many people? That’s—”
<Over nineteen billion. I can give you the exact number if you want.>
“That’s over nineteen billion people. Union citizens. We can’t let them down. So, we’re going to counterattack, all of us. Not just the regiment. Not just the New Hope Marines. But maybe half of the entire Corps.”
“I get that,” Strap said. “But how are we going to get down to the planet? They’re no pissers here, and I don’t think the tin-asses are going to just let us land in a shuttle. I thought Raiders, us and Recon, we’re supposed to be the first in?”
Which was a good question, and one for which Rev had an answer.
“The pissers can be launched from any Navy combatant. Once we get out of null space, they can cross-deck some to us. Don’t worry about that.”
“You think our mission will be like on Mistake?’ Nix asked.
Rev started to answer when it struck him. With Pashu, he’d become the center of gravity for the team from a tactical standpoint. But somewhere along the line, even demoted to corporal, he’d become the center of gravity from a relationship standpoint. He was no better informed, no smarter, no more qualified than Nix, Strap, or Tomiko, but they were looking to him for answers.
It was a humbling realization and one that suddenly became something of a burden. If the others were putting more weight upon his words, as it seemed to him, then he’d better make sure he was right.
And in this case, he didn’t know the answer. That was up to the planners at the regiment of division level, not to him.
He chose to dodge. “Whatever our orders are, we’ve been trained to succeed at them.
Surprisingly to him, there were a few nods, but no one pointed out that he hadn’t answered the question. The conversation continued, and while Rev might have been the focus, he tried to spread it out, letting others voice their opinions. It wasn’t until the master guns returned that the talk ceased.
The master gunnery sergeant spotted the box of chow and rummaged through it, pulling out a Rotted Dick, of all things, and sticking it in his cargo pocket before addressing the team.
“I just got through with the ship’s XO. We’re waiting for the rest of the fleet’s loadout before we move. We’ll be underway in about three hours, and in four, we’re going to conduct our jump into null space with every other ship in this fleet. And not just us. Sixteen fleets are scheduled for a simultaneous exit into the Beacon star system. We’re going to overwhelm the tin-asses with sheer numbers and force.”
Which meant that the Union knew it was going to suffer heavy losses. But that had been the course of the war so far. No major battle had been won without huge human losses. Rev’s first battle, the one on Preacher Rolls, had been barely a blip on the list of engagements since the Centaurs invaded, yet the Marine losses had been huge and the battle lost.
“The latest consensus is that the tin-asses are trying to win this war once and for all with a crushing defeat. Our job is to keep them from doing that. If we can hold them back, then we can worry about taking the fight to them.”
“Do we have a mission yet?” Rev asked.
“The regiment does. We don’t, yet. But the Three is working on that. We’ll have it as soon as the plan is refined.”
“Master Guns, that white case in the shuttle. Are those the grenades we tested? Are we finally getting the weapons they promised us at that brief in Kamachi?” Tomiko asked.
“We have some new weapons, like Corporal Pelletier, there.”
The regiment had four IBHU Marines. That was nothing, and they certainly weren’t the array of promised weapons.
“But this battle is going to be won by air, armor, mech, and naval gunfire. That’s the way it’s been since the beginning of the war. Infantry, recon, Raiders . . . we’re in support, doing what we can to help the heavy hitters. As far as that case we saw, well, you know as much as I do. More so. I wasn’t at the brief with you guys.
“I’ll keep trying to get more info, and I’ll pass that as soon as I get it. We don’t have any Marine-capable sims and no real space to train, so for the moment, stay here and out of the way. Get some rest, because, from the look of things, we may not get much once we get there.”
He grabbed his assault pack from where he’d stashed it, dragged it to the side, and sat on it as he pulled out his meal and popped the heat. He looked tired, and Rev wondered how much sleep the man had gotten over the last forty-eight hours. Probably not much.
“This looks like a tough one,” Tomiko said. “This is where the last five years boil down to.”
“Until the next fight,” Rev told her.
“You think we’ll be around for the next fight?”
“Hell, Miko. You’re too tough for the tin-asses to get.”
She snorted in half a laugh but didn’t say anything.
Rev looked in his meal and pulled out the blackberry cobbler, popped the tab that would reconstitute it. The stew itself wasn’t bad, but the cobbler was what made that particular meal.
“Hey,” he told Miko, and when she looked up, he tossed it to her.
“My favorite,” she said, as a smile spread across her face.
“I know.”
“I guess you do love me, Big Boy,” she said as she opened the packet and sniffed, her eyes closed in joy.
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
* * *
Rev didn’t like null space.
It wasn’t as if he felt different. His eyes saw the same way. His ears heard as they always did. His brain seemed to function normally. But he knew none of that was true, and that grated on him.
Rev didn’t totally grasp the science, but the very cells that built his body, the molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, quarks, were both scattered across space yet held together through a branch of quantum entanglement at the same time. It didn’t make sense, but the mathematicians swore it was true. Have faith, they said which made it sound like religion. Rev had nothing against religion, but when he went to church and sat in a pew, he didn’t have to pray that his body wouldn’t suddenly come apart.
It had been centuries since ships had accidents where the formulas that kept them and the passengers inside intact—virtually, that is—were corrupted, and Rev knew the chances he’d come out of null space as Reverent Pelletier, Corporal of Marines, were pretty high. But the thought of what was being done to his body was unsettling. So, on each of his trips into null space, he liked to either sleep or keep occupied with books or holos. The less he thought of his body stretching across real space—although the physicists said there was no corporeal intersection of null space and real space—the better he felt.
The idea that he was now in a ship designed to fight in null space added fuel to his discomfort. The discontinuity cannon was not the typical meson cannon other Navy ships carried. The cannon fired what were, in essence, formulas that sought to disrupt and cancel the enemy’s own formulas, ejecting the ship from null space. It was math attacking math. All taking place in an instant, it was a fight of calculations until either the attacking formula was expelled or the target ship’s formula collapsed, and with it, the ship and passengers emerged in real space, their molecules spread out over light-years. And being in null space, the weapons were not as constrained by the distances as real space energy weapons and torpedoes, so battle in null space took place almost instantaneously.
The LaSalle was vulnerable in real space with only self-defense torpedoes. But particularly in solar systems, the human navies had an advantage over the Centaur ships, so it didn’t matter much. In deep and null space, however, the Centaur ships had the advantage, and it was up to the LaSalle and ships like her to protect the other ships in the fleet. And that meant that if the Centaurs did attack, the ship, and the Marines inside her, would be rushing to the fight, not trying to get away.
There may not have been an accidental collapse of a ship in null space for centuries, but thousands of them had been lost in wars. And if the LaSalle entered battle during the transit, Rev and the rest would be helpless in determining their fate. Rev didn’t consider himself as a control freak, but it was always when he wasn’t in control that he was nervous, whether that was in a shuttle, in a ship, or descending in a pisser. Once he was on the ground where he could make a difference in deciding his fate, he was fine.
And right now, his life depended on a supersized, supercooled version of Punch, both for transit and to defeat the Centaurs if a battle broke out in null space.
“What are you reading?” Tomiko asked, coming over to sit by him.
“Uh . . .” he wasn’t really deep into the writing, and couldn’t remember the title, so he flipped to the front matter. “Centurion’s Burden. Roman historical fiction.”
“You know, just because we’re in the Marines doesn’t mean you have to read only military stuff. How about a romance or an interactive synch mystery?”
“I know. It was just the next one up in my queue. Got to keep my brain busy.”
“It’ll be fine. We know what we’re doing, Rev. We know how to kill Centaurs.”
Rev just grunted. He’d never told Tomiko that it was the null space that gave him the willies. If she wanted to think he was concerned about the fight on the other end, then he was good with that.
Tomiko reached up to pat the outer tube of the discontinuity cannon looming over them. It had to be nine meters in diameter, even if the actual projector was supposedly much, much smaller.
“You think we’ll see this baby light up?” Tomiko asked.
“Don’t tempt the gods of war, Miko.”
“I don’t know. Just curious. I still don’t know how the damned thing works.”
“You don’t have to understand it. The engineers who designed it do. But with the military using the lowest bidder, well, you do the math.”
“You can be such a cynic sometimes, Rev.”
“A realist.”
“Now I know why you’re reading about Romans. You’d love to be in a time where all you had to do was bash your enemies with a big-ass sword.”
Rev chuckled, tapped a finger against his temple, and said, “Yeah, maybe that’s why. Simpler times for simpler minds.”
“Not me. As small as I am, I’d be cut down in the first charge. No, give me technology to even the playing field.”
“Roman times or now, no one’s cutting you down, Miko. You’re the hardest ass I know.”
“Oh, you say the sweetest things.”
Before Rev could respond, the lights in the space flashed red, and a voice came over the 1MC. “General quarters, general quarters, all hands general quarters. All embarked Marines, get to your berthing and stay out of the way.”
The cannon seemed to come to life with a slight vibration as it powered up, and Rev instinctively scooted away from it.
“Make a hole, make a hole,” a sailor shouted as he ran along the walkway. The Raiders got out of the way so he could get through them.
“What’s going on?” Badem asked.
“The Navy’s gonna fight,” Radić told him.
Various stations reported in over the 1MC. For a ship with fewer than forty sailors in her crew, there seemed to be a lot of stations.