Major (The United Federation Marine Corps Book 5) (8 page)

NEW MUMBAI

Chapter 10

“Happy birthday, Titus,” Ryck said as the crowd moved to the refreshments line.

“Huh?” Titus asked.  “Oh, you mean the Army.  OK, thanks.”

Ryck had to remember that of all armed forces in the known universe (maybe the trinoculars excluded as no one knew how they thought, much less if they celebrated anything), only the Federation Marines elevated their birthdays to such a high level.  For other militaries, there might or might not be some sort of ceremony, and if there was, it was generally low-key. 

The anniversary of the founding of the Army of the Confederation of Free States was one such example.  Various dignitaries, including the foreign military delegations, had been invited to the Slab where a brief ceremony had taken place in the rotunda.  General of the Army Chaudhry, who had the additional rank of
Imperator
, the only old Roman rank the Confeds conferred, gave a five minute speech listing the historical accomplishments of the Army (which included the Trinocular War but made no mention of the Cyngi B incident) before giving over to the Second Secretary of the Confederation of Free States, who stressed the importance of a strong Army to protect the very existence of the state.  Compared to even a Marine battalion’s celebration of its patron’s old birthday, it was pretty lame, Ryck thought. 

Still, he felt he should make some sort of effort by congratulating Titus, who seemed more interested in the snacks and drinks laid out on tables in the back of the rotunda.  He shrugged and followed the Confed major to where a sorry selection of finger foods and a red punch were waiting for them. 

It’s just as well
, Ryck thought as he ran a finger under the edge of his dress blues collar. 

There was no getting around it.  Ryck was gaining weight.  He promised himself that he’d make an early exit and get to the gym.  Dinner would be the papaya and strawberry salad that he’d discovered in his room fabricator’s recipe bank:  450 calories and chock full of added nutrients.

He took a quick glance at his trouser pocket, but he couldn’t make much out of the small bulge that his Bianchi made.  There’d been no further intel that anyone was still gunning for him, and Ryck hoped that if anything, the very public and well-covered ceremony two months ago where he was awarded the
Corona Navalis
had taken some of the heat off of him.  Still, he never went anywhere without the comforting presence of the small handgun if he could help it, and his trou were still not tight enough to show that he was carrying.

“You’d think they could give us some decent food,” Titus grumbled in line in front of Ryck. 

Titus’ trou were beginning to show some strain across the butt as well, Ryck noticed.  Major Titus Pohlmeyer had originally been a combat engineer, but as he switched to whatever Intel branch he was really in, the lifestyle was getting to him, too.  It shouldn’t matter to him, but Ryck felt slightly better, almost as a sense of
schadenfreude
that he wasn’t the only one battling the bulge.  It wasn’t professional, and it wasn’t compassionate, but there it was.

Ryck decided to forego the refreshments completely and get out of there when Captain Franks called his name.  Ryck dutifully went forward to be introduced to the new Federation Chief Security Assistance Officer at the consulate on Godavari.  Commander Nurislam was undergoing his in-brief at the embassy before heading out to his posting, and Captain Franks had dragged him to the ceremony.

Before Ryck could get away, Rainer Kopf grabbed him to make sure he was going to his farewell party that Friday evening.  Ryck promised he would, and then some Confed one-star who Ryck didn’t know came up and congratulated him on his
Corona Navali
.  Ryck wondered how he’d thought he could pull chocks early as the regular political dance was in full swing.  It was more than an hour before he was able to break away and leave the Slab.

Ryck was not senior enough to rate a vehicle to take him back, and autocabs were not allowed to approach the Slab, so Ryck walked the 300 meters to the front security gate.  Several cabs were lined up, but Ryck decided to skip them.  The temperature had cooled down nicely, and it was only another 600 meters or so to his condo.  Even in his dress blues, it should be a nice walk through the restaurant district.

A kabob café was doing a brisk business, the smell of grilled lamb and other delectables wafted across the street as Ryck began to walk.  It took a concerted effort to steel himself and ignore the place.  He’d eaten there several times before, and the food was top-shelf.

The street was not very crowded, even for a Tuesday evening.  He quickly covered the 200 meters to Robinson and turned right.  As he passed his gym, he looked in, trying to gauge how busy it was.  There were only half-a-dozen or so people working out in the first floor where the cardio and simulators were, so Ryck figured there were probably fewer than that upstairs in the weight room.  There would probably be fewer still when he returned in about 15 or 20 minutes.

Despite the lack of anything concrete in as far as a threat against him, Ryck still kept his senses alert wherever he went.  When his condo came into sight a few blocks ahead of him, he started to relax. 

He looked back to check the traffic to cross the street when his nerves went on high alert, snapping him back to warrior mode.  He almost stopped dead, but the training he’d received had sunk in enough that he kept walking, scanning the area to see what had caused his reaction.  A woman was across the street, looking in a shop window.  A man was striding along near her, his head down in the manner of someone who had someplace to be.  Above, several of the ubiquitous drones made their rounds up and down the street.

He’d begun to think his instincts had false-reacted when two men in standard workman overalls came out of the small recessed area across the street from him.  They looked like any other workmen, but Ryck instantly alerted on them like a police dog on drugs.  It took him a moment to figure out why:  they were moving just too purposefully.

Ryck slid his hand into his pocket, wrapping it around his Bianchi as he stopped attempting to cross the street and continued along on the near side.  The Bianchi was small and powerful for its size, but it was designed for close-in self-defense.  Even at 20 meters across the street, it was not that accurate.

Ryck decided that as he reached the open door of a music store a few meters ahead, he was going to enter it and rush to a back entrance, but the men never gave him a chance.  One of them raised his handgun and fired while his companion started to pull a rifle up from behind him.

Ryck was moving before most of this could register.  He lunged forward as he pulled out his Bianchi and fired at the man with the handgun.  His opponent missed Ryck—Ryck did not miss him, his relatively slow, but powerful boost-assist round smashing through the man’s chest.

Ryck didn’t give him another thought as the second man, the one with the rifle leveled his weapon at him and began to fire, undoubtedly intending to swing a line of hypervelocity darts from above and through Ryck.  As a Marine, Ryck had been taught to target each round, but other services taught gunners use their automatic weapons to sweep lines of rounds across a target.

The rifleman opened up, his initial rounds impacting above Ryck and to his right as Ryck swung his Bianchi to aim at him and broke into a run, yelling at the top of his voice.  He fired once and missed, but with the round impacting on the wall beside of rifleman, coupled with Ryck’s madman rush, the man flinched, sending his line of darts into the ground, missing Ryck by centimeters.  Panic took over his face as he tried to bring his rifle back up for another swipe, but it was too late.  Ryck was already halfway across the road, and his next measured shot took the man high in the chest, almost severing his neck from his torso. 

Ryck ran the last few steps to the two men, his eyes scanning for any more attackers.  He heard a scream from the woman who had been window-shopping and the general rumble as people came out of shops and restaurants to see what had happened.

Above him, a holo drone hovered over the street, its recording light steadily flashing.  From start to finish, less than ten seconds had elapsed, and all of it had been recorded.

With his heart pounding, he stepped over the dead rifleman, trying unsuccessfully to keep his shoes out of the pooling blood.  He backed up against the wall there where he was protected from at least that one direction.

He didn’t bother to put the Bianchi in his pocket as the sirens of a police sled sounded from down the street. 

The woman who had screamed had stopped, but she was obviously in shock at what she had witnessed.  Ryck reached up to the brim of his cover and tipped it to the woman and then gave her a nod as if nothing had happened. 

Then he simply waited for the police to arrive. 

Chapter 11

Ryck watched the recording one more time.  He was surprisingly detached as he watched with a critical eye both his and his assailants’ actions.  The News 5 drone provided a good vantage and a pretty clear view of what had happened, better than the security drones or building-mounted cams.  A tiny tickle in the recesses of his mind wondered if the News 5 drone had just happened to be in the right spot at the right time, or if the station had some prior knowledge of what was going to happen.

The two would-be assassins had messed up pretty badly.  They’d had Ryck in their sights for a good twenty seconds before Ryck got close enough to realize something was wrong.  The rifleman should have engaged Ryck then instead of waiting.  The two men compounded the situation by moving forward to get a closer shot.

The choice of weapons was wrong, too.  Why send a man with a handgun at all?  And why a hypervelocity rifle?  A simple chemical sniper rifle would have been a better choice, maybe with the hypervelocity rifle as a backup.  One shot, one kill, and Ryck would probably be in a body bag awaiting transport back to Tarawa.

Ryck’s actions were far more laudable.  By slowing down the playback, he was surprised to see that he’d reacted to the attack before the first man had actually fired his handgun.  Ryck had thought he’d merely reacted, but it was clear that he started his lunge a split second before the man fired.  The news drone used two recording units, giving a degree of three dimensions to the playback, and from the impact of his assailant’s round on the building behind him, Ryck knew it had missed him by less than a few centimeters.  If Ryck hadn’t already been reacting, he’d probably have been hit.

Ryck pulled his first shot at the rifleman, jerking the small Bianchi pretty far off target.  If the rifleman hadn’t been using the sweep method or hadn’t flinched at Ryck’s charge, Ryck would not have had the chance to fire a second round.  Still, that second shot was a thing of beauty.  While running, with a snub-nosed self-defense weapon, he had nailed the man in the chest just below the base of his throat.  

He stopped the recording just as his image tipped his cover to the woman—something that had been getting good press and was going viral in the undernet,  from what Ryck had been told.

He sighed and looked at the clock.  He was in the vault, tired of waiting for the senior embassy staff to decide what to do with him.  The Vishnu police had released Ryck to the custody of the embassy.  Ryck had been told that there were no charges pending yet, but he was to remain in the city pending a complete investigation.

Ryck didn’t expect anything to come up with the killing.  The various recordings showed that he was simply defending himself.  There still was the issue of the Bianchi, however.  Carrying it was strictly verboten, and there could be pretty drastic consequences because of that.  It all depended on how Vishnu city police wanted to proceed with it, and that had to be more of a Confed government call in the long run.  Ryck wouldn’t face jail time, given his diplomatic immunity, but he could get his credentials pulled and be asked to leave New Mumbai.

Ryck had been asked by the police detectives where he’d acquired the Bianchi, but Ryck clammed up, citing his still-current immunity.  There was no use getting anyone else in trouble.

Finally, Captain Franks, Mr. Torrington, the RSO
[5]
, and Mr. Pinyin, the First Secretary, came into the vault.  Ryck had expected Mr. Lamonica as well, or even the ambassador himself, but evidently, neither of those two notables wanted to get that directly involved, even if they’d both been in the meeting to decide just how to handle the situation.

“Well, Ryck, shit just seems to follow you around,” Captain Franks said as the others took seats.

Ryck shrugged and said, “Not really my fault, sir.”

“No one is saying it’s your fault, but wherever you go, things happen.  And now we have to deal with this.  The ambassador was in conference with the Third Minister
[6]
himself on this before he joined us.”

The Third Minister?  The fifth highest official in the entire Federation? 

Despite himself, that impressed Ryck.

“We’ve also received word from the Foreign Office that they will not be taking any action against you.  This is unofficial at the moment.  They still have to go through the motions of an investigation.”

“Not like they want to,” Torrington said in a tone of disgust.  “It was their people, the Liberty Party, at least, that orchestrated the attempt.”

“We don’t know that, Greg,” Mr. Pinyin said.  “It may be, but as Party Secretary Ingles said to me and pointed out, the, shall we say, less-than-professional assailants sent, the incident might have been an attempt to frame the Liberty Party.”

“Bullshit.  I mean with all due respect, sir, they sent these clowns because they are clowns themselves, but their target was a Federation Marine, not some political dabbler.  You fuck with a Marine, and this is what happens!”

The men were ignoring Ryck for the moment, and he tried to digest what he’d heard.  Most of this was new to him. 

The Liberty Party was a far-right, ultra-nationalistic group which was making inroads into public support.  They had vocally come out against Ryck being awarded the
Corona Navali,
arguing that they could not honor a man who had once led an attack against their Army which was only rightfully asserting Free State sovereignty at the time. 

What Mr. Pinyin said, though, about the Liberty Party secretary’s assertion that his party was being framed was an interesting twist.  Torrington was not buying it, but then Torrington had been a sergeant in the Marines before moving into security and working his way up the ladder until he was the RSO for all of the Confederation planets.  He tended to be more direct, and he seemed to be taking the assault on Ryck, a Marine, personally.

Mr. Pinyin held up his hand, stopping Torrington, and said, “We just don’t know, Greg.  Not yet, at least.  But now we have to deal with the major, here.”

They turned back to Ryck, and Mr. Pinyin nodded to Captain Franks to continue.

“After intense discussions, the decision has been made to terminate your assignment here.”

That hit Ryck in the gut.  This had been his least favorite billet since he’d joined the Corps, but he was not a man to accept failure.

As if he could read Ryck’s mind, the captain added, “This is not a reflection on you, Ryck.  Quite the contrary.  You’re going to get a star for your BC3.  You’ve done the Federation proud, and this incident, believe it or not, is a good thing for us.”

Another Battle Commendation?  Why do half of my awards seem to be politically motivated.  I should be used to it by now,
Ryck thought sourly.

“We are lodging a formal protest with the Confederation,” Mr. Pinyin said.  “This looks very bad on them, and your amazing reaction is trending well on the undernet.  We calculate a positive jump of 18.3% on universal opinion as to the effectiveness of Federation military strength, and an 8.5% rise on the overall Federation PubStat.”

The first secretary’s face took on an almost giddy look as he gave Ryck the figures.  That was not surprising.  A large part of his job was to improve the reputation and public acceptance of the Federation, and his performance evals relied heavily on the gathered data and analysis, so those figures could be just what he needed to get his next promotion.

A very dark and nasty thought nibbled at the back of his mind as he listed to the first secretary bring up more numbers.  If this was working out for the Federation, could the attack have been orchestrated by his own government and not the Liberty Party or anyone else?  The two assailants had not been very skilled, after all, and it could have been ordered knowing Ryck, a skilled combat Marine, would prevail.

Shit, I’m getting paranoid!
he told himself. 
They wouldn’t risk my Nova like that.

Ryck knew the government would not be above sacrificing any individual for the good of the Federation, but as one of two living Marine Nova holders, he was worth more to them as a living symbol of Federation superiority. 

He thought.

He pushed that suspicion down and focused back on Captain Franks, who was telling him something.

“. . . back on the sixth floor here at the embassy.  We’ve already got a team picking up your personal effects now.  You’ll stay here until the Confederation finishes its investigation.  You will not leave the embassy grounds again except under heavy guard for anything pertaining to that investigation, but as of now, your duties are suspended.  Once the investigation is complete, you are going back to Earth for some appearances, then to Tarawa for your next assignment.”

“Heavy guard, sir?  Is that really going to be necessary?”

“Appearances, Ryck, appearances.”

“Roger that, sir.  I understand,” Ryck said as the meeting came to a close. 

He shook the hands of the other three men.  Greg Torrington motioned for a young man who’d been standing outside the vault to enter the door after the first secretary left.

“I don’t know if you’ve been in the apartments, but I think you’ll find them quite comfortable,” he told Ryck.  “This is Ed, and he’ll be showing you the way.  He’ll be giving you a list of contacts, so if you need anything you can’t get at the commissary, give any of them a call.  And I don’t want to belabor the point, but please don’t try to leave the compound on your own.”

Ryck grimaced at that.  “Comfortable” apartments or not, he was a prisoner for all intents and purposes.

Torrington must have seen the expression, because he said, “Yeah, I know.  And it sucks.  You pulled two righteous kills, and most of us are damned proud of you, but as a reward, you’re grounded.  It ain’t fair, I know, but it is what it is.”

He held out his hand, and Ryck shook it.  He didn’t really know Torrington that well, but he appreciated the moral support.

“Tell you what.  Why don’t I stop by tonight, say around 2000?  I can bring a six-pack and a bag of kabobs,” the RSO asked Ryck.

“Sure, sounds copacetic,” Ryck answered.

If he was going to be stuck in one of the embassy apartments for the next month or two, some beer and kabobs seemed like a pretty good way to get his ordeal started.