Starfist: Firestorm (18 page)

“Yes, thank you, Corporal.”

“All right, turn your backs and give the lady some privacy,” Doyle said.

“Thank you,” Charlette murmured. A moment later she said, “You can turn around now.”

They did. Doyle thought she looked better dressed than she had naked. Perhaps that was because now she was standing on her own instead of being bound.

“Where are the rest of the Marines?” she asked.

“Oh!” Doyle suddenly realized he hadn’t reported what he’d found in the interrogation building. He knew Sergeant Kerr had given his fire team the assignment because he thought nobody was there. He radioed Kerr, and a moment later the squad leader came in, followed soon after by Ensign Bass.

“Sergeant Charlette Odinloc, Army G2, reporting, sir,” she said when Bass arrived.

“Army G2?” Bass shook his head. “I’ll bet this dummy didn’t know what he had here, did he?” he asked, toeing Keesey in the ankle.

Keesey, conscious again, glared up at him, then at Charlette. If he hadn’t been gagged, he would have said, “I knew there was sumpin’ diff’nt ’bout ya!”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

“They’re coming! They’re
comiiiiiiiiing
!” a female voice screeched in the street outside the headquarters building of the 4th Composite Infantry Division.

“What the hell’s all that racket?” Major General Barksdale Sneed asked, looking up from the
Phelps Independent Courier
, which he read every morning. Because the paper had such a low circulation and Phelps, like most other places on Ravenette, was a somewhat backward place, technologically speaking, it was printed the old-fashioned way, on paper. Usually it was only four or five sheets in length but General Sneed enjoyed putting his feet up, sipping his coffee, and spreading out the sheets to read them. He read everything, even the advertisements. The paper was a morning ritual with him. He especially liked the editorial cartoons which often pilloried Cardoza O’Quinn, the self-important and sticky-fingered mayor of Phelps.

The 4th Composite Infantry Division had been stationed at Phelps for some time by then, and during that time General Sneed had come to despise the mayor who literally slobbered with joy over the presence of the soldiers in his town, who spent their pay in businesses mostly owned by himself and his extended family. But O’Quinn hated General Sneed, who imposed a strict curfew on his men and punished those who broke it or committed any other infraction of good order and discipline.

General Barksdale Sneed was an officer of the Old School, one who believed a soldier’s duty was soldiering, not carousing and staying up late. He also resented being stationed at Phelps, which he saw as a backwater in the war against the Confederation. But no matter where General Davis Lyons sent him, Barksdale Sneed was going to do his duty. He kept his men in tip-top physical condition with road marches and calisthenics; they trained intensively, too, in small-unit tactics and battalion-size maneuvers, and when they weren’t training, he found other work for them to do.

Sneed was the very picture of a professional soldier, tall, spare, closely cropped white hair, and a rocklike jaw that jutted aggressively out from his face. His battle-dress uniform was always spotless. He kept it that way by changing several times a day.

Today’s cartoon showed “Hizzoner” O’Quinn, pockets stuffed with banknotes, being kicked down the street by an enormous boot attached to a skillfully executed caricature of Major General Barksdale Sneed, who was shouting after the departing notable, “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” Little figures clutching overstuffed cashboxes labeled with the names of his associates, mostly relatives, leaped out of the mayor’s way.

“He got me down pretty good,” Barksdale said with a chuckle, slapping the cartoon with one hand. “That artist, Olyphan, he’s a genius! He-he! I bet old O’Quinn is choking on his coffee over this one!” A sudden ruckus outside caught his attention.

“What in the hell
is
all that screaming out there, Captain?” he asked his aide.

“I believe, General, it is, um, one of our soldiers,” Captain Quang Nigh said from the window.

“Go on down there and find out what’s up, will you, Quang? Find out who’s coming and why that damned woman is screaming about it.”

Captain Nigh groaned silently when he got close to the disheveled young woman swaying back and forth in the street. The General would not be pleased, he realized. Her uniform was soiled, her hair was in disarray, and she smelled awful, even from a distance. And her eyes were wildly bloodshot.

“They’re coming!” she shrieked at the officer.

Captain Nigh could see she was a corporal. “What’s your unit, soldier?”

The young woman pulled herself to a loose position of attention and saluted drunkenly, “S-Seventh MPs, shur, sir! Corp’ral Puella Queege, Fourth Comp’ny!”

“Have you been drinking, Corporal?” Then he did a double take and said, “Whaaat? Seventh MPs? What the hell are you doing here, and at this hour, and drunk?” Queege only stared back at him uncomprehendingly. “What in the hell is that
smell?
” He gasped.

“I was eatin’ slimies, sir!”

“What?”

“Bet with my first sergeant, sir! He bet me I couldn’t eat five of ’em.” She burped loudly and gave a lopsided grin.

“Holy…okay, okay.” Captain Nigh tried to get a grip on himself. “Who, precisely, is coming and why are you here, Corporal?”

“Well, I was takin’ a shit down by my first sergeant’s tent—”

“Why are you here?”

“The goddamn Marines landed! Thousands of ’em! So I pulls up my drawers and I hops into the company car ’n’ I drives like hell down here to warn you”—she burped loudly—“but I ran off the road about a klick back ’n’ hadda walk the rest of the way. Shu-Sir.”

Captain Nigh blinked. “Confederation Marines have landed and taken the 7th MPs’ positions on the coast? Is that what you are telling me, Corporal er…”

“Queege, sir, Puella Queege, company clerk, 4th Company, 7th Independent—”

Captain Nigh silenced her with a wave of his hand. By then several soldiers including two military policemen had gathered at the scene. “Take her,” he ordered the MPs, “clean her up, sober her up, and when that’s done, bring her to General Sneed’s office.” He turned on his heel and ran back into the headquarters building.

“I won the bet!” Queege yelled after him. The MPs held their noses as they dragged her down the street.

“Holy shitbirds!” Major General Sneed barked. “How reliable is her story?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Captain Nigh replied, “But, well, she came from there and something’s going on out on the coast this morning. I think we’d better take her seriously.”

Sneed wrenched open the door to his outer office and shouted, “Sergeant Major! Get the staff assembled! Right now! Move!”

In the division briefing room Sneed laid into his staff. “G2, what’s going on out on the coast? What do you know? We had some drunken sot from the 7th MPs shouting in the street that the Marines have landed out there.”

The intelligence chief shrugged. “All quiet on the Ashburtonville front, sir. Both armies still in place. No enemy activity reported in any other sector.”

“Signals?”

The Signal Corps captain in charge of the division’s communication network stood. “Sir, I’ve tried to reach the 7th MPs since last night. They never submitted their daily coast-watch report and they don’t respond to messages. This is not unusual with them, sir, and I didn’t think—”

“Sit down! Christ on crutches! That goddamned Cogswell.” He was referring to Colonel Delbert Cogswell, commander of the 7th Independent Military Police Battalion.

“Sir?” It was the division operations officer. “I heard that Colonel Cogswell had declared, uh, well, a ‘training holiday’ for his battalion. They, uh, sent some men into town yesterday and picked up a lot of booze and some of the, er, ladies of the town. I didn’t see them but someone told me they were over at Mayor O’Quinn’s office and—”

“Oh, God save us all,” General Sneed muttered, running a hand through his hair. “Why the
fuck
didn’t anyone inform me of this mess?” His officers stared silently at the floor. “All right, all right. Plan Red is now in effect.” Plan Red was an emergency defensive plan General Sneed had created just in case his division had to react to an invasion force coming in over the coast. “In case you don’t remember Plan Red, gentlemen, here it is…” He paused in thought, then said to his intelligence officer, “But before anything else, G2, get whatshername, find out everything she knows.”

“Probably won’t know much, sir. She’s drunk as a kwangduk at a sewer party.” Captain Nigh chuckled.

“Try. Get on it. Maps!” He turned to the sergeant in charge of the trid displays, and a huge map of Phelps and the surrounding territory leaped onto the screen. “Aviation! Send hoppers to the coast, have ’em scope out the situation there but tell ’em not to engage! Operations! Send a recon platoon up the coastal road, get them as close to the 7th MP position as they can and report what they see up there. The remainder of the division recon elements, I want them spread out on both flanks along that coastal road, snooping and pooping. We can’t afford to be flanked. 222nd Brigade”—he turned to the colonel commanding the 222nd—“I want you to send one of your battalions, mount ’em up, have ’em run down the coastal road to here”—he identified a spot on the vid display a few kilometers outside the Phelps city limits—“and set up a blocking position. If the enemy comes at them, they are to delay the enemy as long as possible, but no last-stand bullshit; withdraw them when you feel you can’t hold any longer.

“Plan Red calls for a defense in depth. First Brigade will hold the town, armor will support you.” The troop dispositions called for in Plan Red appeared on the screen. “Heavy weapons and aviation, with logistics and medical, will deploy behind the ridge bisected by the Ashburtonville road. The rest of the division will occupy prepared positions straddling the road with the ridge to their rear.

“Signals. Send a Flash message to General Lyons. Tell him we believe the enemy has crossed the coast, strength unknown at this time, and is probably moving inland. Send him updates every fifteen minutes. G2, G3, keep Signals informed as soon as you have more information.

“Civil Affairs. Get O’Quinn up here right now. I told that bastard to get an evacuation plan drawn up and he’d better have it. We can’t have civilians encumbering our forces if this is really an invasion and not another reconnaissance in force like they pulled on Gilbert’s Corners. I think it is a full-scale invasion, but we’ve got to know how big. Get moving, men!”

The briefing room was cleared in thirty seconds. Sneed sat there shaking his head, wearily. “I told General Lyons that the 7th MPs were the chink in his armor—oh, no offense Quang! But that coast is our Achilles’ heel.”

“Sir?” said Major Lucretia Spinoza, the division Civil Affairs officer, “Mayor O’Quinn’s secretary says he is ‘indisposed’ and he will drop by after lunch? I told her of the urgency of the situation but she cut me off.”

“The fat pig is drunk on his ass, Major. Okay. You get a detachment of military police. Go to his mansion—or wherever the useless bastard is—and bring him here. If anyone gives you any trouble, use whatever force you deem necessary to bring him to me. But be prepared to run the evacuation yourself. We have to assume that Hizzoner hasn’t done jack squat about drawing up an evacuation plan. What’s the population today?”

“Four thousand, give or take, sir.”

“Damn. All right, go to Brigadier General Josephus of the 1st Brigade. Tell him I said to give you all the cooperation you need to get these people out of town. He doesn’t need them around if he has to defend this place. I’ll contact him in a minute and give him verbal orders. But do not make a career of moving them, Major. Those that don’t want to move, want to hide in their cellars, let ’em. But warn everybody that once the fighting gets started they’re on their own.”

“Sir, why don’t we just take over the evacuation now? Screw the mayor—excuse my language.”

Sneed grinned. “Good thinking, Major. But protocol requires I advise the civil authority of the military situation and that they handle protecting the noncombatant population. You just get O’Quinn up here ASAP and we’ll see what has to be done.”

“Unhand me, you goons!” Cardoza O’Quinn struggled against the grip the two MPs had on his arms as they dragged him into General Sneed’s office.

Cardoza O’Quinn was ugly even when sober and he was far from sober, still in his nightclothes, disheveled, breath reeking of alcohol. His normally ruddy complexion was inflamed that morning by what he’d consumed the night before and the outrage at being pulled out of his bed so early and so unceremoniously in the morning. The warts that covered his bulbous nose, face, and neck, quivered with anger.

“We pulled him outta bed, sir,” the senior MP, a sergeant, reported. “The uh, lady, he was with never even woke up.” He grinned.

“I apologize to your wife, O’Quinn,” Sneed said.

“She weren’t my wife, Gen’ral, ’n’ don’t think you kin get away with this! President Summers is a personal friend of mine and I knowed Gen’ral Lyons fer years! Yer gonna be in hot water over this!”

“Well, neither of those estimable gentlemen is present now, O’Quinn, so you have to deal with me. We have word the enemy’s landed a force on the coast and it is probably headed this way. I want you to initiate the evacuation plan immediately.”

“What ’vacuation plan?”

General Sneed regarded the mayor silently for a moment. “The plan to evacuate your bowels, O’Quinn, so you won’t be so full of it! The evacuation plan I asked you to draw up in case Phelps ever came under attack! What the hell do you think I meant?”

“You gotta show me more respect, Gen’ral.” O’Quinn drew himself up and tried to look haughty.

“You get what respect you deserve, O’Quinn.”

“I ain’t got no time for any such folderol!”

“You mean there is no evacuation plan, Mr. Mayor?” Sneed asked, his voice deceptively gentle.

“Aw, fuck you, you tin—”

Sneed turned to the MP sergeant. “Take this piece of dreck out of here.”