The Infinity Brigade #1 Stone Cold (8 page)

The next three weeks were rough. The Drills needed everybody to know that my actions, specifically the disobeying orders part, was not to be tolerated. The fact that there had been a positive outcome was really beside the point. I understood and accepted the reasoning… that didn’t make my life any easier. A provisional reprimand had been entered into my record along with a provisional commendation.  Which one remained on my record would depend on me and my actions during the rest of my training… no pressure.

The bottom line was simple. If there was a crap detail or duty to be performed… it was mine by default. JJ was promoted to Ensign. That lasted about a week. JJ’s sense of humor is an acquired taste and apparently it was not one the senior Drill had obtained. Personally I think hacking the Mess Hall’s scheduling computer to make every night ‘prime rib night’ was an inspired bit of leadership. Neither the chief cook nor the Drills agreed with that assessment.

What none of us had realized was tampering with the programming of a computer system was a violation of JJ’s terms of parole. It turns out my friend Hammond was an accomplished pusher of bits and bytes. Sadly, he was just a little less skillful at covering his tracks.

Ramirez was our next ensign. He lasted a bit longer but making a pass, polite though it was, at the Commandant’s eldest daughter wasn’t the wisest career move. It was nice to have company on all of my crap details. It was also nice to see the people I had promoted first had been given a chance at further leadership. I suspected their misadventures might have been an attempt on their part to stand in solidarity with me.

Needless to say, I was surprised when Senior Drill Sergeant Harris called me to his office one evening after our final 10K run. The man had not spoken to me in the entire three weeks since the incident with Sam McDullis.

The Senior Drill’s office was located on the upper floor of the main training building. This same building housed four training platoons and therefore had office space for four Senior Drill Sergeants. Sergeant Harris’s office had a wide, expansive reinforced window that afforded an excellent view of the training yard. Beyond the yard I could just make out the edge of the dome that protected New Parris Island from the hard vacuum of space. When I arrived his administrative assistant ushered me into his office.

“Recruit Stone reporting as ordered Senior Drill Sergeant,” I said as I came to attention in front of his desk. The sergeant was reading something on a tablet.

“At ease recruit,” Harris said. “I have a number of items to discuss with you.”

I separated my feet by about a foot and a half and grasped by wrist behind my back.

Senior Drill Sergeant Harris finished reading the tablet he was holding. Nodding to himself he picked up a stylus off his desk and signed whatever it was he was reading. He put the tablet down and looked at me.

“I seem to be having a problem keeping your platoon’s ensign slot filled. Any ideas as to why that might be recruit?”

“Senior Drill, this recruit has no idea why this might be so.”

“Go ahead and guess. I’d be curious as to your thoughts on the issue.”

“Senior Drill, the failure of your recruits to fulfill the role of ensign is undoubtedly due to the poor quality of the recruits in question… to include myself Drill Sergeant.”

Harris laughed. “That is most assuredly true Recruit Stone. That said, I think there is more to it than that. I suspect there is some type of misguided loyalty at work here.”

I sighed. “I suspect the Senior Drill is correct… but I assure the Drill Sergeant it is nothing I have asked for,” I added.

“Son, you are a born leader. You go out of your way to take care of your people. They see that in you. Don’t ever apologize for your God-given gifts. That still presents me with a problem. I’m promoting you to the platoon Acting Sergeant. Who would you suggest I promote to Ensign?”

Without hesitation I responded, “Gretchen Highmark would be an excellent candidate Senior Drill Sergeant!”

“An interesting choice Acting Sergeant Stone. May I ask why she has your recommendation?”

“Several reasons Senior Drill. First, although she is small, she does not know the meaning of the word ‘quit.’ Second, when we were on our first lunar bivouac she is the one who suggested our ultimate solution. She thinks well on her feet.”

“Very well Acting Sergeant. I accept your recommendation.” He opened up a drawer in his desk and pulled out two armbands with the ranks of sergeant and ensign on them. He tossed them both to me.

“Thank you Drill Sergeant.”

“Don’t thank me yet. Serving as second in command under an officer who may very well be inferior in every way that matters will be a real test of character for you. It’s also a skill you will need to perfect.”

He paused to look at me. It was an uncomfortable stare but I endured it.

“Sure as shooting son, whether you go Commission or non-commissioned… Officer or Enlisted… you will, upon occasion, find yourself under the command of people less capable than yourself. You will need to learn the fine art of guiding while not being in control. Learn it well and you will do well. Fail to learn it and I don’t care how gifted you are… you will be crucified as sure as our Lord and Savior was. Am I clear?”

“Yes Senior Drill Sergeant!”

Drill Sergeant Harris sighed and walked over to a briefing board. “I told you there were several things we needed to discuss. This next bit will be unpleasant. We are going to Mars.”

***

When I got back to the billets I discovered there was a betting pool going. It seemed there was three to one odds that I would walk back in with my Ensign butter-bar rank restored. When they saw the three chevrons of my sergeant’s armband there was some groaning. I imagined some bank accounts had just been depleted.

I walked up to Gretchen, came to attention and saluted her. She looked properly confused and then her eyes lit up as she realized what was happening. She didn’t seem to know what to do and did not return my salute. Somewhat awkwardly I smiled.

“Permission to hug the Ensign,” I requested.

“Permission granted,” she answered breathlessly.

Gretchen was the type of Gal I might have gone after back in the days when I had time to do such mundane things as date. In point of fact, I was hoping at some later point in time she and I might find the time to explore options. The bottom line was I was very happy that she was getting a chance to try on the Officer bar. She deserved the chance. Marines where unique in this day and age in that all officers had to have spent some time in the enlisted ranks. This had not always been true and it still wasn’t true for most of the armed services.

I handed Ensign Highmark her Acting Rank armband and called the platoon to order. Once again I saluted. This time, I was joined by twenty eight additional salutes. This time she returned the salute.

“Ensign, if I could have a moment of your time. I have some additional orders that I received from the Senior Drill.”

She nodded and motioned for Corporal Johnston to join us. We moved our conversation into the break room. When we were all seated on the metal benches that surrounded the weight training machines that were the only amenities in our break room, I began to share what the Senior Drill had shared with me.

“Tomorrow a Bowman-class starship will be entering lunar orbit. It has its own Marine contingent which according to the Senior Drill we will not be interacting with. We will board the ship and remain confined to the shuttle bay for the duration. Our destination is Mars where we will begin a two week training exercise.”

“Any discussion as to what the training exercise will entail?” Ensign Highmark asked.

“Negative Ma’am. The Senior Drill did indicate that he will hold a pre-boarding briefing at 0400. He expects our entire platoon to be at the briefing room on time.”

Gretchen tapped her wrist. A subdermal display lit up showing the current time as 20:35. She tapped her wrist a few more times and set a wakeup alarm for 0330 hours. I had already set mine for 0325.

“I guess we should let the troops know we are heading out in the morning,” Gretchen said. “I want everybody to have their gear stowed and ready to go before lights out tonight.”

***

The Bowman-class ship we boarded was the
GCP Puller
, a fitting name for a ship intending to carry Marines. Lieutenant General Lewis Burwell Puller was the most decorated United States Marine ever to live. To my way of thinking he personified what it meant to be a Marine. I must admit to having a man-crush on him ever since I read a quote attributed to him while I was in the second grade. It’s a quote that I feared would set the tone for my military career. I had shared it once with JJ and it took him the better part of an hour to stop laughing. It was something he said while still only a Major General… “Take me to the Brig. I want to see the real Marines!”

We shared the massive shuttle bay with three other platoons. According to the briefing that we received, the two weeks we were to spend on Mars was to simulate a ground combat mission where two roughly even factions were squaring off against one another. Since the Galactic Coalition was composed of numerous member races it was essential that Marines learn to fight not just as a unit within themselves but also with our allies. We would take turns as the aggressor and as the defender. Sometimes our platoons would operate as homogeneous Marines… sometimes we would operate as a heterogeneous force composed of Marines and something else. In those instances our Stark suits would be tweaked to simulate the differences in mobility and strength that we could expect to encounter in a real engagement.

The
Puller
was proceeding towards a rendezvous with Mars using her massive VASMR thrusters.   VASMR thrusters were a relatively old technology that used radio waves to ionize hydrogen gas. The resulting charged plasma was expelled via magnetic linear accelerators from the business end of the engine.  From lunar orbit the trip to Mars would take about four days. As fast as this might have seemed at the start of the space age, it was painfully slow by modern standards.

Hyperfield emitters could essentially change the effective mass of the ship and fold space-time in such a way that the same trip could be accomplished in seconds but safety concerns meant that hyperfield dampeners were always in operation in the vicinity of all GCP population centers. Exceptions would be made for emergencies but ‘recruit training’ did not fit under that category. These dampeners meant that an enemy couldn’t drop a massive kinetic weapon on an unsuspecting planet. The Sol system had learned a hard lesson eight years ago with the destruction of Mars.

That lesson had cost me my family. One of the reasons Senior Drill Sergeant Harris had wanted to brief me personally on our upcoming mission to Mars was to ensure I would be able to emotionally cope with the situation. I had buried those demons when I enlisted in the Marines… or at least I thought I had.

Watching the red planet grow larger on the monitors that had been setup in the shuttle bay brought a mixed bag of feelings to the forefront of my mind. Mars had been my home… and yet the D’lralu weapons that had slammed into the planet had sent hypersonic shock waves around the planet that effectively removed any trace of humanities presence.

Oddly, the devastated planet was marginally more habitable as a result of the attack.  The heat from the blast had vaporized several million tons of surface material. This included frozen water reserves buried under a thousand feet of bedrock. As a result of the particulate matter in the atmosphere, and well as the addition of a sizable amount of water vapor, the density of the Martian atmosphere now approached 2.8 psi in some locations. This was one to two orders of magnitude greater than when I had been living there. In addition, the thicker atmosphere captured and retained more heat. Near the equator the planet’s temperature had stabilized around a mean value of twenty degrees C.

This had very odd ramifications for us as soldiers. At nearly three pounds per square inch, the surface pressure in some locations on Mars was still lower than Mount Everest on Earth but it was high enough that it meant our blood wouldn’t boil if we were exposed to it without a pressure suit. It also meant we could survive brief exposures to the temperature.  In short, if we were very careful we could walk around with nothing more than an oxygen breathing mask. This made Mars a very different planet from the one I grew up on. On that Mars, even a brief exposure to the surface unprotected was a virtual death sentence.

As we entered Mars orbit I felt my demons stir. Somewhere down of the surface of that planet were three sets of bones. Bones that belonged to my mother, my father and my sister. Somewhere down there were the bones of almost everybody I had ever known growing up. Less than one tenth of one percent of us had made it off the planet.

The shrinks had worried that I would develop what they called ‘survivor’s remorse’… In actually what I had developed was a burning anger… not against the people who had done this but that there was evil in the universe that would visit such wanton destruction against the innocent. I felt that anger burning now. I knew that if I did not control it… it would control me. This was the reason I had ultimately decided to join the Marines. I needed a place and a purpose to focus my anger on.

The D’lralu would have been an easy choice to focus my anger on but they were victims too. The race that had ultimately been responsible for the death of Mars and my family was, in all likelihood, extinct. Only the evil machinations they had created remained. In orbit around Mars I felt my resolve solidify. I would spend everything, up to and including my last breath to ensure no one else ever had to endure a loss like I endured. I was not so foolish as to think I would always succeed… but I could make a difference… I would make a difference!