Wings of the Magpie: Space Operettas (3 page)

“No problems at all, Ma’am,” answered Fifty-Seven. He offered a brief salute, then nodded to the embarrassed girl as her mother launched into an aggressive tirade. “I’m a Grummand,” he said, turning to follow the Gwyndon, “Your problems are our business.”

The Pride of the 419th

As I dropped the GravLif onto the main drag, the painted glass window of one of Port Minéral’s ubiquitous barrooms exploded and a man dressed in mining dungarees landed gracelessly in the muddy street. Corporal Poynter punched me in the shoulder and laughed. “Looks like that’d be a helluva good place to start.”

Sure enough, it was. Once we got inside the beer-soaked tavern, we discovered that Gunny was, as usual, at the center of attention, repeatedly smashing a man’s head against an upright piano to the cheers and jeers of the amassed crowd of nearly-identical miners. Poynter and I watched for a few moments; after all, it’s always a pleasure to watch Gunny do what Gunny does best, but at precisely the instant when the jeering miners seemed ready to rally to the defense of their battered comrade, Poynter and I decided to intervene.

Ozone sizzled as we powered up our Crowd Control Sticks, and the miners turned as one to silently scrutinize this new threat. “Gunnery Sergeant McGill,” I barked. “You are hereby requested to drop that piece of company property and return to the ship immediately.”

Gunny grinned, then walloped the man’s head against the piano one last time before dropping him onto the sawdust-covered floor, where he lay, groaning. “Evening, ladies,” growled Gunnery Sergeant McGill, pulling a half-smoked cigar from the pocket of her flak jacket and placing it between her chrome-plated teeth. “I assume my chariot is waitin’.”

Poynter saluted. “Ma’am, yes ma’am.” Suckup.

Gunny sauntered towards the door, stopping at the bar for a moment to down a shot of glowing green liquid. She coughed, wiped her mouth with her sleeve, then dropped a handful of copper coins onto the bar. “Keep the change,” she said, and headed outside. By the time Poynter and I got to the GravLif, Gunny was already sitting behind the controls, motor chugging away. “Don’t think I’d trust you two knuckleheads to drive in your condition,” she laughed. “Get in, time’s a wasting.”

I took shotgun and Poynter climbed into the turret. Gunny slammed the transport into gear, looked over her right shoulder, and the GravLif shot straight up into the air, terrifying a flock of local birds as it ascended. Gunny quickly managed to wrestle the GravLif into a woozy semblance of control, then turned to look at me. “Refresh my memory, Magpie,” she asked. “Where in the blinding blue blazes did we park the boat?”

***

We dropped the GravLif at the motorcade, checked the CC Sticks at the armory, and caught the first shuttle back to the
Tiptree
. On the way home, Gunny regaled us with tales of the evening's adventures. “Typical mining clones,” she laughed. “Give ’em a little bit of flirtin’ and encouragement and they get all hotheaded, start throwing punches. No manners at all. Sure sign of testosterone poisoning. You’d think they were batchbred on this godforsaken rock; you’d think they were raised by robots. Oh, wait, they were. Give me a couple of nice, strapping, natural-born farmboys and a few cases of beer over these neutered knuckleheads any day of the week, and I’ll show you how to have a good time.”

At one point, Poynter was laughing so hard I was half-convinced she'd crack a rib. By the time we finally hit the cramped and sweaty ready room, it was 0900 hours, and our squad, the Seven Deadly Dames, the Pride of the 419th, was fully assembled. We settled in, made small talk, and began to engage in the personal rituals of pre-Slipspace preparation.Gunny pulled chin-ups while telling dirty jokes to anyone in earshot, “…if a kid is born, it’s gotta be raised a Zoroastrian.” Emerald, our sniper, cleaned her sidearm and laughed heartily, while Mills and Lawrence, the bonded pair of sappers, shaved one another’s heads. Pax, the heavy gunner, fingered her beads and quietly chanted, the compound bow of her upper lip quivering slightly as she pronounced the ancient syllables “Om saha naavavatu… Saha viirya-m karavaavahai… Maa vidvishaavahai. May we be protected together… May we work together with great vigor… May no obstacle arise between us.” Our resident hacker, Poynter, as usual, read a musty old paperbook, this time something called
Starship Troopers
. Why bother reading, I wondered, when the text doesn’t even move? Why bother reading about something that you live every day?

I sauntered over to the exercise-bar next to Gunny, and began pulling chin-ups as well, enjoying the endorphin rush that came as my muscles strained against the
Tiptree’
s artificial gravity. Gunny grinned over at me, cigar clutched in her gleaming teeth, and began pulling faster, competitively. She always managed three for every two I pulled; still, it wasn’t the challenge that I relished, but the camaraderie.

“Hey, Gunny,” shouted Mills from across the room as she cleaned her razorblade in a nearby bowl of water. “Any idea who or what we’re going up against?”

“I hope it’s Lizards,” interrupted Emerald, then, affecting a cartoon voice, added “I hates Lizards.”

“Unknown,” answered Gunny, turning her head towards me without missing a beat. “You pickin’ up anything from the Vat-Brains?”

I dropped from the bar to the floor, then tuned my Comms implant to one of the Vat channels and listened to the chirps and hums of the ship’s cybernetic pilots. It took several minutes of negotiating my way through their coded electronic communications and weird humor, but eventually, I found an answer. “We’re headed out past Echelon IV towards the Buffer Zone,” I volunteered. “We’re going to rendezvous with the
Russ
and the
Butler
. Sounds like we’re intercepting an encroaching Badger worldship, so odds are they’re just bringing us along to mop up.”

Gunny grinned. “Ooh-rah,” she interjected. “Another beautiful day in the Corps.”

***

At 1100 hours, the ship’s bells chimed, alerting us that it was time to climb into our suspension couches for the jump to Slipspace. Until we reached our destination, the thousand swabs and Marines aboard the
Tiptree
would rest enveloped in the dreamless morphinic arms of hypersleep, trusting the Vat-Brains to do the flying. Each of us stripped down, then clambered into the private metal wombs that bore our names. As I mounted my own suspension couch, I touched the stenciled block letters of my name, Mary “Magpie” Mayr, for luck, then closed the glass hatch and connected the familiar umbilical cables to the ceramic ports implanted into the back of my neck. Finally, I stared at the vidigraph of my daughter that I’d taped to the glass, realizing that, thanks to the peculiarities of hypersleep and FTL travel, when I finally saw her again, she and I would be the same apparent age. For now she was safe on Terra with the rest of the girls in her nursery group, but by the time we returned, she would have already gone through her first breeding cycle and started her own term in the Corps. I kissed my fingertips, then pressed them against her infant face, and whispered a silent prayer that we would be friends. A scent like gin-soaked flowers swept over me, and then, the universe winked…

***

The eternal whispered whiteness of Slipspace gave way to blackened starlit void as the
Tiptree
shimmered back into existence, its massive streamlined hull cautiously maneuvering between two equally hulking starships, the
Butler
and the
Russ
. In tandem, the three ships moved along, their Vat-Brains chirping digital greetings to one another along with ponderous electronic puns regarding the vast navigational numberstrings involved in post-Einsteinian physics. Cold blue fusion drives pushed the ships forward, screaming through lightseconds in nearly real time. Within moments, their quarry sighted, the three ships slowed to cruising speed.

The Badger worldship, gleaming silver and moonsized, dwarfed the three Terran warships. Crimson fire belched from its engines pushed it along, leaving behind a glowing radioactive wake. Plasma cannon covered its surface, and, as the three Terran ships approached, erupted into a deadly fusillade that outshined even the brightest stars.

It was the
Butler
, in her position as pack leader, that caught the brunt of this salvo. Unable to react in time, her hull cleaved in two, vomiting hundreds of pink and brown bodies into the cold and unforgiving void. The
Butler
’s Vat-Brains screamed, then fell silent as vacuum encompassed the ship, turning her instantly into a charnel house. Horrified and mournful, the Vat-Brains aboard the
Tiptree
and the
Russ
pressed on in spite of the tragedy and their own damage, and moved immediately into evasive action, launching dozens of Tac-Nukes towards the Badger ship.

As the Nukes impacted, flowers of silent orange flame covered the invader’s hull and several plumes of pale atmosphere vented into the void, dissipating like steam erupting from a teakettle. The Vat-Brains chirped and hummed in unanimous agreement; it was time to send in the Marines.

***

…then just as quickly, opened her eyes.

I awoke to red emergency lights and the shrill voice of emergency klaxons. Outside, I guessed, a battle was raging. I pressed the release on my suspension couch’s hatch, simultaneously disconnecting myself from the umbilicus cable, and tumbled out onto the metal deck. I tuned my Comms implant, hoping for news of our victory, only to discover that we’d lost the
Butler
with all hands, and that both the
Russ
and
Tiptree
had taken fire and suffered heavy losses. The Badger ship was crippled, burning, and leaking radiation. We were being sent in, along with a cadre of Grummands for fire support, to blow the main reactors and finish the job. This wasn’t going to be a mop-up, this was going to be messy.

Around me, my comrades were climbing from their suspension chambers. Maybe it was just the lingering effect of morphinic hypersleep, but at that moment I had an epiphany. As I glanced around at the naked bodies of my companions (bodies, I might add, that I'd seen in a thousand different circumstances, at work and at play, in war and in respite), I realized that we were all more similar than different. Sure, there were minor things that set us apart, marked us as individuals: Gunny's flat, broad nose and metal-covered teeth; Poynter's pale, freckled face; Emerald's deep ebony skin; Pax, olive-toned and golden-eyed; Mills, with her heavily tattooed flesh; Lawrence's cherubic grin; even me, with my Comms augmentation and battle scars; these minor physical differences meant nothing. Instead, we were unified, all of us, by virtue of being female, Terran, and Marines. Each of us wore the long cesarean scar of our first breeding cycle; each of us bore the ceramic implants necessary for hypersleep and long-distance interstellar travel; each of us had the Terran Fleet Marine Corps crest electronically emblazoned on our shoulders, through it constantly receiving signals from the
Tiptree
, reminding us of our charge, our mission, our oath:
Semper Fideles
. It was in that moment that it became clear to me that the Pride of the 419th was more than a shallow title, it was a calling. We were, all of us, the best humanity had to offer, and its greatest hope for the future.

We dressed in our coveralls without speaking, understanding that the ship’s emergency klaxons would drown out all but the most primitive of non-verbal communication, aware that we were going to be stepping out into a life-or-death firefight. We filed from the safe crèche of our ready room into the hangar where our fighting suits awaited, primed and ready for martial action.

***

It was quieter in the hangar; the constant thrum and clang of machinery felt almost serene in cont
rast with the warnings blaring throughout the rest of the ship.
Lee, the
Tiptree
’s XO, met us by the fighting suits, along with a quartet of heavily armed Grummands. Lee was a Vat-Brain-controlled simulacrum, a hologram, who affected the look of a Marine officer of a few hundred years earlier: pressed dress uniform, ceremonial saber, and, strangely enough, gendered male. The Corps has been a female-only organization for generations, an evolution made necessary by the physical demands of fighting suits and the stresses of hypersleep and FTL travel on the human body. Some months ago, Poynter sliced into Lee's graphics program, hoping to update his appearance to something a bit more modern. Unfortunately, all she managed to do was modify his uniform into an equally-archaic gingham skirt and blouse combo. We snickered for about a week, then Gunny insisted that Poynter change Lee back because the new look “lacked dignity.”

Lee briefed us, feeding us the latest information on Badger infantry tactics, weaponry, and support, as we suited up and prepared for boarding. First, we pulled the sleek, dark, airtight pressure suits that would protect us from vacuum, radiation, and most small arms and zapgun fire over our coveralls. Next came our helmets, which, when coupled to our neckports, formed the essential electronic link between Marines and machines, between tenuous flesh and the brawny armored fighting suit frames which were the final accoutrement in the process. A Marine in a fighting suit frame towered over civilians at two and a half meters tall, bristled with weaponry, and could stand up to anything short of a direct hit from a plasma rifle.

As an unarmored human is to a Marine in a fighting suit, so are fighting suits to Grummands. A Grummand’s bulk and power made you feel as if you were a mere adolescent, even while wearing a fighting suit. Standing just over three meters tall, a Grummand was the war machine perfected in matte black Titanoplast, a massive upside-down triangle with powerfully-clawed legs and arms. On either side of their tiny heads sat interchangeable weapons platforms: rocket launchers, plasma cannons, zapguns, whatever armament was deemed necessary for the mission at hand. Originally designed as EVAC infantry support and private army grunts, all Grummands held within their chests an emergency transport cavity, a space intended to suspend the vital signs of a wounded Marine long enough to convey her back to safety, even under the extreme conditions of vacuum, radiation, or hostile fire. Some Marines nicknamed Grummands “Big Brothers.” The rest called them “Big Mothers.”