First to Fight (14 page)

Dean’s first impression of the place was of the strong stench of stale beer. Only a few tables were occupied at that early hour. “Wait’ll after midnight,” Leach said. “Then this place’ll be hopping.”

A dozen men from third platoon had shoved two tables together near the bar and were well into many mugs of the powerful brew served there. Six of Barb’s girls had attached themselves to as many Marines and were busy matching them drink for drink as one of the men sang a drinking song in a surprisingly good tenor.

I’m Cap-tain Jinks of the Space Marines,

I feed my men on flip and creans,

And sport young la-dies in their teens,

Though a cap-tain in the arm-y.

At the mention of Marines and army, the men around the table shouted catcalls and banged their mugs loudly.

The singer, Dean was astonished to discover, was none other than Staff Sergeant Bass.

“Get over here!” Bass shouted as he saw the three new men. “We’ve got some serious drinking to do before this night’s over.” He drained his mug with a flourish and wiped foam off his upper lip with the back of his hand. Dean wondered if Bass had walked into town; he hadn’t been aboard the bus, “Ahhh, you thirsty dogfathers,” Bass shouted. “Beer, more beer for m’lads here.” One of the women, a brunette and not that bad-looking, detached herself from her Marine—it was the missing Claypoole—and hastened to the bar.

“Beer, beer, beer cried the privates!” Claypoole shouted, and several others took up the song:

Beer, beer, beer cried the privates,

Mer-ry men are we!

There’s none so fair

As can com-pare

With the fight-ing infan-treee!

The song went on and on, through all the ranks up to colonel, with all of them shouting for beer, and when they got to the chorus, every man stood up and shouted for beer at the top of his lungs. The bare rafters rang with the sound of their voices.

Face flushed from the shouting, and his heart pounding with the effort, Dean found a seat next to McNeal. “I see you’ve managed to fit right in with this crew,” he commented.

“I fit right in,” McNeal replied, nodding gravely. “I fit right in,” he repeated. Dean realized then that McNeal and the others had been drinking steadily since they’d arrived at Helga’s. McNeal was well on his way to a monumental drunk.

“Joe, Joe,” Fred began. “You are my best friend in the world, you know that?’ He put his arm drunkenly around Dean’s shoulders and leaned into him. “You know sumptin’ else?
fit right in
here. Yessir, I fit in.”

The girl returned with a dozen big mugs on a tray, and Dean snatched one for himself. Nobody said anything about paying, so he just started drinking. The beer was cold and powerful, rich, full-bodied. Dean glanced at McNeal and was surprised and embarrassed to see a tear forming in McNeal’s right eye. “Joe, you know what?” Dean shook his head. “All my life people been kickin’ my ass around, starting with my old man, and you know what? That’s over now,
o
-ver. That’s over ’cause I fit in now and I ain’t takin’ no more shit from no-body no more.”

Three cigars and several schooners of beer later, Dean’s head began to swim sickeningly. Quietly, he excused himself from the table and staggered outside. The cold air seemed to refresh him momentarily, and then suddenly the heavy food, the cigars, the beer, the excitement, overcame him and he vomited in the street until he gagged on a completely empty stomach. Passing Marines hooted and shouted encouragement, but for long moments Dean was just too sick to care. Finished, he wiped his mouth and eyes, straightened his uniform, and, feeling like a new man, strode purposefully back inside.

Sometime around midnight Staff Sergeant Bass called for attention. Big Barb’s was crowded by then and the noise in the place was deafening, but at their tables in the comer, the Marines could have been in church, so rapt were they when their platoon commander spoke.

“Gentlemen,” Bass began, “it is time I was leaving.” The men protested loudly, but Bass held up a hand for silence. “No, I must now seek my beauty sleep.”

“You’ll have to reenlist to get
that
much sleep!” Leach shouted.

“Silence, you miserable short-penis dogfather wretch,” Bass said, feigning anger. “No, I must depart. But first, our anthem.”

Everyone stood. Bass sang in his clear, natural tenor, not a trace of beer in his voice:

We meet ’neath the sounding rafters,

The walls around are bare.

As they shout to our peals of laughter,

It seems that the dead are there.

The rest of the men joined him in the chorus:

Oh, stand to your glasses steady,

We drink to our comrades’ eyes.

A cup to the dead already,

And hurrah for the next who dies.

Dean couldn’t sing the song with the others because he didn’t know the lyrics. He just stood silently taking in the ritual. He knew a lot of beer had been consumed that night, but he also realized something very special was going on, a tribute to friends who’d been lost in combat. He understood this and sympathized with the veterans, but since he had not experienced that loss himself, his heart was not completely in it—not yet. As the song went on, the crowd in Big Barb’s began to grow quiet, and soon the only sound was the voices of the Marines singing. Before the song was done, several of them were crying openly.

The other patrons, and even Big Barb herself, remained silent for several long moments after the Marines had finished.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

In the fifty-two years Fleet Admiral P’Marc Willis had been in the Confederation Naval Forces, he had never seen anything as terrible as the sight before him in the dusty schoolyard.

“It is far worse in the outlying settlements, Admiral,” Jardinier Dozois, the portly Confederation Consul, whispered beside him, a handkerchief clamped firmly to his nose and mouth to keep out the smell of putrefying flesh.

Almost overcome, Admiral Willis cleared his throat before speaking. He gestured helplessly toward the heaps of tiny bodies littering the yard. “How could something like this happen?”

“Too many mouths and not enough food—and the rebels,” Kismayu Merka answered, virtually spitting out the last word. A small brown man with a black goatee, he had been president of the Republic of Elneal for only two months, thrust into the job after his predecessor’s assassination. Unlike the arrogant tribesman who had preceded him, Merka immediately requested assistance from the Confederation upon assuming the duties of his largely ceremonial office. And Admiral Willis had come. That request for help had been the only time Merka had had the courage to make a political decision on his own.

The horribly mutilated children had been dead long enough for decay to swell their tiny bodies obscenely.

When the Admiral’s party arrived only a few moments before, aides had to chase off carrion-eaters—fliers and crawlers—that were feeding greedily on the corpses. Innards and severed body parts lay everywhere, interspersed among piles of tiny corpses, two hundred or more of them. No ordinary person could possibly envisage what had happened here, the Admiral thought.

The fierce sun beat down oppressively on the small party. The Marine major commanding the Admiral’s security detachment whispered into the mouthpiece of his headset, checking the dispositions of his men about the perimeter of the school. An oppressive silence hung over the group. Small dust devils swirling about the schoolyard only momentarily obscured the clouds of insects busily feeding on the bodies. A bright piece of cloth fluttering in the breeze caught the Admiral’s eye. It covered what had once been a little girl, her now hairless skull covered with the remnants of parchmentlike flesh drawn tightly over the delicate bones of her face. The eye sockets were empty cavities; the scavengers had fed. Her arms had been hacked off. Ashes to ashes, the Admiral thought. In another day or so only bones would be left.

“The relief workers ran out of food and medical supplies more than a month ago,” President Merka said. “We could not help them. What you see here is multiplied many times over throughout our poor land. The parents of these poor babies brought them here because they were dying themselves and hoped at least their children might survive with the help of the foreigners who ran this place.”

“Not many crops were put in during last year’s planting season.” Dozois added. “And much of what the farmers could get in was destroyed or confiscated by the rebels. Their ‘scorched earth’ policy,” he said bitterly, “seems to be working better than even they could have hoped.”

“What happened to the adults who ran this place?” Admiral Willis asked.

The other men were silent for a moment. “Dead,” Dozois answered shortly.

“How?”

The Consul paused before answering in a quavering voice. “By the rebels. Dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, tortured, mutilated, nailed to crosses, and burned alive over there, on the other side of the swings. Then the scum ran amok among the children. No one found out about this massacre until yesterday. . . .”

The Admiral stared at Dozois.

“They were all young volunteers from other worlds in this quadrant,” Dozois volunteered. “Good kids. Our people, Admiral,” he added softly, meaning they were citizens of Confederation member worlds, not natives of Elneal, which was only in protectorate status. Elneal had always been a wild and dangerous place. Things like this happened there from time to time, but until recently, only on a much smaller scale.

“The rebels are Siad, the most important of the warrior tribes,” President Merka said. “These,” he gestured helplessly at the bodies, “were the children of farmers and city people, less than human in the eyes of the Siad. They killed the foreigners because they were foreigners, but they killed these children as a civilized man would exterminate pests.” Obviously President Merka himself was not of the warrior tribes.

Admiral Willis was about to reply when a cadaverous man about the Admiral’s own age cleared his throat. Large perspiration rings stained his expensive shirt beneath the armpits, and when his snow-white handkerchief wasn’t blocking his sense of smell, it fluttered across his brow like the dead child’s dress. He cleared his throat several more times until he was certain Admiral Willis had noticed. “Our mining operations have completely ceased,” he said in a soft, wet, petulant tone of voice. “Nobody can move in the hinterlands. The savages have murdered hundreds of our employees.” The Admiral only glanced at him out of the comer of his eye. “Something must be done, Admiral. Must be. Law and order must—”

“That’s why I’m here, Mr. Owens,” the Admiral said, cutting him off abruptly.

“Ah, perhaps the Admiral would like to review the photographic evidence of the atrocities committed upon our employees at—”

“No!” the Admiral replied sharply. He knew what the rebels had done and was disgusted by it, but just then he hated the thin man from Consolidated Enterprises for introducing the tawdry problems of his business partners into that charnel house of dead innocents. Locklear Owens and his friends cared no more for the lives of their slaughtered employees than for those of the murdered children and their benefactors, and although Admiral Willis would never admit it or even show it, he hated the likes of these pampered, overfed businessmen from the bottom of his heart. In reality it was they who were responsible for the suffering of the people of Elneal.

“Gentlemen, I’ve seen enough,” Admiral Willis said. He turned and began striding toward the Dragon that had brought them out. He could not help but notice the President speaking softly and intimately to Owens trailing at the end of the line. Another sharp flash of anger shot through the old navy man. The mining consortiums had paid well to get at the huge molycarbondum deposits under the surface of this world. That money had enabled the tribes to buy the weapons and technology they needed to start the uprising. The companies were warned that would happen, but they had persisted. Admiral Willis even had a file on his desk that proved some of their executives had earned the rights fees back by selling large quantities of modem weapons to the tribes—paying the tribes half what it was worth for the use of their land and then charging them through the nose for the weapons they wanted. And there was no shortage of rogue mercenaries to teach the rebels how to use all that hardware—and they were all on the mining company payrolls.

Even now Owens was whispering some plot into the President’s ear, some scheme to make some off-world entrepreneur even fatter. And the President would listen because he was the company’s man. Hell, the Admiral reflected, what else could the old boy do in his position?

Admiral Willis stood beside his Dragon’s ramp, looking back at the schoolyard as the other members of his party filed aboard the vessel. The security platoon moved with practiced swiftness, withdrawing from its defensive perimeter, the men mounting their vehicles, weapons at the ready. What must it be like to die like those children did, he wondered, nobody left to mourn them, much less remember who they were and give them a decent burial? He thought of his own great-granddaughter. She was seven, about the same age as that nameless little girl in the flapping skirt. Well, by God, I won’t forget what happened here, the Admiral promised himself.

Before the Confederation transferred Admiral Willis to command of the Seventh Star Fleet over a year earlier, he’d been warned about Elneal. Public opinion had been building up for years, pressuring the Confederation Council to take action. Some members wanted intervention for humanitarian reasons alone—which, based on what Admiral Willis had just seen, was fully justified—others to protect the molycarbondurn mines that provided an ore essential to the alloy used in building interstellar spacecraft, the economic lifeline of the Confederation worlds. But all agreed that intervention was a foregone conclusion. It was just a matter of time. And now was the time.

Settled originally by the descendants of nomadic tribesmen from the horn of Africa on Old Earth, from the beginning the inhabitants of Elneal had been a fiercely independent, warlike people who despised civilization and hated outside interference in their ancient ways. Subsequent migrations composed of dissident ethnic elements from other Terran cultures, unassimilable, fractious, and quarrelsome in their own way, only intensified the warlike xenophobia of the first settlers. Until the coming of the mining companies, the nomadic tribes had been content living in their desert fastnesses, venting their hatred on rival clans and, occasionally, the vastly outnumbered citizens in the few settlements on Elneal. The tribes hated the settlements because they saw them as breeding grounds for new ideas and government, the very concept of which drove them to murder.

By law, Admiral P’Marc Willis was the supreme Confederation authority in this quadrant of Human Space, with the power granted to him personally by the Confederation Council of Worlds to act on its behalf on his own initiative. He had already decided what had to be done, but now he must make it legal by going through the motions of soliciting opinions from his staff and the civilian representatives.

He walked up the ramp into his vehicle and the hatch closed with a hiss behind him. As he strapped himself into his seat he wondered, Now who in the hell am I going to send down here to straighten out this goddamned mess?

The briefing room on board CNSS
Robert P. Ogie
, Admiral Willis’s flagship, was designed to accommodate a hundred persons. It was full when an aide announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, Fleet Admiral Willis.” Everyone stood as the Admiral strode into the room. Nodding to Consul Dozois and his staff, Admiral Willis took his seat, a modified captain’s chair taken from the bridge of the Admiral’s first combat command, a Condon-class battle cruiser.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the Admiral announced, “as of 0001 hours this morning, the planet Elneal has been under martial law.” An approving murmur ran through the room. Willis’s N-3, his operations officer, sat straighter in his chair. He and his staff had worked all night to prepare the operations order for the relief of Elneal that now flashed onto the viewscreen before each participant. “Mr. President,” Willis turned to President Merka, “you are now under my orders.” An expression of relief passed over Merka’s face; noting a faint scowl of annoyance on Owens’s craggy countenance, Willis smiled to himself.

“Miss Ebben.” The Admiral nodded at a young woman sitting next to Consul Dozois. As the chief representative of the Confederated Interplanetary Relief Association, Leenda Ebben was responsible for all humanitarian assistance operations in 7th Fleet’s area of operations.

“Sir, we have stockpiled several thousand tons of relief supplies in the capital city, New Obbia, but over the past months much of it has been looted. Local police forces are unable to furnish adequate security in any of Elneal’s settlements, much less the capital.” Willis’s N-2, his intelligence chief, nodded agreement. “We have adequate medical supplies and food for several hundred thousand people on Boradu. We can have it on Elneal in twelve to fourteen days, standard, depending on the availability of transportation. The details are in the logistics annex to N-3’s ops plan.” Her staff had been working all night too.

“We can get it there in that time, Admiral,” the N-4, Fleet logistical officer, added.

“Admiral Nashorn,” Willis turned to his N-2, “give us a brief rundown on the situation down there.”

“It’s bad, sir,” Rear Admiral Jerrold Nashorn said gravely. A planetary map of Elneal appeared on the vidscreens. “Elneal has a total population of perhaps sixteen million. The last census was conducted twenty-four years ago and it was never completed. More than half of the census teams sent into the deserts to count the nomads just disappeared.

“About a million people live in New Obbia, the only city of any size on Elneal. The rest of them are spread out in the deserts that stretch more than three thousand miles from the ocean to the Honolato Mountains. These mountains rise to heights in excess of eight thousand meters and can be crossed only in a few places. Outside the city are numerous settlements—small villages and towns—but most of the people in the outback are nomads. They survive by grazing flocks of sheep and goats, just as their ancestors did on Old Earth more than three and a half centuries ago. The rest of the planet is virtually uninhabited. There are the Muong Song pirates on some offshore islands, as well as a smallcolony recently established by people from Boradu on an island continent a few degrees south of the equator, but the Democratic Republic of Elneal is the only body politic. The molycarbondurn deposits are found only under the deserts of Elneal.

“The original colonists came from Africa, in the Somalia-Ethiopia-Kenya region. Their ancestors were rugged nomadic peoples who never submitted well to civilization. The initial wave of immigration was sponsored by the governments of various oil-rich emirates in an effort to dispose of these unassimilable people peacefully. It proved remarkably successful, and once the word got out, other Terran governments sponsored similar programs to rid themselves of their problem children. Subsequent waves of immigrants came from such diverse regions as Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, the British Isles, and, in the wake of the Second American Civil War, North America.