First to Fight (19 page)

Moira didn’t tell Wad Ramadan that in fact she had advised Shabeli against attacking the orphanage, not because she cared about the victims, but because, like Ramadan, she knew it would make the Confederation more determined than ever to eliminate the Siad. “I will speak to him about this,” she agreed.

Wad Ramadan smiled weakly. He did not believe her. It would still be up to him to talk to his nephew, and he already knew that would do no good. “Thank you, my dear,” he said, resigned. “Now I will accept your offer of a sweet drink.”

“You must kill the old fool,” Moira told Shabeli. “He is against you and—”

Shabeli struck her on the side of the jaw with the full force of his open palm. The blow threw her back upon the bed, shocked. Instantly, she leaped to her feet, fumbling with the dagger she kept under her robe. Shabeli grabbed her wrist in a grip so crushing she screamed aloud in pain and the dagger clattered harmlessly to the floor. He spun her around and pushed her facedown on the bed, her arm twisted painfully behind her back.

“My love, you understand much I will never comprehend, but know three things about the Siad: Never accuse a man of cowardice, never insinuate he’s had sex with his own mother, and never suggest a Siad murder someone in his own bloodline. If ever you say something like that again, I will kill you.”

Shabeli allowed Moira to get up. The right side of her face was already turning bright red from the blow. In the years she had known Shabeli, this was the first time he had hit her. The Siad in general derived no honor from abusing women, unless for political gain. She cursed herself for the remark. She should have known better. But despite her distrust of Uncle Wad, she too was desperately afraid Shabeli’s plan would end in disaster and bring ruin upon all of them.

Shabeli flopped down on the bed and flicked on the flatvid viewer. He motioned for Moira to join him. He put his arm around her. “Nature will take care of Uncle Ramadan,” he whispered. “He is powerless anyway. But he is respected, and as long as he lives, I must defer to him in public.”

Moira was about to mention her own misgivings but decided it was definitely not the right moment to disagree with Shabeli the Magnificent. Instead she asked, “Would you really kill me?”

Shabeli pretended to think hard about this for a moment, then replied, “Only by fucking you to death.”

With Moira sleeping soundly beside him in the darkness, Shabeli the Magnificent thought about his plan. While the others were wasting themselves in the settlements, when he was ready, he would ambush the Marines in the countryside. He would wait until the other-clans had dissipated their strength in urban warfare, and then, when the Confederation, disgusted over its losses and impatient at the delay in its relief operations, believed it had finally gotten the upper hand on Elneal, he would strike a devastating and totally unexpected blow. Afterward, he would offer peace, and the concessions would be granted to him.

Ah, he thought, it is all a gamble! He had purposely ordered the attack on the orphanage because he knew it would bring matters to a head. He also knew that with Confederation intervention, the stakes were now infinitely high and his position utterly precarious. But that was what made life so enjoyable. He lay back and within moments was sound asleep.

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

On the second day out, Captain Conorado held an all-hands briefing for the 173 men of 34th FIST’s advance party, Company L, and half the transportation company. He held the briefing in the crew’s mess, the largest open space on the
Gordon
.

The space was never meant to hold so many people at one time. The men crammed into the room, and those fortunate enough to get seats at the tables were hip-to-haunch so tight they were almost in each other’s laps. Some sat on the tables and tried not to obstruct the view of too many of the others. The rest squeezed tightly into the aisles. The senior NCOs bunched together at the hatch. When all were assembled, Captain Conorado entered from the galley, followed by the other officers and Staff Sergeant Bass. The men of third platoon noticed that Ensign Baccacio didn’t look happy. The company commander took his place in a small open space next to a large vidscreen that was set into the wall, the other officers grouped together around the hatch to the galley.

“Company, atten—”

“Don’t anybody get up,” Conorado said, interrupting Top Myer’s call to attention. “There isn’t enough room for you to move in here.”

The Skipper slowly looked about the crew’s mess before beginning his remarks. If it seemed to his men as 192 though he looked each of them in the eye, it was because he very nearly did. There was no waiting for their attention; each man had fixed his eyes, ears, and thoughts on the company commander as soon as he entered the room. Neither did Conorado have to gather his thoughts; he knew what he was going to say. It was much the same as his own commander had said a dozen years earlier when the company in which he’d been a platoon sergeant was in transit to Haguri, where he was given a direct commission on the battlefield. Conorado paused before speaking now because he wasn’t sure that what he had to say was any more accurate than what his company commander had said then. Haguri was supposed to be an easy, low-key mission with no fighting. It turned out to be one of the bloodiest campaigns he’d ever been involved in.

Well, he was a Marine; when in doubt, act decisively.

“We are on a humanitarian relief mission to Elneal,” he began without preamble. “Elneal is both a backward world and a backwater. It has little trade with the other worlds of Human Space other than in molycarbondum, and there has been almost no immigration into it for several generations. Its molycarbondum deposits are the only thing Elneal has of value. That’s mined by Consolidated Enterprises under contract to the planetary government—and giving legitimacy and providing laborers to the mining operation seems to be the only thing the central government does. The government appears to have control only in New Obbia, the capital city. The rest of Elneal is populated by nomads and isolated pockets of back-to-earthers—at least ‘back-to-earthers’ is how they’re officially characterized—none of whom answer to any power above their own clan or settlement.

“For several years the nomadic tribes have been warring against each other and with the independent settlements.” his has not been sporadic warring, but constant, and recently it has become very serious—some observers have called it genocidal. The best-case estimate is the fighting has reduced the planet’s population by twenty-five percent. Some estimates go above fifty percent. Because of the fighting, agriculture has failed and famine is now endemic. Hundreds of thousands of people have died of starvation on Elneal in the past two years.

“The Confederation hasn’t stood by idly while the fighting has been going on. There have been repeated and continuing attempts to get food and medical supplies into the countryside to feed the starving people. In many instances, food convoys have been attacked and the food taken by the raiders or destroyed in place. In such cases, the crews of the attacked convoys have been killed almost without exception. In places where food and medical supplies have been flown in and central distribution points established, those points have been attacked, the food and medical supplies taken or destroyed, and the staffs killed. Social order on Elneal, such as it is, is on the verge of collapse, as is the entire population.”

The Skipper paused for a moment, to let his words sink in, before continuing. “A few weeks ago, the leaders of the major warring factions agreed to lay down their arms if the Confederation would guarantee their safety so that food and medical supplies could be distributed. That’s our job. Company L, 34th FIST, is the lead unit of a Provisional Marine Brigade being assembled and sent to Elneal to guarantee security of food distribution to end the famine, and secondarily to oversee the disarmament of the warring factions so that the central government can resume control over the world.

“Now I’m going to hand the briefing over to First Sergeant Myer. I’m sure he’ll give you the detailed information you need in a forthright manner that I could not match. First Sergeant.” Without waiting for acknowledgment, Captain Conorado left. The other officers followed him.

“Aye aye, sir.” Top Myer bounded to the top of the closest table and crossed the room rear to front by jumping from table to table over the seated men.

With the officers safely gone, Top Myer nodded Gunny Thatcher, who closed the hatch and dogged it. The first sergeant took his time looking at the troops. He knew what he had to say was accurate, since he’d gotten it direct from the lips of other senior NCOs who had recently been on Elneal—and he himself had served a short tour many years earlier with the security detachment at the Confederation consulate in New Obbia The information he was about to present wouldn’t appear on any official document or in any command-sanctioned briefing. He took his time getting started because he wanted to impress on the men the seriousness of what he was about to say.

“Listen up and listen up good,” he began, his voice gruff. “Gunny Thatcher secured that hatch because the brass wouldn’t like what I’m about to tell you, and I don’t want them walking in while I’m saying it. We’re going up against a bunch of bloodthirsty savages.” Eyes popped open throughout the mess. Not even the men who’d been on several operations had ever heard a first sergeant begin a briefing with a statement like that.

“The Skipper told you the central government only seems to control New Obbia, the capital city. Well, New Obbia’s all the central government has ever controlled. The only reason any kind of official government exists on Elneal at all is because the Confederation needed one to conduct official dealings with Consolidated Enterprises on their mining operation. Otherwise C.E. could have gone in, strip-mined the place down to the moho, and the only accurate record of how much molycarbondum they took out would be in a set of books the tax man never sees.

“There’s a story that Elneal was named after the obscure late-twentieth-century American philosopher L. Neil Smith. Smith had the cockamamie idea that if everybody went around armed to the gills, there wouldn’t be any violence, there wouldn’t be any need for government, and everybody would live in a state of utopian bliss.

“I don’t know whether that story’s true or not, but it happens that the first settlers were nomadic and seminomadic tribesmen from the deserts of northeast Africa and the mountains of southwest Asia who objected to their national governments’ wanting to disarm and urbanize them. Most likely, the planet was named after a North African clan leader called El Nelffi. He was the one who came up with the idea of emigrating.

“Anyway, Elneal got settled by some pretty xenophobic and otherwise unsociable people. Less than a generation later, the British realized there was a world out there where people went around armed and fighting each other, so they rounded up as much of the Irish Republican Army as they could find and exiled them to Elneal. The Spanish thought that was such a great idea, they did the same thing with the Basques. Somewhere in there, the old United States put a lot of pressure on the U.N. to mount a major operation against the opium-producing tribes of Southeast Asia. When those tribesmen realized that this time they were going to lose the war, they sued for peace and offered to move to Elneal. They figured the Kurds, Afghanis, and Tuaregs already there would like a bit of smoke, and they could always refine opium into heroin if the Irish and Basques preferred needles to pipes. Along about that time, the few remaining American pistol-packers, those who believed as L. Neil Smith did, decided it was time to ‘get out of Dodge,’ as they would have put it, and they moved to Elneal. Hardly anybody else has moved there. There’s been no intermarriage between the different groups, though there’s been a lot of interbreeding. The nomads steal women from each other on raids.”

Top Myer stopped talking and slowly looked the troops over again. “Are you getting a picture here?” he asked. “This world was populated almost exclusively by people who want to carry firearms and don’t want to answer to any government.

“I have spent my entire adult life under arms. So has Gunny Thatcher. Every man among you, from Staff Sergeant Bass on down to the newest Marine—who’s that, Clarke?—every last one of you lives under arms, and will as long as you are a member of the Confederation Marine Corps. That’s a condition of being a Marine. Marines go in harm’s way, and we must be armed in order to survive and do our jobs. We expect to have to use our weapons. Most of us have. Those of you who haven’t yet, will soon. That’s part of being a Marine.

“If you’re not prepared to use a weapon, you shouldn’t carry one. We expect to have to use ours, and we’re prepared to. But there’s a universe of difference between carrying a weapon because you expect to have to use it, and liking to be good with it because that’s a skill you’ve mastered, and carrying one because you like the power it gives you. If you like to carry a weapon because of the power it gives you, you’re a danger to everybody around you. In that case, sooner or later you’re liable to use it on someone needlessly.

“However it goes, if you carry a weapon, whether for the reasons we do or for some other reason, sooner or later you’re going to use it. And that’s what happened Elneal. With no government to keep them in check, the tribesmen and various other groups quickly found themselves at war with each other.”

Top Myer paused a moment, then went on: “If you’re thinking that not every individual descendant of the original colonists wants to carry weapons and fight, you’re right. Not all of them do. Those who don’t, generally don’t live to become adults—they get killed during their juvenile training. Some manage to run away to New Obbia. Most of them, though, prefer death rather than the shame of running away. The people of New Obbia are universally considered to be lower than human—to go there is to suffer the greatest shame.

“If they were using swords, or bows and arrows, or other ancient weapons, it wouldn’t be too bad. But they started out with projectile-throwing firearms, which are much more devastating. I don’t have any hard confirmation on this, but there are rumors that some of them have blasters today. Without the controls imposed by a social order larger than the clan or tribe, when people are well enough armed, they go around slaughtering everyone who isn’t a member of the same clan or tribe. You can put that down as a law of nature. It’s happened time and again throughout all of human history. It’s happening today on Elneal.

“On most worlds in Human Space, citizens can walk about with reasonable expectation of not being molested. They do it unarmed. There’s no need for them to carry deadly weapons. On Elneal, they’ve created a world where no one can walk around expecting that nobody will try to kill him. It’s a world where anyone unarmed is in extreme jeopardy. Hell, anyone who isn’t in a large band of heavily armed men is in constant danger.” He shook his head. “Supposedly that’s stopped now. The clans and tribes and other groups want to end the famine and are willing to stop fighting—so they say. I’ll believe it when I see every last one of them disarmed.”

He stopped talking, and stood for a long moment looking someplace only he could see. When he resumed, his voice was much softer than it had been.

“We are not going in on a combat operation. We are going in to provide symbolic security for the distribution of food and medical supplies. We are also going to oversee the disarming of the warring factions—or at least see to it that they go about unarmed. We are not expected to do any fighting. That is the official word from the top. They believe it so much they made us leave our chameleons behind.” He suddenly became gruff and serious again. “But we damn well better be prepared to fight. Because anyone who isn’t prepared to fight is most probably going to get killed.

“That is all. Platoon sergeants, the platoons are yams.” Top Myer made his way through the crowded room to the back, where Gunny Thatcher was undogging and opening the hatch. The two top NCOs left together.

Sergeant Hyakowa, Company L’s three regular platoon sergeants, and the transportation company platoon sergeants, looked at one another. They had to meet with their men and continue the briefing by platoons, but Top Myer was a tough act to follow.

Because the men of the transportation company were conducting maintenance on their vehicles, and half the Dragons were in the two Essays mated to the Gordon, a breathable atmosphere was maintained in the Essays. Hyakowa only wished the transportation chief hadn’t been so condescending about graciously allowing third platoon to cram itself into one of the Essays for its meeting.

Sergeant Hyakowa told the men of third platoon about some of the humanitarian aid and peacekeeping missions he’d been on, and about things that went wrong with them. Then he had everyone else in the platoon with experience on such missions talk about them. He thought it was curious that no one had a story to tell about a humanitarian relief mission on which nothing went wrong.