Lieutenant (The United Federation Marine Corps Book 3) (20 page)

Ryck quickly assessed the groups.  He didn’t show it, but his heart sank.  Two were elderly with one man being helped by another just to stand.  And one, St. Chuck’s Hell, was grubbing pregnant, eight months if she was a day.  The rest were scrawny, filthy, and very naked. 

OK, they thought any man-made materials would bring the capys.  But there was a grubbing creek right there, and they were filthy?  This was a sure sign of people who have lost hope. 

“Damn,” Caruthers whispered next to him.  “They look like they’ve given up.”

“You got any food?” a tall man asked, looking eagerly at the Marines.

“Yes, we’ve brought extra emergency rats,” Ryck said, pulling out a pack of base paste from his cargo pocket.

“Torque it, we’ve got that stuff.  I was hoping for some real food,” the man said, turning around and going back to a lean-to and sitting down.

Ryck was astounded.  His team was there to get these people off the planet, and that was how the guy acted? The rest of the people seemed more excited, though, and he forced his thoughts back to his mission.

“Who’s in charge here,” he asked the group as a whole.

“That would be me,” another woman answered, an older version of Tara.  “Kata Jun.” 

“Lieutenant Ryck Lysander, Federation Marines.  How many people do you have here?”

“We’ve got 25 GenAg staff and two of the commission researchers.  This is Dr. Jarvis, from the commission,” she said, pointing at the young, fit looking man who had stepped up to stand beside Kata.

“What about your security?  Where are the legionnaires or company security?”

“We didn’t have any legionnaires where we were.  Just GenAg security. 
Lieutenant Galstone and six of the researchers took off to lead the capys away from us.  If not, none of us would be here now,” Kata told him.

“You were being pursued by the capys?”

“Yes, from the second day.  We fled the best we could, but there was no way we were going to outrun them.  Four of the security team went back to ambush them, you know, to give us more time, but I don’t think it worked.  They never slowed.  So Dr. Keasey told us to take off our clothes.  We ditched them into a well head, then ran into the bushes and hid while the researchers and the rest of the security team led them away.  Then we came here to wait as they ordered us to do.  We couldn’t fight them, you see,” she told him a little defensively.

“Who was the senior researcher here?”

“That would be Dr. Kopowski,” Jarvis offered.

Grubbing shit!
Ryck thought to himself.  Dr. Georg Kopowski was on the list of “high value” researchers, one who had to be brought back.

“Where is Dr.
Kopowski?” he asked.

“He went with the security team.  He said he had to observe how the capys reacted,” Jarvis told him.

“And where did they all go?” Ryck asked, wishing he didn’t have to pull all this information out piece-by-piece.

“They said they would draw them away and either come back here or meet us at Station 448,” Kata answered.

Ryck held back a sigh.  “And where is Station 448?” he asked calmly, passing Kata the plaspage map.

Both she and Jarvis looked at it, and then Kata pointed to a spot on the map.  “Here.”

Ryck looked at it.  His team had landed not 800 meters from the station.  If he had known, he could have gathered them up and brought them here.  Well, he had to go back.

“We need all of your group together, then we need to get to our extraction point here,” he said, pointing to the primary LZ on the map.  “Time is short, so I need you to get ready.  I need everybody to clean up.  There is a stream there, so use it.  The capys probably have a good sense of smell, so we have to be odor-free.”

Ryck didn’t know if that was true or not, but he needed the group to have a purpose, to feel human again.  Besides, he simply did not like their smell.

“I’m going to leave SSgt Samuelson and Cpl Caruthers here with you, and Sgt Gutierrez  and I are going to go gather up the rest of you.  We should be back in six hours if we make good time, so everybody, get ready.”

He reached into his pack and pulled out his extra skivvies and his one extra blouse and trou, handing them to Sams.  “Get more from the rest and get these passed out.  We’re going to be going through some thick shit, and they need all the protection they can.  See if you can work up some Robinson Crusoe leggings, at least, for the rest while Crutch and I are gone.  If we don’t make it back in eight hours, take them to the LZ.  We’ve got about 12 hours before pick-up.”

“Roger that.  Keep your head down.  If you can’t find them, don’t waste too much time, OK, sir?”

“If I’m not back in eight, I’m either not coming back or we went directly to the LZ.  So don’t you do anything else.  Don’t try and find us.  Get these people to the LZ.  That’s an order, Sams,” Ryck said gently.

He turned to get some information about Station 448.  It was an atmosphere monitoring installation.  It sampled the air, conducting any number of tests that went beyond Ryck after “humidity” and then transmitted that data to a central relay.  Ryck didn’t like that it transmitted data.  The capys would be able to detect that.

As he was about to leave, laughter rang through the camp.  Three men and two women were splashing water on each other in the creek.  One of the guys jumped on the other and pushed him under.  They weren’t clean yet, but they were getting there.  It was amazing how a simple thing like getting clean could raise morale.  Kata Jun should have realized that and kept discipline.  Ryck might have been a little harsh on her, but she was the leader, so she should have led.  It wasn’t the Marines’ job to come in and do that.

“You ready, Crutch?” he asked Cpl Caruthers.

“Born ready, Toad.”

“Then let’s diddiho.”

Ryck gave Sams a wave as he turned to push back through the brush, following the creek until they broke into the teak forest.  The team had just come through the same route, and while capys could have moved in during the interim, Ryck thought the chances were reasonable, and given the time crunch, he and Caruthers moved at a pretty good clip. Within two-and-a-half hours, they were back at their LZ.  They slowed down then, becoming more tactical, as they covered the last 800 meters to Station 448.

A hundred meters out, Ryck knew something had happened, something bad.  He couldn’t see anything yet, but the feeling almost overwhelmed him.  He motioned for Caruthers to move alongside him, and the two Marines, weapons at the ready, crept forward. The smell hit them first, and Ryck’s heart dropped. 

The first body was face-down in the grass. The bloated body, inflating the sky-blue uniform of GenAg security, left no doubt that the man was long dead.  Ryck was tempted to turn the man over, but there was no real reason to do so.  The two Marines moved forward as they came across more bodies, either separate or in small groups.  Trees around them showed the scars of a recent battle, so the jimmylegs had put up a fight.  The first civilian body was crouched by the base of a tree.  Ryck didn’t want to, but he pulled the corpse back so he could see the shirt.  The nametag read “Mukado.”  He carefully lowered the body back to its original position. 

It was Caruthers who found Dr. Kopowski.  He softly called Ryck over.  The doctor had one of the security guard’s side arms, a huge .44 cal auto.  It looked like he had gone out fighting.  There were no capy bodies around the station, but Ryck hoped the doctor had taken a few with him.

Ryck pushed the body over.  It wasn’t bloated, but it was in a fairly advanced stage of decomposition.  That was another sign of terraforming that had progressed quite far—Terran bacteria was present, Ryck noted dispassionately.  He had to be dispassionate.  Otherwise, he could lose focus.

He opened the doctor’s side pocket and took out his PA.  The doctor had a super, high speed PA, one with many more bells and whistles, the purpose of which Ryck didn’t even begin to know. Ryck had been briefed on them, though, and he knew he was to retrieve it if the doctor himself could not be brought back.  If it had been powered down during the fight, and the doctor would have been briefed to that effect, it should have survived a capy energy blast.  If it had been powered up, it was toast.  Ryck would turn it over when they got out of here and let the experts mine the PA for what was in it.  Ryck hoped that whatever that was, it was worth the lives of the 18 people rotting around Station 448 on GenAg 13.

He and Caruthers checked the other bodies.  They gathered up the lieutenant’s PA, but even to the layman’s eyes, it was obvious it had been fried.  They took it anyway, not knowing if anything could be salvaged.  One of the security team had a photo in his hand, the same hand that was clutched around the trigger of his beamer.  A holo would have been fried, but the photo, embedded into an almost indestructible plaspage sheet, was undamaged.  It depicted a young woman, her sari exposing her very pregnant belly.  Ryck eased the photo out of the man’s hand and promised to somehow get it back to the woman.

“OK, Crutch, take some shots of the area.  Get each body.  We won’t be able to recover them now, and if the planet gets interdicted, we never will, so let’s get a record and give it to GenAg so they can inform the families. 

Marines generally had a low opinion of jimmylegs, even if many one-enlistment Marines signed on with the corporations after they got out.  But these men had fought and died trying to save their charges.  That deserved respect.

As soon as Caruthers finished with the photos, the two Marines left the station to make their way back to the camp in the box canyon.  Three hours later, they emerged from the bushes and into the camp.

In the six intervening hours, there had been a sea change.  The people were clean, but more than that, they were looking eager.  Most were still naked, but the Marines’ extra clothing had been partitioned out.  Others had what looked like banana leaves, but probably weren’t, tied to their legs.  All of the men had their balls and dicks restrained with braided leaves of some sort, although Dr. Jarvis had claimed one of the sets of underwear.  The other three pair were worn by women, as were the four pair of utility trousers.  Those braided underwear were going to chafe, and they might not last long, but they could protect the men’s junk for a little while, at least.

Sams and Gutierrez came up at their approach.

“All dead,” Ryck said quietly.  “Probably right after they led the capys away.”

Kata and several others came up, and Ryck told them that the others were gone.  One woman screamed out, almost collapsing, and was taken away by two other women.

“She was engaged to one of the security team,” Kata said matter-of-factly.

Ryck noticed that she had taken one of the pairs of trouser.  Her sister, though, Tara, was still naked.  She had let others wear what the Marines had given up.

“We need to move out in 15 minutes,” Ryck told those gathered around him.  “Please, get everyone ready.  For those who need help, let’s assign two people each to them so one can take over when the first gets tired.  We don’t want to have to stop until we get to the LZ.”

“LZ?” Kata asked.

“Landing Zone.   Where the shuttles will pick us up.  We need to be there on time.  If we’re late, we could get caught up in a full-fledged battle, and if that happens, no one will be worrying about what happens to us.  OK?  Let’s get moving.”

As everyone turned to get ready, Tara came up to Ryck and stood in front of him, hand on one hip in a pose of dominance.  All cleaned up, Ryck couldn’t help but notice that she was quite attractive.  Short and compact, she looked both feminine and powerful at the same time.

“Yes?” he asked, wondering what was up.

“I told your Staff Sergeant there, Samuelson, to give his boots to Reiko.  She’s the pregnant woman there, and she can’t be marching barefoot.  We barely got her here, and that was when she was only six-and-a-half months along.  He told me no.”

“And?”

“And I want you to tell him to give her his boots.  And you other three, we have some people who are going to have a hard time.  They need the boots, too.”

“No.”

“No?” she said incredulously, stepping forward, thrusting her chest up and out in aggression with her fists clenched, not in any form of sexuality.

“That’s right.  No.”

Ryck was about to explain when she went off, moving closer and putting her face centimeters from his chin.  “You are here to support us.  We pay our taxes for you, and it’s your job.  I’m telling you to give up your boots!”

Ryck put his hands on her shoulders and gently, but firmly, pushed her back. “No, our job is to save your lives.  And if we have to fight, it will be up to the four of us.  We need to be able to fight, and that means run, kick, whatever.  And that, Ms. Jun, means we need to be wearing our boots.  We are not giving up our weapons nor our boots.”

With that, he turned and walked off before he could hear any reply she might have.

“She ask, I mean tell you about the boots?” Sams asked as Ryck walked over.

“Yep.”

“Stupid little bitch.  Kept harping on me while you were gone, threatening me with her ‘powerful’ friends who could kill my career.”

“Yeah, stupid, but her heart’s in the right place.  Notice she’s the only management type who didn’t take any of our clothes?”