Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty (55 page)

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Authors: Jean Johnson

BOOK: Theirs Not To Reason Why: A Soldier's Duty
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She knew, though no one else did, that the Lyebariko had planned for this in case their latest attempt was thwarted yet again. With the
Liu Ji
orbiting in a loop that had taken them to the far side of the planetoid’s surface, they no doubt thought the Terrans had moved on to their next patrol spot. They hadn’t. Not because Ia had warned Captain Ferrar, but because Oberon’s governor insisted on throwing a party for the meioas who kept coming back and saving their hides.
The only thing she had done about this potential disaster was electrokinetically trigger the dome sirens about eight minutes early, saving thousands of lives. Everyone was safely tucked underground when the first enemy missile struck. Well, safely, except for this lot.
“Keep digging,” Ia urged them. She kept her tone matter-of-fact, aware just how close most of them were to despair. The noise of the bombardment had stopped hours ago. She knew it was because the
Liu Ji
had been joined by another warship, driving away the Lyebariko’s smaller, less heavily armed fleet. The others didn’t.
Private Gunga stumbled on a patch of grit and dropped the rock he was carrying. He cursed and hopped, then sagged to the ground. “Gods . . . I’m so tired . . .”
“We just need to dig far enough to get to the next air pocket,” Ia urged them. She knew exactly where it was, and that it wasn’t far away, now. She also knew it connected to a functioning lifesupport bay, which would supply them with just enough air to stay alive until the others could find and dig them free. “They have oxygenators all over the place in these tunnels.”
“Just not in the patch
we
picked,” Hunters grunted, briefly lifting his head. He gasped and panted, holding himself still. “Goddamn collarbone . . . goddamn arm . . .”
“Think of something else,” Ia urged.
“Like what?” Lok’tor asked. The corporal was from the 1st Platoon, and sweating even more than Ia. “Like the fact I’m gonna have to piss in one of those cups in a few more minutes, just so I don’t bust my bladder? And then, what, drink it?”
Gunga chuckled, gathering himself to get up again. “Won’t taste any worse than that piss they called beer.” He regained his feet with a grunt, only to stagger and drop. “Ugh . . . I don’t feel so good . . .”
“Hold it together, Gunga,” Ia told him. “This is no worse than Hell Week, and you know it.”
“Hell, this
shova
’s
easier
than Hell Week,” Mitchell muttered from her position on the floor next to Hunters. Her legs were broken and swollen, though at least neither of them had compound fractures.
“Yeah, you just get to . . . uhn! Lie on your back, while we do all the work,” Lok’tor grunted. She staggered as well, stumbling back against the wall. “. . . Oh, that’s not good. The . . . air is getting thick in here.”
“Keep working, Corporal,” Ia ordered, forced to pick her way up and down the rock pile now that two of them were taking a break. “We only had three strikes that sounded like they hit close overhead. The damage to these tunnels can’t be that bad.”
“Says you,” Gunga grunted. He tried to push up again, only sag back down. “Permission to . . . to pass out, Sergeant?”
Ia didn’t stop working. She could feel the air growing stale, too, but knew they needed to keep shifting the rubble between them and the oxygen they needed. “Permission denied, soldier.”
“. . .
Shakk
you.”
She didn’t take offense. She slid a large rock halfway down the slope, ignoring the thumps and bruises of several smaller rocks rattling down around her ankles. Like the others, she was clad in civilian clothes for the party, though she at least had been forewarned enough to wear pants and calf-length boots. Heaving the stone up, she carried it to the far end of their patch of tunnel and let it drop with a cracking
crunch
on several of the others.
Turning back, Ia played her wrist unit light over the faces of her fellow soldiers as she strode past. The beam wasn’t very strong, but it was enough to make them flinch. “Marines
do not
give up. Marines
do not
leave anyone behind. Marines
do not
lie down and die. And so long as
I
am your ranking officer, I will do
everything
in my power to make sure you survive.
“We just need to dig far enough to reach the next pocket of air.”
“Hey! I think I found . . . something . . . Oh . . . oh, God.” Davisson, Gunga’s teammate, scrabbled at the debris shoved aside by Ia’s falling rock. Gunga shoved off the floor and Lok’tor off the wall, joining them in digging out the dusty shoe he had found . . . and the foot it was attached to. And the leg. “Oh . . . God.”
Ia joined them. In grim silence, they unburied the crushed corpse of Private First Class Paul McDaniels, 1st Platoon C Squad Beta. Once he was free from the debris, the others slumped to their knees, heads bowed. Ia bowed her head for a moment as well, then stooped and picked him up.
“Marines don’t leave
anyone
behind, if we can help it,” she murmured. “We’ll bring him out with us, and anyone else we find.”
“Gods damn you to the foulest depths of Gehenna!” Gunga half shouted, half panted. “We are
not
getting out! We are going to
die
down here!”
“Is that what you believe?” Ia asked calmly. The smell of dirt and blood and worse made the air thicker than she wanted to breathe. Turning away, she carried McDaniel’s body to the far end of the pocket that had saved most of them, and knelt to lay him in state.
“What kind of fairy tale do you live in, Sergeant?” That came from Lok’tor. “We’re trapped down here. We can’t get a signal through, we’re running out of air . . .
nobody
knows we’re down here!”
“I don’t live in a fairy tale. I just refuse to give up.” She laid the battered hands at their owner’s sides and murmured a benediction. “May whatever god you prayed to have compassion for your soul, Paul . . . and give strength to your fellow Marines to carry on.”
“Carry on where?” Mitchell asked. She coughed and panted, watching Ia rise and turn toward her and the others. “The air’s . . . so thick . . .”
“That’s because you’re lying down where the carbon dioxide is piling up. Tang, Davisson, shift those rocks and make a platform. We’ll move Hunters and Mitchell up above the worst of it. And then we will keep digging,” Ia told them.
Nobody moved. She tipped her head slightly, studying them, until her gaze fell on Lok’tor.
“You may all want to lie down and die . . . but if we die, then I will be found still trying to dig us out. Still doing
my
duty.” She slapped her left palm on her breastbone and left it there, illuminating her face in the dim glow of its miniature spotlight. “
I
will be found still trying to save your lives.
“Now. Get up, piss in a cup, and get back to moving those rocks, Dinea,” she ordered Lok’tor softly. Implacably. “
You
still have lives to save, too.”
Lok’tor stared back.
Hmongwa, blinking and not quite focusing on anything, shifted on his hip. He scooted closer to the end of the tunnel they had been trying to uncover, scraping grit with each hitch. “I can’t stand . . . and can’t exactly focus . . . but I’m not worn out. I can’t carry anything anywhere, but you prop me up there, Ia, and I’ll pass you the rocks. The others can rest for a while.”
Lok’tor shifted her gaze to him. Watched him
shuff
closer to her end of the tunnel. Slowly, she moved. Pushed from her knees to her feet, and turned back to the remainder of the pile they had shifted, rock by rock, from the far left to the far right for far too long. Davisson met Ia’s gaze only briefly in the dim, patchy light before he, too, turned back to work on the rubble. Tang followed him, murmuring suggestions as the pair shifted of the large pieces into a base for a makeshift ledge.
Stepping up to Hunters, Ia crouched and met both his and Mitchell’s worried looks. “This is going to hurt like hell when we move you, but it’ll give all of us a little more time.”
Mitchell, both of her legs broken, nodded in understanding. “I’m not ready to die.”
“
Shakk!
Watch it, meioa!” Davisson swore, dodging down and back as Lok’tor’s actions shifted the rock pile.
Lok’tor started to slide down with the rocks she had dislodged, then jerked and scrambled upward. That sent more debris scattering down, but the sound of her dragging in a deep, ragged lungful of fresh air made the dangers of her precarious perch not matter. She did it again, silencing everyone.
“Oh, God—air! I can’t
see
anything, but . . .” Another lungful and she slithered back down. “I’m smelling fresh air!”
The other mobile members surged forward, abandoning building the platform in favor of forming another rock-toting chain. Lowering her arm, hiding her face in the darkness, Ia smiled. She’d known how close they were, more or less.
“Work carefully,” she cautioned the others. “Now is
not
the time to break something from carelessness. A Marine never gives up, and a Marine never makes a mistake if it can be helped.”
Gunga grunted and swiped the sweat from his own brow. “Ugh . . . the air’s not clearing fast enough. I still feel like I’m going to pass out, here.”
“Permission still denied, Private,” Ia quipped, moving forward to join them in widening the gap. “Besides, Marines
don’t
faint. We engage the floor in mortal combat.”
The others laughed. They coughed and strained to move large chunks of broken bedrock, but as the gap and its trickle of fresher air widened with each effort, they laughed.
CHAPTER 18
 
Was there any resentment in the troops when I was jumped up from squad sergeant to company sergeant after Sergeant Pleistoch was reassigned? Not in Ferrar’s Fighters. And not from anyone else who knew me on the Hum-Vee/ Johannes circuit. I had earned their trust, and their faith in my abilities. I stayed with the Captain as one year became two, testing psychologically sound and thus fit for continued combat duty. Not everyone can, but in my case, I could, and the military wisely wasn’t going to waste my abilities at a desk job.
Once they moved Battle Platform Johannes into the same system as Oberon’s Rock—I’ll admit, at my suggestion and Captain Ferrar’s formally worded request—it silenced the tech piracy attacks. Of course, that ended up causing other problems down the road in turn. But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I did have the faith of the men and women both in Captain Ferrar’s Company, and on board the Liu Ji. With their faith, we were able to accomplish great things.
~Ia
 
 
MARCH 29, 2492 T.S.
OBSERVATION STATION
IVEZIC
ZELJKO 17 BINARY SYSTEM
 
The setup was perfect.
With Battle Platform
Johannes
relocated by a couple days of travel, their patrol route had been altered to include
Ivezic
Station, located more toward the nadir of the galactic plane. It was more of a combination of refueling depot, mineral refinery, and astronomical research facility than a bustling port of call, but they were pleased to get the contract to service and support the Terran Space Force. And they were pleased to show that, backwater-ish though they were, they were still quite cultured.
Particularly when one of the companies sponsoring the stellar research also sponsored a touring musical production, nudging it into swinging by
Ivezic
for a series of live performances. They also gave the entire crew of the
Liu Ji
and its Marine Company free tickets. Not that the entire crew and company could fit into the station’s modest combination of auditorium and performance theater at one time, but—as Ia knew they would—Captain Sudramara and Captain Ferrar decided the Marines would attend one show and the Navy the other.
As a special treat, the acting company issued invitations to the officers and noncoms to party with them in the theater’s greenroom after the performance. Flattered by the invitation, Ferrar ordered his lieutenants and sergeants to attend both the performance and the party in formal Dress Blacks.
Ia couldn’t have been more pleased than if she herself had lent a hand in setting it all up. Not with such irresistible bait. Not so pleased that she had to pin all of her medals and honors to her dress jacket, with its satin black color and brown satin stripes down the sleeves, but that everything was proceeding exactly as she had foreseen.
Right down to the need, halfway into the party, to visit one of the restrooms. Concluding her business and washing her hands, she lingered at the mirror over the sink. Lingered, and waited, fussing minutely first with her snow-white hair, which had been recently trimmed into a neat, uniform bob cut ending just below her ears. Her hat was still back in the greenroom, which had grown a bit warm from the press of bodies. Once her hair was smoothed enough, to kill some of the intervening minutes, she fussed with the medals pinned to her chest.
By now, she had accumulated several honors. Nine Honor Crosses for exemplary conduct above and beyond the call of duty. Eight Skulls, and twenty-three Crossbones, for taking out or capturing known enemy commanders and noncommissioned officers. Three Target Crosses for exemplary sniper fire, and a Scout Cross for exceptional scouting—that one, she had earned on Oberon’s Rock, along with one of her three Vanguard Stars, and the rarely granted Civilian Award of Merit. It was one of the highest peacetime awards a soldier could earn from a local civilian government; Oberon’s governor had bestowed it upon the members of Ferrar’s Company for their consistent, repeated rescues, not just Ia.

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