The First Casualty

The First Casualty By Mike Moscoe


Chapter One

Every alarm in Sergeant Mary Rodrigo's space suit went off at once. Red lights flashed on her eyeball as her heads-up display demanded her attention. She ignored them.

Mary had five moles laying a minefield for her. Mines were tricky beasts. Laying a field from underground was a tight bitch, not to be left to unsupervised remotes. Twitching her right hand, she froze them in place.

Mary twisted her right wrist and blinked twice, cycling her heads-up display to the screen her alarms were so hot on. The newly deployed infrared sensors were screaming about hot targets. But there weren't supposed to be any— yet!

She chinned her mike to a new channel. “Lek, we got a problem. Either our sensors are spooked, or the colonials got here without you knowing.”

“Not bloody likely,” the old guy said with a chuckle. “Check the angles from the two outer sensors, girl. We've picked up the Colly attack fleet coming around Elmo Four!”

“Acid crap,” Mary swore. “They're that sensitive!”

“Bet they made a fuel scoop and got their balloon heat shields out, “Dumont said beside her, “What a ride for real, not just a vid-game,” the young man from the streets said wistfully.

“I better pass this to the LT,” Mary growled. “Let's get back to the mines.” In the end, even Dumont and his street kids had voted her for sergeant, but that didn't mean he couldn't give her plenty of lip before he did what she said. Today, without a word, Dumont went back to putting in mines. On the other side of Mary, reliable Cassie had never quit work on the minefield.

Mary switched to the command channel. “Lieutenant, we got targets.”

“Sergeant, where the hell have you been? What?” His voice died in mid-question as Mary passed through the visual. “What... Where ... How ... ?” he stammered.

“This is Major Henderson at battalion. What have you got for me?” So the battalion CO was lurking on their command channel, or had an alert on it. Considering all the lurking and alerts Lek had rigged through the brigade's net, Mary had no complaint.

She shut up; let the young officer talk to the man. Only when the wait stretched and started to bend did she speak. “Our infrared sensors have picked up the colonials coming around Elmo Four. We don't have an ETA on them,” she said, though she suspected Lek did by now. No need telling management what they didn't want to hear from dumb worker bees.

“Brigade finally risked a radar sweep about the time the bandits went behind the gas giant,” battalion drawled. “I'll pass this report along. Colonials are right on schedule.”

Which was not what the command net had been saying for the last fifteen hours. Lek had warned Mary not to believe the official word from HQ. She'd learned long ago not to trust what a foreman said. The old electronic wizard had been passing along to Mary and the rest of the unemployed miners the straight dope.

Battalion signed off; the young LT found his voice.

“'Sergeant, what the hell is going on here? We've got to talk.”

What the sergeant had going on here was her own usual go at making everyone happy, to give the LT what he wanted, and the rest of the platoon what they wanted. What Mary wanted was to be light-years away from all this with a beer in one hand and a warm hunk on her shoulder. But today, nobody was getting what they wanted. With a sigh, Mary got ready for a long talk.

Captain Anderson, commander, 97th Defense Brigade, frowned at his screen. “Since when does a leg infantry platoon have infrared sensors that good? Not that I'm complaining, but...”

His XO, Commander Inez Umboto, grinned at the display, showing no sign of surprise. “Half the troops of that platoon are out-of-work miners. Remember the complaints you fielded from several mine administrators about missing equipment, even a jet cart?”

“God, those things are expensive. Even the Navy can't afford 'em. Though I'd love to have one.”

Inez's grin dripped admiration for the culprits. “You may. Each company of the First of the Eighty-eighth has one platoon heavy with miners. All three weighed in heavy at boarding but not enough to complain about.” She paused for a moment. “You remember how tickled Comm was to get all those extra channels. It was an old miner, pulling boards from a 'damaged parts' box, that got them for us.”

Captain Anderson raised an eyebrow. “You didn't tell me.”

“Sir, a good exec doesn't bother her boss with the details.”

“What else haven't you bothered me with, Izzy?”

“I wish I knew. There's a shit-pot of stuff out there, and I've only scratched the surface. Despite the rumors, I am only human and rarely can be in more than three places at once.”

Anderson ignored the humor; today he needed an exec who could be in a dozen places at once. Scowling down at his command display, he shook his head. He'd fought the coming battle hundreds of times in his forty-year career—on the computer display.

Now he was fighting it for real, and it was going wrong in ways even the craziest umpire would not have thrown at him in a war game. Why had a picket boat been waiting for them the moment they jumped into this worthless system? Why was a major colonial force reacting in only seventy-two hours?

He'd expected problems on his side. Lasers were missing parts; power plants were missing cables; crates were miscoded, misplaced, or just plain missing. Most of his grunts were ransacking containers, chasing the critical parts he needed to get the central defenses up. Without them, the colonials could land smack dab in the middle of his base crater. He'd expected time to work all this out. Only one platoon from each company had been shoved forward to block the three cracks in the crater wall.

Everything had gone too fast or too wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the sensors from that platoon would let him give the colonials a surprise or two.

Mary took a deep breath and tried to give the lieutenant an answer he'd like. “I set up the sensors you ordered, sir.” She keyed up the different coverages she'd deployed: video, thermal, radar,

electromagnetic. She ignored the Navy issue crap—they were too big and too noisy to be anything but targets.

“We don't have all that gear, Sergeant. How'd you do it?” That was two questions. Mary chose to answer the easy one. With a flick of her wrist, she called up the schematic of the crater rim and the array she'd dug through it. “I used diggers from the mines to set this up. I got the place covered.”

She activated the laser designators one by one, let them sweep the broken ground in front of the pass the platoon was ordered to hold at all cost.

“By God, you do have it covered.” The LT whistled. “But how? The engineers are still at brigade. How'd you do this?”

Mary let her breath out slowly. How do you explain to a kid that never wanted to be anything but a toy soldier what it's like to spend twenty years of your life in the asteroid mines, to never want to be anything but a miner? And to get your pink slip and draft notice in the same envelope. “Our last shift at the mine, we figured if something might save our life, and it wasn't welded to the deck, we might as well borrow it. Boss men had just installed a lot of new equipment.” Which was why they could afford to let half their workforce go—the senior half. They'd gotten all kind of media plaudits ... and ignored the seniority clause of their labor contract.

Mary shrugged, or tried to. Armored space suits didn't allow much body language. “Who knows what was gonna be surplus, anyway?” Mary knew damn well the old equipment had already been sold off. She and the other members of her investment club had wanted to buy it. They were close, so close to setting up their own mine, having their own place, being their own people. But the gear went without an auction. And Mary and her friends got themselves a war.

So Mary had walked off her last shift with a jet cart.

“We're about done with the minefield,” Mary finished.

“Hurry up and get back here,” the LT answered.

Now Mary did fidget. “Sir, remember our deal.”

“What part of it?” The LT's voice was cautious.

The first time Mary was elected sergeant had been a joke, a setup by a tough drill instructor to break his ex-civilians of their easygoing ways. The miners voted for her; Dumont 's kids voted for him, but there were more miners. Mary was supposed to fall flat on her face. Instead, she'd found what it took to pull this angry bunch of people together. Sometimes begging. sometimes cajoling, sometimes threatening.

They’d coalesced into a team for her. Maybe not the team the DI had in mind, but a team that pulled together when they had to.

The lieutenant had shadowed the platoon the last few days of boot camp, long enough to see how things were. Then he'd taken Mary aside. “You know how to work this bunch,” he'd said.

“Seems that way,” she'd answered cautiously.

“I know how to fight. You know how to make them work. Together, we can get them out of this war alive. If anybody can. You game to work with me?”

He'd been the first to even mention survival; she'd taken his offered hand. For the last two months they'd been a team. Now, she'd find out just how far she could stretch it.

“Lieutenant, I can't leave this network I've built. In the mines, you get too far away from the work, something goes wrong and you can't fix it. From here I can fix anything.”

“Sergeant, I've told you a dozen times, your job is to tell other people what to do. Assign somebody to stay out there.”

“Can't sir. If it's too dangerous for me, it's too dangerous for anyone.” She had a long wait for his answer.

“You dug in good?” he asked.

Mary glanced around the cavern she and Cassie had turned into an observation post—maybe a tomb. Once the servos swung the half-meter-thick stone back, it would be well closed. A billion years ago when the crater was made, a pinnacle had slid from the still molten rock. It sheltered her outpost from observation from across the plain where the attack would come. “Dug in as good as time allows, sir.”

There was a long pause. “Okay, Mary, you win this one. Why didn't you tell me what you had in mind?”

“Sir, you said you didn't want anyone on this side of the rim, just a few sensors. In the mines, when management makes up its mind, they don't want more talk.”

“What I meant. Sergeant. was I wanted all of the platoon behind the rim, where their artillery couldn't wipe us out. Maybe I didn't say it as well as I should have. When this is over, we've got to talk about how to talk.”

“Yes, sir.” Mary said. Talking was what she had in mind. She checked the one digger. Her best, it was halfway across the plain, towing one of Lek's fiber-optic patch lines behind it. If it did its job, even secure communications wouldn't keep Mary and the rest of the miners from having a talk with the colonials before anybody got killed.

“Captain Anderson, sensors here. My witches have something we think you'll like.”

“Did she say bitches?” Umboto grinned.

“Down, Commander, we've got a fight coming, and that college professor is on our side.”

“Oh, right, I keep forgetting,” the commander mumbled.

The captain tapped the comm portion of his board. “Commander Miller, what have you got for me?”

Immediately his board changed to display the gas giant and their moon. Three red lines inched from the giant toward them. “The colonial ships are right on schedule. I expect the vanguard in sixteen minutes. The main body is ninety seconds behind them, led by a pair of superheavy cruisers. Jane's Fighting Ships says they have an even dozen nine-point-two-inch laser cannons.” Only three months from college lecture halls, Miller did slip easily into lecture mode. Commander Umboto hated it. Captain Anderson put up with it. “There are two more heavy cruisers with eight-inchers. Rest are light cruisers with six-inchers. They're in three lines abreast.”

“Probably plan to flatten us in one pass,” the XO observed.

“I agree with Commander Umboto,” Miller said.

That had to be the first time the two women had agreed on anything. Anderson wished they'd picked a better subject. “I concur,” he said. And if they flattened the 97th, the only defenses left to Pitt's Hope would be those in the Pitt system. A major industrial and population center like Pitt's Hope had to be defended here, at least one system out, where the collateral damage from rockets and lasers wouldn't kill a million people. The problem was how to defend this worthless bit of rock. “XO, how's my Crossbow Project coming?”

The commander's smile was all teeth as she snapped to and gave him a drill field salute. “Ancient as you are, sir, but ready at your command.”

“I just hope they're as good. Sensors, I need fast and accurate altitude information.”

“Not going to be as easy as I'd hoped,” Miller answered. “They just dumped their scoop balloon shields and fell off the infrared scanners.”

Inez and the captain exchanged nods; that was a critical requirement. No commander willingly took a big, hot flag into a fight, but if he didn't have spare shields, an admiral might have to. This one had dumped his, and was shooting right into Anderson 's trap. Assuming I haven't set a fox trap for a bear.

Unaware of the silent communication between the captain and his XO, Miller continued. “That infantry platoon has some damn fine sensors. We've hyped up the gain on the video and are tracking the Unity fleet, but, Captain, these bastards are coming on fast. They're not going to make any sudden changes.”

Anderson nodded. “At my age, predictable is nice. Even dull would be fine. But let's not assume anything, keep the reports coming.” He turned to Inez. “I need you at Crossbow.”

“That's where I'm headed.”

What Anderson really needed was a battle squadron riding top cover for him. “Where is my damn Navy?” he muttered.

Captain Mattim Abeeb needed for nothing. He had a beer, a quiet corner in a relaxed bar... and three active readers. Everything he needed for another long evening studying what the Navy thought a drafted skipper needed to know. Then Buck Ramsey stormed through the barroom door.

Damn the Navy. Damn them all to hell. First they commandeer my ship. Then they blow it to hell.”

A dozen other merchant officers, also cramming for the commissions they'd been impressed into, glanced up, but Buck locked eyes with Mattim. “I've pushed that ship through space for ten years without a scratch. They have her three months and she's gone.” He stumbled toward Mattim.

Mattim put down his beer, pushed his readers aside, and made ready to give Buck his full attention. If the Navy so much as dented his Maggie D during the overhaul they were giving her, Mattim would not stop at a bar. He'd head for Navy headquarters with a bomb in his hip pocket.

“What happened?” he asked as Buck plopped into his booth.

“That damn power plant, Matt. They're strapping half of a gigawatt dirt side power plant onto our ships.”

“Certainly your engineer...”

“Daisy quit over Navy guff. They gave me one of theirs to replace her. 'Top of the line,' they told me. 'Knows everything there is about power plants.' Well, he's learning how to dodge pitchforks now, 'cause he blew the whole stern of my ship to hell. Every one of my engineers . . . except Daisy.”

Buck was running out of steam; in a moment the full meaning of his words would slam into him. A waitress showed up dressed in a smile and not much else. Her lack of attire was lost on Mattim and Buck. Anger was crumbling into grief as it hit the captain just how many of his old crew were dead. Mattim spoke without taking his eyes off his friend. “Whiskey. Irish whiskey. Your best.”

“The bottle,” Buck added. “Dear God, Matt, all of them.”

Mattim watched helpless as tears rolled down his fellow captain's cheeks. On the vid above the bar, it was halftime at the zero-g lacrosse game. A grinning announcer told them the evening news had first vids of the marine landing in the next star system out. “An impregnable defense that will keep any rim crazies from getting close to Pitt's Hope.”

“Bloody damn hope so, 'cause there's no f*cking Navy,” a civvy at the bar mumbled ... loud enough that the officers in training had no trouble hearing.

Mattim got an arm around Buck's shoulders just fast enough to keep his friend in his seat. Still, Matt had to agree with the dirtbag. Until the Navy quit wasting time teaching merchant captains what they'd learned twenty years ago. Until the Navy turned loose the engineers like his own Ivan who knew the power plant of his ship better than his wife's body, the Navy was going to get junk, not the made-over warships they wanted.

And the marines would be on their own.

The bottle arrived. He and Buck began the long, slow process of getting the pain out.

Sergeant Mary Rodrigo edged her mole a fraction higher, checking the echo carefully. There was still two centimeters of dirt between it and the surface of the pass. She backed it out and had it shove the mine back where it had been. To any surface scan, the gap was as virgin as it had been a billion years ago when the cooling rock of the rim cracked and split open.

Good.

“Old lady, what we gonna do?” Dumont was the coolest of the kids, which was why they followed him. Now he was one of Mary's corporals and had listened in on the channel Lek used to pass along what was really happening. He knew the colonials were due any time now, and the rest of the company was a long way out. “I mean, some of those Colly troops were killing people before us street kids were hatched. They gonna stomp right over us and not even slow down. We got to get gone from here.”

If they ran, they'd die. “Du,” Mary cajoled, “we've dug you good solid holes with the mining gears. Hunker down. If we hang together, we can make it through together.” How many times had Mary said that? In the mines it worked. Would it work on a battlefield?

“You old folks always got something up your sleeves. What you dreamed up this time?”

Mary never lied to Cassie, Lek, or other miners who'd saved her ass too often to count. The same didn't apply to Dumont and his kids. Still, she'd rather distract him than lie to him. “You seen the minefield. You know the sensors I've put up. Your girls got us the extra rockets.”

“Yeah, some of the girls traded real nice for that shit. But none of us gonna die for that joking green flag.” Dumont shook his head; most of the movement was lost in the suit.

Mary hadn't asked how Dumont 's girls got the extra gear, especially the big rockets. She was willing to do anything to see her team come out of this alive; they were too. Maybe Dumont deserved the whole truth; Mary checked to make sure she was on one of Lek's very private channels. “Maybe we can talk to the colonials before the shooting starts. Maybe we don't have to kill each other.”

“You think so?” Dumont didn't sound nearly as happy about the prospect as Mary had expected. “Them Colly goons don't stop to ask no questions. They just roll up to you and over.”

“I heard that too. We'll try to catch them early. And we got enough here to slow them down. Maybe to talk to them. If not, to stop them. Trust me, Du, we're gonna get through this.”

“I'm thinking maybe we just might,” the kid said softly.

“I'm thinking the last mine's in and we ought to get back.” Cassie broke from her concentration, her right hand the only part of her moving as she supervised her moles. She stretched tall, then wide. “Sure you don't want company?” Cassie offered. “It's gonna get lonesome out here.”

Mary owed her life to Cassie too many times to count, and she'd returned the favor often enough. It would be good to have someone here, someone to talk to when the time got slow, someone to share the burden with when it got through to Mary what she was doing, really doing. “Thanks, Cassie. You're good, but I got to do this one myself. No sharing.”

“God go with you,” Cassie whispered as she gave Mary a hug, battle armor to battle armor, and ducked out the hole and onto the jet cart.

Dumont clapped Mary on the shoulder. “Suit looks good. Take care, Sergeant,” and he was gone.

As Mary ordered the jacks to swivel the massive stone door closed and settle it solidly in place, it dawned on her. That was the first time Dumont had ever called her “Sergeant” when the lieutenant wasn't listening. “He picked a hell of a time to get respectful,” she muttered through a grin.

Mary cycled her heads-up display through the sensor coverage of the gap and both sides of the crater rim. Her diggers were charged; if she had to juggle something, she was ready. Thanks to the jet cart, there were no footprints on this side of the rim. She switched to a view of the platoon. Using the excavator from the mine, everyone was dug in solid. The LT had planned to use the rill for cover. Half the platoon was still dug in there, but two squads now were scattered behind it. Good.

But sensors showed an awful lot of tracks pointing to where the fire teams had gone to ground. Mary wasn't the only one checking. “Sergeant, you on line yet?”

“Yes, Lieutenant.”

“We need to dust this place. Make footprints disappear.”

“Yes, sir. Nan , use the cart and all the nitrogen we got left. Blow away the footprints and cool down any hot spots. I'll pass you the sensor picture.”

“Will do, boss.”

On Mary's screen, Nan was out, gliding over the ground in the cart, blowing compressed nitrogen. The lieutenant was also up, walking toward the crest of the gap.

“Lieutenant?”

“Sergeant, I'd like to see the other side, too. You can't have all the fun.” This was the kid's first battle; she'd heard the longing in his voice as he talked about it. She'd needed the same chance to taste the ground, get the feel of how the battle would unfold. The kid was green as slime, but not dumb.

“Aye, aye, Lieutenant. I've turned the mines off.”

“Lek showed me your plan. You've set up a good attrition field, Sergeant. Thin them down before we hit them. You dug in deep?” The video showed him standing at the crest, slowly turning his suit to take in the scene before him.

“Pretty deep, sir, in a cavern with a half-meter-thick stone covering the entrance.”

“Skunks, five minutes out,” the command circuit interrupted. “Everyone to cover.”

“Well, everything's done.” The Lieutenant turned and started a low-gravity hop down the gap. “Now we do our duty. See you when we're done, Sergeant.”

“Yes, sir,” Mary said. One way or the other, she would.

Major Ray Longknife sat, his back ramrod straight. From the spare seat on the bridge of the Unity attack transport Friendship he had a good view—of the red Unity banner with its yellow lightning bolt painted on the ship's nose, and the blinking displays that made his hands clench into fists. The Navy was screwing the ground-pounders— again!

The admiral had promised a cakewalk when he'd ordered the 2nd Guard Assault Brigade aboard ship on an hour's notice. “We'll blow those Earthie scum away with relativity bombs, and seize Pitt's Hope before they know what hit them.”

Well, the relativity bombs hadn't hit a damn thing. He'd known they were in trouble when Rita—correction, Senior Pilot Nuu—lowered her beautiful eyes at the admiral's bloody optimism. She'd explained during the three-day run out here that the jump point they'd be using was horribly unstable. She'd been right.

Every ship exited the jump point on a different heading. Each captain followed his orders and launched bombs as soon as he was through and before slowing. None hit even close to where ever so slight hints suggested his enemy was. Damn!

The jump had one benefit. Scattered and low on fuel, the fleet had made a scoop pass on the gas giant. That at least slowed the damn Navy down. The cruisers' lasers might actually hit something on their firing pass.

“Quixote.” Ray snarled the code word. On that order, the admiral would drop the 2nd right in the crater the Earthies were using for their defense. Did he really expect grunts to tilt with windmills and win? There was a second code word, Rosebud, to land the transports outside the crater. One site would even save them a low pass across the Earth defenses. Ray and Senior Pilot Nuu both voted for Rosebud One. Quixote and Rosebud. Computer-generated code names; Ray doubted the admiral even knew who Don Quixote was. He also doubted the admiral had any idea what he was sending the 2nd Guard up against.

Then again, neither did Ray. That was the problem. Wait until you know more, and you'd face more. Boot the Earth hirelings before they dug in, and he might get the easy win the admiral wanted. The 2nd was a proud outfit; it had never lost a battle. Ray would not be its first CO to break that record.

Carefully, Mary settled into an almost comfortable slouch. Whoever designed battle suits had made them great for running, leaping, killing. They hadn't put much thought into “hurry up and wait.” The status lights of the gear around her provided the only light in the cavern. Mary waited; it couldn't be long now.

As the now stretched into a private eternity, Mary found herself with time on her hands and the first time to think in way too long. What are you doing here, girl?

Mary scowled at herself. I’m no girl, and the question has too many answers.

She was here because she had no choice. A couple of kids from Dumont 's gang ran after they got their boot camp “haircut.” Their bodies were found the next day, throats slit, decorated with little green flags and a note from the “Patriots for Humanity.”

Nobody'd been arrested for the murders.

That night, the platoon talked it out after lights out. Dumont and the other kids wanted to go over the wall, head for the hills until the war was over. When Cassie asked them if any of 'em had ever hunted or eaten roots, they got quiet and sullen.

Some of the miners wanted to strike. Lek asked them to read their labor contract, then unfolded his enlistment papers. “Nothin' in here about a labor rep, but it do say we got to obey the orders of our superior officers. I checked. They can shoot us if we don't.”

“They can't shoot all of us,” someone in back whined.

“Two kids ran, two kids dead. How many of you got wives that will raise a stink?” Lek asked. “Got family that have any say at the Commissioner's Office?”

About that time it had dawned on Mary. Slowly she'd stood. “We got nobody,” she said, looking around the room. Nobody out there.” She jerked a thumb at the rest of the world. “But we do got somebody. We got each other.” She opened her arms like some kind of corner preacher—only she felt it. “We got to look out for each other, 'cause sure as pay's gonna be shorted, nobody else gonna look out for us. We can't get out of this. But we can get through it. We can if we do it together.”

Which had probably been her first step on the way to being the platoon's sergeant. Cassie told her, after the vote,

We need a ma. You're the closest some of us will ever come to one.”

That had to be a laugh; Mary had never known her own ma or pa.

So, to keep her friends alive, Mary was here, getting ready to kill a lot of people in a war that didn't mean a damn. And when it was over, the only jobs open would probably be farther out in what was now enemy space. Why not do the job-hunting as prisoners of war? Mary checked; the digger burrowing under the plain was about four klicks out, halfway to the escarpment. “Hurry up, little mole. If they ain't using radios, your little wire patch may be the only way we can get a word in edgewise.”