War World X Takeover

War World X Takeover By John F. Carr


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS





Once again, thanks go to Jerry Pournelle for allowing me to expand and create new stories in the War World/Empire of Man future history. Secondly, I’d like to thank Don Hawthorne for all his support and enthusiasm for the War World series over the years.


Special thanks go to Larry King, who also maintains a great CoDominium website, for keeping the CoDominium Time Line and for his continuity work on this volume. I’d also like to thank Stephen Shervais for all his help with the War World author’s bible. And, to Dennis Frank, Archivist at St. Bonaventure University.


Also, I owe a debt of gratitude to Victoria Alexander for her editorial assistance and proof reading.


I’d also like to give thanks to all the members of the Copyediting and Post-Proofing Team, Dennis Frank, Doug McElwain, and Larry Hopkins.


A big thank you goes to Alan Gutierrez who, as always, did a wonderful job on the cover art.





CODOMINIUM CHRONOLOGY




1969 Neil Armstrong sets foot on Earth’s moon

1990-2000 Series of treaties between the United States and the Soviet union   creates the CoDominium. Military research and development outlawed.

1995 Nationalist movements intensify

1996 French Foreign Legion forms the basic element of the CoDominium Armed Services.

1998 The Church of New Universal Harmony founded.

2004 Charles Castell is born.

2010-2100 CoDominium Intelligence Services engage in serious effort to suppress all research into technologies with military applications. They are aided by zero-growth organizations.

2010 Habitable planets discovered in other star systems. Commercial exploitation of new worlds begins.

2020 First interstellar colonies are founded. The CoDominium Space Navy and Marines are created, absorbing the original CoDominium Armed Services.

2020 Great Exodus period of colonization begins. First colonists are dissidents, malcontents and voluntary adventurers.

2028 Creation of the Humanity League. Sponsored by the ACLU, Sierra Club and Zero Population groups.

2032 Haven is discovered.

2040 CoDominium Population Control under the aegis of the Bureau of Relocation and Bureau of Corrections begins mass out-system shipments of involuntary colonists.

2041 Edwin Hamilton discovers the first shimmer stones on Haven.

2042 Hamilton sells the location to Dover Mineral Development and is paid a fortune to keep secret the location of their planet of origin.

2043 John Christian Falkenberg, III is born in Rome.

2043 The 26th Marines, Company C, Third Battalion is dispatched to Haven to stop criminal gangs from taking over the colony.

2052 The Shimmer Stone Rush. When the location of shimmer stones becomes public knowledge, it leads to a “rush” of shimmer stones miners.

2055 The ConDominium Bureau of Intelligence orchestrates a revolt by a band of imported criminals, which ends in disaster when their attack on Jamesport fails and their leader, Jumo, is killed.





From Stephen Ulrich’s An Informal History of the CoDominium Marines: the Good, the Bad and the Unbelievable. New Washington Press, 2088.


26th CoDominium Marine Regiment

(Garrison, Provisional)



In the early CoDominium the Marines were an integral part of the CoDominium Armed Services (CAS). They played an important role in keeping peace both on Earth and off-world. The Marines owed their allegiance not to the CoDominium, a vague political entity on distant Terra, but to their Regiment and band of brothers. The CD Marines were the linchpin, along with the CD Navy in keeping the peace on far-flung worlds, as well as at home. For the Line Marines the predominant organization is the regiment, while for the Garrison Marines it’s the battalion. “The Fleet is our Fatherland” and “No politics in the Fleet” are the mottoes of the Line Marines.

At the top rung of the CoDominium Marine Corps are the Fleet Marines. Next come the Line Marines and under them the Garrison Marines. The latter come in descending flavors including pure constabulary or police units such as are kept in reserve for use on Earth. However the bottom rung are the Provisional Regiments also known as Transport Units. The nomenclature comes from the French. An ad hoc unit was called a unit du marche. In theory they were supposed to be groupings of recruits and replacements formed into temporary units to shepherd them to the front. During war time, higher command would often grab these provisional units as units to meet some pressing emergency. Such units existed for months or at most a few years. Some would find themselves permanently on the order of battle (OOB).

The 26th Marine Regiment took its color and unit’s lineage from one such famous French example5Régiment de marche du Thad (RMT, “Ad hoc Regiment of Chad”). It was a proud regiment with a noble history. The same could not be said of the 26th. Regimental HQ is a few aging officers and senior NCO’s getting the last few years for their pension on Luna Base. They do the personnel and accounting work for the scattered companies.

The company for the world Haven was formed by this process. The 26th was tasked by Fleet HQ to provide a garrison for Haven. As was usual this was done in response to political pressure with no prior planning and no addition to the Fleet budget for the expense. Sufficient cadre was found by the usual expedients. First officers and NCO’s of the appropriate ranks were culled from men between assignments, to minimize transport costs these were men either already on Luna or at Wayforth Station.

Major Lassitre was at the station in transit to a court martial on Luna. The conduct unbecoming charge was silly on its face. Even if he had done everything his commander accused him of it at worst merited administrative punishment. However service politics had no way of protecting a mere major without higher ranking patrons from a colonel’s wrath. A company was too small a command for a major in a service with as few officer billets as the Marines but then Lassitre was scarcely in a position to turn it down.

Lieutenant Frasier’s crime was even simpler. He was on Luna without assignment and a second officer was needed. Had he been on assignment to anything, however menial, some other soul’s life would have been wrecked. Instead he became the other officer for the “company”. This was not unusual. The Marine Corps was short of officers both by policy, a high tooth to tail ratio and low percentage of officer slots was part of the mandate of the service, and budget, where units were perpetually under funded with officer slots often going unfilled as an ‘economy’ move.

Two officers are quite less than a company’s worth but then what was sent was only nominally a company. Two officers, some similarly unlucky NCO’s and a bit over a platoon’s worth of men would be sufficient cadre for something that could be called a company in bad light. The NCO’s and men would be warm body requisitions (hit a unit in Luna with a request for two sergeants and two rankers, then live with them sending you the worst troublemakers they had even if they had to pull them off punishment detail to post them).

Over time more cadre would arrive via the same sort of warm body requisitions. There would be permanent requests at Luna and Wayforth from regimental HQ (The battalions of a regiment such as this are purely notional. They have neither commanders nor staff—instead the companies send their reports and receive their orders directly from regimental HQ on Luna for those infrequent occasions where higher command remembers the companies exist at all). These would go into a roster of similar permanent requests from other units almost all of whom had higher priority than the companies of the 26th. Unless a posting was near the bottom of the priority list the 26th would not have been tasked to garrison it. However military personnel systems are nothing if not capricious. There is always some poor soul either unlucky enough or who has offended his superiors sufficiently to be sent on a one-way trip to Haven.


One-way trip it of course was. Again in theory one could be posted elsewhere. However the norm was that when you fell down a career sinkhole sufficient to be posted to the 26th you stayed there until retirement or death. So the growth of the unit to full company size was more a matter of local recruitment. The transports always had a surplus of men with no future and pasts they would as soon forget.

The Marines had recruited such back to when some of these units had actually been part of the Foreign Legion. Pay was not really an issue. The garrison levied on the civilians for food and locally produced products paying in scrip. The officers and men were paid in the same make believe money less any amounts they were sending elsewhere to support dependants or pay fines from past transgressions. The scrip circulated in Castell City (later planet wide). It was money because the stores and bars would accept it as such. They accepted it because to refuse to do so was to incur the wrath of the only force capable of protecting their property. The Marines knew how to make do and the civilians adjusted to what amounted to a form of taxation by fiat currency creation. A Fleet that supported itself in good part by drug sales could not afford to be fussy.