Chapter 4: Loyalty Earned

The Marine Sergeant stepped off the teleport pad slowly, his body tense and every sense stretched to its limit. He looked carefully left and right, almost casually noting the routes of egress as well as all of the shadows large enough to hide an enemy. The corridor was well lit, the troubling, off-gray walls stretching far down the line. There weren’t many shadows but he was leery of the few that existed. The shrinks called it hyper-awareness. He called it prudent.

He was turning when his peripheral vision caught movement and his right hand shot to his hip – only to come away empty.

Stupid regulations. Marines weren’t allowed to be armed on a moon base unless on duty – and, technically, he wasn’t. Evidently, the assholes in charge had never heard his CO speak. ‘Always carry when you’re in hostile territory – and you’re in hostile territory from the moment you step out of your home pod until the moment the doors close behind you when you arrive home,’ was one of Lieutenant Anderson’s more pervasive mantras.

Constant vigilance. Be vigilant or be dead.

Sergeant Bork nodded to the Marine Private as the other man passed. Nothing this time. This time there was no enemy. He didn’t relax a single iota. How long would it last? Not even a moon base was safe. When you were dealing with the dickheads there was no such thing as a safe haven.

Constant vigilance. Constant readiness. He promised himself the dickheads would not catch him napping.

He stepped forward cautiously, and looked around the edge of the ceiling and up into the maw of the chasm which opened one hundred kilometers straight above him. He shivered, the dull, gray rock extending off into seeming infinity. The cavern’s walls were a near perfectly vertical, sheer shaft rising into darkness. The rumor was some idiot shrink had demanded the structure, insisting the vast emptiness would soothe the humans. The shrink had been adamant keeping humans in closed tunnels would eventually drive them insane.

Sergeant Bork wasn’t ordinarily bothered by agoraphobia. In truth, few things bothered the man who looked to be in his mid-twenties but was actually far older. He certainly didn’t have any phobias – agora-, claustro- or otherwise. Lack of latent fears notwithstanding, the thought of a hard, rocky ceiling somewhere off where he couldn’t see it or inspect it sent chills up and down his spine. Even worse was all of those shadows that could be hiding just about anything. Maybe not today but one day, there was going to be some little horrible death in those shadows waiting to kill every one of the stupid cocksuckers roaming the base.

He shook his head. Someone should find the imbecile who’d suggested such a large, unmonitored area and forcibly feed him to the dickheads. The sergeant decided he’d be more than happy to volunteer for the job.

With a sigh, the large man clenched his teeth. He wasn’t fooling himself. His ranting at the unseen ceiling wasn’t really about the chasm at all, though it was true he felt uncomfortable below it. It wasn’t even about all of those potentially deadly hiding places, though he’d feel more comfortable without them.

The real reason behind his anger and frustration was he had failed. He’d been given one task and he couldn’t carry it out. He was going to have to tell his Lieutenant he couldn’t complete his orders. It didn’t matter it was completely out of his hands. It didn’t matter the whole issue had been decided long before the Lieutenant had even thought to give Bork his orders. All that mattered was he was going to disappoint the Lieutenant.

He would give anything he had, anything he was, to never disappoint the man.

When Lieutenant Anderson had first taken over Echo Rifle Company, Bork had been a new, raw Confederacy recruit. Well, maybe not all so raw – ages ago, in another lifetime, he’d been a Colonel in the Deutsches Heer, the German army. Back when he’d been but a Lieutenant himself in the army, he’d been responsible for the lives of other men during a United Nations Peacekeeping sortie. It hadn’t gone well.

Obviously, he’d survived but not all of the men and women under his command had fared as well. His superiors had cleared him – das Pech - just bad luck – but he’d never forgotten the names of those who’d lost their lives under him. He’d even kept tabs on their survivors – still kept tabs on them now, as best he could. He knew the names of every husband, wife, child, parent or sibling. He admitted to himself there were some nights when he’d see them all one by one – vier Soldaten, zwei Soldatinnen, und jede ihre Familien - in his nightmares. Those dark dreams had eaten at him for years until he finally couldn’t stand it anymore and retired.

When the Confederacy had come along, he’d been ambivalent at first. He’d seen more than his fair share of death. He’d lost troops in combat and he wasn’t interested in losing more.

Then he’d seen the damned video. He’d watched as more men, innocent men, were killed. He’d heard the rumors the Sa’arm were cannibals, eating those they killed. When the Confederacy revealed the bastards were on a course which would lead them to Earth, he manned up and volunteered, got his CAP card and actively searched for an extraction.

They’d tried to make him an officer, but he’d had enough of such a burden. The faces of the men he’d lost still haunted him, making sleep difficult. He didn’t need to add anyone new to the roster of faces he saw in his nightmares – and even some lurid daydreams. He was willing to kill to save his planet. He was willing to kill to save the lives of people around him – even those too ungrateful to show any appreciation – but he wasn’t willing to lead. He was willing to kill as long as someone else took the responsibility.

Responsibility, though, is a funny thing. There are those who are just natural born leaders and Bork, with a heavy sigh, had to admit he was one of them. Though he wasn’t looking for the responsibility of a leader, it found him anyway. After all, he couldn’t stay a Private forever. Promotions do happen, whether they’re sought or not. Unfortunately, promotions – at least after a point – usually mean being put in charge of men.

The Lieutenant, though, had some kind of strange telepathy. When Bork made Corporal and was put in charge of a fire team, Lieutenant Anderson had somehow known Bork wasn’t comfortable with being in charge of the men so he pulled Bork aside. The ensuing talk had taken about four hours, at least eight beers and more than a few shots of hard liquor – and the good stuff, from Earth, not the replicated crap with no kick to it and which tasted like horse piss or worse. Bork could never really remember the conversation. He was more than a little drunk and it had rambled away on tangents and jokes. In the end, he didn’t need to remember it. Somehow, the Lieutenant had allayed his fears and Bork had accepted his promotion and the responsibilities which came with it.

When Bork had made Sergeant and the Lieutenant put him in charge of the squad, there had been another talk – but this one didn’t take nearly as long. It still involved beer and spirits, however. As a matter of fact, it might have been in the nature of a celebration. Bork was never quite sure, though.

What made the responsibilities palatable was the Lieutenant himself. The man was a military genius. While the dickheads were playing tic-tac-toe and the rest of the Confederacy were playing checkers, the Lieutenant was playing chess. He was constantly aware of everything in his theater and consistently maneuvered his platoon in ways which made no sense at first but somehow always managed to both secure their objective and limit their casualties to zero.

Or, at least, they had. They wouldn’t be on this stinking rock if there had been no casualties. Sometimes, though, there’s just no way to account for every variable. Entropy is a bitch.

He still remembered his first mission for the Lieutenant, maybe three months after he’d joined the Confederacy. The brass had received credible intel of a Sa’arm nest within twenty clicks of a Confederacy entrenchment and their objective was to nullify the nest – but the Lieutenant didn’t deploy his squads anywhere near it. Instead, he attacked a minimally fortified Sa’arm checkpoint some fifty klicks down the road from the nest itself. When the dickheads swarmed to the checkpoint, the Lieutenant had already pulled the squads out and attacked a grounded Sa’arm ship some thirty klicks further away on the other side. Again, the dickheads swarmed and again the Lieutenant had already pulled his men. This time, he sent three teams to a minor Sa’arm supply depot eighty clicks beyond the nest in yet a different direction.

The Sa’arm almost didn’t take the bait. They only sent a four creature team to check out the assault. The Lieutenant made them pay for it. He’d dug his teams in and wiped the four dickheads from the face of the planet. The Sa’arm determined this was a real thrust and came running – but by the time they’d got there it was too late again. The Lieutenant had already pulled the three squads out and the fourth team had decimated the minimally defended nest that had been their objective in the first place.

He also remembered their last mission. Their orders were to rescue a small group of human defenders who were over-run when the Sa’arm line had over-taken their position. Drones could still see the defenders fighting off the dickheads – but they were badly outnumbered. A more conventional thinker would probably have dropped the squads in with the defenders – but the Lieutenant was anything but conventional.

Instead, he’d dropped all four teams at the Sa’arm line closest to their objective. For a hellish fifteen minutes, they hammered the line with everything they had but it was far too little – by conservative estimates, the Sa’arm outnumbered them by at least ten to one.

In response, the Lieutenant pulled the squads. Most would have considered it a retreat but Bork knew better. Instead, the Lieutenant dropped them one hundred klicks away at a far less heavily defended bunker. Once again, they hit the line with everything they had – only this time, it was a slaughter the other way. Just at the moment of victory, however, the Lieutenant pulled them and dropped them back at the original point. Once again the squads hammered the line with mortars, rockets and everything else they could find. The depleted Sa’arm forces began to take heavy casualties – and the Lieutenant pulled his unit and dropped them back at the secondary location one hundred klicks away.

The Lieutenant toyed with the Sa’arm for nearly two days, constantly moving the squads back and forth between the two locations, until...

The drones indicated that the dickheads were anticipating the movement back to the secondary location – but the Lieutenant hadn’t moved the squads this time, just had them pull back a klick and stop shooting. When the Sa’arm amassed at the secondary location, the Lieutenant hammered the already massacred line and broke through to the defenders.

They were evacuating everyone as quickly as possible but there were a lot of hurt people. The team rushed, moving as many as they could but the dickheads were fast – so fast for being so big – and their retaliation was just as swift. The squads managed to save every one of the defenders – but it had come at a terrible cost.

Private Chafer and Private Jimenez of Fire Team Bravo had paid the ultimate price.

The Ell-Tee wasn’t happy. The loss of two of his men had shaken him. Hell, it had shaken all of them – they were beginning to believe they were invincible. They all had to suck it up, however, and the Lieutenant led by example. He took the last rifleman in Fire Team Bravo and added him to Fire Team Alpha and just continued on.

After six months fighting the dickheads on Chiva, they’d finally been pulled when it was obvious they were about to lose the system. They’d lost a lot of good Marines in the miserable system, maybe even into the hundreds if not the thousands, but the Reapers had only lost two while compiling an incredible amount of dickhead kills.

Most of it – both their survival rate and high kill rate – was due to Lieutenant George Anderson. It had still shaken the man when two of his had been lost. He took it very hard. In the end, they’d made the dickheads pay.

That was what it was all about, after all.

It was a rare moment of weakness for the Lieutenant. Most line officers didn’t know shit from Shinola. He’d never known what the phrase meant until he’d joined the Confederacy. Before then, it was just something he’d heard once or twice from some Americans who’d fought along side him and his troops in the god dammed sandbox. It meant most line officers gave pretty little orders from a pretty little book which was most likely to get the Marines under them killed pretty damn quickly.

George knew better. The man seemed to know all the tricks and constantly seemed to put as much emphasis on keeping his men and women alive as he did on accomplishing the objectives set before him. What was rather incredible was in doing so he managed to do both – he’d never lost a soldier before Chafer and Jimenez and he’d never failed to obtain whatever objective he’d been set. The Lieutenant simply thought around a problem until a solution presented itself – and fuck the stupid manuals.

Beyond his head for strategy, he’d always had time for the men under his command – even the jaded ones, like Bork. When Bork had joined the Reapers as a buck private, the Ell-Tee had sat him down and discussed what was expected of him as well as what he could expect. Lieutenant Anderson had ended the meeting by telling Bork he had an open door for the men under his command. Personal or business, he was always ready to listen.

The man was as good as his word. When they’d been told to secure a small promontory on Chiva, he’d ‘discussed’ the stupidity and inane idiocy of even attempting such a foolhardy maneuver with the Lieutenant. The promontory was a minor den for the dickheads. It was a suicide mission. The Ell-Tee had listened to his newly minted Sergeant gravely – his former Sergeant, Connolly, had become Staff Sergeant Connolly and been transferred to a regional training center - and commiserated with him.

Anderson never wavered from the commitment, though. He’d been told to take the promontory and he explained his plan to do it. Bork thought it was the craziest idea he’d ever heard – but damned if it didn’t work.

The Lieutenant had split the four squads under his command and sent a squad to four random points about three clicks around the dickheads’ den and launched a few mortars from each one. As soon as the last mortar was launched, he moved the troops to different points the same three clicks away and did it again. Then a third time. The fourth time, though, they were moved in close with high yield explosives dumped into the den on a thirty second fuse and ran like hell. One big boom later – and some slight mop-up of stray dickheads – and they’d secured the promontory. Holding it would be someone else’s job.

Every mission for Lieutenant Anderson was similar. It was what made him so great. Everyone around him saw in straight lines but Anderson thought in circles and arcs and tangents. His ideas were strange and completely unconventional – but they worked.

At least, until Chafer and Jimenez – but it was wrong of the Lieutenant to blame himself for those losses. His idea of scattering the dickheads and stringing them out was masterful. It was just bad luck they couldn’t evacuate everyone in time. It wasn’t anyone’s fault – it just was. Blame it on Murphy’s law.

Now, this. The Marines had given them eight weeks leave to recuperate. Most of the group wanted to return home. They were all looking for some quality time with their concubines, but the Ell-Tee had different plans. He wanted to come to Earth for fresh recruits. He wanted to get them before their training fucked ‘em up too badly. Anderson’s plan was to hand select the next two men under his command and walk them through training himself. He wanted to make sure they never got any bad habits.