To Sail a Darkling Sea

day they go out and like the Spartans of yore-again, I’m sure you’re aware of the movie-they burnish their shields and go forth to do battle.”

“What’s your point?” Zumwald said.

“What the movie failed to mention was that the Spartans only put a last coat of polish on, so to speak,” Steve said. “Each of them had body servants that did most of the work. So the Spartans could concentrate on what they did best: Killing. Now, body servants have, obviously, gone out of style. We organize and manage things now. You’re all about the deal in Hollywood. So here’s the deal. The deal of a lifetime. You are now in charge of cleaning all this crap off of the Marines’ gear. Every night.”

“Oh, fuck you!”

“Do you know what this is, sir?” one of the Marines said. He pushed up against the former executive from behind and held out what looked like a baseball for a second.

“Shit,” Zumwald said, trying to back up. There was nowhere to go. It was a wall of Marine behind him. “That’s a fucking grenade, you… You’re all fucking insane!”

“It’s what Miss Faith says when ‘fuck you’ isn’t enough, sir,” the Marine said. “Would you care to try the next step up from ‘fuck you,’ sir?”

“Please, Staff Sergeant,” Smith said. “Some couth. I did not say nor suggest that you, Mister Zumwald, would be wielding a toothbrush… ”

“And you’ll need to use a toothbrush,” the other Marine growled, “cause I’ll be checking it. And if it ain’t good, I ain’t as nice as the Captain, Mister Zumwald.”

The fucker sounded exactly like R. Lee Ermy. Zumwald had had to deal with that fucker one time and he hated fucking R. Lee Ermy. The prick.

“I said ‘in charge,’ Mister Zumwald,” Smith said, then drew his pistol.

Ernest knew he was dead but the fucker just pulled out the other things with the bullets in them and held both up in his hands.

“So, recruit and manage people to clean gear, to the Gunnery Sergeant’s specifications, or one pistol, twenty-one rounds and La Puntilla. Such a deal I’m offering you!”

“Dude, you missed your calling,” Zumwald said. “You should have been in my business. Deal.”

CHAPTER 16

Me that ’ave watched ’arf a world

‘Eave up all shiny with dew,

Kopje on kop to the sun,

An’ as soon as the mist let ’em through

Our ’elios winkin’ like fun-

Three sides of a ninety-mile square,

Over valleys as big as a shire-

“Are ye there? Are ye there? Are ye there?”

An’ then the blind drum of our fire …

An’ I’m rollin’ ’is lawns for the Squire,

Me!

Kipling, “Chant Pagan”

Faith looked up from the computer at a knock on her door and thought about it. She had a shitload of homework and this damned report to finish.

“It’s open,” she said after a second.

The Boadicea didn’t smell like decaying zombies anymore. It smelled like a hospital. There was a thick reek of disinfectant everywhere.

The cabin she was in had had a zombie in it. But she only knew that cause there wasn’t any carpet. But there were thick rugs, Persian or something she thought. She wasn’t sure where they’d came from but they were nice. The rest of the cabin, except for some minor fittings, was pretty much what she thought a cabin in a cruise she was supposed to look like. She’d never been on a cruise until the Plague and she wasn’t planning on going on one even if somebody hit a button and made the world like it was. But it had a big bed, bigger than the one she’d had on the Alpha, and a really nice head. Big shower and a bath tub which she’d put to good use more than once. The head wasn’t as “refined” as on the Alpha but all the fitting were original at least.

They’d been clearing for a week. Faith wasn’t sure if it was deliberate on Captain Wilke’s part but she hadn’t been near any of the cabin areas on the supermax. All she’d seen was the bowels of the ship. The usual compartments and zombie mess. Some people might have thought that was punishment. For Faith it was sort of relaxing. Once they got past a certain point, there weren’t even many zombies and they had found some survivors.

She had been in on the “spa” clearance. Wilkes had paid attention on that one and they’d hit it with every Marine they had from several different entry points. There were quite a few surviving infected but it was over in ten minutes. Not a single scrum. Faith had been mildly disappointed. But it was the “professional” way to do it. And she was starting to appreciate “professional.”

What she did NOT appreciate was the homework. Captain Wilkes had scrounged textbooks for her to study. Not just Marine manuals, either. Math, science, English. Chemistry. Yuck! With weekly tests. And he was making her do all her platoon reports, then “annotating” them. He had given her a dictionary and thesaurus, among other things, and after the first report after giving them to her told her she was “not allowed words of more than two syllables.” It was worse than fucking school. “Recess” was killing zombies.

“Hey, how’s the report going?” Wilkes said.

“Fine, sir,” Faith said, standing to attention.

“As you were,” Wilkes said, coming in and looking over her shoulder. “I would say that ‘fine’ would be mostly done, Lieutenant. Not stuck on the first sentence.”

“I was reading Lieutenant Fontana’s report, sir,” Faith replied. “And trying to determine a better way to say what I was trying to say, sir. But… sir, what’s an ‘action plan’?”

“An action plan is any plan which involves action, Lieutenant,” Wilkes said. “Direct conflict. When you told me to prepare to fire through the zombies, multiple times, and try to aim my shots so that TnTs would go through the hatch, that was an action plan.”

“Battle field preparation plan, sir?” Faith asked.

“Knock on the door and make sure the zombies are awake,” Wilkes said. “You’re preparing the battlefield to optimize your strengths, kinetic projectile fire, over their strengths, direct contact engagement.”

“So it’s another way of saying ‘get them into your killzone, don’t go into theirs,’ sir?”

“It’s a more modern way of saying it,” Wilkes said. “Your father’s background is historical. Useful, don’t get me wrong. But he tends to phrase things in a way that would be normal in a staff meeting for, say, Operation Overlord.”

“That’s… D-Day,” Faith said. “Sixth of June, 1944.”

“Fifth and sixth, yes,” Wilkes said. “I’d expect that of your father’s daughter.”

“Horrible with dates, sir,” Faith said. “But there’s this band, Sabaton, that’s got this really rocking song about it.”