His eyes were wider now, like a cartoon character, and I felt a bit guilty but pushed it aside. That ship had sailed.
“You may think I’m being rough on you,” I told him, “but I’m not. I swear to God and on my mother’s grave, Delp, this is by far the most merciful of the options I have left open to me to deal with you. Unless you want to spend however long is left in this war in a cell, this is your best bet.” He opened his mouth, but I held a hand up. “Don’t bother thanking me, don’t bother promising me you’ll do better, because I’ve heard it all before. You’re going to behave and do your job because Top and I and your platoon sergeant and whoever your platoon leader winds up being are not going to give you any other choice.”
I jerked a thumb at the car door.
“Now, get out and get back to the tent and I want you to tell Bang-Bang exactly what I just told you. And when Top talks to him in the morning, he’d better recite back to me verbatim what I just told you. You got me?”
“Yes, sir.”
I couldn’t tell if he was grateful to me or just grateful to get out of the car, but he was grateful and then he was gone.
“You get it sorted out, sir?” the MP sergeant asked me when I slid out behind Delp.
“It’s sorted.”
One way or another.
I headed back to the bar to find Vicky and take my own advice.
23
I decided about twenty hours in that I didn’t like the CSS Hermes. She had a smell to her, like the smell of new clothes fresh out of the fabricator, a sharp edge to every corner, and I just couldn’t feel comfortable in her passageways. It was like no one had lived in her before, no stories had been told about her. I’d been sitting in my compartment since we’d entered Transition Space, working on the endless reports, documenting training, disciplinary action, simulator time, patrols we’d run in Deltaville, emerging only to eat or attend battalion and brigade meetings, otherwise stopping only to sleep. This was work that should have been done two days ago, though how I was supposed to do it and lead company-size patrols, I wasn’t sure.
How the hell, I wondered, did anyone ever get any work done in this job?
My vision was starting to blur by the time I finished the last report and I whispered a prayer of thanks that no one else had knocked on my door looking for solutions to problems they should have solved themselves. I checked the time. It was 2330 ship’s time, which was meaningless to my body since I was still on Deltaville time, and I was neither hungry nor tired. I tried Vicky’s ‘link address and it politely told me that she was sleeping and not to bother her until morning unless it was an emergency.
Of course, I was one of the few people who could call her and say it was an emergency, but I wouldn’t do that to her. I knew how rare and precious a good night’s sleep was for a platoon leader, and it was becoming even rarer as a company commander. And I wasn’t going to get it tonight, not unless I resorted to a pill. I tried to avoid that, because I’d seen some Marines who couldn’t sleep without them at all after using them for years.
Instead, I pulled on my boots and my fatigue top and went for a walk.
It was, perhaps, a remnant of my enlisted days that I felt like an intruder entering the storage bays for the Vigilantes. They were off-limits to unauthorized personnel, and it took me a moment to realize I was authorized personnel now. If this was a Fleet cruiser, there would have been duty crews on shift work, pulling maintenance, but Marine troop ships did things differently. We were always headed planetside, and they did the best they could to get us ready for the day-night cycle we were heading toward, so there was a shipboard night and day, and at night, the lights were dimmed and the only people working were skeleton crews on the bridge, in engineering and damage control.
The storage bays seemed deserted; the suits relics left behind from some lost civilization like China’s terracotta armies. I went to mine, first. It had been repaired a few days after the nominal end of the battle and I’d stripped and cleaned it five times for every patrol I’d taken it out on since, but I gave it a quick systems check again out of habit. Everything was nominal, and I knew it would be, but one more check never hurt. I pushed the chest plastron closed and let the palm of my hand linger there for a moment, like I imagined the old cavalry soldiers might have with their horse.
The Vigilante was, I thought perhaps with no small bit of prejudice, the finest weapons system ever fielded. I tried to imagine fighting this war without it and shuddered at the prospect. The battlefield was a nightmare of high-energy lasers, ionized gas and charged particles, and facing all that with nothing but the thin armor of a Force Recon Marine made my testicles want to crawl up into my stomach.
I left my suit and paced down the row of maintenance racks for the company Headquarters Platoon to the Boomers. To my Boomers. That was a kick in the ass. Their coil guns were long and awkward, forcing them to leave a drop-ship from the boarding ramp at a landing zone instead of jetting from a drop rack, but they were sledgehammers, specialized tools I had never had access to before. Besides the gun, their backpacks were larger than
