with bright, blinding light. Tint shields in the Marines’ visors would protect their eyes from the glare. They could stare right into the light and it would not bother them.
Most of the Marines dropped to the ground or looked for cover. Three ran to the ship, and Ray accommodated them by opening the hatch.
Standard Marine training—you don’t walk into a situation blind. You flank the enemy. You always pin the enemy down and flank him. These boys had forgotten that. Guns drawn, they rushed up the ramp yelling something. I have no idea what they said, however, because Freeman picked them off immediately. His automatic rifle had a silenced muzzle. The noise that the armor made as the dead Marines rolled down the ramp was louder than Freeman’s gunfire. The dead men formed a small pile at the base of the ship.
Outside the Starliner, people climbed out of their tents looking absolutely terrified. Seeing the dead Marines topple down the ramp, women screamed. One young wife collapsed to her knees and wailed. Her husband stood beside her, obviously confused whether he should help her or stand still.
I never knew that negotiation was among Freeman’s skills, but his technique was impeccable. First, he dropped a grenade down the ramp. It rolled smoothly, plunked on the three dead men, then continued to roll to the ground.
The Marines scrambled back and waited.
Seeing the grenade, a man jumped out of his tent only to be hit across the top of the head with the butt of a Marines’ rifles. The men and women of Delphi were settlers, not soldiers. This was more than they could handle. They were desperately scared.
Caleb, who had slept through most of this, woke and placed a hand in front of his face to block the glare.
“That one still has its pin,” Freeman yelled.
“What’s happening?” Caleb, now more awake, shouted.
One of the Marines ventured forward to verify this. He picked up the grenade, examined it, then tossed it in one hand like a kid with a baseball. Freeman shot him in the head.
“Oh, God!” Caleb screamed when he saw the Marine fall.
“This one doesn’t have a pin!” Freeman shouted. He did not scream. Freeman sounded like a man in control. But he did not toss the grenade down the ramp this time, he tossed the pin. “Do I have your attention?”
Freeman and his grenade remained in the Starliner. Caleb came out with me. Most of the Marines acted nonchalant as I stepped down the ramp. A few trained their guns on me, but most stood their ground, carefully watching my every twitch. The Marines may have been chatting over the comLinks in their helmets, but I could not hear them.
Caleb stood right behind me, a boy working so hard to be a man. If he wanted me to hold him or protect him, he kept it to himself. He walked at my side, a couple feet away from me. He did not whimper or cry. He did not cringe, but he took tentative steps like a man walking on thin ice.
“We have a standoff,” I called.
“It’s not such a standoff,” one of the Marines shouted for me to hear. He bent down and grabbed a man out of a tent. The Marine held his M27 to the man’s head. He started to say something more, and I shot him.
The ring of Marines in the front raised their guns, then lowered them immediately. Whoever was giving the orders, he did not want to test me.
“What do you want?” one of the Marines asked.
“I want you to leave,” I said. This, of course, was impossible. They had no place to go. Little Man was the only livable planet around. They could fly one hundred light years in any direction and not find a suitable planet. “But you can’t do that, can you?”
A Marine stepped forward and removed his helmet. I did not like what I saw. He held his M27 in his right hand. In his left, he gripped his helmet by the lip as if it were a bucket. He was a clone, of course. The man may have been in his late thirties, a veteran so to speak. His eyes had that calculated confidence you generally saw in the eyes of veteran Marines.
But there was something odd about him. His eyelids rode high on his eyes, showing whites both above and below his pupils. He had a nervous tick which caused him to glance to the sides.
Like me, the man had brown hair and brown eyes. He stood just under six feet tall. Something else caught my attention. The man looked emaciated, as if he hadn’t eaten for weeks. This was not the thin face of a man who eats sparingly, this was the bony face of a man who had lost a lot of weight in a very short time.
It had only been two weeks since the Network was destroyed. Even on a ship trapped in a remote part of the galaxy, the pantries should have had enough inventory to last for months.
“You think you’re in control, don’t you, asswipe?” the Marine asked. He acted as if the entire situation struck him funny.
“That depends how badly you want my ship,” I said.
“Who says I want your ship?” He made a strange, high-pitched whinnie. “Maybe I just want to poke a few women and go home.”
This, of course, was not the way Marines talked to outsiders. Had the man not been a clone, I would have thought he was a pirate or a guerilla wearing stolen combat armor.
Marianne stood outside her tent, watching all of this anxiously. She took little stuttering steps as if she wanted to start running to Caleb then she pulled herself back. She looked at me with a pleading expression.
“This your boy?” the Marine asked, pointing his rifle at Caleb. I loved that boy, and I had no idea what this crazed Marine might do. Bringing my right hand up, I batted the rifle away from Caleb, then grasped the muzzle and thrust it backward as hard as I could. The rifle butt struck the Marine in the shoulder.
“Watch yourself,” he snarled at me.
“Yeah, you’re here for the ship,” I said with a sneer as I let go of the rifle.
Tension showed in his face. He wanted to shoot me, but he couldn’t. If he shot me, he would lose the Starliner. Thanks to Ray Freeman’s opening gambit—shooting three Marines then tossing out the pin of a grenade, no one dared accuse us of bluffing. “I could kill you,” the man’s gaunt face with its hollow cheeks and bulging eyes contorted into a snarl.
“Mad Dog,” I said, “you wouldn’t even be a warm-up.”
He raised his M27. The other Marines all raised their M27s. For a moment I had no idea what would happen. Then I heard
“Why don’t you put me in touch with the officer in command?” I asked.
The guns did not go down. The Marine continued to stare into my face. “I’m going to pull your brains out through your ass,” he said.
“You know, you do a lot more talking than thinking,” I said. “There is at least one man on that ship holding live grenades. Unless you want to set up permanent residence on Delphi …Little Man, I suggest you lower that specking M27 and get me your commanding officer.”
Eyes still fixed on mine, the Marine lowered his rifle again. “You want to speak to the man in command? I’ll get him for you. But you won’t like him. You won’t like the general, but he might have some fun with you.”
The Marine replaced his helmet so he could use the comLink. I was glad not to see his face, it took the edge off the situation. I looked over at Caleb and told him to go to Marianne. Without saying a word, the boy ran over to his mother and they hugged. She kissed him several times on the head and looked at me.
Combat helmets drowned out sounds. They had an external speaker that let you communicate with people around you. “You want to come up to the ship?” the Marine asked using the speaker.
“Sure. I’ll just hop in the kettle of that transport you have hidden somewhere in the woods, and we’ll all fly off to the mothership like we’re best friends. Get real, Marine.”
There was a pause while the Marine relayed my message. “Okay, General Lee says that he will come down.”
I did not know the name of every general in the Marine Corps and I did not know every officer in the Scutum- Crux Fleet, but I took a gamble on this one. “General Lee?” I asked. “Would that be General Vince Lee?”
There was a pause, and then the Marine said, “The general thought you might recognize the name, Harris. He also says you’d better have a damned good reason for being here.”
