once people realized that Philips would not play another song.
“Hello, Master Sarge,” Philips said, mixing Marine slang and derogatory Army lingo.
“Philips,” I said.
Some of the other men greeted me. I shook a couple of hands. Enlisted men do not salute sergeants.
Thomer handed me a beer. He handed Philips a beer, too.
“You play a mean harmonica,” I said.
“Shit, no. I do okay for self-taught, I guess,” Philips said.
“He plays guitar, too,” Thomer said.
“I know a song or two,” Philips corrected. “That ain’t the same thing as playing.”
“How about you, Thomer. What are you good at?” I asked.
Thomer shrugged.
“He’s the one who keeps this platoon running,” Philips said.
Thomer glared at Philips.
“What about them?” I asked, pointing the top of my beer bottle at Evans and Sutherland. They were at the other end of the table, too far away to hear.
“Them?” Philips asked. “They do okay.”
“They run the show,” Thomer said. “At least they used to, before you came.”
“Like I said, they do okay,” Philips said. “Nobody likes them much. I guess they like each other plenty.”
Thomer, who had started to take a swig of beer, laughed and spit beer back in his bottle.
“You were asking me about the time I pissed on a sergeant. Well, I thought it was Sutherland,” Philips confessed. “I wish it had been the son of a bitch.”
“You have a problem with Sutherland?” I asked.
“He’s all right, I suppose,” Philips said. “I like him the way a dog likes a fire hydrant. The good thing about Sutherland is that he can sleep through anything. If that had been Sutherland, I’d still be a corporal right now.”
“He pissed on Sergeant Edmonds instead,” Thomer said. He smiled, took another quick drink of beer, then added, “Edmonds is a light sleeper.”
“Son of a bitch,” Philips muttered. I did not know if he had just called Edmonds a son of a bitch or if he was referring to Thomer. “The bastard woke right up and started screaming. Probably thought he was being attacked by an albino boa constrictor.”
“He told me he thought it was a macaroni noodle,” Thomer mumbled.
“Are we going to see some action soon?” Sergeant Sutherland asked as he came to join us.
“Any day now,” I said. “I just need to clear it with Colonel Grayson.”
“You going to get me some Mogats to shoot?” Philips asked.
“That’s the general idea,” I said.
Given the mission that I had in mind, I would have traded half my platoon for an Adam Boyd clone, but Navy SEALs seldom ran with Marines.
“You want to what?” Colonel Grayson asked. “You must be specking with me, son. You can’t take a Cygnus Central platoon into the Perseus Arm. They have their own damn fleet and their own damn Marines. You do realize that Outer Perseus is halfway across the galaxy? Think about it, son. Think, why don’t you?”
“Colonel, Admiral Brocius has charged me to engage the enemy any way that I can.”
“So engage them in your own damned arm of the galaxy!” Grayson roared. He tried to look angry but a rogue grin played on his lips. I got the feeling that he liked the idea of poaching in another part of the galaxy. “What do you expect to get out of this raid?”
“The war,” I answered. “The whole specking war.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“I heard the last pilot you took out here got fried,” our pilot said as we glided into the space graveyard on our way to the Mogat battleship.
Looking out from the cockpit of the explorer, I saw no sign of that last ship. It had simply vanished into the debris, pilot and all. We might nudge it out of our path and not notice.
“We’ll be more careful this time,” I said.
“How is that?” the pilot asked.
“Last time we didn’t know the Mogats were watching for visitors. This time we do.”
“I hope you don’t expect me to wait around for you,” the pilot said.
“Yes, I expect you to wait till we tell you to leave. Waiting wasn’t what killed our last pilot. He got killed running away. If he’d just sat still and blended in with the scenery…” I let the sentence hang.
In order for my plan to work, we needed the Mogats to know we had trespassed onto their property, and to think they had scared us away. The best way to do that was to give them a show.
As we approached the battleship, the pilot scanned for booby traps and burglar alarms. Once we boarded the derelict, we would use the stealth kits I had requisitioned from naval headquarters. Until then, we would need to rely on the explorer’s sensors. Fortunately, this was a scientific ship. It had sensors that could pick up all kinds of fields. The coast seemed clear, but there was one kind of signal the vessel would not detect—a signal transmitted by a broadcast engine.
As we opened the cargo hatch and started to unpack, the pilot hailed me over the interLink. “I’m not waiting around,” he warned. “Listen, Sergeant. Command said nothing about babysitting a bunch of clones on a suicide mission. If I get a whiff of a Mogat ship, I am going to leave.”
“They won’t find you if you hide, sir,” I said. “They will find you if you run.”
“Then maybe I should leave now,” the pilot said.
“We’re still on your ship, sir,” I pointed out.
“I mean once you are off.”
“Are you talking about abandoning us?” I asked. “Don’t you think someone will ask questions when you show up short forty-two men?”
“No, I don’t. Not if they are clones.”
They had a term for officers who were prejudiced against clones—“antisynthetic.” In my experience, most officers were antisynthetic to some extent, but things were changing. There used to be six hundred clone factory/orphanages pumping out over one million clones every year. Now that the Mogats had destroyed the orphanages, clones were no longer the inexhaustible resource they had once been. Once the military complex ran out of its current supply of clones, the government would have to start sending natural-borns to the front. After years of relying on clones to do their fighting, few natural-borns would willingly fight or die.
“You strand us out here, sir,” I growled, “and you’d better pray the Mogats find you before I do.”
“Are you threatening me, Sergeant?” the pilot asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You have just officially crossed over the…”
“Maybe we should take this up with Admiral Brocius,” I said. “He’s the one who assigned you to this platoon.”
“Admiral Brocius?” the pilot asked.
As a lieutenant, the pilot outranked me. But rank and authority did not always mean the same thing in the Marines. A veteran sergeant is at the top of the arc as enlisted men go. He may not make as much money as the lowest-paid officer, and he may sleep on a mean rack in dingy barracks, but an experienced sergeant merits more respect than a lieutenant who is still wet behind the ears.
A master gunnery sergeant is a veteran and a man who knows his way around the Corps. Let a lieutenant and a master sergeant go head-to-head, and the sergeant may take a token vacation in the brig; but unless that lieutenant has some good answers, his career will be specked for good.
