Recruit by Jonathan Brazee (the best ebook reader for android .txt) 📕
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Ryck picked up his pace. He was going to tie one on, and one of those bastards was going to buy him the first round!
Third Marine Division
Embarked on the FSS Adelaide
Chapter 16
“Ready to get off this motherfucker?” Sparta asked him.
“Right skippy, there, corporal. Let’s diddi ho,” Private First Class Ryck Lysander responded.
Ryck was still the platoon boot, but taking out two of the miners had given him a degree of credibility. He’d been tested and blooded. Once the insurrection had been put down (not that they were allowed to use the “I” word), the lieutenant had even put him in for a meritorious promotion to PFC. He would have made it anyway in another month and a half, but this gave him a leg up on most of the rest of his recruit class. More than the stripe, though, when it came time to assign him to a squad, Sergeant Piccalo-Tensing had fought for him. He joined Corporal Pallas’ fire team, which was down a man with Corporal Singh casevac’d back to the Dirtball. It felt good to Ryck to belong to a unit instead of being just an add-on.
The platoon had taken a heavy hit. Four of the Marines in Second Squad had been opened up like a can of sardines by the miners and killed. Three Marines had been injured enough while clearing the mine to warrant being casevac’d. This was supposed to have been a cakewalk, but that was before someone at UTOM Industries, the company that performed maintenance of the PICS, had both interjected a trojan in the electronics, then sold the information on how to exploit that breach to the miners. A patch had already been installed on the suits, and NIS was supposedly hot on the trail of tracking down the traitor. The scuttlebutt was that the breach was a pretty simple one, but one that could not have been implanted in the Legion’s Rigaudeau-3 suits. Underlying the fuck-up was the knowledge that the Marines had gotten off easy. They did not need the PICS to suppress a tax revolt on a piddly-ass mining planet like Atacama. If the suits had been neutralized while in combat with a real opponent, however, it might have been a disaster of epic proportions.
The issue with the suits, though, had kept the Marines on Atacama longer than usual while the vulnerability was investigated. By Federation charter, the Marines were not allowed to remain on a “peaceful” world while in a combat posture. In other words, they were not occupation nor police troops. They had a limited amount of time to consolidate, then leave the planet to the Federation Civil Development Corps.[18] The FCDC was there to “assist in the restoration of civil order and commerce,” but they had an awful lot of military gear and men to use it all for a supposed bunch of engineers and economists. With the security breach, though, the Council had extended the timeline of the campaign for an extra 45 days.
With the bulk of the FCDC kept off the planet, the Marines had taken over most of the processing of the civilians. This was something the Marines didn’t like to do, and they lacked the manpower to do it well. Certain FCDC teams were assigned to the Marines and even given Marine uniforms, so at least the interrogation of the leaders of the revolt was left to someone else. Ryck had watched four of these fake Marines march into the internment camp while he was on watch and drag off one of the women there. Ryck had no love lost for the miners, but he didn’t want to think of what would happen to that woman. It was her own fault, wasn’t it? Refusing to pay the taxes to the Federation, the same Federation that paid for the Navy, the Marines, and the FCDC to protect them? The Federation was the strongest power in the known galaxy, but still, there were threats, both from the other non-aligned planets and groups as well as conflicts between planets within the Federation’s sphere.
All of that was way above Ryck’s pay grade. What he did know was that he hadn’t joined the Corps to be a prison guard. The eight weeks he’d spent being just that had been more than enough. At least he wasn’t the junior man in the platoon anymore, even if he was still the boot, although the reason for that was not what he would have wished. Two Marines in Third Fire Team, Lance Corporals Verrit and Samuelson had been caught fucking one of the detainees. There was no indication that this was anything other than consensual, so there was no court convened for rape, but contact like that was strictly verboten, and both men had been busted to private and would serve 30 days in the brig after they returned to the Dirtball. Ryck had talked to Sams about it, and the big guy had smiled and said it was totally worth it, even with the brig time and getting busted.
Now, finally, it was time to leave. All their gear had already been embarked, and with the FCDC personnel on deck, they were free to leave for the trip back to the Dirtball. Rumor had it that they were getting a diversion to Vegas for three days liberty, but the brass refused to confirm that. Like most Marines, Ryck had been on Vegas on the way to Tarawa for boot, but he had never gotten out of the spaceport.
Ryck shouldered his ruck and filed after Sparta. He didn’t look back as he entered the Adelaide’s personnel hatch.
Chapter 17
“You are one sick mother,” Sams said as he sat down, looking at Ryck’s breakfast.
“Eat me,” came Ryck’s rote reply.
Food aboard the Adelaide was pretty damn good, even for a farmboy such as Ryck who was used to a degree of “real” food. Sure, his family had a home fabricator, and sure, they bought manufactured food, but being on a farm and surrounded by other farmers, Ryck had often eaten natural food, even meats. While some of the other Marines, mostly from the big industrialized worlds, blanched at the thought of eating animal flesh, to Ryck, it was a special treat. He thought those who said animal flesh was not “normal” were pretty weird, given that some of the bases for the fabricators came from pulverized insects, coal by-products, or other things best not imagined.
The Navy being the Navy, the Adelaide had one hellacious commercial fabricator. It shouldn’t have made a difference as the bases were all the same and a fabricator followed set formulas, but the senior chief in charge of the mess could whip up some tasty chow, better than a grunt could expect. It was common knowledge that the officers got some natural foods in their mess, but Ryck didn’t care. The crew’s mess was plenty fine. Even the bacon he was eating tasted natural. Ryck knew that it was made from a mixture of some of the twelve bases that fed the fabricator, but when he ate it, it seemed like the real deal to him. Sams wasn’t commenting on that, but with what Ryck had covered it.
As a young boy, bacon had been Ryck’s favorite food—real bacon, not the fake bacon made by Sunshine or Healthy Choice. On each birthday, that was what he wanted. That and ice cream. Fab ice cream was pretty indistinguishable from hand-cranked ice-cream made from cow’s cream, even if the luxury brands such as Swiss Heaven or Ben and Jerry’s tried to convince people otherwise. Their little home fabricator could do a pretty decent job on sweet sauces, too, such as chocolate and strawberry. Ryck, though, loved the raspberry sauce, and he lathered it over his ice cream. On his seventh birthday, he had jokingly said he was going to put the sauce on his bacon. All his family had laughed at that, telling him that was silly. Ryck had meant it as a joke, but their reaction raised a degree of stubbornness in him. They couldn’t tell him he was silly. So he insisted on it. His mother had given in, and with ten slices of sizzling bacon on his plate, had hesitantly dribbled the raspberry sauce on it.
“More,” he had insisted.
His parents, Myke, and Lysa watched him as he defiantly raised a forkful of raspberry-covered bacon to his mouth and put it in his mouth. He had thought he would have to choke it down, doing it just to show his family that he was not some little kid, but to his surprise, he actually liked it. Now, aboard the Navy ship where fab bacon was offered at each breakfast and he could dial fab raspberry sauce from the dessert line anytime he wanted, this had become his daily ritual.
“Really, man, why do you always do that? That and your ketchup and polly sauce shit you put on stuff?” Sams persisted.
Ryck just raised his middle finger in response.
Life aboard the Adelaide was an odd confluence of relaxation, stimulation, and boredom. There really wasn’t that much for Marines to do. They had cleaned and re-cleaned all their gear. They had taken care of some admin. The little “gym” on the ship was not much and large enough for only a handful of people at a time. On the plus side, the ship’s entertainment system was immense, with what had to be every flick, song, book, and vid ever recorded. They couldn’t communicate with the outside while in bubble space (unless a message torp was sent to pierce their bubble, and that was done only for extremely high-priority communications), so camming family or friends was out until they dropped back into real space, but still, there was more available to watch than anyone could view in their lifetime. The food was great, and there was plenty of rack time. It should have been a Marine’s dream, but in reality, after a day or two, most Marines became antsy. They wanted to do something, not just be cargo.
Sams sat down and dug into his pancakes. He made exaggerated eating sounds, smacking his lips.
“Enjoy it now, Sams, ‘cause you ain’t getting any of that when your ass is locked up in
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