Starfist: Firestorm Read Free Page B

called his fire team leaders together and told them to get their bunkers ready to stand a round of inspections. “I don’t care that you don’t have the shit you need to get your bunkers properly cleaned,” he said when they objected. “Do what you can with what you’ve got!”
    When he dismissed his fire team leaders, he went in search of the other squad leaders.
    “How’d your people react when you told them to get ready for an IG?” Ratliff asked Sergeant Kerr when he found him.
    Kerr gave him a blank look. “What IG?”
    Ratliff returned the look. “The IG Ensign Bass told us about.”
    “He did?”
    “I had a feeling you weren’t listening during the squad leaders’ meeting,” Ratliff said, shaking his head. “What’s the problem?”
    Kerr looked into nowhere in particular. “No problem. I was, I was thinking about casualties, that’s all.” He hung his head.
    “Look at me, Tim.” Ratliff put a hand on Kerr’s shoulder and drew him close. “Come on, lift your head and look at me.” When Kerr’s head stayed down, Ratliff squeezed his shoulder and gave it a shake. Kerr slowly raised his head and looked into Ratliff’s eyes from a distance of just centimeters. Ratliff shifted his grip to the back of Kerr’s neck and pulled until their foreheads touched.
    “Listen to me, Tim,” Ratliff said softly. “I know you feel like shit because of how you got your job. So what? Most of our fire team leaders got their jobs the same way—someone above them got killed or too badly injured to come back. We’re Marines and that’s life for us.”
    “B-but I, I…”
    “Yeah, yeah, I know. You were almost killed on Wanderjahr and it took a long time for you to make it back to where you could be returned to duty. And then you had to deal with your own mortality. You’ve done a pretty good job of it, you didn’t let it get in the way of doing your job when you were a fire team leader. Now you’ve got more lives to be concerned about. That comes with the big bucks. You’re a good Marine, you were an outstanding fire team leader. Now be the outstanding squad leader you can be.”
    Before Kerr could respond, Sergeant Kelly, the gun squad leader, boomed out “What’s this, kissy-face between squad leaders?”
    “Up your ass with a railroad tie, Kelly!” Ratliff boomed back.
    “Nah, Rabbit’s trying to teach me squad leader’s contact telepathy,” Kerr said.
    “Squad leader contact telepathy? Never heard of it.”
    “That’s because you’re a gun squad leader,” Ratliff snorted. “Gun squad leaders don’t have enough brains for anybody to read their minds.”
    “So what do you think of that IG happy horseshit?” Kelly asked in a more normal voice when he reached the other squad leaders.
    “Happy horseshit about says it,” Kerr replied.
    Ratliff nodded at him sharply, glad to see Kerr was coming out of the funk he’d been in. “Whatever’s going to happen, it won’t be like the IG we missed by coming here in the first place.” The Inspector General of the Marine Corps was at Camp Major Pete Ellis, home of 34th FIST, when the orders for the deployment arrived and the inspection was canceled.
    “Better not be,” Kelly muttered. “Ain’t a man jack in the FIST could pass a fire team leader’s inspection right now, much less a proper IG.”
    “Damn straight!”
    “So what are we going to do about it?”
    “Improvise.”
    “And what we can’t improvise, simulate.”

CHAPTER TWO

    Heb Cawman, former Chairman of the Coalition Committee on the Conduct of the War, sat inside his comfortable cell in the brig of the CNSS Kiowa , twiddling his thumbs and humming an old folk song popular among the farmers of Ruspina, his home world, where he sincerely wished he were. But he would be willing to settle, instead, for a bottle of Old Snort bourbon.
    “Sittin’ by the roadside, on a summer’s day. Chattin’ wif muh messmates, passin’ time away,” he sang quietly. The cell had no bars