Back | Next
Contents

The Johnson Maneuver

Ian Douglas

The motto of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Embassy Security Group was, appropriately enough, “In every clime and place.” And that, Marine Gunnery Sergeant Carl Schaeffer had decided, had become something of an understatement.

The world of Pi3 Orionis IV—dubbed Cernunnos by the human Contact/Liaison group on the surface, and something unpronounceably like “Cha’a” by the natives—was young, raw, and hot. The local gravity was a shade over six tenths of a G, the atmosphere dense and thick. The star, listed as type F5V on the main sequence, was just 27 light-years from Sol—right next door by interstellar standards—and the second-nearest planetary system found so far to have evolved intelligent life.

At least, Schaeffer thought with some amusement, there was supposed to be intelligent life here. He’d had a number of encounters with the natives during the past few weeks, and he wasn’t entirely certain that the xenosophontologists had gotten that part right. He was standing now on the parapets of the Earth C/L compound, looking out over the city of Karnon—low, white domes and flat-roofed octagons. Columns of smoke were rising from several parts of the city, now, and his helmet mikes were picking up the usual chorus of deep, fluting, and disharmonic hoots and wailings that served as Cha’an language.

The crowds were working themselves up to a frenzy. It might just be another demonstration…but the Embassy Guard Marines had been warned that the rebels might attack.

“You think they’ll let us load up, Gunnery Sergeant?” Lance Corporal Carol Passerotti asked him. Like Schaeffer, she was in ceremonial dress armor—peacock-bright in bronze, blue, red, and white. He couldn’t see her face behind the opaque, white visor. “It really sounds like they’re building up to something big.”

“I know,” he told her. “Hang tough. As long as they’re still talking, and the king crab still says it likes us, they shouldn’t bother us.”

A crowd—a big one—was gathering at the main gate, chanting as they gesticulated with clenched, multiple fists. He couldn’t tell what they were saying, not without linking in to the embassy’s translation AI, but they didn’t sound happy. Or friendly.

“Yeah, but how can they tell if it does like us?” Passerotti asked.

“Beats me, Passerotti. I guess when they knock down the gate, we’ll know we’ve worn out our welcome.” He turned away. “Stay sharp, Marine.”

“Aye-aye, Commander.”

Schaeffer was a gunnery sergeant, a non-commissioned officer, but as head of the Marine security detachment assigned to the Pi3 Orionis IV embassy, he held one of the very few enlisted billets in the Corps where an NCO could hold the title of commander. He had ten enlisted Marines under his command; his boss was the embassy’s RSO, a civilian federal agent named Warner—an unpleasant piece of work.

He locked through into the embassy building and pulled off his helmet. The atmosphere outside was almost breathable, but there was too much sulfur dioxide from the young planet’s numerous volcanic vents for human health. You could get by with a breather mask and goggles here, but Marine guards outside wore their Class A armor, which filtered out the SO2 and reduced the high O2 partial pressure to Earth-normal. After a moment’s pause, he accessed his in-head circuitry and opened a private communications channel. “Mr. Warner?—Schaeffer,” he said. “I need a word, please.”

“I’m awfully busy, Commander,” Warner’s nasal voice shot back. “Can it wait?”

“No sir, but it’s short. I need your authorization to go weapons-live.”

That will not be necessary, Commander.”

“Excuse me, sir, but I feel it is. A large crowd is gathering outside, and it sounds like they’re working themselves into attack mode.”

“They’ve never attacked us before. We don’t know what ‘attack mode’ for them would be.”

“All I’m asking for, sir, is authorization to lock and load. Just in case.”

There was a long hesitation on the other end, and then Warner’s voice said, “Come on, then.”

The office of the embassy’s Regional Security Officer, the RSO, was Spartan but high-tech. Surveillance monitors covered the walls from deck to overhead, and Reginald Warner was ensconced within a desk that had more in common with the cockpit of a V/A-90 Demonwraith than a piece of office furniture.

Several screens showed different views of the mob at the front gate. The main viewall, however, was dominated by the startlingly deep-purple, cyclopean eye of Ng’g’!grelchk, the senior administrator to the ek-Cha’a Hierarchy’s chief—call it the king’s prime minister. Its name and title were displayed in English at the top of the screen.

“This,” Warner said to the being, speaking into a microphone on his desk, “is the leader of our security guard here at the embassy. Commander Schaeffer.”

Schaeffer heard in the background the computer-rendered blend of warbling, hooting, and glottal-stopped consonants that was the translation of what the RSO had just said. When they stopped, the being on the screen replied with some warblings of its own.

“I respect you and what you represent.” The consecutive translation scrolled up the right-hand side of the viewall, accompanied by the flat voice of the embassy AI as it spoke. “May long you hold fast to your females. May long you be known to be prosperous.”

“Say ‘thank you,’” Warner said in a harsh whisper when Schaeffer didn’t immediately respond.

“Thank you,” he told the image. He knew better than to add “sir.” Hierarchy administrators were drones, sexless and landless, and sex-based honorifics could be misunderstood.

But not powerless. The Heirarchy’s ruler, Ng’g’ch’gra!ooh was also a drone. Having drones in charge was the only way the ek-Cha’a could have anything like a government without bull-male legislators slaughtering one another on the floor of the Executive Congress over minor legal disagreements.

“Commander Schaeffer,” Warner added, “seems to feel that the situation outside the gate is extremely serious. He’s concerned about…territorial incidents.”

“The Eldest Drone has issued the firmest suggestions,” the AI both said and printed on the screen, translating the string of hoots, pops, and consonants. “There will be no encroachment of territory. Your females will be safe.”

Humans had been studying the ek-Cha’a language for perhaps thirty years, now. Vocabulary, grammar, and inflection all were now well understood, and translation in either direction was not a problem. Understanding the psychology behind the words, however, most definitely was.

“There, Commander, you see?” Warner spoke loudly now, so that his words were picked up for translation. “The Eldest Drone has assured us of our safety.”

“Sir,” Schaeffer said, “I still think it would be a good idea to—”

“No!” He shouted the word, cutting Schaeffer off. Then he continued in a calmer voice. “No, Commander. What you suggest would not be a good idea. Not now. The ek-Cha’a set great store in a martial appearance. But we do not want any…unfortunate incidents. Do we?”

Meaning, Schaeffer thought, we can carry laser rifles, but not the batteries to charge them. He doesn’t trust us.

“I’m not talking about incidents, sir. I’m talking about what happens if that mob decides to come through the front gate.”

“We have the assurance of the Eldest Drone that they will not. Am I right, Ng’g’!grelchk?” He made a pretty good approximation of the alien syllables, at least for a human limited to lips, tongue, and larynx, as opposed to paired air bladders and diaphragms.

“My counterpart speaks precision and truth.”

“You are dismissed, Commander.”

“Counterpart,” meaning that the ek-Cha’a on the screen was in charge of the local army, as Warner was in charge of the security group. Schaeffer almost said something more, but the warning glare in Warner’s eyes told him he would get nowhere with an argument, especially with the native looking on.

“Aye-aye, sir.” He came to attention, turned on his heel, and walked out of the office.

Damn the man! And damn all red-tape bureaucrats, all self-serving politicians, and all sanctimonious REMFs, military and civilian, who thought conciliation and peace were synonyms.

He headed back toward the security unit squad bay. He needed to think.…

For almost ten years, now, humans had been on Cernunnos. The human compound wasn’t precisely an embassy, at least not as humans understood the word, but a contact/liaison facility housing the lab and research staffs for the xenosophontological mission. This world was of great interest to the planetologists; the Pi3 Orionis system was young—only about 1.4 billion years old, not nearly enough time, according to the standard evolutionary model, for sapient life to appear. Either the standard model was wrong, or the ek-Cha’a, together with the local biosphere, were themselves relative newcomers to the world. The C/L team was here to learn as much as possible about the Cernunnans—their biology, their sociology, their culture, and their myths.

After several years of contact, the Eldest Drone had agreed to receive an Earth embassy in the principal city the humans called Karnon. It turned out that the concept of extraterritoriality—of a plot of land within the city that technically was Earth rather than Cha’a—was easy enough for the ek-Cha’a to understand. Much of ek-Cha’a culture was centered on the idea that bull-males claimed areas of land for themselves and their harems, and fought to defend them. The Eldest had ceded a walled-in block of buildings to the C/L mission, an area of land a little more than one hectare in size, and the Earth facility had been built there.

The Hesperus had arrived with Ambassador Gonzales two years ago, a blatant attempt by Geneva to force the ek-Cha’a to accept diplomatic contact with Earth. The first Marine security contingent had come with her. Schaeffer and his Marines had arrived six weeks ago on the Bohr, relieving the original security team, while Ambassador Tarleton had replaced Gonzales. The replacements had arrived in the middle of what amounted to all-out civil war.

The locals didn’t see it that way, not as war. The drones ran things in ek-Cha’a society, but they had no real power save what they were granted day to day by the local dominant-bull males. Those males had initially agreed to cede the compound to the offworlders, but in recent months, more and more, the native population—both dominant and submissive males, the females, and even some of the drones—had been insisting that the aliens needed to abide by ek-Cha’a traditions.

And that meant fighting for their land.

The ambassadors—both Gonzales and Tarleton—had refused the repeated formal challenges, of course. An embassy was an instrument of peace, after all, of diplomacy…ideas the ek-Cha’a had difficulty understanding. Fractious and belligerent, especially over territorial matters, ek-Cha’a history appeared to be a very long saga of land grabs, territorial squabbles, alliances, betrayals, and bloodshed—not wars, as such, but as the niceties of day-to-day life.

And it was beginning to look as though the humans were about to be drawn into the latest round of not-quite-war confrontations.

The drone council that served as this world’s government had so far resisted demands that the offworlders play along, claiming that humans were not true males, that they didn’t understand how ek-Cha’a thought, and so were exempt from the need to claim and fight for land. While a large part of the population was still willing to go along with this, a number of the dominant males had begun organizing gangs with the goal of forcing the Earthers to fight. They’d broken into a local armory, seized military weapons, and begun a campaign of demonstrations, arson, and rioting that had paralyzed Karnon for weeks.

From their point of view, it wasn’t as though it was war.…

Schaeffer didn’t trust the drones. Ostensibly a third ek-Cha’a sex, they were in fact sexless, originally male or female ek-Cha’a who’d metamorphosed out of their sexual phase. In primitive ek-Cha’a society, they’d been specialized caregivers, the nurturers, child-raisers, teachers, and feeders; now they ran the planet, trying to maintain at least a semblance of peace between the hormone-drunken clans and gangs of bull-males. They couldn’t give orders to the bulls—no one could do that except for a bigger, stronger bull—but they could make suggestions…and by long-standing tradition those suggestions generally were honored.

And the Marines understood tradition very well indeed.

“Commander Schaeffer!” The voice was Passerotti’s, her call sounding from the tiny speakers implanted behind and below his ears. “We’ve got trouble! Looks like the mob’s coming through the gate!”

“I’m in the squad bay. Send me a link.”

His cerebral implant, nanochelated within his brain, gave him electronic control over devices nearby. He thoughtclicked the big viewall display to life, tuning in on the image feed from the camera mounted on Passerotti’s helmet. Outside, the sun was setting, an intensely bright, hot, pinpoint glare casting long shadows through the streets of Karnon. He could see the high wall surrounding the embassy compound, and the six-meter-wide iron-bar gate across the entrance.

The mob filled the plaza beyond the compound wall, gesticulating, whooping, surging, a wild cacophony of angry xenophobia.

They did not, in fact, look much at all like crabs, though they had evolved from arboreal pseudocrustaceans. Each was twice as massive as a human, standing two and a half to three meters tall, with four jointed legs around a powerfully muscular tail kept tightly curled up underneath, like a huge, nervous lobster. Possessing both internal and external skeletons, they were sheathed in armor like overlapping strips of hardened leather. Four thick-muscled arms grew evenly spaced around what generously might be called the head—a recessed bowl on the upper end of the highly flexible torso protecting a single small and armor-enclosed eye, deeply buried to protect it from the hot local sun. The feeding pouch was located somewhere beneath the thorax; four slits further down the body allowed it to breathe as well as speak. Ek-Cha’a speech sounded like the discordant hoots and warblings from the brass section of an orchestra just getting tuned up—especially when they were worked up about something, which lately seemed to be most of the time.

The arms were their most distinctive feature—massive, bare of external armor, three-fingered, and bright blue, branching out from the recessed single eye like the petals of a flower. The ek-Cha’a closest to the gate were gripping the bars with all-fours, rattling them furiously.

None of the natives Schaeffer could see was carrying a weapon, thank God, but those powerful arms could do serious damage to an unprotected human. The worst part of the situation was Warner’s order that the Marine guard not carry charged lasers. The battery packs all were in the basement armory, sealed and locked, and only Warner had the keypad code.

He tried another call to Warner, but got the “busy” graphic on his in-head display. He might have been able to kick the RSO’s door in and pound on his desk, and to hell with what the crab on the wallscreen thought about it, but, damn it, there wasn’t time.

Sergeant Broder stood beside Schaeffer, looking at the mob. “What do you, think, Commander?” he asked. “Looks like the Boxer Rebellion all over again!”

“I was just thinking that.”

Schaeffer had long been a student of military history—especially the history and tradition of the Corps, and that included the so-called Boxer Rebellion of some three hundred years ago. The Dowager Empress in her palace in Beijing had claimed she was trying to protect the foreign legations attacked by the fanatic, rampaging Boxers. In fact, secretly, she’d been behind much of the anti-foreign rioting culminating in the 55-day siege of the legation compound that was still a heroic footnote in the Marine Corps’ history.

The ek-Cha’a Eldest Drone, Schaeffer was convinced, was playing a similar game.

The Marines called the asexual drone the king crab.

Schaeffer turned and walked to the rear of the squad bay, where the Security Group’s armor lockers were kept. Schaeffer was wearing his Class As, which should deflect anything the locals had in the way of small arms.

Although it was always difficult to compare mutually alien technologies, the ek-Cha’a were generally thought to be a couple of centuries behind the Human Confederation—no spaceflight, as yet, no lasers, no nano, no heavy EM or plasma weapons.

Small comfort. Chemically propelled slugs could still be lethal. And the ek-Cha’a certainly had the advantage of numbers. The city plaza outside the gates was packed with them; the embassy’s AI estimate put their numbers at between ten and twelve thousand.

“What the hell are you doing, Gunny?” Broder asked.

“I’m going out there,” he replied. “Maybe I can talk them down.”

“‘One mob, one ranger,’ huh?”

“The Texas rangers aren’t here. One mob, one Marine. But that sounds about equal to me.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No,” Schaeffer said. He was already wearing dress armor, and the heavy, combat stuff was locked away with the laser power packs. He would have to content himself with a fresh armor power unit and a meta jump pack, both of which nestled into the curve at the small of his back, the nano-active surfaces melding with his armor and interfacing with it. As he donned his white, visorless helmet, he felt the suit systems snapping on, and the icons on his in-head display came up green.

“Damn it, Gunny, you can’t go out there alone!”

“Maybe one man won’t be as provocative as two. Besides, I want you to go up to Warner’s office, okay?” He drew his 12mm pistol and checked the magazine and safeties, before putting it back in his external holster.

“And do what?”

Schaeffer turned to face Broder, the sergeant’s image clear in his IHD.

“Get him to see you. Knock the door down, if you have to. Tell him we need the armory open and battery packs for the lasers and plasma weapons distributed, and tell him we need them now!”

“You’re going out there with your fucking service pistol?”

“We use what we have,” Schaeffer told him. He grinned, suddenly, though Broder couldn’t see his face. “The Johnson Maneuver, right?”

Broder shook his head. “That mob ain’t gonna back down, Gunny.”

“Then I’ll keep them busy until you can pass out the charge-packs. And break out the heavy armor, too. I’m sick of diplomacy with crabs who don’t even know the meaning of the word.”

“Aye-aye, Gunnery Sergeant. But I don’t like this.…”

“We work with what we have, Sergeant. Improvise! Adapt! Overcome!”

“Ooh-rah,” Broder said, but the old battle cry was delivered flat, without emotion, and without enthusiasm.

By the time Schaeffer made it out the front door of the embassy, fifteen meters from the front gate, the mob had acquired reinforcements. Thompson and Rodriguez were on guard at the door, looking decidedly nervous. “God, Gunny!” Thompson said, pointing, “the crabs’ve got armored back-up!”

A saurian towered above the crowd, ponderously approaching the gate. It could not, Schaeffer thought, get a whole lot worse.

The alien armor was an ek-Cha’a military vehicle, somewhere in size and deadliness between a tank and a personal suit of military power armor. Dubbed “saurian” by Marine intelligence, it combined a tracked base with an erect, armored tower that mimicked the upper torso of a bull-male ek-Cha’a. Almost seven meters tall, the armored, segmented torso could twist and turn through more than ninety degrees vertically, and rotate a full two-seventy side-to-side. At the top, four jointed, chromium-alloy steel arms ended in massive, three-clawed pinchers; two small ball turrets to either side of the upper torso mounted 27mm rapid-fire cannons. The vehicle’s sole occupant rode inside the thing’s upper torso, organic arms operating controls inside mechanical arms, like waldoes, while his legs worked the torso articulation controls and the tracks. The technology was primitive by Confederation standards; the thing was fission-powered, slow, and awkward, its armor no match for Marine lasers and plasma weapons—but the Marines didn’t have lasers at the moment, none that worked, and from the way the vehicle waded up through the crowd and grasped the bars of the gate with all four arms, it looked like the vehicle was about to come into the embassy compound.

“Jesus, Gunny!” Rodriguez said. “What are we gonna do?”

“Get inside,” Schaeffer told the guards. “Go tell Warner if he doesn’t distribute power packs and armor, he won’t have an embassy left to guard. Move it!”

Though awkward and a bit slow, the servomotors behind the saurian’s arms were strong. The upper torso of the armored vehicle strained, twisted from side to side, then lurched back a step, pulling the locked gate with it in a shower of powdered stone from the walls to either side. The mob crowding around the vehicle’s tracks started forward.…

Schaeffer stepped in front of them, drew his service pistol, and aimed it at the closest ek-Cha’a. He thoughtclicked the translate icon on his in-head. “Halt!” he shouted, and an amplified voice boomed across the compound. “!Ah’ih!

The mob came to a halt, the ones behind piling into the backs of the ones ahead in tangles of jointed legs and segmented bodies. Schaeffer’s suit was now linked to the embassy’s library AI; it would translate whatever he said into the principle ek-Cha’a language, clicks, glottal stops, and all.

But the saurian was clattering forward, now, tossing the gate aside and grinding ahead of the crowd with a shrill chirping of road wheels and the clash of tracks.

Schaeffer pivoted, pointing his sidearm at the machine. The pistol was a 12mm Colt-Blackhawk, nearly as much of an anachronism in the modern Marine Corps as an officer’s dress sword, firing solid slugs instead of light or plasma. He had eight rounds in the magazine, not enough to stop a mob of ten thousand…or to do serious damage to a light tank.

But maybe they didn’t know that. “!Ah’ih!” the suit’s amplified voice boomed again.

Abruptly, the saurian halted. A string of hoots, barks, clicks, and grunts thundered from the machine. The listening AI dissected them, and scrolled a running translation down the side of Schaeffer’s in-head display. Submit, human. I am Ga!gre’joooh of the Clan !Dakt’ji, and I claim your land and your habitations for myself and my cows.

“Like hell!” Schaeffer snapped back, the pistol not wavering. “Under the terms of extraterritoriality, this compound is the sovereign territory of the Earth Confederation, and you have five seconds to get the hell out!”

The translation echoed off the surrounding walls and buildings, as Schaeffer wondered how the AI was rendering such terms as “extraterritoriality” and “hell.”

Arms spread wide, its torso bent forward and down, the saurian screamed and lurched forward.…

Schaeffer didn’t bother firing the pistol. That had been for show only, with the hope that an aggressive stance might make the bastard back down. Instead, he flexed his knees, jumped, and cut in a quick burst from his meta pack.

Meta—He64—was an exotic rocket fuel with an exceptionally high energy-density stored in the highly insulated tank on his back. It took tremendous amounts of energy, using high-powered lasers, to pack the helium atoms tightly together in a metastable configuration that came apart very easily when it was released into the jumpjet reaction chamber and heated. In Cernunnos’ sixth-tenths of a G, a single burst carried Schaeffer high into the air, then dropping toward the armored giant. For a moment, he feared he’d miscalculated; objects fell here at less than 600 centimeters per second squared—just five meters and a bit in the first second. From his adrenaline-charged perspective, it felt like he was hanging in the air, nakedly exposed. The flexible torso of the machine twisted about, as though trying to locate him, then angled up, and Schaeffer found himself looking down at the transparent dome located at the joining of the four outstretched arms. Twin ball turrets on the upper torso rotated up, and the saurian loosed two streams of 27mm high-velocity needles.

Something slammed into his side as he dropped, jarring him. His dress armor was light and thin, but designed to distribute the kinetic energy of an impact across its entire surface. Schaeffer was clubbed to one side by the blow, but he managed not to tumble, managed to awkwardly grab hold of the alien tank’s upper body as he struck, managed to grab and hold tight.

From half a meter away, he stared into the transparent canopy at the upturned violet eye of the saurian’s pilot.

The machine’s torso jerked from side to side, trying to throw him off. He jammed his left arm into the mass of interlocking metal plates that served as shutters to protect the clear dome, which appeared to be made of some kind of thick plastic.

He didn’t know if a bullet would penetrate that plastic, and ricochets might hit someone in the crowd. He wanted to stop these people, not start a war.

Reversing the pistol in his right hand, Schaeffer brought the butt down hammer-hard against the dome. The force of the blow jarred him to his shoulder despite his armor’s dissipation of the energy, and the driver on the other side of the plastic flinched, but it didn’t look like he’d even scratched the bubble’s surface.

He swung again, striking hard. And again. And again.…

The machine was frantic, twisting, turning, and trying to claw at him with its arms. A chirping sounded in Schaeffer’s ear, an alarm triggered by his armor’s radar, and he let go, dropping onto the tank chassis as one massive, mechanical fist whipped past his head and slammed into the bubble. Another arm tried to reach him, but he swarmed up the twisting torso once more, using the segmented armor plates as hand- and footholds. Tucked in close, clinging to the torso and one shoulder, he wasn’t safe, exactly, but the clumsy thing was definitely having trouble reaching him.

The dome had been brightly starred by the impact of the machine’s powerful arm. When Schaeffer climbed back into view, the metal shutters around it irised shut, protecting it. His suit’s radar warned him of another incoming swing and again he ducked, clinging tightly to the massive, armored torso. The saurian’s ball turret weaponry opened up, but Schaeffer was too close for the guns to bear, and with the shutters closed over the dome, the pilot appeared to be blind.

“Commander Schaeffer!” Warner’s voice called over his command channel. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

The saurian snapped its torso left and right. He held on.

“Having a discussion…with the…locals!” he replied, spacing his words between attempts to shrug him off. “Sir!”

“You can’t stop that thing by yourself!”

“Tradition…sir! Duty!” He could hear the AI translating, but that didn’t matter.

“Your duty is to obey my orders, Gunnery Sergeant!”

“My duty…is to…protect my people…and civilian personnel…sir!”

“It’ll kill you!”

“Then I suggest…you open up…the armory! Sir! Let my people…lock and load!”

Schaeffer just hoped he could buy them enough time.

A few of the more daring members of the mob were starting to clamber up onto the deck of the chassis.

Twisting around, Schaeffer fired two shots into the air…then kicked at one particularly stubborn ek-Cha’a who hadn’t jumped off with the gunfire. The torso behind him twisted sharply to the right, the weapons still firing blind; rounds slammed into the crowd and several of the unarmored ek-Cha’a fell, writhing.

Shit! But at least the rest began scattering. Schaeffer turned at another radar warning, ducked, dropped to the tank deck, then ducked again at another ponderous swing of an arm. He hit the pavement in front of the machine and rolled, coming up again on one knee. The alien machine loomed above him, its torso bent far forward, the arms spread apart as it reached for him.

Needle-tipped bullets slammed past him, and three shattered against his chest armor and helmet, splintering, staggering him, but he kept his position. The driver’s dome was again open, and Schaeffer could see the ek-Cha’a inside, staring down at him with that single, unwinking purple eye.

Still kneeling, Schaeffer brought his 12mm up in a two-handed grip and began firing, round after round slamming into the plastic bubble and shrieking off in wild ricochets. The star brightened; the dome cracked.…

The shutters irised shut again, blinding the driver. The machineguns stopped, but four arms were descending on Schaeffer from above and from either side.

An alarm shrilled in Schaeffer’s helmet, and he could smell the sulfur stink of SO2. His armor had been breached.

Again, Schaeffer triggered his jumpjets, sailing up and onto the saurian’s forward deck, then clambering once more up the sharply bent torso. The saurian was firing wildly now, quick, sharp bursts that raked the pavement below or shrieked off the surrounding walls. The dome shields irised open as the driver tried to acquire his target.

Schaeffer rammed his left fist down into the moveable armor plates, freezing them, while pointing the pistol directly at the driver’s eye. “You can do what you like to each other,” he shouted, “but this ground is mine!”

For emphasis, he slammed the butt of his pistol against the cracked plastic again, and this time he felt it actually give a bit beneath the blow. He pressed the muzzle of his sidearm against the plastic. “Get this damned thing off my perimeter!”

For long seconds, Marine and ek-Cha’a warrior stared at one another. Two arms started to move, and Schaeffer said, “Don’t!” The armored plates surrounding the damaged bubble tightened against his arm, straining. “I said don’t!”

If worst came to unthinkable worst, Schaeffer had one final card to play. If he released his meta tank, slapped its nanoseal surface against the tank chassis deck, and switched off the insulation circuit, it would explode within a minute or so as the He64 heated up. He didn’t want to do that unless he had to; he wouldn’t be able to control the explosion, and the saurian, he remembered, was powered by a small plutonium reactor inside the chassis. The detonating meta would not only take out the ek-Cha’a armor and a large number of the crowd, it would also scatter an unknown amount of radioactive plutonium across the heart of the city.

Back down, you hormone-happy bastard! he thought. Back down!…

The pressure on his arm relaxed. And the saurian began backing up.

Schaeffer jumped off the front of the vehicle as it continued to back, one track skirt scraping against a gate post with a shower of stone fragments. The crowd behind it began backing up as well, uncertain, and when they collided with unmoving members of the mob behind they began panicking. Schaeffer stepped forward, following the armored vehicle, keeping his pistol steadily pointed at the driver. He halted at the gateway.

The crowd continued to disperse. The armored saurian stood there for a moment longer, and Schaeffer was uncomfortably aware that the machine’s turrets both were aimed directly at him. His armor had deflected everything those weapons had thrown at him so far, but it couldn’t render him invulnerable. Another sustained volley might well deliver more kinetic energy than his dress armor could handle. His side and chest were aching—now that he could think about it—from the earlier impacts.

Perhaps worst of all, the digital counter on the side of his pistol now read “0.” He’d expended all of his rounds moments ago, and the weapon was empty.

The machine raised all four arms, moving them in a complex gesture.

And then it turned on its tracks and rumbled away across the plaza.

“Your actions,” Warner told him in his office later, “were…how shall I put it? Somewhat unorthodox.”

“Yes, sir.”

Schaeffer stood at attention in front of Warner’s high-tech desk. He’d been summoned here immediately after the incident, fully expecting to be chewed a new one.

Damned bureaucrats.…

Warner studied him for a moment, his head propped on thumb and extended forefinger. “Tell me, Commander, just what made you think you could stop that vehicle by yourself, with a pistol of all things?”

“Corps tradition, sir.”

“Tradition. Commander Schaeffer, there is nothing in Marine Corp tradition—”

“Excuse me, sir, but there is.” Schaeffer thoughtclicked a file in his own in-head, transferring it to Warner’s console. “This is a download from the embassy library. Corps history is a…a kind of hobby of mine, sir.”

Warner pulled up the file on one of his monitors and read it. “One Marine with a pistol,” he said. He shook his head. “Against a column of three tanks.”

“Yes, sir. He had them outnumbered. We call it the Johnson Maneuver.”

Most Marines knew the story of Marine Captain Charles B. Johnson, just as they knew the fabled exploits of other Corps heroes—Dan Daly, John Basilone, Chesty Puller, Smedley Butler, and so many, many more.

“You were gambling on the tech differential, weren’t you?” Warner demanded. “That bull-male couldn’t hurt you through your armor.”

“Not really, sir. He did breach my armor once, though the nano systems sealed it off and purged my air. The thing is, I figured he was acting under both cultural and biological imperatives, assuming that if I was a male, I would fight for my territory and my right to mate. If I backed down—if we backed down, sir—we would have proven that we were submissive males, and would have to do what the bull-males demanded. It was simpler to just show them who was boss.”

Schaeffer didn’t add that the armor and the technology had nothing to do with things. It was never about the armor…it was about the man inside. Always.

“Apparently you did so,” Warner continued. “The Ambassador called me a few moments ago. It seems that thirty-five female ek-Cha’a have just applied for admission to the compound. According to ek-Cha’a tradition, they’re yours, now. Your, ah, ‘cows,’ won in single combat, fair and square.”

“Well, the Ambassador is going to have to find a polite way of saying ‘thanks, but no thanks,’ isn’t he?”

“Something of that sort.” Warner shook his head, but he almost smiled. “You know, I should write you up for insubordination, Commander, but Ambassador Tarleton is quite happy with how things have turned out. You appear to have defused a potentially serious diplomatic situation, and resolved it in our favor.”

“I’m glad to hear it, sir.”

But he hadn’t done it for diplomacy.

“By the way, you might be interested to know. When the saurian broke off the fight, it moved its arms…kind of like this.” Warner’s two-handed attempt at a four-armed gesture was not nearly as successful as his attempts at the spoken ek-Cha’a language. “According to Ng’g’!grelchk, who was watching the whole thing…the bull was saluting you as a worthy fellow warrior, and as victor.”

“We should respect the cultural traditions of the locals, sir,” Schaeffer said.

Just so long, he thought, as the locals learn to respect our traditions as well.


USMC HISTORY

CEREBRAL IMPLANT DOWNLOAD [EXTRACT]


On february 2, 1983, Israeli forces were testing the resolve of 1,200 U.S. Marines in southern Lebanon, part of a UN peacekeeping force in the area. Seeking to discredit the Marines in order to impose their own military control over the area, Israeli infantry and armor probed Marine positions and, in one case, sent a column of three heavy Centurion tanks toward a Marine checkpoint. Captain [Charles B.] Johnson stood in the middle of the road, pistol drawn, forcing the tanks to stop. “You will not pass through this position,” Johnson said. “If you go through, it will be over my dead body.”

Two of the tanks broke from the third and attempted to rush past Johnson. The Marine jumped on top of the lead tank, put his .45 pistol to [Israeli Lt. Col. Rafi] Landsberg’s head, and ordered the man to stop his tanks.

Landsberg complied and, after a hurried exchange of radio traffic with his headquarters, the Centurions withdrew. The Israelis tried to downplay the incident, calling it a misunderstanding on the part of the Marines.

But Captain Johnson’s actions were in the highest traditions of Marine Corps commitment to honor, fidelity, and duty.


Ian Douglas is the pseudonym of William H. Keith, the author of over 100 novels, mostly military SF and technothrillers. His work includes the Marines in Space trilogy of trilogies, Legacy, Heritage, and Inheritance, written as Ian Douglas. Under the name H. Jay Riker, he wrote the long-running SEALs: The Warrior Breed series, a lightly fictionalized look at the history of Navy special warfare. More recently, he collaborated with author Stephen Coonts on three bestselling spy thrillers in the Deep Black series: Arctic Gold, Sea of Terror, and Death Wave, while his short fiction has been extensively anthologized by the late Martin H. Greenberg.

Back | Next
Framed