High Jingo
John F. Carr
2069 A.D., Ceres
AFTER SEVEN YEARS of campaigning one comes to realize that the slight disorientation of passing through one Alderson Point is very similar to the sensation when passing through any other of several hundred Alderson Points. And quarters for a lieutenant aboard one CoDominium starship are remarkably functional and similar to those aboard any other ship. Starship travel was, of course, the downtime.
The constant brushfire engagements on a dozen planets varied much more; their only constant being sudden death. Jeremy Savage could still bring up an occasional tear of emotion at some parading of the colors. He enjoyed his work as much as any soldier can. He could endure the spit-and-polish boredom of his occasional stint of garrison duty. What was less easy to endure was that he had polished one set of lieutenant’s bars down to the bare base metal and had to go buy another. After seven effing years Jeremy Savage was still just a lieutenant. A goddamn colonial lieutenant!
He thought often of Colonel Copeland, the Commandant of New Sandhurst, and his parting words: “You shouldn’t have come home. The CoDominium Fleet is little more than a club for the incompetents from various national forces on Earth. They’re despised out here—have to be escorted about with armed guards—and yet they nobble all the top posts out here where the action is. The CD needs more able colonials, more young men like you to put things back in balance. What had you expected to accomplish here on Churchill?”
If this was bettering himself in the CoDominium, where would he be now if he’d stayed on Churchill? Probably saluting moorse drivers instead of waiting for a transfer off Ceres Base.
It was not that Savage lacked ability. Many officers who, unfortunately, had not been in his own chain of command, had privately remarked on how able the young lieutenant was, and what a pity someone could not find a place for him. But the captains and majors and colonels whom Jeremy Savage had helped through one disastrous campaign after another had short memories and were ungrateful for having their bacon saved by a colonial. And, why was the young whelp taking up space when they all had poor relations of their own back on Earth to be taken care of? It was enough to drive a man to drink. And slowly, it was driving Jeremy Savage there.
Ceres was a stopping point for all traffic to Sol’s inner planets. The asteroid was usually a first assignment after graduation from the Academy at Luna Base. It also served as the primary transfer point for returning CoDominium Service Navy personnel and Marines for home or out-system duty.
But after a three month passage from Pesht on a civilian liner managed by some religio-ecological group with a totally unrealistic attitude toward alcohol, Jeremy Savage had developed the kind of thirst that used to be known only east of Suez where the best was like the worst. There weren’t any ten commandments on Luna or Ceres. The sole dictum was, “Thou shalt not miss muster or be unable to perform thy duty.”
He was pleased to see an old friend, Brent Myers, whom he had not seen since their Academy days in the canteen. He motioned him over, asking “When’d you drop in?”
Captain Myers concentrated. “About forty hours ago. Hell of a trip: damned ore carrier’s air machine killed half the poor BuReloc suckers on the way out. Would’ve done us in, only the return cargo mostly doesn’t breathe.”
“Sounds like the Kennicott ship I took two years ago getting off Comstock. Earth’s unwashed coming in, refined ore going out.”
“And air so foul it burned the plating off my captain’s bars,” Brent Myers growled and rubbed at his neck where the skin texture was not quite right.
Savage also had a few of these saddle marks of CD service but his clothing concealed most of the regeneration marks which were not exactly scars but more like ill-matched skin textures and colorings. Savage fingered his lieutenant’s bars. “Nice to see somebody’s getting ahead,” he groused. “Another drink?”
“In the Forty-second you’re never stationary. It’s either another grade up or two meters down.” A topless waitress with the magnificent buoyancy only low gravity could produce was replenishing their glasses when two lieutenants and an ensign caught sight of Brent Myers and glide-walked to the table.
“What’s a nice boy like you doing in a dive like this?” the taller one asked Savage.
“A question I ask myself with increasing frequency,” Savage said.
“Be of good cheer. I bring tidings of joy.”
“Is Earth suffering from a sterility plague?” Myers asked.
“Not exactly.” They pulled chairs back in the rails, without which chairs would be floating all over the low-ceilinged room, and scooted back into a conspiratorial circle around the bolted-down table. “Up the Brotherhood,” the tall lieutenant said, and raised his glass. Captain Myers drank up hurriedly, gave Savage an ‘I’ve heard this before’ look and departed.
Jeremy Savage recalled Colonel McKinley’s pep talk before he had departed Luna Base. In the seven years since he had rejoined the CoDominium the subject of the Brotherhood had come up on occasion but Jeremy was not a joiner. The Academy Commandant had hinted at the subject, but leaving Britannia, leaving Judith Rivers, leaving the swamp untamed—there was too much unfinished in his life for Lieutenant Savage to become involved in some childish rannygazoo of passwords and secret handclasps. Although he came from a Low Church family, Savage was in private agreement with whichever pope it was who had condemned all secret organizations.
The tall lieutenant accepted a glass of red with an appreciative glance at what low G could do for topless waitresses. “They conspire against us,” he said. “In the entire history of the CoDominium has any colonial ever risen beyond colonel?”
Savage struggled to remember the lieutenant’s name. Freedom? Didn’t sound right.
“The high command is torn down the middle between the Yanks and the Russkis,” he continued. “All from Earth, and every bloody one of them busy padding the payroll with whichever of his poor relations can’t hack it on Earth.” The tall lieutenant spoke a bizarre mélange of American and Britannic, with an oddly plangent underlay.
Liberty? Then Savage recognized that Boer underlay. Vreeheit! At least he had been in the right ballpark.
“They have their old boy network. What’s wrong with a few of us colonials having ours?”
“A few?” Savage tended to get nervous around anyone who talked of tight little groups. “Isn’t our first loyalty to the CoDominium?”
“Of course it is!” Vreeheit snapped. “I’m not some goddamn Bolshevik plotting in a cellar with three drunks and a Cheka agent. There’s nothing secret about our aims. Anyone’s welcome to join us. We just don’t go out of the way to call attention to ourselves.”
“What are your aims?” the other lieutenant asked.
“As long as the CD survives, we’re for it. But how many of you think the status quo can last another generation? Back on Earth, in spite of all those rapprochements and peaceful coexistences and Gorbachev’s False Dawn, Yanks and Russkis still distrust one another. And the turd world hates them both. Do you want to see the whole galaxy go the way Latin America turned into two dozen warring states when Napoleon interfered with the Spanish mails? Who will equip us, feed us and pay us when no more ships come from Earth?
“Half of those time-serving poor relations will resign their commissions. The other half will turn pirate and guess whose planets they’ll plunder? We’ve an ugly time coming up but it’ll get no better by shirking responsibility. Somebody has to keep the peace!”
The tall lieutenant had spilled half his drink. He forced himself back down in his chair.
“Sounds as if you’d been there,” Savage observed.
“It comes from growing up a minority in a country we settled about the same time the Yanks were exterminating all their Indians. Our mistake was in not doing the same.”
“Then you’re from Earth?”
“Pop and I went back to lend a hand to the Vaterland. My father managed to get himself killed. I couldn’t even accomplish that.”
“Legio patria nostra,” Savage said.
Vreeheit raised his glass. “While it lasts.”
The topless waitress reappeared with another round. Savage gulped his and got carefully to his feet. “See you tomorrow,” he said, knowing Lieutenant Vreeheit would feel he had gained the field. But Jeremy’s real reason for leaving the taproom was more urgent. One more drink and he’d find himself proposing: the prospect of a topless wedding gown was enough to get him soberly back to his quarters.
Jeremy’s head felt heavier than Ceres’ near-nonexistent gravity could warrant next ‘morning’ but he took the hair of the dog and got through the day without any fatal screw-ups. He tried unsuccessfully not to reach for the pipe that he could not carry or use in a controlled atmosphere. God, he was sick of casual duty already and he’d not been two standard days on Ceres Base. His last unit had been decimated on Winslow after a Soviet colonel had disregarded his Soviet major’s and captains’ recommendations, along with not even hearing Jeremy Savage’s. The colonel’s reply to every objection was that “My dearest friend, Lermontov, would not do it that way.”
From the way he harped on his friendship Savage suspected that Rear Admiral Lermontov had never heard of Colonel Grodky. Pulling a classical Custer, the CD regiment had split forces to march down a river which, within half a day, became impossibly wide with low marshy banks that afforded no cover. At which point the local irregulars hit both banks to score a forty percent casualty rate in the first ten minutes of mortar, recoilless and bazooka fire.
Jeremy Savage had been so furious he intended to make at least one kill before he died. But before he could get Grodky a piece of shrapnel shattered his right humerus while another piece from the same shell parted his right clavicle. He was struggling to shift his pistol to his left hand when he lost consciousness and awoke sixty standard days later to first the nausea, then the raging hunger that always followed regeneration. By then others had been promoted into all the vacancies and he was still Lieutenant Savage. Where would they send him this time?
After several eternities the day was over and retreat blew. Savage went to the Bachelor Officers Quarters for a shower and change. He couldn’t develop enthusiasm for the ichthyoid fillet on the evening menu, instead settled for a Big MacGoo at the slop chute. When he showed up at the topless dive his companions of last night were already sitting at the same table.
“Well,” Vreeheit asked, “Are you in?”
“What can I lose?” Savage asked. In the back of his mind he heard an echo from an ancient document. ‘Our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.’
There was a subdued murmur of congratulation around the table which died down as the impossibly pneumatic barmaid appeared. She failed to understand Savage’s Britannic order for a double whisky. Doubting that an addition of the American “e” would clarify the matter, he forewent all thought of rye and asked for bourbon. The waitress departed, drawing all eyes for an instant and then Jeremy was truly embarrassed as he endured a coaching in the orthodox Brotherhood way to rub his ear and scratch his nose. Finally the foolishness was over with.
“Now that I’m in, what am I supposed to do?” he asked.
“Once you’ve joined the Forty-second we’d like to know what Falkenberg is up to.”
“Slow down,” Savage said. “I’ve heard all the scuttlebutt about Falkenberg and his meteoric rise on Arrarat.” He had to work to keep the unbidden jealousy out of his voice “But I didn’t know he was with the Forty-second; last I heard he was with the 501st Battalion. Isn’t Colonel Hiram Silvers commanding the Forty-second?”
“Yes, but he’ll be eased out now that Lermontov’s fair-haired boy is on board.”
“Who says I’m assigned to the Forty-second?”
“Commandant McKinley,” Vreeheit said.
“But what am I supposed to find out?”
“Major John Christian Falkenberg is one of Lermontov’s ‘Young Lions’. Learn what Falkenberg’s objectives are and you’ll know what future the Admiral plans for us.”
* * *
“Casey Jones,” the repple-depple lieutenant said as he handed the fat envelope to the Lieutenant Savage.
“I beg your pardon?” Jeremy Savage said.
“Orders in your hand. You’re finally escaping this drab and wretched hellhole.”
“Oh, really?”
“Quite so, old chap.” The staffer knew the words to Savage’s Oxonian accent but had never quite mastered the tune.
“Are you going to tell me or must I go to the bother of reading them?”
“Ceres Base. The Forty-second.”
“Oh really?” It sounded too good to be true.
“With the Service’s latest meteor, the famous and fabulous Falkenberg.”
Savage got the notice out of the envelope and learned that he still had twenty free hours. “I’ll fax my first campaign ribbon to you,” he said as he was leaving the office.
“That’s what they all say,” the staffer said, although the expression on his face said he was not about to trade places.
Jeremy Savage scoot-walked through the low Ceres gravity to the Base Library and punched up the Fleet Register on the nearest terminal. He had no idea what had finally gotten him out of this backwater. Falkenberg was a rising legend through the Legion; youngest captain and now youngest major, but he would never have heard of Lt. Jeremy Savage. He began scrolling the regimental muster sheet looking for familiar names. Brent Myers popped up. Until recently Savage had not seen him in over seven years. Did anyone anywhere know or give a damn about Jeremy Savage?
Stop it! Savage told himself. No matter who’s responsible, seize Opportunity by the forelock. Forelock, hell, grab him by the bollocks! He shut down the terminal and went back to BOQ to pack and settle his mess account. An hour later he was in the Ceres duty room studying the overhead display trying to find the Forty-second’s HQ.
“Savage?”
He turned and it was Brent Myers in uniform, looking totally at home with new captain’s bars.
“God damn, it’s good to see you again. Will you be joining us?”
He pointed to his folded transfer papers. “Yes, I think I’ll be settling in with you.”
“I wasn’t sure but I had a kind of feeling.”
“Pray tell me why?”
“Colonel Silvers was poking through the machine a while ago looking for somebody with knowledge of Kennicott and your name popped out.”
Lieutenant Savage nodded. “I spent a year there with the Eighteenth when there was a dust-up five years ago. Some farmers and ranchers were trying to put the squeeze on the Company.”
“It’s worse than that this time. The Colonial Governor’s been assassinated and there’s been some kind of coup. Convict gangs have taken over the streets and the mines have shut down. The new ‘President’ wants official recognition and he’s taken over the Kennicott mines in the name of the ‘Free Republic of Nogales.’ Grand Senator DeSilva is fit to be tied.”
“I see,” Savage said.
* * *
Actually, it had been a bit more complicated than Myers was letting on. The Colonel was an advocate of ‘bringing up’ good troops who had been lost through the cracks and corruption of the system. And when the all-knowing computer had revealed that Jeremy Savage had been posted to Kennicott and was familiar with their towns and traditions, Myers had been fast to reveal that said young officer had been a classmate and thorough-going stout fellow.
“No blotches on his record,” Silvers mused. “Seen plenty of combat and acquitted himself well. Seven years is a long time to remain a lieutenant—even for a colonial.”
Brent Myers had worried about that too. But there were code words for every possible human failing. If ‘bachelor’, for example, appeared once too often the conclusion was obvious. Almost as damning was ‘women find him attractive’. None of these foibles appeared in Lieutenant Jeremy Savage’s curriculum vitae. Which left only a single explanation.
“Major Falkenberg, what do you think?” the Colonel asked.
Falkenberg gave the question due consideration. “He’s on somebody’s shit list,” he said.
“I believe you’re right, Major. Let’s see if we can change his luck.”
“Yessir!” Brent Myers had been hard put to contain his delight.
* * *
“I’ll hang around here and pick up your luggage,” he told Savage. He punched his wristwatch and a line on the overhead display jumped into pulsating amber boldface. “Follow the yellow brick road and make your call on the Old Man.”