First Casualty

  THE FIRST CASUALTY

  An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  Copyright © 1999 by Mike Moscoe.

  Cover art by Scott Grimando.

  Cover design by Diana Kolsky.

  Interior text design by Tiffany Kukec.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized

  editions. For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-61766-3

  Dedicated to

  Lieutenant Robert A. Heinlein, USN, deceased,

  who showed us how it was done

  To Lieutenant Commander Loren J. Moscoe,

  USN Ret., who taught me what it meant,

  and made me mad enough to learn a hell of a lot

  To Lieutenant Commander Michael J. Brennan, USN Ret.,

  and the crew at work who kept this book honest,

  as much as they could

  And to

  Ellen

  who keeps all the different parts of me together.

  CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  About the Author

  One

  Every alarm in Sergeant Mary Rodrigo's space suit went off at once. Red lights flashed on her eyeball as her heads-up display demanded her attention. She ignored them.

  Mary had five moles laying a minefield for her. Mines were tricky beasts. Laying a field from underground was a tight bitch, not to be left to unsupervised remotes. Twitching her right hand, she froze them in place.

  Mary twisted her right wrist and blinked twice, cycling her heads-up display to the screen her alarms were so hot on. The newly deployed infrared sensors were screaming about hot targets. But there weren't supposed to be any— yet!

  She chinned her mike to a new channel. “Lek, we got a problem. Either our sensors are spooked, or the colonials got here without you knowing.”

  “Not bloody likely,” the old guy said with a chuckle. “Check the angles from the two outer sensors, girl. We've picked up the Colly attack fleet coming around Elmo Four!”

  “Acid crap,” Mary swore. “They're that sensitive!”

  “Bet they made a fuel scoop and got their balloon heat shields out, “Dumont said beside her, “What a ride for real, not just a vid-game,” the young man from the streets said wistfully.

  “I better pass this to the LT,” Mary growled. “Let's get back to the mines.” In the end, even Dumont and his street kids had voted her for sergeant, but that didn't mean he couldn't give her plenty of lip before he did what she said. Today, without a word, Dumont went back to putting in mines. On the other side of Mary, reliable Cassie had never quit work on the minefield.

  Mary switched to the command channel. “Lieutenant, we got targets.”

  “Sergeant, where the hell have you been? What?” His voice died in mid-question as Mary passed through the visual. “What... Where ... How ... ?” he stammered.

  “This is Major Henderson at battalion. What have you got for me?” So the battalion CO was lurking on their command channel, or had an alert on it. Considering all the lurking and alerts Lek had rigged through the brigade's net, Mary had no complaint.

  She shut up; let the young officer talk to the man. Only when the wait stretched and started to bend did she speak. “Our infrared sensors have picked up the colonials coming around Elmo Four. We don't have an ETA on them,” she said, though she suspected Lek did by now. No need telling management what they didn't want to hear from dumb worker bees.

  “Brigade finally risked a radar sweep about the time the bandits went behind the gas giant,” battalion drawled. “I'll pass this report along. Colonials are right on schedule.”

  Which was not what the command net had been saying for the last fifteen hours. Lek had warned Mary not to believe the official word from HQ. She'd learned long ago not to trust what a foreman said. The old electronic wizard had been passing along to Mary and the rest of the unemployed miners the straight dope.

  Battalion signed off; the young LT found his voice.

  “'Sergeant, what the hell is going on here? We've got to talk.”

  What the sergeant had going on here was her own usual go at making everyone happy, to give the LT what he wanted, and the rest of the platoon what they wanted. What Mary wanted was to be light-years away from all this with a beer in one hand and a warm hunk on her shoulder. But today, nobody was getting what they wanted. With a sigh, Mary got ready for a long talk.

  * * * *

  Captain Anderson, commander, 97th Defense Brigade, frowned at his screen. “Since when does a leg infantry platoon have infrared sensors that good? Not that I'm complaining, but...”

  His XO, Commander Inez Umboto, grinned at the display, showing no sign of surprise. “Half the troops of that platoon are out-of-work miners. Remember the complaints you fielded from several mine administrators about missing equipment, even a jet cart?”

  “God, those things are expensive. Even the Navy can't afford 'em. Though I'd love to have one.”

  Inez's grin dripped admiration for the culprits. “You may. Each company of the First of the Eighty-eighth has one platoon heavy with miners. All three weighed in heavy at boarding but not enough to complain about.” She paused for a moment. “You remember how tickled Comm was to get all those extra channels. It was an old miner, pulling boards from a 'damaged parts' box, that got them for us.”

  Captain Anderson raised an eyebrow. “You didn't tell me.”

  “Sir, a good exec doesn't bother her boss with the details.”

  “What else haven't you bothered me with, Izzy?”

  “I wish I knew. There's a shit-pot of stuff out there, and I've only scratched the surface. Despite the rumors, I am only human and rarely can be in more than three places at once.”

  Anderson ignored the humor; today he needed an exec who could be in a dozen places at once. Scowling down at his command display, he shook his head. He'd fought the coming battle hundreds of times in his forty-year career—on the computer display.

  Now he was fighting it for real, and it was going wrong in ways even the craziest umpire would not have thrown at him in a war game. Why had a picket boat been waiting for them the moment they jumped into this worthless system? Why was a major colonial force reacting in only seventy-two hours?

  He'd expected problems on his side. Lasers were missing parts; power plants were missing cables; crates were miscoded, misplaced, or just plain missing. Most of his grunts were ransacking containers, chasing the critical parts he needed to get the central defenses up. Without them, the colonials could land smack dab in the middle of his base crater. He'd expected time to work all this out. Only one platoon from each company had been shoved forward to block the three cracks in the crater wall.

  Everything had gone too fast or too wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the sensors from that platoon would let him give the colonials a surprise or two.

  * * * *

  Mary took a deep breath and tried to give the lieutenant an answer he'd like. “I set up the sensors you ordered, sir.” She keyed up the different coverages she'd deployed: video, thermal, radar, />
  electromagnetic. She ignored the Navy issue crap—they were too big and too noisy to be anything but targets.

  “We don't have all that gear, Sergeant. How'd you do it?” That was two questions. Mary chose to answer the easy one. With a flick of her wrist, she called up the schematic of the crater rim and the array she'd dug through it. “I used diggers from the mines to set this up. I got the place covered.”

  She activated the laser designators one by one, let them sweep the broken ground in front of the pass the platoon was ordered to hold at all cost.

  “By God, you do have it covered.” The LT whistled. “But how? The engineers are still at brigade. How'd you do this?”

  Mary let her breath out slowly. How do you explain to a kid that never wanted to be anything but a toy soldier what it's like to spend twenty years of your life in the asteroid mines, to never want to be anything but a miner? And to get your pink slip and draft notice in the same envelope. “Our last shift at the mine, we figured if something might save our life, and it wasn't welded to the deck, we might as well borrow it. Boss men had just installed a lot of new equipment.” Which was why they could afford to let half their workforce go—the senior half. They'd gotten all kind of media plaudits ... and ignored the seniority clause of their labor contract.

  Mary shrugged, or tried to. Armored space suits didn't allow much body language. “Who knows what was gonna be surplus, anyway?” Mary knew damn well the old equipment had already been sold off. She and the other members of her investment club had wanted to buy it. They were close, so close to setting up their own mine, having their own place, being their own people. But the gear went without an auction. And Mary and her friends got themselves a war.

  So Mary had walked off her last shift with a jet cart.

  “We're about done with the minefield,” Mary finished.

  “Hurry up and get back here,” the LT answered.

  Now Mary did fidget. “Sir, remember our deal.”

  “What part of it?” The LT's voice was cautious.

  The first time Mary was elected sergeant had been a joke, a setup by a tough drill instructor to break his ex-civilians of their easygoing ways. The miners voted for her; Dumont 's kids voted for him, but there were more miners. Mary was supposed to fall flat on her face. Instead, she'd found what it took to pull this angry bunch of people together. Sometimes begging. sometimes cajoling, sometimes threatening.

  They’d coalesced into a team for her. Maybe not the team the DI had in mind, but a team that pulled together when they had to.

  The lieutenant had shadowed the platoon the last few days of boot camp, long enough to see how things were. Then he'd taken Mary aside. “You know how to work this bunch,” he'd said.

  “Seems that way,” she'd answered cautiously.

  “I know how to fight. You know how to make them work. Together, we can get them out of this war alive. If anybody can. You game to work with me?”

  He'd been the first to even mention survival; she'd taken his offered hand. For the last two months they'd been a team. Now, she'd find out just how far she could stretch it.

  “Lieutenant, I can't leave this network I've built. In the mines, you get too far away from the work, something goes wrong and you can't fix it. From here I can fix anything.”

  “Sergeant, I've told you a dozen times, your job is to tell other people what to do. Assign somebody to stay out there.”

  “Can't sir. If it's too dangerous for me, it's too dangerous for anyone.” She had a long wait for his answer.

  “You dug in good?” he asked.

  Mary glanced around the cavern she and Cassie had turned into an observation post—maybe a tomb. Once the servos swung the half-meter-thick stone back, it would be well closed. A billion years ago when the crater was made, a pinnacle had slid from the still molten rock. It sheltered her outpost from observation from across the plain where the attack would come. “Dug in as good as time allows, sir.”

  There was a long pause. “Okay, Mary, you win this one. Why didn't you tell me what you had in mind?”

  “Sir, you said you didn't want anyone on this side of the rim, just a few sensors. In the mines, when management makes up its mind, they don't want more talk.”

  “What I meant. Sergeant. was I wanted all of the platoon behind the rim, where their artillery couldn't wipe us out. Maybe I didn't say it as well as I should have. When this is over, we've got to talk about how to talk.”

  “Yes, sir.” Mary said. Talking was what she had in mind. She checked the one digger. Her best, it was halfway across the plain, towing one of Lek's fiber-optic patch lines behind it. If it did its job, even secure communications wouldn't keep Mary and the rest of the miners from having a talk with the colonials before anybody got killed.

  * * * *

  “Captain Anderson, sensors here. My witches have something we think you'll like.”

  “Did she say bitches?” Umboto grinned.

  “Down, Commander, we've got a fight coming, and that college professor is on our side.”

  “Oh, right, I keep forgetting,” the commander mumbled.

  The captain tapped the comm portion of his board. “Commander Miller, what have you got for me?”

  Immediately his board changed to display the gas giant and their moon. Three red lines inched from the giant toward them. “The colonial ships are right on schedule. I expect the vanguard in sixteen minutes. The main body is ninety seconds behind them, led by a pair of superheavy cruisers. Jane's Fighting Ships says they have an even dozen nine-point-two-inch laser cannons.” Only three months from college lecture halls, Miller did slip easily into lecture mode. Commander Umboto hated it. Captain Anderson put up with it. “There are two more heavy cruisers with eight-inchers. Rest are light cruisers with six-inchers. They're in three lines abreast.”

  “Probably plan to flatten us in one pass,” the XO observed.

  “I agree with Commander Umboto,” Miller said.

  That had to be the first time the two women had agreed on anything. Anderson wished they'd picked a better subject. “I concur,” he said. And if they flattened the 97th, the only defenses left to Pitt's Hope would be those in the Pitt system. A major industrial and population center like Pitt's Hope had to be defended here, at least one system out, where the collateral damage from rockets and lasers wouldn't kill a million people. The problem was how to defend this worthless bit of rock. “XO, how's my Crossbow Project coming?”

  The commander's smile was all teeth as she snapped to and gave him a drill field salute. “Ancient as you are, sir, but ready at your command.”

  “I just hope they're as good. Sensors, I need fast and accurate altitude information.”

  “Not going to be as easy as I'd hoped,” Miller answered. “They just dumped their scoop balloon shields and fell off the infrared scanners.”

  Inez and the captain exchanged nods; that was a critical requirement. No commander willingly took a big, hot flag into a fight, but if he didn't have spare shields, an admiral might have to. This one had dumped his, and was shooting right into Anderson 's trap. Assuming I haven't set a fox trap for a bear.

  Unaware of the silent communication between the captain and his XO, Miller continued. “That infantry platoon has some damn fine sensors. We've hyped up the gain on the video and are tracking the Unity fleet, but, Captain, these bastards are coming on fast. They're not going to make any sudden changes.”

  Anderson nodded. “At my age, predictable is nice. Even dull would be fine. But let's not assume anything, keep the reports coming.” He turned to Inez. “I need you at Crossbow.”

  “That's where I'm headed.”

  What Anderson really needed was a battle squadron riding top cover for him. “Where is my damn Navy?” he muttered.

  * * * *

  Captain Mattim Abeeb needed for nothing. He had a beer, a quiet corner in a relaxed bar... and three active readers. Everything he needed for another long evening studying what the Navy thought a
drafted skipper needed to know. Then Buck Ramsey stormed through the barroom door.

  Damn the Navy. Damn them all to hell. First they commandeer my ship. Then they blow it to hell.”

  A dozen other merchant officers, also cramming for the commissions they'd been impressed into, glanced up, but Buck locked eyes with Mattim. “I've pushed that ship through space for ten years without a scratch. They have her three months and she's gone.” He stumbled toward Mattim.

  Mattim put down his beer, pushed his readers aside, and made ready to give Buck his full attention. If the Navy so much as dented his Maggie D during the overhaul they were giving her, Mattim would not stop at a bar. He'd head for Navy headquarters with a bomb in his hip pocket.

  “What happened?” he asked as Buck plopped into his booth.

  “That damn power plant, Matt. They're strapping half of a gigawatt dirt side power plant onto our ships.”

  “Certainly your engineer...”

  “Daisy quit over Navy guff. They gave me one of theirs to replace her. 'Top of the line,' they told me. 'Knows everything there is about power plants.' Well, he's learning how to dodge pitchforks now, 'cause he blew the whole stern of my ship to hell. Every one of my engineers . . . except Daisy.”

  Buck was running out of steam; in a moment the full meaning of his words would slam into him. A waitress showed up dressed in a smile and not much else. Her lack of attire was lost on Mattim and Buck. Anger was crumbling into grief as it hit the captain just how many of his old crew were dead. Mattim spoke without taking his eyes off his friend. “Whiskey. Irish whiskey. Your best.”

  “The bottle,” Buck added. “Dear God, Matt, all of them.”

  Mattim watched helpless as tears rolled down his fellow captain's cheeks. On the vid above the bar, it was halftime at the zero-g lacrosse game. A grinning announcer told them the evening news had first vids of the marine landing in the next star system out. “An impregnable defense that will keep any rim crazies from getting close to Pitt's Hope.”

  “Bloody damn hope so, 'cause there's no fucking Navy,” a civvy at the bar mumbled ... loud enough that the officers in training had no trouble hearing.