Jim Baen's Universe

Introducing: Stories by new authors

Local Boy Makes Good

Written by Ray Tabler

Illustrated by Phil Renne

"Somthin' smells," one of the thousand or so shock troopers milling about in the staging area said, staring straight at me. That was unfair. I'd just had a shower. Most everybody did shower right before an assault, no telling when you'd get the next chance to clean up. Days, weeks later? You never could tell.

"Just ignore him, Danny," Jenny muttered. She shot him a black look. "Stupid bastard."

Jenny didn't need to worry. This wasn't my first assault. I admit I was wound up pretty tight. Everybody was. Needed to be, to get through the chaos we were about to wade into. But, I wasn't set on a hair trigger the way I was the first two or three times.

Either this little guy was too stupid to figure out that starting a brawl in the staging area would get us all thrown in the brig, or he was smart enough to figure out that starting a brawl in the staging area would get us all thrown in the brig. He might get injured in the confusion, but he wouldn't be dropping into a fire-laced hell with the rest of the division. I looked down at the guy with the sensitive nose, flashed him a very toothy smile and marched on with the rest of the team. The sour expression on his ugly face was a tasty treat I savored all the way across the hanger deck to our assigned drop carrier.

"Damn!" Pete complained when Sarge led us up to a scorch marked and rust stained old tub with the unlikely nickname Yolanda Sue stenciled on her grubby side, just forward of the official alphanumeric vessel designation. Nothing smaller than a frigate is supposed to have an actual name. It was one of those rules that generally got ignored after a couple of years into the war. Yolanda must have been some dead hero. You'd see that a lot. There were plenty to choose from.

"What's your problem, Kezelsky?" Sarge bellowed.

"Another sardine can, Sarge. Can't the navy spare a decent transport for us?"

Sarge rewarded Pete with a withering glare. "I'll be sure to pass that question along the next time I have lunch with the fleet admiral. Until then, get your smelly goon asses on that dropper! This is the one we're supposed to be in. It's almost show time and all of these tubs are goin' to the same place! Move!"

We moved. Sarge is pretty tough for a little guy. I think I could probably take him in a one on one fight, but I'd end up with important pieces missing.

Pete wasn't the only one disappointed with the drop carrier. It was quite a squeeze getting all twenty-five of us into the cargo bay of the Yolanda Sue, DC24569 Navy designation. Sarge ordered us all to exhale and then slammed the ramp closed before anybody thought to breathe again. Sarge had a bit of free space around him at the forward end of the bay, next to the ladder up to the control deck. Everyone else, goons and little guys were jammed in so tight it reminded me of a crude joke I'd heard back in high school.

"What's so funny, Danny?" Jenny asked. Being a little guy, she could sit on one of the benches.

"Nothing," I shook my head. That was about all I could move without poking a teammate. I was sitting on the deck with my knees tucked under my chin, back up against the port-side bulkhead and my arm brushing the now vertical surface of the ramp/hatch. That meant I'd be first out once the Yolanda Sue skidded in, assuming she got that far. I wasn't overly concerned. It wasn't the first time.

"Danny's always smiling. Haven't you noticed?" Pete teased from the same position against the starboard bulkhead. Our combat kits were between us; lumpy with all of the toys we'd soon be playing with.

"I have, actually," Jenny confided to Pete in a loud whisper. "I don't think it's normal, if you know what I mean."

I wagged my head back and forth with a foolish grin. "Ah, Duh, Doyh, Doyh!"

"Can that chatter, back aft there!" Sarge was on the horn, probably letting the lieutenant know we were good to go. He hung up after a minute and yelled up the ladder. "Yo. Up topside, we're all secure down here."

A swabbie stuck his head through the forward hatch to make sure we'd shut the ramp. Then he got a look at us and went forward. We could all hear him talking to the bosun's mate in charge of the dropper. The word "goons" was clear enough. Shortly, the mate appeared in the hatchway. She took a good long look at us.

The mate looked like a female version of Sarge, if you can picture that. To her credit, she may not have been pissed about being tasked with dropping a goon unit simply because we were goons. The problem was that we goons don't drop anywhere but the hottest LZs, and that could seriously shorten her life expectancy.

The mate and Sarge glowered at each other for a few seconds, and then she hustled back up to the control deck and clanged the hatch shut behind her. Sarge watched her go and shrugged. Orders were orders and grunts were grunts, goons or little guys.

A couple of minutes later we could hear the dropper's engines powering up. A few bumps as the tub skidded along the deck, and then we were outside the ship.

The bosun's mate came over the loudspeaker, "ETA, thirty-seven minutes."

Pete muttered another curse about the sardine can as he tried to get a bit more comfortable. The folded-up bench seat must have been digging into his back. Its port-side equivalent was digging into mine.

Pete had a right to be pissed. The navy did have a fair number of drop carriers designed specifically for us goons. They're nice, big, roomy tubs with seats that I could actually sit on. They usually have friendlier flight crews as well. Trouble is the enemy is smart enough to tell the difference. The Rigelians target the bigger tubs preferentially to minimize the number of goons we can get on the ground; so much for ergonomic design.

I leaned my head back against the cold metal of the portside bulkhead and closed my eyes.

"How can you do that, just fall asleep anywhere, anytime?" Jenny asked shaking her head.

"It's a goon thing," I teased.

"No, it's not," Pete commented sourly. As usual, Pete hadn't slept a wink the last two nights before the assault.

The Yolanda Sue pitched suddenly, engines vibrating unevenly. Shrapnel pattered the hull armor like hail. One of the other droppers must have been hit.

"Lucky shot for as far up as we must be yet," I said.

"The lieutenant said this one's well defended. The Rigies want to hold on to it," Jenny speculated. "They must be pitching a lot of plasma into orbit."

The lieutenant said a lot of things. You learned to filter out the parts that didn't have to do with the job at hand, like the name of the mudball the Yolanda Sue was hurtling towards. Nobody but a Rigie could pronounce it anyway. Besides, what difference does a name make?

Well, it can make a lot of difference. The swabbies topside sure seemed to feel a lot better about riding Yolanda Sue down into hell than DC24569. The Human Worlds Alliance calls us an Enhanced Capabilities Tactical Unit. That's what you see in the news and hear on the 3D. In practice, people call us goons. We call ourselves goons. We call everybody else little guys. As long as we call each other by these convenient labels, we can all pretend that we're all humans, which, by strict definition, we goons aren't. So, now you see the problem.

We all think of ourselves as humans, and maybe that's all that counts. It's worked so far, and will probably hold up for the duration. After the war's over, we'll just have to see.

The tub pitched and dodged more and more as we got lower. Some guys bitched about not being issued pressure suits in case the tub got holed. The truth is a suit won't do you any good. I've seen a couple of droppers that took plasma hits. There wasn't enough left of the whole damned tub to fill a pressure suit. And those clumsy suits just get in your way once the ramp drops.

"There's the light," Sarge warned. The amber bar above the ramp flashed slowly. It was hard to hear him. The atmosphere was getting thick, wailing like an angry ghost on the hull. The amber light flashed on and off faster and Yolanda Sue's main gun began to speak. It made the hull ring like a bell.

"ETA, sixty seconds." The bosun's calm voice over the speaker sounded like she was piloting a commuter shuttle from Chicago to St. Louis. The flashing amber light turned into a flashing green light.

"When the ramp drops, haul ass! Spread out, stay low and maintain your intervals!" Sarge had to yell over the racket. We'd heard it I don't know how many times before, and he'd said it many more than that. Didn't matter. He had to say it, and we felt better for hearing it.

Pete muttered a prayer, kissed his St. Stanislaus medal and tucked it inside his shirt. Jenny caught my eye and winked. I gave her a thumbs-up and got a good grip on my combat kit bag.

"Brace for landing," the bosun announced.

The ghost's wail changed to a deafening rumble punctuated with bone-jarring thumps.

"Think we're coming in a little hot?" I screamed into Jenny's ear.

"Naaah! This is the way the swabbies always land these tubs," Jenny mimed steering.

We were coming in hot. Tubs that didn't were just ordering a plasma breakfast. Then, with a final skewing to port, Yolanda Sue shuddered to a stop. The ramp flew open.

"Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!" Sarge thundered in the sudden silence.

I rolled out, literally. I couldn't stand up in the dropper, and standing up isn't something you want to do coming out the rear of an assault craft. I crawled at least thirty meters on my hands and knees as fast as I possibly could, which is pretty damned fast. Once the dropper is down and the payload is out it's no longer a worthwhile target. It's done its job and the deployed assault team is the greater danger. But, psychologically, it'll draw a large percentage of the enemy's fire. It's a healthy thing to get far away from it fast.

We were in a muddy field; a muddy field planted in a crop that looked a lot like purplish orange soybeans. I'd marched past enough soybean fields at the training base west of Saginaw to know what they looked like, and I would have preferred something taller like corn or even wheat. But alien soybeans were all we had. Yolanda Sue had plowed an ugly furrow across the land; a long, earthen arrow pointed straight at our objective.

The compound was about one hundred meters away. The dropper had brought us almost to the edge of the bean field, where the dead ground stretched to the high, razor-wire fence. Guard towers stood at each of the five corners of the layout. Rigelians are big on pentagons. Yep, this was the place.

The dropper's main gun fired again, making the air between it and the compound shimmer with the passage of the plasma bolt. The roof of the nearest guard tower seemed to blow away in a high wind. I could see other tubs skidded, or skidding, at other points around the objective. They were firing too. The Rigelians were returning fire.

"Advance by squads! Second squad, go!" Sarge's voice cut through the noise like a meat cleaver. It was time to earn my pay.

Along with the rest of second squad, I rose and dashed forward in a crouching run, firing assault rifles as we went. I wasn't trying to hit anything, just keep the Rigies minds off of their aim. When I figured I'd gone far enough, I found some cover and dove for it. I might be ten feet tall, but I'm not bulletproof.

That cover turned out to be an agricultural robot which had the great misfortune to be tending purplish orange soybeans that particular morning. It was a big, slab-sided, gray ovoid that normally moved about on several dozen short, stout legs so it could gingerly step between the plants. The robot's AI must have dropped into self-preservation mode and directed it towards the supposed safety of the compound. A stray plasma bolt had vaporized its control module, instantly converting the robot to five or six tons of scrap metal and carbon fiber composite.

A second or two after I set my back against the lee of the robot, Pete dropped down next to me, breathing hard and cursing like he'd slammed his thumb in a door. Then Jenny jumped in between us. Damn, but she could run fast for a little guy.

"Nice place you boys have got here. How's the rent?"

Three bolts from a heavy plasma gun slammed into the other side of the robot in quick succession.

"Stiff!" I replied.

"Location. Location. Location," Pete commented. Greasy, black smoke started pouring from vents on the top of our robot.

"Jenny, you're hit," I pointed at drippy line of red on her upper arm.

She looked at it and giggled. "I gouged my arm on the fire extinguisher on the way out of the tub."

Pete and I started laughing, too. Who knows