Chapter 2 – Rendezvous
February 21st, 2201, 1858 hours — Aboard the SSV New York, in transit to the Kite's Nest, Gunthel System
Data Corruption… Automatic Reconstruction Failed…Data Corruption…Profile Reconstruction Required…
(First Lieutenant Lancelot Percival – Fifth Battalion, 104th Marines)
Ten years before the events of the Hippocrates
Fourteen hours before the Battle of Bahak begins.
Percival lay on his bunk with his fingers laced beneath his head, clad in his navy-blue and black Systems Alliance fatigues and staring dully at the metal ceiling above him. He sighed, counting the tiny little imperfections in the metal for the tenth time. Halfway through he stopped to check the clock function on his omni-tool, a ritual that he'd been doing every two minutes for the last hour.
Four more hours, he thought to himself.
He puffed out his cheeks and blew out a gust of air. Four more hours. Counting and re-counting the imperfections might get him through another hour, dinner would occupy another and after that he had only two more to go. In the young marine's opinion, time couldn't move fast enough for his taste. He had somewhere to be.
A boot leapt into his peripheral vision, heading straight for his head. Quick as a cat, Percival shimmied away just in time to dodge it. The heavy, standard-issue, Systems Alliance marine boot crashed against the back of his bunk with a clatter and fell onto his pillow. Percival leapt up from his bunk and looked around, irritated and eager to find the culprit.
He spotted him right away, a gray-eyed marine a few inches shorter than Percival was and about fifty pounds lighter.
"What the hell, Fairy?" Percival grumbled. He grabbed the offending boot and tossed it on the bunk below him.
"Dude, do you know what time it is?" asked Gunnery Chief James Fairchild. The marine had his other combat in one hand, poised to throw it like a football.
"Four more hours until eleven," Percival replied. Four more painful hours.
James gave him a look of extreme confusion. "No, it is 'nine…teen… hun…dred'," he enunciated slowly, as if Percival was some sort of slow child who'd just given him the blatantly wrong answer to a very simple math question. "Nineteen hundred," he repeated. "As in the time the captain set for our pre-operation briefing."
Percival's eyes snapped open and he jumped out of bed. "Shit, you're right! That's right now!"
"Yeah, I know!" exclaimed James. "All the other platoon CO's are already there! They're fucking wondering where you're at, man!"
The blonde marine lieutenant brushed past his shorter friend in a rush. He'd been so engrossed with his eleven o'clock appointment he'd almost completely forgotten about the briefing.
"Darn, thanks Fairy. You coming with me?" he asked his friend.
"Yeah bro," James replied. "All of the senior NCO's are there too."
Together the marines both dashed out of the barracks, nearly flattening Corporal Duc "Ducky" Nguyen and Privates Kane and Sterling in the process.
"Lieutenant, you're late!" the corporal called out.
"I know!" Percival hastily replied. "Get the platoon together after dinner, I'll brief them then!"
"You got it!" Corporal Nguyen replied. The Vietnamese Systems Alliance marine watched as his commanding officer dashed around a corner, followed closely by the senior NCO of his platoon. The big marine had nearly flattened a pretty combat medic that had been flipping through a chart and hadn't seen him coming.
First Lieutenant Lancelot Percival was supposedly some rising young star in the Ninth Fleet, to hear the rest of the company talk about him, but from what the corporal had seen so far he had yet to be impressed. Granted, Nguyen was a recent transfer from another company, and this would be the first tour they'd serve together, so maybe he'd surprise him yet. The corporal sighed and turned to the two privates beside him.
"The captain's gonna have his ass in a sling," he muttered.
February 21st, 2201, 1904 hours — Aboard the SSV New York, in transit to the Kite's Nest, Gunthel System
(First Lieutenant Lancelot Percival – Fifth Battalion, 104th Marines)
Sixteen hours before the Battle of Bahak begins.
Percival stopped his sprint a couple of feet from the entrance to his assigned briefing room, taking a moment to smooth out his uniform to make it presentable to his fellow officers inside. Beside him James was panting hard, having had a much more difficult time keeping up with his long-legged friend.
The Captain had ceased his briefing upon their entrance. The two of them calmly made their way inside and sat down in the two remaining empty seats, conscious of all the eyes currently on them. Percival coughed in embarrassment and James scratched the back of his head.
Captain Michael Garen, twenty-five year veteran of the Systems Alliance marines and the commanding officer of X-Ray Company stood in front of a holo-projection of Bahak and its defenses, his arms crossed. He starred at his two marines in a quiet fury. Percival knew that he hated being interrupted.
"I apologize Captain," Percival said abashedly, "I was busy doing some last-minute—"
"Don't say inventory," James muttered quietly beside him.
"—Inventory," finished Percival. James pinched the bridge of his nose and screwed his eyes shut.
Captain Garen's jaw tightened and his knuckles went white for a moment as he dug his fingers into his arm. Percival swallowed nervously, but amazingly enough when the captain opened his mouth again it wasn't to admonish Percival but to tell him to take a seat. A couple of Percival's fellow Lieutenants gave him a few sly looks – if the Captain wasn't chewing you out immediately, it wasn't because he'd forgiven you, but because he was saving it for later.
"For the benefit of our newcomers, I'll start from the beginning," the captain growled. He tapped the holo-display and brought up a galaxy map and then tapped a location in the lower portion of the map, blowing it up to show five systems. He then tapped one of the systems and brought up the planets within. "Bahak is the third planet in the Gunthrel System, in the Kite's Nest. As you all know, it is the largest, last and final stronghold of the slavers."
The Systems Alliance had been fighting a guerilla war against a large faction of extremist batarian slavers for a long time now, before the start of what was officially known as the Slave Wars and essentially ever since the Reaper War ended.
It had started with the ending of that last, terrible war. The Batarian Hegemony had been hit hard during the Reaper War, core batarian planets such as Khar'shan, Adek, and Erzsbat had been under Reaper control for almost the entire duration of the war, and so the Hegemony in the aftermath of the war boasted more ruined colonies, more dead and displaced populations, and more shattered military and civilian infrastructure than any other species.
A large portion of the survivors were slavers who had been away from the major colonies when the Reapers hit. This faction wanted desperately to rebuild what they lost, but with so few of the surviving batarians being actual engineers, construction workers or scientists and with the majority of the galaxy focusing their resources on helping themselves or their fellow Council species, the Batarian Hegemony seemed destined to be lost forever. These slavers in their desperation turned to the one other thing that the galaxy had no shortage of after the war to help them rebuild their colonies – refugees.
These desperate batarian slavers captured and stole refugees from every species to help them rebuild their planets, and with their own colonies and governments in ruin the other species of the galaxy was largely helpless to react since they too were still struggling to rebuild and restore order in the aftermath of the war. It wasn't until 2188, nearly two years later, that a Systems Alliance officer saw what these slavers were doing and decided that something had to be done. She formed a branch in the Systems Alliance military known as the Joint Air, Extravehicular, and Ground Recovery Specialists, or "Jaegers" for short, and she went hunting for the lost refugees.
"As you can see," the Captain continued, pulling up a topographical map of the planet, "The surface of Bahak is nothing but sand and slaver facilities, although the majority of them are concentrated here, in this valley which we have simply called Slavers Valley, for simplicity's sake."
He tapped the small valley. From what Percival could see the valley looked almost like a giant crater. Inside were eight facilities surrounded by what looked like mining equipment. There were two entrances to the crater, one on the north side and one on the south. The area around the valley was nothing but sand dunes and rocks for dozens of miles.
"Slaver's Valley was created by an asteroid impact millions of years ago," the captain explained. "It not only created the valley, it also littered it with valuable minerals and metals that the batarians have set up these slave facilities to mine and process."
The Systems Alliance officer took the newly-formed Jaegers and began fighting back against the hardline slavers. For nearly seven years after their formation, the Jaegers would be instrumental in disrupting operations and freeing slaves across all of Council space, allowing the rest of the Systems Alliance military to focus on their reconstruction efforts.
The Jaegers fought the slavers to a bitter standstill after seven long years through hundreds of skirmishes and counter-piracy operations, but that only served to delay the inevitable. It would all boil over in the year 2195 on the human colony of Endurance, where the entire colonial militia fought to the death against invading batarian slavers rather than be forced into servitude. The batarians that raided that colony took such heavy losses from them that after the militia was defeated they killed every single surviving man, woman and child in Endurance in anger instead of taking them as slaves.
After the events of Endurance, the Systems Alliance could not in good conscience tolerate the actions of these batarian slavers any longer or abstain from mobilizing their fleet. Civilian populations in dozens of core Systems Alliance worlds began to demand action. In 2196, the Systems Alliance declared official war against the batarian extremists and began what people soon started to call the Slave Wars. They mobilized their fleets and for four years the Systems Alliance hunted down and crushed slaver planets scattered across the galaxy, liberating countless lives.
The decentralized nature of the slavers made it hard for the Alliance to end the war in one brutal blow, and thus the Slave Wars became a long and tedious affair, with many casualties on either side. The slavers fought from hidden strongholds—planets with large and significant slave and slaver populations—and struck at Systems Alliance weakpoints using guerilla tactics, all the while continuing to enslave as many refugees they could to keep their war machine running and to restore the Batarian Hegemony.
Meanwhile the Alliance was relegated to crushing the slavers wherever and whenever they arose and whenever and wherever they could catch them. With no head of the snake to cut off their fleets instead were forced to scour the galaxy for these strongholds, taking them by brute force from the slavers. When their planets were discovered, the slavers simply fought until they couldn't win, then slipped away. It was through these tactics that the slavers managed to stall the Systems Alliance war machine for four long years.
But with each fallen planet the slavers were forced to retreat and retreat to their dwindling surviving strongholds, leaving trails for the Systems Alliance to follow – trails that eventually all lead to the planet of Bahak.
Captain Garen pulled up a satellite image of a large, purple-ish dome that covered the entirety of the valley.
"The valley is protected by a massive cyclonic barrier. I have no idea how the batarians managed to scrap this thing together, but it makes it impossible for us to land directly in the valley," he explained, tapping at the image. "In order to bring down that barrier we need to bombard it with heavy artillery, which unfortunately we can't get down to the surface because of Bahak's network of planetary defense cannons that the batarians set up."
The captain tapped another button on the display and the image shifted from the valley to the space around Bahak. Percival could see nearly a dozen planetary defense cannons all prohibiting direct approach to the planet's surface. Dozens of Slaver cruisers and transports covered the cannons, bristling with all sorts of weapons.
"Their guns will take out anything larger than a shuttle," the captain sighed, "which means we can't get our Goblin transports containing our heavy artillery down to the ground without first taking out these cannons."
He superimposed a battle-plan over the display of the cannons. Percival could see figures representing the various battlegroups of the ninth-fleet taking up combat positions, fighter squadron deployments, as well as shuttles that represented all three battalions that comprised the Marine Expeditionary Unit that Percival's battalion was a part of.
"The Ninth Fleet under Fleet Admiral Octavian will be engaging the Slaver ships in space and keeping them occupied while the marines of the 63rd with the support of our N7 teams board and take out the generators keeping the cannon powered up. Meanwhile, our battalion and the 78th will go down in the shuttles and secure landing zones for the heavy artillery here and here, supported by elements of the 7th Jaeger Battalion," he explained, pointing at the two entrances to Slaver valley.
"Once the cannons are all down and the slaver fleet is neutralized, the Ninth Fleet will send down the Goblins loaded with the heavy artillery we need to break down the cyclonic shield and our mechanized support. They'll also be bringing down teams of combat doctors to provide immediate care to any slaves we might find in critical condition. Once we're all together, we're going to take the facilities and rescue the slaves. Each of our companies have been assigned to take one in the southern half of the crater, while Zulu company stays behind to cover our asses. Any questions?"
Staff Lieutenant Avery Miller, commanding officer of second platoon and the second-in-command of X-Ray company raised his hand. The captain nodded towards him and indicated that he should speak.
"Captain, what kind of mechanized support are we counting with? And will the batarians count with any sort of mechanized support as well?" the Staff Lieutenant asked. He was a twelve-year veteran of the company and had been the 2IC for the last six. Percival considered him to be a competent and dedicated marine, compared to some of the horror stories that his drill instructors had told him back in training.
"I don't know what the batarians will have cooked up, but once the shield is down we will be counting with M-44 Hammerheads, so you boys better watch your helmets. Visibility might be pretty low down there with all the sand, and we all know that hammerhead pilots can't drive for shit," the captain replied.
The marines in the briefing room all broke out in a round of chuckles. M-44 Hammerheads were Infantry Fighting Vehicles that hoveredoff the ground at a height of about six feet. If the pilots or the marines around them weren't careful, it was easy to cause a gruesome accident. Percival always gave them a wide berth every time he was deployed alongside them, seeing as he was 6'3.
"You can disregard the warning, Fairy. I'm pretty sure you're safe," joked Second Lieutenant Adito Yogambe, commanding officer of fourth platoon. At a height of 5'6 in his boots, Gunnery Chief James Fairchild was currently the smallest marine in the room, tied with Second Lieutenant Alexa Volkov, commanding officer of the fifth platoon.
"Eat a dick, Yogi," James spat. "You'll be safe too, seeing as you're probably gonna be up to your thighs in the sand you fat son-of-a-bitch."
The marines, even Yogambe, laughed at that mental image. In contrast to the ranking NCO of Percival's company, the Second Lieutenant was nearly seven feet tall and weighed nearly two hundred and seventy pounds, which had earned him the nickname "Yogi Bear" in the company.
"Settle down marines," the captain said with a small smile. "That concludes the briefing. Go get your platoons caught up, have a nice meal, then hit the hay, the operation starts at oh-nine-hundred. First Lieutenant Percival, could I have a word?"
Percival felt his cheeks redden and James slipped him a look with raised eyebrows. "You're in trouble," whispered Second Lieutenant Yogambe. His platoon Gunnery Chief crossed his arms and snickered.
The rest of the lieutenants and their gunnery chiefs filed out, leaving Percival, James and the captain. The captain switched off the holo-display, crossed his arms once more over his chest, and looked at James before jerking his head towards the door.
"Gunnery Chief Fairchild, you are dismissed," he ordered sternly.
"Sir!" James saluted. The captain nodded and Fairy immediately spun around and made for the door, but not before shooting Percival an apologetic look.
Percival swallowed nervously and patiently waited for his captain to speak. Three and a half more hours, just focus on that, he thought to himself.
Captain Garen let out a sigh and ran his hand through his short, brown hair. "You've been slipping, First Lieutenant. First the combat drills the other day, then during last week's briefing, and now this. Don't think I don't know what's going on."
Percival swallowed again. "Captain, I—,"
Garen waved his hand. "Shut up and listen, Lieutenant, and don't insult my intelligence by giving me another bullshit excuse. Inventory… I've raised three boys, I know what I'm seeing and I know why. I'm not blind. I can see you in the mess hall, and I see what you're looking at."
That was it then, his secret was out and known by the captain no less. Percival would find himself black-listed so fast his head would spin. All the work he'd put in to graduate at the top of his class on Mars, all those times he'd had to swallow his fears and fight because his men depended on him, all of the blood, sweat and tears he'd poured in to make it this far, all that would have been for nothing.
He gestured for him to sit down. Percival nervously took a seat. The captain pulled up a chair and sat down as well with the chair facing backwards, resting his arms up on the back of the seat.
"Lancelot, you know that the Systems Alliance has rules against this…" the captain began quietly.
The big marine looked down at the ground, shaking fearfully inside at what was coming. "I know, sir," Percival nodded morosely. He couldn't believe that had come so far only to lose it all like this.
The two sat in silence. Percival had met the captain's children once before. The oldest was a surgeon and the middle child had gone into accounting, while the youngest was a marine just like he was. They were all roughly Percival's age, and all of them had seemed like they had looked up to their father. Percival looked up to the captain too. Ever since he had received his father's tags, the captain had been the closest thing he'd ever had to a father figure. It made this encounter all the more painful, but Percival knew that the captain had a duty to perform, a duty not just to him but to the Systems Alliance military.
"Look Lancelot…" Captain Garen sighed, "I'm not going to report anything, as long as you're not an idiot about it. I know the rules and I know the regulations… but I also know that sometimes they're wrong."
Percival blinked in surprise. What? Maybe, just maybe he wouldn't be punished after all. Maybe he would get to remain a
"Like I said, I have three boys," he continued. "And I just wanted to tell you what I told them. You're a damn good marine, Percival, one of the finest I've ever seen, and you've got what I hope to be a long and distinguished career ahead of you."
This was not how he envisioned this going down. The captain was strict, the captain was fair, but Percival had never thought that the captain was understanding. He was a military man to the core, a veteran of twenty-five years. His blood was Systems Alliance blue. To hear him openly speak about disobeying rules, that the rules were wrong, shocked Percival.
"But what you're going through now… First of all, let me say that it is beautiful. It can make a marine fight ten times as hard, give a marine the ability to survive terrible, terrible things, and most importantly, make things a hundred times more worth fighting for," the captain told him.
He then leaned in and stared him firmly in the eyes. "But it can also make a marine stupid and reckless. Whether you agree with them or not, there is a reason why those rules are in place…"
Percival nodded, speechless. It did do all that and more. Ever since he'd started he had felt more invincible and somehow more afraid of dying than he ever had. He'd felt stronger and yet more vulnerable, with more to fight for and with more to lose. It defied explanation and the rational mind, and sometimes Percival felt as if he just a man caught in a fast-moving river, unable to escape or outswim the current.
The captain set a hand gently on his shoulder, making the younger marine ever more surprised.
"Worse, it can force a marine to choose, and make no mistake you eventually will have to choose, to choose between it and your duty, a duty that you swore to perform and uphold when you joined the Systems Alliance. That choice, it breaks most marines, Lancelot. It's never an easy choice, and making the wrong one can get you killed, can get your fellow marines killed," the captain said emphatically.
And there it was, thought Percival. A part of him had known that that had been a possibility—no, an eventuality—ever since he'd started this shit, but he'd never openly talked about it or acknowledged it before.
Though the Systems Alliance had rather stringent rules in place, it hadn't stopped others from doing what Percival was doing now. Those who had done so had all had to make that choice at some point or another. Whether it usually ended in tragedy, Percival did not know. Percival knew it was not a choice that could be avoided. Postponed maybe, but one that he and everyone else who done what he did before him would have to make eventually.
They both sat in silence for a while as either person mulled over what was going on inside their own heads.
"Captain?" Percival finally spoke.
"Yes?"
"That choice… it's something every marine will face, right? No way around it?"
The captain looked away, pensive and more than a bit sad. "In my experience? Yes… every marine that chooses to do what you did eventually will have to make that choice between it and duty. There is no way around it, no matter how badly you may want that to be."
Percival squeezed his hands together. "Since my father died, all I've ever wanted was to be the good in the galaxy that he should have been. I joined the Systems Alliance to do that, and I know that when I did I swore an oath of duty – a duty not just to the Alliance but to the people that they swore to protect."
"Yes, you did," Captain Garen nodded.
His fingers were leaving angry red marks in the palms of his hand. For a moment he wished that he could go back to when he was sixteen again, in his bedroom talking with his father about high school and football and girls. He wished he wasn't in the briefing room of a Systems Alliance cruiser, in charge of a platoon, headed to a planet where he might possibly lose his life. He wished that he was just a kid again.
"Then when it's time to make for me to make that choice, I should choose to do my duty, right?
Silence again. Both men sat there in that silence for a little while longer, taking refuge in it before the coming storm that was tomorrow. The next sound that Percival heard was the sound of the captain getting up off his chair and walking away towards the door.
It opened with a hiss. The captain stopped on the threshold and looked back towards Percival.
"Honestly? I don't know son. I don't know…"
February 21st, 2201, 2224 hours — Aboard the SSV New York, in transit to the Kite's Nest, Gunthel System
(First Lieutenant Lancelot Percival – Fifth Battalion, 104th Marines)
Ten and a half hours before the Battle of Bahak begins.
"Establish a goddamn landing zone while a legion of batarians try their best to kill me, all the while the transport pilots and the combat doctors get to sit up in space with their thumbs up their asses while we do all the dirty work, just fucking perfect," whined Corporal Duc Nguyen, or "Ducky". He braced his boots up on the bunk in front of him and leaned back on his chair. "I am over this shit."
Private 1st Class Jasmine Mendoza pushed Ducky's boots off the bed and huffed. "Well I don't know about you boys, but I for one am just about ready to end this war. I've got things to do and places to see."
"You still planning to get hitched to what's-his-name back on Eden Prime after the war, Jazz?" Ducky chuckled. He kicked off his boots and placed his socks back up on the bed. Jazz let it slide with a sigh. At least the corporal kept up with his hygiene.
"His name is Liam, and for your information we're setting the date sometime in late August and I expect all of you to attend, so don't go off and die or something stupid like that," Jazz spat. She then pointed at a female corporal with a shaved head currently cleaning her M-7 Lancer on the bunk above her. "Especially you! You know how embarrassing it'll be if the maid of honor went and got herself offed by some slaver hyped-up on red sand?"
The corporal lying on the bunk above Jazz set her rifle aside and tilted her head over the edge of her bed. "And miss out on all those lovely bridesmaids of yours? Weddings are some damn potent aphrodisiacs, I wouldn't dream of it," chuckled Corporal Kara Johansson.
"You stay away from my bridesmaids," warned the private.
"Relax Jazz, I'm pretty sure Kara prefers them Systems Alliance. In fact, I think Liam's the one who should watch out," laughed Ducky.
Jazz hissed at the laughing Vietnamese marine and pushed his feet back off of her bunk. Above her Johansson chuckled deviously alongside her fellow corporal.
Percival had a small smile on his face as he watched the marines on his squad bicker and joke with one another. His father had told him that the bonds he had forged with the marines in his platoon were some of the strongest he'd ever made. Nothing like baptism by combat to really cement a friendship.
Thirty more minutes, Percival thought to himself.
"Still, I don't much like the idea of being forced to roll out the red carpet," grunted Private 2nd Class Charles Cormack. "How long do we have to hold the door for, Lieutenant?"
"Indeterminate," Percival replied. "It'll depend on how long it'll take for the 63rd to disable the cannons and for Octavian to punch his way through the slaver fleet, either way we still need to make sure those landing zones are clear before those birds can land, we're not getting through that cyclonic shield otherwise."
"I'm with Corms and Ducky on this one," Private 1st Class Laverne Kane pointed at his two friends. "The 63rd could take anywhere between ten minutes and a hundred to get those cannons down, while a batarian can shoot your ass off in two seconds. Why not just get those cannons down and then send in the fighters to bring down that shield instead of spending marine blood?"
"Yeah! Represent, brother!" cheered his fellow private, Malcolm Sterling. The heavy gunner held out a hand in an attempt to garner a high-five from his fellow heavy gunner, but a reproachful shake of the marine's head quickly stopped that train. Sterling coughed and moved his hand to the back of his neck. "Yeah, what's wrong with the fighters? Why are we spending marine blood on something the flyboys can accomplish without a scratch?" He asked.
"All of the fighters of the Ninth Fleet together wouldn't be able to breach that cyclonic barrier, not to mention we need them up in space covering our ships, but our heavy artillery can be modded to fire heavy disruptor shells," Percival explained.
"And we can't risk the batarians destroying our heavy artillery mid-transport. If we don't have enough guns then were not getting through the shield, and all of our efforts will have been for shit. We're clearing that landing zone the hard way, marines," replied James.
"Don't forget, we're here to rescue the slaves," Kara pointed out. She swung herself out of her bunk and landed lightly on her feet. "Innocent little kids, refugees, people who wanted nothing more than to rebuild their lives and homes after the Reaper War. Surely that's worth spilling a bit of blood over."
Sterling merely grunted and folded his arms over his chest. She was right, there was more than just the lives of these marines at stake. There always was.
Service Chief Francisco Ruiz from squad four raised a hand. "Lieutenant, what kind of heavy weapons or mech-support can we count on?"
Percival turned and listed them off on his fingers. "Aside from each squad's M-100 Grenade Launcher every single platoon will get two single-use M-560 Hydras. Those will go to Private Williamson from squad two and Corporal Chang from squad three. I suggest you all make sure those guys stay in one piece."
The rest of the marines laughed a bit and said a few choice words to the two chosen individuals. A few took it open themselves to promise retribution and wrath should the two marines somehow miss their targets with their precious heavy weapons.
"Single-use Hydras?" moaned Ducky. "So if they drop a third Atlas or a third spider-tank I guess we'll all just die then?"
Percival ignored his whiny corporal and continued on. The corporal was a recent transfer and this would be their first tour together, so he could only hope that all the bitching was just a coping mechanism and the man could perform in combat.
"Zulu Company will be equipped with M-110's, they'll be providing covering fire for the entire battalion, and will be staying behind to cover us as we take the facilities. Also, once we clear the landing zone and the planetary cannons are down, we've got elements from the 22nd Armored Division available for mechanized support, as well as the combat doctors."
"And how many combat doctors are we gonna get hitched with?" asked Gunnery Chief Adriano Dimitrios, commander of squad three.
"Six per platoon, so twenty-four per company," Percival replied. "They're all navy corpsman who did a six-month psych course or something, supposedly they'll be able to handle any and all medical needs that the slaves might have once we get to them. And they can fight."
"I hope they can fight well, seeing as they're coming down to Bahak in first-class rather than economy like the rest of us…" muttered a private from squad four.
"They're combat-certified Verdanya, don't you worry. We just can't risk losing the lot of them taking the landing zones," James assured him.
"And what about us Gee-cee? Can we really risk losing this?" Sterling asked. He removed his t-shirt and gestured with his hands up and down his impressive physique. At 6'4 and nearly two-thirty pounds, Malcolm Sterling had taken to the standard System Alliance gene mods very, very well. Not only was the marine built, he was also fast, faster than many marines his size with the same gene mods, and almost as fast as Percival.
"Put your shirt back on," grunted Laverne.
"I don't think Sterls can get his head through that neckline," Cormack added.
The rest of the platoon jeered good-naturedly at the egotistical display, all of them being well-acclimated and used to Sterling's shameless self-promotion after the first ten times he had removed his shirt in a crowded setting. A few single-credit bills erupted from the hand of one of the female marines from squad three and fluttered to the ground at Sterling's feet. He grinned and gave them one last pose before putting his shirt back on.
"If I die tomorrow, cremate me, add my ashes to a fifth of whiskey and send it to my brothers, they'll know what to do."
"Dude, no," shuddered Cormack. The marine rubbed both of his arms and visibly cringed.
"You need to get professional help" said Kane.
"Yes," Kara emphatically agreed.
February 21st, 2201, 2306 hours — Aboard the SSV New York, in transit to the Kite's Nest, Gunthel System
(First Lieutenant Lancelot Percival – Fifth Battalion, 104th Marines)
Ten hours before the Battle of Bahak begins.
Percival rounded the corner at nearly thirteen miles an hour, just barely avoiding a collision with a small maintenance tech who'd been crouched at a conduit junction fixing a leak. Had the large marine hit her there likely would have been an official friendly-fire incident pending an official investigation.
"Sorry!" Percival called out behind him without stopping. The small maintenance tech shook her fist and added a few choice words in complete disregard of the fact that Percival outranked her by several levels.
His arms pumped as they assisted in propelling his legs through the halls of the ship. For a marine his size Percival was surprisingly nimble, being able to duck, dip, dodge and weave through the scores of ship personnel going about their business, sometimes by a distance of several centimeters but more often than not by a distance of one. Many of the personnel he passed also had a few choice words for the marine.
After several dozen more meters and multiple near-misses the First Lieutenant finally reached the supply closet and tapped in the code that the chief maintenance officer had given him. It had cost Percival a month's supply of spaghetti rations and his dessert for the next two weeks but it was a small price to pay for what awaited him inside.
He fumbled the code the first time, his breath labored and his uniform sweaty. For a split-second his anxiety kicked in and he considered going back to make himself more presentable, but he was already late as it was and it wouldn't behoove him to be even more late. Percival managed to get the code right on the second try and with a hiss the doors to the supply closet slid open. He looked behind him to ensure that no one else was nearby, then slipped inside and closed the door behind him.
"You're late, First Lieutenant." a voice said. A figure slipped out from deeper within the closet. Like Percival she was clad in the uniform of a Systems Alliance marine and like him she had a shock of blond hair and a set of light brown eyes. She came up to about his chest and she currently had her fake best scowl plastered on her soft features. It was a terrible fake scowl – it didn't quite reach her eyes, and you could always see the truth in a person's eyes – but Percival thought that it was an adorable attempt nonetheless.
Percival ignored the fake scowl she had and let out a tiny smile. "My apologies, Second Lieutenant Guinevere Lockley."
"… And you're sweaty," that same voice said again. The scowl slipped a bit and that's when he saw his moment. Percival was a trained Systems Alliance marine. He'd been taught how to plan an ambush, how to defend a location, how to protect a VIP, how to storm a building, a ship, a street. He'd been taught how to kill someone from two-thousand meters away and how to kill someone from two centimeters away. Most importantly, he'd been taught when to seize an opportunity when an opportunity presented itself.