Day 3: Recon Search and Rescue
I woke up in the dress shop-turned-surgical bay at 0630 like I usually do. Normally, dear readers, I like a caramel frappe over ice as my morning beverage. But I was still on Aylos after a Supervolcano erupted, not my luxury suite at the Intercontinental. The best I could hope for was a mug of what the Marines call go-juice.
Go-Juice is the nickname for Instant Soluble Coffee Product Blend 2, which is a truly disgusting blend of alleged coffee that could reasonably double as asphalt mix. This headache-inducing, vile liquid that comes out of the clear pouch inside of an FMC Instant Meal Pack (IMP… I'll spare you the details of the food) is poured into a stainless steel mug, drowned in boiling-hot water, stirred six times with a bayonet, and then served with a smile.
I took one sip, and started gagging so violently that Julian thought my trachea was blocked. I started wishing it was as I shot a violent look at the Marine cook who served me this headache-inducing, vile liquid. "What the hell is this shit?!"
That Marine just laughed at me. "It is shit, Ma'am. That stuff's got only one redeeming quality. It wakes you the f*k up."
(Ed note: I'll allow Krin one, and only one, curse word in this article, even if it prints twice.)
Much as it pains me to admit, the cook was right. Twenty minutes later, I was awake. Hell, my heart was racing. Today, I'd be going on my toughest trip yet, for personal and practical reasons. Nia told me that she was worried that the Marines, those jar-headed Sharkies, were worried that they weren't getting enough coverage in my story. So, she voluntold me to join a Force Recon search and rescue squad that day.
I suppose I should explain these animal nicknames before we continue. There are three things that every Marine loves. His/her rifle, three-or-four letter acronyms, and cute, playful nicknames for everything.
A Marine is a Sharkie, a tough and powerful creature that can only move in one direction, has a brain the size of a walnut, and bumps into walls for no discernable reason, aka the typical Federation Marine in the eyes of a Marine.
A Starfleet Officer is a Fishie, a beautiful, graceful creature that lacks a backbone and swims away as fast as it can from any mean-looking object it comes across, aka the typical Starfleet Officer in the eyes of a Marine.
A Fed-Sec Agent is a Piggie, a creature that starts off as cute and cuddly, but eventually grows into a disgusting mound of fat thanks to copious amounts of donuts and coffee, smells like shit, and serves no real purpose but to roll around in the mud, aka the typical Fed-Sec Agent in the eyes of a Marine.
"Who came up with all these nicknames?" I asked Sargeant Talla, my Force Recon escort, as I was helping the squad load supplies into their Raptor.
Talla – who steadfastly refused to tell me his first name – came from John Glenn City on Titan. Like most Marines I've come across, Talla had the typical youth of troublemaking; getting into fights with local cops, breaking into houses, the sort of tearaway activities that get men and women into greater trouble later in life. And like most of these troublemaking youths, Talla gets shanghaied into the Corps, which beats the absolute living shit out of you for six months of basic training at Camp Nath and turns your troublemaking nature into something with slightly more constructive focus.
"I honestly don't know, Pigeon," Talla replied with my earned nickname among the Sharkies, "Its just one of those things that happens, ya know?"
Pigeon was my nickname, because it was the only animal that anyone in the Force Recon platoon that came aboard the Kitty Hawk could think of that associated with reporters. I still don't understand the connection.
After forty-eight hours of continuous broadcasts, FCRU was of the opinion that anyone who could make it to the field hospital on their own was already there. That still left around 12 000 colonists unaccounted for. Someone was going to have to go out and look for them. Aylos' stratosphere was still clogged with volcanic ash, so sensors weren't reliable, at best. Kitty's drones and the targeting sensors of the Raptors were a little better, but sheer amount of magma flowing out of Aylos was creating a greenhouse effect with the stratosphere, which threw off the thermal balance of sensors below the stratosphere. So, Force Recon and I were forced to use the oldest sensors in the book – our eyes and ears.
"So, what's your guys' nickname?" I asked Talla as we flew to a large apartment complex on the other side of the city.
Talla, in something that came as a complete shock, made me laugh. "We're the Secret Squirrels! But you can just call us the Squirrels, Pigeon."
The Secret Squirrels – better known by their formal service name of Marine Force Reconnaissance Battalion, or in their love of acronyms MARFORECON, is the nickname of Force Recon, an elite unit in within the already elite Federation Marine Corps.
A Squirrel is a quiet, skittish creature that hops along in the woods, looking to steal acorns from the mean bears and wolves before the poor little squirrel becomes a snack himself. What this should mean to my readers who are a little past grade three storybooks, is that a Force Recon Secret Squirrel is trained in long-range reconnaissance and deep penetration missions. In wartime, a Force Recon squad is inserted behind enemy lines to gather intelligence or pave the way for heavier forces. The expectation is that Force Recon operates alone, in hostile territory, often without immediate support.
Before this assignment, I had no idea how this training would translate to crisis response. In general, I often struggled to understand what sort of contribution that the FMC could make to FCRU at all. I've been honest in my thoughts about this particular service. The FMC makes sense in wartime, but I strongly believe that such a force has no place in peace, or in an enlightened society like the Federation. When you consider also that the typical Marine recruit is a tearaway youth like Sargent Talla, I often wonder if the FMC is just an excuse to keep our prisons slightly less full. But not for the first time, I was proven wrong.
If nothing else, the Marines are dedicated to their jobs, perhaps even more dedicated than Starfleet or Fed-Sec. Everything they do, how they think, how they move, how they train, how they fight, is drilled down to its most basic level and repeated ad-nauseum until it becomes as instinctive to a Marine as breathing comes to you or I. When we landed just a few yards away from a thirty-story apartment that was dangerously keeled over, there was no panic in the eyes of Sargent Talla or any of his squirrels. For them, this was just a mission like any other, like any of the hundreds that came before.
Kitty's drones had detected wounded civilians buried amidst the rubble. A family of four was trapped on the third floor, about a hundred feet above us. Because of the debris, the ash, and the delicate structural integrity of the apartment, beaming them out wasn't an option. I looked around, wondering how we were going to get to this family.
"Alright boys!" Sargent Talla called to his men, "Get the rescue gear out of the Raptor, its time to skitter up. Our acorns are waiting up there!"
"Aye Sargent!" The Squirrels called back, so loud I jumped in my new Marine-issue boots, which are – if nothing else – a whole hell of a lot sturdier than those cheap Ferengi knock-offs.
In seconds, Talla and the Squirrels had a plan of attack set up. Two duranium ladders were hooked up to the side of the apartment building, secured to the asphalt by heavy bolts fired in by phaser rifles with a special attachment. Talla and another man slung their rifles over their backs and climbed up, secured from falling by an arrestor hook on the inside of the ladder rungs. The Marines are almost disgustingly fit. It might have taken me an hour to climb up that high, but Talla and his man were up in barely ten minutes.
But I could hear Talla sigh as he called back down to us on the street. "We've got a problem here Squirrels. Looks like our acorns are buried back about fifty feet under the rubble, and I can see one of the structural beams from here. That thing's about ten minutes from snapping and taking the rest of this building down. I need options."
I couldn't even begin to come up with an idea. But in ten seconds, Lace Corporal Andrew Kelso of Houston, Texas had an idea. "Sarge, I'm gonna rope up some det-packs. You'll wanna set em ten feet back towards the balcony."
Kelso opened his pack and took out the det-packs, which are called in official Marine documentation the Mk2 Photon Demolition Charge. As Kelso explained to me, every Raptor carried a case of det-packs in the off-chance that boredom – or necessity, mandated that Marines blow things up. I was still struggling to understand how demolition charges were going to recuse a trapped family, but Kelso shaped the plastic charges like he'd done this a thousand times before.
Two minutes later, Kelso sent the charges up in a bucket tied to the end of Talla's fall arrestor cable. Talla and his man spent a few minutes setting the charges, before they climbed back down and hung loose on the ladder. Talla took out a detonator from his pack, smiled at me, and yelled out as loud as he possibly could. "FIRE IN THE HOLE!"
I thought Squirrels were supposed to be quiet. For the third time today, I was wrong. Those charges cracked like Aylos herself was about to explode. I panicked and dropped down to my knees and covered my head, thinking that the apartment was about to crash down on my head. Instead, Kelso picked me up while he started laughing. "You got nothing to worry about there Pigeon, I wouldn't let that building crash on you."
"What the f*k do you mean?!" I screamed back.
Kelso pointed over to a seemingly random pile of rocks sitting about five feet away from the Raptor. "I've set thousands and thousands and thousands of det-packs, Pigeon. Those packs made a reverse funnel charge. In layman's terms, that means the explosion went backwards, sending all the rubble over there. Make sense?"
It did make sense, in the way that could only ever make sense to a Marine. But whatever Kelso did to those charges, it worked. Talla and his man were able to get the family out of the rubble safely, just twenty minutes after we touched down. The Squad's medic gave them a once-over – they weren't hurt badly, just bumps and bruises. We flew our acorns back to the field hospital, the squad restocked on det-packs and juice boxes, and just ten minutes later, we were back at it again, rescuing a man trapped in his hovercar teetering over the edge of a bridge.
All-in-all, over a twenty four hour period, Sargent Talla and his team of squirrels stole eighty acorns. Or, to put it in English, the Marines of Force Recon were directly responsible for saving the lives of eighty people that day.
My overall opinion on the FMC hasn't changed. But I can say that this Pigeon sure as shit appreciates the hard work, dedication, and almost disgustingly high level of courage that every Marine, be he a Sharkie or a Squirrel, displayed during Operation Lifeline.
One day, you might even have to save an acorn for the Secret Squirrels.
•~:~•
