ECV
Full HouseOutbound from Campoleone
Cargo Bay
04 November, 1515 GMT
Adept III-ι Lissea Stoyka, the Foot Platoon leader, continued lounging in her seat for an extra ten seconds longer than she needed to before gathering her booted feet under her and rising slowly to face the rest of the evening. The commander’s dismissal of the assemblage had opened the floor to a dozen individuals and there were now at least that many conversations going on. The ward room’s emotional temperature had warmed in the moments since Hops and Captain Mason departed; it was warmer yet with all the hot air being blown out nearly everyone’s flytraps.
Stoyka glanced over to her right and sniffed in silent amusement.
“Yeah, Hannah, you’re with me,” she said to the newly-breveted Jump Platoon leader.
Crowell smiled beatifically and turned to the senior PL. She had been a non-commissioned officer for years; longer than Lissea herself had been in the ComGuards. But in all that time, even as she negotiated the ranks towards becoming a senior NCO, officers had been the ones who did Certain Things whilst she did Everything Else. The change had been subtle, but the effects had been paradigmatic in scope. Stoyka saw herself reflected in the stocky NCO’s uncompromising bearing. As the newest junior officer in the Double Deuce—Hell, probably the ComGuards!—Hannah Crowell seemed to be channeling the middle-schooler that had to switch to a new facility halfway through the year.
Lissea reached over to clap Crowell past her so she could see the officer that had been next to her, and hidden by her bulk regardless. “Heya, Maurice,” she called out just loud enough to be heard by the intended recipient. “You roll with me too, right?”
Adept Druon, the compact, hirsute fellow who led the detachment of combat helos, pursed his lips and shrugged before giving the infantry officer a thumbs-up. He strode over to her, crabstepping in the narrow footing, though the room was starting to thin out just a bit. Maurice Druon was most at home whipping his gunship through a forest of ’Mech antennae—or chatting up a pretty girl. That made him look and feel like peripheral fodder right now.
She pointedly turned her head until she had Doc Morrison in her direct line of sight, then waited until Morrison’s subconscious registered the gaze. “Which of your chitlins are we taking, Doc?” she asked, only having to raise her voice a little so he could latch on to the timbre of her words and let his mind fill in the blanks.
Morrison blinked, clearly distracted, and made a fluttery gesture with his left hand while his right remained on his hip. “Take, uh, take Carlee, will you? She’ll be at the infirmary, with the rest of the medics. And Munter and Aslett, too, though Carlee is senior.”
Stoyka flashed him a tight-lipped smile in acknowledgment and turned to Crowell and Druon. Carlee was fine; a combat medic who regularly deployed with the line platoons. Doc Morrison knew his business alright. The other pair were relative newbies who normally stuck close to the aid-station. They would do in a pinch under Carlee’s relative presence and direction.
“Okay, we stop by and grab Carlee, Munter, and Aslett on the way to see the kids,” Stoyka said. “Hannah, I want you to get the non-coms together and marshal the troopers outside their billets. Maurice, get one of your trustworthy personnel to help square things up from the opposite end of where we start. I’ll get Top Heravy setting things up from the start-point which is Stack One.
“On order, Maurice will take a medic and form a second inspection team. If I deem that necessary, you’ll start from your end of the line and we’ll work towards the center. Hannah, you’ll maintain crowd control because I know no one will screw with you, right?”
Crowell and Druon nodded. Stoyka wondered if her newly-promoted fellow platoon leader realized that she was being used as a public enforcer precisely because Stoyka didn’t want her in the rooms, raising hell about petty-ante bullshit. And Druon would be a calming presence to the individual troopers because of his laid-back persona. This situation, like life, was simply an exercise in connecting the right dots.
“Good?”
Crowell consciously moved her hands from the small of her back where she had been standing at a relaxed parade-rest. She fiddled with them for the briefest of moments before hooking her thumbs into the pockets of her fatigue trousers to keep them occupied. She was learning, but it would take some time to reformat the senior NCO into a junior officer.
“Is this a pay-day inspection, or a contraband inspection, ma’am?”
Stoyka snorted good-naturedly. “The former; while we are looking for contraband in an absolute sense, we only care about croppies.”
Druon shifted uneasily. “And if we find, you know, other stuff…?”
Stoyka reached over and clapped the flyer on his shoulder. “Make a decision. But I’m not in a mood to hear about pointless minutia this early into the voyage, right?”
Crowell nodded, stone-faced. She was probably wondering about how the next hour or three would go in her first publically official act as a platoon leader. Druon smiled faintly and nodded to her. Stoyka noticed one of the junior MechWarriors, Adept Jenks, standing unattached by the hatchway.
“Holly,” she said, “You got an assignment?”
She was relatively new to the Double Deuce, but bright and attentive. Stoyka hadn’t worked much with her on an interpersonal in the past, but now was as good a time as any to start.
“Fall in with us, will you?” Lissea turned to her growing entourage and chuckled to herself; any longer in this damn room and she’d have half the officer corps with her. “Well, come on, then. Let’s get this insanity started, shall we?”
* * *
“Sure thing, Top,” Delf Helhake was saying to Acolyte Heravy as he turned around towards the stacked billets. “But crazy is as crazy does…”
More quietly, to Tia Spencaire beside him, he continued, “And this is some bughouse bleeding crazy shit if I don’t say so myself.”
“Which you do,” she murmured out of the side of her mouth as they threaded their way back to Fox-Two’s shipping container. He fingers toyed with an unlit cigarette for a moment before she put it behind her ear to keep it out of the way.
The Foot Platoon’s Second Squad was in the Second Tower, so they didn’t have far to walk from where Top Heravy had briefed the squad leaders and their senior troopers. Unfortunately, it was three levels up, a good ten-plus meters or so. Tia Spencaire was the type of person that got the job done, no matter the odds, no matter the cost. But that didn’t mean she particularly enjoyed spending much of her day and most of her night waiting for her sleeping accommodations to come crashing down, crushing her in the process.
But nobody had asked her, so there it was.
“Which I do,” the squad leader finally agreed, stopping Spencaire at the ladder before she had placed her booted foot on the bottom step. “Heya, slow down, eh?”
She raised an eyebrow while reaching up to take hold of the cigarette and twirl it in her fingers. “Yeah?”
“The rest of the kids got anything hidden I need to know about?” Helhake asked pointedly but quietly; they didn’t have much time before the inspectors showed up. “Or maybe that I don’t, hey?”
Spencaire shrugged. “Look, I love those idiots to death and all,” she started, “but the rest of the squad is a bunch of dorks. I don’t think they’re hiding anything more serious than Mouser’s stash of pogey bait, do you?”
Helhake started to smile, but the expression came out stillborn before solidifying into a grimace. “Shitfire,” he breathed. “Triple-damned
Mouser…”
Spencaire looked momentarily stricken. “No damn way, Lucky,” she said. “
No damn way they’re looking for that drek.”
“Hey, you heard Top same as I did,” the squad leader rejoined. “Question is, what do we do about it now, eh?”
“Look, Lucky, you don’t even understand,” she said with quiet and only barely restrained urgency. “They start taking away shit like Mouser’s pogey-bait and we are going to have a real problem on our hands.” The cigarette had stilled in her fingers. “
I am gonna have a Real Problem.”
Delf snorted, but caught himself up short when he saw his senior trooper was serious. “Look, Tia, it can’t be that ba—”
“You are damned well right it can be ‘that bad’,” she shot back. “You don’t have to put up with those guys twenty-four-seven. Not like I do.”
Helhake looked at her and looked away, then up the ladder towards home. “Shitfire,” he said. “Shitfire.”
Spencaire shook her head and leaned up against the bulkhead to steady her thoughts. She reached into a pocket, then another and another before she realized that wherever her minitorch was, it wasn’t on her person. Motherf—
“How’s it hanging, killers?” someone asked as they passed the two troopers idling at the base of the ladder. “You ready for some real fun?”
Spencaire spared a glance away from her personal misery and saw the crew of 006 striding by on some bullshit errand or another. Her eyes lingered on the driver, Mattis, but only for a second.
“Jimmy; Mattie,” Helhake said easily, reaching out to shake the hands of the pair as they continued to edge past, but at a considerably slower rate than they had been before. “We in for it, or what?”
Both enlisted men smiled, but Parker chuckled softly. “El-Tee Stoyka will be here any minute, I’d gather, with Crowell looks like. Sounds like a party to me.”
The squad leader grinned back toothily. “Never a dull moment, eh?”
Mattis reached into his pocket and brought out a cigarette and his lighter. He sparked it up but took a step towards Spencaire before he lit his own. Off to the side, Jimmy Parker’s grin took on a different aspect, the way sunrise can warm a glade even before the temperature can change in full truth.
“No rest for the wicked, killer,” Mattis replied, but he was looking at Spencaire who blinked back at him before they both looked away.
“And the righteous don’t need it, right?” Parker continued. “Well, kids, we’d best be off. They’re probably ransacking our quarters even now so we can play gopher for one of the officers. What none of us needs is Asadi or McCann to be pissed at us because we’re off jerking around, huh?”
“Sure thing,” Helhake said easily as they took their leave. “If you two bastards find yourselves back in these parts, don’t be ****** about it, yeah?”
“Roger wilco,” Parker said over his shoulder, pausing a half-step so Mattis could turn on his heel without his delayed departure being overly noticeable.
Helhake watched them go, Mattis in particular silhouetted against Spencaire’s profile. She raised the cigarette to her lips and inhaled slowly, luxuriantly. The tip glinted off her blue eyes while she turned slightly to watch the vehicle crew stride purposefully towards the staff area.
“Join me when you’re finished, eh, Tia?” he said, turning to mount the ladder in a hurry. “I got a bad feeling about this.”
