A Freelancer Christmas

By G.S. D’Moore

Copyright © 2023 by G.S. D’Moore

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. For permission, contact gsdmore@outlook.com.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN 13: 978-1-7377036-9-3

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A Freelancer Christmas

“Beer me,” I held out my hand expectantly. 

What was supposed to happen was choreographed, alcoholic bliss. The hot, little splice with purple ears and a cat tail should have grabbed a can out of the food processing unit, tossed it over her shoulder, and right into my waiting hand. Ever since Miko and I started hooking up, we’d been more in synch like that. 

Of course, Miko wasn’t usually drunk as a skunk, which I’d read was a fearsome Old Earth alpha predator that even ancient humans feared. With a loud belch that nearly made her commit a party foul with her cup of whitish liquid, she grabbed a beer, fumbled it, turned, and blindly chucked it. 

“Shit,” I lunged for the can and was barely able to snag it with my fingertips before it smacked into the real-life evergreen the skipper had obtained from space gods knew where. I didn’t even know there was a planet nearby that held the unique species of tree. 

“XO for the score,” Miko pumped her fist and downed the rest of her eggnog.

Originally, it had been non-alcoholic, but what kind of ex-marine would I be if I hadn’t spiked it with a little something extra.

“Yeah, nice shooting, Tex.” I didn’t know who Tex was but history said he was a damned fine shot. 

Then, I went out on a limb. “Hey, Miko, maybe you should take it easy,” I suggested. 

She finished throwing back her spiked drink and turned her glare on me. “What did you say?” 

I thought it was pretty obvious by the way she slurred her S’s, but this had always been a touchy subject for the splice. She was young, almost twenty, but she hated it when people looked down on her and thought she wasn’t ready for something. It didn’t matter if it was something important like flying the ship, or simple like holding her booze. We’d butted heads – and other parts of our bodies – together over that issue several times.

The truth was, she was more than capable. She was an infiltration splice. She was born to get close to people, get them to like her, and then kill them if needed. I’d seen her in action and she could be pretty fucking scary. I thought I had pretty good situational awareness and she’d snuck up on me an embarrassing number of times. 

If she wasn’t so drunk, I never would have dared to poke the bear but it was barely Christmas Eve and . . . 

“He means exactly what you think, Miko,” a giant, green, scaly body squeezed through the door to the rec room as Astrid arrived. 

Twelve feet of the ultimate killing machine was undermined by a red hat with a little white ball perched on the top of her head. I couldn’t help but snort at the imagery.

“Is this not your traditional holiday garb?” she asked as she patted her head to make sure the hat was still there. 

“No. You nailed it,” I smiled. 

It was more holiday-appropriate than Miko’s outfit. Her shirt had a disgruntled-looking elf on the front, smoking a burner, with the statement, “I’ve got your present right here” written with a big festive arrow pointing down between her legs. 

I’d tasted that Christmas Miracle before and planned to give her my Yule Log whenever we could find some time to be alone. The tight leggings she was wearing weren’t helping my self-control on that front. 

“Oh. It’s so cute,” Miko completely forgot what we’d been arguing about as she pranced over to the dragon. 

She wasn’t even half the bigger alien’s height but the two were like sisters. They started talking about girl things and left me to enjoy my beer. I cracked it open and looked at the corner of the rec room we’d decorated with holiday cheer. 

Underneath the rare tree were some presents, and the holo-projector had a crackling fire displayed against the bulkhead. Christmas was still one of the most popular holidays in this corner of the galaxy, and I just happened to be spending it aboard the Wayward Stepchild. 

Honestly, it was probably the best Christmas I’d ever had. For the moment, no one was actively trying to kill us but that probably wasn’t going to last. Things with Miko and Astrid were going well. Hell, even the skipper had come around to me. 

“Speak of the devil,” the woman in question strode through the hatch.

Unlike the other two women, Andrea wasn’t wearing anything festive. Technically, neither was I but that wasn’t for lack of trying. My history of limited funds and lack of shopping opportunities was the reason. I didn’t mind the holiday itself, even if I’d never really had a reason to celebrate. 

That had all changed recently. 

“Good, everyone is here,” she glanced around. “We can begin.”

“Secret Santa!” Miko cheered and there was no hiding the fact from her mother that she was wasted. 

Andrea shot her a look that said there would be extra duties added to her task list tomorrow, but Miko was too shitfaced to care right now. If I was being honest, I was a little excited. People didn’t usually give me presents. For the types of things I wanted, I usually had to pay by the hour. 

“Should we start with what we are thankful for?” Astrid asked as she settled down into her reinforced chair. 

“Wrong holiday,” Miko grunted. 

“That’s Thanksgiving,” I informed. “I think it happened while she was . . .” I nodded over to Miko. 

After nearly getting killed on a raid of a pixie ship, Miko had been in cryostasis for the better part of a week. It was easy to lose track of things out in the black, especially when everyone was stressed beyond belief, but I was pretty sure the intergalactic turkey slaughter had happened around then. 

“Apologies. What do you do for this Christmas?” Obviously, dragons didn’t celebrate Christmas but Astrid wanted to be included in the celebration. 

“No,” the skipper held up a hand to stop Miko’s response. “This is our first Christmas together,” she looked around the room. “We’ve been through a lot in the last few weeks. I think we should all share something with one another. Mitchell,” she put me on the spot. “Why don’t you tell us what Christmas means to you.” 

“No pressure,” I laughed awkwardly as I tapped my chin. “What does Christmas mean to me?” I pondered as my thoughts drifted to what was probably my most memorable Christmas to date.

***

“I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus. Underneath the mistletoe last night,” echoed from the comms section of the tactical operation’s center, only to be drowned out by laughter. 

“Kissing Santa Clause. I don’t think so,” Private Burnum announced loudly to the enjoyment of the marines standing around her.

Despite the military, and especially the Confederation Marine Corps being predominantly a sausage fest, the brunette lounging in her battle armor with her helmet on the desk beside her was an oddity. She was cute. Hell, I’d even call her hot. That made her popular. The fact that she gave as good as she got among her fellow marines just made her that much better. 

“What do you mean?” another private asked her. For the life of me, I couldn’t remember the guy’s name. He was a fuck-up and that was all that mattered in my book. 

“Mommy ain’t kissing no Santa Clause. Come on, guys,” she flashed a smile at the group. “If she’s hooking up with a guy that can travel the entire galaxy in a single night, and has enough cash to make gifts for all the girls and boys, she ain’t just kissing him. She’s stuffing his fat cock in her mouth and . . .”

“Private,” I warned as I finally entered the conversation. 

I stood in the TOC of Bravo Company, Second Battalion, Second Regiment, Second Marine Expeditionary Force. The Triple Deuce. One of my squad mates had actually tried that out as a nickname for me back when I was a Lance Corporal. It had lasted all of a week and a half. I didn’t do nicknames, and I made sure the marine who thought he was some sort of comedic genius learned that the hard way by cleaning the head with his face. What happened in the barracks stayed in the barracks.

“Oh, come on, Sarge,” Burnum gave me puppy dog eyes. 

I wasn’t a Lance Corporal anymore but I had at least one evaluation report that said I “lacked the bearing of an NCO”. If I wasn’t so good at killing things, I probably never would have made staff sergeant.

Burnum kind of reminded me of the ex that had been the origin of the triple deuce nickname. The unfortunate nom de plume stemmed from an unfortunate encounter that was entirely not my fault. The MPs didn’t think so but fuck them. Shit happened when a woman Dear Johned a marine after a three-month deployment because she wanted to fuck her spin instructor or something cliché like that. 

Don’t worry, there wasn’t any violence involved. I saved that for the battlefield. Why some of my fellow marines had taken to calling me Tripple Deuce was because, in my anger over the breakup, I went to her house and summoned forth the shits of three men. That would have been bad enough since I didn’t flush, but since I did it in the upper part of the toilet, I ruined her shitter. 

That wasn’t the part that reminded me about Burnum. With the MREs we’d been eating for the last couple of days while we waited for resupply, no one was taking a regular deuce anytime soon. What Burnum and my ex had in common was a truly remarkable ass. I swear, I could see the private’s junk in her trunk through her battle armor. That was some serious bootyliciousness. Thank all the space gods for our standard-issue vitamins.

“Oh, come on, Burnum,” I parroted right back at her. 

Everyone E4 and below might bend over backward to please her in the hopes they might get a peek at that ass, but I wasn’t your average enlisted guy. 

Her pout vanished when she saw her feminine charms weren’t working on me. “You’re killing me, Sarge,” she feigned getting stabbed in the heart. 

“Killing you? A little of my soul dies every time you make me listen to these oldies,” I gave her a look. “That song has got to be a millennia old. Don’t we have anything from the last century to listen to?” I looked at the PFC who was manning the comms station, and who was supposed to keep an eye on incoming and outgoing traffic.

“Sorry, Sarge,” the PFC shook his head. 

“That’s staff sergeant to you,” I stared him down until he looked away. 

What could I say? I wasn’t completely immune to Burnum’s charms, or the occasional wank session to the image of her running around in PT shorts. 

Still, she might have been right about my current mood-killing attitude. That’s what happened after a full night of staff duty and babysitting all the privates while the LT who was supposed to back me up went and took a nap in the officer’s quarters. I failed to summon the proper enthusiasm for my chosen profession at 0600 in the morning.

Burnum understood my mood and dropped it as she went back to tinkering with the lights strung across the ceiling of the TOC. When they’d first been set up, the red and green LEDs had been programmed to blink in time with whatever music was playing. Now, they were just permanently on the fritz and threatened to give some unlucky marine an epileptic seizure. 

The jerry-rigged Christmas lights weren’t the only thing not working after three weeks at our objective. Three weeks on this particular planet would test the most resolute of men, and I wasn’t just talking about trying to get in a certain private’s pants.    

I put all the thoughts of my current predicament out of my head as I forced a smile onto my face. As my drill sergeants used to say, fake motivation was better than no motivation. I was going to fake the shit out of what came next. 

I parted the sea of privates as I walked over to the comms station and hit the call button on the panel in front of me. “TOC to skipper, over.” I waited for the reply. 

“Go ahead, TOC,” the commander of Bravo Company radioed back. 

Overall, he wasn’t a total waste of space. During the few fights we’d been in, he’d kept his head and relied on his platoon leaders, platoon sergeants, and squad leaders to get the job done. As one of the latter, it was nice to not have a captain breathing down my neck every time I assigned sectors of fire. Still, there were a few things I thought he could do better. That was true for any commander.

My main critiques had to deal with garrison situations. Tactically, the guy was sound but when we started to sit around with our thumb up our ass for too long, he made it his personal mission to find busy-work bullshit for us to do. That, and he became obsessed with doing things by the book. In combat, he was willing to take suggestions, try shit out, and color outside the lines. But if we were on base, gods help the poor bastard whose armor wasn’t spotless. One speck of rust and the First Sergeant brought down the hammer on the whole squad.

I had a few suggestions I was waiting for the right moment to email him about. Thanks to my three chevrons and single rocker on my armor, he might actually listen to me. That would be a first but now was not that time.  

“All clear, sir. Nothing significant to report. We observed only slight movement from either camp during the night and intelligence says it was routine resupply. Just a few shuttles ferried to and from orbit. No other movement to report and no uptick in chatter.” If there had been anything worthwhile, I would have filed a Serious Incident Report and woke the skipper up. 

Since there was no SIR waiting in his inbox, he already knew that. My impromptu sitrep was because there was a standing order for staff duty to brief the CO every morning at the end of their shift. Technically, it should have been the LT doing the job but I suspected he’d gone to bed hours ago after “checking” to make sure the sensitive sites on the forward operating base were secure. That left me in charge. Awesome.

“Thank you, staff sergeant,” it was tough to tell what the man was thinking with only audio.

“Yes, sir. I’m off to do my final checks and conduct the handover to the next SDO,” I finished up and moved to disconnect the call. 

“Staff sergeant,” he stopped me.

“Yes, sir?” 

“Put on your fucking helmet,” he growled. 

“Yes, sir. Right away, sir,” I heard the radio click as it disconnected. “Fuck you, sir,” I finished with a growl of my own.

That was one of the skipper’s latest obsessions. He wanted everyone in their helmet at all times and he wanted grooming standards maintained. Talk about an oxymoron. Who the hell gave a shit if you had some five o’clock shadow if you had on your helmet? For fuck’s sake, no one could see anyone else. 

The familiar need to punch something reared its ugly head and it took me a few deep breaths to calm down. I’d lost my stripes the last time by punching out an NCO. I didn’t need that career backtrack again.   

I was just about over my need to ring the captain’s neck when I heard snickers behind me.

I knew exactly who did it.  

“Did I hear something, Private Pyle?” I rounded on the man manning the comms station. The rest of the privates heard the dangerous edge to my tone and immediately vacated the kill box that had sprung up around Pyle’s location. 

The guy wasn’t unlucky enough to actually be named Gomer Pyle. His momma really would have had to hate him if that was the case. In his case, he’d earned the most infamous nickname in the Corps by being a grade-A fucktard to his fellow Marines. He was the kind of guy who’d get fragged by his own battle buddy, which was why he’d been moved from one of the line platoons to headquarters and spent all his time in the TOC. Now, his most pressing duty was not to forget the cream and sugar in the officers’ coffee. That, and being the First Sergeant’s personal bitch. 

He probably should have been forced out of the Corps by now, but the fact of the matter was that there was way too much paperwork involved in a discharge. Our recent and sudden deployment had put the kibosh on that at least until we got home. It would probably be easier to do a write-up about how he tripped leaving the TOC, somehow managed to pull out his own knife and slit his throat. I was an asshole, but even I wasn’t willing to take things that far . . . yet. So, me and the other staff duty NCOs suffered his presence. Too bad for Pyle, he just couldn’t get out of his own way.

“No, staff sergeant,” he zipped his lips despite the smirk he was shooting at the rapidly retreating privates around him. I was already onto him. 

“Are you calling me a liar, private?” I loomed over him so close that he could smell my most recent fart. It was almost to the point the crotch of my matte gray armor was hitting him in the nose.

“No, staff sergeant!” he knew he’d stepped in it but I wasn’t letting him off the hook. 

He’d been as annoying as a pair of howler monkeys fucking all night long and I’d had it. He should have known better. I had a reputation as a bit of a hothead in the battalion. My story of punching out my last sergeant, because he was a dumb shit, was a bit of a legend in the Triple Deuce.

“So, I did hear you, private,” I grinned down at him as he tripped over his own words. 

“No . . . yes . . . I was just saying how beautiful of a day it is, staff sergeant,” he looked to the other marines in the TOC for backup. But that was the thing about being a blue falcon, no one came to his rescue. 

“Are you a fucking weatherman now, Pyle?” I got down and roared into his face. 

“No, sir, I . . .”

“I ain’t no fucking sir,” I shoved him and he toppled out of the chair. “If I was a sir, I’d be asleep in my bunk and not babysitting your sorry ass,” I advanced on him and he scrambled backward. Any slower and my armored boot would have flattened his balls. 

“Please, staff sergeant, I . . .” he blabbered wide-eyed and probably pissed himself. 

“Sarge,” a calm voice stated from behind me. I turned around to see Burnum with her metal gauntlet on my shoulder. She wasn’t pouting anymore. “He ain’t worth it, Paul.” 

If anyone else called me Paul there would be hell to pay. Burnum was lucky she was hot and growing on me. Or more accurately, I was growing for her. Hiding that was one of the few pluses of being in armor twenty-four-seven.    

“I don’t want to hear your fucking excuses, Pyle,” I finally wrangled my temper. “Get on your feet, marine.” Instead of hammer-fisting his sorry ass, I grabbed him under his armpits and bodily yanked him off the ground. “Do a left face, an about-face, and get the fuck out of my face now. You smell like failure and recently sucked dick,” I loudly sniffed him for emphasis. “Report to the chow hall. You’re on KP duty until I can get the smell of you out of my nostrils. Move!” I would have shoved my knife hand up his ass but he was already sprinting for the hatch. He forgot something as he retreated like a little bitch. 

“This asshole is going to get himself killed,” I rolled my eyes. 

“Your fucking helmet, Pyle!” I bellowed as he left a skid mark on the floor, as well as his pants, as he ran back to grab his helmet and sprinted back out the hatch.

Maybe I was a bit of a hypocrite when it came to the helmet thing. After all, the skipper had just chewed me out for the same reason. The critical difference was that I was in the TOC, which was basically a climate-controlled bunker capable of taking indirect fire and maintaining its integrity. Pyle was about to run out into the inhospitable alien atmosphere and suffocate within thirty seconds. Since the chow hall was across the FOB, he never would have made it. 

“I should have just let him die. Death by stupidity means less paperwork,” I grumbled as I marched toward the door.

“See you later, Sarge,” Burnum waved as I secured my own helmet, cycled the airlock, and stepped out into the morning sun. 

My HUD immediately filtered out the red tinge that tinted everything in this place because it was more annoying than taking a dick to the face during combatives training. I shut my eyes until my HUD cycled and then looked out at the world I’d wasted thirty-eight days of my life on. For as far as the naked eye could see, it was nothing but flat land and rocks covered by multi-colored lichen. If someone glanced at it for a minute, they’d call it pretty, but I’d had more than fifty thousand minutes to look at this inhospitable moon. I was over it.  

FUBAR was an acronym that had been part of the military lexicon for centuries, but in the centuries since humanity took to the stars, we’d found another use for it. The mission I was on was FUBAR twice over. Not only was it fucked-up beyond all recognition, but it was on some fucked-up, barren-ass rock out in the galactic boondocks to boot. 

This small moon rotating around a random planet in a system that didn’t even rate a name had no strategic value to the Confederation. Hell, we were well over a hundred light years from my home system. We’d been deployed as a peace-keeping force at the joint request of the Elfin Empire and the Empire of the Coming Dawn. More the latter than the former. Actually, almost entirely the latter. The former just agreed so people didn’t immediately start shooting. 

Technically, it wasn’t even called the Elfin Empire, that was just our shorthand for it. Like with most ET star nations, humanity lacked the vocal cords and the patience to sound out their forty-syllable mouthful of a polity. The elves' name for themselves was extra grand because they thought so highly of themselves. They kind of had to when no one else did. 

What brought the two empires, one human and one alien, into contention? There were a lot of things that could have galactic neighbors at each other’s throats, but this was the oldest one in the books . . . money. The two empires were in conflict over this little patch of real estate – that wasn’t even in either of their territories – because it was full of rare-earth metals and minerals. Those things made expensive shit like warships and weapons, which got sold to species all over the cosmos. That meant that whoever controlled this ball of mud was set to make a healthy credit or a quintillion of them. 

The Dawners – what we called the Empire of the Coming Dawn, because whoever came up with that name had definitely been high at the time – got to the moon first with a company of their marines, surveyors, and a destroyer in orbit. As far as fellow humans went, Dawners had a permanent stick lodged up their ass. Next to the live-and-let-live Confederation, they were practically a different species. 

According to the briefing packet I may or may not have read on the ride over, a few days later the elves showed up with their own equivalent of marines, a destroyer, and a mining vessel that was set to get to work on harvesting all the planet’s goodies. The Dawners objected and a standoff ensued along with a small firefight. People on both sides had died, and that’s when a neutral third party was brought in to make sure it didn’t devolve into a shitshow. Bravo Company rode shotgun with some diplomats to keep the peace while they tried to talk things out. They were the carrot and we were the stick. The problem for me and the other marines on the ground was that we weren’t a very big stick. 

Personally, I prescribed to the philosophy of good, old King Solly. Cut the fucker in half! The Elves got some. The Dawners got some. Everyone got to mine the good stuff and I’d get to go home. The brass said we’d make it home by Thanksgiving when we left shortly after Halloween. Every marine in the company knew that meant we’d be lucky to see the Confederation again before Valentine’s Day. Since I was currently single, that didn’t affect my plans to get drunk and pay a bot to have its way with me. Now that we were rapidly approaching day forty on this FUBAR moon, I’d gladly spend some credits to buy a girl real flowers and chocolate, even if I didn’t get laid. Anything was better than here. 

“Maybe Burnum likes chocolate,” the dangerous thought entered my head before I could stop myself and push it aside. 

Of course, when it came to mission prep no one asked for my take on the situation. It was my job to sit out in the middle of nowhere, in a place that was already the middle of nowhere, between the two rival empires’ camps, and make sure no one did anything stupid. It was hurry up and wait at its finest.  

Even worse, I knew for a fact that something stupid was going to happen. I had that itch in the back of my brain. It was the type that I couldn’t scratch. I’d checked. It wasn’t crotch rot. Elves were assholes and humans weren’t much better. Sooner or later, someone was going to start some shit and I’d be the one in the suck when it happened. 

“Story of my life,” I turned toward the chow hall. 

My checks would take me that way anyway and I wanted to make sure Pyle didn’t disobey my orders. As I moved, I checked every door of every pre-fab structure that made up the forward operating base.

Armory . . . check. Although, there wasn’t much in there at the moment except extra ammo. The skipper had us at a readiness level that meant we slept with our rifles and carried a full combat load. We just didn’t have a round chambered, or an energy beam ready to cook the enemy alive. Still, there was a reason ammo was the top line item of an ACE report. If there was a serious fight, we’d need all we could get. The armory also had some of the bigger boom-boom we needed to keep under lock and key. Because of that, there was an armed guard on it twenty-four-seven. 

“You good?” I asked the corporal currently on duty. 

“Got any coffee, staff sergeant?” he joked. 

“Nope, just recycled swamp ass,” I took the moment to take a pull from my armor’s water bladder. “Mmm, there’s nothing like the taste of my own balls in the morning.” 

The marine chuckled as I moved on to the barracks. All of the barracks had CQ on duty. That meant a pair of marines sat in chairs by the entrances. The quartet of structures that housed each of the company’s platoons were set up in a square around a small parade ground. Inside those buildings was the only place aside from the chow hall where a marine could take off their helmet, per the skipper’s orders. 

Since we weren’t in the barracks much more than to sleep, we didn’t get much time out of our headgear. We still had to be in armor, which meant the two hundred and twelve men of Bravo Company were ripe after five-plus weeks in the field. Showers were for the weak. Our armor had some built-in cleaning features, but what I wouldn’t give to run a baby wipe over my taint. I was pretty sure if we went on like this for much longer, sick call was going to be full of marines who’d gone down to some weird dick fungus. Lucky for Burnum, she’d be safe. 

I checked in with the corpsmen and they were all good. All inventories had been completed and no happy pills were missing. I double-checked the logs just to make sure. The various pharmaceutical-grade narcotics had a tendency to go missing on long, boring ops like this one. If someone wanted a little extra jolly in their holly jolly Christmas, that was the place they’d go. I’d also known one or two enterprising corpsmen who’d made bank in similar situations, so I kept on top of that. I might have been guilty of something similar once upon a time when I was a lowly private or facilitated it when I was part of the E4 mafia. Now, I had to prevent it. Sometimes rank did not hath privileges.  

After blessing off on our quaint little field hospital, all that was left was the officer’s quarters which were passed the TOC in the opposite direction. We had an Army detachment along for the ride but they had their own chain of command and CQ. Less work for me. The only thing left down this way was the chow hall. Now that I thought about it, grabbing a bite to eat before the rest of the company descended on the place was a good way to lift my spirits. I could also grab my daily ration of vitamins. 

Vitamins were what we marines called the set of pharmaceutical enhancements the Corps fed us to keep us lean, mean, big-dicked fighting machines. They made us stronger, faster, and sharper than an average human. It didn’t mod us the way some people had biological or mechanical procedures done to them to make them more, but our vitamins brought us to the peak of human efficiency. With vitamins in our tank, we could literally go all night long. Any seasoned marine had a day or two’s worth of extra packed away in their armor for an emergency, but the last thing I wanted after a long night on duty was to wait in line at the chow hall’s dispensary. I wanted to eat, hand over the duty to today’s staff duty officer, and get some rack time.  

I was halfway there, dreaming of the hard polymer that the Corps called a bed when I started to hear a warble in my ears. It was barely detectable but out here in the boondocks, I shouldn’t have been hearing anything weird at all. My money was on an armor malfunction, which sucked. Anything that was wrong with my armor could be a hindrance in combat, or more likely get me gigged if the platoon sergeant did a surprise inspection. As the second-most-senior NCO in the platoon and first squad’s leader, I needed to set the standard. Setting the standard was fucking exhausting.  

“Run audio diagnostic,” I grunted and watched code flash across my HUD. A few seconds later everything reported green. A heartbeat after that an alert blared in my ears as my HUD flashed red. 

“You’ve got to be shitting. . .” I didn’t even have time to finish the thought before I toggled over to the company-wide comms net. As a squad leader, I had access but really wasn’t supposed to use it unless there was an emergency. This was a fucking emergency. 

“Incoming!” I yelled just as something screeched into the FOB at hypersonic velocities and slammed into the chow hall. 

BOOM

The shockwave picked me up and tossed me twenty feet back to land on my ass. It would have shocked me for a moment if the combat systems in my armor didn’t give me a shot of pharmaceutical motivation to get up off my ass and get in the fight. Because we sure as shit were in a fight now. No one fired on a Confederation base and got away with it.  

“Chow hall is gone! Everyone on your feet and get to your assigned fighting positions or this will be your last day in this fine institution we call the Corps. No Christmas presents and no New Year’s blowjobs from your boyfriends, ladies. Move . . . move . . . move, marines!” I had a tendency to become a bit of a smartass in combat. 

I thought it helped the junior marines not freak the fuck out if I joked around while the lasers were flying, but at the same time, they needed to haul ass or they were going to die.   

“Where are my high-speed marines at? Let’s make these assholes regret ever fucking with the Corps!”

There was a chorus of oorahs over the channel as marines started to slam on helmets and rush out of the barracks toward the trenches we’d prepositioned around the FOB. Between rousing my marines, getting a battle damage assessment off the loss of the chow hall – losing your food was always a motivational blow to any military formation – and scanning the skies for more incoming, it was a good thing I had computer assistance. My helmet blared a warning that another warble was incoming.

“Take cover!” I yelled before I toggled over to the Army detachment’s net.  

“Master Sergeant, you ADA boys better pull your heads out of your asses or . . .” I was interrupted as the hiss-sizzle of the air-defense artillery positions north of the FOB opened fire.

It would be stupid to sit between two hostile forces without the ability to knock missiles, artillery, or lasers out of the sky and that’s where the ADA detachment came in. For a bunch of doughboys, they weren’t so bad. We had a healthy rivalry going since we’d arrived, but right now, I wanted to be butt buddies with their NCOIC. Without them, we were sitting ducks. 

ADA weaponry was basically the same as shipboard point defense. Powerful emitters were strategically placed to protect the FOB and were currently reaching out to defeat incoming ordnance in detail. They would detonate enemy missiles, or render their guidance systems inert so they missed by a literal mile. They could literally swat artillery out of the sky, or their energy particles would mix with an incoming beam weapon and result in a volatile, fantastic explosion. To us grunts on the ground, we just hope the latter happened far enough away from the FOB. The outgoing energy pulses registered as blue streaks of light on my HUD’s friend-or-foe designator, and their fire was continuous and on target.

“We’re on it, staff sergeant,” the master sergeant sounded cool and collected. I swore I heard him slurping his morning coffee in the background. He was Army, of course he had coffee when the Marines didn’t.  

“One problem solved,” I ran down my mental shit-out-of-luck procedures and quickly found that we had two more big problems.

“Counterbattery fire!” I toggled over to another net I was just senior enough to have access to. “You tube-lubers better not be beating off your mini candy canes to the LT’s wife again! Rain steel, marines. Now!” 

As a staff sergeant, I didn’t have as much authority as a platoon sergeant or officer and I usually wouldn’t be running around yelling orders to other NCOs not in my platoon. However, I was the senior marine on the battlefield until the rest of them got their battle rattle squared away and into the trenches. So, for the first few minutes of this fight, I was in command.

Which was how I knew exactly what the mortarmen were up to instead of triangulating the enemy artillery’s position and returning fire. The LT of second platoon had made the mistake of bringing a holo-recording of his wife on the op. An enterprising corporal had promptly stolen the saucy bit of entertainment meant for the junior officer and it had been passed around the company’s enlisted for the last month. Usually in exchange for the best MREs, or even a few credits for the truly pent-up. 

I might have even taken a run at pummeling my purple-headed pirate to her unwrapping herself like a Christmas present, complete with a fat dildo, and shooting saucy looks over her shoulder at her man. Clearly, he was the only one she expected to be watching the recording. Boy things were going to be awkward when we saw her at the next company picnic. 

Still, I wouldn’t mind her calling me daddy. She was a little on the stocky side, but that was okay when you were young. I just hoped she didn’t let herself go as her husband rose in the ranks and became a dependopotamus. There was nothing worse than a nice piece of ass letting herself go to waste. 

“No chance of that for Burnum,” my HUD highlighted the private as she rushed from the TOC to her assigned fighting position. 

“On it, staff sergeant,” I got a delayed reply from the sergeant over in the mortar pits as they started to return fire. 

The whump of them sending rounds downrange felt good as it traveled through my bones. Being able to take remote command of those rounds, juke them around enemy ADA, and bring explosive retribution down on the enemy’s head was even better than opening presents on Christmas morning. 

Unfortunately, it also meant the enemy was a hell of a lot closer than they were supposed to be. Our FOB was smack dab in the middle of the moon, more than a thousand miles from either camp. The mortars only had a two-hundred-and-fifty-mile range. Whoever was hitting us, they’d snuck in close during the night. As the staff duty NCO, that didn’t bode well for my evaluation report. 

“I’ve got to live before they can bust me down to corporal again.” My rank and paycheck were not high on my priority list right now. 

“Ernest A. Janson, this is Raider Company, over,” my armor shot the message over to a powerful transmitter on top of the TOC that beamed the 1’s and 0’s up to the troop transport ship in orbit above us. “Do you read me, Ernie?” I used the universal nickname for the vessel when I didn’t get an immediate reply.

“Ro . . . der . . . ny. Wha . . . tion . . . n . . . here . . . er?” the transmission was so broken up that the only thing I could discern was that whoever was on the other end was asking a question. 

“One step forward, two steps back,” I didn’t bother trying again. The skipper could deal with the jamming issue. I wasn’t some commo guy who could punch through whatever the enemy was using to scramble our comms. I was an infantry marine.  

“Mortars, once you get a BDA, send it to me and the skipper. Look for any jamming equipment and target it for your next fire mission, over,” I multitasked as I toggled back to the tube-lubers and then moved on from the mortarmen to my next problem. 

“Where the fuck are my deflectors?” I yelled. 

Deflectors were another naval mainstay repurposed for ground combat. They were the primary defense against indirect fire, direct fire, or orbital bombardment. A shield that provided total coverage, could stand up to an enemy fleet’s firepower, and didn’t require power cells the size of a warship was still the holy grail of space combat. On the ground, we had a little more flexibility. Our deflectors were the first thing we brought down when we established the FOB. They sat in the dead center of camp and the massive power cells were buried beneath our feet so they were nearly impossible to target. They were also surrounded by hundreds of ornery marines with all of our instruments of doom to protect them. 

The only parts of the deflector that were visible aboveground were the emitter’s four giant apertures. Each was the size of a house and protected a quarter of the FOB’s acreage. They should have been turned on by flipping a switch once we started taking fire. So, either the marine on duty was off taking a shit or something was wrong. 

Another bombardment came screaming in and the ADA guys took it out. The ground still shook from the force of the explosions and I stumbled. That was close . . . too close. The enemy had us dialed in and was probing for weak points in our defenses. Each successive fire mission was getting closer to slipping something past the Army boys and soon, we’d be looking at another explosion right in the center of the FOB. 

“I’m moving to the deflectors,” I righted myself and took off at a sprint. 

With a jolt of energy from my armor’s power cell, the pseudo-muscular structure inside my armor activated and I went from a decent pace to a speed that would make an Olympic sprinter sit down and cry. Proper power management was the name of the game in modern combat. Everything from the deflectors to our armor, and even our weapons ran on power cells. If those died, so did the marine. I didn’t activate this feature of my armor much because it could eat power like a dragon after a juice cleanse. Despite that, getting those deflectors up was priority one and I needed to get eyes on the issue. 

“Is anyone online above an E6? Is this fucking amateur hour?” I couldn’t hide the exasperation in my tone. Everything I’d done in the last ninety seconds was literally way above my pay grade. 

“This is Raider-One-Six,” my PL came online and I barely concealed my sigh of relief. “I’m taking command. Raider-Six was in the chow hall.” 

“Shit balls.” Now, I kind of felt bad about giving the skipper shit about his helmet obsession. If you asked me, it was kind of ironic that his insistence on following the regs hadn’t saved him,  

“Raider-One-Five,” he spoke to the platoon sergeant, “you’re now in command of first platoon. Mitchell, you’re now Raider-One-Five.”

And just like that . . . I made platoon sergeant. “There ain’t nothing quite like a battlefield promotion,” I wasn’t exactly thrilled, but it wasn’t like I had a choice in the matter. Chain of command was chain of command and shit like this was laid out plain as day in our operations order.  

“Roger that, I’ll check the deflectors and then head to the line. Raider-One-Five, out,” I cut the connection and the extra power to my armor so I didn’t careen around a corner and go through a building instead of around it. 

ADA blasted over my head more frequently than was good for my health. Whoever the enemy was, they were keeping things interesting. As I sprinted across the FOB against the flow of marines heading to the perimeter, I looked up and saw the atmospheric streaks of missiles rocketing in at hypersonic velocities. My armor highlighted the bursts of positioning thrusters firing from maneuvering artillery shells that slipped to the side of the friendly, blue ADA beams like a boxer in the ring. Lastly, angry red beams of light singed my retinas as incoming energy weapons reached out like the fingers of an angry space god and tried to wipe us off the face of the planet.

“They’re throwing everything but the kitchen sink at us,” I grimaced. “And to think, in a few days Ernie was going to drop off some hams for Christmas dinner.” Holiday cheer was so totally fucked right now.  

The enemy was keeping the ADA on their toes and until I got the deflectors up, all it would take was one hit to end the fight in the enemy’s favor. Just ask the old skipper.  

In reply, our mortars fired a continuous barrage to try to find and kill the enemy, but my sensors hadn’t picked up any small-arms fire. That wouldn’t last for long. Artillery bombardment was pretty standard before enemy infantry showed up. They wanted to soften us up for their grunts, which meant I really needed to get the deflectors up or we’d be spending New Year’s six feet under.  

Call it instinct, or call it training, I grasped my main battle rifle from where it was maglocked to my back, pulled it around to a ready position, and chambered a round. If in doubt, I preferred slug-throwers to beam weapons. There was just something satisfying about that kick. Even with caseless rounds, a Gauss rifle bucked a little. It was nature’s way of telling me my weapon was working and something was reaching out to kill the thing that was trying to kill me.   

I brought the four-foot rifle to my shoulder, pivoted around the corner of the TOC like I was in a shoot house, and scanned the area around the deflectors. The concave dishes that served as the emitter’s apertures were all humming away in stand-by mode, but it was the marines guarding them that caught my attention. My armor took in the data faster than I could and beeped an alert just as my thoughts formed. 

“I knew it,” I felt my balls jump into my throat as my computer assessed the status of the two marines on duty. 

One marine was on the ground, unmoving, with blood leaking out of his neck gator. The light armor that protected our neck was a weak point and everyone knew that. There was no way to avoid it. We needed something flexible if we wanted to be able to turn our heads. With my new platoon sergeant-level permissions, I had access to his vitals, or I would have if there were any. My systems automatically tagged him as KIA and pushed the data through our net to whatever platoon he was assigned to. Sadly, I didn’t recognize the name that popped up above his prone form.  

Then, I spotted the second marine. He was still upright and facing away from me. A casual glance and I might have thought he was taking a piss, but the data streaming to my HUD said something entirely different. His blood pressure and heart rate were through the roof. His breathing was erratic and his sensors relayed two breaches in his armor. One in the front and another in the back.

“Hang in there, lance corporal,” I radioed to him.

Instead of going straight to the in-distress marine, I moved forward at an angle to get a better read of the situation. Active pulses from my sensors bathed the area in radiation, but I got a fat load of nothing . . . except one peculiar visual image. I couldn’t help but notice the blood sticking out his back. 

“What the hell?” It looked like there was a line of red shooting out a full foot from his lower lumbar area, and with the Dark God Murphy as my witness, I watched drops of blood literally drip off it and down to the ground. 

My HUD recorded it and cross-referenced it against my armor’s database for a similar phenomenon. It beeped a result just as the bloody line vanished and my audio picked up a sickening slurp sound. The data my armor had collected, plus the knowledge of who was on the moon with my company, told me all I needed to know about who our surprise enemy was. 

I didn’t even think, I just aimed and fired. My rifle calibrated itself to the newly realized threat, which was a nice way of saying I sprayed and prayed. Bullets tore from my muzzle and saturated the space around the marine, while my weapon’s friend-or-foe indicators made sure I didn’t put a round through the deflectors or the marine who’d been guarding them.

Most of those rounds missed, which was what happened when you couldn’t see what you were shooting. Add in the fact that the enemy knew all about human tech and was using the other marine as a human shield, and I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t hit shit as my ammo count rapidly dropped. Still, all I needed was one hit . . . and I got it. 

To the naked eye, it was like a stone hitting the surface of a calm pond. The impact spread across the enemy’s armor, but the armor was nothing like mine. I felt a surge of savage glee as something blue and wet shot out the other side of the attacker as his armor failed to stop my bullet . . . and then failed altogether. Like a T.V. on the fritz, I finally saw my enemy in the flesh.

I quickly advanced forward with my weapon at the ready as the enemy toppled over backward. I pushed the injured marine out of the way and put my boot on the chest of the injured alien as it tried to rise and flee. 

“Not so fast, you pointy-eared bastard!” I pushed and ground my boot into the elf’s chest. A little bit of juice from my armor’s power assist had him spitting up more blue blood. 

“We’ve got elfin hunter teams inside the perimeter. Lock it up tighter than a virgin’s knees, boys and girls!” I put out on the company net before turning my attention to my captive. Technically, he was a prisoner of war but he’d killed one marine and gutted another. 

I felt that offered me some latitude when it came to the enforcement of the Geneva Convention of 1949, and the Alpha Centauri Pact of 2325. Plus, I was pretty sure the elves didn’t sign on to the latter, and what good was a one-way treaty on the laws of war.   

A lot of the species of Old Earth’s folklore had some origin in truth. The truth wasn’t that all those mythical creatures were from a different realm. They were from different worlds. Other races had visited primitive Earth throughout its history and made their way into our stories. It was only once humanity ventured out among the stars that we learned the truth. About the only thing those stories got right about elves was that they lived a long time and had pointy ears.

In reality, the elves were a race of humanoid bipedals that populated a far-reaching empire at the edge of human space. They weren’t jovial little things with bells on their feet, a sugar addiction, and they sure as shit didn’t work in a big fat guy’s sweatshop that made toys for spoiled brats.  

I wasn’t going to lie, their empire was nothing to sneeze at. They’d settled hundreds of planets in hundreds of habitable systems, and many uninhabitable ones as well. They might even be pushing quadruple digits as far as I knew. The only species that had more real estate under their belt was humanity. That was because we fucked like rabbits and had a generally poor attitude when it came to sharing. If we were united under a single banner, despite being relative newcomers to the galactic scene, we could probably conquer the cosmos. Too bad we sometimes hated each other as much as ETs.  

Unlike humans, elves were cold-blooded creatures somewhere between amphibians and mammals on the scientific org charts. I didn’t know anything more specific than that. I knew that they bled and how best to kill them. That was all that really mattered in my book. Besides, I was more interested in getting laid than engaging in my high school’s Xeno class. I had another type of biology on my mind.  

On average, elves were smaller and thinner than a human. They stood about five-five, with skin ranging from deep black to light blue. Their skin was usually soft but sticky. Smarter people than me said they’d likely evolved from an aquatic species, and might even still spend some time in the water. Our xenobiologist would love to know more, but no one had been to an elfin planet and lived to tell the tale. Even peaceful science missions were never heard from again.

Even creepier, elfin eyes had more of a vertical slit than my own and they had three total eyelids. An upper and lower row of needle-like teeth lined their mouths and they had an extra finger-like appendage on each hand, which gave them greater dexterity. Overall, that meant they were weaker than an average human but they made up for that with greater speed and ingenuity. 

Exhibit A for the latter lay on the ground under my boot. Elves had the best stealth tech in the business. It was good enough to make it through a hundred miles of active and passive scans put out by the FOB and Ernie overhead, and it snuck this bastard right up next to our biggest defensive asset without anyone knowing. Hell, the dead marine probably never saw the blade coming. 

Thank the space gods I was there to save the day. I could already see the commendations in my file.

But while their tech made the elfin some stealthy motherfuckers, by its very nature, their armor had to be thin and streamlined. All the power that went into it was needed to maintain its cloaking features. Because of that, it couldn’t stop incoming rounds for shit. All of that meant that when you hit an elf, the fucker stayed down.

Despite putting a hole in the one who’d been trying to take down our deflectors, it still fought on. The blade, still grasped in the fucker’s hand, stabbed toward my calf. I stopped it by shooting the ET in the shoulder, which successfully blew its arm off. It squealed as it dropped the weapon. When the blade lost contact with the elf’s hand, it lost its stealth properties. To be fair, I couldn’t be sure if that was because the stealth actually transferred from the armor into the blade, or because the arm was no longer attached to the body and the stealth tech’s power source. Still, I couldn’t help but whistle inside my helmet. 

The elves might be my enemy but they had excellent craftsmanship. I found myself looking down at a sword that was clearly made by a master. It fell somewhere between a rapier and a katana on the human scale. Whatever it might have been called, its edge was so thin it made my K-bar look dull. Rumor had it the elves honed their blades to the width of a single molecule and being armed with one was a sign of rank and prestige. That meant that only elite warriors carried them and they cut through just about anything. I wasn’t even sure how our armor’s shields would fare against it.  

“Now we can find out,” I grinned behind my helm. 

“I’ll take that,” I picked up the blade, and with the press of a button, it retracted inward on itself until it was the size of a baton. I stuffed it into one of my armor compartments and looked down at the elf. 

“You will die, Interloper,” it spat blood up at me. “This is ours. All of the cosmos will bow before the . . .” 

I shot him in the head before he could finish. “Merry Christmas, motherfucker,” I spit on the corpse as I reloaded my rifle with a fresh magazine. 

“Interloper,” I scoffed and put a second round into its chest just to be sure. “I’ve been called worse.”   

That was another thing Old Earth got wrong about elves in all those stories way back when. They weren’t all down with peace, harmony, and giving Chris Kringle rim jobs. As a rule, they were total fucking dicks. They came from a militarized theocracy. Not only were they deadly in battle with top-notch gear and weapons, but they followed a perverse religion that basically stated anything their emperor laid eyes on was theirs by divine right. Since you could see the whole galaxy through a telescope nowadays, that meant they claimed it all. In my thirty-plus years, I couldn’t remember a time when the Elfin Empire wasn’t fighting somebody or another. Today, it just happened to be the Dawners and I was caught in the middle of it.

“Raider-One-Five. Sitrep,” the LT, no . . . the new skipper radioed in. 

“Deflectors are coming online,” I replied. My armor did a handshake with the deflector’s software and with a mental flip of the switch, a loud hum reverberated through my bones. 

Without my HUD, I wouldn’t have seen anything change, but with my enhanced optics, I saw the four, golden half-spheres spring to life. They overlapped at the apex directly over the apertures, in order to provide the most protection to the deflectors themselves. From there, they arced down toward the ground before terminating about eight feet above the alien soil. That space would be filled with squad and platoon-level deflectors that optimized our firing positions and were buried along the earthworks. While they were nowhere near as powerful as the giant company-level deflectors, having a few layers of condensed energy between a marine and incoming rounds was always nice. Despite that, the Dark God Murphy was wise in his tenets. Incoming fire always had the right of way . . . eventually. 

In a perfect world, we’d be able to fire through the deflectors while they stopped the incoming fire, but that was some sci-fi bullshit. What we could do was leave small openings in the various deflectors for marines to fire through. It was like an ancient castle’s arrow slits. That, plus integrated fire control so we could still do outbound fire missions, and that gave us the best balance of offense and defense technology could offer.

The elves would try and time their salvos accordingly to take advantage of any outgoing fire missions. Or, they’d simply pound our deflectors into submission. If they put enough hurt on our defenses, they’d go into emergency shutdown so they didn’t explode. As much as it might suck reindeer dick to lose an energy barrier at the wrong moment, it was better than having it blow up in your face and incinerate anything within a dozen feet. Once the deflectors went down, my marines would have to rely on hugging the dirt and their own personal forearm shield emitters. All of that meant that even with all the toys the Confederation Marine Corps brought to the fight, men and women would still die today. No more white Christmases for those unlucky souls.     

“Good work,” the LT radioed back and pulled me out of contemplating my own mortality. “I need you on the line, platoon sergeant. Stick to the platoon net. Raider-Six, out.” 

After literally saving the entire company’s ass it felt like a curt dismissal, but I knew the officer was just doing his job. He was one of the good ones, better than the old skipper in my humble opinion, and he’d just been thrown into a position above his pay grade. He had enough responsibility to handle. He didn’t need a staff sergeant galivanting all over the nets. 

So, for once in my career, I did what I was told and moved to my assigned position. First platoon was assigned the western sector of the FOB’s earthworks, which also just happened to be the side facing the elves’ mining camp. Lucky me. I jogged to where first squad was set up along the left flank of our area of responsibility and hopped down into the trenchwork. If I looked to my left, I was close enough to spit on the first member of second platoon. 

“Rejoice, all ye faithful. I have returned triumphant,” I radioed into my squad’s net and got a chorus of laughs. “What’s the situation?”

“All green, staff sergeant,” a corporal, and my senior team leader piped up as my HUD started to populate with everything he’d done so far. 

Working as a grunt, especially a junior NCO, was a lot more than pointing and shooting shit. Battle management was a big focus in the NCO Academy for good reason. There was nothing harder to command in the whole Corps than a squad or fire team. A skipper had his platoons and he usually moved them around like chess pieces from the comfort of the TOC. That continued up through the org chart all the way to the generals at the expeditionary force level. To the senior brass, it was more like a video game than being balls-deep in battle. I didn’t have that luxury. I was in the trenches and neck deep in the suck with the dozen or so men and women under my command. 

They weren’t icons on a HUD to me. They were the people to my left and right. I could reach out and touch them, pull them out of the way of incoming lasers, or grab them by their chestplate and throw them face-first into the fire if that’s what the mission required. I didn’t like the latter part of my job description but someone had to do it.   

On top of being boots on the ground, a key part of my job was managing their battle data. The corporal had laid out sectors of fire well and placed the squad’s automatic weapons where I would. Ammo, casualties, and equipment were green across the board. I’d do some spot checks when I had time to walk the lines. Even more important, I was glad to see no one had the shits. I was always surprised how pre-battle nerves could make chow go through a man like shit through a goose. Since hurry up and wait was a reality of military life, a sudden urge to clear the pipes at the wrong moment could really fuck with operational readiness. 

Everyone’s medical data was a little elevated but that was within normal parameters when a fight was about to kick off. Plus, there was still a lot of shit blowing up over our heads and that was enough to put a little lead in any man’s pencil. Overall, the corporal had done well and we were good to go. 

It only took me a few moments to review all of that data, but I spent longer checking the perimeter sensors. Aside from all the indirect fire, I didn’t see anything out there yet. This was definitely the calm before the storm. Things would only get more hectic from here on out, and the worst thing I could do for my squad was have them sitting around. Idle hands would land my marines on the naughty list and the last thing I wanted them to get for Christmas was a big fat lump of you’re-dead coal.  

“Okay, kids, pop quiz,” I grinned at the predictable groans. “The first one to buzz in gets to be exempt from the first ammo run.” Having to jump out of a foxhole and sprint to an ammo-collection point under fire in order to resupply the whole squad was not a desired duty. “What is the SOP for engaging these pointy-eared fucks?”

Halleluiah Burnum buzzed in. It was the cherry on top of the sundae that was her fine ass that she wasn’t just a pretty face. She knew her shit.

“A marine will engage in probing fire with the main battle rifle, target anything suspicious, and continually run multi-spectrum scans on our areas of responsibility. Single enemy combatants can be brought down with massed fire. Upon contact with a larger formation, a marine should call in a fire mission or radio up the chain of command and await orders.” 

“Bingo. Winner winner chicken dinner.” It felt good that my people knew their shit. “Burnum is exempt from ammo duty.” 

There was bickering but a few pats on the back as well. “And what is proper spacing?” I fired back as my HUD ran my range finder over my marines.” 

“Ten meters!” they all called back and started to adjust themselves.

“Excellent. I’d hate to write letters to your significant others this holiday season that say you died because of pure stupidity,” I nodded approvingly. 

Burnum might have gotten a pass, but someone still had to do the dirty work. I went back through the logs and figured out who was the slowest on the uptake. “Ricci, it’s your lucky day,” I sent to the unfortunate private first class who’d just been outdone by four lowly privates. “You’ve got the first ammo run. Don’t die or I’ll be pissed. If you get in trouble, call Burnum for help and she’ll sort the mess out.” There was more laughter from the squad at Ricci’s expense. 

The PFC took it all in stride. “You can sort me out anytime, Burnum.”

“I’ll sort my foot right up your ass, Ricci,” she fired back and I left the enlisted to their banter.

“Speaking of ammo runs,” I needed to figure out where our collection point was so Ricci would know where to go. 

I toggled to my waypoints and . . . nothing. “Someone needs to get their head out of their ass,” my databanks searched for who had that responsibility and . . . “Oh shit.”

“I was wondering when you’d figure it out, Mitchell,” the old platoon sergeant – now platoon leader – piped in. Ammo-collection point assignment was a platoon sergeant duty and that was me. 

“Sorry, Gunny,” I didn’t facepalm in front of my marines but I still felt like an idiot. 

“You need to start thinking about the whole platoon and not just your squad. Your senior team leader should take over. You need to focus on . . .” the retort of a rifle going off not far to my right ended our conversation, and a moment later a guttural shriek carried across the battlefield. 

Every eye on the line snapped to where none other than PVT Burnum had tagged an elf . . . less than thirty meters from our earthworks.

“Single enemy in the open, at two-zero-one degrees, thirty meters,” I called out distance and direction even though everyone’s HUD displayed the data right in their faces.  

“All units, three-round burst. Now!” the skipper ordered. 

“Fire!” everyone with marines under their command gladly carried out that order.

For about a second and a half, there was a colossal uproar as two hundred plus marines opened fire . . . and then the screaming started. 

New reports of contact, distance, direction, and number of enemies sighted started to fill the platoon net. In front of us, elves started to appear in the weak morning light like wraiths . . . and started to die.  

“Fuck my gingerbread house and tickle my gumdrops,” I brought up my own rifle and started to throw rounds downrange. There had to be a couple hundred elves in stealth mode within pissing distance of the platoon.  

“Mitchell . . .!” Gunny’s voice was strained as he took a critical moment to remind me of my duties, while he tried to guide his platoon against the sudden appearance of the company-sized force advancing on our portion of the line.

“On it,” it went against every instinct I had, but I pulled myself away from firing at the enemy. 

I started to set the various rally points the SOP said I needed to have in place before a fight began. Casualty and ammo collection points were forwarded to the platoon’s squad leaders while I managed any deflector adjustments needed for first and second squad. That was all very important, but the best job of all was that if the platoon leader was busy, I was in charge of coordinating fire missions.

“Ho ho ho let's blow some holes in these assholes,” I felt like a kid who’d just been handed his first cherry bomb. 

As the marines of my platoon unleashed a can of whoop ass against the charging elves, I quickly realized that operating at the platoon level was a whole different ball game than leading a squad. It was information overload. There was way more than I was used to dealing with. It took me the first few minutes of the fight to realize I was micromanaging the squad leaders by watching their ACE data stream in. I was also giving orders before the squad leaders had a chance to weigh in, which took my eye off things like relaying resupply needs to the company HQ or coordinating with the tube-lubers.  

To do a squad leader and platoon sergeant’s job at the same time was impossible. Since I hated when I was micromanaged, it was a bit of a slap in the dick. There were a lot of things about being a senior NCO I had yet to learn. 

What it all boiled down to was that I had to trust the other sergeants and staff sergeants to handle their business. I focused on making sure ammo was flowing freely from the armory to the front lines and working the deflector while keeping a small menu open to monitor casualties. Once in a blue moon, I might have even fired my weapon at the enemy. That was probably the biggest difference. I didn’t take the fight to the enemy as much anymore. People did that for me. Bummer. 

Despite squad, platoon, and company-level deflectors in play, enemy rounds still found their way through our defenses. In response, I adjusted our platoon deflectors and kept adjusting them as needed. Battle was a technological dance and I had to feel the rhythm and anticipate where the enemy might strike next. That way, we were ready for them. 

If the elves pushed on the right flank, I tightened it up over there. Then, when they predictably launched an attack on the left where they thought we’d be weak, I maneuvered the energy barriers to cover my marines as best I could while making sure the squad leaders adjusted their sectors of fire to deal with the increase in hostiles.  

At some point, Ricci rushed past me to grab ammo but I barely noticed. I was locked into the net and going with the flow as best I could. Platoon leadership was such an exercise in both mental flexibility and concentration that I had no idea what was going on with the other platoons until the fight was basically over. Hell, the barrel of my rifle was practically cold by that point. Only when an elf appeared within striking distance of our defenses and tried to take out one of the squad-level deflector emitters did I raise my weapon and put a three-round burst into his skull. Despite my battlefield promotion, my shot group was still tighter than Mrs. Claus’s pussy. As Burnum had said, if Santa was out getting sucked off by all the greedy mommas across the cosmos, Mrs. Claus definitely wasn’t getting any.  

Slowly but surely, the small arms fire started to peter out as the elves learned the hard way that they couldn’t sneak up on Confederation marines. Attacking a prepared defensive perimeter was suicide without heavier battle armor, armored vehicle support, or orbital supremacy. They’d tried to sneak in through the front door and we’d slammed it closed on their dicks. That felt good, but I wasn’t one of the privates celebrating the fact they’d lived through their first dose of combat. I knew better. These were elves we were dealing with. This fight was just beginning. If I was the pointy-eared bastard in charge, I’d try to ram something down our chimney while we tried to resupply and recuperate. 

“Fifty percent security,” the skipper ordered. “PLs on me.” 

That meant I was in charge. “Reload. Top off on water. Have some of that five-star protein sludge. Who knows when we’ll get another break.” The marines knew their job but a friendly reminder to eat and hydrate couldn’t hurt. “Ten-minute rotations so everyone gets a turn. If you need to use the latrine too bad. Use the thing suction cupped to your dick. If you need to take your first combat dump . . .” I left the squad leaders to deal with that unpleasant reality of modern combat as I made sure the platoon leader had the most up-to-date data for his briefing with the skipper.  

We burned through about twenty percent of our ammo during that push. The platoon had three marines down with minor injuries. Corpsmen were treating them now and they’d be back on the line in thirty minutes or less. There was some minor equipment damage here and there, the biggest of which was that third squad’s deflector had taken a hit and was on the fritz. It was a small source of secret pride that the deflector hadn’t been my responsibility. All my equipment had come through the battle intact. 

Too bad that didn’t matter in the long run. When activated, third squad’s gear only worked about half the time and that meant Gunny and I had to spend more time and energy covering them with the platoon deflector, or shifting other squad deflectors. That was going to tax our entire defensive perimeter and increase the chance of an overload or shutdown. Despite how much that sucked for us, that was the name of the game. Everything worked perfectly until it broke and war was never fair. 

Before I even knew it twenty minutes had passed and the Gunny was back. “On me,” he ordered.

“What’s the situation?” If there was anything good about being higher up the pecking order, it was that I was likely to get more information than the average grunt. 

“Diplomacy has broken down . . .”

“No shit,” I chuckled and then zipped it. “Sorry, Gunny.” 

“No, you’re right. Why the brass thought we could get the elves to talk is beyond me,” he was preaching to the choir. “The bad news is that to bring all of their forces to bear on the Dawners, they have to get rid of us. Even worse, we’re having trouble punching through their jamming to radio Ernie. I’m sure they have eyes on us from orbit and unless the tin can’s skipper is a total fuck up, they’re preparing for the multitude of contingencies in the op order.”

An operation this size had an op order that would have required the sacrifice of a whole farm of Christmas trees if we still did hard copies. In ones and zeros, it still took up a respectable amount of memory. Needless to say, I hadn’t read all of the contingencies the brass had put in place. I’d have to take the Gunny’s word for it. 

Ernie coming to the rescue would have given me the warm and fuzzies if our ride had the capabilities to actually help. They had some railguns and two missile tubes, but the rest of the ship was nothing but point-defense lasers. It was a troop transport. It wasn’t meant to fight. It was meant to move a few thousand marines from point A to point B and not get blown up in the process. As far as the elfin destroyer in orbit was concerned, Ernie could probably hold it off, but it wouldn’t be able to kill it. The enemy destroyer turning its guns on our FOB had my pucker factor dialed up. The deflectors would hold out for a little, but there was only so much they could take. 

Speak of the pointy-eared devil. More indirect fire streaked in and smashed into our deflectors in a shower of light that made our defensive bubble ripple. It seemed like the ADA guys were taking a mid-morning siesta and letting the deflectors pick up some of the slack.  

“Any good news?” I asked. You should always end with good news. 

“So far, the elfin destroyer hasn’t moved. Once it does, we can start the clock on getting the hell off this ball of mud.”

I was about to echo that sentiment when an alert flashed on my HUD. “Seismic sensors are picking up movement, eight hundred meters at two-seven-zero,” that was the dead center of first platoon’s line.

The elves were back. 

It was common for modern-day combat to take place at five hundred-plus meters. The average grunt’s rifle could reach out and touch someone up to two kilometers away if they had good aim. Eight hundred meters was almost danger close if Ernie was going to offer any orbital assistance, even though I doubted we’d get a helping hand. We wanted that enemy destroyer to stay in place, and firing on elves was the fastest way to get it moving. It was up to us Marines to get the job done. 

Gunfire started up again and this time, we saw them coming. The hunter teams had been there to probe our defenses and they’d paid a heavy butcher’s bill to get that intel back to the main grunts. My HUD automatically magnified so I got a good look at the advancing elves. Their armor was a little more glamorous than the Confederation version but it was real armor. No more stealth mode bullshit. I could always pick out the officers because they had unnecessary flourishes and filigree detailed into their suits. That was fine by me. It made them clearer targets. Aside from being slightly smaller and having sharper angles than my own battle armor, there wasn’t much difference on the outside. On the inside, it was a different story. 

My battle rattle was designed to offer a dual defense against lasers and kinetics. A hush-hush, metallo-ceramic composite with laminate-ablative plating underneath allowed us to shrug off both. The average elfin grunt didn’t have the same luxury. Their species preferred kinetic weapons, as shown by the sword I’d stolen from the officer who tried to disable our deflectors. Naturally, their armor was better suited to defend against the same type of weaponry. 

“Change out barrels for energy weapons,” I sent the order. With the stealth suits, it didn’t matter but now, we needed to adapt and overcome. “Start probing fire at six hundred meters.” 

They were moving forward with their own deflectors covering their advance, so anything beyond six hundred meters wouldn’t do anything against the energy barriers. I habitually checked my own power cell and swapped it out for a fresh one. Soon, it would be a battle of attrition to see whose deflectors failed first. That responsibility fell to the squad leaders to coordinate their fire and interpret the data we got back from those hits. Once we knew a section was weakening, we could mass fire and take it down. Of course, the elves would be trying to do the same with the squads under my command.  

I went back to the grind of managing my little chunk of the battlefield, just with the added fun of deflector overloads to think about. I might have repositioned a little to get away from third squad’s faulty equipment. Even if it didn’t overload and explode, when the equipment took too many hits and shut down to cool off, I didn’t want to be in that opening. It took about two minutes for a squad deflector to come back online. In battle, seconds were a lifetime. Minutes were an eternity.

Soon the space between the two formations was full of bullets and energy beams as both sides tried to break through. The elves continued to advance and took casualties as their deflectors shut down and gaps opened in their defenses that we ruthlessly took advantage of, but we didn’t come out of the exchange unscathed. Two more WIAs happened in the next five minutes as enemy fire found its way through the holes in our defenses before we could shift or plug them. Then, we took our first KIAs when third squad’s deflector overloaded. It went into emergency shutdown and the marines protected by it dove for cover. Not quick enough. Two marines got stitched across their heads and shoulders by multiple rounds from the advancing enemy. Their armor held against some but not all of the hits. Their armor’s auto-docs did their best, but it was hard to come back from a big hole in your dome. They just died a little slower.  

“Plug that gap,” the Gunny was all over it and leading by example. I saw him pour fire from his rifle into the rush of elves that were repositioning to assault the weak point, as he singlehandedly helped drive them back until we could shift the platoon deflector to cover third squad. Gunny was a badass. 

I would have given the man a round of applause and a medal but a sudden roar and rumble caught my attention. All I caught was a large muzzle popping up from a slight depression in the landscape before a crack echoed through the battlefield. At first, I thought the moon had been torn in half, but the brilliant flash of light against our deflectors disabused me of that notion. That, and half the deflectors on my HUD started going haywire.  

“Mortars, Raider One-five. Fire mission on TRPs five, six, and seven. Six, I say again, six vehicles in defilade. Fire for effect. Over.” I hurriedly let the mortars know we had a world of hurt coming our way. 

“When the hell did they get armored vehicles?” I asked the Gunny as the mortars pinged back an affirmative on the fire mission, but I never got an answer. 

After a moment to think about it, the answer was obvious . . . those resupply shuttles from last night. I cursed as I made a mental note to write a strongly worded letter to whoever calibrated our sensors. We should have been able to tell that the elves were landing mechanized infantry. The only comfort I drew from the situation was that we weren’t facing fully armored main battle tanks. These were LAVs and not even elfin ones at that. 

My battle computer was taking in all the information and feeding me probabilities, and it was very probable we were facing some Goblin light armor. 

“Seriously? More pointy-eared motherfuckers,” I grumbled, not realizing my comms were still on with my old squad. 

“I know, right, sarge,” Burnum replied back. It was nice to know she was still kicking after the first assault.

I vaguely remembered from my Corps Intro to ET class that elves and goblins probably shared a common ancestor but diverged at some point in the last million years or so. Thank the space gods they’d gone their separate ways and the goblins didn’t follow the elfin emperor and his fucked-up crusade to conquer the cosmos for all pointy-eared kind.  

Our scientists thought goblins had evolved on land instead of amphibiously like elfin ancestors, but anyone who’d met one of the rough-skinned, generally poor-mannered humanoid creatures could have told you that. They just happened to look similar, which lent more credence to the spermia thing a lot of the white lab coats spouted on and on about. 

Goblins were shorter on average than a human but unlike the physically weaker elves, goblins were a strong, stocky bunch. Their homeworld had a slightly higher gravity so like the Dragons and Amazons, they’d developed denser bones and thicker muscles, just not the height. I’d made the mistake of getting into an arm-wrestling match with a goblin on a different deployment. Fucker broke my wrist, but it was better than the dumbass private who got into a slap bet with one of them. I hadn’t signed up with the Corps to scavenge for a man’s teeth on a dive bar’s floor at closing time. That was probably the biggest difference between goblins and elves, the goblins were actually pretty fun to hang around with off-duty. Their women, well . . . anything looked good through thick enough beer goggles. Honestly, it was hard to tell the males from the females until they took their clothes off. Then, they had all the right parts and then some. Goblin women didn’t earn the same promiscuous reputation as other ETs, like the Amazons, because most marines had trouble fucking what amounted to a green midget who could bench press them. Not me. I didn’t discriminate.

While the goblins lacked the ingenuity that allowed the elves to have the best stealth tech in the galactic neighborhood, that didn’t mean their military-industrial base was anything to sneeze at. In fact, goblins were well known for their practice of supplying arms and ordnance to anyone or anything that wanted it . . . and had the credits to spare. Their laissez-faire, capitalist view on weapons exports had made them a lot of enemies in our part of the galaxy, but also a lot of friends. I knew for a fact that naval intel would buy up goblin guns and sell them to rebels to mess with other polities they believed were encroaching on the Confederation’s sovereignty. Personally, doing a peacekeeping op and suddenly getting tagged by a goblin-made assault rifle when the insurgents should have been using slingshots and rocks was a major pain in my ass. 

  Whatever I might think of the goblin race, that didn’t make the barrel of the 120mm cannon I was staring down, or its ability to pierce our deflectors, any less deadly. The question was why?

“I think we fucked up their plans,” I relayed to Burnum. “I think that elf I killed by the deflectors was supposed to keep them down. The hunter-killer teams were supposed to break through our lines, and while we tried to round them up, the mechanized infantry would roll in and fuck us up with their goblin tech. Since we are jammed, the only thing Ernie would see was the goblin LAVs, and those could be employed by either side. The elves are actually looking for some deniability. The fuckers!” 

“Yeah, they’re definitely on my naughty list, sarge,” I heard her wince as another round came screaming in and nearly took out a squad-level deflector.    

That was enough chatting. It was time to get back to work. I didn’t have any more time to ruminate on possible elfin contingency plans before every mortar in our arsenal whumped in quick succession. Our deflectors dropped for just a moment to let them through and I saw the elves try and take advantage. A red beam blazed for the opening, but the ADA was on it. The explosion was still close enough that it smacked me into the wall of our earthworks, but the enemy artillery didn’t make it past our perimeter. 

I hoped the elves weren’t as successful in their defense. Our high-explosive, anti-armor rounds dropped down toward the enemy with multiple rounds targeting each vehicle. I saw them juking left and right like a hummingbird looking for a snack as the LAV’s built-in ADA went to work. Several flashes of destroyed mortar shells illuminated my HUD as more than half got shot out of the sky. The other half detonated above the vehicles and did their best to kill them. The vehicle’s deflectors defended them, and since it all happened out of sight, I had no idea how successful our tube-lubers had been. 

When the LAVs didn’t immediately light us up again, I took that as a good sign. I had my answer when only four of the six vehicles accelerated out from behind their cover and aimed themselves right at us. My armor measured their speed, distance, and threw up a timer in the corner of my HUD. I made sure the rest of the platoon had that information. 

“Anti-armor!” I radioed to the squads. That was all they needed to know as they loaded up what they had on hand and dispatched runners to grab some extra boom boom from the armory. They needed to haul ass or we were going to get overrun.

“Grandma got run over by a reindeer,” I mumbled under my breath as I added my own rifle to the fight. 

The LAVs blazed ahead of a second wave of advancing infantry to draw our fire. One unlucky elf drew my fire right into his face as I saw blue puffs of mist explode from the back of his armor. He toppled to the ground and was crushed under a stampede of armored boots as the elves behind him continued the charge. 

“Drop one hundred and keep it coming,” I let the mortars know we were in deep shit if the elves crossed the distance to our trenches. Despite the losses we’d inflicted, there were a lot more of them than there were of us. 

The only silver lining, if you could call it that, was that the elves had advanced with all of their armor aimed at first platoon. Each platoon wasn’t facing half a dozen LAVs, so second and third platoons were able to shift fire with their flank squads to help out my beleaguered marines. If the elves had spread them out and we had to split our indirect fires, we’d be worse off.

Mortars continued to whump from behind me and managed to take out another vehicle before the squad runners returned with their handheld anti-armor launchers. They took another few seconds to load and aim before streaks of super-heated death lanced out from between our deflectors to strike at the three remaining vehicles. First platoon killed two with less than one hundred meters to spare. It was unlucky number three that fucked us. 

Don’t get me wrong, we killed it, but not quick enough. Forward momentum propelled it to where its deflector smashed into third squad’s faulty equipment. I knew without a doubt that the Dark God Murphy had influenced that. How else would the only LAV that survived the charge hit us in the exact spot where we were weakest? 

Third squad’s deflector went into emergency shutdown but we’d fucked up the LAV’s power regulator during its charge and its equipment overloaded. The two powerful energy fields smashing into each other while one went critical was not a healthy combination. I wasn’t an engineer but I knew what was going to happen. All I got was a shrill warning beep as I started to curl up to protect my candy cane and milk duds before the world went white and something hard and hot smacked into me. Luckily, I stayed conscious. Unluckily, it took fifteen seconds for my armor’s systems to reboot. That was fifteen seconds most of first platoon was combat ineffective and the elves could advance with little opposition. 

“Get on your feet, marines!” I yelled over the platoon net as I struggled to follow my own orders. 

My diagnostic came back with a few yellow alerts but for the most part, I was good to go. Some of the platoon wasn’t. Third squad had four KIA and just as many wounded. With two-thirds of the squad down, I sent orders to first and second squads to push their lines down to connect with what was left of third. That spread us thin, and the elfin infantry was less than a hundred meters away. They were closing fast with their power-assisted armor. Too fast for us to react.

I made a snap judgment. “Fix bayonets!” I ordered. 

When I first heard that order back in boot camp, I had to do some research. What I found was some old-timey war movies that made me laugh. Who in their right mind would attach a knife to some prehistoric gun that had less range and accuracy than the spitballs I’d fired in Ms. Low Cut Top’s fifth-period English class?

As my marines followed my order, they didn’t literally attach their K-bars to their rifles. It was the order to prepare for close combat. It was a battle drill that had about a third of the marines stepping back to provide fire with their rifles, while two-thirds of the platoon maglocked their rifles to their back, pulled out their knife or pistol, and activated the shield attached to their forearms. Compared to the squad, platoon, and company-level deflectors in play, a marine’s individual shield was nothing more than a thin golden barrier that they could manipulate. They could make a circular shield as big as their head, or they could have it cover them from chin to ankles. Whatever they decided, that was up to them. What was important was that they did it quick and prepared to repel the elves.

“Give’em hell, marines!” I roared as the first elf hit the trench line.

Deflectors pressed up against one another with a sizzle as they fought to cancel each other out, but I had a trick up my sleeve. “Grenades on three,” I sent to the squads as I toggled to deflector control. “One, two, three!” with a mental flick of the switch, I dropped all our deflectors. 

The elves that had been pushing to break through suddenly found no resistance and fell forward, while grenades rose up to meet their buddies behind them and first platoon’s marines surged forward.   

“Frag out,” ran down the line as booms started to shake my bones. The weird alien soil flew into the air to create a natural smoke screen as we cut off the first wave of elves from the second. My armor couldn’t filter out all the elfin screams as the elves that fell into our earthworks got to their feet and attacked. Like I said, the fuckers were quick.

Human bellows met elfin hisses as the two lines of troops crashed into one another. It was here, more than anywhere else, that the elves with their smaller stature and bladed weapons were at their most dangerous. 

I didn’t even think as I maglocked my rifle to my back. I pulled out the elfin sword I’d taken, grabbed my pistol in my free hand, and started to move toward the nearest gap in the line. That was when the first casualty beeped on my HUD, and then another, and another. Elfin blades were cutting down my marines. I even saw one poor bastard raise his shield to intercept a sword, only to have the blade cut through the shield and take the marine’s hand off at the wrist. 

“Shields to max power!” I ordered with my platoon-level override code. 

Every active shield in first platoon suddenly went to full power so that didn’t happen again. Over the next few seconds, casualties still started to populate on my HUD but they’d slowed down. I advanced on the elf that had taken the marine’s hand with my pistol blazing. The ET jerked as my rounds punched into it until it finally fell backward and a burst of fire from another marine’s rifle put it down for good.   

“One down, a few hundred to go,” I grimaced, put another burst of power into my armor, and surged forward. 

I shoulder-checked an elf struggling to overpower a shield-wielding marine and allowed that marine to get their K-bar into the alien’s neck gator. I pushed past them and only had a heartbeat to survey the chaos . . . and carnage. Marines and elves were dead or dying all around me and all I could do was turn my sights on the nearest enemy.   

The first elf I targeted was pulling his blade out of Ricci’s chest. My old squad’s ammo bitch was barely hanging on, and the best I could do was get the elf off his ass so the corpsmen could get to him. I came at him with my own sword. The elf saw me coming and got his blade up to block. Too bad he was a weak bag of shit. My sword smashed down onto his and forced his blade back into his own armor. With a roar, I forced him back and pinned him to the side of the trench. This up close and personal, I could see he had officer filigree across his armored front.  

I gave zero shits about his rank as I brought up my pistol to fire into his armor’s weak point around his visor. I saw his yell of defiance as his pointy teeth snapped at me, right before an explosion of blue blood soaked his HUD when one of my rounds finally got through. He went limp and sagged down the side of the trench, but that didn’t stop me from chopping down on his neck like I was cutting wood. Better safe than sorry. 

Unfortunately, the action cost me. My leg buckled under me as some elf fired their version of a shotgun into my knee. I grasped at the trench for support as I fell, and might have bought the farm right then and there if Burnum hadn’t come out of nowhere and tackled the elf into the wall beside me. She pushed off him, got her weapon up, and poured lead into him while I stabbed at the elf’s stomach with the blade. Together we took it down. 

“You okay, sarge?” she turned on me. Her biometrics showed her heart rate was through the roof, and more than one pharmaceutical cocktail had been dumped into her system. 

“Move!” I grabbed the front of her armor and yanked her forward. 

She collapsed on top of me as the blade missed her head by inches and dug itself deep into the side of the trench. I kicked with my boot into the back of the blade – thank the space gods it wasn’t double-edged – and pinned it to the earth. The crouched-over elf gave his blade a futile yank and had enough time to look up at me in surprise before I stabbed around Burnum and drove my own blade up through his lightly-armored chin, through his mouth, into his brain stem, and out the top of his helmet. He twitched as his brain died and his body failed to comprehend it. I roared as I shrugged Burnum off me, rose up, drove him to the ground, pulled my blade out, and turned in a circle to look for new targets.

“Never been better, private,” I finally answered the shocked girl’s question.   

It looked like the fight was winding down and my marines were going to come out ahead. The skipper must have been busy calling in fire missions because mortars were raining down danger close on the follow-up waves of elves. From the way they’d faltered, they weren’t going to press deeper into the carnage after what happened to the first two waves. 

Victory came at a cost. We had a dozen KIA and more WIA. Not a single member of third squad was fit to fight but that didn’t mean the rest of the squads had gotten off easy. Our combat effectiveness was down to forty percent, which by Corps regs made us combat ineffective. Of course, regs didn’t mean jack shit when you needed every marine on the line to survive.

“Squad leaders,” I coughed and had to take a sip from my bladder to get my voice back. I didn’t even realize I’d been bellowing in rage inside my helmet as I killed elves. “Sitrep.” 

I’d report to the platoon leader and figure out what to do . . . 

“Fuck me,” a name stood out to me on the list of KIAs. It was the Gunny. Like me, he just couldn’t stay out of the fight. But unlike me, he didn’t have an elfin sword to parry and block with. He’d also been a little too close to third squad’s position when their deflector went up.  

You could be the best marine in the Corps but sometimes you needed plain, dumb luck to survive.

“Skipper,” I toggled to the company net. 

“I know,” my old LT sounded exhausted. “You’re Raider One-Six now, Mitchell.”

“Double fuck,” I never wanted to be an officer, even if I’d done their jobs often enough. “I haven’t done anything like this.” 

Sure, I’d seen some police actions. More than one peacekeeping op here and there, plus those joint-force exercises with other, friendly human polity’s armed forces. This wasn’t that. We weren’t wargaming shit. We were going toe-to-toe with an alien interstellar power’s infantry. We hadn’t done anything like this in a while. I didn’t count the times we’d gone up against pixies because the face-eaters pretty much always charged and drowned us in numbers. There were actual tactics at play here. 

“Hot damn, I might just make the history books,” I thought as I realized I needed to start thinking about the present, not the future. I might be down to two combat-effective squads, but I was still a PL with all the responsibilities that entailed.  

“QRF is headed your way to reinforce,” the skipper continued. “Hang in there.” 

“Roger that.” I was glad for the help.

The quick reaction force was basically an extra squad from headquarters that could deploy to where our lines were the weakest. Although the elves had hit the entire perimeter, first platoon had taken the brunt of it with those vehicles. The dozen marines of the QRF slipped into the trenches and started to shore up our defenses. I spent some time organizing and positioning everyone and the remaining heavy weapons. After that, I reviewed the status of our equipment.

The deflectors were obvious targets and on top of third’s being gone, it looked like fourth squad had lost theirs to a sword through its mechanical guts. The QRF brought their own but that still left a lot of holes in my perimeter. We still had the platoon deflectors, and the big boys back by the TOC were keeping us safe from artillery and orbital bombardment. Still, if the enemy got in close again, I wasn’t confident in our ability to hold. 

“We need to move the LAV,” that was wishful thinking. If I were the elves, I’d have a sniper just waiting for us to poke our heads out a try to move the multi-ton piece of armor. 

I just had to do the best I could with what I had. As a rule, marines always had to make do with less. I ended up consolidating everyone, even the QRF, into two, overstrength squads for better command and control. At the end of the day, I was still a squad leader commanding a platoon. I did my best to get them what they needed to continue to fight. Bullets, beans, and batteries as the old-timers would say. Once that was done, all we could do was wait for another attack, because there would be another. 

The elves had fallen back to the depression where we’d destroyed their first two vehicles. They were still firing probing shots at our lines but nothing serious. They’d redeployed their own heavier deflectors so our mortars were ineffective. The whumps that brought me such comfort had been silent for a while now. Just like us, the ETs were consolidating and planning their next move.

Last but not least, we dealt with the dead. For our own, we picked them up and carried them back toward the medical tent. There, sterile black bags were waiting to entomb the bodies. Aside from vacuum sealing to keep them from decomposing, body bags hadn’t changed much in the last five centuries. Dead elves went over the top of the trench to create another barrier between us and incoming fire. If they charged again, maybe the pointy-eared bastards would trip over their friend’s corpses and make it that much easier for us to send them back to their emperor-god in pieces. 

As I looked out on the battlefield, we’d probably killed ten of them for every marine who’d fallen, but when they had at least a battalion encircling us, they could take those losses. Every dead marine was a hole I couldn’t fill. Elfin infantry might not impress me now that I’d seen them in action, but they could grind my marines down to nothing. Then, it didn’t matter if they knew their asses from their elbows.  

“Things were so easy twelve hours ago,” I really wanted to go back to commanding my rag-tag little band of miscreants, chewing out Private Pyle, and arguing about the Santa-themed fellatio that Burnum had a surprise interest in. 

“Mitchell,” the skipper’s arrival nearly had me drawing my elfin sword. I was still amped up. 

“Sir,” I settled down and let him look over my handiwork. He didn’t say anything, he just nodded.

Death was an old acquaintance of mine. The LT-turned-skipper had far less time in the Corps and even less experience in battle. Still, he was doing a great job judging by the number of dead elves. He’d have to deal with the mental and emotional aftermath like the rest of us. My medicine of choice was booze and lose women but to each their own. 

“We’re going to have a leadership huddle in ten. We just broke through the jamming to Ernie and . . . 

He abruptly cut off and looked up. I followed his gaze and saw a new star being born in the sky off to our east. From the ground, we could actually see the shockwave of the explosion ripping through the atmosphere and fucking with the limited cloud cover the moon could generate. It wasn’t actually a star, but it was a few hundred meters and tens of thousands of tons of warship going up in flames. 

“Please let that be the elves. Please let that be the elves,” I wished.

No dice.  

“Marathon! Marathon! Marathon!” the skipper sent out over the company net and then movement orders started to stream out to the platoon leaders as he sprinted away toward the TOC. So much for that leadership huddle.

Marathon was the code word set up at the very beginning of the mission when the brass were planning everything out back in their cushy offices on Oberon. Generally, marines liked to pray for the best but be prepared for the worst. As far as the senior officers were concerned, the worst was negotiations breaking down, the elves and Dawners going at it, and us getting stuck in the middle. So far, that had all come to pass but Marathon was one situation in particular. 

Marathon would only be called if the elves had successfully neutralized the Dawners’ destroyer in orbit. As fellow humans, we could marginally count on the Empire of the Coming Dawn to stay civil with us. If the elves attacked, we could count them as allies and vice versa. If their destroyer was gone, we’d lost the high ground. Ernie was outgunned up there and didn’t count much when you crunched the numbers in the calculus of war. What happened in the next half hour wasn’t set in stone, but it didn’t take a tactical genius to figure it out. 

The moon wasn’t big, so orbiting it wouldn’t take long. The first thing the elves would do was take out the Dawners’ camp. The other empire had their own marines, deflectors, etc. That didn’t matter. Enough pounding from the big naval guns would wear them down. Plus, if the elves had more troops, they could conduct a combat drop and land marines right on the Dawners’ heads. The Dawners would fight but without a ship to assist, the best they could do was run and hide in the mines they were digging. That was a shit way to go. 

Since we’d proven a tough nut to crack, the elves would simply wait until they finished with their competition before they came back to finish the job with extra firepower. We still had Ernie, but the plan wasn’t for us to stick around. We didn’t need her to come for us. We needed to get to her. 

The brass gave it a better than fifty-percent chance that if we made a run for it, the elves would let us leave. It wasn’t like they could cover up what they were doing here after their sneak attack failed. That was a bunch of credits wasted on goblin tech for nothing. Both empires had automated, FTL-capable communications buoys sitting near their respective ramps in the system. Word would be sent through the intergalactic highways system to the Dawners’ HQ about the shitshow that had just transpired. It wasn’t like the elves could hide taking out that destroyer. 

We wanted to be long gone by the time they retaliated. With the Dawners’ destroyer reduced to a billion flaming pieces in the upper atmosphere, Ernie should be launching birds to scoop up Bravo Company to get us the hell off this rock. That was Marathon. The troop transport might need to play a little cat and mouse with the elfin destroyer to buy some time for us to make it back to the ship, but as long as we survived pickup and got back aboard, our chances of survival were actually pretty good. 

“Be ready to evac,” I sent out on the platoon net. “We’ll exfil by squads and condense the perimeter with the rest of the company. We aren’t taking anything with us, so sorry if you left your favorite dildo back in the barracks,” I tried to sound calm and in control while another part of me waited for the elves to charge us again. “Once we hit the final protective line, we book it for the birds. Do what you’re trained to do, and we’ll make it out of here alive.” 

It would take thirty minutes for the birds to get to us and I wasn’t going to lie, I jumped at a few shadows and popped off a few shots when I thought my sensors caught something. If I was the elves, I wouldn’t risk more infantry casualties when they knew we were bugging out. I’d send in hunter teams and try to take down our birds. 

Finally, the howl of engines overhead announced the arrival of our transports. Thank-fucking-god. I’d never been happier to see the Flyboys. Usually, if they showed up at the bar, they tried to steal all the girls. Today, I’d be willing to buy them a pitcher.

“First squad, move!” I really wanted to go with my people but as the PL, I needed to continue coordinating our withdrawal. That meant I brought up the rear. 

My squad hauled ass to the next defensive perimeter and covered second squad’s rush, but I didn’t just pick up and run. I made sure my marines left some nasty surprises for anyone who tried to occupy the trenches we’d bled and died in. I didn’t even know if trip-lasers worked against Elfin stealth tech. This would be a good way to find out, but I wasn’t going to compromise our tactical position to play out a hunch. Why would I do that when good old-fashioned steel cable never went out of style. 

We moved in time with the rest of the company as we pulled back. It was a battle drill we’d rehearsed back at our home base and out in the field. It showed. At all times, our shrinking perimeter was covered by half the guns in the company while the company deflectors shrank with our perimeter. The real test would be when we had to drop them to get to the birds 

“I’m setting the self-destruct for five minutes,” the skipper radioed the platoon leaders as the deflector closest to the LZ dropped and the first marines started to stream aboard the waiting birds. “ADA will be on auto-target and deflectors will drop off completely with one minute left. Maybe we’ll lure in a few curious elves to blow to hell.” I liked how the LT thought.

There were four armored shuttles in total and they should have been armed to the teeth, their wing pylons bristling with enough bang bang to give our FOB’s deflectors a run for their money. Instead, they were bare. Whoever the skipper was up top had been caught getting blown by his receptionist because we were shit out of luck if we got in a fight once we were wheels up. The only weapon I could see was the shuttle’s 30mm auto-cannon tracking back and forth. Too bad they were pointed in the wrong direction. At this point, all we could do was shoot out the back cargo ramp and hope we hit something.  

A shuttle was always the most vulnerable when they were on the ground. All four were currently parked with asses open to receive us. I wouldn’t have done it that way either. I’d have at least one bird on overwatch, but without missiles, I wasn’t sure how much protection one auto-cannon could give the other three. We were sacrificing security for speed. Oftentimes, you couldn’t have both.

“Let’s go! Let’s go!” I sat at the end of the ramp and guided my people up it as the last of our security perimeter disintegrated. 

The warm air coming off the engines passed over me but I hardly noticed. I was already soaked in sweat despite the armor’s environmental regulators. Combat would do that. I scanned the FOB for any stragglers and for a second, I thought I saw the hazy outline of an elf in stealth mode at the edge of our little LZ getting back blasted by the engines. I snapped my rifle up but they were already gone. Hell, they might have never been there. The heat pouring off the engines could probably cause mirages and shit. 

“Dust off!” the pilot of my platoon’s bird informed as the engines whined and it started to defy gravity. I hopped onto the ramp as it started to rise up but kept my rifle sighted on the abandoned FOB. I had a bad feeling. 

One by one, the shuttles took off and burned for the stars. Mine was the last in line, so I was technically the last set of Confederation boots on the ground. Imagine that. If I’d been asked this morning, I would have been the first person off that shit ball if I had the option. Our retreat only reiterated my opinion that we never should have been there in the first place. We’d lost good marines for nothing. 

My ass had barely hit the seat when the pilot’s voice squealed over the comms. “Incoming! Evasive maneuvers!”

I wasn’t completely buckled in, so I wrapped my arms around the loose straps and held on for dear life. Our bird went from climbing to going completely vertical and banking hard left. The move nearly tossed me out of my seat and then threw me into the hull, but I never let go. I toggled into the external feed just in time to see our wing almost clip the top of the TOC as we got the hell out of the way. It also let me see the inbound SAMs. 

Like the skipper said, the ADA was on auto-target but there was a reason humans operated weaponry with computer assistance and not the other way around. Beams of blue energy lashed out at the incoming ordnance, but the elves within a kilometer of the FOB must have been throwing up EW to confuse the sensors. The friendly beams still destroyed most of the missiles, but a couple got through. 

“Chaff, chaff!” the pilot yelled. “Max power on EW.” 

I didn’t know what electronic warfare the birds had on them but it seemed superfluous as canisters of chaff were jettisoned around the bird and exploded. The cloud of what was basically superheated shrapnel used to confuse sensors was way too close for comfort and definitely fucked with our ride’s paint job. Still, it worked . . . kind of. One missile lost its target lock and peeled off to slam into the ground several hundred meters to our left. For a second, the final missile seemed to wobble, but then, like a bloodhound with a scent, it adjusted and shot toward the barely dispersed shuttles. We almost got away clean. We were so close, but close only worked with horseshoes and hand grenades.

The first two shuttles had gained enough elevation to take effective evasive maneuvers. My shuttle was still pretty low and our pilot opted for nape-of-the-earth flying as we basically put some of the FOB’s buildings between us and the incoming fire. It was the third shuttle that was shit out of luck. To the pilot’s credit, he did his best but he didn’t have the lift and power he needed. Plus, I had a sinking suspicion the stealth-mode elf I’d seen hadn’t been a mirage. It would be all too easy for a hunter team to be bouncing a beam off the third shuttle’s hull from inside the chaff’s explosive radius. 

In the end, I’d never know the truth. The elfin missile hit the third bird dead center. It tore into it as it continued to try and gain altitude. For a second, I thought it was going to hold together, but then the back half detached and fell a hundred feet to explode on impact. The top half, which was nothing but the cockpit plummeted to the ground as well. It didn’t take a genius to tell there were no survivors.   

Our shuttle took more evasive maneuvers and jerked us grunts violently in our five-point harnesses. Between each juke, I struggled to get my harness buckled, and the marine next to me reached over to help. Of course, it was Burnum. The girl had saved my ass twice now. Once we got the harness secured, she moved to grip my forearm. The cute brunette was probably pissing herself after the eventful morning, but that’s what the armor’s waste management disposal unit was for. 

“I think we’re in the clear. We . . .” my mouth snapped shut as the FOB went up in a mushroom cloud of pre-placed explosives. 

The violent punch that hit the bird a few seconds later nearly made me bite my tongue off. That was so not what I needed right now. With my helmet on, I couldn’t even spit out the blood. I’d have to swallow it. I just hoped we got a few elves in exchange for the millions of credits of Confederation equipment.

“I think we’re clear,” I repeated with a chuckle as I looked down at the gauntlet still gripping me. “How are you doing, private?”

“Honestly, sarge. I could use some hot cocoa. What do you say? Do you want to fill me up with your hot cocoa?”

I had my computer replay that statement to make sure I’d heard her right. 

“Private,” the new PL in me warred with the man who thought she was a smoke show. In the end, it was forty days on a barren, piece of shit rock without enough privacy to rub one out in peace that won out. “I think I can figure out something to help that sweet tooth of yours,” I flirted right back at her.     

“Yum,” I imagined her running her tongue over her upper lip as our flight path finally stabilized. 

“You can let go now,” I motioned down to where she was still gripping me.

“I think I’ll hold on a minute longer, sarge.” At the very least, it kept our private person-to-person comms net up. 

“Be my guest.” Who was I to turn down the wishes of a lady who wanted some of my whipped cream topping. 

I pushed the imagery of what my future held to the back of my mind as a rumble went through the bird as it reconfigured for space ops. I plugged into the external sensors and got my first look at the space around the moon. The Dawners’ destroyer was causing quite the light show as it plunged down into the atmosphere. The bigger bits of the hull that survived the trip would make some decent craters that the enterprising elves could turn into quarries. Speak of the devil, I spotted streaks of railgun rounds coming from the elfin warship as it put the hurt down on what I assumed was the Dawners’ camp. It actually looked pretty cool as thousand-pound projectiles left super-heated streaks as they cut through the atmosphere and pancaked against the camp’s deflectors. 

“I’ll stick to Ernie, thanks,” I never wanted to see that moon again. 

I looked away from the ongoing battle for control of the moon’s surface and saw home sweet home rapidly growing in front of us. The Ernest A. Janson was rectangular with engines on the back, a large hangar deck in the center, and the rest of the space dedicated to moving thousands of marines around the cosmos. It wasn’t pretty, but it was a good ship and it was our ride home. I didn’t feel my asshole unclench until we were skids down on the flight deck, the blast doors closed behind us, and atmosphere was pumped back into the space. That was also when Burnum finally removed her hand from my arm. 

We quickly disembarked amid the maintenance personnel who were hurrying about and securing the shuttles. About two dozen more sat in cradles above the deck and each was capable of carrying a full platoon to the surface of a world. In a single flight, Ernie could put an entire battalion of marines on the ground. As I scanned them, they were all visibly unarmed. That was a fuck-up I was going to put in my report. Even as an acting PL, I doubted anyone would read it but it was worth a shot. I’d bet my paycheck that everything from this op was going to get swept under the rug. It never looked good when marines died way outside Confederation space for no fucking reason, and ship skippers were masters at covering their ass. 

“Not everything can be hidden away,” I tried not to look at the deck crew of the missing bird as they huddled together and cried over the lost flight crew. I’d lost enough of my own people today. 

“Platoon leaders,” the skipper came over the net. “Accountability check and then everyone to their combat stations. We aren’t out of the woods yet.” 

“Yes, sir,” we all radioed back and I had to figure out where the first platoon leader’s combat station was located. Normally, I helped out with damage control but that was grunt work. I was temporarily in an officer’s billet. 

“Huh. Bridge security detachment.” That wasn’t a half-bad gig. “At least I’ll know what’s going on.” 

Despite having an electronic uplink to the whole platoon some traditions were too stubborn to die. Each platoon formed up and did a roll call. It felt weird to stand at the back of the formation instead of the front right as we went through person by person and noted everyone who wasn’t there. It was tough, especially when the other platoons had a lot more present and accounted for. In total, first platoon had lost thirteen marines with many more wounded in action. I’d lost four from my first squad and another two were WIA on their way to sick bay. 

That was half of my people! I involuntarily curled my hands into fists where no one could see them. I knew what those men and women liked, what they hated, and how to motivate them. I’d spent months of my life training with them, honing their edge so that when shit hit the fan, they’d be ready and live. A monumental amount of shit had hit the proverbial fan and it hadn’t been enough. We’d still lost so many. A sense of failure started to creep up on me, but I shoved that fucker back down. There wasn’t any time for that crap. I put those feelings back in a bottle and screwed the lid on tight. I’d deal with it later, preferably with another bottle of something much more potent.   

With accountability accomplished, I headed for the bridge. The place was a madhouse and that didn’t account for the two squads of marines that had to find chairs at the back of the circular space and wait for something interesting to happen. Aside from the pair of sergeants posted outside the armored hatch, there wasn’t much for me to do unless we got boarded. 

Ernie wasn’t sticking around to see how the orbital bombardment ended. Even as I heard Dawners pleading with the troop transport over the net, we were already running for the nearest on-ramp, but that wasn’t what all the commotion was about. 

“We’ve got nine, I repeat nine bogies emerging from the elfin ramp, ma’am. CIC will have their estimates in shortly and we’ll have confirmation in seventy-two minutes,” someone important with lots of stripes on their shoulder was yelling to someone more important with more stripes on their shoulder.

Most civilian ships only had a fifty-thousand-mile bubble their sensors actively monitored, but mil-spec equipment pushed that to millions of miles. With the help of relays like the ones the Dawners had seeded the system with, we could receive data from hundreds of millions of miles away. For well-developed, tier-one systems, integrated sensors allowed humanity to see for tens of billions of miles with ease. You just needed the right access codes and make the right requests. 

Despite the increased range, sensors were still limited to light-speed transmission, and that was a little over one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. The Elfin ramp was several planets away and something like four hundred million miles. That meant over half an hour for the light of their arrival to reach us. Then, you had to add in all the time it took the sensors to take a peek at the ships’ transponders if they were even flashing them in the first place. If they weren’t, we could check their drive signatures and get a tonnage estimate but that would take more time. Lastly, we had to compare all of that to Confederation databanks in the combat information center to figure out what we were facing. When all of that was said and done, we were looking at over an hour to figure out who’d just arrived in the neighborhood. 

“Space stuff is weird,” I shook my head. The whole battle for the FOB had taken less than that from start to finish. I’d stick with bullets flying rather than this hurry up and wait shit any day of the week.  

“Emergence!” someone new yelled. “I have ten. No, make that twelve bogies emerging from the Dawners’ ramp.” That ramp was a lot closer but still the next best thing to ten million miles away. It was one of the reasons the Dawners thought they had a better claim to the moon. 

“Thank our lucky stars,” judging by the big chair she sat in, the last person to talk was the ship’s skipper. I’d never merited a meeting with the person who was one step below God on a warship and that was a good thing. 

“For both of those fleets to jump in so close together means they must have been waiting for something to go tits up,” she frowned at the tactical display that hovered in front of her command chair. “Full speed for the Dawners’ ramp. That’s our fastest way home and I’d rather put a dozen friendly ships between us and the elves. It will be a long time before missiles start flying but I don’t want us pissing into the wind.” 

As far as full speed was concerned, Ernie wasn’t a sprinter. We had hours to kill before we’d rendezvous with the incoming fleet and then we still needed to flip and burn before we could configure for FTL and get the fuck out of there. All that meant a lot of scratching my balls and wishing I could go grab chow. 

No luck on that while the ship was at combat stations. I got a feeling a skipper with some combat experience would have relaxed our strategic posture for a couple of those hours so the marines who’d just been through a battle could shit, shower, and shave.  

Instead, it was protein sludge and a tube suction cupped to my meat stick for me and the rest of the security team. The only bright side was that I got to see some space shit. I had one word to describe it . . . boring. It was hours of monotony interspersed with a few minutes of actually getting shit done. Even worse, every department on the bridge had at least three other people backing up the department OIC. Shit, if the Marines had this many people doing one job our company would be the size of a battalion. All of that solidified one fact in my mind, I could never actually serve on a starship. 

The Dawners weren’t exactly happy that we’d abandoned their people on the moon, but they also understood that our troop transport couldn’t hang with the elfin destroyer. The Dawners’ Admiral gave us the go-ahead to use the ramp so we could go home while he proceeded to move in and kill the destroyer that was pounding his people. 

Of course, it wasn’t like the Elfin warship sat around and waited to get blown into their component atoms. They continued to kill Dawners until the last moment before turning and burning for their incoming fleet. We arrived at the on-ramp well before the two fleets met, but we spent the next day shuttling FTL communications buoys back and forth to facilitate our transit through Dawners’ space. We’d already pissed them off and the brass back on Oberon didn’t want to create a galactic incident over us getting home. 

During that period of diplomacy, I finally got to shed my armor for the first time in over a month. I sat in debriefs with the other platoon leaders and the skipper, and even tried to find Burnum. I had a built-up store of hot cocoa with her name written on it. Too bad the private, like most of the enlisted, had been tasked with things like cleaning their weapons and then cleaning them again when the NCOs said they weren’t good enough. It was an old trick to keep a grunt’s mind off things they couldn’t control. If you did it enough, weapons maintenance even became therapeutic. 

Several watch cycles passed before the combat station's alarm blared. Since those things never came at a good time, I was mid-shit. Pinching off a log of half-digested protein sludge was not my idea of a fun start to the day, but I arrived just in time to see the first steps in the battle.  

“Battle walls are forming,” the guy I’d learned was the Operations OIC chimed in. 

What we were seeing on the plot was almost twenty minutes old, so hypothetically a bunch of people over there might already be dead. It was weird how time and space worked to completely buttfuck the human mind. 

Slowly on the plot, the various destroyers, cruisers, battlecruisers, and battleships of the two fleets started to stack up vertically in space. With a dozen ships on the Dawners’ side, they didn’t have the numbers to create any depth to their formation. If there were dozens of ships involved, they’d start to stack them horizontally as well. The term battle wall, or wall of battle, was from way back in wet navy days. By today’s standards, it meant the optimal positioning of warships to coordinate fire control and overlapping point defense. In layman’s terms, it was the best way to shoot and defend yourself.

I couldn’t help but be in a little bit of awe as billions of tons of military hardware hurtled through space at tremendous speeds hundreds of millions of miles away from us. Mankind had come a long way from throwing pointy sticks at one another. From the data I was seeing, any chance at diplomacy had gone out the airlock. Honestly, I didn’t really expect any. That wasn’t how the elves operated. 

The Dawners had the numbers advantage in the engagement but the elves had the tonnage. Three of the Dawners’ ships were destroyers, and another pair of cruisers left them with only seven true ships of the wall. The elves had brought along another destroyer, but the rest were battlecruisers or battleships. Unless I misunderstood the Navy’s weird classification system the elves even had an assault carrier. 

“Who the hell starts an assault carrier designation with CV?” I scratched my head. 

 An assault carrier meant fighters. No one liked to tangle with fighters. I bet one of the fleet officers could give me the breakdown of guns, missiles, and point defense clusters, but I’d rather not know. I just wanted to go home.   

Apparently, the imminent battle was the push the Dawners needed to give us the green light. We configured the engines for FTL and got the hell out of dodge just as the first missiles started to launch. Good riddance.

***

I looked up that battle a few months later and learned the Dawners lost that fight to the tune of four ships and tens of thousands of lives. To this day, the elves had control of that little moon and mined it for the big bucks. That was how my mission on that fucking barren ass rock ended . . . total failure.

For my efforts in that fight – it wasn’t every day a staff sergeant had to jump in as a PL – my LT had put me in for a medal. A good one too. That was how on Christmas Day of all days, I stood on a stage with the regimental commander while everyone not on holiday leave shivered in the cold wind whipping across the tarmac.

“Attention to orders,” the salty old Colonel called the company to attention. “For gallantry in action while serving as a squad leader, platoon sergeant, and platoon leader in Bravo Company, Second Battalion, Second Regiment, Second Marine Expeditionary Force at the conflict on Echo-Mike-Six-Nine-Three . . .”

“They don’t even call it a battle. It’s a conflict,” I had to fight really hard not to roll my eyes or clench my jaw at the Echo-Mike designation. That’s what they used to identify a moon in the Elfin Empire. I really fucking hated those pointy-eared bastards.   

“. . . Staff Sergeant Paul Mitchell held the line against enemy hunter-killer teams, a full heavy infantry battalion, and a platoon of lightly-armored vehicles to deny the enemy access to his unit’s Forward Operating Base. He assumed command not once but twice as his superiors fell on the field of battle. He single-handedly dealt with enemy saboteurs, coordinated, and led the counterattack when a squad-level deflector failed and the perimeter was breached. He personally dispatched dozens of enemy soldiers and armor with on-target indirect fire that saved the lives of countless marines. His gallant actions and dedicated devotion to duty, without regard for his own life, were in keeping with the highest traditions of military service and reflect great credit upon himself and the Confederation Marine Corps. For this, he is awarded the . . .”

I didn’t really give a shit about the shiny silver medal they draped around my neck, other than the fact that it might save my ass from being demoted so easily the next time I punched a senior NCO or officer. What I cared about was right in front of me. My eyes searched the formation until I spotted her. Private Burnum was right where she should be in first squad, first platoon with her eyes front and fixated on a spot somewhere in the distance. But as I stared at her, it was like she felt my attention. Her eyes darted up to me for a second and after they met, she winked before she returned to staring at something off in the distance. 

That was what I fought for. That was why I killed so many elves. It was for the man, and more importantly, the woman standing beside me. What could I say, I might fight harder if the woman beside me had a nice ass. 

“That would be a great recruiting slogan,” I considered as I shook the Colonel’s hand.

There were more hands to shake, more officers’ asses to kiss, and then I had to deal with the good-natured ribbing the rest of the platoon gave me. A little party at the NCO club for the unit gave us the Christmas dinner we’d all been craving. Even better, it was all on the battalion’s dime. The Corps looked out for its own, which was a good thing because there was no way I could have afforded the shindig on my salary. I was still only a staff sergeant.  

I talked, joked, and let the enlisted in my squad – I was back to being a simple squad leader where I belonged – fawn over my medal. I downed more beer than I probably should have while I kept my peripherals on the true prize. Burnum only congratulated me like the rest of the squad and then spent the rest of the night chatting with other marines around the club. She didn’t let on to what we had planned next.

Being a staff sergeant, I had a place off base but Burnam was only a private. She lived in the barracks and it would raise less eyebrows to go back to her place than have me sign her off base. Thankfully, we wouldn’t have to hang a sock on the door. I’d conveniently paid for her roommate to stay off base for the night. The other marine didn’t even ask any questions and jumped at the opportunity to be anywhere other than on base Christmas evening.  

I was finally putting my counterespionage training to good use as the party started to wind down. Obviously, we didn’t leave together because despite being the battalion’s golden boy for the moment, the Corps still frowned on superiors fucking their enlisted subordinates. She left the party about twenty minutes before me. I had a tougher time retreating from all the well-wishers. Finally, I had to buy a round of drinks for the twenty stubborn marines still hanging around the bar so I could sneak out to the cab I’d called. As far as distractions went, there was nothing better than booze to distract marines, except maybe pussy.

I paid an autocab to take me discretely around the corner and drop me off at the barracks. CQ should have stopped me on entry, but they were busy playing some VR game and didn’t even see me. I made my way to the lift and took it up to Burnum’s floor. Her room was right next to the elevator so I waited for the door to close and looked myself over in the reflective surface. 

“Damn, I look good,” I had to admit. 

All my combat ribbons, qualification badges, and the most recent medal cut a mean figure. I didn’t have the fruit salad some officers did, but if my ribbons were my resume, anyone who took a close look knew I was good at my job.   

I was going to make sure that worked for me tonight. Girls loved a man in uniform even if they wore a uniform themselves. Maybe even more because now they understood all the shit that went with the lifestyle. Softly, I knocked on Burnum’s door in the pre-determined combination. And got nothing. I knew I was a little tipsy, but I was pretty sure I got the sequence right. I tried the combination again. With a soft hiss, the door finally opened. 

On-post barracks were basically giant dorm rooms. Burnum’s room was messier than I thought a girls would be, but I wasn’t one to cast stones. I had a small mountain of dirty clothes I’d been putting off washing since before our mission to that moon. All around me, white-painted cinderblocks made a small square that held two beds, two desks, and whatever personal shit the two enlisted women could stuff in there. 

I didn’t care about that shit. I cared about the woman in bed . . . with her eyes closed . . . and snoring. 

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” I grumbled. 

“Oh, poor, sarge,” she quipped as she peeked an eye open. “You thought you were getting lucky and everything.” 

I raised an eyebrow and leaned against the doorframe as I folded my arms across my chest. “Well, maybe I should get going then.” I played along. 

“Baby, it's cold outside,” she pouted as her bare arm extended from underneath the comforter and motioned me forward. 

“The skipper will start to worry and the Gunny will be pacing the floor,” I motioned with my thumb over my shoulder. 

“Beautiful, what’s your hurry,” the comforter slipped down to reveal one perfect breast. 

That caught my attention. “Maybe another drink,” I pulled a bottle from inside my coat. “But what will the neighbors think?” I grinned. 

“Baby it's bad out there, no cabs to be had out there,” the comforter fell down to her waist as she sat up and eye-fucked me as a prelude to the main event. 

“You’re very pushy you know,” I stepped forward so the door could hiss closed behind me as I shucked out of my dress jacket. 

“I like to think of it as opportunistic,” her breath caught in her throat as I crawled on top of her. 

“Okay, fine, I’ll stay,” I pressed my lips gently to hers, only for her to devour me. 

“That took some convincing,” she ripped at my shirt and pants when she finally came back up for air.

My cock popped free as she yanked my boxers down and immediately grabbed it. That sent a shiver through me. Partly because I’d imagined her doing something like this in many a bathroom stall, but also because her hands were frigid. I pushed through the pain as friction warmed up the both of us. Boy was there plenty of friction. 

She acted like a one-woman army determined to make me bend the knee and cum. At this rate, I was going to ruin her sheets. To distract her, I smothered her with my lips and yanked at the comforter to get it out of the way. Our knees got tangled up in the mess but neither of us deviated from our goal. I finally found mine wet and pleading for attention. 

I slipped my hand down between her legs and her stroking faltered. “Oh,” her eyes popped open in surprise as I played with her clit.

“What’s so surprising?” I teased as I slipped a finger inside her and curled it to rub at her inner walls.

“Nothing,” she breathed heavily as she started stroking me harder. In response, I stuck a second finger inside her and started to jab into her.  

I didn’t know how, but we’d gotten into a competition to see who could make who come first. It was on and I was determined to win. Both of us grunted and breathed heavily as the bed rattled around us. At one point, she threw back her head and let out a long moan. I thought I was victorious, but it was a feint by the little minx. She redoubled her efforts when I let my guard down. 

As I fought back the tightening of my balls, she maneuvered me closer to her. I took advantage of her mistake to execute a pincer movement on her clit and added my final finger to a brute-force assault on her G-spot. That time, the scream that escaped her lungs wasn’t fake, but she was a worthy opponent. I was so wrapped up in my own maneuvers that I didn’t see her going nuclear before it was too late. With a lunge forward, she bent her body in half and swallowed my dick. I had to admit, she had some real tactical dick-sucking skills.  

“Oh fuck!” my eyes bulged as her tongue went to work. Her other hand outmaneuvered me to capture my balls and that interrupted the crescendo I was building toward. Her climax slipped further and further away as mine drew closer and closer. 

The desire to win at all costs vanished as the pleasure started to ratchet up in my balls. It had been way too long, and the private had successfully outflanked my resolve.

“Okay,” I pulled my fingers out of her and moved them to her head. I tried to pull her back but she greedily slurped at me. “Not yet,” I gathered up her hair and gave it a yank.

My dick freed itself from her throat with a pop as a trail of saliva connected my tip with her lips, but she didn’t give up. She lubed her thumb up with my precum and started to rub the sensitive underside of my tip. That was too much. I had to tap out. 

“Uncle. Uncle!” I laughed as I pulled back out of her eager grasp and retreated to the far side of the bed. 

“Awe,” she pouted as she started to crawl toward me. “Don’t tell me you’re a one-shot chump,” she challenged. 

“Of course not,” I took her comment in stride. I knew she was trying to rile me up. “I just think the first nut should be busted somewhere special.” I made my move.

She gave a yelp as I pushed her back down onto the bed and simultaneously shucked out of my dress pants. I spread her legs wide and positioned myself between them. 

“Where I nut is entirely up to you,” I grabbed my wet shaft and positioned my tip at her entrance. 

“Wait!” she threw up her hand to push at my chest so I couldn’t sink down inside her. 

“Huh?” I frowned down at her as I threatened to breach her threshold. 

“I . . . I can’t,” she blushed as she gave me another push so I got off of her.

“What?” I couldn’t help the confusion and disappointment that leaked into my tone. “I’m sorry,” I sat back on my haunches as my dick still pointed hungrily at her. “But why did we do all of this?” I pointed at our throbbing bathing suit places. 

“Oh, we’re still going to do it, sarge” she corrected, which left me even more confused than before. “It’s just that I’m saving this,” she patted her box, “for marriage.” 

“What?” I thought I’d been confused before, but I now officially had no idea what was going on. “Is it some sort of religious thing? Did I miss the purity ring?” I looked at her fingers. 

“Yeah,” she blushed harder even though I didn’t spot a ring. “I know it might seem stupid but it’s what I believe.” 

I cursed whatever god she worshipped as my dick started to deflate. “It’s your call,” I grumbled . . . only for her to roll over onto her stomach, reach under her bed, and pass a bottle back to me. 

“Make sure to lube up really good and tell me when,” she pulled her cheeks apart to show me her waiting asshole. 

“Wait. You want me to fuck you in the ass?” my dick snapped back to attention. 

“There’s nothing in the holy writ about the backdoor,” she looked over her shoulder with a naughty grin. “Hop to it, sarge. This marine is tired of waiting for that big, fat cock of yours.” 

She didn’t have to wait long. I lathered up well and told her when. I didn’t ask about her anal virginity but she seemed to know what she was doing. I bet if I opened up some drawers in here, I’d find some interesting toys. I had a little experience with this myself. 

An ass wasn’t a pussy, but there was something about me sinking my cock into her backdoor that really did it for me. Hell, I’d been imagining this since the first company run when I saw her in PT shorts. She didn’t disappoint. She also seemed to be pretty sensitive back there. I knew there were lots of nerve clusters and from the way she moaned loudly as I started slow and then started to pick up the pace, I was hitting them just right. 

“Harder. Faster. Deeper,” she gave me orders for once and I was happy to obey them. 

I even regathered her hair in my fist and gave her head a yank. She liked that and I pulled her back to taste her lips again as I smashed that ass.  

“Oh. My. God. Sarge. You’re. Cock. Is. So. Fucking. Good!” she screamed as I sank myself all the way into her over and over again. She reached down between her legs with a free hand and started to diddle her skittle as I held her up by the hair. Pretty soon, she was cumming. She wasn’t subtle about it. 

As she came down from her first orgasm, I changed things up. I let go of her hair and grabbed her hips. I pulled her up so she was still face down in the comforter, her back was arched, and her ass pointed skyward for me to do with as I pleased. I stood up in a crouch so that I could piledrive down into her. My first thrust with the extra power of my body weight added in drove her crazy. 

“I’ve been such a bad girl. I deserve so much more than to be on the naughty list,” she looked back at me with ecstasy written all over her face.  

So, I grabbed her hips tightly and punished her as the bed smacked loudly into her desk and wall. I wished I could have punished her all night long but it all went by too fast for my taste. That’s what happened when you pregamed too much. 

I felt my balls start to tighten in preparation. “I’m gonna cum!” I warned. 

“Fill me up with your hot cocoa, sarge!” she screamed and I did as she commanded. 

Over a month of built-up cum fired out of me and into her ass. Spurt after spurt of vitamin-enhanced seed spewed to the point it made her gasp as it started to seep out around the edges of my shaft . . . and I just kept going. I held onto her hips for dear life as I buried myself in her asshole up to my shaft and kept on cumming. It got to the point where I got a little lightheaded as my spurts became dribbles.

Time seemed to stretch out as bliss-filled me and my empty balls, and she gave a satisfied groan from her mattress. Her hands had curled around her sheets and she slowly released them as she breathed through her own euphoria. I nearly folded over the top of her from where I stood over her with my cock.

“I just need a minute,” I took some deep breaths as I’d let my cock shrink a bit before I pulled out. 

“Merry Christmas, Sarge,” she looked behind her and pulled the sweaty hair out of her eyes.

“Feliz Navidad, . . .” I never got to finish as the door flew open. 

“Military police. Freeze. Don’t . . .” the pair of cops in light armor with stunners drawn stopped abruptly when they found us in such a compromised position. It only got worse when I straightened up to put my hands in the air. My dick popped out of her ass and triggered an avalanche of my cum to seep out of her, down her legs, and onto her bed. 

That was bad but not as bad as the new company commander walking into the room to that lovely imagery. Apparently, someone had called in the noise complaint and thought it was a domestic. It seemed that both Burnum and I were loud fuckers. The MPs responded as such and the automatic alert went out to the skipper that one of his marines was involved in an incident. Since he wasn’t far from the barracks after stopping in at my party, he hurried over. Things couldn’t get any worse.

Apparently, my backdoor Christmas bonanza was too much for my silver tongue or new silver medal to get me out of. I was wrong when I thought it would keep me from getting demoted so easily. The new skipper had no problem busting me down to corporal, busting Burnum out of the Corps entirely, and busting my balls for the rest of my time in the Tripple Deuce. 

It was both my best and worst Christmas to date.

***

“Until this one,” I shook myself out of my reverie.

“Mitchell?” Andrea asked as she gave me a concerned look. 

“Sorry,” I shook my head. “What was the question again?” 

“What does Christmas mean to you?” she repeated.

“Oh that,” I looked down at my lap and saw three things. 

First, the memory had my cock struggling to break free of my shipboard coveralls. Second, a giant hand with claws possessively grazed my inner thigh and wasn’t helping my southern blood flow situation. Third, on my opposite thigh, a smaller more delicate hand was working its way north toward the promised land. The only woman not playing find the Christmas strudel was Andrea.

“Mitchell?” Andrea frowned as I quickly looked back up at her.

“Yeah . . . um . . . what I’m thankful for,” I cleared my throat. I didn’t think it would go over well if I said I was thankful for all the ass I was getting recently. I considered it a Christmas miracle I was even better with the ladies than I had been back in my marine days. 

“I’m thankful to be here, alive, spending time with all of you,” I raised my glass and tried to shake off Astrid’s claws as they started to draw circles across my pants close to my balls.  

“Cheers to that,” Miko took her hand off my leg with a pointed look at the dragon and took another deep swig of her eggnog. 

“I too am grateful for your presence,” Astrid gave me an intense look as she sipped her own drink and finally removed her hand.  

“I was thinking of something a little more specific but I guess that works,” Andrea sipped at her drink and looked around the table. 

“Who’s next?” 

About the Author

I hope you enjoyed this little short story set in the Life of a Freelancer universe. I’d like to make this a regular things and delve into the holiday celebrations of my other storylines. If you liked the book, please take the time to rate it and write a short, positive review. I’d like to hear what you think. As an independent author, each review means a lot. If you like what you’ve read, feel free to peruse the other series below.

You can friend G.S. on Facebook at G.S. D’Moore where he’ll update you on any of his new writings. He doesn’t like Twitter, Instagram, or any of that other crap. That might hurt his marketing, but it’ll help keep him sane. If you like Haremlit Readers, monster girls, harem lit, or want to check out something by the other Dukes of Harem then check out the linked Facebook groups for other good reads.

If you liked the book, please take the time to rate it and write a short, positive review. I’d like to hear what you think. As an independent author, each review means a lot.

Thanks for reading!

Other Books by G.S. D’Moore

Courts and Cabals (Supernatural Fantasy)

Courts and Cabals

Courts and Cabals 2

Courts and Cabals 3

Courts and Cabals 4

Courts and Cabals 5

Thirdborn (Medieval Fantasy)

Thirdborn

Thirdborn 2

Life of a Freelancer (Military Sci-Fi)

Life of a Freelancer

Life of a Freelancer 2

A Freelancer Christmas (Short Story)

I’m Just a Small Town Shifter (Paranormal Fantasy)

I'm Just a Small Town Shifter

I'm Just a Small Town Shifter 2

The Adventures of Grave (Superhero/Supervillain)

The Adventures of Grave