There were ten of them, wearing dappled camouflaged uniforms, heavily armed. They were dirty, and smelled like the jungle they’d been living in for the past four days.

Now, they crouched in meter-deep muck at the edge of a swamp, and watched the security patrol move past. The patrol’s heatscanners were blocked by the insulated fabric the ten wore, and no one in her right mind would dream anyone would hide out in the reeking swampy goo.

The man on point looked at the team’s leader, pointed to half a dozen bubble shelters a hundred yards away, drew a question mark in the air. The woman in charge nodded. The point man held up one finger … one sentry? The woman in charge shook her head — two. She pointed, and the point man saw the second, moving stealthily behind the first.

She motioned two others forward, tapped her combat knife. One smiled tightly, drew his blade, and crept forward, his partner behind him …

• • •

Haut
Njangu Yoshitaro picked up his mug of tea, sipped, grimaced at the tepid mixture, then turned back to the holo.

“The problem, boss,” he said, “is that they’ve got antiaircraft here … here … and I’ll bet more missiles right under that finger of land that looks so frigging inviting for an LZ.

“I don’t see any way to honk our Griersons into this LZ over here, either, so we could make a decent attack.”

Caud
Garvin Jaansma, Commanding Officer, Second Regiment, Strike Force Angara, studied the projection, spun it, spun it again.

“Howsabout we whack ‘em with a wave or so of Shrikes on the finger, then put in the combat vehicles through the mess?”

“No can do,” Njangu, his Executive Officer, said. “We’ve got Nan Company right here … Rast Company backing them up, too close in to chance a blue-on-blue friendly casualty.”

Garvin Jaansma was every centimeter a soldier — tall, muscular, blond-haired, blue-eyed, square-jawed. Everyone agreed he made a perfect recruiting poster. Everyone except Jaansma, which might have been part of his charm. Few people knew the devious mind concealed beneath his straight-arrow appearance.

But almost everyone agreed Njangu Yoshitaro was exactly what he looked like — sneaky and dangerous. Slender, dark-skinned, black-haired, he’d come from the depths of a slum world, forced into the military by a hanging judge.

“Shit,” Garvin muttered. “Whose dumb-ass idea was it to put our grunts right on top of the baddies?”

“Uh … yours.”

“Shit twice. I guess we can’t tolerate friendly fire from our own artillery, can we?”

“Not after yesterday,” Njangu said. “And all the
aksai
are tied up working for Brigade. Look. Try this. We take a flight of Zhukovs up high … above Shadow range, then have ‘em come straight down toward — ”

He broke off, hearing a soft grunt, as of someone being sapped.

“Aw hell,” he said, moving swiftly across the bubble toward his combat harness. He’d barely touched the butt of his pistol when the bug shield was ripped aside, and three dirty men and a woman jumped into the shelter.

He tried for the gun anyway, and two blasters chattered. Njangu grunted, looked at the bloody mess of his chest, fell on his face, and lay still.

Garvin had his blaster up, and the woman in charge of the team shot him in the face. He went backward, through the holo, sending the projector to the ground.

“All right,”
Cent
Monique Lir said briskly. “Spread out and take care of the rest of the command group until you get killed. Don’t get taken prisoner … interrogation is a righteous pain in the ass.”

Her Intelligence and Reconnaissance troops went back out, and the sound of blasters thumping came.

Lir sat down in a camp chair, put her feet up on another.

“Nice dying, boss. The new ones love a little realism.”

Garvin sat up, wiped sticky red dye off his face.

“Thanks. How the hell’d you get through the lines?”

“Just looked for the shittiest part of the world and started crawling,” Lir said.

Njangu got to his feet and looked at his uniform distastefully.

“I hope to hell this crap washes out.”

“Guaranteed,” Lir said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go finish wiping out your headquarters.”

She left the bubble.

“Fitzgerald is gonna rip my lungs out for getting killed,” Garvin said.

“I think she’s likely to have her own worries,” Njangu said. “Last time I got a sitrep, she was up to her ass in cliffs and Aggressors.”

He went to an unmarked cooler, opened it, and took out two beers.

“I guess since we’re officially dead, we can have one, eh?”

“Why not?” Garvin said, drinking deeply. “This was about an abortion of a war game, wasn’t it?”

“Only goes to show first that a brigade attacking an entrenched brigade takes it up the old koondingie,” Njangu said. “Just like in the books.

“Not to mention that well-trained thugs like I&R can always pull a sneaking number on crunchies like we’re in charge of.”

“As if I ever doubted that,” Garvin said. He took another swallow of beer. “You know, it was a lot more fun when
we
got to play Aggressor and do dirty deeds dirt cheap and ruin other people’s plans, wasn’t it?”

“Maybe,” Njangu said. “But when the blaster rounds got real, we also got killed a lot, remember? Which also was real, remember? That was one reason we decided to get ambitious and move upward in the chain of command, like good little heroes.

“More money in that, too.”

“But it sure is duller’n shit in peacetime,” Garvin said.

“Shut up,” Njangu suggested. “Death comes knocking too early in the morning anyway.

“Let’s see if we can’t wrap this whole mess into one untidy ball, pull the troops out, and go looking for a shower and a drink.”

“After,” Garvin said gloomily, “we get our asses chewed for losing.”

• • •

“Ouch,” Garvin said, rubbing imaginary wounds. “I keep forgetting that one reason you get promoted to high command is an ability with words. I wish
Caud
Fitzgerald had done the critique instead of
Dant
Angara.”

It was late the next afternoon before the Legion’s CO had finished his after-game commentary and the troops had been bathed, fed, and turned loose for a deserved two-day pass.

“I bleed, I moan, I sorrow,” Njangu said. “What did he say about me? ‘Ineptly planned, carelessly executed, stupidly ended’?”

“I got worse, nanner,” Garvin said. “ ‘Incorrect intelligence, failure to control staff, assumption of a degree of intelligence, deservedly assassinated, generally lazy staff and field work that can only be ascribed to the torpid assumption that peacetime exercises aren’t important.’”

“The Man
can
talk some shit,” Njangu said, absently returning the salute of an
Aspirant
trotting at the head of his platoon as they went up the steps into the Camp Mahan Officers’ Club. “What time’s Jasith coming over for you?”

“Eighteen-thirty or so. She said I wasn’t supposed to let you get me too drunk.”

“’At’s funny,” Njangu said. “That’s the same thing Maev said about you.”

“Great minds, in the same track,” Garvin said. “Like sewers.” He wriggled. “Sure feels nice to be clean again.”

“Gettin’ soft, boss,” Njangu said. “You ain’t much of a field troopie if a mere day or three without a ‘fresher gets to you. And you wanted to be out slitherin’ through
giptel
doots with Lir? Getting old, grandpa. What are you, almost twenty-six? That’s a year up on me.”

“Maybe I am turning into a candy ass,” Garvin said. “Unlike you younger goons. Hey. Look.”

He pointed across the cavernous club to a table in the rear, where a very large, prematurely balding man in a flight suit sat, morosely staring at an almost-empty pitcher of beer.

“What’s our Ben brooding about?” Njangu said. “He can’t be too broke to drink. We just got paid a week ago.”

“Dunno,” Garvin said. He went to the bar, got two pitchers and two glasses, and he and Njangu went to
Cent
Been Dill’s table.

“Oo looks unhappy,” Njangu cooed. “Did oo faw down getting out of oo’s
aksai
and dent oo’s ickle nose?”

“Worse,” Dill said. “Far, far worse. Mrs. Dill’s favorite son got killed today.”

“Big frigging deal,” Njangu said. “So did we.”

“No, I don’t mean playing some stupid war game,” Dill scowled. “I mean killed killed.”

Garvin reached over and poked the pilot.

“You seem pretty solid for a ghost.”

“I don’t mean killed killed killed,” Ben said. “Just killed killed.”

“I’m getting confused,” Garvin said.

“Here,” Njangu said. “Drink beer and tell Aunt Yoshitaro all.”

“Can’t do it,” Dill said. “What’s your clearance?”

“Crypto Quex,” both officers said smugly. “There ain’t no higher,” Njangu added.

“Oh yeh?” Dill growled. “What about HOMEFALL?”

Jaansma and Yoshitaro looked at each other blankly.

“Ho-ho,” Dill said. “If you ain’t heard of it, you ain’t got clearance enough, and I can’t talk to you.”

“I surely understand your caution,” Njangu said. “Being here in a nest of spies and all.”

“Come on,” Garvin said. “Security’s important.”

“Only for other people,” Njangu said. “Now, let us do a little intel analysis while we sit here and work on the beer we just put on Mr. Dill’s tab.

“First, we should be aware that, since I’ve been demoted from my former lofty position as one of
Dant
Angara’s intelligence sorts, the quality of Two Section has slipped astoundingly.

“This means that my replacements have slid into the easy grip of giving a certain operation a code name that suggests what it’s about.

“We might suspicion that …” and Njangu reflexively lowered his voice, looked to make sure the tables around them were empty, “… HOMEFALL might just happen to have something to do with the Force starting to investigate why our ever-so-beloved Confederation has vanished and left us out on the far frontiers with a tear in our eye, our dick in our hand, and a hole in our pants.”

Dill covered his flinch. “Jeez,” he said, “you’re getting as wordy as Jaansma.”

“There probably has been a certain cross-cultural leveling flow,” Njangu admitted.

“More like I’ve been able to drag him up to our level,” Garvin said. “Njangu’s doing a good job of guessing, since all of the hot-rod pilots have been detached for a special assignment … people like you and Alikhan and Boursier, for instance. And if you get killed killed, but not killed killed killed, maybe you’re running pilotless craft out into the wild black yonder.

“But I don’t think we ought to get specific if you want to tell us any details.”

Dill nodded. “Let’s just say I stuck my dick out where it shouldn’t’ve been and got it shortened by about forty centimeters, leaving me with only a ninety-centimeter stub.”

The Confederation was a centuries-old federation, sometimes authoritarian enough to be called an Empire, scattering across several galaxies. One of its Strike Forces, the Legion, had been assigned to the mineral-rich Cumbre system, which sat on the edges of “civilization,” with the alien, hostile Musth “beyond” and the aggressive systems of Larix and Kura “behind” them.

Garvin and Njangu had been raw recruits on the last transport from the Confederation’s capital world of Centrum to support Cumbre, barely escaping a highjacking by Larix and Kura to make it to D-Cumbre.

And then all communications, all transport, ended.

The Force, now isolated, fought first a civil war against the ‘Raum, worker-terrorists of Cumbre; then against the Musth; and, not much over an E-year past, a brutal campaign against Larix and Kura.

Now there was peace. But sooner or later everyone knew the Legion, as it was unofficially known, would have to go looking for the Confederation, or its remnants.

And so, very quietly, Force scientists had built drones, with realtime controllers on D-Cumbre “flying” them. The commands to the ship bounced from satellite to satellite as the drone jumped from hyperspace navigation point to nav point, making them ideal for taking a peek at places elsewhere.

“I think we can figure out what happened,” Njangu said. “You were out playing with your drone, and somebody or something blew you off. Sorry about that.”

“At least we’re not sending manned ships out,” Garvin said.

“Still, it’s damned unsettling, getting killed,” Dill said, drinking straight from a pitcher until it was dry, ignoring Garvin’s protests. “Shuddup. If I’m buying, it’s my beer, so I can drink it if I want.

“Right?”

He glared at Garvin, who nodded hastily. Ben Dill was, thankfully, a cheerful sort of prime mover. Mostly. The problem was that no one in the Force was precisely sure what set his temper off, since it seemed to vary from day to day and mood to mood.

Jaansma waved at a bartender for another round.

“You know,” Njangu said thoughtfully, “maybe it’s time I put my finely tuned mind to considering things.”

“What sort of things?” Dill said, accepting one of the three new pitchers.

“Oh,” Njangu said, “like how you got so ugly.”

Dill was about to respond when he saw a nightmare entering the club. It was over two meters tall, with many-banded coarse fur in various shades of yellowish brown. It had a small head, on a very long neck, that peered constantly about.

The creature walked upright on large rear legs, and its front legs were clawed. It had a small tail and wore a weapons harness in the Confederation colors of blue and white.

“Hey, Alikhan,” Dill bellowed to the Musth mercenary pilot. “Get your fuzzy butt over here and help me deal with a couple of line slime!”

The alien made his way to their table.

“Whassamatter?” Dill asked. “You don’t look happy.”

He was one of the few who claimed he could decipher Musth expressions.

“I cannot say,” Alikhan said. He, unlike most Musth, who had trouble with sibilants, spoke excellent Common Speech. “But if I were where I was not, I would not be here with you.”

“Aw,” Ben Dill said. “Order up some of your stinky meat and get wasted with us. The whole lot of us have gotten killed.”

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