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Revealed: Chapter 11

"Did you know?" I asked Crane. We were back in the entertainment section. The place was the most intact large space at the moment and the now working jukebox was just too much to pass up. It was good background noise for the tense mood. We had left Krauss in the medical ward, he wouldn't leave his brother's side and after seeing him, I was perfectly fine with letting him grieve. He would be able to rip me in half if he lost control, best not to tempt fate.

"No." Crane shook his head. "I was just as surprised as you cap. Anyway, what's the chances of that happening, a whole Spec Enforcer squad made up of siblings?"

I wasn't sure, as far as I knew, it had never happened. Being a special operations unit, it was extremely difficult to get into the Spec Enforcer program. It required a person to be in peak physical and mental condition and being with family members was a potential hindrance. There had been instances where there were two siblings, but they would always be separated for missions. Krauss, must have had friends in high places for this to happen and get away with it.

"It should be impossible." I said it, but now I was doubting it. What other stuff had gone on under the table? If Krauss had someone high up doing him favors, then was there other things Krauss was hiding? It felt terrible to doubt him this way, but there was no getting around it. The Krauss that I thought I knew was a lie, or at least partially.

"An entire squad made up of brothers." Crane marveled at the thought, looking airily off into the distance.

I let him go off into his thoughts, I had my own thinking to do. There was plenty of time, until Mr. Hawthorne finished calling whatever Senator owed him some favor and we got some new armor for the mission, we were stuck on the station.

I watched the other people in the room. People were moving about getting back to their jobs and Hawthorne's men who were off duty were keeping busy with what little the entertainment area had. There was an out dated dart board and a projector that had the news going. A sense of normalcy was slowly returning. The bodies had been dragged off, a soldier told me they were being stored in the medical ward's morgue. There were forty seven people in the morgue. Twenty were Jostens soldiers and the rest were ours, I didn't count Alex, I doubt that Krauss was letting anyone get near the body.

Despite Krauss' now shady background, I felt sorry for him. To lose a squad member was one thing, I knew that, but to lose family was another. The closest thing to a brother I had was Crane, and he was sitting next to me. I couldn't imagine the pain I would feel if Crane died. Back at Mars, I had felt something similar when I thought he was dead, but that was after we had both accepted death on the Eurasia. Now that I had him back, I don't think I could really live through losing him, especially of he died right in front of me.

I would need to talk to Krauss before we went to Jupiter, but now wasn't the time. I would let him have his time to himself before I confronted him.

I decided that for the time being it would be best to catch up on current events. I had been out of the loop for over a month now and with the nukes and everything else that had gone on, I felt that it was important to know that the universe was still there.

"Trouble around Venus." An attractive new woman in a red blazer stood aboard what appeared to be a military ship, by the looks of the crew who were in Navy blues. "I'm aboard the USS Columbia, a heavy cruiser as it makes its way to Venus after the sole space station which services the entire planet was attacked. The details of the attack have not yet been released to the public."

I got up to the projector and looked around. No one was watching the news and I didn't need some woman to tell me the station I was on was attacked. It was nice to know that the United States was actually sending something. I switched to another news station which was reporting on the economic situation which to my surprise was doing surprisingly well due to the amount of jobs that was created for the cleanup effort. I knew better though, it was a temporary boom, once everything was better and there was no longer a need for so many workers, it would deflate.

I busied myself, flipping through the various news stations that the space station had, which was not many. I ended up looping through the entire selection before anything interesting came up. It was back on Earth, some Russian billionaire, that had disappeared recently had been caught and was now being tried for providing illegal amounts of plutonium to one Dr. Ruse. They found him living in some trailer on the outskirts of Moscow with a godly amount of booze stored under it and now he was in some cell awaiting transportation to the court where NATO was making their case against Louis Jostens.

"So they finally found him." Teresa came up from behind to stand next to me and looked up at the screen. She had gone back to talk to her brother about, I wasn't sure, business? Ever since we got here, Francis had simply disappeared, off doing whatever now that we had met his father and he had done his part. I think he was uncomfortable around so many of us hairy brutes and was simply just being friendly. I didn't blame him, we were a sight and capable of some pretty marvelous and scary feats.

"I didn't know there was a Russian involved." I said.

"You have no idea how many people are involved. It makes for a lot of paper work finding them." She laughed, but in a way that you knew she wasn't joking about it. I with her, despite that, I knew the pain of paper work. Living in the 26th century and people still preferred ink and paper over digital even though the white stuff cost a fortune. The forests of Earth and Mars were not enough to supply the rest of humanity, and being the picky kinds of beings they were, would not touch any synthetic paper that was offered.

"But we're just going for the Jostens." I clarified.

"Right to the source of it all." She nodded her head. "Cut off the head..."

"And the body dies." I finished. A classic and mostly sound strategy. Hopefully the Jostens weren't like a hydra and would just sprout out of control once the cutting started.

We spent the next hour just talking and I learned quite a bit about her family. She had been in the Royal Marines a few years back and once she did her time, she took a job as her father's personal security guard. Turns out there are a lot of murderous people out there that will try to get at Mr. Hawthorne on a near weekly basis. There was a man who tried to crash a freighter through the atmosphere of Venus, but because of the near zero visibility, he missed by half the planet. When the rescue team had arrived, he was nearly dead from exposure and was ranting about how her father was a capitalist devil. There were many more, but Teresa said that was one of the more memorable ones since in reality, there was no danger.

In turn, I told her about my rather boring life before the military. Grew up in Wisconsin to two Irish Catholics. In my opinion, Irish Catholics are the worse than normal Catholics. A person can convert to Catholicism, but the Irish have it in their blood. My parents weren't bad, they just had their ideals engrained into their lives. Once I finished school, I went straight into the military. I heard the Marines were the toughest sons of bitches around so I decided to try my hand at that. I excelled quickly, was handpicked to become a Spec Enforcer and the rest is fairly recent history.

"How did you meet Crane?" Teresa asked me while watching a now intoxicated Crane try his luck at darts with some of the other soldiers.

"Spec Enforcers. He was a Marine before as well." I watched him as well. He fumbled with the darts, trying to get all of them in one paw, but they kept twisting between his fingers. He pricked himself and with a yip, he dropped them all. The others began to laugh and bent down and picked them back up with a silly grin.

"How did he get into one of the most advanced and prestigious military groups?" It was a valid question, one that I had in fact asked him after getting a rather bad first impression of him.

The first time I had met him was when he was actually assigned to my squad for a basic reconnaissance mission on Io. We were supposed to gather intel on a suspected smuggling operation before a destroyer came in and pounded the area. At first, he seemed like any of the other grunts and I ignored him. That was a mistake, since I didn't go up to him to say hello, he took it personally and came to me.

At first it started with a basic hello and I responded appropriately, but generally ignored him and treated him like any other soldier that had served under me. What I didn't at the time, was that Crane had a reputation among the Spec Enforcer officers. He was usually bounced around by desperate officers who just couldn't put up with him anymore. This had caused more than a few investigations from command as to why no one wanted him, but his service record was phenomenal and since he never actually did anything wrong, there weren't any marks against him on his record. Basically, no one wanted him, but he was too good to get rid of.

It was sad, but I quickly understood the officers reasoning. He was too friendly, always wanting to know what you were doing. I also quickly understood why he was kept in Spec Enforcers. It was on that moon where I came to respect him.

That reconnaissance mission went south fast, the pilot that was flying our transport came in too high and we were picked up on radar. Normally we would have just pulled and scrubbed the mission and NATO would simple send in several additional destroyers to compensate the lack of intelligence, but getting the port side stabilizers blown off by a rocket quickly ruined that.

The pilot was killed in the crash and Crane was the only one who got away uninjured. He got us stabilized, even performing emergency surgery on and a man to seal off a nasty gut wound. It was amazing seeing him in action and to make it even better, when the smugglers came to investigate, he put a round into one of their heads before they could even get a single shot off. He essentially save all of our lives.

I no longer cared about his personality, he deserved to be like that if he wanted to. The question wasn't why he was in the Spec Enforcers, it was why he was still a Sergeant that leaves me confused now.

"So?" Teresa was still waiting on my answer.

Crane had finally steadied himself enough to get ready to take a shot. He raised the dart to his eye and all of the swaying from the alcohol, for a split second went away. No one else, but me noticed it, he was entirely focused. The dart was flung and hit dead center. The other soldiers were silent at the perfect shot. I grinned, no one could beat Crane at anything that involved aiming.

I returned my attention to Teresa who also looked impressed by Crane's shot. "He's a Spec Enforcer because he's reliable, smart, loyal and it also helps that he's the best shot in the room."

Crane swiveled on his toes to face the soldier. He bowed and promptly tripped and fell on his face.