"Uh, I gotta get mine," Lipinski said.
Sergeant Despreaux waited as the lance corporal and a private from Bravo Team retrieved their combat harnesses and the others took swigs from their bladders. Once everyone had gathered again, she glanced around mildly.
"The next time I see anyone without her harness," she noted, and then glanced pointedly at one of the plasma gunner's flat bladders, "or with an empty water bladder, I'm putting her on report. Your nanites may help you keep going even when you dehydrate, but only to a point."
She glanced around the team again, and then shrugged one shoulder. It was the one her rifle was slung over.
"And I'm also gonna put you on report if I see anyone without a weapon again. We don't know a thing about this planet, and until we do, we will consider it hostile at all times. Understood?"
She listened to the chorus of agreement, then nodded.
"The Captain is going to give a little talk before we get started. Get your teams together and get loaded up. We've got fifteen minutes before move-out. I want you to mostly finish your bladders, then refill from the tanks on the shuttles. I want you sloshing when we start out." She glanced around one more time. "Let's go over this again. Drink?"
"Water," the squad responded, more or less in unison and with a few smiles.
"When?"
"Always."
"How much?"
"Lots."
"And carry... ?"
"Your weapon."
"When?"
"At all times."
"Very good," she said with a blinding smile. "You're a credit to your squad leader." She gave them a wink and headed back over to where Sergeant Major Kosutic was standing.
Kosutic waited until the company's NCOs had gathered around, then raised an eyebrow.
"Well?"
"Just like you said," Julian said, taking a sip of water from the bladder in his armor. "Nobody had finished his water. Only a couple had refilled."
"Same here," Koberda said. "You'd think they'd learn. We're all vets, and we all went through RIP. Hell, most of us have spent time in Raider units! This is just same shit, different day."
"Uh-huh." Kosutic nodded in agreement. "How's your water level, George?"
"What?" Koberda's hand tapped the bladder on his back. "Oh." The bladder was mostly full, and Kosutic chuckled as he popped the drinking tube into his mouth.
"This is gonna be a long mission, By His Wickedness," she said, scratching her ear. "And we need to get the right habits right at the beginning. Most of your troops think they're tough. Hell, they are tough. But there's tough and there's tough, and, frankly, they're the wrong kind of bad news for this. Give me a bunch of fringe world mercenaries for an op like this one. We're used to having everything on a silver platter, and all we gotta do is drop, kick ass, and go home. This is about staying in the fight for months. That's not something we train for or plan on.
"The troops are gonna get worn out. They're not gonna want to eat. They're not gonna want to drink. They're not gonna want to keep alert. They are not, By His Evilness, going to care.
"So you've gotta be their momma and their poppa. You've gotta make them eat. You've gotta make them drink. You've gotta make sure they keep up their hygiene. You've gotta make sure they keep up their heads.
"Let the troops keep on the lookout for the bad guys. You squad leaders and platoon sergeants have to keep an eye on the troops.
"And I'll keep an eye on you," she finished with a laugh. "Now, drink!"
"Have you had anything to drink this morning, Your Highness?" Captain Pahner asked as he watched the prince unpack his weapon.
The rifle would have been a point of contention if Armand Pahner had had an ounce of strength left for silly arguments. He had nothing against the weapon as a hunting rifle: the Parkins and Spencer eleven-millimeter magnum was a gem among heavy caliber rifles. True, it was a "smoke-pole" rather than a bead gun, but the selectable action weapon (it could be fired in either bolt-action or semi-automatic mode) was the end product of over a millennia of development. The big, chemical-propelled round had excellent penetration and muzzle energy, and in the hands of an expert, it was deadly out to nearly two kilometers with the Intervalle 50x variable hologram scope mounted on it.
Yet whatever its virtues, it was also incredibly heavy, nearly fifteen kilos, and used nonstandard brass-cartridge rounds, which meant the prince would be unable to trade ammunition with the other weapons. Eventually, the prince's own ammo would run out, and he would be left with an extremely expensive, very heavy stick.
But Armand Pahner was done arguing with the arrogant young prick. About most stuff.
"Not recently," Roger replied with a headshake as he snapped the receiver into the walnut stock.
"Then might I suggest that His Highness drink water?" Pahner said through gritted teeth. He knew that the prince had all the military's nanite and toot enhancements, and a few that even his bodyguards didn't have. But he still had to have some water in his veins for the nanites to swim in.
"You can suggest it," Roger said with a slight smile. "And I even will, in a minute. But I'm going to get my rifle assembled first."
"Very well, Your Highness," Pahner said after a calming breath. It was hot as the hinges of hell already, and he didn't need this. "We're going to be moving out in a few minutes." The captain smiled faintly. "O'er Marduk's sunny plain."
"I'll be there," Roger said with a glance at the captain. The Marine's last phrase had not made sense to the prince, but he had other things to worry about, and he started loading ammunition into his combat vest. The handspan-long cartridges would eventually cover the chameleon cloth harness, actually providing an ersatz armor. He had a pack at his feet which was intended to accept additional rounds, and there were loops sewn into the legs of his combat suit. He would eventually be covered in bullets.
God help us if he gets hit by a stray bead, Armand Pahner thought.
Pahner glanced at Poertena. The armorer was racked out in the shade under one net-draped wing of the shuttle. The captain knew most of the troops had bitched about hauling the camo nets into place and staking them down, but he'd been adamant. The shuttles' hulls and wings were essentially one huge crystal display; as long as their internal power held out, their programmable skins could produce better reactive camouflage than a chameleon suit or even powered armor. But even though the power requirement wasn't huge, it was more than enough to eventually drain the shuttle capacitors, at which point the craft would stand out like elephants on a golf course if anyone happened to overfly them and look down. Even if that hadn't been the case, the best reactive skins in the universe couldn't do much about the shadows they cast, so he'd ordered the nets out. Not only would they take over when the power did run out, but they broke up the artificial angularity of the shuttle hulls and wings, which also broke up the artificiality of the shadows they cast.
Roger, predictably, had considered it a waste of time, although at least he'd managed to restrict his bitching about it to Pahner himself instead of whining in front of the troops. The captain had wanted—badly—to ask why he'd been so upset when no one was asking him to do the grunt work, but he'd decided against it after only a brief struggle. They'd already gone around and around about his decision to maintain a round-the-clock listening watch on all frequencies. It would only require a single trooper to monitor them through the sophisticated com equipment engineered into his helmet, which would hardly pose a crippling drain on their manpower. Despite that, the prince had done a deplorably poor job of concealing his opinion that worrying about possible communications traffic when the entire mass of the planet lay between them and the only high-tech enclave on it made no sense at all, and Pahner had no doubt that Roger had written him off as a terminally paranoid security dweeb.