In Every Clime and Place by Patrick LeClerc

general’s rosebushes, you take the hit with him. You read me, Corporal?”
    “Yes, sir!” I snapped.
    “Good. Now, I just want you to know, you and your Marines did a good job back there. I’m proud to have you in my platoon.” To my surprise, he rose from his chair and extended a hand across the desk.
    I took it. “It’s an honor to serve with you, sir.”
    I was dismissed, and hastily deployed to the rear. We don’t say “retreat” in the Corps.
    That pretty much summed up Lt Mitchell. He would back his Marines to the hilt if he thought we were right, but he wanted to put the fear of God in me so I’d remember who was in charge. He also knew that his success depended on his Marines, which is why he let me know he appreciated me and my team. That was one reason we’d gladly assault the gates of hell if he gave the order.
    I was reminded of a quote from the old Corps. I read it in the memoirs of a Marine from the 1920s, when we were fighting in Nicaragua. A veteran enlisted man said of his lieutenant: “He may only be an officer, but he’s still a damn good Marine.”

Chapter 11
8 JUN 2078
    ASTEROID BELT RESCUE SUBSTATION ECHO 7
    I looked up from Jensen’s reader. Now I knew what the corporation was after, but not why.
    “What did they want that outpost cleared out for?” I asked. “It’s not like a Spaghetti Western and the railroad was coming through.”
    “Certain organizations wanted a place where they could do their dirty work out of sight. The same way ‘civilized’ nations used to hand their high profile prisoners to a less scrupulous ally for interrogation. Back at the beginning of the century, a lot of that got out into the public. It was too hard to contain internet leaks. Ever since the big fire storms caused by Manning and Snowden and Assange, governments have longed for a nice secluded place to train operatives, debrief prisoners, that kind of thing.”
    “You mean they wanted a nice deep hole to put people in.”
    Jensen smiled. “The oubliette of the twenty-first century. It’s not like a hundred years ago when you could just train rebels in Mexico and stage them in Guatemala for the invasion of Cuba.”
    “It must be heartbreaking for the CIA that they can’t recapture the rousing success of the Bay of Pigs.”
    “We all miss the good old days sometimes,” he said. “But they thought they’d found the perfect solution out in space.”
    SNN News File 4, courtesy Brian Jensen
    16 Nov 2075
    Unconventional Forces Training Station, Ganymede
    Milos Radicz grunted in disgust as he watched his men repairing the artificial atmosphere controller. Typical of everything on this squalid base, it was malfunctioning. Again. The technicians swore and sweated as they struggled with the machine.
    Radicz shook his head and regretted for the hundredth time the place his career had brought him. He had been a colonel in the Serbian Special Forces at one time. Had worn a uniform with pride, and held his head high as he served a country he loved. Now he was a mercenary, a hired gun in the pay of the American CIA. It bothered him to work for the Americans. It was their meddling that brought down the government he once served. He reminded himself that he didn’t have much of an option. As an officer in his position, it would have been jail or the noose of some Muslim vigilante mob had the American intelligence agency not offered him a job.
    He now commanded eight hundred men. Nearly the number in his old regiment.
    Eight hundred hired thugs , he thought. Failed rebels, outcast terrorists, and modern day pirates. Men without a nation to call their own. Men like me, he admitted. Their causes back on Earth may have failed, but they were hardened warriors. The intelligence community had uses for such men. The pay was good, in money at least, but he missed the surge of pride when he stood before his troops and saluted his flag.
    A tone rang in his earpiece, jolting him back to the