Starfist: Lazarus Rising Read Online Free PDF

himself up to shake the kinks out of his hips and legs. It took some effort, but he managed to ignore the quietly snickering squids who briskly walked past as he looked back at the twenty meter stretch of passageway he'd just scraped, both sides, and decided it was good enough—as if it wasn't good enough before he started. If he didn't ignore the snickering squids, he'd be obligated to do something about their snickering. He was a corporal , he wasn't supposed to do scutwork, he was supposed to supervise scutwork. And all those snickering squids were prime candidates for doing scutwork. Which would just get him in trouble with the ship's command—Sergeant Linsman had made that perfectly clear.
    So instead of putting the snickering squids to work doing what was properly their work anyway, he ignored them and quickly used the suction hose to clean up the...
    the... Well, there might be something on the deck after all the stripping he'd just done. That finished, he started to bend over to pick up the scraper, thought better of further tormenting his back, and squatted to pick it up. Standing again, he began to step through the hatch to make his way to Company L's mess for a drink and some rest. Hey, the squid who put him to work told him when he got the job done he was free.
    "You missed a spot, Marine."
    The words brought him up, rigid. He knew that voice and hated it. Slowly, he turned around and glared at Bosun's Mate First Giltherr. Giltherr looked back with an evil smirk.
    "What did I miss?" Claypoole snarled.
    "Right there." Giltherr pointed.
    Claypoole clomped stiff-legged to him and looked. "I didn't miss anything.
    There's nothing there to strip."
    Giltherr shook his head. "It's a good thing they give you jarheads blasters instead of masers," he said. "You can't see well enough to hit a man at fifty meters with a maser. Now do it again. This whole section of passageway. If you missed that spot, I'm sure you missed more."
    Claypoole glared at Giltherr again. He wanted to tell the squid to shove it, there wasn't anything to strip, and then help him shove it because the squid was probably too damn dumb to be able to find his own ass with both hands. But the squid was a first class, the navy equivalent of a staff sergeant, and technically outranked a corporal. As if any squid could outrank a Marine!
    Snarling, he twisted past Giltherr to the far end of the passageway and dropped back to all fours to strip away once more at something that didn't need any stripping.
    Staff Sergeant Hyakowa's going to hear about this, he promised himself. I'm going to take this all the way to the brigadier if I have to! It's time somebody told him what's happening. But he stripped the entire section of passageway, all twenty meters on both sides, and the ends. Again.
    Brigadier Sturgeon, of course, didn't need to be told what was happening—after all, the "squid work" the Marines were doing had been his idea. He not only knew what his Marines were doing, he knew what they thought about it—the same thing he'd thought about it a long time ago when he was a junior enlisted man and his FIST commander made a similar arrangement with the captain of the ship on which they were returning to Camp Smutter on the curiously named Falala at the end of a particularly brutal campaign. Thirteenth FIST had lost a lot of Marines—he'd lost a couple of friends himself—and the Marines were dwelling on it. Morale was sinking fast and there was serious risk that 13th FIST would wind up irreparably combat-ineffective. Almost as soon as they were assigned to the heavy duty make-work on the ship the dwelling on injury and loss was turned into anger over what they perceived—rightly, he had to admit—as a misuse of Marines. It was hard, physically and mentally, to do that work. But it accomplished what it was meant to—it gave their bruised and bloodied psyches relief, let them put some distance between their injuries and losses, and allowed their psyches to