Title: Tactical Shit
Fandom: Generation Kill/Vorkosigan Saga
Characters: Brad Colbert, Piotr Vorkosigan, Amor Klyeuvi, Ray Person
Rating: PG-13
Length: 2500 words
Content notes: Marine language. Moral dilemmas above an E-5's paygrade.
Author notes: Many thanks to petra and tricksterquinn for audiencing. All errors are entirely my own doing.

Summary: One real recon. Anywhere but here.



One Alpha didn't take their turn with the dysentery until they'd already been out of Baghdad for a couple of weeks, and Brad went down as hard as any of them. As soon as the worst had passed--as soon as he could get up and move around without immediately puking or shitting himself--Brad escaped from the medics' supervision and walked out toward one of the quieter edges of the camp.

Through the very worst of it, Brad had managed to be glad that their role in this invasion had been as abbreviated as it was farcical. For as long as he was incapacitated, he'd been able to console himself that he wasn't compromising mission readiness. Now that he was functioning again, the balance tipped back. He wished more desperately than ever to be on a recon, to be doing anything that would absorb his attention and give him a reason to force his body past its limitations.

Brad stared at the dusty horizon, leaning more than he wanted to against the chain link fence, and willed himself away. One real recon. Anywhere but here.

In the next instant a gust of wind seemed to catch him--without the choking sand of a shamal, just the pressure of air against his body. Brad caught at the fence for support, but the fence was gone, and he stumbled to his knees in a dark, grassy clearing. He popped back up immediately, hands going to his MP4 as he looked around for cover or landmarks, and then he looked up and lost all situational awareness.

The stars were wrong.

Brad had been in plenty of places where he got a good long look at the night sky, and he'd taken the opportunity to study the sky whenever he'd been in Australia, or on cruises in the southern hemisphere, to say nothing of looking at the standard charts. He was confident that he could make a rough estimate of his location from anywhere on Earth. Which meant that right now, he was confident that he was nowhere near Earth.

Okay. Hallucinating. Hallucinating or experiencing some sort of science fucking fiction--

And that was as far as he got before someone, hallucination or science fiction or both, landed on his back and pressed the flat of a blade to his throat. Brad did a better job of bracing against the weight this time--not a hundred percent, but enough not to accidentally cut his own throat or wind up on his knees again.

Two more men stepped out of the trees where Brad could see them. One was holding some kind of ray gun thing. The other had a knife in his hand.

"Go ahead, Ceta spy," the one with the ray gun said. "Try and zap yourself back to your masters. You'll take Kly with you, and he'll cut your throat before you can breathe a word."

Brad considered his words carefully. He was in uniform, he had a loaded MP4 under his hands, and if this was actually happening, it was going to be obvious to anyone looking at him who he was and where he was from. (If this was actually happening they were much too far from Iraq, or the US, for it to matter.) He had no useful intelligence whatsoever, and he could not open fire--he shouldn't even fight more than he had to--while there was any possibility that he was standing in camp having a psychotic break. The guy on his back could be Ray, for fuck's sake, trying to drag him back to the medics in between shitting his guts out.

Brad licked his lips and then said, "Sergeant Brad Colbert. United States Marine Corps." Brad couldn't resist glancing up one more time--Christ, was that a moon rising over the trees?--before he added, "Earth."

None of the three said a word for nearly a minute, and then the one with knife spat to one side, shoved his weapon into a sheath, and said, "We better take this one to the General."

---

Brad was brought into a tent where the only illumination was a couple of green chem lights hanging from the ridgepole, masking colors and enhancing Brad's general sense that this was all some kind of prolonged special effects sequence. The General was a dark-haired guy in a dark-colored uniform, wearing a sword on one hip and a ray gun on the other. The sword looked heavy and battered--not some dress uniform accessory or flashy prop for fighting CGI dragons.

Brad was close enough to touch him--or would have been, if his hands weren't bound behind his back--before he realized that the General was younger than Fick, and harder than any recon Marine Brad had ever met. Whoever he was, whatever this place was, this officer and his sword had already seen real war. If he'd been a Marine instead of an alien/hallucination, Brad wouldn't have hesitated to follow him into combat.

"He says he's from Earth," said Kly, the yet-unseen man at Brad's back, who had at least traded keeping a grip on Brad's arm for riding Brad like a pony.

"Just appeared in the clearing, eh," the General said, studying Brad intently. He was about Fick's height, tall enough to only look slightly upward at Brad, and he was by far the tallest man Brad had seen here. "Like magic, Dono said. You a magician, Earth-man?"

When somebody asks you if you're a god, Brad thought, you say yes. But magicians were trickier, and he definitely didn't want to claim he knew what the hell had just happened. Brad decided to stick with what had worked so far. He could see all too clearly that they'd demand a demonstration.

"Sergeant Brad Colbert, sir. United States Marine Corps. Earth."

"'Sir'," The General repeated, with a hint of a smirk, and Brad made his face as perfectly parade-blank as he could manage.

"United States," The General went on thoughtfully instead of pressing the point. He looked, seeming to study Brad's fatigues. "Marine Corps."

He turned away and picked up Brad's MP4, obviously brought ahead to him by the guy who'd told him Brad had appeared by magic. Unlike the one who'd taken it away from Brad, he handled it with obvious respect for the weapon it was, keeping his hands well away from the trigger and the muzzle pointed up.

"This is an antique projectile weapon, pre-Jump vintage. An assault rifle of some kind. No power pack, no circuitry, and no blade."

The shadows and the green light made his expression hard to read, but Brad watched the way the General's hand moved on the MP4 and knew that he'd give an arm for enough of them to equip his troops. Brad politely did not point out that it also fired grenades. The ray guns probably did something even better, if they required power packs and circuits.

"What year did you come from, Sergeant?"

Brad blinked, but that was an obvious question, wasn't it? If the MP4 was antique, if there were humans on other worlds carrying ray guns--it might not even be another world, it might still be Earth, in some unimaginably distant future.

"Two thousand three, sir. Anno Domini or common era."

The General nodded, and then put a hand in his pocket and brought out some kind of handheld light, flicking it on as he raised it to the level of Brad's chest.

"Desert camouflage," he murmured, mostly to himself. "Pre-digital. Early twenty-first."

He raised the light to the level of Brad's face, but he didn't look him in the eye; he was squinting to one side. Brad kept still, standing as much at attention as he could with his hands behind his back, and studied the General. He had gray eyes and black hair, and his face was pale and drawn--he'd been on short rations in wooded country.

Brad jerked at the touch against the side of his neck--the General was rubbing a finger against Brad's skin. He drew it away and squinted at the dust under the hand light, then licked it.

"Sandstorm?"

Brad nodded slightly. "Just before dawn."

Because nothing livened up a tent full of guys trying not to shit themselves to death like being sandblasted.

"He's been in a desert recently, Kly," the General said, switching off the light and tucking it into his pocket again, leaving Brad half-blind. "A desert with sand the same color as his uniform. You know where they have those?"

Brad felt Kly shift behind him. "Earth, sir?"

"Earth," the General agreed. "And on Earth in the twenty-first century, the United States was, if I remember the military history I've studied, fighting a couple of wars in desert countries."

"Afghanistan's mostly mountainous, sir," Brad offered, and the General definitely smirked that time.

"Mesopotamia, then," the General said. "What did you call it?"

"Iraq," Brad said. "They named the invasion Operation Iraqi Freedom."

The General's smirk turned sour, and Kly's hand hardened on Brad's arm.

"So now that you're finished invading Iraq to free it," the General said coldly, making Brad suddenly aware of how much he'd already let himself believe the General was on his side, "what brings you here, Sergeant?"

Brad ducked his head slightly. "I was wishing I could have done one real mission, sir. One good mission. And then I was here."

"Like magic," the General said, his coldness thawing into irony. "You wished yourself into our hands, did you, Sergeant?"

Brad flexed his fingers but kept his chin up and his gaze steady. "Sir."

"Sergeant, I am General Count Piotr Vorkosigan." He leaned in, speaking almost into Brad's ear. "I inherited my title when invaders from a distant land reduced the capitol city of my district to a crater of glowing glass, to encourage us to surrender to their overpowering might. They killed my father and mother, my sisters, my brother, and the girl I had been promised to marry for most of my life. And now those same invaders believe they have conquered my world, Sergeant, but we here fight back to retake our home. We are--what would you call us, Sergeant?"

Brad bit his tongue on hajjis, which was probably wrong on every possible level, and said quietly, "Freedom fighters, sir."

"There's that word again," Vorkosigan replied, no louder. "Freedom."

You keep on using that word, Brad thought dizzily. I do not think it means what you think it means.

"Do you want a mission, Sergeant? Do you want to help me kick a bunch imperialist invaders with big guns and fancy tech out of my home? Or do you want me to hand you over to them to give them the headache you're giving me?"

"I'm a reconnaissance Marine, sir," Brad said, because whatever had brought him here, it had put him on this side, with this man. "All I want is a mission."

---

Two hours later, Brad had finally found out what Kly looked like, and was only moderately humiliated to discover that he was about fifteen years old. He'd also gotten Kly within ten yards of an occupied village full of guys in face-paint and impossibly clean uniforms. Every one of them had two or three different ray guns, and the face paint didn't hide the way they all looked perfectly well-fed and movie-star hot.

"What about that," Brad whispered, pointing to something high-tech built onto the back of a local hut. "Is that some kind of power plant?"

Kly snorted--not remotely for the first time--at Brad's staggering ignorance. "Water condenser and filtration, Sarge. They're too prissy to get their water out of our rivers."

Too prissy, or too reluctant to drink water full of their own fallout. Brad squinted down at the thing through his scope, picking out the minute details. It was just water, and if they were being at all plausible about being conquerors (liberators?) they probably gave their nice water out free to anyone who cooperated enough to ask for it. (And maybe sometimes they just took a truckload of their water to some likely street and stood there like idiots because no one was going to come out in broad daylight and ask for it.)

But they probably went through a lot of water, and it was probably some grunt who had to service the filters, and you never wanted to trust a grunt with keys if you didn't have to. So it might just be some kind of latch down there....

Brad shifted minutely in place, and for the first time in hours he let himself feel the ominous cramping of his guts.

"So," Brad whispered, "what do you think happens if somebody takes a shit in their prissy water supply?"

Kly lit up with a grin that made him look almost as young as he was, and probably twice as evil.

"Two minutes," Brad said, because just this once he was absolutely sure he wouldn't need much time. "Distract them for me for two minutes and then run home to the General."

Kly touched a finger to his forehead in silent salute, and then he was inching back through the trees while Brad made his way forward.

---

Staring down the barrel of a ray gun and wondering what the hell it was going to do to him, Brad thought, as fiercely as he had ever thought anything, There's no place like home.

The sudden light was blinding, and Brad discovered he was free to fling an arm up to cover his face. Just as he lowered it to look around--grinning to discover himself back in the middle of a desert the color of his uniform with the sun glaring down on him--he heard Ray say, "There you are, Jesus Christ, Brad, the LT has been freaking the fuck out--we all thought you crawled off alone to die."

Brad kept on grinning. Ray really didn't look anything like Kly. "I'm fine, Ray. There was just something I needed to do."

One hell of a good recon mission, no matter how far he'd had to go to find it.

"Yeah, well, you need to get the fuck back to Doc." Ray grabbed one of his hands to pull him up and then scowled down at the fresh scrapes and cuts. "You're all fucking banged up, who did you find to tangle with out here by yourself?"

The bad guys, Brad thought, and wondered if Ray could see traces of face-paint on his knuckles. Out loud he said, "Nobody, Ray. Just some kind of mirage."

"Stop fucking smiling," Ray grumbled, dragging Brad up to his feet and shoving his shoulder under Brad's armpit. They headed back toward the tents, and Brad closed his arm around Ray's shoulders, steadying Ray as much as Ray steadied him.

"Fucking mirage, what the fuck," Ray muttered, and Brad knew better than to argue with him.