Star Corps (17 page)

“Troubleshooter, huh?” She chuckled. “That's rich. A civilian Marine!”

“What?”

“A civilian Marine! We're troubleshooters too, y'know. There's trouble, we shoot it!” She cocked her thumb and forefinger, mimicking a gun. “Zzzt! Blam!” She blew across the tip of her finger. “Problem down. Area secure.”

“I see.”

“I doubt that. Ha!”

“What?”

“I was just thinking,” she said, grinning. “When we get to Ishtar, let me know how your troubleshooting works with the Frogs.”

“Uh…frogs?”

“The Ishtaran abs. The Ahannu. What are you going to do if they get out of line, slap 'em with a lawsuit?”

“I will assess the situation and report to the PanTerran director's board with my recommendations. I'll also be there
as a corporate legal representative should there be, um, jurisdictional or boundary disputes, shall we say, with any of the other Earth forces going to Ishtar.”

“I like my way better,” Horst said. She shook her head. “Give me a twenty-one-twenty with an arpeg popper any day.”

“A…what? Arpeg?”

“The Remington Arms M-12 underbarrel self-guiding rocket-propelled 20mm grenade launcher, RPG Mark Four, Mod 2, select-fire, gas-actuated, laser-tracking, self-homing round in high-explosive, armor-piercing, or delay-detonated bomblet or intel submunitions,” she said, rattling off the words as though they were a part of her, “with select-fire from an underbarrel mount configuration with the Marine-issue GE LR-2120 Sunbeam pulse laser with detachable forty-or ninety-round box magazine and targeting link through the standard Mark Seven HD linkage—”

“Whatever you say,” he replied, interrupting when she took a breath. “I'll stick to legal briefs, thank you.”

She laughed. “Washington must really be pissed with the Frogs,” she said. “Being taken down by a self-homer arpeg round is a hell of a lot cleaner than being fucking lawyered to death.”

He smiled blandly, then looked away, pointedly taking an interest in the docking approach on his seat-back screen. Clearly, he shared little in the way of language or attitude with the Marines. He wondered if PanTerra was paying him enough for this assignment.

The shuttle docked with the
Derna,
drifting gently into a berthing rack mounted on the flat underside of the reaction mass dome. A number of other TAV craft were already docked, their noses plugged into a ring of airlock modules circling the transport's core just forward of the slowly spinning hab-module access collar.

There was a slight pop as cabin pressures matched, then the Marines around him began unbuckling, floating up from their seats and forming a queue in the central aisle. He un
buckled his own harness but kept hold of the seat arm, unwilling to let himself float into that haphazard tangle of legs, arms, and torsos.

“Mr. Norris?” a voice said in his head. “Have you had zero-g experience?”

He thought-clicked on the noumenal link. “Yes,” he said. “A little, anyway.” He'd had other offworld assignments with PanTerra—on the moon, on Mars, on Vesta, and twice on mining stations in the Kuiper Belt. All had been steady-g all the way—PanTerra always sent its executives first class—but he'd endured weightlessness during boarding and at mid-trip flipovers.

“Even so, it might be best for you to remain in your seat until the Marines have moved out. A naval officer can help you board the transport and get to your deck.”

“Who is this?” He didn't recognize the noumenal ID: CS-1289. An artificial intelligence, obviously, but ship AIs generally went by the name of their vessel, and this one felt a bit broader in scope than a typical ship AI.

“You may address me as ‘Cassius,'” the voice said. “I am the executive AI component for the command constellation on this mission.”

“I see.”

“Colonel Ramsey regrets that he cannot receive you in person,” Cassius went on, “but he is still on Earth attending to the details of mission preparation. And Cicero has not yet uploaded to the
Derna
.”

“Cicero?”

“General King's AI counterpart.”

“Who's General King? I thought Ramsey was the mission commander?”

“Colonel Ramsey is the regimental commander and, as such, will have operational command on the ground at Ishtar. General King will have overall mission command, including all ground, space, and aerospace units.”

“The CEO, huh? He supervises the whole thing from orbit?”

“The analogy is a fair one, Mr. Norris. Once the Pyramid of the Eye has been secured, and assuming direct real-time communications can be reestablished between the Legation compound and Earth, General King will likely transfer his headquarters from the
Derna
to New Sumer.”

Norris nodded, then wondered if the disembodied voice in his head could see the gesture. “Gotcha,” he said. His briefing at PanTerra had covered Marine space-ground command structures and procedures in some detail, but he would need to know the people involved, not just the TO&E. General King, evidently, would be his primary target, but Ramsey would be the one to watch. He would have to get close to both men if his assignment for PanTerra was to succeed.

Waiting, only somewhat impatiently, he watched the last of the Marines float out of the aisle and through the
King Priam
's forward lock. Patience had never been one of Norris's best or most reliable assets; he needed to keep reminding himself that he was committed to a twenty-year-plus contract in objective time, that even in subjective time there was no need for hurry at all.

Angry with himself, he thought-clicked through some meditative subroutines in his implants, seeking peaceful acceptance. Within moments the medical nano in his body was subtly altering the balance of several neurochemicals, lowering his blood pressure, slowing his heart rate, inducing the patience he required.

“Mr. Norris?”

It was an external voice a human voice this time. He opened his eyes. “Yes?”

A Navy officer floated in the aisle next to his seat row. He wore dress whites and appeared very young. “I'm Lieutenant Bolton. Will you come with me, please?”

“Of course.”

The lieutenant gestured toward a storage case forward. “Uh, pardon my asking, but do you need a drag bag?”

“Drag bag?”

“Microgravity Transit Harness, sir. An MTH. To help get you—”

Norris frowned. He'd seen MTHs used in civilian spacecraft, and a more undignified mode of travel was hard to imagine. “That won't be necessary, Lieutenant. I've been in zero g before.”

“Very well, sir. If you'll just follow me?”

Grasping fabric handholds on the tops of the seats around him, Norris pulled himself gently from his seat and maneuvered his way into the aisle. For a dizzying moment his visual references spun and shifted; he'd been thinking of the cabin as having the layout of a suborbital shuttle or hypersonic TAV, with seats on the floor. During acceleration out from Earth, of course, down was aft, toward the rear of the cabin, and he felt as though he were lying on his back, but it was easy to translate that in terms of the acceleration one felt during the suborb boost from New York to Tokyo.

Now, though, all references of up and down were lost. The seats were attached to the wall, he was hanging in midair above a long drop toward the cabin's rear, and Lieutenant Bolton was swimming straight up, toward the forward lock.

It's all in your mind
, he thought, angry again. He closed his eyes, grasped the next handhold forward, and grimly pulled himself along. When he opened his eyes, just for a moment, perspectives had shifted again and he was now moving down, head first, into a well, with Lieutenant Bolton looking up at him with a worried expression. “Mr. Norris?”

“I'm
fine
, damn it,” he said. “Lead on!”

The worst parts were the twists and turns, though the airlock was small enough and without contradictory visual cues, so he could catch his breath. Damn it, when was someone going to find a way to provide constant gravity, no matter where you were on a ship or what the ship was doing at the time?

Inside
Derna
's inner hatch, a sign had been attached to
one wall saying
QUARTERDECK
, next to an American flag stretched taut by wires in the fly and hoist. Lieutenant Bolton saluted the flag, then saluted again to another naval lieutenant who floated there. “Permission to come on board.”

“Permission granted.”

An asinine ceremony, Norris thought with distaste. How did one stand at attention in zero g? Once the military got hold of one of these little rituals, they never let go.

At last they floated through a hatch and entered a cylindrical compartment with the words
DECK
and
FEET TOWARD HERE
painted in red letters on one end. Using straps on the wall, they aligned themselves with the deck, and Bolton used his implant to activate the elevator.

The device loaded into one of the rotating hab arms like a shell locking into the firing chamber of a rifle. For a disorienting moment Norris felt like he was upside down, feet hanging toward the ceiling, while the elevator's gentle acceleration away from the ship's spine induced a momentary feeling of weight. Then the sensations of spin gravity took hold and he drifted, feet down, to the deck.

The returning feeling of weight did little to soothe his bad mood. He'd never liked being weightless, with conflicting clues as to what might be up or down. The hatchway opened at last on Deck One of Hab Three. Uppermost of five decks in the module, this deck had rotation sufficient to create the sensation of about half a g, a bit more than the surface of Mars. Relishing the feeling of a solid deck beneath his feet once more, Norris strode into the lounge area surrounding the central elevator shaft.

He wrinkled his nose as he stared about the room. “What the hell is that smell? I thought this was a new ship?”

“It is, sir. New wiring, new fittings, new air circulators. All new ships smell a bit funny. Just wait until you wake up in ten years! It'll smell a lot worse, believe me!”

Norris didn't doubt the man. The interior of the hab module was clearly designed to cram as many humans into as
small a space as possible. The walls—no, on a ship they would be called bulkheads, he reminded himself irritably—the bulkheads were covered by hexagonal openings, some open and lit within, some closed, giving him the impression of being inside an immense beehive. The central area was divided into thin-walled cubicles. He glimpsed men and women in some of them, sitting at workstations or jacked into entertainment or education centers. There was also a lounge with a table—not large or spacious, but with chairs enough to sit in small groups.

“The head—that's the bathroom on board a ship—is over there,” Bolton said, pointing. “There's a common area in each hab module…Deck Two, one down from here. That's where the mess deck is, too.”

Norris eyed the hexagonal cells all around him. Each appeared to be a tiny, self-contained cabin, two meters long and a meter across, only slightly larger than a coffin. A person could lie inside, but there wasn't room to stand. “My God, how many people do you have in here?”

“On this deck? Eighty. But these are the luxury quarters, sir…for the command constellation and the officers. Decks Three and Four house two hundred personnel apiece.”

He looked around the compartment in disbelief. “Five hundred people? In
here
?”

Bolton cleared his throat. “Uh…actually, 480 just in this one hab module, sir. The
Derna
carries an entire Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit. An MIEU consists of a Regimental Landing Team, headquarters, recon, and intelligence platoons, and an aerospace close-support wing. That's twelve hundred Marines altogether, sir, plus 145 naval personnel as ship's crew. Of course, only about a quarter of that complement are on board now. The rest will be coming up over the course of the next three months.”

“Thank you for the lecture,” Norris replied dryly. “Where do you keep them all?”

“In the cells, of course,” Bolton said. “Yours is over here, sir.”

He would have to climb a ladder to reach his hexagonal cell, he found…located four up from the deck, just beneath the chamber's ceiling, or “overhead,” as Bolton called it. Inside was a thin mattress, storage compartments, data jacks and feeds, access to the ship's computer and library, and a personal medical suite; altogether, a wonder of microminiaturization.

“It's not very big, is it?” Norris was reminded of the traveler hotels, common worldwide now, but first designed in Japan a century or two back, a person-sized tube with room to sleep in and not much else.

“You won't need much space, sir,” Bolton told him. “You're scheduled for cybehibe in…” He closed his eyes, accessing the ship's net. “…twelve more days, sir. At that time, you'll be plugged into the ship's cryocybernetic system, and you won't know a thing until we reach Ishtar.”

“Twelve days.” He wondered how he was going to endure the crowding until then, and gave himself another nano boost.
Acceptance
. “Twelve fucking days.”

8
AUGUST
2138

Sick Bay
U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center
Parris Island, South Carolina
1430 hours ET

“Garroway!”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Through that hatch!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

Garroway banged through the door that had already swallowed half of Company 1099. Inside was the familiar, sterile-white embrace of seat, cabinets, AI doc, and the waiting corpsman.

“Have a seat,” the corpsman said. It wasn't the same guy he had met in there before. What was his name? He couldn't remember.

Not that it was important. New faces continually cycled through his awareness these days. Without his implants he could only memorize the important ones, the ones he was ordered to remember.

Of course, that was about to change now. He suppressed the surge of excitement.

“Feeling okay?” the corpsman asked.

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“No injuries? Infections? Allergies? Nothing like that?”

“Sir, no, sir!”

“Do you have at this time any moral or ethical problems with nanotechnic enhancement, implant technologies, or nanosomatic adjustment?”

“Sir, no, sir!”

The corpsman wasn't even looking at him as he asked the questions. He wore instead the far-off gaze of someone linked into a net and was probably scanning Garroway now with senses far more sophisticated than those housed in merely human eyes or ears.

“He's go,” the man said.

The AI doctor unfolded from the cabinet. One arm with an airjet hypo descended to his throat, and Garroway steeled himself against the hiss and burn of the injection.

“Right,” the corpsman said. “Just stay there, recruit. Give it time to work.”

This was it, at long last. It felt as though he'd been without an implant now for half his life, though in fact it had only been about six weeks. Six weeks of running, of learning, of training, all without being able to rely on an internal uplink to the local net.

It was, he thought, astonishing what you could do without a nexus of computers in your brain or electronic implants growing in your hands. He'd learned he could do amazing things without instant access to comlinks or library data.

But that didn't mean he wasn't eager to get his technic prostheses back.

Outside of a slight tingle in his throat, though, he didn't feel much of anything. Had the injection worked?

“Okay, recruit. Off you go. Through that door and join your company.”

“Sir…I don't feel—”

“Nothing to feel yet, recruit. It'll take a day or two for the implants to start growing and making the necessary neural connections. You'll be damned hungry, though. They'll be feeding you extra at the mess hall these next few days to give the nano the raw materials it needs.”

He fell into ranks with the rest of his company and waited as the last men filed through the sick bay. Damn. He'd been so excited at the prospect of getting his implants that he'd not thought about how long it might take them to grow. He'd been hoping to talk to Lynnley tonight….

He hadn't seen her, hadn't even linked with her, since arriving on Parris Island. Male and female recruits were kept strictly apart during recruit training, though he had glimpsed formations of women Marines from time to time across the grinder or marching off to one training exercise or another. The old dream of serving with her on some offworld station seemed remote right now. Had she changed much? Did she ever even think about him anymore?

Hell, of course she's changed
, he told himself.
You've changed. So has she.

He'd been on the skinny side before, but two months of heavy exercise and special meals had bulked him up, all of the new mass muscle. His endurance was up, his temper better controlled, the periodic depression he'd felt subsumed now by the daily routine of training, exercise, and discipline.

And a lot of things that had been important to him once simply didn't matter now.

He had been allowed to vid family grams to his mother, out in San Diego. She was still living with her sister and beginning the process of getting a divorce. That was good, he thought, as well as long overdue. There were rumors of unrest in the Mexican territories—Recruit Training Center monitors censored the details, unfortunately—and scuttlebutt about a new war.

He kept thinking about what Lynnley had said, back in Guaymas, about him having to fight down there against his own father.

Well, why not? He felt no loyalty to that bastard, not after the way he'd treated his mother. So far as he was concerned, he'd shed the man's parental cloak when he'd reclaimed the name Garroway.

“Garroway!” Makowiecz barked.

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Come with me.”

The DI led him down a corridor and ushered him into another room with a brusque “In there.”

A Marine major, a tall, slender, hard-looking woman in dress grays, sat behind a desk inside.

“Sir! Recruit Garroway reporting as ordered, sir!” In the Corps, to a recruit,
all
officers were “sir” regardless of gender, along with most other things that moved.

“Sit down, recruit,” the woman said. “I'm Major Anderson, ComCon Delta Sierra two-one-nine.”

He took a seat, wondering if he'd screwed up somehow. Geez…it had to be something pretty bad for a major to step in. During their day-to-day routine, Marine recruits rarely if ever saw any officer of more exalted rank than lieutenant or captain. From a recruit's point of view, a major was damned near goddesslike in the Corps hierarchy, and actually being
addressed
by one, summoned to her office, was…daunting, to say the least.

And a comcon? That meant she was part of a regular headquarters staff, probably the exec of a regiment. What could she possibly want with him?

“I've been going over your recruit training records, Garroway,” she told him. “You're doing well. All three-sixes and higher for physical, psych, and all phase one and two training skills.”

“Sir, thank you, sir.”

“No formal marriage or family contracts. Your parents alive, separated.” She paused, and he wondered what she was getting at. “Have you given much thought yet to duty stations after you leave the island?”

That stopped him. Recruits were
not
asked to voice their preferences, especially by majors. “Uh…sir, uh…this recruit…”

“
Relax,
Garroway,” Anderson told him. “You're not on the carpet. Actually, I'm screening members of your platoon for potential volunteers. I'm looking for Space Marines.”

And that rocked him even more. He'd wanted to be a Marine for as long as he could remember, true, ever since he'd learned about his famous leatherneck ancestors, but the real lure to the Corps had always been the possibility of offworld duty stations. The vast majority of Marines never left the Earth; most served out their hitches in the various special deployment divisions tasked with responding to brushfire wars and threats to the Federal Republic's interests around the globe.

A very special few, however…

“You're asking me to volunteer for space duty?” Excitement put him on the edge of the seat, leaning forward. “I mean, um, sir, this recruit thinks that, uh—”

“Why don't we drop the formalities, John? That third-person recruit crap gets in the way of real communication.”

“Thank you, si—uh, ma'am.” He sighed, then took a deep breath, trying to force himself to relax. The excitement was almost overwhelming. “I…yes. I would be
very
interested in volunteering for a duty station offworld.”

“You might want to hear about it first,” she cautioned. “I'm not talking about barracks duty on Mars.” She went on to tell him, in brief, clipped sentences, about MIEU-1, a Marine expeditionary unit tasked with a high-profile rescue-recovery mission at Llalande 21185 IID, the Earthlike moon of a gas giant eight light-years distant.

“That's where the human slaves are, right, ma'am?” he asked her. The newsfeeds had been full of the story around the time he'd signed up. The enforced e-feed blackout during his training period had pretty well cut him off from all news of the outside world, but there'd been plenty of rumor floating around the barracks for the past couple of months. “We're going out there to free the slaves?”

“We are going to protect federal interests in the Llalande system,” she replied, her voice firm. “Which means we'll do whatever the President directs us to do. The main thing you have to think about right now is whether you want to volunteer for such a mission. Objective time will be at
least
twenty years. Ten years out in cyhibe, ten back, plus however long it takes us to complete our mission requirements. Things change in twenty years. We won't be coming back to the same place we left.”

That sobered him. His mother was, what? Forty-one? She'd be sixty-one or older by the time he saw her again. Regular anagathic regimens and nanotelemeric reconstruction made sixty middle age for most folks nowadays, but twenty years was still a hell of a chunk out of a person's life. How much would he still have in common with any of the people he left behind?

“We'll be in hibernation for the whole trip?”

“Hell, yes! That transport is going to be damned cozy for thirteen hundred or so people. We'd kill each other off long before we reached the mission objective if we weren't. Besides, they wouldn't be able to pack that much food, water, and air for that long a flight.”

“No, ma'am.” In a way, he was disappointed. Part of his dream included the thrill of the journey itself, flying out from Earth on one of the great interplanetary clippers or boosting for the stars on a near-
c
torchship.

Anderson was accessing some records with a faraway look in her eyes. “I'm checking your evaluations,” she told him. “Your DI thinks highly of you. Did you know you're up for selection for embassy duty?”

“Huh? I mean, no, ma'am.” The way Makowiecz and the other DIs kept riding him, he'd not even been sure they were going to recommend him for retention in the Corps, much less…embassy duty? That was supposed to be the softest, best duty in the Corps, standing guard at the UFR embassy in some out-of-the-way world capital. You had to be absolutely top-line Marine for a billet like that, and be able to keep yourself and your uniform in recruiting poster form. But the duty was the stuff dream sheets were made of…

“It's true,” she told him. “And I won't bullshit you. The Ishtar mission
is
a combat op. We'll be going in hot, weapons free, assault mode. The abos are primitive, but they
have some high-tech quirks that are guaranteed to raise some damned nasty surprises. So…what'll it be? A soft billet at an embassy? Or a sleeper slot and a hot LZ?”

He knew what he wanted. Plush as embassy duty was supposed to be, he'd always thought the reality would be boring. In fact, most duty Earthside would be boring, punctuated by the occasional day or two of truly exciting discomfort, pain, and fear during a combat TAV deployment to some war-torn corner of the planet. The Llalande mission might be hardship duty and combat, but it was offworld…as far offworld, in fact, as he was ever likely to get.

It would be what being a Marine was all about.

“Um, ma'am?”

“Yes?”

“I have a friend who joined up the same time I did. Recruit Collins. She's in one of the female recruit training platoons.”

“And…?”

“I was just wondering if she was being asked to volunteer too, ma'am.”

“I see.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “And that would determine your answer?”

“Uh, well…”

“John, you presumably joined the Corps of your own free will. You didn't join because she joined, did you?”

“No, ma'am.” Well, not entirely. The idea of signing up together, maybe getting the same duty station afterward, had been part of the excitement. Part of the thrill and promise.

But not all of it.

“I'm glad to hear it. Contrary to popular belief, the Corps does not want mindless robots in its ranks. We want strong, aggressive young men and women who can make up their own minds, who serve because they believe, truly believe, that what they are doing is right. There is no room in my Corps for people who simply follow the crowd. Or who have no deeper commitment to the Corps than the fact that a buddy joined up. Do you copy?”

“Sir, yes…I mean, yes, ma'am.”

“I'm sure your DI has drilled this line into your skull, even without implants. The Corps is your family now. Mother. Father. Sib. Friend. Lover. In a way, you cast off your connections with everyone else when you came on board, as completely as you will if you volunteer for Ishtar and report on board the
Derna
for a twenty-year hibe slot. You will have changed that much. You've already changed more than you imagine. You'll never go back to that old life again.”

“No, ma'am.” But he wasn't talking about a civilian friend. Why didn't she understand?

“And you also know by now that the Corps cannot be run for your convenience. Sometimes, like now, you're given a choice. A carefully crafted choice, within tightly defined parameters, but a choice, nonetheless. You must make your decision within the parameters that the Corps gives you. That's part of the price you pay for being a Marine.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“So. What'll it be? I can't promise you'll end up stationed with Recruit Collins, no matter what you decide. No one can. The question is, what do you want for yourself?”

He straightened in his chair. There still was no question what he wanted most. “
Sir,
this recruit wishes to volunteer for the Ishtar billet,
sir,
” he said, slipping back into the programmed third-person argot of the well-drilled Marine recruit.