Kitabı oxu: «Star Strike»
STAR STRIKE
BOOK ONE OF THE INHERITANCE TRILOGY
IAN DOUGLAS
To CJ and Garin, good friends who saw me through rough times. And, as always, for Brea.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Keep it simple. Secure the spaceport. Hold until relieved.
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Epilogue
Also by Ian Douglas
Copyright
About the Publisher
Acknowledgments
My special thanks to David Plottel, friend, programmer, mathematician, and ubergeek, for his insights into Leonhard Euler and the God-equation known as Euler’s Identity.
Keep it simple. Secure the spaceport. Hold until relieved.
Nothing new there.
Remember your training.
The question was whether the landings would be enough. Alighan was a heavily populated world in the Theocracy of Islam, with over two billion people in the ocean-girdled world’s teeming cities. The Marine assault force consisted of the four companies of the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, a total of five hundred eighty men and women … against an entire world.
True, they were exceptionally well armed and armored men and women, and they seemed—for the moment at least—to have the element of surprise. Even so, fewer than six hundred Marines against a population of two billion who would fight to the death and take as many Marines with them as they could.
Impossible.
Ridiculously impossible.
But the United Star Marines specialized in the impossible, as they and their predecessors had done for the past eleven hundred years …
Prologue
Deep within the star clouds of the Second Galactic Spiral Arm, a sentient machine detected the blue-white shriek of tortured hydrogen atoms, and a program hundreds of thousands of years ancient switched from stand-by to active. Something was out there … something massive, something moving at very nearly the speed of light.
Even the hardest interstellar vacuum contains isolated flecks of matter—hydrogen atoms, mostly, perhaps one per cubic centimeter or so. The object’s high-speed passage plowed through these atoms, ionizing many, leaving a boiling hiss in its wake easily detectable by appropriately sensitive instrumentation. The disturbance was a kind of wake, created by a mass of some hundreds of millions of tons plowing through the tenuous matter of the interstellar void at near-c.
The sentry machine had taken up its lonely vigil half a million years before, during the desperate and no-quarter war of extermination against the Associative, a war that had laid waste to ten thousand suns and countless worlds scattered across a third of the Galaxy. Occasionally, it conversed with others of its kind—a means of staying sane through the millennia—but for most of its existence it had been asleep, dreaming the eldritch dreams of a being neither wholly mechanism, nor wholly biological.
The builders of the Sentry called themselves something that might have translated, very approximately, as “We Who Are.” Other species across light centuries of space and hundreds of millennia called them many other things. The inhabitants of Earth, once, had called them “Xul,” a name that in ancient Sumeria had come to mean “demon.”
A far older civilization had called them the Hunters of the Dawn.
However they were known to themselves or to others, how they were identified was less important for their view of themselves than was their evolutionary imperative, the drive, refined over millions of years, that made them what they were. For the Xul, existence—more, survival—was an absolute, the defining characteristic of their universe. In their worldview, survival meant eliminating all potential competition. Their culture did not have anything like religion, but if it had, their religion would have been a kind of Darwinian dogmatism, with the fact that they had so far survived serving as proof that they were, indeed, the fittest.
For the Xul, the first requirement for continued survival was the detection and identification of potential threats to existence. An object with the mass of a fair-sized asteroid traveling through the Galaxy at near-c velocities indicated both sentience and a technology that might represent a serious threat.
With an analytical detachment more characteristic of the computers in its ancestry than of organic beings, the Sentry tracked the disturbance through local space. A ripple twisted the fabric of space/time, and the Sentry shifted across light-years, emerging alongside the massive object, traveling at precisely the object’s velocity.
At this speed, a hair’s breadth short of the speed of light itself, the universe appeared weirdly and beautifully compressed, a ring of solid starlight encircling the heavens slightly ahead of the hurtling vessels. With the patient calm of a lifespan measured in millennia, the Sentry reached out with myriad senses, tasting the anomalous traveler.
Outwardly, the object was an ordinary asteroid, a carbonaceous chondrite of fairly typical composition, with a dusty, pocked surface of such a dark gray color as to be nearly coal black. Outwardly, there was no indication of intelligent design—no lights, no artificial structures on the surface, no thruster venturis or other obvious clues to the object’s propulsive system. Even the high velocity might be an artifact … a souvenir of a long-ago close-passage of a black hole or neutron star, with the resultant slingshot effect whipping a random, dead rock to within one percent of c.
But the Sentry’s gentle probings elicited other evidence, proof that the fast-moving object was both the product of technology and inhabited. A steady trickle of neutrinos proved the presence of hydrogen fusion plants, providing power for life-support and secondary systems. The tick and flux of even more subtle, virtual particles revealed the operation of a quantum effect power system, tapping the base state of space itself for the energies necessary to move that much mass at that high a speed. The drive was quiescent now, but the potential remained, a subtle aura of shifting energies representing fields and forces that might engage at any moment. Perhaps most telling of all, a powerful shield composed of interplaying gravitic and magnetic fields swept space far ahead of the starship—for starship is what the object was—clearing its path of stray subatomic particles lest they strike rock and cascade into deadly secondary radiation, frying the ship’s passengers as they slept away the objective decades.
For passengers there were—some fifty thousand of them, stored in a cybernetic hibernation that let them pass decades of subjective time without the need for millions of tons of food, water, and other expendables. At the moment, the only member of the starship’s crew that was actually awake was a being far more closely related, in its basic nature, to the Sentry than it was to the slumbering beings in its care, a sentient computer program named Perseus.
For over five hundred years, Perseus had overseen the routine operation of the asteroid starship and her refugee passengers, monitoring drive systems and power plant, life support and cybe-hibe stasis capsules. The ship, christened Argo, had fled distant Earth a few years after the devastating attack on that world by the Xul; her destination was another galaxy entirely, M-31, in Andromeda, something over two million light-years distant.
The voyage as planned would take almost 2.3 million years objective, but on board the clocks would record the passage of barely thirty years. Argo’s sleeping passengers, for the most part, were members of Earth’s political and economic elite. Many were representatives of the governments of the United States and of the American Union who’d felt Humankind’s only hope of survival lay in avoiding all-out war with the technologically advanced Xul, in escaping the enemy’s notice, in fleeing to another galaxy entirely and beginning anew.
Their decision proved to be a supreme exercise in wishful thinking. The Xul sentry engaged Perseus as the sentient program was still shifting to full operational mode. It had time to engage a single emergency comm channel before the Xul group-mind overwhelmed it in an electronic cascade of incoming data.
Parts of Perseus were hijacked by the alien operating system; others were wiped away, or simply stored for later exploration.
And within the Argo-planetoid’s heart, fifty thousand human minds cried out as one as they were patterned and replicated by the intruder. Moments later, the asteroid’s immense kinetic energy was instantly transformed into heat and light, bathing the Xul Sentry in the actinic glare of a tiny nova.
By the Xul way of thinking, the asteroid starship represented both a threat and unfinished business.
Neither could be tolerated.
1
0407.1102
Green 1, 1-1 Bravo
Alighan
0340/38:22 hours, local time
The Specters descended over the Southern Sea, slicing north through turbulent air, their hulls phase-shifted so that they were not entirely within the embrace of normal space. Shifted, they were all but invisible to radar, and little more than shadows to human eyes, shadows flickering across a star-clotted night.
On board Specter One-one Bravo, Gunnery Sergeant Charel Ramsey sat huddled pauldron-to-pauldron with the Marines locked in to either side of him. The squad bay was red lit and crowded, a narrow space barely large enough to accommodate a platoon of forty-eight Marines in full Mark 660 assault battlesuits. He tried once again to access the tacnet, and bit off a curse when all that showed within the open mindwindow was static. They were going in blind, hot and blind, and he didn’t like the feeling. If the Muzzies got twitchy and started painting their southern sky with plasma bolts or A.M. needlers, phase-shifting would not protect them in the least.
“They’re holding off on the drones,” Master Sergeant Adellen said over the tac channel, almost as if she were reading his mind. Likely she was as nervous as the rest of the Marines in the Specter’s belly. She just hid it better than most. “They don’t want to tip the grounders off that we’re on final.”
“Yeah, but it would be nice to see where the hell we’re going,” Corporal Takamura observed. “We can’t see shit through the LV’s optics.”
That was not entirely true, of course. Ramsey had a window open in his mind linked through to the feed from the Specter’s cockpit. Menu selections gave him a choice of views—through cameras forward or aft, in visible light, lowlight, or infrared, or a computer-generated map of the planet that showed twelve green triangles in a double-chevron formation moving toward the still-distant coastline. Ramsey had settled on the map view, since the various optical feeds showed little now but water, clouds, and stars.
The MLV-44 Specter Marine Landing Vehicles were large and slow, with gull wings and fusion thrusters that gave them somewhat more maneuverability than a falling brick, but not much. Each mounted a pair of AI-controlled high-speed cannon firing contained micro-antimatter rounds as defense against incoming missiles, but they relied on stealth and surprise for survival, not firepower, and certainly not armor. A Specter’s hull could shield those on board from the searing heat of atmospheric entry, but a mag-driven needle or even a stray chunk of high-energy shrapnel could puncture its variform shell with shocking ease. Ramsey had seen the results of shrapnel impact on a grounded Specter before, on Shamsheer and on New Tariq.
The Specter jolted hard, suddenly and unexpectedly, and someone vented a sharp curse. They were falling into denser air, passing through the cloud deck, and things were getting rougher.
“One more of those,” Sergeant Vallida said, her voice bitter, “and Private Dowers gets jettisoned.”
“Hey, Sarge! I didn’t do anything!”
“Don’t pick on Dowers,” Adellen said. “He didn’t know.”
“Yeah, but he should have. Fucking nectricots. …”
It was rank superstition, of course. Even if it went back over a thousand years. Maybe it was the sheer age of the tradition that gave it so much power. But somehow, back in the twentieth or twenty-first century, it had become an article of faith that if a Marine ate the apricots in his ration pack before boarding an alligator or other armored transport, the vehicle would break down. Over the centuries, the focus of the curse had gradually shifted from apricots to genegineered nectricots, but the principle remained the same.
And Ela Vallida had walked in on Dowers back on board the Kelley just before the platoon had saddled up that morning, to find him happily slurping down the last of the nectricots in his drop rats. Dowers was a fungie, fresh out of RTC, and not yet fully conversant with the bewildering labyrinth of tradition and history within which every Marine walked.
“Fucking fungie,” Vallida added.
“Belay that, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Jones growled. First Platoon’s CO wasn’t evenly physically present on the squad bay deck; the eltee was topside somewhere, plugged into the C3 suite behind the Specter’s cockpit, but she obviously was staying linked in on the platoon chat line. “Chew on him after One-one Bravo craps out, and you have something to bitch about.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Vallida replied. But Ramsey still heard the anger in her voice.
Likely, he thought, it was just the stress. This was always the roughest part of a Marine landing, the long, agonizing wait, sealed into a tin can that was flying or swimming toward God-knew what kind of defenses. Did the Alighani Muzzies know the Marines were coming? What was waiting for them at the objective?
How many of the men and women sealed into this Specter were going to be alive an hour from now? …
Don’t even think about that, Ramsey told himself. It’s bad ju-ju. …
Not that he actually believed in luck, of course … or in the power of nectricot curses. But he didn’t know anyone who’d survived the hell of modern combat who didn’t engage in at least a few minor superstitious behaviors, and that included Ramsey himself. He never went into combat without a neumenal image of his Marine father watching from a minimized mindwindow. Totally irrational, he knew.
His mental gaze shifted to the tiny, mental image of Marine Master Sergeant Danel Jostin Ramsey, resplendent in his dress blacks … an image recorded just days before the landings on Torakara.
The Specter gave another hard lurch. According to the feed from the cockpit, it was raining outside now, and lightning flared behind the clouds ahead. The mission planners had chosen to insert through a large, tropical storm, taking advantage of lightning and rain to shield the assault group’s approach for a precious few seconds longer.
“Listen up, people,” Lieutenant Jones’ voice said over the platoon net. “We’re three minutes out, and about to drop below the cloud deck. Remember your training, remember your mission downloads. Keep it simple! We secure the spaceport, and we hold until relieved. Ooh-rah?”
“Ooh-rah!” the platoon chorused back at her.
Seconds later, a loud thump announced the release of the battlezone sensor pods, and the main tactical feed came on-line as thousands of thumb-sized microfliers were shot-gunned into the skies ahead of the assault group. Ramsey opened a mental window, and entered a computer-generated panorama of ocean, and the coastline to the north. Red pinpoints illuminated the coast, marking generators, vehicles, and other power-producing facilities or units. The spaceport was marked in orange, the Fortress in white, with sullen red patterns submerged within the graphics, indicating the main power plants.
As he watched, more power sources winked on. That might be an illusion generated by the fact that more and more BZ pods were entering the combat area, but it also might mean the enemy had been alerted and was waking up.
But so far, the skies were quiet, save for the flash of lightning and the sweeping curtains of rain.
Remember your training. Yeah … as if that were a problem. Remember your downloads. Their mission parameters had been hard-loaded into their cephlink RAM. It wasn’t like you could freaking forget. …
Keep it simple. Secure the spaceport. Hold until relieved.
Nothing new there, either.
The question was whether the landings would be enough. Alighan was a heavily populated world in the Theocracy of Islam, with over two billion people in the ocean-girdled world’s teeming cities. The Marine assault force codenamed Green 1 consisted of the four companies of the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, a total of 580 men and women … against an entire world.
True, they were exceptionally well armed and armored men and women, and they seemed—for the moment at least—to have kept the element of surprise. Even so, fewer than six hundred Marines against a population of two billion …
Impossible.
Ridiculously impossible.
But the United Star Marines, once the United States Marines, specialized in the impossible, as they and their predecessors had done for the past eleven hundred years.
Alighan. The name was derived from the Arabic term for “God is Guardian,” and the name suited the place. The system of five rocky planets orbiting a K0 star was strategically positioned along the New Dubai trade route, a channel for ninety percent of the interstellar shipping between the Heart Worlds and the Theocracy. Control Alighan, and you controlled access to the Islamic state … or to the Heart Worlds, depending on which way your battlefleet was headed. Scuttlebutt had it that the Terran Military Command wanted Alighan as an advance base for deeper strikes into Theocratic space.
The key, of course, was the planetary starport, AI Meneh, “The Port,” which doubled as the system capital. The battle-ops plan called for the Marines to seize and hold the starport. Within a standard day—two at the most—the Navy transports would arrive from Kresgan, bringing with them the Army’s 104th Planetary Assault Division, the 43rd Heavy Armored Division, and elements of the 153rd Star Artillery Brigade and the 19th Interstellar Logistical Support Group.
And the Marines, those who’d survived, would be off to their next planethead.
Five hundred planetary assault Marines against two billion Muslim fanatics. …
Ramsey shook his head, a gesture unseen within the massive helmet of his 660-ABS. In fact, the vast majority of the local population would not be fanatics. Most of the population down there would be ordinary folks who wanted nothing more than to be left alone, especially by their own government.
But experience gained so far in the present war—and in other wars fought against the Theocracy and similar governments over the past eleven centuries—taught that the ones who did fight would do so with all their heart and soul, with no thought of quarter, and with no mind for the usual rules of war.
They would fight to the death, and they would take as many Marines with them as they could.
So far as the Marines of the 55th MARS were concerned, they would be happy to help the Muzzies find their longed-for medieval paradise.
Without going with them.
USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
0455/24:20 local time, 1513 hrs GMT
“Gods and goddesses, Jesus, Buddha, and fucking Lao Tse! Those fat-assed bastards up in Ring City are trying to fucking destroy my Corps! …”
Gunnery Sergeant Michel Warhurst stopped his pacing in front of the ragged line of recruit trainees and shook his head sadly. “You maggots are trying to fucking destroy my Corps! My beloved Corps! And I am here this morning to let you know that I will not stand for that!”
Recruit Private Aiden Garroway stood at a civilian’s approximation of attention, staring past the glowering drill instructor’s shoulder and off into the velvet, star-riddled blackness of the Martian night. After a brief flight down from the Arean Ring, he and his fellow recruits had been unceremoniously hustled off the shuttle, herded into line by screaming assistant DIs, and were now being formally inducted into Recruit Company 4102 by the man who would rule their lives for the next sixteen weeks.
He was actually enjoying the show, as the drill instructor paraded back and forth in front of the line of recruits. Three assistant DIs stood a few meters away, two glowering, one grinning with what could only be described as evil anticipation.
He’d been expecting this speech, of course, or something very close to it. For the past two years, ever since he’d decided to escape a dead-end jack-in and shallow friends by enlisting in the United Star Marines, he’d lived and breathed the Corps. Boot camp, he knew, would be rough, and it would begin with exactly this kind of heavy-handed polemics, a strategy honed over the centuries to break down the attitudes and preconceptions of a hundred-odd kids with civilian outlooks and build them back up into Marines. It was part of a tradition extending back over a thousand years … and it self-evidently worked.
And getting through boot camp, he’d decided, wouldn’t be all that tough, not for him. After all, he knew what it was all about. He knew …
“What the fuck are you daydreaming about, maggot!?”
The DI’s face had appeared centimeters in front of his own as if out of nowhere, contorted by rage, eyes staring, mouth wide open, blasting into Garroway’s face with hurricane force. The sheer suddenness and volume forced him to take a step back. …
“And where the fuck do you think you’re going, you slimy excuse for an Ishtaran mudworm? Get back here and toe that line! I am not done with you, maggot, not by ten thousand fucking light-years, and when I am done you will know it! Drop to the sand! Give me fifty, right here!”
Startled, Garroway swallowed, looked at Warhurst, and stammered out a “S-sorry, sir!”
The senior drill instructor’s face blended fury with thunderstruck. “What did you say?”
“I’m sorry, sir!”
“What did you just call me? Gods and goddesses of the Eternal Void, I can’t believe what I just heard!” Warhurst brought one blunt finger up a hair’s breadth away from Garroway’s nose. “First of all, maggot, I did not give you permission to squeak! None of you will squeak unless I or one of the assistant drill instructors here gives your sorry ass permission to squeak! Is that understood?”
Garroway wasn’t sure whether a response was called for, but suspected this was one of those cases where he would get into trouble whether he replied or not. He remained mute, eyes focused somewhere beyond Warhurst’s left shoulder.
“Give me an answer, recruit!” Warhurst bellowed. “Is that understood?”
“Yes, sir!”
“What?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Second of all, for your information my name is not ‘Sorry.’ So far as you putrid escapees from a toilet bowl are concerned, I am sir!” He turned away from Garroway and strode up the line, bellowing. “In fact, so far as you mudworms are concerned, I am God, but you will always address me as ‘sir!’ If you have permission to address me or any of the other drill instructors behind me, the first word and the last word out of your miserable, sorry shithole mouths will be ‘sir!’ All of you! Do I make myself abundantly clear?”
Several in the line of recruits chorused back with, “Sir, yes, sir!” A few, however, forgot to start with the honorific, and most said nothing at all, or else mumbled along.
“What was that? I couldn’t hear that!”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“What?!”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
Warhurst turned again to glower into Garroway’s face. “Third! Recruits will not refer to themselves as ‘I’! You are not an I! None of you rates an I! If for any reason you are required to refer to your miserable selves, you will not use the first person, but you will instead say ‘this recruit!’ That goes for all of you! Is that clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“Fourth! If I give you an order, you will not say ‘sir, yes, sir!’ You will reply with the correct Marine response, and say ‘Sir, aye, aye, sir!’ You are not Marines and you may never be Marines, but by all the gods of the Corps you will sound like Marines! Is that clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” came back, though it was made ragged by a few shouted “Sir, aye, aye, sirs.” The recruits were all looking a bit wild-eyed now, as confusion and sensory overload began to overwhelm them.
Garroway thought Warhurst was going to explode at the company for using the wrong response. Reaching the left end of the line, he spun sharply and charged back to the right. “Idiots! I ask for recruits and they give me deaf, dumb, and blind idiots!” Turning again, he charged back to the left, raw power and fury embodied in a spotlessly crisp Marine dress black-C uniform. “Get the shit out of your ears! If I ask a question requiring a response of either ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ you will say ‘sir,’ then give me a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ as required, and then you will again say ‘sir!’” Stopping suddenly at the center of the line, he turned and bellowed, “Is that clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“And when I give you an order, you will respond with ‘sir, aye, aye, sir!’ Remember that! ‘Aye, aye’ means ‘I understand and I will obey!’ Is that understood?”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
Garroway was impressed. Under the DI’s unrelenting barrage, the line of recruits, until moments ago a chaotic mélange of individually mumbled responses, was actually starting to chorus together, and with considerable feeling … but then the DI was back in his face once again, eye to eye, screaming at him. “What the hell are you doing on your feet, maggot? I gave you a direct order! I told you to give me fifty! That’s fifty push-ups!”
Damn! Garroway had been as confused as the rest, stunned into unthinking immobility by the DI’s performance. He dropped to the ground, legs back, arms holding his body stiffly above the sand, and started to perform the first push-up, but then Warhurst was hauling him upright by the scruff of his neck, dangling him one-handed above the sand, still screaming. “I did not hear you acknowledge the order I gave you, mudworm!”
“Sir, yes, sir! Uh, I mean, aye, aye, sir!”
“What was that?”
“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”
Warhurst released him. “Gimme those fifty goddamn push-ups!”
“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”
Garroway dropped again and began cranking out the push-ups. He’d worked out a lot over the past couple of years, knowing that this sort of thing would be routine. He’d also spent a lot of time recently working in the Recovery Projects back on Earth. There he massed a full 85 kilos, so he had a bit of an advantage of some of the other kids in the line. On Mars, he only weighed 32 kilos, compared to the 60 kilos he carried at his home level in the Ring.
So right now he weighed half what he normally did, and was feeling pretty strong, even competent. The push-ups came swiftly and easily as Warhurst continued to parade up and down the line of recruits, finding fault everywhere, screaming invectives at the other recruits. Before long, Garroway wasn’t the only one doing push-ups. He completed his count and stood at attention once more, surprised to find he was breathing harder, now. In fact, his chest was burning.
The Martian air was painfully thin, despite the nanochelates in his lungs that incrçased the efficiency of his breathing. The terraformers had been reshaping Mars for almost four centuries, now, hammering it with icebergs to begin with, but more recently using massive infusions of nanodecouplers to free oxygen from the planet-wide rust and restore the ancient Martian atmosphere. For the past two centuries, the air had been breathable, at least with nanotechnic augmentation, but it was still thin, cold, and carried a harsh taste of sand and chemicals.
Abruptly, as if at the throw of a switch, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst’s fury was gone. Instead, he seemed relaxed, almost paternal. “Very well, children,” he said, standing before them with his hands on his hips. “You have just had your first fifteen minutes of Marine indoctrination and training … an ancient and hallowed tradition we refer to as ‘boot camp.’ Each of you has volunteered for this. Presumably, that means each of you wants to be here. I certainly understand that desire. The Marines are the best there are, no question about it.
“However, I want each and every one of you to take a moment and think very hard about this decision you’ve made. Behind you is the shuttle that brought you down from the Arean Ring. If for any reason you are having second thoughts, I want you to turn around right now and plant your ass back on board that shuttle. You will be flown back up to the Arean Ring, where you can retrieve your civilian clothing, have a nice hot meal, and make arrangements to go home. No questions asked. No one will think the less of you.” He paused. “How about it? Any takers?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Garroway sensed movement down the line to his left. Someone was wavering … and then he heard the sound of footsteps in the sand, moving toward the rear. He didn’t dare look, however. The formation was still at attention, and he had a feeling that if he turned his head to look, Warhurst’s sudden nice-guy persona would vanish as abruptly as it had begun.
“Smart boy,” Warhurst said, nodding. “Anybody else? This will be your last chance. If you miss that shuttle … then for the next sixteen weeks you will be mine.”
Garroway thought he heard someone else leave the line, but he wasn’t sure. He knew he wasn’t going to quit, not now. He was going to be a Marine. …
“Handley!” Warhurst snapped, addressing one of the recruits. “Eyes front!”
“Sir! Aye, aye, sir!”
A long silence passed. Warhurst stood before them, his head down, as if he were listening to something. Then he looked up. “I want each of you to open your primary inputs. Full immersion.”
Garroway did so. His neurocranial link implants opened to a local feed coming down from the Martian Ring. It was coded, but each had received the appropriate clearances up at the receiving station.
There was a moment’s mental static, followed by the always odd feeling of standing in two places at once …
… and then Garroway was standing on another world.
It was night there, as it was at Noctis Labyrinthus. It was also raining, though the link was not transmitting the feel of the rain on his skin, or the bluster of the wind.
He could see, however, a formation of Marine landing vehicles skimming in a few meters above the surf and spray of a beach, their black hulls shimmering as they phased into full solidity, their variform shells unfolding into landing configuration. Lightning flared … or perhaps it was a plasma bolt fired from the shore. It was tough sorting out exactly what was happening, because there was a great deal of noise and movement.
One of the landing vehicles crumpled with nightmare suddenness in midair, flame engulfing its gull-winged form, the wreckage tumbling out of the sky and slamming into the surf in a crashing fountain of spray and steam. Plasma bolt, Garroway thought. An instant later, a beam of dazzling incandescence struck down out of the black overcast, a white flash starkly illuminating the beach and the incoming formation as it lanced the squat building from which the plasma bolt had been fired. The explosion further lit the night, as the first of the shape-shifting landing craft began touching down.
In his mind, Garroway turned, watching as other craft passed overhead. There was a city behind the beach … and what looked like a large and sprawling spaceport. Beams of light continued to spear out of the angry heavens, vaporizing enemy hardpoints.
And now, individual Marines were appearing in their cumbersome combat armor, bounding through flame and smoldering wreckage and sand dunes to close with the enemy.
“This,” Warhurst’s voice said in Garroway’s head, “is taking place on a world called Alighan, about four hundred light-years from where you’re standing right now. There’s a slight delay in the feed, but, within the uncertainties imposed by the physics of FTL simultaneity and the time lag down from the Arean Ring, it is happening more or less as you see it. The image is being relayed from our battlefleet straight back to HQ USMC. Colonel Peters thought you should see this.”
More Marines surged across the beach, sweeping toward the outer Alighan beach defenses. Other landing craft had passed over those bunkers and gun emplacements and were settling to ground on the spaceport itself. Fire continued to lance out of the sky, pinpoint bombardments called down by Marine spotters. Garroway found he could hear some of the chatter in the background, a babble of call signs, orders, and acknowledgments.
“The Islamic Theocracy,” Warhurst went on, “has blocked several key trade routes into their territory. Worse, they have supported terrorist incursions into Commonwealth Space, seized Commonwealth vessels, and are suspected of holding Commonwealth citizens as slaves.
“As you should know by now, the sole purpose of the U.S. Marine Corps is to protect Commonwealth worlds and Commonwealth citizens. To that end, a naval battlefleet and a Marine Expeditionary Force have been dispatched to effect a change in the Theocrat government. Their first step is to capture the spaceport you see in the distance, so that Army troops can land and occupy the planet.
“The politics of the situation are unimportant, however. Marines go where they’re sent. They do what they’re told to do. They do so at the behest of the United Star Commonwealth, and the Commonwealth Command Authority. All very nice, neat, and clean. …
“But this, children, is what modern combat really is.”
The scene around Garroway was rapidly becoming a burning nightmare out of some primitive religion’s hell. With a mental command, his point of view drifted up from the beach toward the spaceport, where the heaviest fighting was now taking place. The landing craft all were down now—those that had survived the approach. Upon touching down, their fuselages had broken into sections, becoming automated mobile gun platforms; the wing, cockpit, and spine assemblies then each had lifted off once more, becoming airborne gunships that darted across the scene like immense, spindly insects, spewing plasma bolts and blazing streams of autocannon fire. And individual Marines, forty-eight to each LV, fanned out across the flame-tortured landscape, hunting down the enemy one gun position or hardpoint at a time. Overhead, Marine A-90 Cutlass sky-support attack craft darted and swooped like hideously visaged black hornets, locking in on ground targets and blasting them with devastating fire.
Clouds of gray fog swept over the landscape from different directions—combat nano and countemano, waging their submicroscopic battles in the air and on the ground. Disassemblers released by the Muzzies were seeking out Marines and vehicles, while the counter-clouds roiling off Marine armor and vehicles sought to neutralize them. The result was a deadly balance; in places, the ground was melting, the rain hissing into steam.
Almost in front of him, a Marine bounded in for a landing, his combat suit making him seem bulky and awkward, but the impression was belied by the grace of movement on the suit’s agrav packs. The Marine touched down lightly, aimed at an unseen target with the massive field-pulse rifle mounted beneath his right arm, then bounded again.
The armor itself, Garroway saw, was mostly black, but the surface had a shimmering, illusive effect that rendered it nearly invisible, an illusion due to the nanoflage coating which continually adapted to incoming light. In places, he saw blue sparks and flashes where enemy nano-D was trying to eat into the suit’s defenses, but was—so far—being successfully blocked by the suit’s counters.
Neither near-invisibility nor nanotechnic defenses could help this Marine, however. As he grounded again, something flashed nearby, and the man’s midsection vanished in a flare of blue-white light. Legs collapsed to one side, head and torso to the others, the arms still, horribly, moving. Garroway thought he heard a spine-chilling shriek over the link, mercifully cut off as the armored suit died. Rain continued to drench the hot ruin of the combat suit, steaming in the flare-lit night, and the armor itself, exposed to the relentless embrace of airborne nanodisassemblers, began to soften, curdle, and dissolve.
The arms had stopped moving. There was a great deal of blood on the ground, however, and slowly dissolving wet chunks of what might be …
Gods. …
Garroway struggled not to be sick. He would not be sick. He wrenched his mental gaze away from the feed, and stood once more in the Martian night.
“Being a Marine is one of the greatest honors, one of the greatest responsibilities available to the Commonwealth citizenry,” Warhurst said, his voice still speaking in his mind over the implant link. “But it is not for everyone. It requires the ultimate commitment. Fortitude. Courage. Character. Commitment to duty and to fellow Marines. Sometimes, it requires the ultimate sacrifice … for the Commonwealth. For your brother and sister Marines, For the Corps.
“You’ve all just seen what modern combat is like … what it’s really like, not what the entertainment feeds would have you believe. Do any of you want to see this thing through?”
Garroway heard others leaving the line; he didn’t know how many. He also heard someone retching off to his left.
After a long pause, Warhurst nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Get ‘em out of here.”
With a whine, the agrav shuttle at Garroway’s back lifted into the Martian night. He felt the flutter of wind as it passed overhead, and he watched its drive field grow brighter as it accelerated back to orbit, back to the Arean Rings that stretched now across the zenith like a slender, taut-pulled thread of pure silver.
“You maggots,” Warhurst growled, his former tough-DI persona slowly re-emerging, “you mudworms are even more stupid than I was led to believe. All right. Show’s over. Like I said earlier, from this point on, you are mine. I personally am going to eat you alive, chew you up, and spit your worthless carcasses out on these sands.
“But maybe, maybe, a few of you will have what it takes to be Marines.” Turning, he addressed one of the assistants—the evil-grinning one. “Sergeant Corrolly!”
“Yes, Drill Instructor Warhurst!”
“We need to find out what these worms are really made of. Let’s take them on a little run before breakfast!”
The evil grin grew wider. “Yes, Drill Instructor!”
“Move out!”
“Aye, aye, Drill Instructor!” The assistant DI turned to face the waiting survivors of the morning’s muster. “You heard the Drill Instructor! Recruit platoon … lef’ face! For’ard, harch! And … double time! Hut! Hut! Hut! …”
Garroway began to hut.
And within twenty minutes, as he dragged screaming leg muscles through the fine, clinging, ankle-deep sand of the Martian desert, he was wondering if he was going to be up for this after all.
What the hell had he been thinking when he’d volunteered? …
2
0407.1102
Green 1
Meneh, Alighan
0512/38:20 hours, local time
Ramsey kicked off, his 660-ABS armor amplifying his push and sending him in a low, flat trajectory across bubbling ground. Maneuvers like this always carried a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t risk. Jump too high and your hang time made you an ideal target; jump too low and flat and a miscalculation could slam you into an obstacle.
He came down next to a ferrocrete wall, his momentum carrying him into the half-collapsed structure with force enough to bring more of it down on top of him, but he was unhurt. A quick check around—he was a kilometer from the city’s central plaza. All around him, the skeletal frameworks of skyscrapers rose like a ragged forest, a clean, modern city reduced in minutes to ruin and chaos. Some of the damage was due to the Marine bombardment, certainly, and to the firefight raging now through the enemy capital, but much, too, had been self-inflicted by Muzzie nano-D.
In fact, Ramsey’s biggest tactical concern at the moment were the nano-D clouds, which were highlighted by his helmet display as ugly purple masses drifting low across the battlefield. Where they touched the ground or surviving fragments of building, rock, earth, and ferrocrete began dissolving in moments, as the submicroscopic disassemblers in the death clouds began pulling atom from atom and letting it all melt into a boiling and homogenous gray paste.
Where the cloud hit counter-nano, sparks flashed and snapped in miniature displays of lightning. Nano-D, much of it, possessed intelligence enough to attempt to avoid most countermeasures; victory generally went to the cloud with both the most numbers and the most sophisticated programming.
A Muzzie field-pulse gun opened up from a ferrocrete bunker two hundred meters ahead, sending a stream of dazzling flashes above his head. Almost automatically, Ramsey tagged the structure with a mental shift of icons on his noumenal display, which hung inside his thoughts like a glowing movie screen. His suit AI melded data from a wide range of sensory input into a coherent image. In his mind’s eye, he could see the bunker overlaid by the ghostly images of human figures inside, and the malevolent red glow of active power systems.
“Skyfire, I have a target,” he said, and he mentally keyed the display skyward, tagged with precise coordinates.
Seconds later, a voice in his head whispered what he’d been waiting to hear. “Target confirmed. Sniper round on the way.”
Several seconds more slipped past, and then the cloud deck overhead flared sun-bright, and a beam of light so brilliant it appeared to be made of solid, mirror-bright metal snapped on, connecting clouds with the bunker.
At the beam’s touch, the bunker exploded, ferrocrete and field-pulse gun and Theocrat soldiers all converted to fast-expanding vapor, blue-white heat, and a sharp surge of gamma radiation. The ground-support gunners out in Alighan orbit had just driven a sliver of mag-stabilized uranium-cladded antimatter into that gun emplacement at half the speed of light. The resulting explosion had vaporized an area half the size of a city block, leaving very little behind but hard radiation and a smoking hole in the ground.
Unfortunately, the enemy had weapons just as powerful, and as minute followed bloody minute, more and more of them were coming on-line. He needed to move … but first, this looked like a good place to leave one of his mobile weapons.
Working quickly, Ramsey pulled a KR-48 pack out of a storage compartment on his hip, extended its tripod legs with a thought, and placed the device atop what was left of the wall. Through its optics, the image relayed through his helmet AI to his brain, he checked its field of fire, giving it a clear view toward the city’s central plaza.
His 660-ABS had more than once been compared to a one-man tank, but so shallow an image wildly missed the point, and in fact was insulting to the battlesuit. In fact, tanks had become obsolete centuries ago thanks primarily to the rise of battlesuit technology. Wearing an ABS, a Marine could walk, run, or soar for distances of up to a kilometer, could engage a wide range of targets on the ground and in the air with a small but powerful arsenal of varied weaponry, and could link with every other ABS in the battle zone to coordinate attacks and share intelligence. An ABS allowed its wearer to shrug off the detonation of a small tactical nuke less than a hundred meters away, to survive everything from shrapnel to radiation to heavy-caliber projectiles to clouds of nano-D, and to function in any environment from hard vacuum to the bottom of the sea to the boiling hell-cauldron of modern combat.
In fact, any contest between a lone Marine in a 660 battlesuit and a whole platoon of archaic heavy tanks could have only one possible outcome.
What was important, however, was why, after a thousand years, individual and small-unit tactics were still of vital importance in combat. For centuries, virtual-sim generals had been predicting the end of the rifleman as the centerpiece of combat. The energies employed by even small-scale weapons were simply too deadly, too powerful, and too indiscriminate in their scope to permit something as vulnerable as a human being to survive more than seconds in a firefight.
Somehow, though, the venerable rifleman had survived, his technology advancing to extend his effectiveness and his chances of survival. The truth was, a planetary ground-assault unit like the 55th MARS could drop out of orbit, seize the starport, and hold it, where larger, faster, and more powerful AI-directed weaponry would simply have vaporized it.
Of course, by the time the Muzzies were through defending the port, most of it would be vaporized, wrecked, or otherwise rendered unusable anyway. That was the problem with war. It was so damned destructive … of personnel, of property, of entire cultures and societies. …
He completed setting up the KR-48 and keyed it to his helmet display. He switched on the weapon’s power shields, to keep it from being directly targeted by roving enemy combat drones or smart hunters, then bounded clear, making his way around the perimeter of the city plaza. Gunfire continued to crack and spit from the surrounding buildings, those that hadn’t been demolished yet, but the accuracy of the Marines’ orbital sniper fire seemed to be having a telling effect on the defenses. The instant a Marine came under fire, the attack was noted by Skyfire command and control, and the attacker would in moments be brought under counterfire, either by high-velocity rounds chucked from orbit, or from the A-90 ground-support aerospace craft now crisscrossing the skies above the port complex, or from other Marines on the ground linked into the combat net.
“Bravo one-one-five,” a voice whispered in his mind. His AI identified the speaker as Captain Baltis, his platoon commander, but he recognized the dry tones without his suit’s comm ID function. “Hostile gun position at six-one-three-Sierra. Can you neutralize it, Ram?”
He zoomed in on the indicated coordinates on his map window. The enemy fire was coming from the top of a forty-story structure two kilometers ahead. A drone feed showed the Muzzie gunners, clustered on a rooftop overlooking the plaza, clustered around a tripod-mounted high-velocity sliver gun.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Ramsey replied. “Why can’t we leave it to Sniper?”
“Because that would bring that whole tower down,” Baltis replied, “and we have civilians in there.”
Shit. The Muzzies didn’t seem to care whether their own civilians were caught in the line of fire or not. But the Marines were under standing orders to minimize collateral damage, and that meant civilian casualties.
“Okay. I’m on it.”
Rising, he bounded forward, covering the ground in long, low, gliding strides that carried him both toward the objective building and around toward the right. He was trying to take advantage of the cover provided by some smaller buildings between him and the target. As he drew closer, someone on the rooftop spotted him and swung the heavy-barreled weapon around to bear on him. He felt the snap of hivel rounds slashing through the air above his head, felt the impacts as they punched into the pavement nearby with bone-jarring hammerings and raised a dense cloud of powdered ferrocrete.
Dropping behind a plasteel wall, he connected with the KR-48 he’d left behind, using his suit’s link with the weapon to pivot and elevate the blunt snout toward the target building. On the window inset in his mind, he saw the KR-48’s crosshairs center over the top of the building; a mental command triggered a burst, sending a stream of thumb-sized missiles shrieking toward the rooftop gun emplacement.
The missiles vaporized chunks of cast stone, but the Muzzies’ armor damped out the blast effects. He’d been expecting it; he was using the weapon as a diversion, not for the kill.
Instantly, the Muzzie gunners swung their weapon back to the south, searching for the source of incoming fire. Ramsey watched the shift in their attention, and chose that moment to leap high into the air.
A mental command cut in his jump jets in midair, and he soared skyward, clearing the upper ramparts of the building, cutting the jets, and dropping onto a broad, open rooftop.
He used the flamer connected to his left wrist to spew liquid fire into the gun emplacement. The enemy troops were shielded against tactical heat, of course, but the suddenness of his appearance, arcing down out of the sky, surprised and startled them, and the torch blast melted the plastic mountings of the hivel gun and toppled it over onto its side.
Shifting his aim, he torched the floor of the rooftop enclosure, cutting open a gaping crater. Two of the Muzzie infantrymen were caught in the collapse of the roof, falling through in a shower of flaming debris; Ramsey shifted to the mag-pulse rifle mounted on his right arm and hammered away at five more Theocrat soldiers who were busily crowding back and away from his landing point.
One of the hostiles managed to open fire with a sliver gun at Ramsey, and the Marine felt the hammer of high-speed rounds thudding into his chest and helmet armor, but he held his ground and completed his targeting sweep with the pulse rifle, watching the barrage smash through enemy armor like a rapid-fire pile driver, shredding, rending, turning titanium laminate carballoy into bloody scrap.
The last of the hostiles collapsed on the blazing rooftop, or toppled through the gaping hole in front of them. The entire engagement had taken perhaps three seconds.
“Bravo one, Bravo one-one-five,” he reported. “Target neutralized.”
“Good deal,” Baltis replied. “Now get your ass forward! You’re behind sched!”
“On my way.”
Another leap, and he sailed off the burning building’s upper story, using his jump jets to brake his fall.
His suit AI was flagging another gun position just ahead. …
USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
0720/24:20 local time, 1738 hrs GMT
“Fall in! Fall in!”
Panting hard, Garroway stumbled up to the yellow line painted on the pavement. The run, which Warhurst had lightly declared to be a shake-down cruise, had lasted two hours and, according to his implant, had covered nearly 14 kilometers. A number of the recruits hadn’t made it; at least, they’d not kept up with the main body. Presumably, they were still straggling along out in the desert someplace, unless Warhurst had sent a transport out to pick them up.
Garroway had assumed that the meager third-G of Mars’ surface gravity would make calisthenics—no, PT, in the Marine vernacular—easy. He’d been wrong. Gods, he’d been wrong. The run across the rugged highlands of the Noctis Labyrinthus had left him at the trembling edge of collapse. His skinsuit, newly grown for him when he’d checked in at the Arean Ring receiving station, was saturated with sweat, the weave of microtubules straining to absorb the moisture and chemicals now pouring from his body. His leg muscles were aching, his lungs burning. He’d thought the implants he’d purchased two weeks ago would have handled the extra stress.
This was not going to be easy.
The worst of it was, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst had accompanied them on that run, and so far as Garroway could tell, the guy wasn’t breathing hard, hadn’t even broken a sweat. His uniform was still crisp, the flat-brimmed “Smokey Bear” hat of ancient Corps tradition still precisely squared above those hard, cold eyes.
“Okay, children,” he said, planting his hands on his hips. “Now that we’ve warmed up a bit, it’s time we got down to work. Hit the deck, push-up position! And one! And two! …”
By now, the sun was up, though much of the run had been through the foggy, pre-dawn darkness. Mars was a tangle of mismatched terrain, rendered both beautiful and twisted by the centuries of terraforming. The sky was a hard, deep, almost violet-blue, the sun shrunken and cold compared to back home. The ground was mostly sand, though patches of gene-tailored mosses and coldleaf added startling accents of green and blue. The run had brought them in a broad circle back to Marine RTC Noctis Labyrinthus, a lonely huddle of domes and quick-grown habs in a rocky desert. East, the tortured terrain of the Vallis Marineris glowed banded red and orange beneath the morning sun, and open water gleamed where the Mariner Sea had so far taken hold.
Damn it, he couldn’t breathe. …
“Come on, kiddies!” Warhurst shouted. “You can give me more than that! There’s plenty of oh-two in the air! Suck it down!”
What sadist, Garroway wondered, had decided that this was where Marine recruits would come to train? Centuries ago, of course, RTC had been on Earth … at a place called Camp Pendleton, and at another place called Camp Lejeune. Those places were no more, of course. The Xul Apocalypse had wrecked both bases, when tidal waves from the oceanic asteroid strikes had come smashing ashore. For a time, Marines had been trained on Luna, and then at one of the new LaGrange orbital bases, but almost two centuries ago, with the completion of the Arean Ring, the Corps had transferred much of its training command to Mars. The first recruits on the surface at Noctis Labyrinthus, Garroway had heard, had done their PT wearing coldsuits and oxygen masks. He was beginning to think someone had jumped the gun in deciding to forego the support technology.
“Okay! Okay! On your feet!” Warhurst clapped his hands. “How are we doing, kids? Eyes bright? Hearts pumping? Good! We have a very special treat in store for you now.” He pointed. “See that building? Fall in, single file, in front of that door! Move it! Move it!”
The platoon scrambled to obey, running fifty meters across the ’crete pavement and lining up outside the door. A sign beside the doorframe read sickbay.
That puzzled Garroway. They’d pumped him full of medinano at the receiving station, enough, he’d thought, to kill everything in his system that wasn’t nailed down. He’d already had several thorough physicals, back on Earth Ring, and in Mars orbit. What were they going to …
Realization hit him just as Warhurst began addressing the formation.
“This, children, is where we separate the real men and women from the sheep. You were all informed that this would be part of your recruit training, and you all agreed when you thumbed your enlistment contract. However … if any of you, for any reason, feel you cannot go through with this, you will fall out and line up over there.” He pointed across the grinder at one of the assistant DIs, who was standing in front of a transport skimmer. “You will be returned to the receiving station, and there you may make arrangements for going home. No one will think the less of you. You will simply have proven what everybody knows—that the Marine Corps is not for everyone. Do I have any takers?”
Again, Garroway thought he felt some of the recruits in line around him wavering. The terror was almost palpable.
“If you file through that door,” Warhurst continued, a tone of warning giving his edge a voice, “you will be given a shot of decoupling nano. It won’t hurt … not physically, at any rate. But after the shot takes effect, you will be unable to access your personal cerebral implants. Right now, each of you needs to think about what that means, and decide if being a Marine is worth the cost.”
The decoupler shot. Yeah, they’d told him about it, but he’d already known about it, of course. It was one of the things that set the Marines and a few other highly specialized elite military units apart from the Army, Navy, or the High Guard. Wonderingly, Garroway looked down at his right hand, catching the glint of gold and silver wires imbedded in the skin at the base of his thumb and running in rectilinear patterns across his palm.
He was going to lose his implants.
The vast majority of humans had cereblink implants, including palm interface hardware, quantum-phase neurocircuitry, and a complex mesh of Micronics grown layer by layer throughout the brain, especially in the cerebral sulci and around the hypothalamus. The first nano injections generally were given to the fetus while it was still in womb or in vitro, so that the initial base linkages could begin chelating out within the cerebral cortex before birth. Further injections were given to children in stages, at birth, when they were about two standard years old, and again when they were three. By the time they were four, they already possessed the hardware to let them palm-interface with a bewildering variety of computers, input feeds, e-pedias, and machines. Most basic education came in the form of electronic downloads fed directly into the student’s cerebral hardware. Adults depended utterly on hardware links for everything from flying skimmers to paying bills to experiencing the news to opening doors to talking to friends more than a few meters distant. The cereblink was one of the absolutely basic elements of modern society, the ultimate piece of technology that allowed humans to interface with their world, and interact with their tools.
And now, the recruits of Company 4102 were about to lose that technology and, for the first time in their lives, would face the world without it.
The thought was terrifying.
“Okay, recruits! First five in line! Through the hatch, on the double!”
The first five recruits stumbled up the steps as the door cycled open for them and vanished into the building. Garroway watched them go.
He thought about quitting.
This was the one part of recruit training that he’d wondered about, wondered whether or not he could make it through. Oh, he knew he would survive, certainly. Millions did, and most went on to be U.S. Marines. And if he could get through these next few weeks, his old hardware would be reconnected and he would get new implants as well. Marines were hardwired with internal gadgetry and high-tech enhancements that most civilians didn’t even know existed.
But the thought of being cut off like that …
Many of the humans now living on Earth, he understood, were pre-tech … meaning they went through their lives, from birth to grave, as completely organic beings. No technological chelates cradling their brains and brain stems, no nanocircuitry growing through their neural pathways.
No EM telepathy, so no way to talk to those around you unless you were actually in their presence or you happened to have a portable comm unit with you. No translator software; if your friend didn’t happen to speak your language, you were out of luck. No e-conferencing in noumenal or virtual space. No e-Net linking you with every other person and every electronic service across the Solar System.
No way to access news, or weather—assuming you were on Earth which actually had weather—or med access, or epedia information feeds, or travel directions, or life journals, or any of the hundreds of other data downloads necessary in today’s fast-paced life.
No sims. No download entertainment. No way to interact with either the stored or broadcast simvids that let you take the role of hero or villain or both.
No way to buy the most basic necessities. Or to find them, since most shops now were on-line.
No driving ground cars, piloting mag skimmers, or accessing public transit.
No books, unless you could find the old-fashioned printed variety … and that was assuming you could read them. No more educational feeds … and no access to personal e-memory. Gods, how was he going to remember anything? …
And there was Aide. For Garroway, that felt like the worst … losing access to Aide, the AI mentor, secretary, and personal electronic assistant he’d had since he was a kid.
Without his hardware, the world was suddenly going to be a much smaller, much more difficult, much narrower place … and knowing that he would survive that narrowing did not make the prospect any more bearable.
Cut off from technological civilization, from society, from everything that made life worth the living. …
“I know it seems extreme, kids,” Warhurst said, using a telepathic feed to whisper inside their minds. “You feel like we’re cutting you off from the universe. In boot camp we call it the empty time.”
Garroway wondered whether the DIs had some secret means of accessing their implants and hearing their thoughts … or if he just knew and understood what the recruits would be thinking now. Probably the latter. It was against the law to sneak into another’s private thoughts and eavesdrop, wasn’t it?
“The thing is,” Warhurst went on, “there will be times as a Marine when you won’t have the Net to rely on. Imagine if you’re on a combat drop and something goes wrong. You end up a thousand kilometers behind enemy lines. You don’t have the local Net access codes. Worse, if you try to link in, the local authorities will spot you. Somehow, you have to survive without the Net until you can make contact with your sibling Marines.
“Or maybe you just have to go into a hot DZ on a planet with no Net at all, and there’s a screw-up and the battlefleet Net isn’t up and running for, oh, a standard day or two or ten. Believe me, it happens. What can go wrong will go wrong. What are you going to do then?
“The answer, of course, is that you will be Marines, and you will act like Marines. You will be able to draw upon your own resources, your training, your experience, and you will survive. More than survive, you will kick ass and emerge victorious, because victory is the tradition of the Corps!”
Garroway felt a little better after Warhurst’s speech. Not good … but better. He gave a mental click to increase neural serotonin levels and help lift his mood. Hell, that was another thing he’d be missing in the next few weeks—the ability to alter his own emotional state as necessary. He felt a tiny, sharp stab of fear, and instantly suppressed it.
How did Marines control the fear if they didn’t have access to neural monitoring software or the ability to deliberately tailor their emotional state? Or were the wild stories true, stories to the effect that Marine combat feeds eliminated fear and boosted such emotions as rage and hatred for the enemy? He’d always assumed those tales were nonsense, the product of civilian ignorance. Still …
“If you children want to be Marines,” Warhurst’s whisper continued, “we have to know who and what you are. How you react under stress. We need to know your character. And we need to take you, all of you, down to your most basic, most elementary level and build you up, one painful layer at a time. At the end of these sixteen weeks, you will not be the men and women you were. You will be Marines … if you make it through.”
It made sense, of course, what Warhurst was saying. Boot camp always had required an initial breaking down, so that the drill instructors could mold recruits into Marines. And there were other factors besides … like cutting the recruits off from outside sources of information so that they were utterly dependent on their instructors. Like taking away anything that would distract them from the grueling physical and intellectual training ahead.
Like getting them to rely upon themselves.
“Believe me,” Warhurst added, and Garroway swore he could hear a grin in the man’s inner voice, “for the next few weeks you children won’t need your tech-toys, and you’ll be way too busy to miss ‘em! Besides, you’ll have me to tell you what you need to know! Next five in line! Through the hatch!”
Garroway thought one last time about quitting, and shoved the thought aside.
“Don’t worry, Aiden,” his inner AI whispered in his mind. “I’ll be back. You’ll see.”
Together with four other recruits, he bounded up the steps and into the unknown.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
