Star Strike: Book One of the Inheritance Trilogy (The Inheritance Trilogy, Book 1)

by Ian Douglas

  Unlike Earth, Mars possessed only a single ground to synchronous-orbit elevator, the Pavonis Mons Tower. Pavonis Mons, the middle of the striking set of three volcanoes in a row southeast of the vast swelling of Mons Olympus, reached seven miles into the sky and by chance exactly straddled the Martian equator—the perfect ground-end anchor for a space elevator. The habitat housing the Marine Recruit Training Center Command was positioned close by the nexus with the P.M. Tower, which looked like a taut, white thread vanishing down into the mottled ocher and green face of Mars.

  PFC Aiden Garroway stood at attention on the Grand Arean Promenade, together with the thirty-nine other Marines of Recruit Company 4102 who’d completed boot training, and tried not to look down. The deck they were standing on was either transparent or a projection of an exterior view from a camera angled down toward Mars—the resolution was good enough that it was impossible to tell which—and it was easy to imagine that the company was standing on empty space, with a twenty-thousand-kilometer fall to the rusty surface of the planet far beneath his feet.

  The effect of standing on empty space, the gibbous disk of Mars far beneath his feet, could be unnerving. He could just glimpse the planet when he turned his eyes down, while keeping his head rigidly immobile.

  Garroway and his fellow newly hatched Marines had spent a lot of time looking at that sight since they’d made the ascent from Noctis three days before. The world was achingly beautiful—red-ocher and green, the pristine sparkle and optical snap of icecaps, the softer white swirls and daubs and speckles of clouds, the purple-blue of the Borealis Sea.

  For many of them, those from Earth’s Rings, Garroway included, it brought with it a pang of homesickness. Not that Mars resembled Earth all that closely, even with its reborn seas and banks of clouds…but the oceanic blues and stormy swirls of white echoed the world they’d watched from Terrestrial synchorbit; for the handful of recruits from Earth herself, it was the colors—the blues and greens, especially—that reminded them of home.

  All things considered, perhaps it was best that he was standing at attention and looking straight ahead, not gawking at the deck. Somewhere behind him were the ranks of seats filled with friends and families of graduating Marines. No less a luminary than General McCulloch, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, was delivering a speech, his head and shoulders huge on the wallscreen ahead and slightly to Garroway’s right.

  “The Marines,” McCulloch was saying, “have been criticized for being different, for being out of step with the society that they are sworn to protect. And it’s true. Marines look at the world around them differently than most people. Marines are dedicated to the ideal of service.

  “I don’t mean to say that joining the Marines constitutes the only valid form of service. Certainly not. Nor do I mean that military service is the only way to serve one’s country.

  “But military service is one of the very few, unambiguous ways by which a young man or woman can declare themselves in support of the common good. It’s one of the few means remaining today by which young people can make a deep and lasting difference, both in their own lives, and in support of their homeland, even their home world.

  “And Marines—these Marines—have selflessly chosen service to country at considerable personal risk, have chosen service to others above comfort, above profit, above every other mundane consideration popular with young civilians these days….”

  Garroway listened to the words, but somehow they didn’t connect for him. The seats above and behind him, he knew, were filled almost to capacity, but not one of the Giangreco line had come out to watch his graduation. Not one.

  Estelle, he knew, had wanted to come, but an e-transmit from her last week had told him the money for a flight out to Mars just wasn’t there. He wondered if that was the reason…or if Delano Giangreco had put his pacifist foot down. Delano, he knew, held the purse strings for the entire Giangreco line family.

  He wished that, at least, his birth mother could have been there.

  McCulloch was still talking.

  “…and it is within the Corps that these young people learn the heart and soul of altruism. They learn to value the person standing next to them more than they value themselves, learn to regard sacrifice as the sacred gift they give to their comrades, and to their home.

  “There was a time, a thousand years or more ago, when service in the military was a prerequisite for public service as a leader of the community or of the larger state. It was the military that taught a young person character, and half or more of the people attending the institutions of higher learning first served in the military.

  “Eventually, however, and unfortunately, such service, such altruism, became unfashionable. Today, I might point out, only a tiny fraction of our leaders actually have military service in their records.

  “Does that mean that our Commonwealth leaders are of poor character? No…and I wouldn’t be allowed to say so if they were.” That brought a small chuckle from the audience. The commandant, Garroway thought, was skating kind of close to the edge, here. Service personnel were required to be completely apolitical so long as they were in uniform.

  “But I do wonder,” McCulloch continued, “just where in this day and age a future leader can better develop that altruistic ethic, that willingness to sacrifice for others, that comes from military service in general, from service as a Marine in particular….”

  Garroway stifled a yawn. His feet were hurting, and his back, and he thought-clicked the appropriate anodynes into his system, mixed with a mild stimulant. He was operating now less on a willingness to sacrifice than terror of what Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst would do to him if he screwed up.

  “Duty,” McCulloch said, the word reverberating through the Arean Promenade. “Honor. Loyalty…to comrades, to country, to the Corps….”

  There was more, lots more, but the rhetoric ended at last. Warhurst, at the head of the graduating class, crisply attired in Marine full dress, rasped out the command. “Comp’ney, forrard…harch!” As one, forty new Marines stepped out, left foot first, the sharp clash of sound shivering the air as they began the first leg of their march around the Arean Promenade.

  “Right turn…harch!” and they swung in-column, four abreast to the right. As they passed the reviewing stand, Warhurst snapped, “Comp’ney, eyes…right!” He then raised a sharp salute toward the stand. A live band waiting in the wings burst into the surging strains of the Marine Corps Hymn.

  Garroway snapped his head to the right, and so was able to see the assembled brass in the reviewing stand rise to their feet and return the salute….

  Afterward, they attended one hell of a party.

  Sloan Residence

  Ares Ring, Mars

  1720 hrs GMT

  Warhurst stepped off the elevator and onto a broad, open deck of artificial wood overlooking a lake. A forest crowded close around the house—he couldn’t tell if the trees were real or artificial, but they smelled real in the gentle breeze. Whichever they were, the illusion was that of a forested mountain on Earth; the illusion broke down only when the visitor looked up, toward the hub, and, beyond the hub’s artificial sun, saw the green and sculpted landscape—woods, streams, and other buildings—etched into the other side of the colony arching overhead.

  And, of course, when he turned around, he found himself looking through the hab’s transparent end cap, to see the green and ocher half-disk of Mars turning gently with the rest of the sky. Stars and an endless night rotated beyond the opposite end cap, the two transparencies sandwiching between them this strip of green and blue.

  “Welcome, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst!” a young servant in scarlet livery announced.

  Warhurst had never met the man, and he assumed that the guy had just pulled his ID off the local Net. “Thank you. It was kind of you to invite me.”

  “It was the senator’s pleasure. Would you care for a drink?”

  A serving robot hovered at the man’s side, a selection of drinks
of various sizes, shapes, and colors on its tray.

  “Not just now, thank you,” Warhurst replied. He looked about, puzzled. “I’m not the first one here, am I?”

  The servant laughed. “Certainly not, sir! People have been coming in since early this morning!”

  “Oh. Good.” He felt terribly awkward. He wanted to ask if Julie, Callie, Donal, or Eric were here…or if they were expected. He didn’t want to see them right now, or relive any of those memories, not the pain, not the injustice, not the anger.

  God it still hurt….

  But the servant was still speaking, gesturing toward the sliding glass doors leading into the main house. “You’ll find refreshments inside, sir. Or you can follow the guidelight on the deck around the corner, there, and go straight back to the pools. Make yourself at home, have a good time…and happy birthday!”

  “Thank you,” Warhurst replied, terse. He didn’t like being here alone. And quite apart from his…personal problems, social galas like this one always gave him a pain.

  As did the pretensions of the rich. But he appreciated the greeting.

  Wherever there was a Corps presence, the date of 1011—the tenth day of November, old-style—was celebrated, the birthday of the U.S. Marines.

  On that date, in 1775, the Second Continental Congress had enacted legislation, resolving that “two battalions of Marines be ‘inlisted’ to serve for and during the present war between Great Britain and the colonies.” Two weeks later, a Quaker innkeeper named Samuel Nicholas had been commissioned as the first officer of the Marines, and recruiting had begun at the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia. Less than four months after that, on 3 March 1776, four full months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Captain Nicholas led 268 Marines ashore on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, capturing two forts, cannons, and a supply of gun powder in the Corps’ very first amphibious operation.

  Eleven hundred two years later, the Corps continued to celebrate that birthday, in this case with an elaborate party. The graduation of class 4102 had been arranged to coincide with the festivities.

  Normally, Marines took care of their own celebrations. The festivities within the Arean Ring, though, had been hijacked this year. Warhurst made a face as he looked around the expansive, rotating hab module. Senator Sloan was not a Marine. According to his Net bio, he hadn’t even served in the military.

  But he was one of four Commonwealth senators representing Mars, and the two chief pillars of the Martian economy were xenoarcheological research and the Marines. Both the 1st Marine Division and the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force had moved their headquarters to Mars centuries ago, and any political representative of that world knew that his hopes of staying in office resided with the Marine constituents.

  Danis Sloan was also ostentatiously rich, as the lavishness of his personal quarters suggested. The hab was enormous, a squat, rotating cylinder similar in design to some of the larger O’Neil-type space colonies, but only about 1 kilometer long, and twice that in diameter. The ends were capped in transplas, giving constantly turning views of the stars, the sun, Mars, and the other nearby habs making up this portion of the Arean Ring as the structure rotated, producing its out-is-down spin gravity. Visitors docked at the hub airlock, then traveled out and down one of the elevators to reach the landscaped terrain. The main house, where the party was being held, occupied nearly ten percent of the hab’s internal terrain, tucked in between one of the transparent end caps, and a broad, sparkling lake.

  And the whole damned thing belonged to Danis Sloan.

  Half a million years ago, the Builders had left a vast array of faster-than-light communicators in a subsurface complex called the Cave of Wonders, beneath a weathered plateau in Cydonia. Those communicators still possessed real-time visual and audio links with similar devices on Chiron, Ishtar, and elsewhere, but it had taken centuries to reverse-engineer the process and learn how to use quantum entanglement to instantly bridge distances measured in light-years.

  A quantum dynamicist named Victor Sloan, among others, had been instrumental in making modern FTL communication possible, and that, in turn, made both interstellar business and government possible.

  The Sloan fortune now was rumored to exceed the economies of several small nations. Hell, the guy could probably buy small countries if he had a use for them. Warhurst had heard that Sloan’s Arean Ring hab was only one of his dwellings, that a larger one existed in Earth’s First Ring, and that others existed in at least three other star systems. The guy, through his company, Sloan Stellartronics, had his own FTL starship, for God’s sake, and that was certainly no cheap date.

  Fair enough. FTL communication was vital in tying together the far-flung worlds of Humankind. The Commonwealth wouldn’t have been possible without it. More than that, humanity’s survival might depend upon it; late in the twenty-sixth century, shortly after they’d become commercially feasible, faster-than-light starships had caught up with the Argo and the other fleeing asteroid starships, offering to share the new technology, and offering them evacuation, a chance to come home. The offers in every case had been rejected, but Argo and her sisters all had accepted Sloan units in order to maintain real-time communications with Earth.

  Likely, Warhurst thought, they wanted to know if and when the Xul found and destroyed Earth, thereby justifying their flight.

  But if that hadn’t happened, if Argo had not possessed an FTL transmitter quantum-entangled with a Sloan unit back in the Solar System, Perseus would not have been able to flash news of the Xul appearance instantly back to Earth, and word of Argo’s destruction would not have been received on Earth for more than another four hundred years.

  By then it almost certainly would have been too late.

  So Sloan was welcome to his fortune. His family had come by it honestly, at least. Warhurst just wished the man wasn’t so damned ostentatious about it. Importing and growing those gene-tailored trees alone must have cost tens of millions of newdollars…enough to fully equip a modern Marine rifle company at least.

  Possibly, he thought as he followed the guidelight moving before him across the decking, the problem lay in the implication that the Marines—or at least 1MarDiv—somehow belonged to Sloan personally. That wasn’t the case, to be sure, but the press and often parts of the Commonwealth government seemed to think it was. Sloan had been chairperson of the Defense Advisory Council three times running, losing out in the elections four years ago only because Marie Devereaux and the Peace Party had insisted on the change as part of the price of their support.

  He wondered if the Peace Party’s swing to support the Constitutionalists would bring Sloan back to chairpersonship of the council. He doubted it. Current politics were way too volatile to permit long-term government fiefdoms.

  And there were all those rumors that Danis Sloan hoped to launch his own bid for the presidency four years from now.

  Warhurst stepped around the corner of the house and onto the raised deck above the pool area behind the house. Sonic suppressor fields had kept the noise levels low, but as he stepped through the field interface, the babble of conversation, laughter, music, and noise assaulted his ears. Sloan had been planning a lavish ball in honor of the Marines for a long time, and the party promised to be a long one—several days at least.

  Several hundred people were gathered on the tiers of decks behind the residence already. Perhaps a quarter, he saw, wore Marine dress uniforms, complete with gloves, glowribbons, and red-striped trousers. The rest wore a dazzling array of costumes, from formal ball gowns and dressuits to holographic light displays and sim projections to complete and fashionable nudity. Sloan’s invitation, obviously, had gone out to his own social set as well as Marine personnel…and that griped Warhurst as well. This…this ritual honoring this date in history belonged to the Corps. Civilians shouldn’t have any part of it, no matter how rich or well connected they might be.

  “Sergeant Warhurst, is it?” a woman’s voice said at his back.
“Michel?”

  He turned. The speaker was a tall and beautifully sculpted blond woman, technically nude, but with a fan of what looked like gorgeously colored peacock feathers arranged in a full, 2-meter circle behind her body, reaching from her knees to well above her head, and with nanorganic emitters within her skin giving off a constant, golden radiance that perfectly matched her hair. Her nipples alone, he estimated, were giving off enough light to read by, had it been dark.

  “Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst, ma’am,” he said, correcting her.

  “Larissa Sloan,” she told him, extending a hand. “Danis’s first wife, don’t you know. Welcome to our little gathering!”

  He took her hand and gave a slight, perfunctory bow above it. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

  “Now, Sergeant! Don’t ‘ma’am’ me! I’m Rissa to my friends!”

  He made a noncommittal sound, more of a grunt than an assent, but softening it with a smile. Warhurst wasn’t entirely sure yet if the woman was actually offering that level of friendship…or if he should accept it if she did. Her exuberance was just a little disturbing, as was her misunderstanding of the Marine rank structure.

  For a moment, she had a faraway look in her eyes as she accessed data. “And are your wives and husbands here yet?” she asked brightly. “I haven’t seen them so far….”

  “Actually, I’m here alone tonight, Ms. Sloan.”

  “Oh, but you must know this affair is for Marines and their spouses and other partners! Feel free to call them and have them come right over!”