by Ian Douglas
Briefly, he considered replying with a blunt, “I’m divorced. They kicked me out a month ago.” If the woman had bothered to look more deeply into his public data stats, past the front page, at least, she would have seen that.
But it didn’t matter. And he certainly didn’t want to have to explain the circumstances to this…naked butterfly. He let the comment pass. She was already taking him by the arm and leading him deeper into the crowd. “There are so many people for you to meet! Please, help yourself to food, drink, drugs, whatever suits your fancy! And inside there’s so much going on. If you want a companion, we have a number of lovely girls here as personal entertainers…boys too, if you prefer.” She patted his arm. “I might look you up myself after a while, if your partners don’t mind!”
“Ah, excuse me, ma’am,” he said, stopping abruptly. “I see a couple of Marines over there I know. If you’ll forgive me?”
He disentangled his arm and strode across the deck, not waiting to find out if he was forgiven or not. He came up between two young PFCs in full dress blacks at a buffet and put his arms over their shoulders. “Semper fi, Marines,” he said.
The two Marines started, whirled, and came to attention. “Sir, yes, sir!”
Warhurst grinned and shook his head. “You can always tell the ones straight out of boot camp. Danvers? Garroway? What are you two fucking dipshits doing in a galahole like this?”
Garroway stammered, swallowed, and tried again. “Sir! We were invited, sir!”
Warhurst raised an admonishing white-gloved finger. “Negative on the ‘sir,’ son. You both are Marines, now, and that means that I am no longer a ‘sir.’ I may still be God, so far as you sorry-assed PFCs are concerned, but I do work for a living. ‘Gunnery Sergeant’ will do perfectly well.”
“Thank you, s-, uh, Gunnery Sergeant.”
“That’s better.” He looked around. “So this is how the other half lives.”
Garroway turned, his eyes following a small group of attractive and naked young women as they made their way through the crowd toward the pool. “Must be nice,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind having a couple of mil, if it meant living like this.”
“Dream on,” Ami Danvers told him. “You’d need a couple of bil for a spread like this!” Eyeing a couple of equally nude men who’d just joined the women, “Of course, I must admit that the scenery is very nice.”
Garroway sighed dramatically. “Such a tough job, living like this, but someone has to do it.” He popped a purple-iced something into his mouth and chewed reflectively. “At least they feed well.”
“So, Gunnery Sergeant,” Danvers said conversationally. “Now that 4102 has flown the nest, will you be taking on a new boot company?”
“Negative, Danvers. I’ve had it with diaper duty and babysitting. I’ve put in for 1MIEF.”
“Maybe we’ll be serving together, then,” Garroway said. “Our orders are for 1MIEF, too!”
“I know,” Warhurst said, nodding. “The whole company. God help me. I thought I was free of you clowns.” He shrugged. “But, hey, who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll stick me on a listening post on some God-forsaken asteroid at the other end of the galaxy instead. Then at least I wouldn’t have to look at the likes of you two!”
“We love you, too, Gunnery Sergeant,” Danvers said.
“Where do we go around here to get a drink?”
Garroway pointed to a bar at the other side of the nearest swimming pool. “They’ve got booze there. Or there’s a bigger bar inside.”
“Marines, I’m going to attach myself to you two—just temporarily—because I am using you for protective cover. Shall we perform a reconnaissance in force?”
Garroway grinned. “Yes, sir, Gunnery Sergeant, sir!”
Together they entered the house.
The mansion’s interior was, if anything, more decadently luxurious than outside. The rooms were large and sprawling, most with soft-carpeted floors that rearranged with a thought into any size or shape or design of furniture imaginable. Most walls and ceilings were taken up by projection screens, some showing outdoor or undersea views, other showing erotic scenes with such high resolution it was possible to bump into a wall that looked like an archway into yet another bed-or playroom. Food was everywhere, available at small buffets, or straight out of niches in the walls. Many of the guests wore sensory helmets, which picked up and enhanced sights, sounds, tastes, touches, and smells according to preset programming. He noticed that most of those folks had bypassed the food, and gone straight to the caressing and sex.
One large, circular room, in fact, proved to be the source of several of the erotica projections they’d seen on various walls. A dozen people of various sexes were grappling with one another in an impromptu orgy. The three Marines had to carefully pick their way over and past a number of thrashing bare limbs to reach the doorway on the other side.
The house wasn’t entirely devoted to orgies, however. One room they passed through had been set up with sim projectors, so that people walking in saw and heard and smelled the claustrophobic bustle of the Tun Tavern late in the year 1775, with Samuel Nichols seated behind a large wooden barrel, puffing at a long-stemmed pipe as a recruiter regaled the listeners with the benefits of service with the Marines. The lines about bounty payments and a ration of grog brought amused chuckles from the twenty-ninth-century spectators…especially the handful of men and women in uniform.
That raised a question, though. Warhurst wondered why most of the people he was encountering were in civilian clothing, or no clothing at all. This was supposed to be a Marine function, after all.
Or were the Marines all shucking their uniforms to join in the orgies? A disquieting thought.
“So…Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst?” Garroway asked.
“Yeah?”
“This is the Commonwealth way of life we’re supposed to be fighting for?”
“Well, you won’t find it in the Theocracy or the Hegemony.”
“Sure, you would,” Danvers said. “They’re just not as blatant about it.”
“Bullshit,” Garroway said.
“No, it’s true. The prudes of every age in history had orgies. They just didn’t admit to them.”
Warhurst bent over and dragged one white-gloved finger up the curve of a naked, heaving female butt cheek. The owner didn’t seem to notice the touch. He looked at the fingertip critically. “Dust. They need to field-day this barracks.”
Warhurst was feeling a little giddy, and he wasn’t sure why. He always felt a bit up-tight around civilians, especially in this sort of social milieu. Damn it, they just weren’t Marines.
And that, he thought, explained the giddiness. He’d seen and recognized two of his erstwhile recruits, and the relief he’d felt had been palpable.
“Good evening, gentlemen.”
They’d found the inside bar and been making their way toward it when a silver-haired man wearing a golden glow and little else greeted them. Warhurst did a fast ID check, and almost came to attention. “Senator Sloan?”
“Correct. And you are…Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst, and Privates Danvers and Garroway. Welcome to my home.”
“It was good of you to host this party, sir.”
“Not at all, not all. Least I could do. I, ah, see by your public data, you’re on your way to the MIEF.”
“I’ve requested the transfer, sir, yes. Don’t know yet that they’ll give it to me.”
“Mm. Yes. A Marine goes where he’s sent. Still, I should think that a man with your record will get that billet, especially since the MIEF is going to be rather dramatically expanded over the next few months.”
“Sir?” He’d heard scuttlebutt, but nothing certain.
“General Alexander’s proposal did pass, Gunnery Sergeant. A reinforced Marine Expeditionary Force is going to be sent into Xul space.” Sloan gave Warhurst an appraising look. “What do you think about that, anyway?”
“As you say, sir. A Marine goes where he’s
sent.”
“Yes, but…against the Xul? That’s a tall order if I ever heard one.”
“The Xul are not invincible, Senator. We’ve proven that several times over.”
“What do you think about General Alexander?”
“I don’t know the man, sir.”
“Yes, but you must have an opinion.”
Warhurst shrugged. “From everything I’ve heard, he’s an excellent officer. And a good Marine.”
“Good enough to take on the Xul?”
“Why are you asking me this, sir?”
“Oh, just taking advantage of an opportunity. I have several hundred Marines in my home for the day. Seemed like a good opportunity to get a feel for their morale, their caliber. Their esprit. How about you, Ms. Danvers? What do you think about fighting the Xul?”
“Sir! The Marines are gonna kick Xul ass. Sir!”
Sloan laughed. “And you, Private Garroway?”
“Doesn’t much matter what I think, sir. It’s all up to you people in the government.”
“How’s that?”
“Sir, the Marines will do their job, no matter what. Their job is whatever the government tells them to do.”
“Yes?”
“So, the way it seems to me…the government just needs to make up its collective mind, if it has one, about just who the enemy is, what it wants done to him, and give the appropriate order. And we’ll do the rest.”
“In other words,” Warhurst added, “you start it. The Marines will finish it. Sir.”
Sloan looked serious for a moment, then nodded. “That, Gunnery Sergeant, is not as easy as that. But we’ll do the best we can.” He studied his drink. “My question for you is, though…the Xul are so far ahead of us in technology. Ahead of us in numbers, too, if they’re really spread across the entire Galaxy, the way it appears they are. The MIEF is going to be horrifically outnumbered, outgunned, outclassed, right from the start. Do you really think you have a chance in hell of pulling this off?”
Warhurst pulled himself up straighter. “Sir. Like the private here said…we will kick Xul ass. Assuming, of course, that they have one.”
“I sincerely hope you’re right, Gunnery Sergeant,” Sloan said. “I sincerely hope you’re right.”
11
1811.1102
UCS Samar
In transit, Alighan to Sol
1430 hrs GMT
The passage from Alighan to Sol took six weeks. For most of that time, the Marines on board the Marine assault transport Samar would be in cybe-hibe; four companies of Marines required a lot of consumables—air, food, water—and took up a lot of space. It was far more economical to ship them in electronic stasis, sealed inside narrow tubes and stacked ten-high in the cavernous vessel’s cargo holds, the meat lockers as they were known to the men and women who traveled in them.
Escorted by the destroyer Hecate, the Marine transport Samar had departed Alighan three weeks earlier, engaging her Alcubierre Drive as soon as she was clear of the bent space-time in the vicinity of the local star. Almost three hundred men and women were in meat-locker storage, passing the voyage in blessed unconsciousness.
For Gunnery Sergeant Charel Ramsey, however, sleep—or at least the dreamless emptiness of cybernetic hibernation that mimicked real sleep—had been deferred. He was one of seventeen Marines in the 55th Marine Regimental Aerospace Strikeforce designated as psych casualties.
And they weren’t going to let him sleep until he was cured.
“We can edit the memories, you know,” Karla told him gently. “That would be the easiest course for you, I think.”
“Fuck that,” Ramsey said. “I don’t want to forget….”
“I understand. But it’s going to mean a lot of work on your part. Very difficult, even painful work.”
“So what are we waiting for?” He took a deep breath. “Tell me what I’m supposed to do.”
In Ramsey’s mind he was in a forest in eastern North America, back on Earth—oaks, tulip trees, and maples; rhododendrons, ferns, and mountain laurel, and a fast-moving stream splashing down across tumbled piles of limestone boulders, many thickly blanketed with moss. The sky glimpsed through the leaf canopy was bright blue, with sunlight slanting through the branches at a low angle, as if in the late afternoon.
It didn’t matter that the woods scene was an illusion.
Within his external reality, he knew, he was in Samar’s sick bay, in one of the compartments reserved for this type of treatment. Karla was the ship’s psychiatric specialist AI; “Karla” was derived from Karl Jung, the name given the feminine ending because Ramsey found it easier to talk with women than with men. The AI appeared to be a handsome, middle-aged woman in a blue jumpsuit, seated on a boulder next to him. With her dark and lively eyes, black hair, and square jaw, she actually looked a bit like his mother, going back to perhaps twenty years before she’d died; he wondered if that detail was deliberate.
Probably. The Corps’ psych AIs didn’t miss very much.
“You can start,” Karla told him, “by telling me about your relationship with Thea Howell.”
“We met about a year and a half ago. She was in the 55th MARS already, Alpha Company, First Platoon…though she hadn’t gotten promoted to staff sergeant yet, and been moved up to the platoon sergeant’s billet. I was transferred in from 2/1….”
He went on to tell the AI about how they’d met, how the relationship had developed. He was a bit nervous about that. Talking to a medical AI was exactly like talking to a human medical officer, and a serious breach of regulations would be reported.
And there were regulations about having sex with someone in your own platoon, and even stronger ones about sleeping with your leading NCO—with anyone higher or lower on the chain of command, in fact. The fact was, though, that everyone did it, and for the most part the powers-that-were turned a blind eye to casual sex between fellow enlisted Marines.
The emphasis was on the word casual and on the word enlisted. If two Marines became so close that they wanted to establish a formal contract, one was generally transferred to a different platoon, because no Marine could be permitted to show favoritism to a sex partner over another fellow Marine in combat. If jealousy became an issue, the Marine with the problem would have to enter therapy, possibly to have the possessive aspects of his or her libido adjusted.
And officers never slept with enlisted personnel. That particular sin could lead to a general court and dismissal from the Corps for both parties, as it had since women had first entered the Corps in 1918. The same went for pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease, though neither issue was the problem it had been before the advent of medinano late in the twenty-first century.
The fact that Ramsey had been sleeping with his platoon sergeant for ten months might well be reported, and it could come back to bite him. Hell, he thought, as another wave of depression surged up from the blacker corners of his mind, it had already bitten him. He’d damned near been incapacitated when Thea had been hit on Alighan. They never had let him see her; her wounds were serious enough that she’d been popped straight into cybe-hibe and loaded into a medical support capsule for medevac back to Mars.
Two months afterward, word had finally trickled back down the chain of command to the 55th MARS, still deployed in mopping up Muzzie resistance on the planet. At the Naval Hospital in the Arean Ring, on 3007, Staff Sergeant Thea Howell had been declared an irretrievable.
She was dead, and he hadn’t even been able to tell her goodbye.
“What was that?” Karla asked him.
“What was what?”
“You just registered an extremely strong surge of emotion while you were speaking—extremely depressive emotion. Was it thinking about Staff Sergeant Howell that triggered it?”
He sighed, leaning back on the boulder and closing his eyes. “Of course. What did you think it was? Fucking indigestion?”
“Emotion does not map linguistically…at least, not with one-to-one corresponde
nce. I can easily sense the emotion within you, but the source, the triggering thought or thoughts, can be numerous and they can be subtle.”
“Look, it’s not complicated,” he told the AI. “I was in love with Thea—with Staff Sergeant Howell, okay? She was my platoon leader, but we had a…a thing. We were sex partners, yeah, but we also cared for each other. A lot. We’d been—” He stopped himself. He’d felt as though once the words started flowing, he wouldn’t be able to hold them back, wouldn’t be able to hold back the emotion, or the memories that caused them.
“You’d been what?”
“We’d started talking about a long-term contract. Marriage.” He said the words with an almost defiant edge to them.
“I see.” The program paused for a moment, as though considering the best way to reply. That, Ramsey knew, was sheer nonsense. Even expert software as complex as a psych AI ran so much faster than human thought that any pause in the conversation at all would be for the program the equivalent of waiting hours before responding.
No, the hesitation, he knew, was a tool the AI was using to let him better respond to it as if it were a human.
“Charel, I know you must be concerned about telling me this. Regulations prohibit relationships of this sort, particularly when they result in harm to the Marines involved, to general productivity, good order, and discipline, and especially to the mission.”
“Yeah.” He thought about it. “You know, I had a buddy once, a PFC, who fell asleep while sunbathing, back on Earth. Second-degree burns over half his body. When he got out of the hospital, he got a court-martial. The charge was ‘damaging government property,’ meaning him.”
“What happened to him?”
Ramsey shrugged. “A slap on the wrist. I think they fined him part of his pay for three months. And he got himself a new asshole drilled by his platoon sergeant.”
She nodded. “Legally, Charel, Marines are not ‘government property,’ as you put it. But regulations do allow military personnel to be charged and punished if their actions, inattention, or irresponsibility causes them bodily or psychological harm, or causes others to be harmed.