Star Strike

by Ian Douglas

  “The Paxists,” Devereaux said sternly, “were invited because they represent the views of a large minority of the Commonwealth population. Very well. General Alexander, thank you for your presentation. The Council will retire now to its private noumenon and vote the question.”

  And the Council was gone, leaving Alexander alone in the imaginal room.

  If the reaction to Daley’s speech was any indication, though, he would need to begin preparations.

  The Marines would be going to war.

  6

  0810.1102

  USMC Recruit Training Center

  Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

  1512/24:20 local time, 0156 hrs GMT

  Garroway opened his eyes, blinked, and flexed his hands. This was… wonderful. The crisp reality of the sensations coursing through his imaginal body was almost overwhelming.

  The hellish empty time was over.

  “Pay attention, recruit! This is important!”

  Warhurst’s order snapped his attention back to the exercise. He tried to let the feelings flow through his mind, but to keep his focus on the scene around him.

  The landscape was barren and unforgivingly rugged, a volcanic mountain of black rock and sand cratered and torn by a devastating firestorm and draped in drifting patches of smoke. He was standing in the middle of a battle…an ancient battle, one with unarmored men carrying primitive firearms as they struggled up the mountain’s flank. Gunfire thundered—not the hiss and crack of lasers and plasma weapons, but the deeper-throated boom and rattle of slug-throwers, punctuated moment to moment by the heavy thud of high explosives.

  Something—a fragment of high-velocity metal—whined past his ear, the illusion so realistic he flinched. He reminded himself that he had nothing to fear, however. This panorama of blood, confusion, and noise was being downloaded into his consciousness from the RTC historical network, the sights and sounds real enough to convince him he really was standing on that tortured mountainside. But the Marines around him were noumenal simulations—literally all in Garroway’s head. Two days earlier he’d received the nano injections which had swiftly grown into his new Corps-issue headware, and this was his first test of its capabilities.

  “Move on up the slope,” Warhurst whispered in his ear. He obeyed, feeling the gritty crunch of black gravel beneath his feet. A Marine lay on his back a few meters away, eyes staring into the sky, a gaping, bloody hole in his chest. Garroway could see bare ribs protruding from the wound.

  It’s not real, he told himself. It’s a sim.

  “Yeah, it’s a simulation, recruit,” Warhurst told him. Garroway started. He hadn’t realized that the DI could hear him. “But it is real, or it was. These Marines are members of the 28th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division. They really lived—and died—to take this island.”

  From the crest of the volcanic mountain, Garroway could see the whole island, a roughly triangular sprawl of black sand, rock, and jungle extending toward what his inner compass told him was the north to northeastern horizon. Offshore, hundreds of ships—old-style seagoing ships, rather than military spacecraft—lay along the eastern horizon. A few moved closer in, periodically spewing orange flame and clouds of smoke from turret-mounted batteries, and the beaches near the foot of the mountain were littered with hundreds of small, dark-colored craft like oblong boxes that had the look of so many ugly beetles slogging through the surf.

  “The date,” Warhurst told him, “is 2302, in the year 170 of the Marine Era. That’s 23 February 1945, for you people who still think in civilian. The mountain is Suribachi, a dormant volcanic cone 166 meters high at the southern end of a place called Sulfur Island—Iwo Jima in Japanese. For the past four days the 4th and 5th Marine Divisions, plus two regiments of the 3rd, have been assaulting this unappealing bit of real estate in order to take it away from the Japanese Empire. For two years, now, the United States has been island-hopping across the Pacific Ocean, closing toward Japan. Iwo Jima is the first territory they’ve reached that is actually a prefecture of Japan; the mayor of Tokyo is also the mayor of Iwo. That means that for the Japanese defending this island, this is the first actual landing on the sacred soil of their homeland. They are defending every meter in one of the fiercest battles in the war to date.

  “Yesterday, the 28th Marines started up the slope of Suribachi which, as you can see, has a commanding view of the entire island, and looks straight down on the landing beaches. In an entire day of fighting, they advanced perhaps 200 meters, then fended off a Japanese charge during the night. They’ve suffered heavy casualties. Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander, has honeycombed the entire island, which measures just 21 square kilometers, with tunnels, bunkers, and spider holes. The defenders, 22,000 of them, have been ordered to fight to the death…and most of them will.

  “This battle will go down as one of the most famous actions in the history of the Corps. In all of World War II, it was the only action in which the Americans actually suffered more casualties than the enemy—26,000, with 6,825 of those KIA. The Japanese have 22,000 men on the island. Out of those, 1081 will survive.

  “The battle will last until 2503, a total of thirty-seven days, before the island is declared secure. Almost one quarter of all of the Medals of Honor awarded to Marines during World War II—twenty-seven in all—were awarded to men who participated in this battle.

  “Ah. There’s what we came up here to see….”

  Warhurst led the recruits farther up the shell-blasted slope. At the landward side of the summit, a small number of Marines were working at something, huddled along a length of pipe.

  “The mountain now, after a fierce naval and air bombardment, appears cleared of enemy soldiers, and several patrols have reached the top. Half an hour ago, a small flag was raised on the summit of the mountain to demonstrate that the mountain has been secured, but now a larger flag has been sent to the top. The men you see over there are part of a forty-man patrol from E Company, Second Battalion, 28th Marines, of the 5th Marine Division, under the command of Lieutenant Harold Schrier.

  “Those men over there are Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon Block, PFC Rene Gagnon, PFC Ira Hayes, and PFC Franklin Sousley, all United States Marines. The sixth man is Navy, a Pharmacy Mate—what they later called Navy Hospital Corpsmen, P.M./2 John Bradley.

  “Of those six men, three—Strank, Block, and Sousley—will be killed a few days from now, in heavy fighting at the north end of the island. P.M./2 Bradley will be wounded by shrapnel from a mortar round.”

  The men completed doing whatever it was they were doing to the pipe. Grasping it, moving together, they dug one end into a hole in the gravel and lifted the other end high. A flag unfurled with the breeze; nearby, one man turned suddenly and snapped an image with a bulky, old-style 2-D camera, while another man stood filming the scene.

  The whole flag raising took only seconds. As the flag fluttered from the now upright pipe, however, Garroway could hear the cheering—from other Marines on the crest of Suribachi and, distantly, from men on the lower reaches of the island to the north. The rattle of gunfire seemed to subside momentarily, replaced by a new thunder…the low, drawn-out roar from thousands of voices, so faint it nearly was lost on the wind.

  “Have a peek down there on that beach,” Warhurst told them. As Garroway turned and looked, it seemed as though his vision became sharply telescopic, zooming in precipitously, centering on a party of men wading ashore from one of the boxlike landing craft. Two of the figures appeared to be important; they were unarmed, though they wore helmets and life preservers like the others around them. One took the elbow of the other, pointing up the slope toward Garroway’s position. He appeared jubilant.

  “That,” Warhurst continued, “is the secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, just now coming ashore with Marine General Holland ‘Howlin’ Mad’ Smith. When they see the flag up here, Forrestal turns to the general and says ‘Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Mar
ine Corps for the next five hundred years.’”

  There was a surreal aspect to this history lesson—especially in the way Warhurst was describing events in the present and in the future tense, as though these scenes Garroway was experiencing weren’t AI recreations of something that had happened 937 years ago, but were happening now.

  “As it happens, the future of the Marine Corps was far from secure,” Warhurst told them. “Only a couple of years after this battle, the President of the United States attempted to enact legislation that would have closed the Corps down. He referred to the Marines as ‘the Navy’s police force,’ and sought to merge them with the Army. The public outcry over this plan blocked it…but from time to time, cost-cutting politicians looked for ways to slash the military budget by eliminating the Marines.”

  The simulation had continued as Warhurst spoke, the primitively armed and equipped Marines on that volcanic slope continuing to move about as the flag, an archaic scrap of cloth with red and white stripes and ranks of stars on a blue field, continued to flutter overhead.

  Gradually, though, the scene began to fade in Garroway’s mind. He was sitting once again in a simcast amphitheater back at the training center on Mars, his recliner moving upright along with all of the others arrayed in circles about a central stage. The image of six men raising a flag continued to hover overhead, a holographic projection faintly luminous in the theater’s dim light.

  Warhurst paced the stage, lecturing, but with an animated passion. This, Garroway thought, was not just information to be transmitted to another class of recruits, but something burning in Warhurst’s brain and heart.

  “As Forrestal predicted, however,” Warhurst went on, “the Corps did endure for the next five hundred years—and then for over three hundred years after that. For most of that time, the politicians tended to dislike us…or at least they never seemed to know what to do with us. We’ve been on the budgetary chopping block more times than we can count. Civilians tend to like us, however. They see us as the holders of an important legacy—one embracing duty, honor, faithfulness. Semper fi. Always faithful.

  “In fact, though, the raising of the flag on Suribachi probably had less to do with the Corps’ survival than did certain other factors. A century after the Battle of Iwo Jima, we left the shores of our home planet, and discovered the Ancient ruins on Mars and on Earth’s moon, and later at places like Chiron and Ishtar. Both the Builders and the An left a lot of high-tech junk lying around on worlds they visited in the past…the Xul, too, for that matter, if you count what we found out on Europa. Started something like a twenty-first-century gold rush, as every country on Earth with a space capability tried to get people out there to see what they could find. Xenoarcheology became the hot science, since it was thought that reverse-engineering some of that stuff could give us things like faster-than-light travel or FTL radio. The Navy, logically enough, became the service branch that ran the ships to get out here…and where the Navy went, the Marines came along. The Battle of Cydonia. The Battle of Tsiolkovsky. The Battle of Ishtar. The Battles of the Sirius Gate, and of Night’s Edge. ‘From the Halls of Montezuma, to the ocher sands of Mars.’ We’ve written our legacy in blood across a thousand years and on battlefields across two hundred worlds.

  “And in all that time, and on all those worlds, the Marine Corps has done one thing…what we’ve always done. We win battles!

  “And you, recruits, have come here to Mars in order to learn how to do just that.”

  Garroway felt a stirring of pride at that—not at the promise that they would win battles, but at the way Warhurst was addressing them now. This was now the twelfth week of training, with just four more weeks to go. At some point during the last couple of months—and Garroway honestly could not remember when—Warhurst had stopped calling the men and women of Recruit Company 4102 children, and started calling them recruits.

  Step by step, their civilian individuality had been broken down; step by step Warhurst and the other DIs had been building them back up, forging them into…something new. Garroway wasn’t sure what the difference was yet, but he felt the difference, a sense of confidence, of belonging that he’d never before known.

  The feeling that he belonged had just taken a major boost skyward, of course. The nano injected into his system on 0710 had grown into standard-Corps issue cereblink hardware, and now, for the first time in three months, he was again connected.

  It had been a rough time without connections—no downloads, no direct comm. Or, rather, downloads and incoming comm messages had entered his brain via his ears and his eyes, without mediation or enhancement by AI software. It had been like starting all over again, learning how to learn, rather than allowing headware and resident AIs to sort and file his memories for him.

  He had a new personal electronic assistant, too…or, rather, a Corps platoon EA guide he shared with everyone else in the company. The EA’s name was Achilles; Warhurst had told them to think of him as a kind of narrowly focused platoon sergeant. Achilles was a bit short in the personality department, but the system was very fast, very efficient, and was working hard at its first task, helping him learn how to get the most out of the new headware.

  Later, at evening chow, he discovered one down side to Achilles.

  “So, whatcha think of the new headware?” he asked Sandre Kenyon, a recruit who’d been born and raised in one of the new arcologies off the coast of Pennsylvania. She’d been a vir-simmer, a programmer of simulation AIs, before she’d joined the Corps. He followed her out of the chow line and toward a couple of empty seats at one of the tables. Noise clattered and echoed around them; meals were among the very few times when recruits were free to socialize with other recruits, at least after the first month of training.

  “It’s okay, I guess,” she said. “It’s gonna take some getting used to, though.”

  “I know. It’s so damned fast….”

  “It’s also damned creepy,” she told him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Having your platoon sergeant perched on your shoulder every minute of every day? Watching everything you do? Even everything you think? And reporting it all back to HQRTC, complete with images in glorious color and infrared? I don’t know about you, Aiden, but there are a few things I do or think about doing that I don’t care to share with half the base, y’know?”

  “Oh…”

  He’d not thought about that aspect of things, at least not before now.

  In fact, privacy was an alien concept in boot camp. Male and female recruits trained together, shared the same barracks, and used the same head. Toilets had stalls but no doors, and no recruit was ever really alone for more than a few moments at a time. In fact, come to think of it, standing barracks fire watch in the middle of the night was probably the closest any recruit came to having some private time—but then you never knew when the sergeant of the guard was going to show up on one of his rounds.

  Mostly, it wasn’t a hardship. The recruits were too damned busy, moving at a flat run from reveille to taps every day, for it to be a problem…and most human cultures accepted casual social nudity as the norm.

  “Is Achilles listening to you gripe about it now?”

  She shrugged. “I asked it. It told me it monitored everyone in the company for breaches of regulations and compliance to orders…but that it didn’t record or transmit anything else. It…it’s a machine. A program, rather, so I guess it shouldn’t bother me. Still…how do we know?”

  Garroway began digging into his meal—a nanassembled steak indistinguishable in taste and texture from live steaks culture-grown in the Ring agros. One thing you had to say about the Marines: they fed well.

  He assumed Sandre was talking about sex. Technically, fraternization between recruits was forbidden, though in fact the authorities didn’t seem to pay much attention to occasional and harmless breaches of the rules. If a recruit on fire watch was caught in the rack with a fuck buddy, they both would probably be bounced out of the Co
rps and back to Earth or wherever they’d come from so fast their eyes would be spinning in their heads, but Garroway knew that several recruits in Company 4102 were enjoying one another’s physical companionship—at least if their break-time war stories could be believed.

  His only question was how they found the time—or the energy—with the daily schedule that ruled their lives—up at zero-dark thirty, followed by eighteen hours of marching, drilling, classroom work, lectures, testing, and downloading, with lights out at 2200 hours.

  Having a personal daemon was nothing new. Most humans had them, the only hold-outs being the various neoluddite or neoprimitive cultures which had abandoned high-tech for religious, esthetic, or artistic reasons. Achilles was a daemon, nothing more. In fact, he seemed just like Aide, except that he was more powerful, faster, and he linked all of the recruits in Company 4102 into a close-knit electronic network.

  But he had to admit that Sandre had a point. Having Achilles watching him was just like having Warhurst watching him, except that the watching was taking place every second of every day. His stomach tightened at the thought.

  “Recruit Kenyon is correct,” a voice whispered in his mind.

  Garroway looked up, startled. “Achilles?”

  “What?” Sandre asked. Garroway hadn’t realized he’d spoken the name aloud. He waved his hand back and forth, requesting her silence.

  “Affirmative,” the voice continued. “Think of me as a part of yourself, not as a spy for your superiors.”

  But you do report to the DI shack, don’t you? This time, Garroway thought the question silently, employing the mindspeak he’d always used with Aide.

  “Technically, yes, but only in matters involving gross negligence of duty. In any case, Marines are supposed to be of superior moral character. By this point in your training, those with serious moral flaws have already been weeded out.”

  “Oh…”

  Company 4102 had dwindled a lot in the past few weeks, it was true. Only forty-five recruits remained out of the over one hundred who’d originally mustered at Noctis Labyrinthus. But he’d assumed the DORs—the Drop Out Requests—had quit because they couldn’t get along without their headware.