Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  The briefing room, if it could be called that, was being projected inside the minds of the participants, some of whom were at Quantico, others as far away as the Derna, in high Earth orbit. The icon representing Captain Martin Warhurst wore Marine grays, which were somewhat outmoded on the fashion front. Just three weeks back from Egypt, he’d not had time to update his personal software, what with endless rounds of debriefings and the work he was putting into his latest assignment—the Llalande Relief Expedition ARLT. In contrast, most of the others at the virtual briefing flaunted the latest Marine officer’s fashion, duotone white and gold tunics over blue trousers, both with red trim, and with a holographic globe-and-anchor projected above the left breast. Ramsey wondered how many of them wore the new uniforms outside of virtual reality. They looked peacock-gaudy in the briefing feed; few field commanders, however, bothered with the game of fashion keep-up so popular with the stateside Corps brass.

  “I’d still feel better about this if we just rocked ’em from orbit,” Warhurst said. “This giant gun or whatever it is they have inside the mountain…if it can claw starships out of the sky, how the hell are we going to even get close?”

  Colonel Ramsey nodded. “I know. But we have very specific orders on this one. I already tried to sell the commandant on a bombardment from space, but his orders are to deliver that weapons system to our experts…intact. If we reduce that mountain to a crater, the Joint Chiefs are not going to be happy with us.”

  “So?” Major Ricia Anderson said, grinning, her voice just low enough that the colonel could convincingly ignore it. “They’ll be ten years away! What are they gonna do, write us a nasty e-note?”

  “Fortunately,” Ramsey went on, “the Annies don’t know we have to take that mountain instead of flattening it. That gives us a possible edge tactically, a slim one. From the description provided in the last transmission from the pyramid, we estimate that the beam weapon hidden inside An-Kur must generate a bolt of energy measuring at least 1016 joules.

  “Now, we don’t know how they generate that kind of power. Like all of the Ahannu god-weapons, it’s pretty much magic so far as we or they are concerned. But that much energy takes time to generate and store, even if they have some kind of antimatter generator down there. We’re counting on the fact that they’ll have a limited number of shots, with a goodly recharge time between each one. That, Captain, will operate in your favor.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Ramsey smiled. What else could Warhurst say? The man had volunteered for this mission as soon as it had been described to him. The chance to deploy to another star system…hell, don’t quibble. The chance at an assignment with a Career 3 rating meant promotion points as well as a whopping big combat-hardship pay bonus. If Warhurst survived this op, his career would be made.

  “Our biggest problem right now,” Ramsey told his staff, “is manpower. Volunteers only, of course…and because of the objective mission duration, the pick is limited to Famsit One and Two. Our original TO and E called for a full regimental MEU…about two thousand people. With the logistical limitations of a Derna-class IST, we’re reconfiguring that as an MIEU, a Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit, with a roster of twelve hundred. Even with that, though, we may have trouble filling out the roster.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Lyle Harper, the Regimental Landing Team’s CO, raised a hand. “We could put in a special request at Camp Lejeune, Colonel. There are sixteen companies in training right now, and a fair percentage of those people won’t have close family ties. Hell, they might see it as an adventure.”

  “Not to mention returning to Earth with five years objective under their belts,” Major Lyssa DuBoise, commander of the MIEU’s aerospace element, said. “Eligible for discharge and a hell of a lot of hardship pay!”

  “Since when did the Corps become a mercenary unit?” Major Samuel C. Ross, the Regimental G-2, said. He was in charge of mission intelligence—a particular bastard of a job, Ramsey thought, since no one knew exactly what was happening on Ishtar right now, and there was no way in hell they could guess what it would be like ten years hence.

  “Our people will do their jobs because that’s the way they were trained,” Ramsey said. “As for the rest, it’s about time they got some financial recognition for what they do. There’s little enough material gratification in the peacetime Corps.”

  “Amen to that,” someone in the watching group muttered aloud.

  “In any case,” Ramsey continued, “Major Anderson will be responsible for recruiting volunteers at Lejeune. Because of the mission’s subjective length, we’ll need a high percentage of young men and women right out of boot camp. They’ll all be eligible for sergeant’s stripes and better by the time they get home.”

  Subjective versus objective time was becoming more and more of a problem in the modern military, especially in the Navy and the Marines. While career-military officers and senior NCOs were “lifers”—meaning they expected to be in the service for a full twenty or thirty years, at least—the vast majority of enlisted personnel signed up for an initial four-year hitch. Some small percentage of those opted to extend their enlistment for an additional six years, to “ship-for-six,” as the old saying went, and a smaller percentage of ten-year veterans decided to go the full twenty or more to retirement.

  If a young Marine rotated through various duty stations on Earth, or even on the moon or one of the orbital stations, there was no problem. That’s the way things had been run in the military for centuries. But it was expensive to ship large numbers of men and women plus their equipment to other worlds within the Solar system, and so time on-station offworld tended to be measured in years rather than months.

  And now that Marines were being sent to the worlds of other stars, the problem of finding unattached personnel who didn’t mind leaving Earth and all they knew there for years, even decades at a time, was becoming critical. Nanohibernation technology and time dilation might make subjective time on board the Marine transport seem like days or weeks, at most, but objectively the voyage would last a decade—two before the mission personnel saw the Earth again. Those young Marine men and women would return to an Earth aged twenty years or more. And even the most optimistic mission planners expected the deployment to the Llalande system to require no fewer than two years of ground-time at the objective.

  Finding the best Marines who were also Famsit One—no close family ties on Earth—or Famsit Two—FOO, or Family-of-Origin only—was becoming damned near impossible. If anyone could deal with the details and the delicacies of such a search, Ramsey knew it was Ricia.

  “I have one final piece of business for this briefing,” Ramsey said. He thought-clicked a new connection, allowing another image to form within the shared noumenal conference space. “Ladies, gentlemen, may I present our mission commander, Brigadier General Phillip King.”

  In fact, the image was a secretarial AI, projecting General King’s thin face and dour expression into the group noumenon, and identified as such by a winking yellow light at his collar. Ramsey mentally shook his head at that; one never knew for sure if the construct one met in noumenal space was a real-time projection or an AI secretary, unless the other party put up an AI tag like King’s insignia light. For most senior officers, secretary stand-ins for briefings and presentations were a necessity if they wanted to get any real work done at all.

  In King’s case, though, the light was a kind of message board proclaiming, “I am a busy man and have no time to spare for you.” Ramsey had served under King once before, back in ’29, and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. The man tended to be fussy, rigid, and a bit of a prima donna.

  He was also a superb politician, with a politician’s connections and oil-smooth sincerity, at least on the surface. The word from on high was that King—thanks to postings to various ambassadorial staffs over the past few years—had the blessing of half a dozen other national governments involved in the international relief force.

  “Thank you, Colonel
Ramsey,” the image said in King’s somewhat nasal tones. “I look forward to getting to meet each of you personally in the coming months.

  “For now, I wish to impress upon each of you what an honor it is to be chosen for Operation Spirit of Humankind. I expect each of you to do your best, for the Corps, for America, for the Confederation, and for me.

  “We are engaged in a deployment of tremendous…ah…diplomatic importance. As you all know, the Marine expeditionary force was to be followed by a second American expedition. That has now changed. The follow-up expedition is now envisioned as a true multinational interstellar task force, one including personnel from the European Union, the Brazilian Empire, the Kingdom of Allah, the Republic of Mejico, and others, besides our Confederation allies. The Confederation Council has decided that this is an expedition of truly human proportions, one in which all of humankind has a stake.

  “It will be our task not only to defeat enemy forces on Ishtar, but to maintain the peace with the disparate members of the multinational task force. We will present a united front to the Frogs….”

  Somehow, Ramsey stifled an inward grimace that might otherwise have projected into the noumenon. The fighting in Egypt with KOA religious fanatics was only the most recent bit of terrestrial bloodshed going down. The European Union had been sparring with Russia as recently as the Black Sea War of ’34, and the Brazilians and Japanese were going at it over Antarctic fishing rights just last year. And things had been simmering between the United Federal Republic and Mejico since long before the Second Mexican War.

  Frankly, facing a planet-full of hostile Ahannu god-warriors was infinitely preferable to facing the politics, red tape, and outright blood-feuds that were bound to entangle Earth’s first interstellar expeditionary forces. Ramsey knew that not even King, for all his diplomatic experience, was going to have an easy job keeping those factions straight.

  And as a military commander…well, he had serious doubts that General King was the best man possible for the command.

  10

  19 JULY 2138

  Field Combat Range

  U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center

  Parris Island, South Carolina

  0640 hours ET

  “Crawl, you sand fleas! Crawl! You will become one with the dirt!”

  Makowiecz stood on the beach like an implacable giant, hands on hips, khaki uniform, as always, immaculately clean and sharp-creased, despite the unmitigated hell flying around him. The sound was deafening and unremitting, with explosions going off every few seconds and live rounds, both solid and optical, cracking through the air a meter above the ground.

  John Garroway wondered why the ordnance never came near the DI, and decided, like the others in his company, that no bullet or laser pulse would dare threaten to muss the man’s uniform, much less actually hit him. Break-room speculation had it that the DIs on the combat range wore smartclothes that communicated with the robotic weapons laying down the fire on the beach, blocking any fire aimed too close to any of the exercise supervisors, but that couldn’t be proven. Besides, shrapnel and spent rounds were mindless and didn’t care where they flew. A low-powered round glanced off John’s helmet—a spent rubber bullet, by the dull thump it made—and left his head aching.

  “Garroway, you stupid asshole!” Makowiecz screamed. Damn, the man had been thirty meters up the beach; he had never seen him approach. “What do you think, that this is some kind of VR sim? Get your fucking head down!”

  “Sir, yes, sir!” John screamed back through a mouthful of gritty sand. He pressed himself flatter as a close-grouped trio of explosions detonated meters away. Makowiecz didn’t flinch.

  “And keep moving! The enemy’s that way! That way! What, are you waiting for him to come give you a personal invitation? Move your damned, tin-plated ass! Move it!”

  John kept moving, forcing himself ahead with an odd, uncomfortable twisting of the hips, inching forward in his dead-man armor.

  The grim sobriquet was an old term for Mark XIV polylaminate impact armor, obsolete since the Second Mexican War or before. Unpowered, unenhanced, the suit was heavy and drunk-clumsy, and moving in it was like dragging along the weight of another man. The outer chamelearmor layer had been stripped off, leaving a stark, bone-white surface shiny enough that the recruits could be easily seen on the combat range, at least in theory. At the moment, the recruits were so mud-covered that they might as well have been fully camouflaged.

  They hadn’t even been given fully enclosed helmets; learning how to use HDO displays was still weeks away in their training. Instead they wore ancient bucket helmets with swing-down laser-block visors and just enough built-in comm linkage to let their DIs talk to them, usually in blistering invective.

  Not that Gunny Makowiecz needed technical assistance to chew out the recruits. He seemed to be everywhere on that live-fire range, yelling, swearing, admonishing, cajoling, raging, relentlessly using every trick of the drill instructor’s handbook to motivate his struggling charges.

  For three weeks now Company 1099 had been all but living in the antique Mark XIVs, marching in them, exercising in them, standing fire watch and sentry duty in them, and when they weren’t wearing them, cleaning them. Twice now John had been ordered to hit the rack wearing his armor as punishment for being too slow hitting the mark with his ready kit at morning muster. That bit of motivational guidance, as it was called, had left him sore, chaffed, and tired, and a hell of a lot more eager to jump out of bed at a zero-dark-thirty reveille.

  Another explosion thundered nearby, and John felt the thump of the detonation through the ground. Gravel rattled off his armored back. He was by now thoroughly miserable. Wet sand, mud, and grit had worked its way, inevitably, past the armor suit’s seal at his neck and chafed now against tender places too numerous to mention. The platoon had started this morning’s exercise twenty minutes ago at the surf line on the beach, leaving all of them soaked and coated with sand. Their objective was to belly-crawl three hundred meters up the shelf of the beach, over the dune line, and across the mud pit beyond. Explosive charges buried in the sand and the constant laser and projectile fire overhead kept things interesting…especially with the word from the DIs that one in a hundred of the bullets whizzing overhead was steel ball, not rubber, just to keep the men focused.

  John stopped for a moment, trying to rub against a suddenly insistent itch on his side, beneath the armor. Sand fleas. They infested the beaches of Parris Island, seemingly as thick as the sand grains themselves, and when they got inside the armor, they bit and bit and bit, leaving long chains of fiery welts.

  He was up to the line of dunes now, dirty gray sand slopes capped by straggling patches of grass rising like mountains in his path. Robot gun towers and sensors were spaced along the crest of the ridge, entrenched behind ferrocrete bastions, but the recruits were to ignore those and keep moving. The finish line for this sadistic race lay beyond the mud pits on the far side of the dunes.

  “If you stop, you’re dead.” Makowiecz’s voice grated in their ears, an ongoing litany, chiding, needling, threatening. “When you’re under fire out in the open this way, you keep moving or you stay put and get killed. That’s your choice, ladies. That’s your only choice! Now hump it! Fox! Paulsen! Stop your malingering, you two! Garroway! You’re not being paid to scratch! The last ten men to the finish give me fifty push-ups, in armor!”

  John humped it, wiggling up the dune slope faster, ignoring the grating pain of sand-rasped sores in armpits, neck, and groin, ignoring the burning itch of the flea bites. He’d managed to place himself so he would pass close to one of the robot sentry guns, the idea being that explosives and the fields of fire from the array of field emplacements wouldn’t come too close to other gun mounts. Maybe he could make up for some lost time, then, crawling over the crest of the dune without having to worry about one of those damned towers winging him.

  He’d been tagged for armored push-ups more than once before when he couldn’t keep pac
e, and he did not like it.

  The sun was still low above the teeming, reeking swamps of Parris Island to the east, still burning through the early morning mist. South, the gleaming facade of the new hospital facility, aerospace port, and depot HQ rose on pylons from the sea halfway to the skytower complex at Hilton Head, on the outskirts of Greater Savannah. Another world, that…an alien world, as far removed from the mud and stink and sweat and sand fleas of Parris Island as the fabled Ruined Cities of Chiron were from Earth.

  No. That was just four light-years and some. Make it the An world at Llalande.

  John squirmed onto the crest of the dune, up on knees and elbows now, scuttling ahead as fast as he could. The next thing he knew, a hammer-blow caught him smack in the tail-bone, toppling him over and sending him sprawling back down the seaward side of the dune. Lying on his back, blinking up at the sky, he next became aware of Gunny Makowiecz leaning over him. “You okay, recruit?”

  “S-Sir! Yes, sir!”

  Makowiecz appeared to be listening to someone else—tapping into his link, perhaps, to the monitor AIs that kept track of all of the personnel on the range. “They say you caught a round in the ass, sweet pea. Maybe next time you’ll learn to keep your damned ass down, where it belongs! You hear what I’m saying?”

  “Sir! Yes, sir!”

  “How do you cross an exposed ridge crest?”