Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

“Sir! Flat on the belly and using all available cover to avoid showing a recognizable silhouette against the sky, sir!”

  “Back in the action, then! And this time keep your mind on what you’re doing!”

  How the hell did Makowiecz know what was going on in his head? The man was uncanny. “Aye aye, sir!”

  His hips and buttocks felt numb, but he rolled over and crawled back up the slope, careful this time to keep flat on the ground. Even rubber bullets packed a hell of a wallop, and he was going to be sore for days after this.

  Worse, the rest of the platoon was well across the mud pit by now, plowing ahead as explosions sent columns of mud geysering into the air and bullets smacked and chopped into the mud around them. He’d lost a lot of time.

  He thought-clicked to check his time, then groaned when nothing happened. Damn it, he still kept instinctively trying to trigger his Sony-TI 12000, even though almost a month had passed since he’d lost it. The worst was not being able to talk with Lynnley.

  Makowiecz was waiting for him with an evil grin when he straggled in at the finish line fifteen minutes later…one of the last three or four to arrive.

  “Assume the position, recruits!” Corporal Meiers, an assistant DI, barked. “Push-ups! And one! And two! And…”

  John’s legs were aching now, but he went into the exercise set with grim determination.

  “Remember, ladies!” Makowiecz bellowed over his assistant’s cadence. “Pain is the feeling of weakness leaving your body!”

  “And twenny-eight! And twenny-nine! And…”

  Lagrange Shuttle King Priam

  In approach to IST Derna

  Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

  1320 hours Zulu

  Half a million kilometers from Parris Island, the Marine Interstellar Transport Derna fell in her month-long orbit about the Earth. Built around a long, slender keel with a cluster of antimatter drive engines at the aft end, she had a length overall—her loa—of 622 meters. The massive, dome-shaped ablative shield and reaction-mass storage tank ahead of the three hab-cylinders gave her the look from a distance of a huge mushroom with a needle-slender stem. Aft, the broad flare of heat radiators resembled the fletching on a blunt-tipped arrow.

  When under drive, the hab cylinders were folded up tight behind the RM dome, safe from the storm of radiation and high-energy dust impacts resulting from near-c velocities. Under one g of acceleration, aft was down. When the drives stopped—even AM-charged torchships couldn’t haul enough reaction mass to carry them onward for years at one g—the three hab cylinders folded out and forward on arms extending ninety degrees from the ship’s central keel, though still protected by the overhang of the RM dome. Rotating around the ship’s axis, they provided out-is-down spin gravity for the passengers without requiring a rearrangement of the deck furniture, consoles, and plumbing.

  At the moment, the IST Derna was in orbital configuration, her hab modules spread and rotating slowly. Beyond her, twenty kilometers away, Antimatter Production Facility Vesuvius gleamed in the sunlight, its vast solar array back-lit by the glare of the sun.

  Strapped into one of the passenger seats on board the Lagrange Shuttle King Priam, Gavin Norris watched the approach on the viewscreen set into the back of the seat in front of him. The shuttle was making her final orbital insertion maneuver with short, sharp taps on her thrusters; she was still several kilometers out from the Derna, but the immense transport still all but filled the screen.

  Norris was on his way at last, with unimaginable wealth at the end of the journey. He let his gaze stray from the screen and move about the passenger cabin. Every seat was taken by hard-muscled men and women in gray fatigues—the Marines who would be his fellow travelers for the next two decades.

  He was glad that most of that time would be spent asleep. These were not exactly the sort of people he would choose as companions on a vacation cruise. The woman in the seat next to him, for instance…an argument against genetic manipulation and somatic nanosculpting if ever he’d seen one. Big-boned, lean, muscular, she looked like she could snap him in two with a glance from those eerily black augmented eyes. Her hair had been close-cropped to little more than fuzz, and if she had anything like breasts under those fatigues, she kept them well hidden. Hard, cold, asexual…he tried to imagine himself in bed with her, then decided that was a noumenon he did not want to file in permanent memory.

  He wondered why they were here. This was a volunteer mission, of course; you didn’t simply order young men and women to leave homes and families for a twenty-year mission to another star, not if you wanted to avoid a full-fledged mutiny. They certainly weren’t offering these grunts money. What, then? Rank? Glory? He snorted to himself. To Norris, the military mind was something arcane and incomprehensible.

  “What the fuck are you gawking at, civ?”

  He blinked. He’d not been aware that he was staring. “Uh, sorry,” he told her. A thought-click picked up her name-tag data. She was Gunnery Sergeant Athena Horst, of something called ComCon DS 219. The mil-babble told him nothing. “I was just wondering why you Marines would sign up for a party like this.”

  She grinned at him, an unsettling showing of teeth. “Hey, this is the Corps,” she told him. “Just like they say in the recruiting blurbs. ‘See exotic worlds, meet fascinating life-forms, kill them….’”

  “Uh…yeah…”

  “Why are you here?”

  “Me? I’m the corporate rep for PanTerra. They have…interests on Llalande, and I’m going to see to it that they’re protected.”

  “What, you’re a lawyer?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am. My specialty, though, is CPM.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Corporate problem management.” When her face remained blank, he added, “I’m a troubleshooter. I make certain that small problems do not become large ones.”

  “Troubleshooter, huh?” She chuckled. “That’s rich. A civilian Marine!”

  “What?”

  “A civilian Marine! We’re troubleshooters too, y’know. There’s trouble, we shoot it!” She cocked her thumb and forefinger, mimicking a gun. “Zzzt! Blam!” She blew across the tip of her finger. “Problem down. Area secure.”

  “I see.”

  “I doubt that. Ha!”

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking,” she said, grinning. “When we get to Ishtar, let me know how your troubleshooting works with the Frogs.”

  “Uh…frogs?”

  “The Ishtaran abs. The Ahannu. What are you going to do if they get out of line, slap ’em with a lawsuit?”

  “I will assess the situation and report to the PanTerran director’s board with my recommendations. I’ll also be there as a corporate legal representative should there be, um, jurisdictional or boundary disputes, shall we say, with any of the other Earth forces going to Ishtar.”

  “I like my way better,” Horst said. She shook her head. “Give me a twenty-one-twenty with an arpeg popper any day.”

  “A…what? Arpeg?”

  “The Remington Arms M-12 underbarrel self-guiding rocket-propelled 20mm grenade launcher, RPG Mark Four, Mod 2, select-fire, gas-actuated, laser-tracking, self-homing round in high-explosive, armor-piercing, or delay-detonated bomblet or intel submunitions,” she said, rattling off the words as though they were a part of her, “with select-fire from an underbarrel mount configuration with the Marine-issue GE LR-2120 Sunbeam pulse laser with detachable forty-or ninety-round box magazine and targeting link through the standard Mark Seven HD linkage—”

  “Whatever you say,” he replied, interrupting when she took a breath. “I’ll stick to legal briefs, thank you.”

  She laughed. “Washington must really be pissed with the Frogs,” she said. “Being taken down by a self-homer arpeg round is a hell of a lot cleaner than being fucking lawyered to death.”

  He smiled blandly, then looked away, pointedly taking an interest in the docking approach on his seat-back screen. Clearly, he
shared little in the way of language or attitude with the Marines. He wondered if PanTerra was paying him enough for this assignment.

  The shuttle docked with the Derna, drifting gently into a berthing rack mounted on the flat underside of the reaction mass dome. A number of other TAV craft were already docked, their noses plugged into a ring of airlock modules circling the transport’s core just forward of the slowly spinning hab-module access collar.

  There was a slight pop as cabin pressures matched, then the Marines around him began unbuckling, floating up from their seats and forming a queue in the central aisle. He unbuckled his own harness but kept hold of the seat arm, unwilling to let himself float into that haphazard tangle of legs, arms, and torsos.

  “Mr. Norris?” a voice said in his head. “Have you had zero-g experience?”

  He thought-clicked on the noumenal link. “Yes,” he said. “A little, anyway.” He’d had other offworld assignments with PanTerra—on the moon, on Mars, on Vesta, and twice on mining stations in the Kuiper Belt. All had been steady-g all the way—PanTerra always sent its executives first class—but he’d endured weightlessness during boarding and at mid-trip flipovers.

  “Even so, it might be best for you to remain in your seat until the Marines have moved out. A naval officer can help you board the transport and get to your deck.”

  “Who is this?” He didn’t recognize the noumenal ID: CS-1289. An artificial intelligence, obviously, but ship AIs generally went by the name of their vessel, and this one felt a bit broader in scope than a typical ship AI.

  “You may address me as ‘Cassius,’” the voice said. “I am the executive AI component for the command constellation on this mission.”

  “I see.”

  “Colonel Ramsey regrets that he cannot receive you in person,” Cassius went on, “but he is still on Earth attending to the details of mission preparation. And Cicero has not yet uploaded to the Derna.”

  “Cicero?”

  “General King’s AI counterpart.”

  “Who’s General King? I thought Ramsey was the mission commander?”

  “Colonel Ramsey is the regimental commander and, as such, will have operational command on the ground at Ishtar. General King will have overall mission command, including all ground, space, and aerospace units.”

  “The CEO, huh? He supervises the whole thing from orbit?”

  “The analogy is a fair one, Mr. Norris. Once the Pyramid of the Eye has been secured, and assuming direct real-time communications can be reestablished between the Legation compound and Earth, General King will likely transfer his headquarters from the Derna to New Sumer.”

  Norris nodded, then wondered if the disembodied voice in his head could see the gesture. “Gotcha,” he said. His briefing at PanTerra had covered Marine space-ground command structures and procedures in some detail, but he would need to know the people involved, not just the TO&E. General King, evidently, would be his primary target, but Ramsey would be the one to watch. He would have to get close to both men if his assignment for PanTerra was to succeed.

  Waiting, only somewhat impatiently, he watched the last of the Marines float out of the aisle and through the King Priam’s forward lock. Patience had never been one of Norris’s best or most reliable assets; he needed to keep reminding himself that he was committed to a twenty-year-plus contract in objective time, that even in subjective time there was no need for hurry at all.

  Angry with himself, he thought-clicked through some meditative subroutines in his implants, seeking peaceful acceptance. Within moments the medical nano in his body was subtly altering the balance of several neurochemicals, lowering his blood pressure, slowing his heart rate, inducing the patience he required.

  “Mr. Norris?”

  It was an external voice a human voice this time. He opened his eyes. “Yes?”

  A Navy officer floated in the aisle next to his seat row. He wore dress whites and appeared very young. “I’m Lieutenant Bolton. Will you come with me, please?”

  “Of course.”

  The lieutenant gestured toward a storage case forward. “Uh, pardon my asking, but do you need a drag bag?”

  “Drag bag?”

  “Microgravity Transit Harness, sir. An MTH. To help get you—”

  Norris frowned. He’d seen MTHs used in civilian spacecraft, and a more undignified mode of travel was hard to imagine. “That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant. I’ve been in zero g before.”

  “Very well, sir. If you’ll just follow me?”

  Grasping fabric handholds on the tops of the seats around him, Norris pulled himself gently from his seat and maneuvered his way into the aisle. For a dizzying moment his visual references spun and shifted; he’d been thinking of the cabin as having the layout of a suborbital shuttle or hypersonic TAV, with seats on the floor. During acceleration out from Earth, of course, down was aft, toward the rear of the cabin, and he felt as though he were lying on his back, but it was easy to translate that in terms of the acceleration one felt during the suborb boost from New York to Tokyo.

  Now, though, all references of up and down were lost. The seats were attached to the wall, he was hanging in midair above a long drop toward the cabin’s rear, and Lieutenant Bolton was swimming straight up, toward the forward lock.

  It’s all in your mind, he thought, angry again. He closed his eyes, grasped the next handhold forward, and grimly pulled himself along. When he opened his eyes, just for a moment, perspectives had shifted again and he was now moving down, head first, into a well, with Lieutenant Bolton looking up at him with a worried expression. “Mr. Norris?”

  “I’m fine, damn it,” he said. “Lead on!”

  The worst parts were the twists and turns, though the airlock was small enough and without contradictory visual cues, so he could catch his breath. Damn it, when was someone going to find a way to provide constant gravity, no matter where you were on a ship or what the ship was doing at the time?

  Inside Derna’s inner hatch, a sign had been attached to one wall saying QUARTERDECK, next to an American flag stretched taut by wires in the fly and hoist. Lieutenant Bolton saluted the flag, then saluted again to another naval lieutenant who floated there. “Permission to come on board.”

  “Permission granted.”

  An asinine ceremony, Norris thought with distaste. How did one stand at attention in zero g? Once the military got hold of one of these little rituals, they never let go.

  At last they floated through a hatch and entered a cylindrical compartment with the words DECK and FEET TOWARD HERE painted in red letters on one end. Using straps on the wall, they aligned themselves with the deck, and Bolton used his implant to activate the elevator.

  The device loaded into one of the rotating hab arms like a shell locking into the firing chamber of a rifle. For a disorienting moment Norris felt like he was upside down, feet hanging toward the ceiling, while the elevator’s gentle acceleration away from the ship’s spine induced a momentary feeling of weight. Then the sensations of spin gravity took hold and he drifted, feet down, to the deck.

  The returning feeling of weight did little to soothe his bad mood. He’d never liked being weightless, with conflicting clues as to what might be up or down. The hatchway opened at last on Deck One of Hab Three. Uppermost of five decks in the module, this deck had rotation sufficient to create the sensation of about half a g, a bit more than the surface of Mars. Relishing the feeling of a solid deck beneath his feet once more, Norris strode into the lounge area surrounding the central elevator shaft.

  He wrinkled his nose as he stared about the room. “What the hell is that smell? I thought this was a new ship?”

  “It is, sir. New wiring, new fittings, new air circulators. All new ships smell a bit funny. Just wait until you wake up in ten years! It’ll smell a lot worse, believe me!”

  Norris didn’t doubt the man. The interior of the hab module was clearly designed to cram as many humans into as small a space as possible. The walls—no, on a ship t
hey would be called bulkheads, he reminded himself irritably—the bulkheads were covered by hexagonal openings, some open and lit within, some closed, giving him the impression of being inside an immense beehive. The central area was divided into thin-walled cubicles. He glimpsed men and women in some of them, sitting at workstations or jacked into entertainment or education centers. There was also a lounge with a table—not large or spacious, but with chairs enough to sit in small groups.

  “The head—that’s the bathroom on board a ship—is over there,” Bolton said, pointing. “There’s a common area in each hab module…Deck Two, one down from here. That’s where the mess deck is, too.”

  Norris eyed the hexagonal cells all around him. Each appeared to be a tiny, self-contained cabin, two meters long and a meter across, only slightly larger than a coffin. A person could lie inside, but there wasn’t room to stand. “My God, how many people do you have in here?”

  “On this deck? Eighty. But these are the luxury quarters, sir…for the command constellation and the officers. Decks Three and Four house two hundred personnel apiece.”

  He looked around the compartment in disbelief. “Five hundred people? In here?”

  Bolton cleared his throat. “Uh…actually, 480 just in this one hab module, sir. The Derna carries an entire Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit. An MIEU consists of a Regimental Landing Team, headquarters, recon, and intelligence platoons, and an aerospace close-support wing. That’s twelve hundred Marines altogether, sir, plus 145 naval personnel as ship’s crew. Of course, only about a quarter of that complement are on board now. The rest will be coming up over the course of the next three months.”

  “Thank you for the lecture,” Norris replied dryly. “Where do you keep them all?”

  “In the cells, of course,” Bolton said. “Yours is over here, sir.”

  He would have to climb a ladder to reach his hexagonal cell, he found…located four up from the deck, just beneath the chamber’s ceiling, or “overhead,” as Bolton called it. Inside was a thin mattress, storage compartments, data jacks and feeds, access to the ship’s computer and library, and a personal medical suite; altogether, a wonder of microminiaturization.