by Ian Douglas
“It’s not very big, is it?” Norris was reminded of the traveler hotels, common worldwide now, but first designed in Japan a century or two back, a person-sized tube with room to sleep in and not much else.
“You won’t need much space, sir,” Bolton told him. “You’re scheduled for cybehibe in…” He closed his eyes, accessing the ship’s net. “…twelve more days, sir. At that time, you’ll be plugged into the ship’s cryocybernetic system, and you won’t know a thing until we reach Ishtar.”
“Twelve days.” He wondered how he was going to endure the crowding until then, and gave himself another nano boost. Acceptance. “Twelve fucking days.”
11
8 AUGUST 2138
Sick Bay
U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center
Parris Island, South Carolina
1430 hours ET
“Garroway!”
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“Through that hatch!”
“Aye aye, sir!”
Garroway banged through the door that had already swallowed half of Company 1099. Inside was the familiar, sterile-white embrace of seat, cabinets, AI doc, and the waiting corpsman.
“Have a seat,” the corpsman said. It wasn’t the same guy he had met in there before. What was his name? He couldn’t remember.
Not that it was important. New faces continually cycled through his awareness these days. Without his implants he could only memorize the important ones, the ones he was ordered to remember.
Of course, that was about to change now. He suppressed the surge of excitement.
“Feeling okay?” the corpsman asked.
“Sir, yes, sir!”
“No injuries? Infections? Allergies? Nothing like that?”
“Sir, no, sir!”
“Do you have at this time any moral or ethical problems with nanotechnic enhancement, implant technologies, or nanosomatic adjustment?”
“Sir, no, sir!”
The corpsman wasn’t even looking at him as he asked the questions. He wore instead the far-off gaze of someone linked into a net and was probably scanning Garroway now with senses far more sophisticated than those housed in merely human eyes or ears.
“He’s go,” the man said.
The AI doctor unfolded from the cabinet. One arm with an airjet hypo descended to his throat, and Garroway steeled himself against the hiss and burn of the injection.
“Right,” the corpsman said. “Just stay there, recruit. Give it time to work.”
This was it, at long last. It felt as though he’d been without an implant now for half his life, though in fact it had only been about six weeks. Six weeks of running, of learning, of training, all without being able to rely on an internal uplink to the local net.
It was, he thought, astonishing what you could do without a nexus of computers in your brain or electronic implants growing in your hands. He’d learned he could do amazing things without instant access to comlinks or library data.
But that didn’t mean he wasn’t eager to get his technic prostheses back.
Outside of a slight tingle in his throat, though, he didn’t feel much of anything. Had the injection worked?
“Okay, recruit. Off you go. Through that door and join your company.”
“Sir…I don’t feel—”
“Nothing to feel yet, recruit. It’ll take a day or two for the implants to start growing and making the necessary neural connections. You’ll be damned hungry, though. They’ll be feeding you extra at the mess hall these next few days to give the nano the raw materials it needs.”
He fell into ranks with the rest of his company and waited as the last men filed through the sick bay. Damn. He’d been so excited at the prospect of getting his implants that he’d not thought about how long it might take them to grow. He’d been hoping to talk to Lynnley tonight….
He hadn’t seen her, hadn’t even linked with her, since arriving on Parris Island. Male and female recruits were kept strictly apart during recruit training, though he had glimpsed formations of women Marines from time to time across the grinder or marching off to one training exercise or another. The old dream of serving with her on some offworld station seemed remote right now. Had she changed much? Did she ever even think about him anymore?
Hell, of course she’s changed, he told himself. You’ve changed. So has she.
He’d been on the skinny side before, but two months of heavy exercise and special meals had bulked him up, all of the new mass muscle. His endurance was up, his temper better controlled, the periodic depression he’d felt subsumed now by the daily routine of training, exercise, and discipline.
And a lot of things that had been important to him once simply didn’t matter now.
He had been allowed to vid family grams to his mother, out in San Diego. She was still living with her sister and beginning the process of getting a divorce. That was good, he thought, as well as long overdue. There were rumors of unrest in the Mexican territories—Recruit Training Center monitors censored the details, unfortunately—and scuttlebutt about a new war.
He kept thinking about what Lynnley had said, back in Guaymas, about him having to fight down there against his own father.
Well, why not? He felt no loyalty to that bastard, not after the way he’d treated his mother. So far as he was concerned, he’d shed the man’s parental cloak when he’d reclaimed the name Garroway.
“Garroway!” Makowiecz barked.
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
“Come with me.”
The DI led him down a corridor and ushered him into another room with a brusque “In there.”
A Marine major, a tall, slender, hard-looking woman in dress grays, sat behind a desk inside.
“Sir! Recruit Garroway reporting as ordered, sir!” In the Corps, to a recruit, all officers were “sir” regardless of gender, along with most other things that moved.
“Sit down, recruit,” the woman said. “I’m Major Anderson, ComCon Delta Sierra two-one-nine.”
He took a seat, wondering if he’d screwed up somehow. Geez…it had to be something pretty bad for a major to step in. During their day-to-day routine, Marine recruits rarely if ever saw any officer of more exalted rank than lieutenant or captain. From a recruit’s point of view, a major was damned near goddesslike in the Corps hierarchy, and actually being addressed by one, summoned to her office, was…daunting, to say the least.
And a comcon? That meant she was part of a regular headquarters staff, probably the exec of a regiment. What could she possibly want with him?
“I’ve been going over your recruit training records, Garroway,” she told him. “You’re doing well. All three-sixes and higher for physical, psych, and all phase one and two training skills.”
“Sir, thank you, sir.”
“No formal marriage or family contracts. Your parents alive, separated.” She paused, and he wondered what she was getting at. “Have you given much thought yet to duty stations after you leave the island?”
That stopped him. Recruits were not asked to voice their preferences, especially by majors. “Uh…sir, uh…this recruit…”
“Relax, Garroway,” Anderson told him. “You’re not on the carpet. Actually, I’m screening members of your platoon for potential volunteers. I’m looking for Space Marines.”
And that rocked him even more. He’d wanted to be a Marine for as long as he could remember, true, ever since he’d learned about his famous leatherneck ancestors, but the real lure to the Corps had always been the possibility of offworld duty stations. The vast majority of Marines never left the Earth; most served out their hitches in the various special deployment divisions tasked with responding to brushfire wars and threats to the Federal Republic’s interests around the globe.
A very special few, however…
“You’re asking me to volunteer for space duty?” Excitement put him on the edge of the seat, leaning forward. “I mean, um, sir, this recruit thinks that, uh—”
“Why
don’t we drop the formalities, John? That third-person recruit crap gets in the way of real communication.”
“Thank you, si—uh, ma’am.” He sighed, then took a deep breath, trying to force himself to relax. The excitement was almost overwhelming. “I…yes. I would be very interested in volunteering for a duty station offworld.”
“You might want to hear about it first,” she cautioned. “I’m not talking about barracks duty on Mars.” She went on to tell him, in brief, clipped sentences, about MIEU-1, a Marine expeditionary unit tasked with a high-profile rescue-recovery mission at Llalande 21185 IID, the Earthlike moon of a gas giant eight light-years distant.
“That’s where the human slaves are, right, ma’am?” he asked her. The newsfeeds had been full of the story around the time he’d signed up. The enforced e-feed blackout during his training period had pretty well cut him off from all news of the outside world, but there’d been plenty of rumor floating around the barracks for the past couple of months. “We’re going out there to free the slaves?”
“We are going to protect federal interests in the Llalande system,” she replied, her voice firm. “Which means we’ll do whatever the President directs us to do. The main thing you have to think about right now is whether you want to volunteer for such a mission. Objective time will be at least twenty years. Ten years out in cyhibe, ten back, plus however long it takes us to complete our mission requirements. Things change in twenty years. We won’t be coming back to the same place we left.”
That sobered him. His mother was, what? Forty-one? She’d be sixty-one or older by the time he saw her again. Regular anagathic regimens and nanotelemeric reconstruction made sixty middle age for most folks nowadays, but twenty years was still a hell of a chunk out of a person’s life. How much would he still have in common with any of the people he left behind?
“We’ll be in hibernation for the whole trip?”
“Hell, yes! That transport is going to be damned cozy for thirteen hundred or so people. We’d kill each other off long before we reached the mission objective if we weren’t. Besides, they wouldn’t be able to pack that much food, water, and air for that long a flight.”
“No, ma’am.” In a way, he was disappointed. Part of his dream included the thrill of the journey itself, flying out from Earth on one of the great interplanetary clippers or boosting for the stars on a near-c torchship.
Anderson was accessing some records with a faraway look in her eyes. “I’m checking your evaluations,” she told him. “Your DI thinks highly of you. Did you know you’re up for selection for embassy duty?”
“Huh? I mean, no, ma’am.” The way Makowiecz and the other DIs kept riding him, he’d not even been sure they were going to recommend him for retention in the Corps, much less…embassy duty? That was supposed to be the softest, best duty in the Corps, standing guard at the UFR embassy in some out-of-the-way world capital. You had to be absolutely top-line Marine for a billet like that, and be able to keep yourself and your uniform in recruiting poster form. But the duty was the stuff dream sheets were made of…
“It’s true,” she told him. “And I won’t bullshit you. The Ishtar mission is a combat op. We’ll be going in hot, weapons free, assault mode. The abos are primitive, but they have some high-tech quirks that are guaranteed to raise some damned nasty surprises. So…what’ll it be? A soft billet at an embassy? Or a sleeper slot and a hot LZ?”
He knew what he wanted. Plush as embassy duty was supposed to be, he’d always thought the reality would be boring. In fact, most duty Earthside would be boring, punctuated by the occasional day or two of truly exciting discomfort, pain, and fear during a combat TAV deployment to some war-torn corner of the planet. The Llalande mission might be hardship duty and combat, but it was offworld…as far offworld, in fact, as he was ever likely to get.
It would be what being a Marine was all about.
“Um, ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“I have a friend who joined up the same time I did. Recruit Collins. She’s in one of the female recruit training platoons.”
“And…?”
“I was just wondering if she was being asked to volunteer too, ma’am.”
“I see.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “And that would determine your answer?”
“Uh, well…”
“John, you presumably joined the Corps of your own free will. You didn’t join because she joined, did you?”
“No, ma’am.” Well, not entirely. The idea of signing up together, maybe getting the same duty station afterward, had been part of the excitement. Part of the thrill and promise.
But not all of it.
“I’m glad to hear it. Contrary to popular belief, the Corps does not want mindless robots in its ranks. We want strong, aggressive young men and women who can make up their own minds, who serve because they believe, truly believe, that what they are doing is right. There is no room in my Corps for people who simply follow the crowd. Or who have no deeper commitment to the Corps than the fact that a buddy joined up. Do you copy?”
“Sir, yes…I mean, yes, ma’am.”
“I’m sure your DI has drilled this line into your skull, even without implants. The Corps is your family now. Mother. Father. Sib. Friend. Lover. In a way, you cast off your connections with everyone else when you came on board, as completely as you will if you volunteer for Ishtar and report on board the Derna for a twenty-year hibe slot. You will have changed that much. You’ve already changed more than you imagine. You’ll never go back to that old life again.”
“No, ma’am.” But he wasn’t talking about a civilian friend. Why didn’t she understand?
“And you also know by now that the Corps cannot be run for your convenience. Sometimes, like now, you’re given a choice. A carefully crafted choice, within tightly defined parameters, but a choice, nonetheless. You must make your decision within the parameters that the Corps gives you. That’s part of the price you pay for being a Marine.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So. What’ll it be? I can’t promise you’ll end up stationed with Recruit Collins, no matter what you decide. No one can. The question is, what do you want for yourself?”
He straightened in his chair. There still was no question what he wanted most. “Sir, this recruit wishes to volunteer for the Ishtar billet, sir,” he said, slipping back into the programmed third-person argot of the well-drilled Marine recruit.
“Very well, recruit,” Anderson replied. “No promises yet, understand. We’re still just screening for applicants. But if everything works out, and you complete your recruit training as scheduled, it will be good to have you on board.”
“Thank you, sir!”
“Very well. Dismissed.”
“Aye aye, sir!”
He rose, turned, and banged through the door, scarcely able to believe what had happened.
The stars! He was going to go to the fucking stars!…
Headquarters, PanTerra Dynamics
New Chicago, Illinois
United Federal Republic, Earth
1725 hours CT
“PanTerra Dynamics is going to the stars, gentlemen,” Allyn Buckner said. “We have personnel on our payroll on the Derna, and they will be on Ishtar at least six months before you. Now…you can work with PanTerra, or you can be left out in the cold. What’s it going to be?”
The virtual comm simulation had them standing in a floating garden, high above the thundering mist of Victoria Falls, in the Empire of Brazil. The building actually existed—a combination of hotel, conference center, and playground for the wealthy. Terraced steps, sun-sparkling fountains, riotous tangles of brightly flowering greenery to match the remnants of rain forest around the river below, Orinoco Sky was an aerostat city adrift in tropical skies.
Buckner, of course, was still in New Chicago. His schedule hadn’t allowed him the luxury of attending this conference in person. In fact, perhaps half of the people in the garden lounge in front of him wer
e there in simulacra only. Haddad, he knew, was still in Baghdad, and Chieu was linking in from a villa outside of Beijing.
Through the data feeds in their implants, however, each of the conference attendees saw and heard all of the others, whether they were in Orinoco Sky in the body or in telepresence only.
Buckner was glad he was there in virtual sim only. The decadence of the surroundings fogged the brain, sidetracked the mind. It was easier to link in for the meeting he’d called, get the business over with, and link off, all without leaving the embrace of the VR chair in his New Chicago office.
For one thing, it meant he could cut these idiots off if they imposed on his time.
“You Americans,” Haddad told him with a dark look. “For a century you’ve acted as though you own the Earth. Now you are laying claim to the stars as well. You should remember that Allah is known for bringing down the proud and arrogant.”
“Don’t lecture me, Haddad. You’re lucky even to be here, after that business the KOA pulled in Egypt.” He grinned mirthlessly. “Besides, I thought you Mahdists didn’t believe in the Ahannu.”
“Of course we believe in them.” He gave an eloquent shrug. “How could we not? They are there, on the Llalande planet, for all to see. We do not believe, however, that they are gods. Or that they shaped the course of human destiny. Or that they…they engineered us, as some ignorant people, atheists, suggest.”
“Our friends in the Kingdom of Allah are not the blind fanatics you Americans believe them to be,” Dom Camara said. “They are as practical, and with as keen a sense of business, as we here in the Brazilian Empire. Your scheme could upset the economies of many nations here on Earth. We wish to address that.”
“You want to be in on the distribution of goodies, is what you mean,” Buckner said. “I can accept that. But PanTerra is going to be there first. That means you play by our rules.”
“And what, precisely,” Raychaudhuri asked, “are the rules, Mr. Buckner?”
“PanTerra Dynamics will be the authorized agent for Terran economic interests in the Llalande system. All Terran economic interests. We welcome investment on Ishtar, but the money will go through us. We expect, in time, to form the de facto government on Ishtar.”