Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  If the damned sleep cells had been just a little larger…but they were designed for one occupant apiece. Having sex in one of those hexagonal tubes was like coupling in a closed coffin. Ramsey knew. He’d tried it during the past month…twice with Ricia and once with Chris DeHavilland. They would be claustrophobic in micro-g; they were impossible under spin-gravity. Besides that, everybody on the hab deck would know who was sleeping with whom, and the Corps simply wasn’t that liberal yet.

  Everyone knew it was done, of course. The whole point of command constellations was supposed to be that teams that worked well together should be kept together, especially on long deployments. There was nothing wrong with that. But the fact that they’d been deliberately chosen because they had few family ties on Earth meant that there would be ties, both casually recreational and seriously romantic, among team members. They were, after all, human.

  But few things about human nature ever changed, or, when they did, the change took a long time to manifest. The likely response among civilian taxpayers who paid for the Marines—not to mention their spartan accommodations in deep space—would have been horror at such scandalous goings-on. And the senior staff was always at pains to make certain that nothing scandalous about the Corps ever got into general circulation among civilians…especially civilian lawmakers.

  Ramsey thought of an old Corps joke—the image of a Marine kept perpetually in cybehibe, with a sign on the sleep tube, “In case of war, break glass.” Marines weren’t supposed to have families, friends, or lives.

  And they certainly weren’t supposed to have sex.

  They finished dressing—shipboard uniform of the day was black T-shirts, khaki slacks, and white sweat socks—gently spun one another in midair for a quick once-over for incriminating evidence of their past few hours, then pulled close in a parting hug. “Again tonight, after duty?” he asked.

  “Sorry, T. J.,” she told him. She kissed him gently. “I’m going to be with Chris. And tomorrow I’m shifting to the third watch. Maybe in two weeks?”

  He nodded, masking his disappointment. “Sure.” Relationships within the command group created what sometimes amounted to a large, polyamorous family. Social planning, however, could be a real problem at times, especially when complicated by ever-shifting duty schedules.

  Well, it beats the hell out of living with civilians, he thought. He’d been married once—a five-year contract that Cindy and George had elected not to renew with him. If you were going to sleep with someone, it helped if they had some notion of what it was you did for a living, what it cost you, and why you did it.

  Making their way aft through the docking bay, they paused on the quarterdeck to chat with Lieutenant Delgado, floating at his duty station in front of the big American flag. “Logic center is clear,” he told Delgado, sotto voce.

  “Aye aye, sir.” Zeus Delgado was not a member of the command constellation, but he knew what went on forward. He’d promised to flash Ramsey over his link if someone was heading toward the logic center access who couldn’t be turned aside.

  At the centrifuge collar, Ramsey followed Ricia into an elevator and together they swiftly dropped outshaft into the familiar tug of spin gravity once more. Emerging on Deck 1 of Hab 3, they stepped into a crowded, hot, and noisy bustle of activity.

  Eighty percent of the MIEU’s troop complement was on board, but so far fewer than half of those had entered cybehibe. That meant crowding on all decks and a battle for the shipboard environmental systems as they struggled to vent all of that excess heat. Supplies were arriving at the L-4 space docks at the rate of two freighters every three days, most of them carrying either water or C-sludge, the hydro-carbon substrate used in the nanoprocessor tanks to make food. The Derna needed water especially, a small ocean of water, in fact, filling the huge mushroom cap forward. Water was Derna’s primary consumable, necessary not only for the drinking and washing needs for her crew and passengers, but also as their source of oxygen, their AM-drive reaction mass, and as radiation shielding at near-c velocities.

  But the MIEU’s weapons and equipment were arriving on board as well, and those Marines who hadn’t yet gone into cybehibe were busy unpacking gear, checking it for wear, damage, or missing parts, and stowing it for the long voyage ahead. Everything from Mark VII suits and laser rifles to spy-eye floaters and TAL-S Dragonflies had to be unpacked, examined, up-or down-checked for maintenance, and entered into the virtual ship’s manifest. Each individual Marine was responsible for her or his personal gear, including armor and primary weapon, so the hab deck was packed with men and women unshipping, inspecting, and cleaning everything from LR-2120s to KW-6000 power packs to M-780 grenades and CTX-5 demo packs. It was a job that would have been more happily carried out groundside, especially in the case of the high explosives, but the troops were arriving piecemeal, as were their weapons, on different flights from different spaceports scattered across the Earth. Especially considering the need to check all equipment after it had made the trip up to L-4, the most efficient place to bring the two together was on board the Derna.

  But it made for a hell of a lot of chaos.

  As Ramsey threaded his way past busy groups of enlisted Marines, he reopened his implants to shiplink traffic. He’d shut them down to afford some peace for his tryst with Ricia, and now he had to brace himself against the onslaught of messages and requests that had backlogged during his virtual absence.

  “Good morning, Colonel,” Cassius said. “You have forty-seven link messages waiting, twenty-nine of them flagged ‘urgent’ or higher. Two are flagged as Priority One. You also have seventeen requests for face meetings, and twenty-one requests for virtual conferencing. Also, there will be a delay in the shipment of the Dragonflies from Palo Alto. This may mean an additional delay in mission departure time.”

  Take a couple hours off for a quick docking maneuver, he thought, and all hell breaks loose.

  “Two Priority Ones?” he asked the AI-symbiont aloud. “Shit, why didn’t you tag me?” The command group’s AI could reach him at any time, whether his link was online or not, and standing orders were to let Priority One and Two messages come through no matter what his link status.

  “I felt you needed the downtime, sir,” Cassius replied. “You’ve been pushing quite hard and showing both emotional and physiological signs of stress. I exercised discretionary judgment according to the specific parameters of—”

  “Can it. What were the calls?”

  “One from General King. He wished to know the status of the Dragonfly shipment. In your persona, I routed him through to the TAL-S maintenance center at Seven Palms.”

  “I see.” He would have done the same. “And the other?”

  “From General Haslett, sir, requesting an immediate virtual conference on the political situation. I pointed out that Derna is on Zulu, that you had been up quite late overseeing the arrival of the last stores freighter and were currently on sleep shift. I offered to wake you, and he said it could wait. I have scheduled you for a virtual conference with the general in…two hours, seventeen minutes from now.”

  Again he couldn’t fault the AI’s judgment…which was the reason they made such exceptional personal secretaries. Both priority calls had been less than truly urgent, but both needed handling by means both courteous and expeditious.

  “Very well,” he told Cassius. “Let’s see the urgents.”

  “You may wish to greet Captain Warhurst first, sir.”

  “Eh?” Warhurst’s dress khakis were a bit more up-to-date than his icon garb, Ramsey noted. “Oh. Of course.”

  Warhurst was uncovered so he did not salute, but he came to a crisp attention. “Captain Martin Warhurst reporting on board, sir.”

  “Ah, Captain Warhurst, yes,” Ramsey replied. “Welcome aboard.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Check with my exec, here, Major Anderson, for your berthing assignments. Are your people getting settled in?”

  “Yes, sir. But my company is o
nly at half strength…eighty-two troops out of 150 on my TO and E.”

  “Affirmative, Captain. But I’m afraid the rest of your team will be newbies.” He saw Warhurst’s face fall at that news. “Don’t worry, son. You’ll have time to whip them into shape before deployment.”

  “Yes, sir. Uh…fresh meat out of Lejeune, sir?”

  “Yup. Volunteers from recruit companies 1097, 1098, and 1099. They’ll be arriving over the next three weeks or so.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Major Anderson has the specs and stats. You can review their recruit records online, of course, and you can interview them, if you wish, before they embark. Problem, Captain?”

  Warhurst made a face. “No, sir. It’s just…”

  “Yes?”

  “My mission brief has my company hitting Objective Krakatoa. I would have thought you’d want an experienced Mobile Assault Team on that one, sir.”

  “Ideally, yes. I’m afraid we don’t have that luxury, however. Groundside HQ is holding back the best MATs against the situation in Mejico and the Southwest territories. We get what’s left, I’m afraid.”

  “I see, Colonel.”

  “Don’t worry, son,” Ramsey said with an easy grin. “If your people aren’t experienced now, they sure as hell will be by the time they’ve taken Krakatoa!”

  “The ones who survive will be experienced, yes, sir,” Warhurst told him. “The rest will be dead.”

  “That’s the way it always is, Marine. You have your orders. Carry on!”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  Warhurst was not happy, but that couldn’t be helped. Weeks ago, Ramsey had downloaded the captain’s combat record and guessed that Warhurst was at least as worried about his own qualifications for the assignment as he was about the experience of his men. He’d only taken part in one combat mission so far—the brief, bitter assault on Giza last June—and he must be wondering about why he’d been recruited for a berth with the MIEU, much less why he was supposed to lead the first assault onto Ishtar.

  No matter. He was a good man and would come through when he had to.

  Or he would be dead. But he would do his honest-to-Chesty-Puller best.

  Semper fi….

  U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center

  Parris Island, South Carolina

  0730 hours ET

  Time, which had crawled forward at a seemingly imperceptible pace, with each day very much like the one past, at last began to accelerate. Garroway’s training entered phase three as his nanochelates began to kick in, then phase four, when all of the pain and sweat at last began coming together. He might be, in Makowiecz’s cordially bellowed invective, a scum-of-the-Earth lowlife-maggot recruit, but by the Goddess, he was a Marine scum-of-the-Earth lowlife-maggot recruit.

  “Fire teams advance, by the numbers!” Philby called over the squad comm channel. “Fire Team One…go!”

  Recruits Myers, Kilgore, and Garvey rose from cover, their combat suits mottled with the same ocher and gray tones of the rock and sand of the desert. They were still a bit clumsy with the new suits; Kilgore slipped in a soft patch of sand and fell heavily, dropping his laser rifle as he hit.

  “Any time you’re ready, Kill-girl!” Makowiecz’s voice cut in, harsh and sarcastic. “I’m sure the enemy will happily sit down and wait until you’re freaking ready!”

  “Sorry, sir!”

  “Yes, you are! Now move! Move! Move!”

  Garroway heard the exchange spoken inside his head, a kind of technological telepathy generated by the chelated nanoconnections growing in key areas of his brain.

  The full range of vision and hearing available to him was breathtaking, and he was still getting used to a sensory input that could be overwhelming at times. With a thought-click, his helmet’s AI could adjust his visual input to anything from monochrome to full HSD, a hyperspectral display combining every wavelength from deep infrared to X ray. By clicking through a mental menu, he could see in the dark, filter out harsh light, and easily tell the difference between natural vegetation and camouflage.

  “Fire Team Two!” Philby called. “Go!”

  Mendelez, Jaffrey, and Kaminski rose from the sand, rushing forward in short, zigzagging bursts of speed, their goal a low, rock-strewn ridge crest a hundred meters ahead. Simulated laser fire—hell, it was real laser fire, Garroway thought, but stepped down in wattage until only suit sensors could register it—flashed and strobed from a pair of automated gun emplacements concealed among the boulders ahead and to the left. Explosions detonated somewhere behind him. The word was that the AIs triggering each burst knew how close they could get without actually hurting any of the recruits, but scuttlebutt also said there’d been plenty of injuries in other recruit companies during this part of the training already, and even a few accidental deaths. Dead was still dead, whether you were fighting frog-faced aliens eight light-years away or taking part in a routine training exercise right in your own backyard.

  The excitement of the moment pounded in Garroway’s skull. This might be just an exercise, but it was being played in deadly earnest against both AIs and flesh-and-blood opponents. His company—what was left of it now, eleven weeks into training—had been TAV-lifted to the Marine Corps training facility at Guardian Angels, in the Baja Territory, to play war games with SpecOps commandos and other Marines. They’d been told off in threes, grouped according to the Corps’ current three-four-two doctrine: three men to a fire team, four fire teams to a squad, two squads to a platoon section. Owen Philby, a short, wiry agro from Niobrara, Nebraska, was the ARNCO—the acting recruit noncommissioned officer in command of Third Platoon’s 1st Squad. They’d been given their orders—to take and hold that ridge up ahead—and except for Makowiecz’s acid commentary over the comm channels from time to time, they were largely on their own.

  Shit. Mendelez was down, the servos in his suit killed by his own AI. He would lie on the ground, a simulated casualty of a simulated fight, until the exercise was over. Garroway thought-clicked to his squad status display and saw that Kilgore and Garvey were down as well. Those guns up there were chopping the squad to bits.

  “Fire Team Three! Go!”

  Three more suited figures rose from cover, zigzagging across the open ground. One of them stumbled and fell…Fox. Then Lopez. And Hollingwood. Three up, three down. The enemy guns had the range.

  “Fire Team Four! Go!”

  That was Garroway’s cue. Scrambling to his feet, he began dashing toward the ridge crest, dodging and weaving across the rocky ground. Philby and Yates rose with him, clumsy in their Mark VIIs. Philby took three lumbering steps, then fell heavily facedown as his suit servos cut out. Garroway saw the AI-generated flash of a rapid-fire laser skittering across the slope but couldn’t make out where it was coming from. There was a wrecked and rusted hulk at the top of the ridge—the wreckage of an old magfloater APC, it looked like. The fire might be coming from there, but it was impossible to tell for sure.

  Yates stumbled and fell, another simulated casualty….

  Garroway dropped to cover behind a sand-polished boulder, his shoulder slamming painfully against the rock despite the internal padding of his suit.

  He thought-clicked to the tactical display again, superimposing the remaining members of 1st Squad on a color-coded map of the immediate area. Myers was halfway up the ridge, pinned down behind a scattering of boulders. Kaminski was also pinned, thirty meters behind Meyers. And…damn! Jaffrey had just gone down as well, yet another casualty.

  And Garroway had barely gotten started, tail-end Charlie, a hundred meters from his objective.

  Three men left, out of a twelve-man squad, strung out across the laser-blasted boulder field. Not good. Not good at all. Gunny Makowiecz was ominously silent. Had he already written the squad off for this exercise?

  Garroway sagged inside his armor, almost overcome with frustration and, more, with exhaustion. This week in the Baja was an old Corps tradition—“Motivational Week,” more often re
ferred to by the recruits who endured it as “Hell Week.” In a solid week of exercises and evolutions, each man in the company could expect to get perhaps seven hours sleep in seven days, as his physical and mental limits were tested to the snapping point.

  This was day two of Motivational Week. How the hell was he going to see this thing through for five more days? And what was the point? Things had been getting steadily worse ever since he’d arrived at Parris Island. He knew now he’d never make it as a Marine. All he needed to do was flash-link Makowiecz with the words “I quit.”

  An hour from now he could be enjoying a hot shower followed by a hot meal as he waited for them to process him out of the Corps. It would be so easy….

  Yeah? he asked himself. Then what? Transfer to the Aerospace Force? Go back to live with your mother? Maybe you could get a job boss-linking construction robots on the moon….

  He sighed, as another round of explosions detonated nearby. He’d had this discussion with himself before, and frequently. It was just getting harder and harder to see the answer clearly.

  Still, there was one answer he could see, and that was an advantage, a small one, to the tactical situation he found himself in. The three surviving recruits of 1st Squad were so widely scattered that they were tougher targets for two automatic gun positions. More important, the three of them had more line-of-sight data to work with, with three widely spaced perspectives. Those guns might be invisible to all three men individually, but if they put their AI heads together, as it were…

  “Myers!” he called over the tactical channel. “Ski! This is Garroway! Link in with your HSD data!”

  He knew he was begging to be slapped down, and kept expecting Makowiecz to step in with his sharp-edged sarcasm and ask what he thought he was doing. He was taking over the responsibilities of the squad leader here…but Philby, the squad ARNCO, was lying helpless among the rocks a few meters away now, his suit dead and his comm suite offline. Somebody had to take charge, and Garroway’s position at the far end of the strung-out line gave him a slightly better overview of the tactical situation.