Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  His helmet AI picked up the data feeds from both Myers’s and Kaminski’s suits. With a thought-click, he could now see what the other men were seeing from their vantage points…and he could let his own AI sort through all three hyperspectral arrays and build up a more detailed, more revealing image of what was really up there.

  For over a century, now, military technology had witnessed a race between high-tech camouflage and the high-tech means of seeing through it. The first primitive hyperspectral arrays had been developed late in the twentieth century, allowing analysts to see the tanks, gun emplacements, and other equipment masked beneath camo netting and cut branches. Paint that changed color to match the surroundings had been harder to distinguish, but even the best reactive paint still had slightly different optical properties than steel, plastic laminates, or ceramics, especially at both long infrared and at UV and long X-ray wavelengths.

  Nowadays, reactive camo paints used nanotechnology to mimic textures and UV refractive properties and to better mask distinctive heat signatures at all IR wavelengths. While targets like vehicles, which shed a lot of heat, couldn’t be masked completely, relatively cool targets like robot gun emplacements were almost impossible to spot.

  And yet…

  His helmet AI brought three sets of data together, repainting the landscape in front of him in enhanced colors. A laser flashed again—the muzzle was carefully shielded, so he couldn’t pinpoint the weapon that way—but Myers’s helmet scanners had also detected something else, something critical…a telltale shifting of reflective frequencies that suggested movement.

  “Myers, can you work your way farther to the left?”

  “I’ll try,” Myers replied. “But every time I move, those damned guns—”

  His voice was chopped off as the comm link was cut. But Garroway had the last bit of necessary input now, relayed just as Myers had shifted position. One of the two guns was there, well to the left and halfway up the ridge. The other was straight ahead, close to that wrecked APC but a little below it and to the right, a position calculated to misdirect the recruits into thinking the laser emplacement was somewhere on the wreckage itself. Sneaky…

  His helmet marked both guns for him in bright red.

  “You see them both, Ski?” he called.

  “Got ’em, Gare.”

  “You take the one on the left,” Garroway told him. “I’ll get the one by the APC.”

  “Roger that.”

  “On my command, three…two…one…now!”

  Garroway rolled to the left side of the sheltering boulder, coming to his knees and dropping his laser rifle into line with the chosen target. His weapon projected a crosshair onto his helmet display; he leaned into the boulder, bracing himself, as he dropped the targeting reticle onto the patch of enhanced color that marked the enemy gun, bringing his gloved finger tight against the firing button. The weapon cycled as the enemy gun spotted him and swung around to target him.

  Garroway was a fraction of a second faster. The enemy gun didn’t fire.

  “Got him!” Kaminski yelled. “One echo down!”

  “Two echoes down,” Garroway added, using mil-speak shorthand for a gun emplacement. The ridge should be clear now, but he checked it out carefully before moving again. There could be backup positions, well-hidden and kept out of action until the first guns were killed.

  “Sea Devil, this is Devil One,” he called, shifting to the platoon frequency.

  “Devil One, Sea Devil,” the voice of the platoon controller replied. “Go ahead.”

  “Objective positions neutralized, but we’ve taken eighty-two percent casualties. If you want that fucking ridge, you’d better send support ASAP.”

  His phrasing wasn’t exactly mil-standard, but the exhaustion and despair of a few minutes ago had just given way to a surge of adrenaline-laced excitement. Rising, he trotted forward, making his way up the face of the ridge to join Kaminski, who was already crouched in the shadow of the wrecked APC.

  “Quite a view, Gare,” Kaminski told him.

  It was…and a familiar one. From up here, Garroway could look east across the silver-gray gleam of the Sea of California.

  It was a bit strange being so relatively close to his old home at Guaymas, a place he honestly expected never to see again. The training range in the desert scrub country of Isla Angel de la Guarda was just across the Gulf of California from Hermosillo and only a couple hundred miles northwest of Guaymas. Even in late September the air simmered with the familiar dry but salt-laden heat of home, a baking, inhospitable climate ideal as a test range for the recruits as they learned to handle their new Mark VII armor.

  I’m not going back, he thought, the emotion so fierce his eyes were watering. I’m not going to quit.

  The thought came unexpectedly, unbidden, but he thought he recognized the surge of emotion that rode with it. He was over the hump.

  Time after time in the past weeks, Makowiecz and the other DIs had hammered at the recruits of Company 1099: “Sooner or later each and every one of you will want to quit. You will beg to quit! And we’re going to do our best to make you quit!…”

  Every man and woman going through recruit training, he’d been told, hit a period known as “the wall” somewhere around halfway to three-quarters of the way through, a time when it felt like graduation would never come, when the recruit could do nothing but question the decision to join the service in the first place.

  For those tough enough to endure, the wall was followed by “the hump,” a time when training became even tougher, when the questions, the doubts, the self-criticism grew ever sharper, and then…

  “Garroway!” Makowiecz’s voice snapped in his head. “What the hell did you just do?”

  “Sir!” he replied. “This recruit took command of 1st Squad when the acting squad leader was incapacitated, sir! We then took the objective, sir!”

  He braced for the inevitable chewing out.

  “Well done, Marine” was Makowiecz’s surprising reply. “What would you have done differently if you had been in command from the start?”

  “Sir, this recruit would have attempted to reconnoiter the objective with one fire team in the lead, the other two in support, and attempted to correlate hyperspectral data from all vantage points before moving into the open. Sir.”

  Philby, frankly, had screwed up, ordering the squad to advance into the open, knowing those guns were up there but without knowing their exact positions. In any race between man and laser, the laser was going to win.

  Garroway kept his opinion of Philby’s tactics to himself, however. They were all in this together, after all. Gung-ho…

  “Outstanding job, Marine,” Makowiecz told him. “Your support is on its way. Second Squad lost its ARNCO. When they reach your position, you will take command. Sit tight until then.”

  “Aye aye, sir!”

  He was over the hump.

  Graduation might be another five weeks off, but he felt like a Marine.

  Makowiecz had called him a Marine!

  Even getting killed an hour later didn’t dampen the feeling. The Army SpecOps commandos were literally buried behind the ridge, their heat signatures masked by solid rock, their fighting holes hidden by boulders. They waited until 2nd Squad arrived and was just settling in, then rose like ghosts from their positions and cut down the recruits with simulated laser and plasma gun bursts before they knew what was happening. “You’re dead, kid,” one of the black-armored commandos had said as he grabbed Garroway from behind.

  It didn’t matter. He was a Marine….

  13

  9 OCTOBER 2138

  Pacifica

  Off the California Coast

  1105 hours PT

  Garroway grinned at Lynnley. “You know, this would be a lot more fun in zero gravity.”

  “You!” she retorted, giving him a gentle punch in the chest. “Aren’t you ever satisfied?”

  “Well, if anybody can do it, you can,” he replied. He checked his i
nner timer. “I guess we’d better be moving.”

  “Unless we want to be listed as AWOL, yeah,” she told him. She stroked his arm gently. “It’s been good, being with you like this. Thanks.”

  “Real good. I’m…going to miss you.” He shook his head as she rolled out of the bed.

  The walls and ceiling of the room showed a view of space—Earth, moon, sun, and thick-scattered stars, slowly circling. The view was an illusion, of course; for one thing, even in space the stars weren’t that bright when the sun was visible.

  “I’ll miss you too,” Lynnley said.

  “I still don’t want to believe we can’t see each other again. Maybe ever.”

  “Don’t say that, John! We don’t know what’s going to happen!”

  “Sure we do! I’m on my way to Ishtar, and you’re going to Sirius. I checked a star map download. We’ll be farther away from one another than if one of us stayed on Earth!”

  She shrugged. “That doesn’t make any difference, does it? Even one light-year is too far to think about.”

  “Well, you know what I mean. We’re going in two different directions. And I’d hoped we’d get deployed together.”

  “Damn it, we both know how unrealistic that idea was, John. The needs of the Corps—”

  “Come first. I know. But I don’t have to like it.” He balled his fists, squeezing tight. “Shit.” He got out of the bed and began picking up his clothes. He and Lynnley had been fuck buddies off and on for a couple of years now…nothing serious, but she was fun to be with and therapeutic to vent at and fantastic recreation in bed. He’d thought of her as his closest friend and somehow never even considered the possibility that they would end up in different duty stations.

  “Simulation off!” he called, addressing the room. The view of space vanished, replaced by empty walls that seemed to echo his loneliness.

  “Look,” she told him, “we’re both getting star duty, right? And we’re both going about eight light-years. There’s still a good chance we’ll be tracking each other subjectively when we get back.”

  “I guess so.” She meant that their subjective times ought to match pretty closely. Since they were both heading eight light-years out, they’d be spending about the same times at the same percentage of c and aging at about the same subjective rate.

  But he didn’t believe it. Things never worked out that neatly in real life, especially where the Corps was concerned. If he ever saw her again, one of them might well be years older than the other.

  He sighed as he started pulling on his uniform. How much did that matter, really? They both knew they would be taking other sex partners. With the future so uncertain, there was no sense in meaningless promises to wait for one another. It wasn’t like they shared a long-term contract.

  “I think,” he said slowly, sealing the front of his khaki shirt, “I’m just feeling a bit cut off. Like I’ll never be able to come home again.”

  “I know. Everything, everyone, we leave here is going to be twenty years older when we see them again. At least. My parents aren’t happy about it, but at least they understand. And they’ll only be in their sixties when I get back.”

  “I just don’t understand my mother,” he said. “How can she consider going back to that…man?”

  “Like I told you once before, you can’t protect her. You can’t live her life. She has to make her own decisions.”

  “But I keep wondering if she’s going back to him because of me. Because I’m going to Ishtar.”

  “That’s still her issue, right? You have to do what’s right for you.”

  “But I don’t know what that is. Not anymore. And I feel…guilty. She wasn’t happy when I saw her yesterday. About my going to Ishtar, I mean.”

  “I think you’re giving yourself a lot more power over your mother than you really have. You’ve been around before when she’s left, and she’s always gone back, right? What made you think this time would be any different?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. You ready?”

  Dressed now in her khakis, she pulled on her uniform cap and tugged it straight. “Ready and all systems go,” she told him. “You feel ready for lunch?”

  He brightened, with an effort. “You bet.” If they only had a few more hours together, he was determined to enjoy them, instead of brooding about the might-have-beens and the never-would-bes.

  They left the room, stepping out onto the hotel concourse. Pacifica was a small city erected on pylons off the southern California coast, halfway between San Diego and San Clemente Island, a high-tech enclave devoted to shopping, restaurants, and myriad exotica of entertainment. Two days after their graduation from boot camp, they were in the middle of a glorious seventy-two—three whole, blessed days of liberty. They’d already been to the Europa Diver, paying two newdollars apiece to take turns steering a submarine through the deep, dark mystery of Europa’s world-ocean, all simulated, of course, to avoid the speed-of-light time lag. After that they’d checked into the pay-by-hour room suite and entertained themselves with one another.

  Now it was time to find a place to eat. The restaurant concourse was that way, toward the mall shops and the sub-O landing port. White-metal arches reached high overhead, admitting a wash of UV-filtered sunlight and the embrace of a gentle blue sky.

  In another forty-eight hours he would be vaulting into that sky, on his way to the Derna at L-4.

  And after that…

  “What do you do,” he wondered aloud, “when you know you’re not going to see Earth again for twenty years?”

  “You are gloomy today, aren’t you? We won’t—”

  “I know, I know,” he interrupted her. “Our subjective time will only be four years or so, depending on how long we’re on Ishtar…and most of that time we’ll be asleep. From our point of view, we could be right back here a few months from now. But all of this…” He waved his hand, taking in the sweep of the Pacifica concourse. “All of this will be twenty years older or more.”

  “Pacifica’s been here for forty-something years already. Why wouldn’t it be here in another twenty?”

  “It’s not Pacifica. You know what I mean. All of these people…it’s like we won’t fit in anymore.”

  “Take a look at yourself, John. We’re Marines. We don’t fit in now.”

  Her words, lightly spoken, startled him. She was right. In all that crowded concourse, Garroway could see three others in Marine uniforms, and a couple of Navy men in black. The rest, whether in casual dress, business suits, or nude, were civilians.

  Their uniforms set them apart, of course, but he also knew it was more than the uniform.

  And now he knew what was bothering him.

  It was as though he’d already left on his twenty-year deployment, as if he no longer belonged to the Earth.

  It was a strange and lonely feeling.

  Hab 3, Deck 1, IST Derna

  Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

  1240 hours Zulu

  Keep thinking about the money, she told herself with grim determination. Keep thinking about the money…and the papers you’re going to publish…and winning the chair of the American Xenocultural Foundation….

  Traci Hanson lay halfway out of the hot and claustrophobic embrace of her hab cell, flat on her back on the sleep pad, eyes tightly shut as the technicians on either side of her made the final connections. She hated the prodding, the handling, as if she were a naked slab of meat.

  Which, of course, in a technical sense she was. The idea was to preserve her for the next ten years, to feed and water her while her implants slowed her brain activity to something just this side of death.

  IV tubes had been threaded into both of her arms as well as in her carotid artery beneath the angle of her jaw. A catheter had been inserted into her bladder. She knew her implant was supposed to block all feelings of hunger, despite the fact that she’d had no solid food for a week, but her stomach was rumbling nonetheless. She was uncomfortable, s
weaty, ill-tempered, she hadn’t had a decent shower since she’d come aboard the Derna, and now these…these people were sticking more tubes and needles into her.

  “Relax, Dr. Hanson,” one of the cybehibe techs told her. “This’ll just take a moment. Next thing you know, you’ll be at Ishtar.”

  “‘Relax.’ Easy for you to say,” she grumped. She opened her eyes and turned her head as far as the tube in her throat would let her. The hab deck was still crowded with Marines, most of them busily cleaning or working with weapons and other articles of personal equipment. “You have to go through this with every one of those people?”

  “Sure do,” the tech told her. “That’s why it takes so long to work through the list. There’s only about thirty of us, and we have twelve or thirteen hundred people to prep this way.”

  She noticed that her blood was flowing through the tubes in her wrists, and the thought made her a little queasy, despite the suppressant effect of her implant.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “Okay, I guess,” she said. “Uncomfortable. The pain in my arms is going away, a little.”

  “Good.”

  “It feels like this damned mattress pad is melting, though. It feels wet, and kind of squishy. Am I sweating that much?”

  “No. It’s supposed to do that. Think about it. For the next ten years, you’re going to be lying here, breathing, eating, drinking, eliminating, filtering your blood, all through these IV tubes. Medical nano and the AI doctor built into these walls are going to be monitoring and handling all of your body functions. The one thing these machines can’t do is safely turn you over every couple of hours for ten years. Can you imagine the problems you’d have with bedsores if you just laid on your ass for that long? By the time you’re asleep, the pad will have turned into a kind of gel bath. It’ll support you gently, just like you were in a pool of water…and the gel gives the medical nano access to your back so it can rebuild skin cells and keep your circulation going, keep your blood from pooling, y’know?”