Star Corps (16 page)

“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 ex
perience, 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.

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 pace, 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?”

“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 assis
tant'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.”