Star Corps (20 page)

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 in
vective, 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 be
hind 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 referred 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.

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 exhaus
tion 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…