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And there was Aide. For Garroway, that felt like the worst … losing access to Aide, the AI mentor, secretary, and personal electronic assistant he’d had since he was a kid.
Without his hardware, the world was suddenly going to be a much smaller, much more difficult, much narrower place … and knowing that he would survive that narrowing did not make the prospect any more bearable.
Cut off from technological civilization, from society, from everything that made life worth the living. …
“I know it seems extreme, kids,” Warhurst said, using a telepathic feed to whisper inside their minds. “You feel like we’re cutting you off from the universe. In boot camp we call it the empty time.”
Garroway wondered whether the DIs had some secret means of accessing their implants and hearing their thoughts … or if he just knew and understood what the recruits would be thinking now. Probably the latter. It was against the law to sneak into another’s private thoughts and eavesdrop, wasn’t it?
“The thing is,” Warhurst went on, “there will be times as a Marine when you won’t have the Net to rely on. Imagine if you’re on a combat drop and something goes wrong. You end up a thousand kilometers behind enemy lines. You don’t have the local Net access codes. Worse, if you try to link in, the local authorities will spot you. Somehow, you have to survive without the Net until you can make contact with your sibling Marines.
“Or maybe you just have to go into a hot DZ on a planet with no Net at all, and there’s a screw-up and the battlefleet Net isn’t up and running for, oh, a standard day or two or ten. Believe me, it happens. What can go wrong will go wrong. What are you going to do then?
“The answer, of course, is that you will be Marines, and you will act like Marines. You will be able to draw upon your own resources, your training, your experience, and you will survive. More than survive, you will kick ass and emerge victorious, because victory is the tradition of the Corps!”
Garroway felt a little better after Warhurst’s speech. Not good … but better. He gave a mental click to increase neural serotonin levels and help lift his mood. Hell, that was another thing he’d be missing in the next few weeks—the ability to alter his own emotional state as necessary. He felt a tiny, sharp stab of fear, and instantly suppressed it.
How did Marines control the fear if they didn’t have access to neural monitoring software or the ability to deliberately tailor their emotional state? Or were the wild stories true, stories to the effect that Marine combat feeds eliminated fear and boosted such emotions as rage and hatred for the enemy? He’d always assumed those tales were nonsense, the product of civilian ignorance. Still …
“If you children want to be Marines,” Warhurst’s whisper continued, “we have to know who and what you are. How you react under stress. We need to know your character. And we need to take you, all of you, down to your most basic, most elementary level and build you up, one painful layer at a time. At the end of these sixteen weeks, you will not be the men and women you were. You will be Marines … if you make it through.”
It made sense, of course, what Warhurst was saying. Boot camp always had required an initial breaking down, so that the drill instructors could mold recruits into Marines. And there were other factors besides … like cutting the recruits off from outside sources of information so that they were utterly dependent on their instructors. Like taking away anything that would distract them from the grueling physical and intellectual training ahead.
Like getting them to rely upon themselves.
“Believe me,” Warhurst added, and Garroway swore he could hear a grin in the man’s inner voice, “for the next few weeks you children won’t need your tech-toys, and you’ll be way too busy to miss ‘em! Besides, you’ll have me to tell you what you need to know! Next five in line! Through the hatch!”
Garroway thought one last time about quitting, and shoved the thought aside.
“Don’t worry, Aiden,” his inner AI whispered in his mind. “I’ll be back. You’ll see.”
Together with four other recruits, he bounded up the steps and into the unknown.
3 (#ulink_109d68cd-764d-56da-aa69-7c7cc3dac878)
0407.1102
Green 1, 1-1 Bravo
Meneh, Alighan
0824/38:22 hours, local time
“Okay, Marines. How are we going to do this?”
Ramsey considered the question. Staff Sergeant Thea Howell rarely asked for advice. When she did, the problem was certain to be a certified bitch.
With the vantage point of the gods, he looked down on the city. In the noumenon, the imaginal inner space of his mind’s eye, he was hovering above the city center and starport as if from a giant’s towering perspective. Physically, in fact, he was crouched in what had been a basement, shielded from view by several tons of rubble, and the closest Marine to his current position was nearly five hundred meters away, but he was only distantly aware of any of that. His cereblink and the fleet’s SkyNet, however, allowed them to share a noumenal conference space, complete with tiny red icons marking the position of each known Muzzie soldier, gun, and vehicle, green for Marines, white for civilians or unknowns.
The tacsit was clear enough. Theocrat riflemen had holed up in another skyscraper, an eighty-three-floor tower at the edge of the central plaza, and they’d turned the place into a fortress, with portable rocket launchers and at least one light plasma cannon. Life scans had revealed a heavy concentration of civilians in the smaller buildings clustered about the tower’s base; smash the tower with close-air ground support or orbital fire, and several hundred civilians would die.
So rather than standing off and bombing the Theocrats, the Marines would have to do this the old-fashioned away, with a direct CQB assault.
And it was going to get damned messy.
“From the top down,” Ramsey said after a moment, answering Howell’s question. Under his control, green lines of light flicked across the imaginal landscape, taking advantage of available cover, then vaulting into the sky to converge on the tower roof from four directions. “Has to be. Otherwise we fight our way up that tower one floor at a time.”
“Agreed,” Howell said. “But that rooftop is over 250 meters straight up. Too far for jumpjets.”
“Then we’ll need to ride Specter guns,” Sergeant Chu pointed out. “And we’ll need to move straight up and fast.”
“Roger that,” Corporal Ran Allison said. “Looks like a lucky two-fiver.”
The slang referred to twenty-five percent casualties … if they were lucky. It was a grim and chillingly sobering assessment.
“Ten of us,” Howell said, noting the green icons surrounding the tower, a kilometer distant. The icons flashed, one after another, as she ran through the names. “Me, Beck, and Santiago on one. Hearst and Daley on two. Rodriguez and Gertz on three. Ramsey, Allison, and Chu on four. Coordinate on me. I’ve put the call out, and our rides will be here in two mikes. Everyone get set.”
Ramsey dropped out of the noumenal link and began shouldering upward through the layer of debris above him, his combat suit’s paramusculature allowing him to move aside several tons of debris as he climbed. Heaving aside a 3-meter chunk of ferrocrete, he emerged again into the smoke-stained light of the Alighan morning.
The pace of the battle had slowed considerably, now that the defenders had been reduced to a few isolated pockets of resistance scattered across a ruined city. In less than the promised two minutes, a Specter gun hissed overhead, an awkward-looking fragment of one of the landing vehicles that had brought the Marines down to the planet’s surface hours before. Piloted by an independent AI, kept aloft by agrav pods and protected by a ball-turret plasma gun, the flier looked like a black insect, complete with gangly, slender legs equipped with powerful grapples. Reaching up, he grabbed hold of one of those legs and locked on; the jointed member retracted partially, pulling him clear of the wreckage and into the air.
Corporal Allison and Sergeant Chu were already on board the tactical carrier, grappled to the aircraft’s other legs and retracted up into the partial shelter of the machine’s body. The rubble dropped away as the vehicle swiftly ascended, rotating and banking toward the distant tower.
The helplessness and the sense of being exposed were sharper now than during the landing craft descent earlier. The gun was sharply maneuverable, however, and the artificial intelligence piloting it possessed inhumanly fast reflexes. It was easier on the stomach not to watch. Ramsey closed his eyes and merged with the assault team gestalt, watching again from the gods’ perspective as four green icons representing the fast-moving Specter guns converged on the objective.
All four aircraft street-skimmed in toward the tower, zig-zagging all the way to take every possible advantage of buildings, trees, and rubble. Hivel rounds snapped past the flier, and once Ramsey felt the solid shock of a heavy detonation close by. His helmet readout warned of a gamma pulse; someone was firing antimatter rounds at them. He felt another thump as the gun’s plasma weapon fired, knocking down an incoming rocket that had targeted them.
He saw a sudden flare as one of the incoming Specter guns took a direct hit despite its evasive maneuvering. According to his link, both Daley and Hearst jumped clear as the aircraft crumpled and slammed into the rubble-clogged street below.
The remaining three tactical carriers reached the base of the skyscraper at the same instant, changing vectors to travel straight up the sides of the tower in a stomach-wrenching maneuver that was only partly eased by the inertial dampers in Ramsey’s armor.
Three seconds, the pilot AI whispered in his mind, and he opened his eyes in time to see of blur of ferrocrete and structural ornamentation flashing past.
Two seconds … one second …
Another gut-twisting shift in vector, and the Specter gun slipped over the rampart encircling the top of the tower. A mental command, and he was released from the craft’s unfolding leg, dropping onto the roof, striking, rolling, coming up with his mag-pulse rifle raised, his helmet electronics already tracking the nearest threat. The weapon was set to AI control, and he let his suit guide him; the weapon triggered as soon as it had a solid targeting lock.
The first Muzzie rifleman went down, his armor hammered by a rapid-fire barrage of magnetic pulses. The top of the building became a bewildering and rapidly unfolding blur of motion and weapons fire, as two of the other Specter guns came up over the ramparts and released their payloads of Marines.
The Specter gun carrying Howell, Beck, and Santiago took a direct hit as it hovered above the rampart, an antimatter blast flashing with deadly brilliance at the edge of the tower. Ramsey overrode his weapon control and shifted aim to the Muzzie gunner—a low threat because he was facing away from Ramsey as he manhandled the massive A.M. accelerator for a second shot, but he was trying to target the three Marines on that side of the tower as they fell from the burning transport. Ramsey triggered his weapon, and the enemy soldier folded backward around the kinetic impulse slamming into his spine, his weapon cartwheeling across the roof with the impact.
A warning went off in his mind; gunners were targeting him. He cut in his jumpjets and sailed across the roof, pivoting in midair to target one of the Muzzie gunners who was standing up behind a waist-high ferrocrete barrier, tracking Ramsey as he sailed through the air.
The stricken Specter gun slammed into the edge of the tower, metal burning furiously, catching and holding for a moment before rocking back and off the roof, crashing to the street eighty-four-stories below. The remaining two guns hovered above opposite sides of the building, ninety meters apart, coordinating their plasma weaponry with the fire from the eight Marines now fanning out across the roof.
A transparent wall overlooked the rooftop, a penthouse or upper story of some sort, enveloped in hanging plants, and with a sunken interior that formed a well-protected redoubt. The transparency—plastic and shatterproof—melted as someone inside detonated a thermal charge. An instant later, a swarm of APerMs emerged and arced into the sky before descending on hissing contrails—antipersonnel missiles, each the size of a man’s forefinger, each with an on-board AI smart enough to identify an enemy’s armor signature and home on it relentlessly, each with a dust-speck’s worth of antimatter in magnetic containment. Ramsey’s armor fired a countermeasures charge, and flashes of actinic brilliance from the hovering guns picked individual missiles out of the air with hivel kinetic-kill rounds each the size of a grain of sand. The sky turned to white fire. …
At first he thought the threat had been neutralized, and he started moving forward once more. In the next instant, his helmet display flashed warning; there were still APerMs in the air.
He triggered another countermeasure burst … but it was too little, too late, and he couldn’t get them all. APerMs slashed into Howell and Beck, who was bounding alongside her, blasting gouts of molten laminate from their armor, knocking the two Marines backward.
“Thea!” Ramsey screamed, and then he was standing twenty meters from the open penthouse, hosing the low, cavern-like opening in front of him with his flamer. One of the hovering Specter guns with a good line of sight added lance after flaring lance of plasma energy to his fire; Ramsey could see figures writhing and incinerating within the flames.
Turning, he bounded across the rooftop to the two fallen Marines. Corporal Gerry Beck was dead, his helmet punctured, then exploded from within. There was a lot of blood, and only smoking, blackened shards remained of helmet and skull.
Staff Sergeant Thea Howell, however, was still alive. The AP round had struck her in the chest, shattering ribs, rupturing a lung, flooding her torso with hard radiation, but her diagnostic feed showed she was still alive as her armor struggled to control the damage. She was already deep in medical support stasis.
Thea. …
Crouching above her body, he turned his fire against a last remaining clump of Muzzie gunners behind a ferrocrete wall. One of the Specter guns burned down the last of them, and the firefight came to an abrupt end.
But Ramsey continued to hold the broken body of Thea Howell, letting his own armor make automatic feed connections and linkages so that he could bolster her suit’s damaged support systems.
Besides being a fellow Marine and the platoon’s senior NCO, Thea was an old friend, and frequently his lover.
She was family.
And he didn’t want to see her die. …
USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
1045/24:20 local time, 2003 hrs GMT
Garroway felt … alone. Alone and utterly empty.
And he couldn’t even mind-click himself a serotonin jolt to lift the settling black mist of depression … or ask Aide for help.
“I know you’re all feeling a bit low right now,” Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst said, smiling. “But I have just the ticket! We’re going to run. Comp’ney, lef’ face! For’ard harch! Double time, harch! …”
Garroway still felt dazed and lost. After his ten-minute session with the Navy corpsmen in the sickbay, he’d been led back out into the weak sunshine of the Martian morning and marched to chow.
He’d barely tasted the food, and ate it automatically. After that there’d been an indoctrination class, with an assistant DI lecturing the company on Corps tradition, and on what it meant to be a Marine.
And now, they were out in the cold once more, running. Who the hell was he trying to kid? His first six hours in the Corps, and already he wanted to quit.
Something, though, was keeping him going … one tired foot after the other.
Aiden Garroway had been born and raised in the 7-Ring orbital complex in Earth orbit, a son of an extended line marriage, the Giangrecos; on his Naming Day, he’d taken his name from Estelle Garroway, the woman who’d also passed on to him his fascination with the Corps.
It had been Estelle who’d told him about other Garroways who’d been Marines. There was one, a real character who’d fought in the UN War of the mid-twenty-first century, who was still remembered in Marine histories. “Sands of Mars Garroway,” he was known as, and he’d led a grueling march up the Vallis Marineris only a couple of thousand kilometers from this spot to attack a French invasion force.
And later there’d been John Garroway, a gunnery sergeant who’d made first contact with the N’mah, an alien civilization at the Sirius Stargate a century later … and General Clinton Vincent Garroway who’d fought and won the critical Battle of Night’s Edge against the Xul in 2323. And other Garroways had served in the Corps with distinction ever since, first in the old United States Marines, then, with the gradual assimilation of the old U.S. into the United Star Commonwealth, in the old Corps’ modern successor, the United Star Marine Corps.
It had been Estelle who’d suggested he join the Corps. She’d known how unhappy he was at home.
Not that home life had been abusive or anything like that. Most of his mothers and fathers were okay, and he deeply loved his birth mother. But with twenty-five spouses and one hundred eighty-three children and grandchildren underfoot, along with numerous aunts, uncles, in-laws, and cousins, the living quarters allotted to the Giangreco line family, though spacious enough, tended to be something of a zoo. There was always someone to put him down, tell him what to do, or shove him out of the way. His job in the aquaculture farms was boring and dead-end. There were no better options for educational downloads until he specialized in a career, and farming water hyacinths for the Ring filtration matrices decidedly was not what he intended to do for the next century or two. Hell, life at home with that many parents and sibs was like life in a barracks, anyway; the Marines seemed a logical option.
The problem was Delano Giangreco, the patriarch of the line, and a committed pacifist. A member of the Reformed Church of the Ascended Pleiadean Masters, he didn’t quite insist that everyone in the family follow Church doctrine regarding diet, luminous tattoos, or ritual nudity, but he did insist on observance of the Masters’ Pax. No mention of war within the house, no downloads touching on military history, battles, or martial arts. Garroway had been twelve before he’d even heard of the Marines, and then only because of the electronic emancipation laws. Once you were twelve and had chosen your name, no one else could censor your thoughts or your data feeds, even for religious purposes.
But those feeds could be monitored by parents or guardians until a person was eighteen, and Garroway had received almost weekly lectures on the evils of war and the falsity of such historical lies as military glory, honor, or duty.
Somehow, though, the lectures had only increased his determination to learn about the Corps, and about all those other Garroways who’d served country and, later, Commonwealth. By the time he was sixteen, he’d picked up some semi-intelligent software, with Aide’s help, which let him partition his personal memory storage, and keep parts of it secret from even the most determined morals-censoring probes.
But the need to do so, to keep his guard up against his senior father’s intrusions, had been a powerful incentive to get himself out of the home and off on his own.
His senior father had disowned him when he learned Garroway had enlisted. No matter. He had a new family now. …
If he could keep up with it. If he quit, if he gave up, he would be right back in the Rings looking for work—probably in one of the environmental control complexes or, possibly, the nanufactories.
Hell, he’d rather run himself to death.
“Christ,” Mustafa Jellal muttered at Garroway’s side. “Is the bastard gonna run us all the way up Olympus?”
The recruit company had been running steadily west for almost an hour, now, slogging uphill almost all the way. Somewhere over the western horizon was the staggering mass of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System, though its peak was still far over the curve of the Martian horizon. Jellal’s mutterings were purely fictional, of course. The mountain known as Olympus Mons was five hundred kilometers across at the base, and reached twenty-one kilometers above the surrounding terrain; the raw, new, artificially generated atmosphere on Mars was still only a step removed from hard vacuum at the summit.
The Noctis Labyrinthus lay at the eastern rim of the Tharsis Bulge, the vast, volcano-crested dome marking a cataclysmic upwelling of the Martian mantle 3.5 billion years before. The broken, canyon-laced terrain of the Noctis Labyrinthus—the “Labyrinth of Night”—was the result of floods released by the sudden melting of permafrost during that long-ago event. The ground, as a result, was a difficult tangle of rocks and channels that made footing treacherous and the climb exhausting.
“Save your … wind … for running,” Garroway muttered between pants for breath. His side was starting to shriek pain at him, and the thinness of the incompletely terraformed atmosphere was dragging at his lungs and his endurance. How much farther? …
Jellal suddenly fell out of the formation, stepping to the side, hands on his knees as he started to vomit. Garroway maintained his pace, staring straight ahead. Behind him, he could hear one of the assistant DIs talking to Jellal, though he couldn’t hear what was being said. In a moment, the column had continued up a dusty hill covered in patches of gene-tailored dunegrass, and passed well beyond earshot of what was being said.
A minute or two later, however, just over the crest of that hill, Warhurst bellowed for the company to halt. The recruits had become strung out over a half kilometer of ground, and it took minutes more for the trailing runners to catch up with the main body. Garroway stood at attention as more and more recruits fell in to either side, breathing hard, savoring the chance to suck down cold gulps of air and try to will his racing heart to slow.
After a few heavy-breathing minutes, he was glad to see Jellal jog past and take a place farther up the line. He’d met the young Ganymedean Arab at the receiving station up in the Arean Ring. Mustafa Jellal had been friendly, cheerful, and outgoing, and seemed like a good guy. Garroway had started talking with him at chow last night, partly out of a sense of isolation kinship. There was a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment throughout the Sol System right now, had been ever since the outbreak of hostilities against the Theocracy, and during the conversation Garroway had had the sense that Jellal was feeling lonely, a bit cut off.
Garroway had been wrestling with loneliness as well—he wasn’t prepared to call it homesickness just yet—and felt a certain kinship with the dark-skinned Ganymedean recruit. After chow, they’d gone back to the center’s temporary barracks, and there they’d opened a noumenal link and shared bits of home with each other—Jellal taking him on a virtual tour of the Jellal freestead complex at Galileo, on Ganymede, with Jupiter looming banded and vast just above the horizon, and Garroway showing him Sevenring, with Earth huge and blue and white-storm-swirled through the arc of the Main Gallery’s overhead transparency.
He wondered how the guy was feeling now, with his implants switched off.
It was actually a pleasant respite, a chance to simply stand and breathe. Warhurst waited a few minutes more, until the last tail-end Charlie straggled over the top of the ridge and took his place in line.
“Glad you could join us, Dodson,” the DI said with a sour growl to his voice. “Okay, recruits, listen up. A few hours ago, we let you see a Marine action now taking place on Alighan, a few hundred light-years from here. We’ve just received a feed from USMC Homeport. The Marines on Alighan report both the starport and planet’s capital city are secure. Army troops are now deploying to the surface to take over the perimeter.
“Lieutenant General Alexander, in command of the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, has reported that the op went down according to plan and by the book. He singled out the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, which spearheaded the assault on the planethead, saying that despite heavy casualties, they distinguished themselves in the very best traditions of the Corps.
“So let’s give a Marine Corps war-yell for the Fighting Fifty-fifth! Ooh-ra!”
“Ooh-ra!” the company yelled back, but the response was ragged and weak, the recruits still panting and out of breath.
“What the hell kind of war-yell is that?” Warhurst demanded. “The Marines fight! They overcome! They improvise! And they fucking kick ass! Let me hear your war-yell!”
“Ooh-ra!”
“A good war-yell focuses your energy and terrifies your opponent! Again!”
“Ooh-ra!”
