WEDNESDAY, 3 SEPTEMBER 2042

Marine Fire Base 125
Near Kirovsky
Russian Far Eastern Maritime
Territory
0800 hours local time

The met-boys were calling for another day with a high of 30° Celsius, humid, with the wind from the southeast…a typical summer’s day, in other words, in this muddy, godforsaken, global-warmed corner of Asia. It was hard to imagine, Jack thought as he came to attention, that in another three months this place would be a howling, ice-and snowbound wilderness. Across the grinder, canned music began playing the “Star Spangled Banner,” and he snapped to a crisp salute as the American flag fluttered up the pole set in front of the sandbagged Quonset hut serving as 3rd Battalion HQ. Right on cue, he heard the sharp but distant thump-thump-thump of the NC mortars, but he held his salute as the anthem continued to play.

He knew the game now, and the rules. After two weeks at Marine Fire Base 125—“Ol’ Buck and a Quarter” to the old hands—he could play it with the best of them. He still remembered that first Monday, his first at Kirovsky, when he’d come to attention with his entire company at morning colors and heard the thump of the mortars. He’d flinched—hell, he’d been ready to dive headfirst for the nearest slit trench—but Gunnery Sergeant Blandings had been standing nearby. “As you were, Marine,” Blandings had growled from the side of his mouth, just loud enough for Jack to hear. The man must’ve had eyes in the back of his head.

The anthem had finished, Captain Rollins, his company commander, had dropped the salute he’d been holding for the unit, and then, finally, Blandings had shouted, “Incoming!”

The company had melted away, diving into slit trenches, bunkers, and foxholes. Seconds later, the first savage crump of a mortar round had thundered on the grinder where the company had been drawn up for colors, followed by another detonation…and a third…and a fourth. It had been Jack’s first time under hostile fire, and he’d huddled in the bottom of a muddy trench with five other Marines, as gravel, mud, and hot bits of shrapnel rained on them from the startlingly clear, blue sky.

Blandings had explained it to him later. “The NCs always fire a few rounds when they see us raising the colors…especially if they see us in formation, like today. But the first rounds don’t arrive until ten, maybe fifteen seconds after the anthem ends, so there’s plenty of time, see?”

If that had seemed strange, the aftermath was even stranger. The bombardment had lasted only a couple of moments and consisted of perhaps a dozen rounds. After the silence following the last tooth-rattling whump of an explosion, Marines all over the camp began jeering, whistling, and catcalling, as though taunting the unseen enemy. Seconds later, another flag had gone up…a T-shirt dyed bright red and affixed to a pole so it could be waved back and forth in slow, lazy arcs.

Jack had caught the symbolism immediately. Maggie’s drawers…the flag waved on the target range that signified that the poor recruit on the firing line had not only missed the bull’s-eye, but had, in fact, missed the entire target. He’d laughed out loud, a harsh, nervous bark, when he got the joke.

“Tradition,” Blandings had told him. “Marines did the same damned thing at least as far back as Khe Sanh.”

After the recording of the national anthem crashed to its home-of-the-brave conclusion, Jack dropped his salute and trotted easily to the nearest sandbagged trench along with several other Marines. There was no formation held this morning—that was reserved for Mondays—but Ol’ Buck and a Quarter was heavily populated, and there were always a dozen or two men and women crossing the grinder when Colors sounded. Lazy seconds later, with lots of time to spare, the first detonation erupted from the grinder, spraying dirt, gravel, and smoke skyward.

“One of these days,” Jack said, leaning back against a sandbag wall and feeling the ground shudder and buck beneath him, “those people are going to get smart and send a volley of hypes after us.” Hypersonic artillery rounds would reach the hilltop target before the sound of their firing had covered five kilometers.

“Nah,” PFC Duberand said. He was a big man—a “fat tray” in Company 4239 who’d trimmed down into hard muscle. He was one of fifteen of Jack’s boot-camp buddies who’d been deployed to the Vlad theater with him. “They ain’t that smart.”

“Shows what you know, newbie,” Corporal Virginia Casey replied. She was an old Siberian hand, a Marine who’d been at the fire base since late July. “Wait’ll you find a company of NC sappers coming through the wire on your watch some night!” Another mortar round thundered, close by, and the Marines hunkered down a bit lower.

“Shit,” Lonnie Costantino said, brushing a scattering of gravel from his active-camo body armor. “If they’re so freakin’ shit-hot, how come we’re up here looking down at them down there?”

“Maybe they don’t like this any more than we do,” Jack said.

“Fuckin’-A, Flash,” Casey said. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned about the NCA, it’s that the opposition is as tired, as dirty, as hot, as hungry, and as fucking sick of this fucking war as we are.”

“That’s right,” Corporal Slidell said. “They’re just like us, ’cept they talk funny. Hell, they wouldn’t want to upset the nice, friendly little balance of power we’ve worked out here.” Two more mortar rounds whistled in with a savage whump-whump.

Jack looked at Slidell—“call me ‘Slider,’”—with interest. “You mean they don’t want to kick our asses into the Sea of Japan?”

“Oh, sure. They would if they could. But they know that trying it’ll buy ’em another Hill 229. The poor SOBs got enough trouble back home across the river without bleedin’ themselves dry trying to break our line.”

That seemed true enough. Precious little news had come out of North China since the war had started, but POWs and deserters spoke of street fighting in Beijing and Harbin, and of the possibility of wide-scale civil war. Even so, the Chinese had a well-deserved reputation for being able to field huge armies, inexhaustibly supplied by new levies of peasant troops. Some wit in the company had actually calculated that if the Marines killed one Chinese soldier per second for the next twenty years, the Chinese birthrate would still produce a larger standing army than they had now, and that invading Russia was simply Beijing’s way of reaching UN-mandated population controls before the year 2050.

There was a long silence, and then Marines began rising from their shelters. Over in front of the mess hall, the familiar red banner went up, accompanied by shouted jeers and insults. Maggie’s drawers.

He wondered if the Marines would lie to the enemy and wave the red flag one bright morning when the enemy barrage had actually killed someone. Or if they’d keep waving the flag if the Chinese lobbed a few rounds extra someday, after the red flag had gone up. Hell, maybe the Chinese weren’t any more anxious to rock the boat than the Marines were.

Standing, shrugging his torso armor into a more comfortable position and straightening his helmet, Jack walked toward the wall of sandbags and tightly coiled razor wire that made up Fire Base 125’s inner bastion. Covered firing positions, carefully camouflaged, housed Marine riflemen and SLWs. Beyond, the ground, which dropped away down a steep hill toward Chancre Valley below, had been churned and blasted into a flat and open killing ground, one heavily laced with claymore and robotic mines, with teleoperated pop-up weapons towers and hopper-poppers, with sensors that could pinpoint a stealthy man’s heartbeat and relay targeting data that could nail him with fire from a dozen separate positions.

Far off, down the valley, Chancre Lake—actually the Ozero Khanka or Chanka, depending on which maps you consulted—gleamed silver in the morning light, twenty kilometers to the northwest. The enemy mortars were south of the big lake, between the lake and the fire base. Other enemy positions must be closer…perhaps as close as that tree line beyond the outermost ring of the base’s robotic defenses. The bad guys were rarely seen, however. Since Jack had arrived at Fire Base 125, he’d been in exactly one firefight. He’d scrambled to his assigned position on the wall and taken his place with the rest of his company, blazing away with his ATAR into a thick middle-of-the-night fog of smoke and dazzling flashes, burning flares, and savage explosions, trying to make sense out of the confused jumble of greens and yellows squirming across his helmet visor’s HUD on its IR setting.

Once, during that ten-minute firefight, he thought maybe he’d seen someone running out there…but it could easily have been a shadow cast by a drifting flare or fast-strobing chain of poppers. He’d fired at the target and not even known if he’d hit anything or not.

So much of his recruit training, and the combat training that had followed, had emphasized personal combat. He now knew a dozen different ways to kill a man with his bare hands, could take a man down with a knife or a rock or the butt end of his ATAR, could end any hand-to-hand encounter with a Marine-approved shout and stomp to the head. A lot of that training, he knew, had been designed to overcome civilian sensitivities and squeamishness and to bring out what Knox had called “the native aggressiveness of the US Marine.” Somehow, though, he’d never quite picked up on the fact that most combat was at ranges where you never saw the enemy.

From here, he had an impressive view of the entire Chancre Valley. In the distance near the lake, a flight of drone VT-20 hunter-killers banked and darted in the sunlight, seeking out the enemy mortar tubes, as a pair of Marine Valkyries circled watchfully overhead. Closer, a pair of hulking Marine A-25 Cataphracts growled and rumbled as they nosed through the underbrush outside the perimeter. ’Phracs in the distance were always a comforting sight, quad-tracked mobile weapons platforms twice as long and four times more massive than the old Abrams and Schwarzenegger tanks that still served as Marine reserve armor. They were the subject of lively debate at the base, now, with their detractors claiming they were obsolete in an age of smart-AI battlefield HK missiles and pinpoint railgun bombardment from orbit, but most Marines liked having them about.

Just so long as they weren’t too close by; ’Phracs tended to draw enemy artillery fire like bodies drew flies, and it was generally safer to admire the behemoths from a comfortable distance.

“Hey, Flash!” Slidell called from behind. “Whatcha doing? Admiring the scenery?”

“Hey, Slider,” Jack replied. He still wasn’t sure how Slider and the others had picked up on the handle he’d earned at boot camp. It almost had to be Lonnie or Dubber or one of the others from his boot company, but he’d thought he’d had them all sworn to silence. “You know what they say. Join the Marines. See exotic, far-off lands. Meet fascinating people. Kill them….”

“Ooh-rah. Listen, buddy. You ’n’ me need to talk!”

Jack peeled back the Velcro cover on his watch. “Got a few minutes. I’ve got honey-bucket detail at zero-eight-thirty.”

“This won’t take long.” Slider gestured at a stack of sandbags and grinned. “Step into my office and pull up a seat!”

Jack grunted and dropped onto a sandbag. Slider pulled another bag a bit closer, sat, and leaned forward, dragging his PAD from its holster. He opened the screen, keyed it on, and Sam’s lovely face appeared, wearing a sultry smile and nothing else. “Hi, Slider,” she said.

“Listen, Flash,” Slidell said, ignoring her, “this has got to be the greatest fucking gimmick since Net-babe downloads! You are a fucking genius, man!”

Jack shrugged, embarrassed. “Hey, no big deal. I just hacked some commercial AI software.”

“‘No big deal,’ the man says. How’d you crunch her down to fit on a Marine PAD, anyway?”

“That was pretty easy, actually. The government-issue AI, well, the source code just isn’t that efficiently written, you know? Loose, redundant, and looking like it was turned out by a committee. Turned out that Samantha’s source code wasn’t that much bigger than the government program. It just, well, it’s tighter. Does more in less space, and better.”

“Better! I’ll say!” He eyed Samantha’s body appreciatively. “Hey, baby!” he said. “Let’s see your ass!”

“Whatever you say, Slider.” Standing, she turned around, spread her legs, and gracefully bent over, grabbing her ankles to give Slider a good look.

“The color’s a bit flat and garish,” Jack said. “I had to go down from millions of colors to two fifty-six. But I might know a way to get around that. I’m still tweaking it, you know.”

“Well, all I can say is I would love to give her a tweak! Flash, m’boy, you and me are gonna clean up!”

“What do you mean?”

Gently, he patted the screen over Sam’s raised bottom. “Okay, honey. Let’s see you dance for us!”

“Whatever you say, Slider.” She straightened up and began a slow, sensuous bump and grind, turning slowly as she danced to nonexistent music. Frowning, Jack made a mental note to check her source code, especially the random sequencing routine. She was falling into that “Whatever you say” response much too often.

“Flash, do you have any idea what the guys would pay to have their very own naked babe, at their command, right on their own PADs?”

“Pay? I figured some of the guys would just like to have them….

“Oh, Flash, Flash, Flash, I am so disappointed in you! There is opportunity here, big-time, and you obviously are in desperate need of someone to show you how to make the most of it! You gotta learn how to play the angles, man!”

“But we can’t sell it, can we? I mean, I started with this commercial package. It was really pretty lame, a kind of customized do-it-yourself date on your computer, but it was protected by a copyright, you know? And the AI agent came from another package. I just kind of knitted the two together.”

“Ah, that stuff is all in a gray area, know what I mean? You probably already technically violated copyright just by rewriting her source code, right?”

“I don’t think I—”

“Sure! And with all the stuff you did with her code, you changed her quite a bit, right? Like, you were telling me you worked in that emergency quick-change bit, and got her to respond personally, with your name, and stuff? And obviously you worked in the Net agent stuff, and the government-issue agent, too, right?”

“Yeah, but I still used—”

“You used the store-bought program as a template. Sure. But what we have here is a whole new product! Trust me!”

Jack looked at Slider for a moment, letting his gaze flick up to the patch glued to the Marine’s helmet. Armor and helmet decorations weren’t authorized for the 5th MarDiv, strictly speaking, but none of the brass, up to Major General Holcomb himself, had issued any orders to end the widespread practice. Slider carried his Hops Vincet patch glued to his helmet, right next to the visor drag and above the stenciled name SLIDELL.

All The Way To Mars And They Made Us Throw Away The Beer….

Jack knew all about the beer patch and the story behind it from his uncle, but he’d been startled to find someone who’d been on Garroway’s March here, in Russia. He’d heard that the Corps was a tight little family, that if you stayed in long enough, you would inevitably run into just about everyone…but he’d not really believed it until he’d met Slider.

He was worried about Slider’s proposition. It still didn’t seem entirely legal…and Jack hadn’t really planned on selling Sam to the other Marines. He’d thought that she might be a good way for him to make friends, but he hadn’t thought at all about using her to make money. But the fact that Slider had been there, with the MMEF on Mars went a long, long way toward making Jack want to trust the guy. In point of fact, Slider was a little vague about the details; once he’d claimed to have been at Mars Prime during the march, helping to offload the contraband beer that Garroway had used in his unorthodox attack at Cydonia, but most of the time he claimed to have actually been with “Sands of Mars” Garroway in the long trek up the Valles Marineris.

It hardly mattered. Slider was obviously an operator, as old-hand Marines called them, but he seemed a decent enough guy. And whether he’d actually been on the March or not, he’d been to Mars…

Jack did wonder, sometimes, why the guy was still only a corporal when he had to have been in damned near forever to have gotten a billet with the MMEF. He’d asked Slider about it once, but the Marine had just shrugged, and said, “Sergeants. Can’t live with ’em, and it sure would be nice to live without ’em.”

“So what’s your idea?” Jack asked.

“I figure we could sell these to the other guys at sixty bucks a pop, maybe seventy-five, see?” He stared at Sam for a moment, watching her silent, writhing dance on the PAD’s display. “Hell, I’m gonna have to think about the price, some. Even a hundred wouldn’t be too much for one of these baby dolls! Anyway, I figure you and me split the take, fifty-fifty. You do whatever customizing is necessary, you know, to get her to use the customer’s name and everything. And I’ll see to the sales and marketing end of things. I can make the pitch, close the sale, collect the cash, and then we make the split. Deal?”

“Oh, man,” Jack said. “I’m going to have to think about that one.”

“Lemme ask you one thing.”

“Shoot.”

“You think you might wanna go with this idea? I mean, it’s a possibility, right?”

“Well, I guess so….”

“Then do us both a big favor, kid. Stop giving the fucking things away!”

“Huh?”

“You’re gonna kill the market with freebies, man! What’s worse, some other techie-type might get ahold of this and do up a product of his own! Man, you gotta go into business with me on this thing just to protect your interests, y’know?”

Jack shrugged. He’d only given Sam to Slider and a couple of others…and three or four of the guys like Lonnie who’d come over to the Vlad with him. He didn’t suppose it mattered. “Okay, sure. Why not? But I’m still not sure this thing’s such a good idea.”

“Hey, trust me, Flash! I wouldn’t steer ya wrong! You ‘n’ me are gonna clean up big!”

Jack looked at his watch again. “Hey, I gotta get to the honey buckets, Slider. I’ll see you later.”

“Okay, man. Just remember! No more freebies!”

Honey-bucket duty was one of the less glamorous aspects of service with the Marines, Jack was finding. Each morning, and again in the evening, the cut-down two-hundred-liter fuel cans set beneath the latrine benches had to be hauled out into the open, the contents doused with diesel fuel or kerosene, and burned. It was filthy, back-breaking, stinking, stomach-turning work, the sort traditionally reserved for the newbies and the replacements who either hadn’t yet proven themselves, or who hadn’t been aboard long enough for anyone newer to come along and get picked for shit detail instead.

“So, anyone hear any more about that asteroid the UNdies are supposed to’ve launched at the US?” Lonnie wanted to know. There were four of them on the detail—Jack, Lonnie Costantino, Duberand, and PFC Alan Kale, another alumnus from Platoon 4239. They’d dragged out the first three honey pots and set them ablaze. Oily, foul-smelling smoke boiled above the barren hillside.

Kale leaned on his shovel. “I still think it’s all bullshit. The UNdies’d never launch an asteroid at us! I mean, they gotta live on this planet, too!”

“I dunno,” Duberand said. “My sister’s in the Air Force, stationed at V-berg, and she said they already launched missiles to knock the thing off course. She swore it was true.”

“You’re too ugly to have a sister, Dub. How come they didn’t tell the whole country, huh?”

“Maybe because they didn’t want a panic,” Jack said. “Or because they want to wait and make sure it’s going to miss.”

“Man,” Kale said. “You think they’d let something like that go down without warning folks? Without trying to evac ’em or something? That’s cold, man.”

“If they can’t move everybody,” Jack said, “maybe they opted not to move anybody, just because of the panic and stuff.”

“You know,” Duberand said, “there’s a story goin’ around that it wasn’t the UN that moved that asteroid. It was aliens.”

“No way,” Costantino said. “Uh-uh, no way it was aliens.”

“What makes you an authority, Lonnie?” Kale wanted to know. “You talk to ’em?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah.” Lonnie pointed at his forehead, where four months earlier he’d worn the star emblem of the An. “I’m still Alien Astronauts, y’know. The Masters don’t want to harm the Earth. They want to save it.”

“I don’t know what scares me more,” Kale said. “The idea of the UN dropping rocks on us, or you telling me that the aliens won’t.”

“Some churches back home are saying the aliens are the Antichrist’s forces,” Jack pointed out. “Others say they’re angels, here to save us. They both can’t be right!”

“What do you say?” Duberand wanted to know.

He shrugged. “I don’t think they’re gods or devils. I think right now they’re telling us more about humans, from the way people react to them, than they are telling us about themselves.”

“Yeah, so you think the UN has been changing asteroid orbits?”

“Wouldn’t put it past them. A small enough rock might just be enough to cripple us, without hurting the rest of the world. It’d be a hell of a weapon. Of course, that’s why the Marines are going to need more of a presence in space.”

“Uh-oh,” Kale said. “Flash is gonna do his speech again!”

“Fuck you too, Kale. No speeches. But if any two-bit dictator or terrorist with even minor space capability can bump a fair-sized rock into an Earth-intercept orbit, we’re going to have to set up some sort of regular patrol out there, just to make sure no one tries that shit! What I want to know is, if that rock is on the way, how come they didn’t scramble the Marines to go get it?”

“Would you have gone on a mission like that?” Lonnie asked.

“Hell, yeah. Wouldn’t you?”

“Hell, no. I don’t mind joining the Marines and getting shot at by unfriendly natives. But getting stuffed into a tin can and fired into space, man, a guy could get killed that way. No thanks!” Costantino stirred the bubbling, smoking mess in one of the burn bins with his shovel. “I think we’re ready for another load, here.”

“I’ll get it,” Jack said. Turning, he started down the hill toward the latrines. Lonnie followed him.

The move—all of four meters—saved their lives.

A Chinese railgun located well inside Manchuria had fired a hypervelocity fléchette cluster moments before; the depleted uranium fléchettes, traveling at nearly eight times the speed of sound, slammed into the hilltop occupied by Ol’ Buck and a Quarter with a release of kinetic energy equivalent to a kiloton pocket nuke.

Kale was sliced cleanly in two. Duberand was lucky; he only lost his leg. The thunderclap of the impact was deafening, as buildings, sandbag walls, artillery pieces, and one of the Cataphract MWPs were either shredded, flattened, or enveloped in flame. When Jack was able to raise his head again, he was fifteen meters from where he’d been, half-buried in mud and gravel. The air was choked with clouds of smoke, and the shrill screams of the wounded went on and on and on above the crackle of flames in nightmare choruses of agony and terror.

This time, no one bothered with the Maggie’s-drawers joke.