The next thing he knew, he was lying on the pavement, looking up into the less than appealing features of Sergeant Dolby. He felt dizzy and sick, light-headed and cold. Dolby slapped him lightly on the face a couple of times. “You okay, recruit?”

“S-Sir.” He tried to formulate the correct response—This recruit is okay—but failed. “Yes, sir.”

“Stay put. A doc’ll be along in a second.”

Five other recruits of Company 1099 had passed out as well. They were helped back into the sick bay by unsympathetic corpsmen, who laid them out on cots, took their vitals, and gave them spray injections in their arms. There was no autodoc or treatment room; without cerebralinks, they couldn’t be hooked into a diagnostic system. That thought alone was enough to leave Garroway wondering what could possibly have possessed him to voluntarily give up his cyberimplants. After receiving the injection and being allowed to rest for twenty minutes, he felt well enough to return to the rest of the group. Another hour dragged by as the rest of Company 1099—those who’d agreed to lose their cybernano, at any rate—passed through the sick bay and the ministrations of the AI examination room. Out of the original complement of ninety-five men in Company 1099, fifteen had refused to allow their nanochelates to be removed, and three more had been rejected by the AI treatment room for one reason or another. Most of them were on their way back to civilian life by that afternoon, processed out on a DD-4010—“Subject unsuitable for Marine Corps service,” a convenience-of-the-government discharge. Two volunteered instead for a transfer to the Navy, and three others elected to join the Aerospace Force.

“Why,” Gunnery Sergeant Makowiecz bellowed at the ranks later that morning, “did we take away your implants? Anyone!” Several hands went up, and Makowiecz chose one. “You!”

“S-Sir, this recruit believes that you will issue Marine implants,” Murphy, a kid from Cincinnati, said.

“Civilian implants may not be compatible with military-issue gear or with each other. Sir.”

“That,” Makowiecz replied, “is part of the answer. But notall of it. Anyone else?”

Garroway raised his hand, and Makowiecz snapped, “You!”

“Sir,” Garroway said, “it is Marine Corps policy to have all recruits begin at the same level, with no one better or worse than anyone else, sir!”

“Again, a piece of the answer, but not all of it. And not the most important part. Anyone else?” No one moved in the ranks. “All right, I’ll tell you.” Makowiecz pointed at the sky. “Right now, there are some 2,491 communications satellites in Earth orbit, from little field relays the size of your thumb in LEO to the big library space stations at L-4 and L-5. They all talk to one another and to the Earth stations in all of the major cities down here. As a result, the air around us is filled with information, data streams moving from node to node, access fields, packets uploading and downloading so thick if you could see ’em with your eyes you’d think you were in a snowstorm.

“With the right hardware chelated into your brains, all you have to do, anywhere on the surface of the Earth, is think a question with the appropriate code tag, and the answer is there. You want to talk to another person, anywhere between here and the moon, all you do is think about them andbang , there they are inside your head. Right?

“If you go to Mars, there are 412 communications satellites in orbit, not counting the big stations on Deimos and Phobos. Same thing holds. You don’t have as many channels or as much of a choice in where you get your data from, but you can have any question answered, any spot on the planet mapped down to half-meter resolution, or talk to anyone at all, just by thinking about it.

“Even if you were to go all the way out to Llalande 21185, to the moon Ishtar, you’d find a few dozen communications satellites in orbit, plus the mission transport. Same deal. The Llalande net is a lot smaller even than the one on Mars. Highly specialized…but it’s there.

“But what happens if you find yourself on some Goddess-forsaken dirtballthat doesn’t have a GlobalNet system ?”

He let the words hang in the air for a moment, as Garroway and the other recruits wrestled with the concept. There wasalways a GlobalNet. Wherever man went, he took his technology with him…and that meant the net, and the myriad advantages of constantly being online. Life without the net would be as unthinkable as…as life without medical nano or zollarfilm or smartclothing or…food. Their access to the net had been limited since they’d arrived on Parris Island, of course, but even that knowledge didn’t carry the same impact as the DI’s grinning words.

“Don’t look so shocked, kiddies,” Makowiecz went on. “People got on just fine without instant net access, back before they figured out how to shoot nanochelates into your brains. And you will too. Trust me on that one! Awright! Leh…face!Fowah…harch!Left! Left! Your left-right-left…”

Garroway was willing to accept the idea of learning how to live as a primitive, at least in theory. He’d expected to go the camping and survival route, learning how to make a fire, orienteer across the Parris Island swamps, catch his own dinner, and treat himself or a buddy for snakebite. The Marines were famous for being able to live off the land and get by with nothing much at all. He had no idea justhow primitive things would get, however, until that afternoon after chow, when Dolby marched half of them back to the recruit sick bay to be fitted with glasses.

Glasses! He’d never heard of the things, though he realized now that he had seen them before, in various downloads of historical scenes and images from a century or two back. Two pieces of glass ground to precise optical properties, held just in front of the eyes by a plastic framework that hooked over the ears and balanced on the bridge of the nose…Once, evidently, they’d been quite fashionable, but the advent first of contacts, then of the dual technologies of genetic engineering and corrective visual nano, had sent them the way of the whalebone corset and silk necktie.

Those recruits whose parents had selected for perfect vision before their births didn’t need visual correction. About half of the company, however, had had nano implants as part of their cerebralinks—submicroscopic structures that both allowed images and words to be projected directly onto the retina and, as an incidental side issue, subtly changed the shape of the cornea and of the eyeball itself to allow perfectly focused vision. Contact lenses, it had been decreed, were too dangerous, too likely to be smashed into the eye in pugil stick practice, a fall on the obstacle course, or hand-to-hand training. Glasses, with unbreakable transplas lenses, might fly off the face but they wouldn’t blind a careless or unlucky recruit. And, unlike contacts, glasses could be taken off and cleaned in the field with the swipe of a finger after a fall in the platoon mud pit.

They justlooked as ugly as sin…and twice as silly. Why, Garroway wondered, couldn’t they just inject them all with a specialized antinano that neutralized the neural chelates but left stuff like vision correctives?

Several times so far in his service career he’d heard people refer to how there were three ways of doing anything—the right way, the wrong way, and theCorps’ way.

He decided that he was going to have to get used to the occasional seeming irrationality, to accept it as a normal part of this new life.

It was that or go mad.

Headquarters, USMCSPACCOM

Quantico, Virginia

United Federal Republic, Earth

1415 hours ET

Colonel T. J. Ramsey wondered what megalomaniac had designed this program. A dozen Marine officers hovered in space, like gods looking down upon the glowing red-gold, brown, and violet sphere representing distant Ishtar. A window had opened against the planet, revealing an orbital survey map of the New Sumer region along the north coast of the continent called Euphratea. The sense of sheer power was almost hypnotic.

Colonel Ramsey was completing the mission briefing. “That’s it, then,” he said. He gestured, and lines of green light flared against the map of the city, outlining perimeters, zones of fire, and LZs. “The initial landings will seize control of the city of New Sumer and the immediate area, with special attention paid to gaining control of the Pyramid of the Eye. That will be the Regimental Landing Team HQ.” Another window opened, enlarging the map area around a prominent rise west of the city. “Before that happens, however, we will need to neutralize Mount An-Kur. That will be the particular task of your Advance Recon Landing Team, Captain Warhurst.”

The briefing room, if it could be called that, was being projected inside the minds of the participants, some of whom were at Quantico, others as far away as theDerna , in high Earth orbit. The icon representing Captain Martin Warhurst wore Marine grays, which were somewhat outmoded on the fashion front. Just three weeks back from Egypt, he’d not had time to update his personal software, what with endless rounds of debriefings and the work he was putting into his latest assignment—the Llalande Relief Expedition ARLT. In contrast, most of the others at the virtual briefing flaunted the latest Marine officer’s fashion, duotone white and gold tunics over blue trousers, both with red trim, and with a holographic globe-and-anchor projected above the left breast. Ramsey wondered how many of them wore the new uniforms outside of virtual reality. They looked peacock-gaudy in the briefing feed; few field commanders, however, bothered with the game of fashion keep-up so popular with the stateside Corps brass.

“I’d still feel better about this if we just rocked ’em from orbit,” Warhurst said. “This giant gun or whatever it is they have inside the mountain…if it can claw starships out of the sky, how the hell are we going to even get close?”

Colonel Ramsey nodded. “I know. But we have very specific orders on this one. I already tried to sell the commandant on a bombardment from space, but his orders are to deliver that weapons system to our experts…intact. If we reduce that mountain to a crater, the Joint Chiefs are not going to be happy with us.”

“So?” Major Ricia Anderson said, grinning, her voice just low enough that the colonel could convincingly ignore it. “They’ll be ten years away! What are they gonna do, write us a nasty e-note?”

“Fortunately,” Ramsey went on, “the Annies don’t know we have to take that mountain instead of flattening it. That gives us a possible edge tactically, a slim one. From the description provided in the last transmission from the pyramid, we estimate that the beam weapon hidden inside An-Kur must generate a bolt of energy measuring at least 1016joules.

“Now, we don’t know how they generate that kind of power. Like all of the Ahannu god-weapons, it’s pretty much magic so far as we or they are concerned. But that much energy takes time to generate and store, even if they have some kind of antimatter generator down there. We’re counting on the fact that they’ll have a limited number of shots, with a goodly recharge time between each one. That, Captain, will operate in your favor.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Ramsey smiled. What else could Warhurst say? The man had volunteered for this mission as soon as it had been described to him. The chance to deploy to another star system…hell, don’t quibble. The chance at an assignment with a Career 3 rating meant promotion points as well as a whopping big combat-hardship pay bonus. If Warhurst survived this op, his career would bemade .

“Our biggest problem right now,” Ramsey told his staff, “is manpower. Volunteers only, of course…and because of the objective mission duration, the pick is limited to Famsit One and Two. Our original TO

and E called for a full regimental MEU…about two thousand people. With the logistical limitations of a Derna -class IST, we’re reconfiguring that as an MIEU, a MarineInterstellar Expeditionary Unit, with a roster of twelve hundred. Even with that, though, we may have trouble filling out the roster.”

Lieutenant Colonel Lyle Harper, the Regimental Landing Team’s CO, raised a hand. “We could put in a special request at Camp Lejeune, Colonel. There are sixteen companies in training right now, and a fair percentage of those people won’t have close family ties. Hell, they might see it as an adventure.”

“Not to mention returning to Earth with five years objective under their belts,” Major Lyssa DuBoise, commander of the MIEU’s aerospace element, said. “Eligible for discharge and a hell of a lot of hardship pay!”

“Since when did the Corps become a mercenary unit?” Major Samuel C. Ross, the Regimental G-2, said. He was in charge of mission intelligence—a particular bastard of a job, Ramsey thought, since no one knew exactly what was happening on Ishtar right now, and there was no way in hell they could guess what it would be like ten years hence.

“Our people will do their jobs because that’s the way they were trained,” Ramsey said. “As for the rest, it’s about time they got some financial recognition for what they do. There’s little enough material gratification in the peacetime Corps.”

“Amen to that,” someone in the watching group muttered aloud.

“In any case,” Ramsey continued, “Major Anderson will be responsible for recruiting volunteers at Lejeune. Because of the mission’s subjective length, we’ll need a high percentage of young men and women right out of boot camp. They’ll all be eligible for sergeant’s stripes and better by the time they get home.”

Subjective versus objective time was becoming more and more of a problem in the modern military, especially in the Navy and the Marines. While career-military officers and senior NCOs were

“lifers”—meaning they expected to be in the service for a full twenty or thirty years, at least—the vast majority of enlisted personnel signed up for an initial four-year hitch. Some small percentage of those opted to extend their enlistment for an additional six years, to “ship-for-six,” as the old saying went, and a smaller percentage of ten-year veterans decided to go the full twenty or more to retirement. If a young Marine rotated through various duty stations on Earth, or even on the moon or one of the orbital stations, there was no problem. That’s the way things had been run in the military for centuries. But it was expensive to ship large numbers of men and women plus their equipment to other worlds within the Solar system, and so time on-station offworld tended to be measured in years rather than months.

And now that Marines were being sent to the worlds of other stars, the problem of finding unattached personnel who didn’t mind leaving Earth and all they knew there for years, even decades at a time, was becoming critical. Nanohibernation technology and time dilation might make subjective time on board the Marine transport seem like days or weeks, at most, but objectively the voyage would last a decade—two before the mission personnel saw the Earth again. Those young Marine men and women would return to an Earth aged twenty years or more. And even the most optimistic mission planners expected the deployment to the Llalande system to require no fewer than two years of ground-time at the objective.

Finding the best Marines who were also Famsit One—no close family ties on Earth—or Famsit Two—FOO, or Family-of-Origin only—was becoming damned near impossible. If anyone could deal with the details and the delicacies of such a search, Ramsey knew it was Ricia.

“I have one final piece of business for this briefing,” Ramsey said. He thought-clicked a new connection, allowing another image to form within the shared noumenal conference space. “Ladies, gentlemen, may I present our mission commander, Brigadier General Phillip King.”

In fact, the image was a secretarial AI, projecting General King’s thin face and dour expression into the group noumenon, and identified as such by a winking yellow light at his collar. Ramsey mentally shook his head at that; one never knew for sure if the construct one met in noumenal space was a real-time projection or an AI secretary, unless the other party put up an AI tag like King’s insignia light. For most senior officers, secretary stand-ins for briefings and presentations were a necessity if they wanted to get any real work done at all.

In King’s case, though, the light was a kind of message board proclaiming, “I am a busy man and have no time to spare for you.” Ramsey had served under King once before, back in ’29, and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. The man tended to be fussy, rigid, and a bit of a prima donna. He was also a superb politician, with a politician’s connections and oil-smooth sincerity, at least on the surface. The word from on high was that King—thanks to postings to various ambassadorial staffs over the past few years—had the blessing of half a dozen other national governments involved in the international relief force.

“Thank you, Colonel Ramsey,” the image said in King’s somewhat nasal tones. “I look forward to getting to meet each of you personally in the coming months.

“For now, I wish to impress upon each of you what an honor it is to be chosen for Operation Spirit of Humankind. I expect each of you to do your best, for the Corps, for America, for the Confederation, and forme .

“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. Wewill 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 experience, was going to have an easy job keeping those factions straight.

And as amilitary commander…well, he had serious doubts that General King was the best man possible for the command.

10

19JULY 2138

Field Combat Range

U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center

Parris Island, South Carolina

0640 hours ET

“Crawl,you sand fleas!Crawl! Youwill becomeone with thedirt!”

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’sthat 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 youstop , you’redead. ” 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 youronly choice! Nowhump 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 didnot 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! Andone ! 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 assistant’s cadence. “Painis the feeling ofweakness leaving your body!”

“And twenny-eight! And twenny-nine! And…”

Lagrange ShuttleKing Priam

In approach to ISTDerna

Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

1320 hours Zulu

Half a million kilometers from Parris Island, the Marine Interstellar TransportDerna 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 ISTDerna was in orbital configuration, her hab modules spread and rotating slowly. Beyond her, twenty kilometers away, Antimatter Production FacilityVesuvius 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 ShuttleKing 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 theDerna , 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 didnot 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 areyou 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.”

“Troubleshooter, huh?” She chuckled. “That’s rich. A civilian Marine!”

“What?”

“A civilian Marine! We’re troubleshooters too, y’know. There’s trouble, we shoot it!” She cocked her thumb and forefinger, mimicking a gun. “Zzzt! Blam!” She blew across the tip of her finger. “Problem down. Area secure.”

“I see.”

“I doubt that. Ha!”

“What?”

“I was just thinking,” she said, grinning. “When we get to Ishtar, let me know how your troubleshooting works with the Frogs.”

“Uh…frogs?”

“The Ishtaran abs. The Ahannu. What are you going to do if they get out of line, slap ’em with a lawsuit?”

“I will assess the situation and report to the PanTerran director’s board with my recommendations. I’ll also be there as a corporate legal representative should there be, um, jurisdictional or boundary disputes, shall we say, with any of the other Earth forces going to Ishtar.”

“I like my way better,” Horst said. She shook her head. “Give me a twenty-one-twenty with an arpeg popper any day.”

“A…what? Arpeg?”

“The Remington Arms M-12 underbarrel self-guiding rocket-propelled 20mm grenade launcher, RPG

Mark Four, Mod 2, select-fire, gas-actuated, laser-tracking, self-homing round in high-explosive, armor-piercing, or delay-detonated bomblet or intel submunitions,” she said, rattling off the words as though they were a part of her, “with select-fire from an underbarrel mount configuration with the Marine-issue GE LR-2120 Sunbeam pulse laser with detachable forty-or ninety-round box magazine and targeting link through the standard Mark Seven HD linkage—”

“Whatever you say,” he replied, interrupting when she took a breath. “I’ll stick to legal briefs, thank you.”

She laughed. “Washington must really be pissed with the Frogs,” she said. “Being taken down by a self-homer arpeg round is a hell of a lot cleaner than being fucking lawyered to death.”

He smiled blandly, then looked away, pointedly taking an interest in the docking approach on his seat-back screen. Clearly, he shared little in the way of language or attitude with the Marines. He wondered if PanTerra was paying him enough for this assignment.

The shuttle docked with theDerna, drifting gently into a berthing rack mounted on the flat underside of the reaction mass dome. A number of other TAV craft were already docked, their noses plugged into a ring of airlock modules circling the transport’s core just forward of the slowly spinning hab-module access collar.

There was a slight pop as cabin pressures matched, then the Marines around him began unbuckling, floating up from their seats and forming a queue in the central aisle. He unbuckled his own harness but kept hold of the seat arm, unwilling to let himself float into that haphazard tangle of legs, arms, and torsos.

“Mr. Norris?” a voice said in his head. “Have you had zero-g experience?”

He thought-clicked on the noumenal link. “Yes,” he said. “A little, anyway.” He’d had other offworld assignments with PanTerra—on the moon, on Mars, on Vesta, and twice on mining stations in the Kuiper Belt. All had been steady-g all the way—PanTerra always sent its executives first class—but he’d endured weightlessness during boarding and at mid-trip flipovers.

“Even so, it might be best for you to remain in your seat until the Marines have moved out. A naval officer can help you board the transport and get to your deck.”

“Who is this?” He didn’t recognize the noumenal ID: CS-1289. An artificial intelligence, obviously, but ship AIs generally went by the name of their vessel, and this one felt a bit broader in scope than a typical ship AI.

“You may address me as ‘Cassius,’” the voice said. “I am the executive AI component for the command constellation on this mission.”

“I see.”

“Colonel Ramsey regrets that he cannot receive you in person,” Cassius went on, “but he is still on Earth attending to the details of mission preparation. And Cicero has not yet uploaded to theDerna .”

“Cicero?”

“General King’s AI counterpart.”

“Who’s General King? I thought Ramsey was the mission commander?”

“Colonel Ramsey is the regimental commander and, as such, will have operational command on the ground at Ishtar. General King will have overall mission command, including all ground, space, and aerospace units.”

“The CEO, huh? He supervises the whole thing from orbit?”

“The analogy is a fair one, Mr. Norris. Once the Pyramid of the Eye has been secured, and assuming direct real-time communications can be reestablished between the Legation compound and Earth, General King will likely transfer his headquarters from theDerna to New Sumer.”

Norris nodded, then wondered if the disembodied voice in his head could see the gesture. “Gotcha,” he said. His briefing at PanTerra had covered Marine space-ground command structures and procedures in some detail, but he would need to know the people involved, not just the TO&E. General King, evidently, would be his primary target, but Ramsey would be the one to watch. He would have to get close to both men if his assignment for PanTerra was to succeed.

Waiting, only somewhat impatiently, he watched the last of the Marines float out of the aisle and through theKing Priam ’s forward lock. Patience had never been one of Norris’s best or most reliable assets; he needed to keep reminding himself that he was committed to a twenty-year-plus contract in objective time, that even in subjective time there was no need for hurry at all. Angry with himself, he thought-clicked through some meditative subroutines in his implants, seeking peaceful acceptance. Within moments the medical nano in his body was subtly altering the balance of several neurochemicals, lowering his blood pressure, slowing his heart rate, inducing the patience he required.

“Mr. Norris?”

It was an external voice a human voice this time. He opened his eyes. “Yes?”

A Navy officer floated in the aisle next to his seat row. He wore dress whites and appeared very young.

“I’m Lieutenant Bolton. Will you come with me, please?”

“Of course.”

The lieutenant gestured toward a storage case forward. “Uh, pardon my asking, but do you need a drag bag?”

“Drag bag?”

“Microgravity Transit Harness, sir. An MTH. To help get you—”

Norris frowned. He’d seen MTHs used in civilian spacecraft, and a more undignified mode of travel was hard to imagine. “That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant. I’ve been in zero g before.”

“Very well, sir. If you’ll just follow me?”

Grasping fabric handholds on the tops of the seats around him, Norris pulled himself gently from his seat and maneuvered his way into the aisle. For a dizzying moment his visual references spun and shifted; he’d been thinking of the cabin as having the layout of a suborbital shuttle or hypersonic TAV, with seats on the floor. During acceleration out from Earth, of course, down was aft, toward the rear of the cabin, and he felt as though he were lying on his back, but it was easy to translate that in terms of the acceleration one felt during the suborb boost from New York to Tokyo.

Now, though, all references of up and down were lost. The seats were attached to the wall, he was hanging in midair above a long drop toward the cabin’s rear, and Lieutenant Bolton was swimming straight up, toward the forward lock.

It’s all in your mind, he thought, angry again. He closed his eyes, grasped the next handhold forward, and grimly pulled himself along. When he opened his eyes, just for a moment, perspectives had shifted again and he was now moving down, head first, into a well, with Lieutenant Bolton looking up at him with a worried expression. “Mr. Norris?”

“I’mfine , damn it,” he said. “Lead on!”

The worst parts were the twists and turns, though the airlock was small enough and without contradictory visual cues, so he could catch his breath. Damn it, when was someone going to find a way to provide constant gravity, no matter where you were on a ship or what the ship was doing at the time?

InsideDerna ’s inner hatch, a sign had been attached to one wall sayingQUARTERDECK , next to an American flag stretched taut by wires in the fly and hoist. Lieutenant Bolton saluted the flag, then saluted again to another naval lieutenant who floated there. “Permission to come on board.”

“Permission granted.”

An asinine ceremony, Norris thought with distaste. How did one stand at attention in zero g? Once the military got hold of one of these little rituals, they never let go. At last they floated through a hatch and entered a cylindrical compartment with the wordsDECK and FEET TOWARD HERE painted in red letters on one end. Using straps on the wall, they aligned themselves with the deck, and Bolton used his implant to activate the elevator. The device loaded into one of the rotating hab arms like a shell locking into the firing chamber of a rifle. For a disorienting moment Norris felt like he was upside down, feet hanging toward the ceiling, while the elevator’s gentle acceleration away from the ship’s spine induced a momentary feeling of weight. Then the sensations of spin gravity took hold and he drifted, feet down, to the deck. The returning feeling of weight did little to soothe his bad mood. He’d never liked being weightless, with conflicting clues as to what might be up or down. The hatchway opened at last on Deck One of Hab Three. Uppermost of five decks in the module, this deck had rotation sufficient to create the sensation of about half a g, a bit more than the surface of Mars. Relishing the feeling of a solid deck beneath his feet once more, Norris strode into the lounge area surrounding the central elevator shaft. He wrinkled his nose as he stared about the room. “What the hell is that smell? I thought this was a new ship?”

“It is, sir. New wiring, new fittings, new air circulators. All new ships smell a bit funny. Just wait until you wake up in ten years! It’ll smell a lot worse, believe me!”

Norris didn’t doubt the man. The interior of the hab module was clearly designed to cram as many humans into as small a space as possible. The walls—no, on a ship they would be called bulkheads, he reminded himself irritably—the bulkheads were covered by hexagonal openings, some open and lit within, some closed, giving him the impression of being inside an immense beehive. The central area was divided into thin-walled cubicles. He glimpsed men and women in some of them, sitting at workstations or jacked into entertainment or education centers. There was also a lounge with a table—not large or spacious, but with chairs enough to sit in small groups.

“The head—that’s the bathroom on board a ship—is over there,” Bolton said, pointing. “There’s a common area in each hab module…Deck Two, one down from here. That’s where the mess deck is, too.”

Norris eyed the hexagonal cells all around him. Each appeared to be a tiny, self-contained cabin, two meters long and a meter across, only slightly larger than a coffin. A person could lie inside, but there wasn’t room to stand. “My God, how many people do you have in here?”

“On this deck? Eighty. But these are the luxury quarters, sir…for the command constellation and the officers. Decks Three and Four house two hundred personnel apiece.”

He looked around the compartment in disbelief. “Five hundred people? Inhere ?”

Bolton cleared his throat. “Uh…actually, 480 just in this one hab module, sir. TheDerna carries an entire Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit. An MIEU consists of a Regimental Landing Team, headquarters, recon, and intelligence platoons, and an aerospace close-support wing. That’s twelve hundred Marines altogether, sir, plus 145 naval personnel as ship’s crew. Of course, only about a quarter of that complement are on board now. The rest will be coming up over the course of the next three months.”

“Thank you for the lecture,” Norris replied dryly. “Where do you keep them all?”

“In the cells, of course,” Bolton said. “Yours is over here, sir.”

He would have to climb a ladder to reach his hexagonal cell, he found…located four up from the deck, just beneath the chamber’s ceiling, or “overhead,” as Bolton called it. Inside was a thin mattress, storage compartments, data jacks and feeds, access to the ship’s computer and library, and a personal medical suite; altogether, a wonder of microminiaturization.

“It’s not very big, is it?” Norris was reminded of the traveler hotels, common worldwide now, but first designed in Japan a century or two back, a person-sized tube with room to sleep in and not much else.

“You won’t need much space, sir,” Bolton told him. “You’re scheduled for cybehibe in…” He closed his eyes, accessing the ship’s net. “…twelve more days, sir. At that time, you’ll be plugged into the ship’s cryocybernetic system, and you won’t know a thing until we reach Ishtar.”

“Twelve days.” He wondered how he was going to endure the crowding until then, and gave himself another nano boost.Acceptance . “Twelve fucking days.”

11

8AUGUST 2138

Sick Bay

U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center

Parris Island, South Carolina

1430 hours ET

“Garroway!”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Through that hatch!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

Garroway banged through the door that had already swallowed half of Company 1099. Inside was the familiar, sterile-white embrace of seat, cabinets, AI doc, and the waiting corpsman.

“Have a seat,” the corpsman said. It wasn’t the same guy he had met in there before. What was his name? He couldn’t remember.

Not that it was important. New faces continually cycled through his awareness these days. Without his implants he could only memorize the important ones, the ones he was ordered to remember. Of course, that was about to change now. He suppressed the surge of excitement.

“Feeling okay?” the corpsman asked.

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“No injuries? Infections? Allergies? Nothing like that?”

“Sir, no, sir!”

“Do you have at this time any moral or ethical problems with nanotechnic enhancement, implant technologies, or nanosomatic adjustment?”

“Sir, no, sir!”

The corpsman wasn’t even looking at him as he asked the questions. He wore instead the far-off gaze of someone linked into a net and was probably scanning Garroway now with senses far more sophisticated than those housed in merely human eyes or ears.

“He’s go,” the man said.

The AI doctor unfolded from the cabinet. One arm with an airjet hypo descended to his throat, and Garroway steeled himself against the hiss and burn of the injection.

“Right,” the corpsman said. “Just stay there, recruit. Give it time to work.”

This was it, at long last. It felt as though he’d been without an implant now for half his life, though in fact it had only been about six weeks. Six weeks of running, of learning, of training, all without being able to rely on an internal uplink to the local net.

It was, he thought, astonishing what you could do without a nexus of computers in your brain or electronic implants growing in your hands. He’d learned he could do amazing things without instant access to comlinks or library data.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t eager to get his technic prostheses back. Outside of a slight tingle in his throat, though, he didn’t feel much of anything. Had the injection worked?

“Okay, recruit. Off you go. Through that door and join your company.”

“Sir…I don’t feel—”

“Nothing to feel yet, recruit. It’ll take a day or two for the implants to start growing and making the necessary neural connections. You’ll be damned hungry, though. They’ll be feeding you extra at the mess hall these next few days to give the nano the raw materials it needs.”

He fell into ranks with the rest of his company and waited as the last men filed through the sick bay. Damn. He’d been so excited at the prospect of getting his implants that he’d not thought about how long it might take them to grow. He’d been hoping to talk to Lynnley tonight…. He hadn’t seen her, hadn’t even linked with her, since arriving on Parris Island. Male and female recruits were kept strictly apart during recruit training, though he had glimpsed formations of women Marines from time to time across the grinder or marching off to one training exercise or another. The old dream of serving with her on some offworld station seemed remote right now. Had she changed much? Did she ever even think about him anymore?

Hell, of course she’s changed, he told himself.You’ve changed. So has she. He’d been on the skinny side before, but two months of heavy exercise and special meals had bulked him up, all of the new mass muscle. His endurance was up, his temper better controlled, the periodic depression he’d felt subsumed now by the daily routine of training, exercise, and discipline. And a lot of things that had been important to him once simply didn’t matter now. He had been allowed to vid family grams to his mother, out in San Diego. She was still living with her sister and beginning the process of getting a divorce. That was good, he thought, as well as long overdue. There were rumors of unrest in the Mexican territories—Recruit Training Center monitors censored the details, unfortunately—and scuttlebutt about a new war.

He kept thinking about what Lynnley had said, back in Guaymas, about him having to fight down there against his own father.

Well, why not? He felt no loyalty to that bastard, not after the way he’d treated his mother. So far as he was concerned, he’d shed the man’s parental cloak when he’d reclaimed the name Garroway.

“Garroway!” Makowiecz barked.

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Come with me.”

The DI led him down a corridor and ushered him into another room with a brusque “In there.”

A Marine major, a tall, slender, hard-looking woman in dress grays, sat behind a desk inside.

“Sir! Recruit Garroway reporting as ordered, sir!” In the Corps, to a recruit,all officers were “sir”

regardless of gender, along with most other things that moved.

“Sit down, recruit,” the woman said. “I’m Major Anderson, ComCon Delta Sierra two-one-nine.”

He took a seat, wondering if he’d screwed up somehow. Geez…it had to be something pretty bad for a major to step in. During their day-to-day routine, Marine recruits rarely if ever saw any officer of more exalted rank than lieutenant or captain. From a recruit’s point of view, a major was damned near goddesslike in the Corps hierarchy, and actually beingaddressed by one, summoned to her office, was…daunting, to say the least.

And a comcon? That meant she was part of a regular headquarters staff, probably the exec of a regiment. What could she possibly want with him?

“I’ve been going over your recruit training records, Garroway,” she told him. “You’re doing well. All three-sixes and higher for physical, psych, and all phase one and two training skills.”

“Sir, thank you, sir.”

“No formal marriage or family contracts. Your parents alive, separated.” She paused, and he wondered what she was getting at. “Have you given much thought yet to duty stations after you leave the island?”

That stopped him. Recruits werenot asked to voice their preferences, especially by majors. “Uh…sir, uh…this recruit…”

“Relax,Garroway,” Anderson told him. “You’re not on the carpet. Actually, I’m screening members of your platoon for potential volunteers. I’m looking for Space Marines.”

And that rocked him even more. He’d wanted to be a Marine for as long as he could remember, true, ever since he’d learned about his famous leatherneck ancestors, but the real lure to the Corps had always been the possibility of offworld duty stations. The vast majority of Marines never left the Earth; most served out their hitches in the various special deployment divisions tasked with responding to brushfire wars and threats to the Federal Republic’s interests around the globe. A very special few, however…

“You’re asking me to volunteer for space duty?” Excitement put him on the edge of the seat, leaning forward. “I mean, um, sir, this recruit thinks that, uh—”

“Why don’t we drop the formalities, John? That third-person recruit crap gets in the way of real communication.”

“Thank you, si—uh, ma’am.” He sighed, then took a deep breath, trying to force himself to relax. The excitement was almost overwhelming. “I…yes. I would bevery interested in volunteering for a duty station offworld.”

“You might want to hear about it first,” she cautioned. “I’m not talking about barracks duty on Mars.”

She went on to tell him, in brief, clipped sentences, about MIEU-1, a Marine expeditionary unit tasked with a high-profile rescue-recovery mission at Llalande 21185 IID, the Earthlike moon of a gas giant eight light-years distant.

“That’s where the human slaves are, right, ma’am?” he asked her. The newsfeeds had been full of the story around the time he’d signed up. The enforced e-feed blackout during his training period had pretty well cut him off from all news of the outside world, but there’d been plenty of rumor floating around the barracks for the past couple of months. “We’re going out there to free the slaves?”

“We are going to protect federal interests in the Llalande system,” she replied, her voice firm. “Which means we’ll do whatever the President directs us to do. The main thing you have to think about right now is whether you want to volunteer for such a mission. Objective time will be atleast twenty years. Ten years out in cyhibe, ten back, plus however long it takes us to complete our mission requirements. Things change in twenty years. We won’t be coming back to the same place we left.”

That sobered him. His mother was, what? Forty-one? She’d be sixty-one or older by the time he saw her again. Regular anagathic regimens and nanotelemeric reconstruction made sixty middle age for most folks nowadays, but twenty years was still a hell of a chunk out of a person’s life. How much would he still have in common with any of the people he left behind?

“We’ll be in hibernation for the whole trip?”

“Hell, yes! That transport is going to be damned cozy for thirteen hundred or so people. We’d kill each other off long before we reached the mission objective if we weren’t. Besides, they wouldn’t be able to pack that much food, water, and air for that long a flight.”

“No, ma’am.” In a way, he was disappointed. Part of his dream included the thrill of the journey itself, flying out from Earth on one of the great interplanetary clippers or boosting for the stars on a near-c torchship.

Anderson was accessing some records with a faraway look in her eyes. “I’m checking your evaluations,” she told him. “Your DI thinks highly of you. Did you know you’re up for selection for embassy duty?”

“Huh? I mean, no, ma’am.” The way Makowiecz and the other DIs kept riding him, he’d not even been sure they were going to recommend him for retention in the Corps, much less…embassy duty? That was supposed to be the softest, best duty in the Corps, standing guard at the UFR embassy in some out-of-the-way world capital. You had to be absolutely top-line Marine for a billet like that, and be able to keep yourself and your uniform in recruiting poster form. But the duty was the stuff dream sheets were made of…

“It’s true,” she told him. “And I won’t bullshit you. The Ishtar missionis a combat op. We’ll be going in hot, weapons free, assault mode. The abos are primitive, but they have some high-tech quirks that are guaranteed to raise some damned nasty surprises. So…what’ll it be? A soft billet at an embassy? Or a sleeper slot and a hot LZ?”

He knew what he wanted. Plush as embassy duty was supposed to be, he’d always thought the reality would be boring. In fact, most duty Earthside would be boring, punctuated by the occasional day or two of truly exciting discomfort, pain, and fear during a combat TAV deployment to some war-torn corner of the planet. The Llalande mission might be hardship duty and combat, but it was offworld…as far offworld, in fact, as he was ever likely to get.

It would be what being a Marine was all about.

“Um, ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“I have a friend who joined up the same time I did. Recruit Collins. She’s in one of the female recruit training platoons.”

“And…?”

“I was just wondering if she was being asked to volunteer too, ma’am.”

“I see.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “And that would determine your answer?”

“Uh, well…”

“John, you presumably joined the Corps of your own free will. You didn’t join because she joined, did you?”

“No, ma’am.” Well, not entirely. The idea of signing up together, maybe getting the same duty station afterward, had been part of the excitement. Part of the thrill and promise. But not all of it.

“I’m glad to hear it. Contrary to popular belief, the Corps does not want mindless robots in its ranks. We want strong, aggressive young men and women who can make up their own minds, who serve because they believe, truly believe, that what they are doing is right. There is no room in my Corps for people who simply follow the crowd. Or who have no deeper commitment to the Corps than the fact that a buddy joined up. Do you copy?”

“Sir, yes…I mean, yes, ma’am.”

“I’m sure your DI has drilled this line into your skull, even without implants. The Corps is your family now. Mother. Father. Sib. Friend. Lover. In a way, you cast off your connections with everyone else when you came on board, as completely as you will if you volunteer for Ishtar and report on board the Derna for a twenty-year hibe slot. You will have changed that much. You’ve already changed more than you imagine. You’ll never go back to that old life again.”

“No, ma’am.” But he wasn’t talking about a civilian friend. Why didn’t she understand?

“And you also know by now that the Corps cannot be run for your convenience. Sometimes, like now, you’re given a choice. A carefully crafted choice, within tightly defined parameters, but a choice, nonetheless. You must make your decision within the parameters that the Corps gives you. That’s part of the price you pay for being a Marine.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So. What’ll it be? I can’t promise you’ll end up stationed with Recruit Collins, no matter what you decide. No one can. The question is, what do you want for yourself?”

He straightened in his chair. There still was no question what he wanted most. “Sir,this recruit wishes to volunteer for the Ishtar billet,sir, ” he said, slipping back into the programmed third-person argot of the well-drilled Marine recruit.

“Very well, recruit,” Anderson replied. “No promises yet, understand. We’re still just screening for applicants. But if everything works out, and you complete your recruit training as scheduled, it will be good to have you on board.”

“Thank you, sir!”

“Very well. Dismissed.”

“Aye aye, sir!”

He rose, turned, and banged through the door, scarcely able to believe what had happened. The stars! He was going to go to the fucking stars!…

Headquarters, PanTerra Dynamics

New Chicago, Illinois

United Federal Republic, Earth

1725 hours CT

“PanTerra Dynamicsis going to the stars, gentlemen,” Allyn Buckner said. “We have personnel on our payroll on theDerna , and they will be on Ishtar at least six months before you. Now…you can work with PanTerra, or you can be left out in the cold. What’s it going to be?”

The virtual comm simulation had them standing in a floating garden, high above the thundering mist of Victoria Falls, in the Empire of Brazil. The building actually existed—a combination of hotel, conference center, and playground for the wealthy. Terraced steps, sun-sparkling fountains, riotous tangles of brightly flowering greenery to match the remnants of rain forest around the river below, Orinoco Sky was an aerostat city adrift in tropical skies.

Buckner, of course, was still in New Chicago. His schedule hadn’t allowed him the luxury of attending this conference in person. In fact, perhaps half of the people in the garden lounge in front of him were there in simulacra only. Haddad, he knew, was still in Baghdad, and Chieu was linking in from a villa outside of Beijing.

Through the data feeds in their implants, however, each of the conference attendees saw and heard all of the others, whether they were in Orinoco Sky in the body or in telepresence only. Buckner was glad he was there in virtual sim only. The decadence of the surroundings fogged the brain, sidetracked the mind. It was easier to link in for the meeting he’d called, get the business over with, and link off, all without leaving the embrace of the VR chair in his New Chicago office. For one thing, it meant he could cut these idiots off if they imposed on his time.

“You Americans,” Haddad told him with a dark look. “For a century you’ve acted as though you own the Earth. Now you are laying claim to the stars as well. You should remember that Allah is known for bringing down the proud and arrogant.”

“Don’t lecture me, Haddad. You’re lucky even to be here, after that business the KOA pulled in Egypt.”

He grinned mirthlessly. “Besides, I thought you Mahdists didn’t believe in the Ahannu.”

“Of course we believe in them.” He gave an eloquent shrug. “How could we not? They are there, on the Llalande planet, for all to see. We do not believe, however, that they are gods. Or that they shaped the course of human destiny. Or that they…theyengineered us, as some ignorant people, atheists, suggest.”

“Our friends in the Kingdom of Allah are not the blind fanatics you Americans believe them to be,” Dom Camara said. “They are as practical, and with as keen a sense of business, as we here in the Brazilian Empire. Your scheme could upset the economies of many nations here on Earth. We wish to address that.”

“You want to be in on the distribution of goodies, is what you mean,” Buckner said. “I can accept that. But PanTerra is going to be there first. That means you play by our rules.”

“And what, precisely,” Raychaudhuri asked, “are the rules, Mr. Buckner?”

“PanTerra Dynamics will be the authorized agent for Terran economic interests in the Llalande system. All Terran economic interests. We welcome investment on Ishtar, but the money will go through us. We expect, in time, to form the de facto government on Ishtar.”

Camara chuckled. “Mightn’t the abos have something to say about that?”

Buckner made a dismissive gesture. “That’s what the American Marines are for,” he replied. “The human slavery issue has all of North America ready to kick the Ahannu where it hurts most.”

“What do you mean?” Koslonova, of Ukraine, said. “You’re saying the Marines are going to wipe out the Ahannu?”

Buckner smiled at her. “That, of course, would be the ideal.”

Pelligrini, one of the other Euro-Union representatives, looked shocked. “Signor Buckner! You are talking about annihilating the population of a planet!”

“Calm yourself, Aberto. I said that would be the ideal, from our perspective, but we are realists. The MIEU will only have about a thousand Marines or so, and Ishtar is a world, a damned big place. They wouldn’t be able to wipe out something like ten million aborigines all at once. Hell, even if they could, public reaction back on home would be…counterproductive.

“But we do see the game playing out like this: we all know they won’t find any of our people alive when they get there, not after ten years. The Marines will have to assault the Legation compound and, of course, secure the Pyramid of the Eye to reestablish real-time communication with Earth. The Frogs, the abos, are practically stone age, but they’re tenacious little bastards. They’ll put up a fight. The Marines will have to smash them down pretty hard in order to regain control.

“Once the local government is forced to see reason, our people will form an advisory council and oversee the creation of a new abo government. We can expect the defeat of the current government to result in the surfacing of lots of new factions, and we’ll selectively help those factions who go along with our plans for Ishtar. Within two years, three at the most, we should have a functioning Ahannu government in place, one completely friendly to PanTerran interests and compliant to the directions of our representatives. And, of course, the Marines will be there to provide the stick behind PanTerra’s carrot.”

“Thegwailos of the western world followed a similar policy once on the shores of the Middle Kingdom,”

Chieu said quietly. “The end result was revolution, economic ruin, the collapse of empires, and unspeakable human suffering. Do you really expect your policies on Ishtar to have any different outcome?”

Buckner wasn’t sure at first what Chieu was talking about. He thought-clicked through some download references, pausing just long enough to confirm that the Hegemony’s representative was referring to the virtual land rush in China during the nineteenth century. Hong Kong. Macao. The Opium Wars. The Boxer Rebellion. A dozen nations had staked claims to various trading ports along the Chinese coast, intervening in Chinese affairs, forcing China to trade with the foreigners and on the foreigners’ terms.

“Mr. Chieu, PanTerra has already invested heavily in the development of our franchise on Ishtar. We wish only to see a return on that investment. Frankly, when Ishtar ceases to be a profitable venture, we will be quite happy to return full control of Ishtaran affairs back to the Ahannu. In the meantime, we offer the aborigines peace, technical advancement, the advantages of technic civilization in so far as they’re able to handle them, and stability. Think of it! Ahannu culture has advanced scarcely at all since the collapse of their interstellar empire ten thousand years ago. Within a few generations, they could undergo an industrial revolution and even contemplate a return to space.”

“It’s not like PanTerra to encourage potential competitors,” Camara said. His smile robbed the words of their edge.

“Not competitors,” Buckner said. “Trade partners.Business partners. The point is, all of that won’t happen for a century or two. We don’t need to worry about it. All we need do is think about the money we’re going to make from this one investment!”

“Yes,” Haddad said. “Money. A return on your investment. I believe I speak for a number of us here when I say that your scheme for using the human slaves on Ishtar as an additional return on your investment…this has a very foul smell to it. Am I to understand that PanTerra intends to import slaves, human slaves, from Ishtar? That you intend—if I understand this correctly—to use a campaign to free those slaves, only to ship them back to Earth for use as slaves here?”

“Please, Mr. Haddad,” Buckner said with a pained expression. “We prefer the word ‘domestics.’ Not

‘slaves.’ There are entirely too many negative connotations to that word.”

“Whatever you choose to call it,” Haddad said, pressing on, “the concept is neither moral nor economically viable.”

“Representative Haddad has a point,” Chieu said. “The population of Earth would never accept such a moral outrage.”

Buckner scowled at the assembly. “You want to lecture me on morality? You, Haddad—when for at least the past two hundred years or more your upper classes have imported domestic servants from various parts of Asia and Pacifica and paid them so poorly they cannot return home if they wish? When pockets of outright slavery still exist throughout the KOA in places like Sudan and Oman, and when women still have fewer rights than male slaves?”

“We are all slaves of Allah—” Haddad began.

“Can the sermon. I worship at a different church, the Church of the Almighty Newdollar.” Haddad bristled, but Buckner raised a hand. “Please. I mean no disrespect to anyone here. But it does give me a tremendous pain when people start making a major bleeding poor-mouth about moral outrages when it’s their comfort andtheir security andtheir wealth that they’re really concerned about. I don’t like hypocrisy.”

“According to the report you’ve uploaded to us,” Raychaudhuri said evenly, “you plan to partly defray PanTerra’s development costs on Ishtar by bringing freed human Sagura back to Earth and selling them as servants. If that, sir, is not hypocrisy—”

“And in your country, Raychaudhuri, a poor man can still sell his daughters,” Buckner said. “But that’s not the point, is it? Everything depends on how it is packaged. You’ve seen PanTerra’s reports…in particular, the reports on these Saguras. For ten thousand years they’ve been raised, been bred, as slaves to the Ahannu. They think of the Ahannu as gods…would no more think about disobeying them than you, Mr. Haddad, would think about disobeying Allah. They are conditioned from birth to accept the living reality of gods who direct every part of their lives.

“And now, we’re going to arrive there, backed up by the Marines, and stand their world on its ear. What do you think would happen if we just walked in, gathered up all the Sagura, and said,

‘Congratulations, guys. You’re free.’ Hell, they’d starve to death in a month! They don’t even have a word in their vocabulary that means ‘freedom’! Like Orwell pointed out a couple of centuries ago, you can’t think about something if you don’t have a word for it.

“At the same time, we have half the people on Earth clamoring for their release. ‘Humans being held in slavery by horrible aliens! Oh, no!…We must set things right, must free those poor, wronged innocents from their bondage!’

“So PanTerra is proposing a social program that will satisfy the people of Earth, help the Ishtaran humans, and, just incidentally, help PanTerra recover what we’ve put into this project. As we send interstellar transports filled with Marines, scientists, and researchers out to Ishtar, we will begin bringing back transport loads of ex-slaves. They will be reintegrated slowly and carefully into human society. They do not understand the concept of ‘money’ or ‘payment’ or ‘salary,’ so they will be hired out to people willing to provide them with room and board in exchange for their domestic services.

“Status, my friends, is an important coin in human relations. The upper classes on Earth of nearly every culture still derive considerable status from the employment of human servants. And, as they used to say, good servants areso hard to find. Well, PanTerra has found the mother lode of domestic servants. Happy, healthy, beautiful people conditioned to take orders and provide service because that’s the way they were raised, because that’s the only thing they know. And those Sag-ura who are shipped back to Earth, I might add, will derive considerable status from the mere fact of being chosen to return to the fabled home planet.And they will have the chance to slowly assimilate into Earth-human culture.

“And if PanTerra charges for providing this service…what of it? People, don’t you see? Everybody wins! You. The Sag-ura. And PanTerra.”

“Mr. Buckner,” Chieu said, “I thought PanTerra’s sole interest in Ishtar was the possibility of acquiring alien technology?”

Buckner nodded. “It’s our interest, certainly. Not oursole interest, but an important one. We expect to reap enormous profits from our research on Ishtar. The greatest profits of all may well come from aspects of their history and technology and biology and culture yet to be uncovered, things that we’re not even aware of yet. But that is all so speculative at this point, it would be insane to count on that to balance the accounts. Weknow we will make a profit by bringing a few thousand Sag-ura back to Earth and acting as agents on their behalf. Anything else is, as they say, gravy.”

The French representative, Xarla Fortier, folded her arms, radiating disapproval. “What arrogant assumption, monsieur, gives you the right to dictate this way to us? Ishtar, its wealth and its lost knowledge, should be the inheritance of all of humanity, not the playground of a single corporate entity!

What you propose is nothing less than the wholesale rape of an inhabited world, toyour benefit.”

“Worse, Madame Fortier,” Raychaudhuri said, “he proposes to let us watch but not participate. PanTerra intends nothing less than a complete monopoly over Ishtar and all her products, subsidized by the United Federal Republic and backed by the muscle of the U.S. Marines. I, for one, protest.”

“Tell us, Mr. Buckner,” Chieu said, eyes narrowing to hard, cold slits, “what happens if the population of Earth at large gets wind of this scheme of yours? You realize, of course, that any one of us here could upset your plans simply by net-publishing your report.”

“Is that a threat, Mr. Chieu?” Buckner sighed. “I’d thought better of you. Each and every one of you answers to your own corporate interests. You will need to consult with them before taking such an irretrievably drastic step…one, I might add, that would reveal your own complicity in these deliberations. PanTerra would respond as necessary to minimize the damage, to put a good spin on things. We would emphasize the benevolent nature of our business dealings on Ishtar, the great public good we were providing. Even slavery, you see, can be presented as good, as a social or an economic or a religious necessity, if there is a carefully nurtured will to believe…. Am I correct, Mr. Haddad? True, our profits might be adversely impacted to some degree, but I doubt there would be major problems in the long run.

“Of course, whoever leaks that information would find their corporate interests cut off from the deal. My God…we’re not leaving you out. We’re making you our partners! Secrecy, you see, is more in your interests than in ours. Play along, and each of you becomes the sole agent for the distribution of what we bring back from Ishtar to your own countries. New science. New knowledge. New medicines, perhaps, or new outlooks on the universe. And, of course, the chance to offer Ishtaran domestics to the upper strata of your populations, at avery healthy profit for yourselves.

“Mr. Chieu, why would you possibly want to jeopardize that for yourself or the people of the Chinese People’s Hegemony?” He shrugged. “You all can discuss it as much as you want. Take it up with the Confederation Council, if you like. The simple fact is, PanTerra will be at Ishtar six months before the joint multinational expedition gets there. And I happen to know that the Marines will have orders not only to safeguard human interests on the planet, but to safeguard Confederation interests as well…and that means UFR interests, ladies and gentlemen. PanTerran interests. I tell you this in the hope that we can avoid any expensive confrontations, either here or on Ishtar.” He spread his hands, pouring sincerity into his voice. “Believe me when I say we want a reasonable return on our investment—no more. PanTerra is not the evil ogre you seem to believe it is. We are happy to share—for a fair and equitable price. Ishtar is aplanet , aworld , with all of the resources, wonders, and riches that a planet has to offer, with fortunes to be made from the exchange of culture, philosophy, history, knowledge.”

“And if anyone can put a price tag on that knowledge,” Haddad said wryly, “PanTerra can. Friends, I think we have little alternative, at least for now.”

“I agree,” Fortier said. “Reluctantly. We don’t have tolike it….”

“We understand the need for secrecy, Señor Buckner,” Dom Camara said. “But how can you guarantee that word of this—this plan of yours will not leak anyway? You can threaten to cut us off from our contracts with you…but not the Marines. Or the scientists.” Camara cocked his head to one side. “This civilian expert you’ve hired…Dr. Hanson? Suppose she doesn’t go along with your ideas of charity and enlightenment for the Sag-ura?”

“Dr. Hanson is, quite frankly, the best in the field there is. We brought her on board to help us identify and acquire xenotechnoarcheological artifacts that may be of interest. She is a PanTerran employee. If she doesn’t do her job to our satisfaction, we will terminate her contract.”

He didn’t elaborate. There was no reason to share with these people the darker aspects of some of the long meetings he’d held here in New Chicago with other PanTerran executives. The truth of it was that anyone who got in PanTerra’s way on this deal would be terminated.

One way or another.

“And the Marines?” Camara wanted to know.

“They work for the FR/US government, of course, and are not, as such, directly under our control. They will do what they are sent out there to do, however. And we have taken…certain steps to ensure that our wishes are heard and respected.

“Believe me, people, we are not monsters. We are not some evil empire bent on dominating Earth’s economy. What we at PanTerra are simply doing is ensuring that there is not a mad scramble for Ishtar’s resources.” He cocked an eye at Chieu. “We certainly do not want an unfortunate repeat of what happened in China three centuries ago, with half the civilized world snapping like dogs at a carcass. We propose order, an equitable distribution of the profits, and, most important, profits for everyone.”

“Including the Ahannu, Mr. Buckner?” Chieu asked.

“If they choose to accept civilization,” Buckner replied, “of course. They cannot wall off the universe forever. But as they adopt a less hidebound form of government, a freer philosophy, they will benefit as our partners and as our friends.” He was quite sincere as he spoke. He almost meant everything he said.

12

2SEPTEMBER 2138

Combat Center, ISTDerna

Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

0810 hours Zulu

“Maybe we should get up,” Ramsey said. “The day’s half over.”

“And just what,” Ricia Anderson asked, “do you mean byup ?”

“Insubordinate bitch!” he said playfully. “You know what I mean!”

In fact, there was no up, no down, no sense of direction save the words neatly stenciled across one bulkhead:THIS END DOWN DURING ACCELERATION .

“Bitch,” Ricia said, cheerful. “That’s me. Beautiful…intelligent…talented…creative…and hard to please.”

He chuckled. “Hard to please? You didn’t sound hard to please a little while ago.”

She snuggled closer. “Mmm. That’s because you’re rather talented and creative yourself.”

They floated together, naked, still surrounded by tiny glistening drops of perspiration and other body fluids adrift in microgravity. The compartment they occupied was small, only a couple of meters across in its narrowest dimension, an equipment storage space and access tunnel to theDerna ’s logic centers. The electronics housing the various AIs running on board—including Cassius and theDerna ’s own artificial intelligence—lay just beyond an array of palm panels on the “ceiling” and one bulkhead. Tool lockers and storage bins took up most of the remaining surfaces, with a narrow, circular hatch in the deck leading aft to the centrifuge collar. Ramsey could hear the gentle, grinding rumble of the centrifuge beyond the hatch.

“Yeah, well,” he said, ripping open the Velcro closure on the body harness joining them. “If somebody comes up forward through that hatch to check on the logic circuits, we’ll have some explaining to do.”

He pulled the harness off their hips and they drifted apart, reluctantly. Ricia rotated in space, plucking from the air behind her a towel she’d brought for the purpose, and began sopping up the floating secretions. Ramsey grabbed his T-shirt and helped, taking special care to wipe down the gleaming surfaces of the storage bins and lockers around them. He knew that every Marine on board must know what went on in there, even those who didn’t use it for recreational purposes, but it wouldn’t do to leave behind such obvious evidence of their tryst. TheDerna ’s Navy crew could get testy about the grunts and the messes they made.

Getting dressed together in those close confines was almost as much fun as getting undressed earlier. It was easier when they helped one another, since there was hardly room enough to bend over. It would be nice, Ramsey thought with wry amusement, if the people who designed these ships would acknowledge that people needed sex, and included sufficient space for the purpose—maybe a compartment with padded bulkheads and conveniently placed hand-and footholds—not to mention locker space for clothing and perhaps a viewall for a romantic panorama of a blue-and-white-marbled Earth hanging against a backdrop of stars.

But unfortunately, that just made too damned much sense.

TheDerna , first of a first generation of interstellar military transports, was designed with efficiency of space, mass, and consumable stores in mind, not the erotic frolickings of her passengers. She had to keep thirteen hundred people alive for a voyage lasting years, even with relativistic effects, which meant that every cubic centimeter was carefully planned for and generally allotted to more than one purpose. If the damned sleep cells had been justa little larger…but they were designed for one occupant apiece. Having sex in one of those hexagonal tubes was like coupling in a closed coffin. Ramsey knew. He’d tried it during the past month…twice with Ricia and once with Chris DeHavilland. They would be claustrophobic in micro-g; they were impossible under spin-gravity. Besides that, everybody on the hab deck would know who was sleeping with whom, and the Corps simply wasn’t that liberal yet. Everyone knew it was done, of course. The whole point of command constellations wassupposed to be that teams that worked well together should be kept together, especially on long deployments. There was nothing wrong with that. But the fact that they’d been deliberately chosen because they had few family ties on Earth meant that therewould be ties, both casually recreational and seriously romantic, among team members. They were, after all, human.

But few things about human nature ever changed, or, when they did, the change took a long time to manifest. The likely response among civilian taxpayers who paid for the Marines—not to mention their spartan accommodations in deep space—would have been horror at such scandalous goings-on. And the senior staff was always at pains to make certain that nothing scandalous about the Corps ever got into general circulation among civilians…especiallycivilian lawmakers.

Ramsey thought of an old Corps joke—the image of a Marine kept perpetually in cybehibe, with a sign on the sleep tube, “In case of war, break glass.” Marines weren’t supposed to have families, friends, or lives.

And they certainly weren’t supposed to havesex .

They finished dressing—shipboard uniform of the day was black T-shirts, khaki slacks, and white sweat socks—gently spun one another in midair for a quick once-over for incriminating evidence of their past few hours, then pulled close in a parting hug. “Again tonight, after duty?” he asked.

“Sorry, T. J.,” she told him. She kissed him gently. “I’m going to be with Chris. And tomorrow I’m shifting to the third watch. Maybe in two weeks?”

He nodded, masking his disappointment. “Sure.” Relationships within the command group created what sometimes amounted to a large, polyamorous family. Social planning, however, could be a real problem at times, especially when complicated by ever-shifting duty schedules. Well, it beats the hell out of living with civilians, he thought. He’d been married once—a five-year contract that Cindy and George had elected not to renew with him. If you were going to sleep with someone, it helped if they had some notion of what it was you did for a living, what it cost you, and why you did it.

Making their way aft through the docking bay, they paused on the quarterdeck to chat with Lieutenant Delgado, floating at his duty station in front of the big American flag. “Logic center is clear,” he told Delgado, sotto voce.

“Aye aye, sir.” Zeus Delgado was not a member of the command constellation, but he knew what went on forward. He’d promised to flash Ramsey over his link if someone was heading toward the logic center access who couldn’t be turned aside.

At the centrifuge collar, Ramsey followed Ricia into an elevator and together they swiftly dropped outshaft into the familiar tug of spin gravity once more. Emerging on Deck 1 of Hab 3, they stepped into a crowded, hot, and noisy bustle of activity.

Eighty percent of the MIEU’s troop complement was on board, but so far fewer than half of those had entered cybehibe. That meant crowding on all decks and a battle for the shipboard environmental systems as they struggled to vent all of that excess heat. Supplies were arriving at the L-4 space docks at the rate of two freighters every three days, most of them carrying either water or C-sludge, the hydro-carbon substrate used in the nanoprocessor tanks to make food. TheDerna needed water especially, a small ocean of water, in fact, filling the huge mushroom cap forward. Water wasDerna ’s primary consumable, necessary not only for the drinking and washing needs for her crew and passengers, but also as their source of oxygen, their AM-drive reaction mass, and as radiation shielding at near-c velocities.

But the MIEU’s weapons and equipment were arriving on board as well, and those Marines who hadn’t yet gone into cybehibe were busy unpacking gear, checking it for wear, damage, or missing parts, and stowing it for the long voyage ahead. Everything from Mark VII suits and laser rifles to spy-eye floaters and TAL-S Dragonflies had to be unpacked, examined, up-or down-checked for maintenance, and entered into the virtual ship’s manifest. Each individual Marine was responsible for her or his personal gear, including armor and primary weapon, so the hab deck was packed with men and women unshipping, inspecting, and cleaning everything from LR-2120s to KW-6000 power packs to M-780

grenades and CTX-5 demo packs. It was a job that would have been more happily carried out groundside, especially in the case of the high explosives, but the troops were arriving piecemeal, as were their weapons, on different flights from different spaceports scattered across the Earth. Especially considering the need to check all equipment after it had made the trip up to L-4, the most efficient place to bring the two together was on board theDerna .

But it made for a hell of a lot of chaos.

As Ramsey threaded his way past busy groups of enlisted Marines, he reopened his implants to shiplink traffic. He’d shut them down to afford some peace for his tryst with Ricia, and now he had to brace himself against the onslaught of messages and requests that had backlogged during his virtual absence.

“Good morning, Colonel,” Cassius said. “You have forty-seven link messages waiting, twenty-nine of them flagged ‘urgent’ or higher. Two are flagged as Priority One. You also have seventeen requests for face meetings, and twenty-one requests for virtual conferencing. Also, there will be a delay in the shipment of the Dragonflies from Palo Alto. This may mean an additional delay in mission departure time.”

Take a couple hours off for a quick docking maneuver, he thought, and all hell breaks loose.

“Two Priority Ones?” he asked the AI-symbiont aloud. “Shit, why didn’t you tag me?” The command group’s AI could reach him at any time, whether his link was online or not, and standing orders were to let Priority One and Two messages come through no matter what his link status.

“I felt you needed the downtime, sir,” Cassius replied. “You’ve been pushing quite hard and showing both emotional and physiological signs of stress. I exercised discretionary judgment according to the specific parameters of—”

“Can it. What were the calls?”

“One from General King. He wished to know the status of the Dragonfly shipment. In your persona, I routed him through to the TAL-S maintenance center at Seven Palms.”

“I see.” He would have done the same. “And the other?”

“From General Haslett, sir, requesting an immediate virtual conference on the political situation. I pointed out thatDerna is on Zulu, that you had been up quite late overseeing the arrival of the last stores freighter and were currently on sleep shift. I offered to wake you, and he said it could wait. I have scheduled you for a virtual conference with the general in…two hours, seventeen minutes from now.”

Again he couldn’t fault the AI’s judgment…which was the reason they made such exceptional personal secretaries. Both priority calls had been less than truly urgent, but both needed handling by means both courteous and expeditious.

“Very well,” he told Cassius. “Let’s see the urgents.”

“You may wish to greet Captain Warhurst first, sir.”

“Eh?” Warhurst’s dress khakis were a bit more up-to-date than his icon garb, Ramsey noted. “Oh. Of course.”

Warhurst was uncovered so he did not salute, but he came to a crisp attention. “Captain Martin Warhurst reporting on board, sir.”

“Ah, Captain Warhurst, yes,” Ramsey replied. “Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Check with my exec, here, Major Anderson, for your berthing assignments. Are your people getting settled in?”

“Yes, sir. But my company is only at half strength…eighty-two troops out of 150 on my TO and E.”

“Affirmative, Captain. But I’m afraid the rest of your team will be newbies.” He saw Warhurst’s face fall at that news. “Don’t worry, son. You’ll have time to whip them into shape before deployment.”

“Yes, sir. Uh…fresh meat out of Lejeune, sir?”

“Yup. Volunteers from recruit companies 1097, 1098, and 1099. They’ll be arriving over the next three weeks or so.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Major Anderson has the specs and stats. You can review their recruit records online, of course, and you can interview them, if you wish, before they embark. Problem, Captain?”

Warhurst made a face. “No, sir. It’s just…”

“Yes?”

“My mission brief has my company hitting Objective Krakatoa. I would have thought you’d want an experienced Mobile Assault Team on that one, sir.”

“Ideally, yes. I’m afraid we don’t have that luxury, however. Groundside HQ is holding back the best MATs against the situation in Mejico and the Southwest territories. We get what’s left, I’m afraid.”

“I see, Colonel.”

“Don’t worry, son,” Ramsey said with an easy grin. “If your people aren’t experienced now, they sure as hell will be by the time they’ve taken Krakatoa!”

“The ones who survive will be experienced, yes, sir,” Warhurst told him. “The rest will be dead.”

“That’s the way it always is, Marine. You have your orders. Carry on!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

Warhurst was not happy, but that couldn’t be helped. Weeks ago, Ramsey had downloaded the captain’s combat record and guessed that Warhurst was at least as worried about his own qualifications for the assignment as he was about the experience of his men. He’d only taken part in one combat mission so far—the brief, bitter assault on Giza last June—and he must be wondering about why he’d been recruited for a berth with the MIEU, much less why he was supposed to lead the first assault onto Ishtar.

No matter. He was a good man and would come through when he had to. 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 invective, a scum-of-the-Earth lowlife-maggot recruit, but by the Goddess, he was aMarine 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! Nowmove! 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 wasreal 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 behind 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 suggestedmovement.

“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 laserwas 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 hadcalled 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 aMarine ….

13

9OCTOBER 2138

Pacifica

Off the California Coast

1105 hours PT

Garroway grinned at Lynnley. “You know, this would be alot 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 inner 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 ofc 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. “Howcan 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 foryou .”

“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 theDerna 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. Fromour 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 innow .”

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, sweaty, ill-tempered, she hadn’t had a decent shower since she’d come aboard theDerna , and now these…thesepeople 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?”

“It feels…like I’m sinking.” Thoughts of drowning tugged at her mind. She wasn’t thinking clearly, and she was having trouble formulating the questions she wanted to ask. “Will…I dream?”

“Maybe a little, when you’re going under, and when you’re coming out. The AI doc will be initiating REM sleep as it takes you down. But most of the time? No.”

One of the other techs laughed. “I know I wouldn’t care to have to deal with a decade’s worth of dreams,” she said, “especially knowing I couldn’t wake up!”

“I…think the Ahannu sergeant is Cydonia at the Institute. Ahannu Buckner is a real bastard. Manipulative. Make me rich…”

“I’m sure that’s true, Doctor. Would you mind counting backward from a hundred for me?”

“Counting…backward? Sure. Saves power. But what about the Hunters of the Dawn? They won’t have to wait in line, not with PanTerra. A hunnerd…ninety…uh, no…ninety-seven. Eight…nine…Ishtar. It’s beautiful there, I understand….”

“You’ll be able to see that for yourself, Doctor, very, very soon now.”

Hab 3, Deck 1, ISTDerna

Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

1405 hours Zulu

The surface of the world of Ishtar blurred beneath the hurtling Dragonfly, jagged mountains and upthrust volcanic outcroppings among gentler rivers of gleaming ice. This was Ishtar’s anti-Marduk side, the hemisphere held in the grip of perpetual winter as the moon circled its primary in tidal lock-step. But the ice was thinning, the land greening. New Sumer lay just beyond the curve of the red-purple horizon up ahead, another hundred kilometers or so….

“Black Dragons,” Warhurst announced over the tactical net, using the assault force’s new call sign.

“Stand by…three minutes.”

One by one the other dragons responded. Six Dragonfly reentry vehicles, laden with APC landers, hugged the terrain as they swung into the final approach, skimming scant meters above the boulders and ice whipping past below. Abruptly, rocks and ice gave way to open water, and the sextet of deadly black skimmers howled over the sea, raising rooster tails of spray in their sonic-boom footprints. Ahead, just visible now, the black, conical mountain designated Objective Krakatoa lifted slowly above the horizon. Following plans logged with their onboard AIs, the shrieking aerospacecraft began weaving back and forth, spreading out to make themselves harder targets to hit. Forty kilometers from the target the sky exploded in dazzling, blue-white radiance. Dragonfly Three, touched by that nova heat, melted away in an instant. Dragonfly Five, jolted by the blast’s shock wave, lost control and struck the water in a cartwheeling spray of foam and metallic debris. Damn, he thought.Not again!

It just wasn’t working….

And then the mountain was rising to meet them, vast and black and ominous. Dragons One and Two flared nose-high, dumping forward velocity, then hovering briefly above flash-blasted rock and cinder, before releasing their saucer-shaped payloads—“personnel deployment packages” in mil-speak. Dragons Four and Six howled low overhead, reaching farther up the mountain slope before settling with their PDPs.

Each saucer lander, cradled in the gap behind the Dragonfly’s bulging nose and intakes and the tail-boom mounted rear plasma thrusters, carried a section of twenty-five Marines and their equipment—two to a fifty-man platoon. The Marines, strapped into wire-basket shock frames, were jolted hard back and forth within their harnesses as the saucers plowed into the burned-over side of the mountain.

Then the pilot AIs released the harnesses and cracked open the side hatchways, and the Marines spilled out into the dim red twilight of Ishtar.

Warhurst followed, though his proper post was the HQ command center in Dragon One’s lander. They’d already lost, and there was no sense in continuing….

“End program,” he called, and in a flicker of blurred motion the towering mountain, the red and purple sky, the charging Marines, all vanished, and he was again in the simulation couch in his office on Deck One, Hab Three, of the ISTDerna.

The simulated attack had failed the moment he’d lost a third of his assault team to Krakatoa’s searing, antimatter-powered beam.

“You should have continued the assault, Martin,” Major Anderson’s voice said over his link. “You might have learned something.”

“I really don’t care to get killed again, Major,” he said. “Neither do my people. That sort of thing can’t be good for morale.”

Actually, he was more concerned with his troops picking up careless habits than about poor morale. Losing your life in a VR simulation like this one was no worse than losing a game sim, but Warhurst wondered if too much reliance on painless simulations led to Marines taking chances on the battlefields of the real world…chances that could leave them dead and jeopardize a critical mission.

“So what happened?” Colonel Ramsey asked over the link.

“Same as before, Colonel. We lost two of the Dragonflies going in. We can’t take that whole damned mountain with only a hundred Marines.”

“Mmm. And we won’t have the resources to use human wave tactics. The troopsor the equipment.”

“No, sir,” Warhurst replied. Colonel Ramsey wasn’t serious about human wave tactics, of course. Marine tactical doctrine emphasized finesse rather than brute force. Ramsey was gently pointing out that this particular tactical problem was not one that could be solved by throwing more troops at it.

“Recommendations?”

“Hard to make any, sir, since we don’t really know what to expect. But if these worst-case scenarios prove out, then we’re screwed. We need to hit Objective Krakatoa with at least two full companies to be sure of getting through with one.”

The only information they had about the An planetary defense weapon had been based on the account FTL-transmitted by a young Marine at the New Sumer compound moments before it was overrun by the An rebel forces. They knew that the An facility, hidden in the mountain they called An-Kur, could shoot down a spacecraft in orbit, and that it could shift the aim of the beam by as much as ten degrees out of the vertical to aim at a specific target.

Could that beam be aimed at a target hugging the surface of Ishtar only a few kilometers away, as well as claw starships out of orbit? No one knew. Was the beam generated, as most analyses suggested, by matter-antimatter interaction? Pure conjecture, based on the fact that no one knew of another energy source with the same star-hot output. Was there a recycle time on the beam, meaning a force could slip in after it fired once, while it was still recharging? No one knew. So far as anyone on Earth was aware, the An-Kur beam had fired exactly once. Hell, there was a possibility that the thing was a one-shot weapon, like the old X-ray laser technique that used the detonation of a nuclear weapon to generate the needed X rays, destroying the gun as it fired. The Marines might get to Objective Krakatoa and find nothing left there but a ten-year-old glass-bottomed crater.

But they couldn’t count on that, not with so much riding on the question. Damn it all! How the hell was he supposed to train himself and his company for an assault when next to nothing was known about the target?

Warhurst’s stomach rumbled, and he realized again how hungry he was. He didn’t notice it when he was in sim, but once he was back in the real world, he wanted toeat, and he didn’t care what his implants told him he was supposed to feel. This fasting business, he thought, was strictly for the religious fanatics. The thought made him smile, though. He was going to get to see the An in person, which was more than most of Earth’s fanatics could hope for, whether they were with the Human Dignity League or the Anist Creators Church.

He just wished he didn’t have to starve to do it.

Warhurst covered his face with his hands, thinking. “Okay,” he said at last. “If I only have one company, that’s all I have. The best approach we’ve tried was Scenario Five. We only lost one Dragonfly that way. Splitting up over the horizon and angling in from all directions is bound to scatter the enemy’s defenses somewhat and may keep our casualties down. The only other possible approach is to land farther out and make the approach on foot.”

“Which runs up against the time problem,” Anderson put in.

“Agreed.”

“I’d throw in a tactical reserve if we had one,” Ramsey said, thoughtful. “But we’re stretched way too thin as it is. Trying to invade a whole damned planet with twelve hundred Marines…it’s like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. We just don’t have the assets to spare, in personnel or in logistical transport.”

“Don’t I know it. I’ve been thinking about this lots, Colonel. If my people don’t take Krakatoa, we’re pretty much screwed no matter what…unless the whole thing is a paper tiger anyway. And I’m not betting the farm on that possibility.”

“Nor am I, Martin. Nor am I. Doesn’t make sense to turn a mountain into a gun that’s only good for one shot.”

“Unless, of course, they havelots of mountains around New Sumer, each with its own superpopgun,”

Anderson said.

“Lovely thought,” Ramsey told her. “I’ll recommend you for command of the World Pessimists Legion.”

“No thanks. I probably wouldn’t like that.”

“Fortunately,” Ramsey said, “there’s no indication of more than one planetary defense element. We have to start somewhere, and the Chiefs of Staff are starting this one with the assumption that we have one target—An-Kur—and that the An aren’t going to be too eager to point that devastating a weapon at anything below their own horizon. Tell you what. We go with Scenario Five. I’ll cut back on the first ground assault at New Sumer by…make it two Dragonflies. That’s one more platoon. We’ll treat Black Dragon as a reinforced company of four platoons. How’s that sound?”

“Best we can do, I guess,” Warhurst agreed. “Thank you, sir.”

“Not a problem. It’s my job to make your life and career a living hell. How’m I doing?”

“Quite well, actually. I’m impressed.”

“Glad to know we’re all doing what we’re best at. Okay, Major Anderson and I have to split for a senior staff meeting. Do you need anything more from us?”

“A steak would be nice, Colonel. Rare. With onions.”

“You’ll have to wait twenty years for that, Captain, but I’m sure it can be arranged when we get back home. Talk to you later.”

And the voices in his head were gone.

So…not as good as he’d hoped, but better than he’d feared. Hitting Krakatoa with eight Dragonflies instead of six was a little better, anyway. The worst part of the whole situation was the fact that his company included so many relatively inexperienced men and women, the newbies coming out of the past month’s crop at Parris Island. The assault on An-Kur was not something he wanted to throw unseasoned people into, not if the idea was to keep down casualties.

But Captain Warhurst was a Marine. He made do with what he was given. Or with what he could steal…

Stomach still growling, he linked into Cassius in order to begin working on a rewritten TO&E for the Black Dragon assault.

Hab 3, Deck 1, ISTDerna

Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

1430 hours Zulu

The virtual meeting space had the look and feel of a large, Earthside conference room, complete with chairs, American flag, and a floor-to-ceiling viewall currently set for the GlobalNet Evening news. In the virtual reality unfolding within his mind, Colonel Ramsey leaned back in one of the glider chairs at the table, watching the broadcast with the dozen or so other people in the room.

“Yes, Kate,” an earnest-looking reporter said, staring into the pickup. “Here at New York City’s Liberty Plaza, enthusiasm is building for the imminent launch of Operation Spirit of Humankind, the relief expedition to the world of Ishtar. Folks have been gathering here for the past twenty-four hours to show their solidarity with the American forces who will be departing our Solar system soon, bound for the world of another star.”

At the reporter’s back a vast throng of demonstrators carrying torches sang beneath the reflected glare of floater lights. Liberty Plaza was a broad, sweeping esplanade built fifty years earlier to raise the Statue of Liberty above the slowly encroaching waters of the Upper Bay. The plaza was filled now with demonstrators, picked up by a far-flung array of hovering cameras as scene followed scene. Batteries of powerful, ground-mounted searchlights beamed the reflective floaters a hundred meters up, which scattered a frosty, blue-white radiance across a veritable sea of singing, chanting, swaying people. In the distance, across the bay, the vast and translucent city dome of lower Manhattan shone like an enormous, iridescent pearl in the ghostly glow, as arc lights sent slender needles of white radiance vertically into the night sky.

“Let my people go! Let my people go! Let my people go!…”The background chanting rose and fell, a muted thunder of thousands of voices. An enormous projection screen had been raised at the foot of Lady Liberty, high enough to reach above her waist, displaying a view of theDerna floating free at L-4

against a background dusting of stars.

“Satellites counting the crowd here tell us over sixty thousand people have come to Liberty Plaza tonight to witness the historic departure of the first MIEU, scheduled for some forty hours from now,” the reporter was saying. “I don’t think these camera images can ever possibly convey the sense of excitement and purpose and sheer dedication displayed here in what must be one of the biggest and grandest parties ever thrown in the Greater New York City area. I’m told that deliveries of food to Liberty Plaza exceed 150tons in the past twenty-four hours alone, delivered by air, by hovercraft, by tunnel. At that, most of the people I’ve talked to aren’t eating and aren’t sleeping. They’ve set their implants to take care of their bodily needs so they can concentrate on what one of the demonstration organizers here called, and I quote, ‘A group mind experience that will shake the very walls of reality.’

And I have to tell you, Kate, that the atmosphere here is like nothing I’ve—”

“Screen mute,” President LaSalle said, and the reporter’s voice fell silent. “You see, General, what we’re up against. The political repercussions of further delay in this project could be devastating.”

General King nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“This whole thing is wildly out of hand. All of the different religious factions are at each other’s throats, either hailing the An as gods or attacking them as demons. And everyone who isn’t working to start a new round of religious wars is marching or demonstrating for a crusade to free the slaves on Ishtar. And in addition to all of that, we have the second relief mission being assembled at L-5. They’re breathing down our necks right now. So…tell me again, in words that I can understand…why the new delay?”

General King glanced at Ramsey before answering, then across the table at Admiral Vincent Hartman, who would be commanding the naval assets of the mission. “Madam President…the cybernetic hibernation personnel on board theDerna are just running too far behind sched. They can only put people into hibernation so fast, you know. And more Marines keep arriving, making for extremely crowded conditions. It’s…well, it’s pretty chaotic up there.”

Which was something of an understatement, Ramsey thought, even though King hadn’t yet been physically on board the ship. Thingswere chaotic. With crowding, heat, and tempers all rising, there’d been four fights on the lower decks already, and it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt or threw a punch that could not be ignored or downplayed by the officers.

“What can be done to speed things up?” General Gabriowski said. He looked at the President. “If things slip much further, the Europeans and Brazilians will beat us to Ishtar. Thenthey’ll dictate tous how things are played.”

“Unacceptable,” LaSalle said. She looked at Ramsey. “Colonel? The bottleneck seems to be in your backyard. What do you propose?”

“Madam President—” He stopped, suddenly uncomfortable. Therewas something that could be done, but he’d been putting off suggesting it. It would be hard on the men, especially the newer ones.

“Go on, Colonel,” Gabriowski told him.

“Yes, sir. Madam President, there are still about four hundred Marines on Earth, waiting for passage up to L-4. One reason they’re not moving faster is that the D-480s—the personnel transfer shuttles we’ve been using—can only carry thirty people at a time, and they have a long turnaround time on the ground.”

“You can’t blame the Navy for that,” Vice Admiral Cardegriff put in. Cardegriff was the Navy’s representative on the Joint Chiefs, and a senior member of the National Security Council. His word hauled alot of mass.

“No, sir. The Navy’s been doing all that’s expected, and a hell of a lot more. But we might be able to speed things significantly by putting the Marines straight into cybehibe on the ground and shipping them up as cargo.”

“As cargo, Colonel?” President LaSalle said. “That seems a bit…indelicate.”

“Marines aren’t exactly what you would call ‘delicate,’ ma’am. I’ve been looking at this for a while now, wondering if we’d need to go this way. With more technicians and more room on the ground, we can pop out people into hibernation a lot faster than we can at L-4. They’ve been on their diets now for several days already and getting the preliminary nano injections, so we can start processing them through pretty quick. Best of all, they can be loaded straight into their cells on theDerna once they stop the hab rotation. Zero g’ll make things a hell of a lot easier. And they won’t be using consumables—water and air, mostly—if they’re hibernating.”

“You don’t sound happy about it, Colonel.”

“No, Madam President. I’m not. Most of those four hundred Marines are fresh out of recruit training. I was hoping to start them on simulation combat training once they reached theDerna and were waiting to be dropped into hibe. Besides, it’s kind of a dirty trick to pull on them, shipping them up like slabs of frozen meat. I imagine a lot of them are looking forward to the flight up, and now they’re going to miss it.”

“I’ll remind you, Colonel,” Gabriowski said, “that this is the Corps we’re talking about, not a travel agency. These people didn’t sign on for a scenic tour.”

“No, sir.”

“How fast can you do it?”

Ramsey already had the figures stored in his implant. “Here’s the data,” he told them. “The short story is that we can have them all aboard within the next five days. If we wait for the D-480s, it’ll be another nine days before they’re all aboard, and it will be at least two weeks after that before the last of them are in cybehibe.”

“I don’t think we have much choice,” the President said. “Do you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then do it. Do what you have to to get theDerna under way within the next week. That’s October sixteenth at the latest.At the latest . Am I clear?”

“Clear, ma’am.”

“Very well. Keep me informed of further developments.” And the President of the United Federal Republic vanished from the conference room.

“Dismissed, gentlemen,” Admiral Cardegriff said. And the fiction of the conference room faded from Ramsey’s awareness.

He was back on board theDerna , lying back in his VR couch.

His people weren’t going to like this. Not the section leaders who needed to see to it that everyone was up to speed on the training sims. Not the logistics personnel, who were looking forward to the use of a few hundred more backs to help shift cargo intoDerna ’s holds. And not the men and women themselves, who were going to be taken by surprise by this change. Marines were creatures of habit that never liked unexpected change.

How in all of the hells of the Corps was he going to break this to them?

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