Ian Douglas - The Complete Legacy Trilogy - Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines

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 for me .

“We are engaged in a deployment of tremendous … ah … diplomatic importance. As you all know, the Marine expeditionary force was to be followed by a second American expedition. That has now changed. The follow-up expedition is now envisioned as a true multinational interstellar task force, one including personnel from the European Union, the Brazilian Empire, the Kingdom of Allah, the Republic of Mejico, and others, besides our Confederation allies. The Confederation Council has decided that this is an expedition of truly human proportions, one in which all of humankind has a stake.

“It will be our task not only to defeat enemy forces on Ishtar, but to maintain the peace with the disparate members of the multinational task force. We will present a united front to the Frogs. …”

Somehow, Ramsey stifled an inward grimace that might otherwise have projected into the noumenon. The fighting in Egypt with KOA religious fanatics was only the most recent bit of terrestrial bloodshed going down. The European Union had been sparring with Russia as recently as the Black Sea War of ’34, and the Brazilians and Japanese were going at it over Antarctic fishing rights just last year. And things had been simmering between the United Federal Republic and Mejico since long before the Second Mexican War.

Frankly, facing a planet-full of hostile Ahannu god-warriors was infinitely preferable to facing the politics, red tape, and outright blood-feuds that were bound to entangle Earth’s first interstellar expeditionary forces. Ramsey knew that not even King, for all his diplomatic experience, was going to have an easy job keeping those factions straight.

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

19 JULY 2138

Field Combat Range

U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center

Parris Island, South Carolina

0640 hours ET

“Crawl, you sand fleas! Crawl! You will become one with the dirt!”

Makowiecz stood on the beach like an implacable giant, hands on hips, khaki uniform, as always, immaculately clean and sharp-creased, despite the unmitigated hell flying around him. The sound was deafening and unremitting, with explosions going off every few seconds and live rounds, both solid and optical, cracking through the air a meter above the ground.

John Garroway wondered why the ordnance never came near the DI, and decided, like the others in his company, that no bullet or laser pulse would dare threaten to muss the man’s uniform, much less actually hit him. Break-room speculation had it that the DIs on the combat range wore smartclothes that communicated with the robotic weapons laying down the fire on the beach, blocking any fire aimed too close to any of the exercise supervisors, but that couldn’t be proven. Besides, shrapnel and spent rounds were mindless and didn’t care where they flew. A low-powered round glanced off John’s helmet—a spent rubber bullet, by the dull thump it made—and left his head aching.

“Garroway, you stupid asshole!” Makowiecz screamed. Damn, the man had been thirty meters up the beach; he had never seen him approach. “What do you think, that this is some kind of VR sim? Get your fucking head down!”

“Sir, yes, sir!” John screamed back through a mouthful of gritty sand. He pressed himself flatter as a close-grouped trio of explosions detonated meters away. Makowiecz didn’t flinch.

“And keep moving! The enemy’s that way! That way! What, are you waiting for him to come give you a personal invitation? Move your damned, tin-plated ass! Move it!”

John kept moving, forcing himself ahead with an odd, uncomfortable twisting of the hips, inching forward in his dead-man armor.

The grim sobriquet was an old term for Mark XIV polylaminate impact armor, obsolete since the Second Mexican War or before. Unpowered, unenhanced, the suit was heavy and drunk-clumsy, and moving in it was like dragging along the weight of another man. The outer chamelearmor layer had been stripped off, leaving a stark, bone-white surface shiny enough that the recruits could be easily seen on the combat range, at least in theory. At the moment, the recruits were so mud-covered that they might as well have been fully camouflaged.

They hadn’t even been given fully enclosed helmets; learning how to use HDO displays was still weeks away in their training. Instead they wore ancient bucket helmets with swing-down laser-block visors and just enough built-in comm linkage to let their DIs talk to them, usually in blistering invective.

Not that Gunny Makowiecz needed technical assistance to chew out the recruits. He seemed to be everywhere on that live-fire range, yelling, swearing, admonishing, cajoling, raging, relentlessly using every trick of the drill instructor’s handbook to motivate his struggling charges.

For three weeks now Company 1099 had been all but living in the antique Mark XIVs, marching in them, exercising in them, standing fire watch and sentry duty in them, and when they weren’t wearing them, cleaning them. Twice now John had been ordered to hit the rack wearing his armor as punishment for being too slow hitting the mark with his ready kit at morning muster. That bit of motivational guidance, as it was called, had left him sore, chaffed, and tired, and a hell of a lot more eager to jump out of bed at a zero-dark-thirty reveille.

Another explosion thundered nearby, and John felt the thump of the detonation through the ground. Gravel rattled off his armored back. He was by now thoroughly miserable. Wet sand, mud, and grit had worked its way, inevitably, past the armor suit’s seal at his neck and chafed now against tender places too numerous to mention. The platoon had started this morning’s exercise twenty minutes ago at the surf line on the beach, leaving all of them soaked and coated with sand. Their objective was to belly-crawl three hundred meters up the shelf of the beach, over the dune line, and across the mud pit beyond. Explosive charges buried in the sand and the constant laser and projectile fire overhead kept things interesting … especially with the word from the DIs that one in a hundred of the bullets whizzing overhead was steel ball, not rubber, just to keep the men focused.