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

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 you stop , you’re dead. ” 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 your only choice! Now hump 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 did not 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! And one ! 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. “ Pain is the feeling of weakness leaving your body!”

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

Lagrange Shuttle King Priam

In approach to IST Derna

Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

1320 hours Zulu

Half a million kilometers from Parris Island, the Marine Interstellar Transport Derna 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 IST Derna was in orbital configuration, her hab modules spread and rotating slowly. Beyond her, twenty kilometers away, Antimatter Production Facility Vesuvius 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 Shuttle King 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 the Derna , 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 did not want to file in permanent memory.