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

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 hydrocarbon substrate used in the nanoprocessor tanks to make food. The Derna needed water especially, a small ocean of water, in fact, filling the huge mushroom cap forward. Water was Derna ’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 the Derna .

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 that Derna 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 a Marine scum-of-the-Earth lowlife-maggot recruit.