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

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 suggested movement.

“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 laser was going to win.

Garroway kept his opinion of Philby’s tactics to himself, however. They were all in this together, after all. Gungho …

“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 had called 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 a Marine . …

9 OCTOBER 2138

Pacifica

Off the California Coast

1105 hours PT

Garroway grinned at Lynnley. “You know, this would be a lot more fun in zero gravity.”

“You!” she retorted, giving him a gentle punch in the chest. “Aren’t you ever satisfied?”