Ian Douglas - The Complete Inheritance Trilogy - Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human

“Recruit Kenyon is correct,” a voice whispered in his mind.

Garroway looked up, startled. “Achilles?”

“What?” Sandre asked. Garroway hadn’t realized he’d spoken the name aloud. He waved his hand back and forth, requesting her silence.

“Affirmative,” the voice continued. “ Think of me as a part of yourself not as a spy for your superiors. ”

But you do report to the DI shack, don’t you? This time, Garroway thought the question silently, employing the mindspeak he’d always used with Aide.

“Technically, yes, but only in matters involving gross negligence of duty. In any case, Marines are supposed to be of superior moral character. By this point in your training, those with serious moral flaws have already been weeded out.”

“Oh …”

Company 4102 had dwindled a lot in the past few weeks, it was true. Only forty-five recruits remained out of the over one hundred who’d originally mustered at Noctis Labyrinthus. But he’d assumed the DORs—the Drop Out Requests—had quit because they couldn’t get along without their headware.

“That is a large part of it,” Achilles agreed. “ One aspect of moral character is the ability to rely on yourself rather than on technology .”

Carefully, Garroway took another bite of faux steak and chewed, thoughtful. Achilles seemed to be a bit more dominant than Aide had been. And the damned thing was reading his thoughts, rather than waiting for him to encode them as mindspeak.

“You will simply have to learn to trust me, Garroway,” Achilles told him. “ Trust that I am not sharing your thoughts with others .”

“Unless I deserve it.”

“Do you always talk to yourself?” Sandre asked him.

Achilles, tell her I’m holding a conversation with you.

A moment later, Sandre’s eyes grew very large. “Did you send that?”

He nodded. “Pretty slick, huh?”

“Damn it, Garroway!” she snapped. “Get out of my head!” Abruptly, she stood, picked up her tray, and walked away. Garroway considered calling to her, but decided that using telepathy would just make matters worse.

They were all going to have to work with the new technology for a bit, in order to get used to it.

Exactly , Achilles told him. He could have sworn the AI sounded smug.

Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst stepped out of the flyer and onto the landing deck outside his home. It was a small place, but with lots of exterior spaces and enclosed garden patios surrounding a double plasdome growing from a canyon wall. Other base housing modules were visible up and down the canyon, extruded from the ancient sandstone walls.

A billion years ago, this part of Mars had been under a sea a kilometer deep; the relentless rise of the Tharsis Bulge, however, had lifted the Noctis Labyrinthus high and dry; as the water drained away, it had carved the maze of channels from the soft stone. The northern ocean had rolled again, briefly, under the touch of the Builders half a million years ago, but by that time the Noctis Labyrinthus was far above mean sea level.

Apparently, the Builders had not colonized this part of Mars, restricting their activities to Cydonia, far to the north, to Chryse Planitia, and to Utopia on the far side of the planet. Some of the base personnel spent off hours pacing up and down the canyon with metal detectors, however. A handful of people out here had made fortunes with the chance find of a fragment of cast-off xenotech.

Warhurst never bothered with that sort of thing, however. His career—the Corps—was everything.

A fact that was making things difficult at home.

“Honey?” He stepped in off the deck, dropping his cover on a table. “I’m home.”

The place seemed empty, and he queried the house AI. “Where is everybody?”

Julie and Eric are home , the house’s voice whispered in his mind. Donal and Callie are still at the base .

Warhurst was part of a group marriage and, as was increasingly the case nowadays, all of the other partners in the relationship were also Marines. It was simpler that way … and the partners tended to be more understanding than civilians. Usually .

A door hissed open and Julie emerged from the bedroom. She was naked, and she looked angry. “Well, well. The prodigal is home. Decided to come visit the family for a change?”

“Don’t start, Julie.”

“Don’t start what?”

“Look, I know I haven’t been home much lately—”

“I know that too.” She ran a hand through her short hair. “Look, Marine, I’m having sex with Eric, so give us some privacy. Fix yourself dinner. When Don and Cal get home, we need to talk, the five of us.”

“What do you—”

But she’d already turned away and padded back into the bedroom.

Damn .

It had been a few days since he’d come home. How long? He pulled a quick check of his personal calendar, and saw the answer. Eight days.

Damn it, Julie knew the score. When a new recruit company started up, he spent all of his time with the company, at least for the first few weeks. After that, he shared the duty with the other DIs, sleeping in the DI shack, or in one of the senior NCO quads across the grinder one night out of four. But even late in the training regime, there were particular times when it was important that he be there. This past week had been the last week for the recruits of 4102 in naked time, without their civilian headware, a time when lots of them came close to cracking. He needed to be there, to see them through. He’d almost stayed over tonight as well, but Corrolly had insisted that he and Amanate could handle things.

He wished he’d stayed.

Julie’s flat statement about a family meeting probably meant an ultimatum, and that probably meant a formal request that he move back into the BOQ, the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters.

In other words, a divorce.

It had been coming for a long time. He knew she’d been wanting to talk to him about the marriage, and his part in it, for a long time, but he’d been hoping to postpone it, at least until after 4102 had graduated. Damn it, he didn’t have time for this nonsense, for all this sturm und drang, and Julie ought to know that. He didn’t have the emotional stamina to deal with it now, either. There was just too much on his plate. Angry, he walked into the kitchen unit and punched up a meal.

Warhurst was the most recent addition to the Tamalyn-Danner line marriage, having been invited in by Julie just fifteen months ago. Like many Corps weddings taking place on Mars, the vows had been declared, posted, and celebrated at Garroway Hall, at Cydonia, and half of RTC command had attended.

Marriages outside the Corps were discouraged. Not forbidden … but discouraged. A Marine might be at any given duty station for a year or two, but then he or she might be deployed across a hundred light-years, or end up on board a Navy ship plying a slow run between stargates. The routine played merry hell with traditional relationships.

At that, it was better than in the bad old days, before FTL and stargates, when a 4.3 light-year hop to Chiron took five and a half years objective, which meant a couple of years subjective spent in cybe-hibe stasis. Back then, Marines were assigned on the basis of their famsits, their family situations—whether or not they were married, had parents or other close relatives, and how closely tied they were psychologically to the Motherworld.

Long ago, the Corps had adopted the habit of assigning command staff as discrete groups, called command constellations, to avoid breaking up good working teams through transfers and redeployments. A similar set of regulations now governed marital relationships. While the Corps couldn’t promise to keep everyone in the family together—especially in group marriages that might number ten or more people—the AIs overseeing deployments did their best, even shuffling personnel from one MarDiv to another, when necessary, to make the numbers come out even. The tough part was when kids were involved. Each major base had its own crèche, nurseries, and schools, but Navy ships on deep survey or remote listening outposts at the fringes of known Xul systems didn’t have the resources for that kind of luxury. Those assignments still required Marines with Famsits of two or better.