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

he bounded across the rooftop to the two fallen Marines. Corporal Gerry Beck was dead, his helmet punctured, then exploded from within. There was a lot of blood, and only smoking, blackened shards remained of helmet and skull.

      Staff Sergeant Thea Howell, however, was still alive. The AP round had struck her in the chest, shattering ribs, rupturing a lung, flooding her torso with hard radiation, but her diagnostic feed showed she was still alive as her armor struggled to control the damage. She was already deep in medical support stasis.

      Thea. …

      Crouching above her body, he turned his fire against a last remaining clump of Muzzie gunners behind a ferrocrete wall. One of the Specter guns burned down the last of them, and the firefight came to an abrupt end.

      But Ramsey continued to hold the broken body of Thea Howell, letting his own armor make automatic feed connections and linkages so that he could bolster her suit’s damaged support systems.

      Besides being a fellow Marine and the platoon’s senior NCO, Thea was an old friend, and frequently his lover.

      She was family.

      And he didn’t want to see her die. …

       USMC Recruit Training Center

       Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

       1045/24:20 local time, 2003 hrs GMT

      Garroway felt … alone. Alone and utterly empty.

      And he couldn’t even mind-click himself a serotonin jolt to lift the settling black mist of depression … or ask Aide for help.

      “I know you’re all feeling a bit low right now,” Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst said, smiling. “But I have just the ticket! We’re going to run. Comp’ney, lef’ face! For’ard harch! Double time, harch! …”

      Garroway still felt dazed and lost. After his ten-minute session with the Navy corpsmen in the sickbay, he’d been led back out into the weak sunshine of the Martian morning and marched to chow.

      He’d barely tasted the food, and ate it automatically. After that there’d been an indoctrination class, with an assistant DI lecturing the company on Corps tradition, and on what it meant to be a Marine.

      And now, they were out in the cold once more, running. Who the hell was he trying to kid? His first six hours in the Corps, and already he wanted to quit.

      Something, though, was keeping him going … one tired foot after the other.

      Aiden Garroway had been born and raised in the 7-Ring orbital complex in Earth orbit, a son of an extended line marriage, the Giangrecos; on his Naming Day, he’d taken his name from Estelle Garroway, the woman who’d also passed on to him his fascination with the Corps.

      It had been Estelle who’d told him about other Garroways who’d been Marines. There was one, a real character who’d fought in the UN War of the mid-twenty-first century, who was still remembered in Marine histories. “Sands of Mars Garroway,” he was known as, and he’d led a grueling march up the Vallis Marineris only a couple of thousand kilometers from this spot to attack a French invasion force.

      And later there’d been John Garroway, a gunnery sergeant who’d made first contact with the N’mah, an alien civilization at the Sirius Stargate a century later … and General Clinton Vincent Garroway who’d fought and won the critical Battle of Night’s Edge against the Xul in 2323. And other Garroways had served in the Corps with distinction ever since, first in the old United States Marines, then, with the gradual assimilation of the old U.S. into the United Star Commonwealth, in the old Corps’ modern successor, the United Star Marine Corps.

      It had been Estelle who’d suggested he join the Corps. She’d known how unhappy he was at home.

      Not that home life had been abusive or anything like that. Most of his mothers and fathers were okay, and he deeply loved his birth mother. But with twenty-five spouses and one hundred eighty-three children and grandchildren underfoot, along with numerous aunts, uncles, in-laws, and cousins, the living quarters allotted to the Giangreco line family, though spacious enough, tended to be something of a zoo. There was always someone to put him down, tell him what to do, or shove him out of the way. His job in the aquaculture farms was boring and dead-end. There were no better options for educational downloads until he specialized in a career, and farming water hyacinths for the Ring filtration matrices decidedly was not what he intended to do for the next century or two. Hell, life at home with that many parents and sibs was like life in a barracks, anyway; the Marines seemed a logical option.

      The problem was Delano Giangreco, the patriarch of the line, and a committed pacifist. A member of the Reformed Church of the Ascended Pleiadean Masters, he didn’t quite insist that everyone in the family follow Church doctrine regarding diet, luminous tattoos, or ritual nudity, but he did insist on observance of the Masters’ Pax. No mention of war within the house, no downloads touching on military history, battles, or martial arts. Garroway had been twelve before he’d even heard of the Marines, and then only because of the electronic emancipation laws. Once you were twelve and had chosen your name, no one else could censor your thoughts or your data feeds, even for religious purposes.

      But those feeds could be monitored by parents or guardians until a person was eighteen, and Garroway had received almost weekly lectures on the evils of war and the falsity of such historical lies as military glory, honor, or duty.

      Somehow, though, the lectures had only increased his determination to learn about the Corps, and about all those other Garroways who’d served country and, later, Commonwealth. By the time he was sixteen, he’d picked up some semi-intelligent software, with Aide’s help, which let him partition his personal memory storage, and keep parts of it secret from even the most determined morals-censoring probes.

      But the need to do so, to keep his guard up against his senior father’s intrusions, had been a powerful incentive to get himself out of the home and off on his own.

      His senior father had disowned him when he learned Garroway had enlisted. No matter. He had a new family now. …

      If he could keep up with it. If he quit, if he gave up, he would be right back in the Rings looking for work—probably in one of the environmental control complexes or, possibly, the nanufactories.

      Hell, he’d rather run himself to death.

      “Christ,” Mustafa Jellal muttered at Garroway’s side. “Is the bastard gonna run us all the way up Olympus?”

      The recruit company had been running steadily west for almost an hour, now, slogging uphill almost all the way. Somewhere over the western horizon was the staggering mass of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System, though its peak was still far over the curve of the Martian horizon. Jellal’s mutterings were purely fictional, of course. The mountain known as Olympus Mons was five hundred kilometers across at the base, and reached twenty-one kilometers above the surrounding terrain; the raw, new, artificially generated atmosphere on Mars was still only a step removed from hard vacuum at the summit.

      The Noctis Labyrinthus lay at the eastern rim of the Tharsis Bulge, the vast, volcano-crested dome marking a cataclysmic upwelling of the Martian mantle 3.5 billion years before. The broken, canyon-laced terrain of the Noctis Labyrinthus—the “Labyrinth of Night”—was the result of floods released by the sudden melting of permafrost during that long-ago event. The ground, as a result, was a difficult tangle of rocks and channels that made footing treacherous and the climb exhausting.

      “Save your … wind … for running,” Garroway muttered between pants for breath. His side was starting to shriek pain at him, and the thinness of the incompletely terraformed atmosphere was dragging at his lungs and his endurance. How much farther? …

      Jellal suddenly fell out of the formation, stepping to the side, hands on his knees as he started to vomit.