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

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.

      What none of this took into account was the workload at established bases like Noctis-L. Training a company of raw recruits, breaking them out of their smug little civilian molds and building Marines out of what was left—that was a full-time job, and then some. Warhurst and five assistant DIs supervised Company 4102, now down to just forty-three recruits, and still it was never enough.

      He closed his eyes. That one kid, Collins. After six weeks without her implants, she’d just … snapped. The messy and very public suicide had hit everyone hard, and the DI staff especially had been badly stressed. Damn it, he should have been there. …

      Warhurst leaned back in his chair, his meal half finished but unwanted. He summoned a cup of coffee, though, and waited while a servo extended it to him from a nearby wall-mar. He knew there was nothing he could have done, and the board of inquiry had almost routinely absolved him and his staff of blame. But … he should have been there. Collins had stolen that thermite grenade one evening from a malfunctioning training arms locker when he’d been here, at home.

      Angrily, he pushed the thought aside, then mentally clocked on the wallscreen, looking for the evening news. He wanted an external distraction, rather than an internal feed, telling himself he needed to keep his internal channels clear, in case there was a call from the base.

      Which was pure theriashit, and he knew it. An emergency call would override any feed he had going. And either Achilles, the company AI, or Hector, who was reserved for the training staff, could talk to him at any time. He was avoiding the real issue, which was the strain within his marriage.

      Damned right I’m avoiding it, he thought. And a good job I’m doing of it, too.

      The news was dominated by the war, of course. The capture of Alighan was being hailed in the Senate as the defining victory of the war, the victory that would bring the Theocrats to their senses and bring them to the conference table.

      “In other military news,” the announcer said, her three-meter-tall face filling the wall, “the Interstellar News Web have received an as yet unconfirmed report of hostile contact with what may be a Xul huntership outside of the Humankind Frontier. If true, this will be the first contact with the Xul in over 550 years.

      “For this report, we go livefeed to Ian Castriani at Marine Corps Skybase headquarters in paraspace. Ian?”

      The announcer’s face faded away, replaced by a young man standing in the Public Arena of the headquarters station. He looked intense, determined, and excited.

      And what he had to say brought a cold, churning lump to the pit of Warhurst’s gut.