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

servant laughed. “Certainly not, sir! People have been coming in since early this morning!”

      “Oh. Good.” He felt terribly awkward. He wanted to ask if Julie, Callie, Donal, or Eric were here … or if they were expected. He didn’t want to see them right now, or relive any of those memories, not the pain, not the injustice, not the anger.

      God it still hurt. …

      But the servant was still speaking, gesturing toward the sliding glass doors leading into the main house. “You’ll find refreshments inside, sir. Or you can follow the guidelight on the deck around the corner, there, and go straight back to the pools. Make yourself at home, have a good time … and happy birthday!”

      “Thank you,” Warhurst replied, terse. He didn’t like being here alone. And quite apart from his … personal problems, social galas like this one always gave him a pain.

      As did the pretensions of the rich. But he appreciated the greeting.

      Wherever there was a Corps presence, the date of 1011—the tenth day of November, old-style—was celebrated, the birthday of the U.S. Marines.

      On that date, in 1775, the Second Continental Congress had enacted legislation, resolving that “two battalions of Marines be ‘inlisted’ to serve for and during the present war between Great Britain and the colonies.” Two weeks later, a Quaker innkeeper named Samuel Nicholas had been commissioned as the first officer of the Marines, and recruiting had begun at the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia. Less than four months after that, on 3 March 1776, four full months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Captain Nicholas led 268 Marines ashore on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, capturing two forts, cannons, and a supply of gun powder in the Corps’ very first amphibious operation.

      Eleven hundred two years later, the Corps continued to celebrate that birthday, in this case with an elaborate party. The graduation of class 4102 had been arranged to coincide with the festivities.

      Normally, Marines took care of their own celebrations. The festivities within the Arean Ring, though, had been hijacked this year. Warhurst made a face as he looked around the expansive, rotating hab module. Senator Sloan was not a Marine. According to his Net bio, he hadn’t even served in the military.

      But he was one of four Commonwealth senators representing Mars, and the two chief pillars of the Martian economy were xenoarcheological research and the Marines. Both the 1st Marine Division and the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force had moved their headquarters to Mars centuries ago, and any political representative of that world knew that his hopes of staying in office resided with the Marine constituents.

      Danis Sloan was also ostentatiously rich, as the lavishness of his personal quarters suggested. The hab was enormous, a squat, rotating cylinder similar in design to some of the larger O’Neil-type space colonies, but only about I kilometer long, and twice that in diameter. The ends were capped in transplas, giving constantly turning views of the stars, the sun, Mars, and the other nearby habs making up this portion of the Arean Ring as the structure rotated, producing its out-is-down spin gravity. Visitors docked at the hub airlock, then traveled out and down one of the elevators to reach the landscaped terrain. The main house, where the party was being held, occupied nearly ten percent of the hab’s internal terrain, tucked in between one of the transparent end caps, and a broad, sparkling lake.

      And the whole damned thing belonged to Danis Sloan.

      Half a million years ago, the Builders had left a vast array of faster-than-light communicators in a subsurface complex called the Cave of Wonders, beneath a weathered plateau in Cydonia. Those communicators still possessed real-time visual and audio links with similar devices on Chiron, Ishtar, and elsewhere, but it had taken centuries to reverse-engineer the process and learn how to use quantum entanglement to instantly bridge distances measured in light-years.

      A quantum dynamicist named Victor Sloan, among others, had been instrumental in making modern FTL communication possible, and that, in turn, made both interstellar business and government possible.

      The Sloan fortune now was rumored to exceed the economies of several small nations. Hell, the guy could probably buy small countries if he had a use for them. Warhurst had heard that Sloan’s Arean Ring hab was only one of his dwellings, that a larger one existed in Earth’s First Ring, and that others existed in at least three other star systems. The guy, through his company, Sloan Stellartronics, had his own FTL starship, for God’s sake, and that was certainly no cheap date.

      Fair enough. FTL communication was vital in tying together the far-flung worlds of Humankind. The Commonwealth wouldn’t have been possible without it. More than that, humanity’s survival might depend upon it; late in the twenty-sixth century, shortly after they’d become commercially feasible, faster-than-light starships had caught up with the Argo and the other fleeing asteroid starships, offering to share the new technology, and offering them evacuation, a chance to come home. The offers in every case had been rejected, but Argo and her sisters all had accepted Sloan units in order to maintain real-time communications with Earth.

      Likely, Warhurst thought, they wanted to know if and when the Xul found and destroyed Earth, thereby justifying their flight.

      But if that hadn’t happened, if Argo had not possessed an FTL transmitter quantum-entangled with a Sloan unit back in the Solar System, Perseus would not have been able to flash news of the Xul appearance instantly back to Earth, and word of Argo’s destruction would not have been received on Earth for more than another four hundred years.

      By then it almost certainly would have been too late.

      So Sloan was welcome to his fortune. His family had come by it honestly, at least. Warhurst just wished the man wasn’t so damned ostentatious about it. Importing and growing those gene-tailored trees alone must have cost tens of millions of newdollars … enough to fully equip a modern Marine rifle company at least.

      Possibly, he thought as he followed the guidelight moving before him across the decking, the problem lay in the implication that the Marines—or at least lMarDiv—somehow belonged to Sloan personally. That wasn’t the case, to be sure, but the press and often parts of the Commonwealth government seemed to think it was. Sloan had been chairperson of the Defense Advisory Council three times running, losing out in the elections four years ago only because Marie Devereaux and the Peace Party had insisted on the change as part of the price of their support.

      He wondered if the Peace Party’s swing to support the Constitutionalists would bring Sloan back to chairperson-ship of the council. He doubted it. Current politics were way too volatile to permit long-term government fiefdoms.

      And there were all those rumors that Danis Sloan hoped to launch his own bid for the presidency four years from now.

      Warhurst stepped around the corner of the house and onto the raised deck above the pool area behind the house. Sonic suppressor fields had kept the noise levels low, but as he stepped through the field interface, the babble of conversation, laughter, music, and noise assaulted his ears. Sloan had been planning a lavish ball in honor of the Marines for a long time, and the party promised to be a long one—several days at least.

      Several hundred people were gathered on the tiers of decks behind the residence already. Perhaps a quarter, he saw, wore Marine dress uniforms, complete with gloves, glowribbons, and red-striped trousers. The rest wore a dazzling array of costumes, from formal ball gowns and dressuits to holographic light displays and sim projections to complete and fashionable nudity. Sloan’s invitation, obviously, had gone out to his own social set as well as Marine personnel … and that griped Warhurst as well. This … this ritual honoring this date in history belonged to the Corps. Civilians shouldn’t have any part of it, no matter how rich or well connected they might be.

      “Sergeant Warhurst, is it?” a woman’s voice said at his back. “Michel?”

      He turned. The speaker was a tall and beautifully sculpted blond woman, technically nude, but with a fan of what looked like gorgeously colored peacock feathers arranged