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

      But even the display of an educated guess was essentially boring, the patterns of stars changing so slowly the novelty wore off after a very few hours.

      Still, Ramsey and the other waking psych-wounded on board tended to spend a lot of their off-hours here. The cool, K0 star circled by Alighan was located in the constellation Ophiuchus, as seen from Sol, and after the first three weeks or so, star patterns in the sky opposite Ophiuchus, ahead of the Samar, had begun to drift into recognizable constellations, albeit shrunken and distorted. Day by day, those constellations opposite Ophiuchus in Earth’s sky, including the easily recognizable sprawl of Orion with the prominent three-in-a-row suns of his belt, became more and more evident.

      Ramsey and Colver were sitting in one of the double lounge recliners, a side-by-side seat that let them watch the stars. They’d been watching Orion, and wondering if Sol was visible yet somewhere within that dusting of stars ahead.

      No wonder, Ramsey thought, passengers and crew alike in A.D. ships spent the passage in cybe-hibe, save for a small, rotating watch. The planetarium display did little but emphasize just how tiny Samar was within a very large galaxy. That sort of thing could wear unpleasantly on the healthiest of minds.

      “Did you ever wonder,” Colver asked him after a long while, “why we’re doing our therapy time shipboard? Why didn’t they just pack us away with everyone else, and start unscrambling our brains once we get home?”

      Ramsey looked around. Three Navy enlisted ratings were playing cards at a table on the other side of the compartment. They didn’t appear to be listening to the two Marines, though the space was small enough that they could have, had they wanted.

      “I never thought about it, no,” Ramsey replied. “I mean, they have the psych AI resident in the ship’s Net, so it’s there and available. They’d need it for ship’s crew, just because the isolation could drive people off the deep end. So, as long as the software’s there anyway …” He shrugged. “Why, is it important?”

      “I dunno. I’ve just been in the Corps long enough to know they do everything for a reason, even if that reason doesn’t make a whole lot of sense up front. I was just wondering if they do it in-transit because we are so isolated out here. No distractions. Nothing to do but count the days until we get home.”

      Ramsey managed a chuckle. “Well, hell. I can just imagine Karla trying to talk to me back at the Ring, and all I want to do is put on my civvies and hit the airlock. The Arean Ring is pretty good for liberty.”

      “You call it Karla?” she asked. “Mine is Karl. For Karl Jung.”

      “Yeah. Depends on whether the patient relates better to men or women. You know, another possible reason for shrinking us out here … they can control what they put in our heads.”

      “How do you mean?”

      “Think about it. Out here, it’s just us and our … our memories, right?”

      She nodded. Ramsey didn’t know exactly what had happened to Colver on Alighan, but it was probably one of a relatively few but common problems. Stress shock—what once had been called post-traumatic stress syndrome—or survivor guilt or anxiety attacks or, like Ramsey, she’d lost someone important to her and was dealing now with the depression. Whatever it was, he could see echoes of grief, fear, and sadness in her eyes.

      He wondered if his own eyes betrayed his inner demons that clearly.

      “Well,” he went on, “if we were back on the Ring—unless they quarantined us all—we’d be going out on liberty and visiting family, getting drunk, getting simmed—”

      “Getting laid,” she put in.

      “Sure, that, too. We’d probably get ten kinds of advice from family and friends back there, all about how to put all the bad memories away, get over it, forget about it, and move on, y’know?”

      “And what they’re telling us here, Karl and Karla, I mean, is that we have to look at the memories. Deal with them.”

      “Yeah. Something like that. Unless we let them memwipe us, we’ve got to deal with our shit. We can delay it, we can play all kinds of games, we can pretend it never happened, but, sooner or later, we’ve got to face it.”

      “You sound like Karl.” She smiled.

      “I wonder why?”

      “So you think they don’t want us contaminating our minds with input from our families?”

      “Yeah.”

      “Okay, but they let us talk together. They don’t have us isolated from all human contact. They even have the group sessions, where all of us get together and talk.”

      “True. But then … we’re all in the same boat, literally, right? Same general experiences. Same problems. And Karla, Karl, I mean, is there to facilitate.” He thought about it a moment. “It’s kind of like being in the Corps. We’re all Marines. Family, y’know?”

      “The Green Family.”

      “Yeah. Semper fi. …”

      Green Family was a term out of the days before FTL, when Marines deployed starside might be gone for decades, objective. Over the course of the past eight centuries, the Marine Corps had been strongly shaped in certain key ways by the physics of interstellar travel.

      Back at the dawn of Humankind’s migration into space, all that had been known for sure about faster-than-light travel was that it was impossible. Einstein and relativity had convincingly demonstrated that converting all of the mass in the universe into energy would not be enough to accelerate a single atom to the speed of light, much less pass it. If humans wanted to travel to the stars, they would have to settle for decades-long voyages in cybernetic hibernation, on board ships that approached, but could never actually reach, the magic velocity of c. Relativistic time dilation slowed the passage of subjective time, but the fundamental way in which the universe was put together forbade the FTL warp drives of the popular fiction of the time.

      As a result, Marines deployed to the worlds of other stars would return to a culture that had changed dramatically during the intervening decades. Time dilation meant that the Marines might have aged five or six years, subjective, while twenty or thirty years objective had passed on Earth. The resultant temporal isolation had guaranteed that large numbers of Marines simply couldn’t fit in with the civilians they were sworn to protect; while they were out-system, most of the cultural markers they’d known and grown up with had changed. Music, language, fashion, art, politics, technology, everything that connected them with others had transformed, while the people they’d left behind were dead or changed by age.

      More and more, Marines had relied on the Corps as family. A Marine might return from the stars and find that Marines back on Earth possessed a different cultural background, true, but they were still Marines. Somehow, the similarities always outweighed the differences.

      Eventually, of course, Einstein was proved to be a special case within the broader scope of quantum physics, just as Newton had been a special case within the mathematics of relativity. The Stargates had demonstrated that it was possible to bypass enormous gulfs of interstellar space. Encounters with the Xul proved that FTL travel was possible without the Gates, though for centuries no one could figure out how they did it.

      What no one had ever imagined was that, when the problem was finally cracked, there would be not one solution, but many. It was still not known how the Xul hunterships bypassed light, but humans now possessed not one but two non-Gate modes of FTL travel of their own—the Alcubierre Drive and the much more recent paraspace phase-shift transitions, or PPST, used by large structures such as the Corps’ Skybase. And there were suggestions within the wilderness of theoretical physics that promised other modes of FTL travel as well.

      Neither the Alcubierre Drive nor PPST involved acceleration, and, therefore, time dilation didn’t enter into the equation.