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

face the world without it.

      The thought was terrifying.

      “Okay, recruits! First five in line! Through the hatch, on the double!”

      The first five recruits stumbled up the steps as the door cycled open for them and vanished into the building. Garroway watched them go.

      He thought about quitting.

      This was the one part of recruit training that he’d wondered about, wondered whether or not he could make it through. Oh, he knew he would survive, certainly. Millions did, and most went on to be U.S. Marines. And if he could get through these next few weeks, his old hardware would be reconnected and he would get new implants as well. Marines were hardwired with internal gadgetry and high-tech enhancements that most civilians didn’t even know existed.

      But the thought of being cut off like that …

      Many of the humans now living on Earth, he understood, were pre-tech … meaning they went through their lives, from birth to grave, as completely organic beings. No technological chelates cradling their brains and brain stems, no nanocircuitry growing through their neural pathways.

      No EM telepathy, so no way to talk to those around you unless you were actually in their presence or you happened to have a portable comm unit with you. No translator software; if your friend didn’t happen to speak your language, you were out of luck. No e-conferencing in noumenal or virtual space. No e-Net linking you with every other person and every electronic service across the Solar System.

      No way to access news, or weather—assuming you were on Earth which actually had weather—or med access, or epedia information feeds, or travel directions, or life journals, or any of the hundreds of other data downloads necessary in today’s fast-paced life.

      No sims. No download entertainment. No way to interact with either the stored or broadcast simvids that let you take the role of hero or villain or both.

      No way to buy the most basic necessities. Or to find them, since most shops now were on-line.

      No driving ground cars, piloting mag skimmers, or accessing public transit.

      No books, unless you could find the old-fashioned printed variety … and that was assuming you could read them. No more educational feeds … and no access to personal e-memory. Gods, how was he going to remember anything? …

      And there was Aide. For Garroway, that felt like the worst … losing access to Aide, the AI mentor, secretary, and personal electronic assistant he’d had since he was a kid.

      Without his hardware, the world was suddenly going to be a much smaller, much more difficult, much narrower place … and knowing that he would survive that narrowing did not make the prospect any more bearable.

      Cut off from technological civilization, from society, from everything that made life worth the living. …

      “I know it seems extreme, kids,” Warhurst said, using a telepathic feed to whisper inside their minds. “You feel like we’re cutting you off from the universe. In boot camp we call it the empty time.”

      Garroway wondered whether the DIs had some secret means of accessing their implants and hearing their thoughts … or if he just knew and understood what the recruits would be thinking now. Probably the latter. It was against the law to sneak into another’s private thoughts and eavesdrop, wasn’t it?

      “The thing is,” Warhurst went on, “there will be times as a Marine when you won’t have the Net to rely on. Imagine if you’re on a combat drop and something goes wrong. You end up a thousand kilometers behind enemy lines. You don’t have the local Net access codes. Worse, if you try to link in, the local authorities will spot you. Somehow, you have to survive without the Net until you can make contact with your sibling Marines.

      “Or maybe you just have to go into a hot DZ on a planet with no Net at all, and there’s a screw-up and the battlefleet Net isn’t up and running for, oh, a standard day or two or ten. Believe me, it happens. What can go wrong will go wrong. What are you going to do then?

      “The answer, of course, is that you will be Marines, and you will act like Marines. You will be able to draw upon your own resources, your training, your experience, and you will survive. More than survive, you will kick ass and emerge victorious, because victory is the tradition of the Corps!”

      Garroway felt a little better after Warhurst’s speech. Not good … but better. He gave a mental click to increase neural serotonin levels and help lift his mood. Hell, that was another thing he’d be missing in the next few weeks—the ability to alter his own emotional state as necessary. He felt a tiny, sharp stab of fear, and instantly suppressed it.

      How did Marines control the fear if they didn’t have access to neural monitoring software or the ability to deliberately tailor their emotional state? Or were the wild stories true, stories to the effect that Marine combat feeds eliminated fear and boosted such emotions as rage and hatred for the enemy? He’d always assumed those tales were nonsense, the product of civilian ignorance. Still …

      “If you children want to be Marines,” Warhurst’s whisper continued, “we have to know who and what you are. How you react under stress. We need to know your character. And we need to take you, all of you, down to your most basic, most elementary level and build you up, one painful layer at a time. At the end of these sixteen weeks, you will not be the men and women you were. You will be Marines … if you make it through.”

      It made sense, of course, what Warhurst was saying. Boot camp always had required an initial breaking down, so that the drill instructors could mold recruits into Marines. And there were other factors besides … like cutting the recruits off from outside sources of information so that they were utterly dependent on their instructors. Like taking away anything that would distract them from the grueling physical and intellectual training ahead.

      Like getting them to rely upon themselves.

      “Believe me,” Warhurst added, and Garroway swore he could hear a grin in the man’s inner voice, “for the next few weeks you children won’t need your tech-toys, and you’ll be way too busy to miss ‘em! Besides, you’ll have me to tell you what you need to know! Next five in line! Through the hatch!”

      Garroway thought one last time about quitting, and shoved the thought aside.

      “Don’t worry, Aiden,” his inner AI whispered in his mind. “I’ll be back. You’ll see.”

      Together with four other recruits, he bounded up the steps and into the unknown.

       3

       0407.1102

       Green 1, 1-1 Bravo

       Meneh, Alighan

       0824/38:22 hours, local time

      “Okay, Marines. How are we going to do this?”

      Ramsey considered the question. Staff Sergeant Thea Howell rarely asked for advice. When she did, the problem was certain to be a certified bitch.

      With the vantage point of the gods, he looked down on the city. In the noumenon, the imaginal inner space of his mind’s eye, he was hovering above the city center and starport as if from a giant’s towering perspective. Physically, in fact, he was crouched in what had been a basement, shielded from view by several tons of rubble, and the closest Marine to his current position was nearly five hundred meters away, but he was only distantly aware of any of that. His cereblink and the fleet’s SkyNet, however, allowed them to share a noumenal conference space, complete with tiny