The Complete Legacy Trilogy: Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines. Ian Douglas

have possessed him to voluntarily give up his cyberimplants.

      After receiving the injection and being allowed to rest for twenty minutes, he felt well enough to return to the rest of the group. Another hour dragged by as the rest of Company 1099—those who’d agreed to lose their cybernano, at any rate—passed through the sick bay and the ministrations of the AI examination room. Out of the original complement of ninety-five men in Company 1099, fifteen had refused to allow their nanochelates to be removed, and three more had been rejected by the AI treatment room for one reason or another. Most of them were on their way back to civilian life by that afternoon, processed out on a DD-4010—“Subject unsuitable for Marine Corps service,” a convenience-of-the-government discharge. Two volunteered instead for a transfer to the Navy, and three others elected to join the Aerospace Force.

      “Why,” Gunnery Sergeant Makowiecz bellowed at the ranks later that morning, “did we take away your implants? Anyone!” Several hands went up, and Makowiecz chose one. “You!”

      “S-Sir, this recruit believes that you will issue Marine implants,” Murphy, a kid from Cincinnati, said. “Civilian implants may not be compatible with military-issue gear or with each other. Sir.”

      “That,” Makowiecz replied, “is part of the answer. But not all of it. Anyone else?”

      Garroway raised his hand, and Makowiecz snapped, “You!”

      “Sir,” Garroway said, “it is Marine Corps policy to have all recruits begin at the same level, with no one better or worse than anyone else, sir!”

      “Again, a piece of the answer, but not all of it. And not the most important part. Anyone else?” No one moved in the ranks. “All right, I’ll tell you.” Makowiecz pointed at the sky. “Right now, there are some 2,491 communications satellites in Earth orbit, from little field relays the size of your thumb in LEO to the big library space stations at L-4 and L-5. They all talk to one another and to the Earth stations in all of the major cities down here. As a result, the air around us is filled with information, data streams moving from node to node, access fields, packets uploading and downloading so thick if you could see ’em with your eyes you’d think you were in a snowstorm.

      “With the right hardware chelated into your brains, all you have to do, anywhere on the surface of the Earth, is think a question with the appropriate code tag, and the answer is there. You want to talk to another person, anywhere between here and the moon, all you do is think about them and bang, there they are inside your head. Right?

      “If you go to Mars, there are 412 communications satellites in orbit, not counting the big stations on Deimos and Phobos. Same thing holds. You don’t have as many channels or as much of a choice in where you get your data from, but you can have any question answered, any spot on the planet mapped down to half-meter resolution, or talk to anyone at all, just by thinking about it.

      “Even if you were to go all the way out to Llalande 21185, to the moon Ishtar, you’d find a few dozen communications satellites in orbit, plus the mission transport. Same deal. The Llalande net is a lot smaller even than the one on Mars. Highly specialized … but it’s there.

      “But what happens if you find yourself on some Goddess-forsaken dirtball that doesn’t have a GlobalNet system?”

      He let the words hang in the air for a moment, as Garroway and the other recruits wrestled with the concept. There was always a GlobalNet. Wherever man went, he took his technology with him … and that meant the net, and the myriad advantages of constantly being online. Life without the net would be as unthinkable as … as life without medical nano or zollarfilm or smartclothing or … food.

      Their access to the net had been limited since they’d arrived on Parris Island, of course, but even that knowledge didn’t carry the same impact as the DI’s grinning words.

      “Don’t look so shocked, kiddies,” Makowiecz went on. “People got on just fine without instant net access, back before they figured out how to shoot nanochelates into your brains. And you will too. Trust me on that one! Awright! Leh … face! Fowah … harch! Left! Left! Your left-right-left …”

      Garroway was willing to accept the idea of learning how to live as a primitive, at least in theory. He’d expected to go the camping and survival route, learning how to make a fire, orienteer across the Parris Island swamps, catch his own dinner, and treat himself or a buddy for snakebite. The Marines were famous for being able to live off the land and get by with nothing much at all. He had no idea just how primitive things would get, however, until that afternoon after chow, when Dolby marched half of them back to the recruit sick bay to be fitted with glasses.

      Glasses! He’d never heard of the things, though he realized now that he had seen them before, in various downloads of historical scenes and images from a century or two back. Two pieces of glass ground to precise optical properties, held just in front of the eyes by a plastic framework that hooked over the ears and balanced on the bridge of the nose … Once, evidently, they’d been quite fashionable, but the advent first of contacts, then of the dual technologies of genetic engineering and corrective visual nano, had sent them the way of the whalebone corset and silk necktie.

      Those recruits whose parents had selected for perfect vision before their births didn’t need visual correction. About half of the company, however, had had nano implants as part of their cerebralinks—submicroscopic structures that both allowed images and words to be projected directly onto the retina and, as an incidental side issue, subtly changed the shape of the cornea and of the eyeball itself to allow perfectly focused vision. Contact lenses, it had been decreed, were too dangerous, too likely to be smashed into the eye in pugil stick practice, a fall on the obstacle course, or hand-to-hand training. Glasses, with unbreakable transplas lenses, might fly off the face but they wouldn’t blind a careless or unlucky recruit. And, unlike contacts, glasses could be taken off and cleaned in the field with the swipe of a finger after a fall in the platoon mud pit.

      They just looked as ugly as sin … and twice as silly. Why, Garroway wondered, couldn’t they just inject them all with a specialized antinano that neutralized the neural chelates but left stuff like vision correctives?

      Several times so far in his service career he’d heard people refer to how there were three ways of doing anything—the right way, the wrong way, and the Corps’ way.

      He decided that he was going to have to get used to the occasional seeming irrationality, to accept it as a normal part of this new life.

      It was that or go mad.

       Headquarters, USMCSPACCOM

       Quantico, Virginia

       United Federal Republic, Earth

       1415 hours ET

      Colonel T.J. Ramsey wondered what megalomaniac had designed this program.

      A dozen Marine officers hovered in space, like gods looking down upon the glowing red-gold, brown, and violet sphere representing distant Ishtar. A window had opened against the planet, revealing an orbital survey map of the New Sumer region along the north coast of the continent called Euphratea. The sense of sheer power was almost hypnotic.

      Colonel Ramsey was completing the mission briefing. “That’s it, then,” he said. He gestured, and lines of green light flared against the map of the city, outlining perimeters, zones of fire, and LZs. “The initial landings will seize control of the city of New Sumer and the immediate area, with special attention paid to gaining control of the Pyramid of the Eye. That will be the Regimental Landing Team HQ.” Another window opened, enlarging the map area around a prominent rise west of the city. “Before that happens, however, we will need to neutralize Mount An-Kur. That will be the particular task of your Advance Recon Landing Team, Captain Warhurst.”

      The briefing room, if it could be called that, was being projected inside the minds of the participants, some of whom were at Quantico, others as far away as the Derna, in high Earth orbit. The icon representing Captain Martin Warhurst wore Marine