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

and some. Make it the An world at Llalande.

      John squirmed onto the crest of the dune, up on knees and elbows now, scuttling ahead as fast as he could. The next thing he knew, a hammer-blow caught him smack in the tail-bone, toppling him over and sending him sprawling back down the seaward side of the dune. Lying on his back, blinking up at the sky, he next became aware of Gunny Makowiecz leaning over him. “You okay, recruit?”

      “S-Sir! Yes, sir!”

      Makowiecz appeared to be listening to someone else—tapping into his link, perhaps, to the monitor AIs that kept track of all of the personnel on the range. “They say you caught a round in the ass, sweet pea. Maybe next time you’ll learn to keep your damned ass down, where it belongs! You hear what I’m saying?”

      “Sir! Yes, sir!”

      “How do you cross an exposed ridge crest?”

      “Sir! Flat on the belly and using all available cover to avoid showing a recognizable silhouette against the sky, sir!”

      “Back in the action, then! And this time keep your mind on what you’re doing!”

      How the hell did Makowiecz know what was going on in his head? The man was uncanny. “Aye aye, sir!”

      His hips and buttocks felt numb, but he rolled over and crawled back up the slope, careful this time to keep flat on the ground. Even rubber bullets packed a hell of a wallop, and he was going to be sore for days after this.

      Worse, the rest of the platoon was well across the mud pit by now, plowing ahead as explosions sent columns of mud geysering into the air and bullets smacked and chopped into the mud around them. He’d lost a lot of time.

      He thought-clicked to check his time, then groaned when nothing happened. Damn it, he still kept instinctively trying to trigger his Sony-TI 12000, even though almost a month had passed since he’d lost it. The worst was not being able to talk with Lynnley.

      Makowiecz was waiting for him with an evil grin when he straggled in at the finish line fifteen minutes later … one of the last three or four to arrive.

      “Assume the position, recruits!” Corporal Meiers, an assistant DI, barked. “Push-ups! And one! And two! And …”

      John’s legs were aching now, but he went into the exercise set with grim determination.

      “Remember, ladies!” Makowiecz bellowed over his assistant’s cadence. “Pain is the feeling of weakness leaving your body!”

      “And twenny-eight! And twenny-nine! And …”

      Lagrange Shuttle King Priam

      In approach to IST Derna

       Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

       1320 hours Zulu

      Half a million kilometers from Parris Island, the Marine Interstellar Transport Derna fell in her month-long orbit about the Earth. Built around a long, slender keel with a cluster of antimatter drive engines at the aft end, she had a length overall—her loa—of 622 meters. The massive, dome-shaped ablative shield and reaction-mass storage tank ahead of the three hab-cylinders gave her the look from a distance of a huge mushroom with a needle-slender stem. Aft, the broad flare of heat radiators resembled the fletching on a blunt-tipped arrow.

      When under drive, the hab cylinders were folded up tight behind the RM dome, safe from the storm of radiation and high-energy dust impacts resulting from near-c velocities. Under one g of acceleration, aft was down. When the drives stopped—even AM-charged torchships couldn’t haul enough reaction mass to carry them onward for years at one g—the three hab cylinders folded out and forward on arms extending ninety degrees from the ship’s central keel, though still protected by the overhang of the RM dome. Rotating around the ship’s axis, they provided out-is-down spin gravity for the passengers without requiring a rearrangement of the deck furniture, consoles, and plumbing.

      At the moment, the IST Derna was in orbital configuration, her hab modules spread and rotating slowly. Beyond her, twenty kilometers away, Antimatter Production Facility Vesuvius gleamed in the sunlight, its vast solar array back-lit by the glare of the sun.

      Strapped into one of the passenger seats on board the Lagrange Shuttle King Priam, Gavin Norris watched the approach on the viewscreen set into the back of the seat in front of him. The shuttle was making her final orbital insertion maneuver with short, sharp taps on her thrusters; she was still several kilometers out from the Derna, but the immense transport still all but filled the screen.

      Norris was on his way at last, with unimaginable wealth at the end of the journey. He let his gaze stray from the screen and move about the passenger cabin. Every seat was taken by hard-muscled men and women in gray fatigues—the Marines who would be his fellow travelers for the next two decades.

      He was glad that most of that time would be spent asleep. These were not exactly the sort of people he would choose as companions on a vacation cruise. The woman in the seat next to him, for instance … an argument against genetic manipulation and somatic nanosculpting if ever he’d seen one. Big-boned, lean, muscular, she looked like she could snap him in two with a glance from those eerily black augmented eyes. Her hair had been close-cropped to little more than fuzz, and if she had anything like breasts under those fatigues, she kept them well hidden. Hard, cold, asexual … he tried to imagine himself in bed with her, then decided that was a noumenon he did not want to file in permanent memory.

      He wondered why they were here. This was a volunteer mission, of course; you didn’t simply order young men and women to leave homes and families for a twenty-year mission to another star, not if you wanted to avoid a full-fledged mutiny. They certainly weren’t offering these grunts money. What, then? Rank? Glory? He snorted to himself. To Norris, the military mind was something arcane and incomprehensible.

      “What the fuck are you gawking at, civ?”

      He blinked. He’d not been aware that he was staring. “Uh, sorry,” he told her. A thought-click picked up her name-tag data. She was Gunnery Sergeant Athena Horst, of something called ComCon DS 219. The mil-babble told him nothing. “I was just wondering why you Marines would sign up for a party like this.”

      She grinned at him, an unsettling showing of teeth. “Hey, this is the Corps,” she told him. “Just like they say in the recruiting blurbs. ‘See exotic worlds, meet fascinating life-forms, kill them. … ’”

      “Uh … yeah …”

      “Why are you here?”

      “Me? I’m the corporate rep for PanTerra. They have … interests on Llalande, and I’m going to see to it that they’re protected.”

      “What, you’re a lawyer?”

      “As a matter of fact, I am. My specialty, though, is CPM.”

      “What’s that?”

      “Corporate problem management.” When her face remained blank, he added, “I’m a troubleshooter. I make certain that small problems do not become large ones.”

      “Troubleshooter, huh?” She chuckled. “That’s rich. A civilian Marine!”

      “What?”

      “A civilian Marine! We’re troubleshooters too, y’know. There’s trouble, we shoot it!” She cocked her thumb and forefinger, mimicking a gun. “Zzzt! Blam!” She blew across the tip of her finger. “Problem down. Area secure.”

      “I see.”

      “I doubt that. Ha!”

      “What?”

      “I was just thinking,” she said, grinning. “When we get to Ishtar, let me know how your troubleshooting works with the Frogs.”

      “Uh … frogs?”

      “The Ishtaran abs. The Ahannu.