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

figures. The Corps likes to run every detail of your life, he thought with a wry inner shrug. And no matter what you wanted, the Corps would tell you to do something else.

      In a way, though, it was pleasant to have someone tell him what to do, even if the someone was only a disembodied voice in his head. He was still feeling a bit muzzy, like he’d just awakened after a night of pretty heavy drinking, and didn’t entirely trust his own thought processes.

      “Haven’t seen you around,” a muscular, naked man told him as he stepped into the shower queue. “Newbie?”

      “Yeah,” he admitted. “Company 1099.”

      “Don’t mean shit here,” the man said. “You’re 1st Marine Div now. How’dja make out on the pool?”

      “Pool?”

      “Yeah. The death-watch pool.”

      “Don’t pay any mind to this shithead,” a flat-chested woman in line behind Garroway said. “Some of these jackoffs think it’s cute to run a pool on how many people don’t survive cybehibe. Everybody puts in five a share and picks a number. The closer your number is to the CH attrition, the more money you get.”

      “What’d you win, Kris? Zip, as per SOP?”

      “Ten newdollars profit.”

      “Eat shit, Staff Sergeant. Twenty-five.”

      “Screw you.”

      “Your place or mine?”

      “Wait a second,” Garroway said, breaking into the exchange. “You’re saying people died during the passage?”

      “Sure,” the man said. “Whadja expect?”

      “Thirty-seven Marines didn’t make it,” the woman said. “Three percent attrition. That’s actually not that fucking bad. Sometime’s it’s as high as five.”

      “Hey. One cybehibe passage to Europa lost twelve out of sixty,” the man said with infuriating nonchalance. “One out of five. That was a real tech-fuck.”

      Garroway felt as though a cold draft had brushed the back of his neck. He’d not realized that nanotechnic hibernation was that much of a crapshoot.

      “Stop it, Schuster,” the woman said. “You’re scaring the kid.” She extended her hand. “Staff Sergeant Ostergaard,” she told him. “The jackoff in front of you is Sergeant Schuster, and don’t let him get to you, he’s a teddy bear. Welcome to the Fighting 44th.”

      “Sir, thank you, sir. Recruit Private Garroway.”

      “Don’t sir me,” Ostergaard told him. “I work for a living.”

      “You can drop the boot camp crap, kid,” Schuster added. “Officers are ‘sir.’ NCOs are addressed by rank or last name. The quicker you stop sirring everything that moves, the quicker you’ll fit in.”

      “Aye aye, s—uh, Sergeant.”

      “That’s better. You’re not ‘recruit private’ anymore, either. You’re a private first class now, unless they Van Winkle you.”

      “Van Winkle? What’s that?”

      “Promote you on the basis of your time served subjective,” Ostergaard said.

      “Objectively,” Schuster told him, “you’ve been in the Corps ten years. Subjectively, you’ve been in for four, even though you were asleep for most of that time. Can’t have a PFC with four-slash-ten years in. Looks real crappy on his service record.”

      Garroway remembered downloading that information in boot camp … hell, it seemed like a month ago. It had been a month ago, so far as his waking mind was concerned. This was going to take some getting used to.

      “So I might have gotten a promotion already?”

      Ostergaard shrugged. “You’ll just have to wait and see what the brass hats say. But … you know? Out here rank isn’t quite as important as they made it out to be back at Camp Lejeune.”

      “Heresy,” Schuster said.

      “S’truth. Way out here? The Corps is more like family than military.”

      The line moved forward enough that the three were able at last to file through the shower area, bombarded by water and by ultrasonic pulses that melted the accreted slime from their bodies. Hot air let them dry without requiring laundry facilities, and by the time they emerged back on the Hab Module deck, a laser sizer and uniform dispenser had been set up and was cranking out disposable OD utilities. The food paste tasted like … well, Garroway thought, like food paste, but it staunched the hunger pangs and helped him begin to feel more human.

      Which was important. It was slowly starting to dawn on him that he was eight light-years from home, twelve from Lynnley, surrounded by strangers … and utterly unsure of his chances of survival over the next twenty-four hours.

      Somehow, as thorough and rigorous as boot camp had been, it hadn’t prepared him for this—a devastating loneliness mingled with soul-searing fear.

      15

       25 JUNE 2148

       Lander Dragon One

       Approaching Ishtar

       1312 hours ST

      “… and four … and three … and two … and one … release!”

      A surge of acceleration pinned Captain Warhurst against his seat as powerful magnetic fields flung the TAL-S Dragonfly clear of the vast, flat underbelly of Derna’s reaction mass tank and into empty space. Seven additional Dragonflies, each with its attached lander, drifted out from the transport’s docking bays at the same moment, the formation perfectly symmetrical with Derna at the center. Derna’s massive AM drive had been shut down, since the gamma emissions from matter-antimatter annihilation would have fried the landers and all on board.

      Long minutes passed, and the landers continued to pace the Derna, sharing with the huge transport her current velocity toward the planet ahead. Once the landers were well clear of the deadly kill zone of Derna’s AM drive venturi, the transport and her two consorts again triggered their drives, continuing to decelerate.

      From the point of view of the eight landers, Derna, Algol, and Regulus appeared to be accelerating back the way they’d come at ten meters per second per second. In free fall, the Dragonflies hurtled toward the looming curve of the planet, now some two million kilometers ahead.

      Dragon One’s microfusion plasma thrusters kicked in as the craft pirouetted into its proper alignment, accelerating. They would hit Ishtar’s atmosphere six hours before the transports decelerated into orbit, a critical timing element of the Krakatoa mission.

      Still strapped immobile in his seat, encased in his Mark VII armor and with his LR-2120 clipped to its carry mount on his front torso, Warhurst closed his eyes and reviewed the op program.

      “D-day, the sixth of June 1944,” the voice of General King echoed in his noumenal reality, a replay of the general’s address of some hours before. “The Allied invasion forces were threatened by massive shore battery emplacements at Pointe du Hoc, west of Omaha Beach. Elements of the U.S. Army Rangers assaulted the battery from the sea, scaling forty-meter cliffs with mortar-fired grapnels trailing climbing ladders and ropes.”

      In his noumenal display Warhurst could see the grainy, black-and-white images of historical documentary films, showing primitively clad soldiers climbing sheer cliffs from tiny, tin-box boats bobbing in the surf at the base of the rocks as King’s voice droned on.

      “After a fierce firefight at the top of the cliffs, with opposing forces at times only meters apart, the Rangers overran the position, suffering