Star Strike. Ian Douglas

body. Presumably, they were still straggling along out in the desert someplace, unless Warhurst had sent a transport out to pick them up.

      Garroway had assumed that the meager third-G of Mars’ surface gravity would make calisthenics—no, PT, in the Marine vernacular—easy. He’d been wrong. Gods, he’d been wrong. The run across the rugged highlands of the Noctis Labyrinthus had left him at the trembling edge of collapse. His skinsuit, newly grown for him when he’d checked in at the Arean Ring receiving station, was saturated with sweat, the weave of microtubules straining to absorb the moisture and chemicals now pouring from his body. His leg muscles were aching, his lungs burning. He’d thought the implants he’d purchased two weeks ago would have handled the extra stress.

      This was not going to be easy.

      The worst of it was, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst had accompanied them on that run, and so far as Garroway could tell, the guy wasn’t breathing hard, hadn’t even broken a sweat. His uniform was still crisp, the flat-brimmed “Smokey Bear” hat of ancient Corps tradition still precisely squared above those hard, cold eyes.

      “Okay, children,” he said, planting his hands on his hips. “Now that we’ve warmed up a bit, it’s time we got down to work. Hit the deck, push-up position! And one! And two! …”

      By now, the sun was up, though much of the run had been through the foggy, pre-dawn darkness. Mars was a tangle of mismatched terrain, rendered both beautiful and twisted by the centuries of terraforming. The sky was a hard, deep, almost violet-blue, the sun shrunken and cold compared to back home. The ground was mostly sand, though patches of gene-tailored mosses and coldleaf added startling accents of green and blue. The run had brought them in a broad circle back to Marine RTC Noctis Labyrinthus, a lonely huddle of domes and quick-grown habs in a rocky desert. East, the tortured terrain of the Vallis Marineris glowed banded red and orange beneath the morning sun, and open water gleamed where the Mariner Sea had so far taken hold.

      Damn it, he couldn’t breathe. …

      “Come on, kiddies!” Warhurst shouted. “You can give me more than that! There’s plenty of oh-two in the air! Suck it down!”

      What sadist, Garroway wondered, had decided that this was where Marine recruits would come to train? Centuries ago, of course, RTC had been on Earth … at a place called Camp Pendleton, and at another place called Camp Lejeune. Those places were no more, of course. The Xul Apocalypse had wrecked both bases, when tidal waves from the oceanic asteroid strikes had come smashing ashore. For a time, Marines had been trained on Luna, and then at one of the new LaGrange orbital bases, but almost two centuries ago, with the completion of the Arean Ring, the Corps had transferred much of its training command to Mars. The first recruits on the surface at Noctis Labyrinthus, Garroway had heard, had done their PT wearing coldsuits and oxygen masks. He was beginning to think someone had jumped the gun in deciding to forego the support technology.

      “Okay! Okay! On your feet!” Warhurst clapped his hands. “How are we doing, kids? Eyes bright? Hearts pumping? Good! We have a very special treat in store for you now.” He pointed. “See that building? Fall in, single file, in front of that door! Move it! Move it!”

      The platoon scrambled to obey, running fifty meters across the ’crete pavement and lining up outside the door. A sign beside the doorframe read sickbay.

      That puzzled Garroway. They’d pumped him full of medinano at the receiving station, enough, he’d thought, to kill everything in his system that wasn’t nailed down. He’d already had several thorough physicals, back on Earth Ring, and in Mars orbit. What were they going to …

      Realization hit him just as Warhurst began addressing the formation.

      “This, children, is where we separate the real men and women from the sheep. You were all informed that this would be part of your recruit training, and you all agreed when you thumbed your enlistment contract. However … if any of you, for any reason, feel you cannot go through with this, you will fall out and line up over there.” He pointed across the grinder at one of the assistant DIs, who was standing in front of a transport skimmer. “You will be returned to the receiving station, and there you may make arrangements for going home. No one will think the less of you. You will simply have proven what everybody knows—that the Marine Corps is not for everyone. Do I have any takers?”

      Again, Garroway thought he felt some of the recruits in line around him wavering. The terror was almost palpable.

      “If you file through that door,” Warhurst continued, a tone of warning giving his edge a voice, “you will be given a shot of decoupling nano. It won’t hurt … not physically, at any rate. But after the shot takes effect, you will be unable to access your personal cerebral implants. Right now, each of you needs to think about what that means, and decide if being a Marine is worth the cost.”

      The decoupler shot. Yeah, they’d told him about it, but he’d already known about it, of course. It was one of the things that set the Marines and a few other highly specialized elite military units apart from the Army, Navy, or the High Guard. Wonderingly, Garroway looked down at his right hand, catching the glint of gold and silver wires imbedded in the skin at the base of his thumb and running in rectilinear patterns across his palm.

       He was going to lose his implants.

      The vast majority of humans had cereblink implants, including palm interface hardware, quantum-phase neurocircuitry, and a complex mesh of Micronics grown layer by layer throughout the brain, especially in the cerebral sulci and around the hypothalamus. The first nano injections generally were given to the fetus while it was still in womb or in vitro, so that the initial base linkages could begin chelating out within the cerebral cortex before birth. Further injections were given to children in stages, at birth, when they were about two standard years old, and again when they were three. By the time they were four, they already possessed the hardware to let them palm-interface with a bewildering variety of computers, input feeds, e-pedias, and machines. Most basic education came in the form of electronic downloads fed directly into the student’s cerebral hardware. Adults depended utterly on hardware links for everything from flying skimmers to paying bills to experiencing the news to opening doors to talking to friends more than a few meters distant. The cereblink was one of the absolutely basic elements of modern society, the ultimate piece of technology that allowed humans to interface with their world, and interact with their tools.

      And now, the recruits of Company 4102 were about to lose that technology and, for the first time in their lives, would 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