Star Strike. Ian Douglas

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 red icons marking the position of each known Muzzie soldier, gun, and vehicle, green for Marines, white for civilians or unknowns.

      The tacsit was clear enough. Theocrat riflemen had holed up in another skyscraper, an eighty-three-floor tower at the edge of the central plaza, and they’d turned the place into a fortress, with portable rocket launchers and at least one light plasma cannon. Life scans had revealed a heavy concentration of civilians in the smaller buildings clustered about the tower’s base; smash the tower with close-air ground support or orbital fire, and several hundred civilians would die.

      So rather than standing off and bombing the Theocrats, the Marines would have to do this the old-fashioned away, with a direct CQB assault.

      And it was going to get damned messy.

      “From the top down,” Ramsey said after a moment, answering Howell’s question. Under his control, green lines of light flicked across the imaginal landscape, taking advantage of available cover, then vaulting into the sky to converge on the tower roof from four directions. “Has to be. Otherwise we fight our way up that tower one floor at a time.”

      “Agreed,” Howell said. “But that rooftop is over 250 meters straight up. Too far for jumpjets.”

      “Then we’ll need to ride Specter guns,” Sergeant Chu pointed out. “And we’ll need to move straight up and fast.”

      “Roger that,” Corporal Ran Allison said. “Looks like a lucky two-fiver.”

      The slang referred to twenty-five percent casualties … if they were lucky. It was a grim and chillingly sobering assessment.

      “Ten