Battlespace. Ian Douglas

they’d make him take a drink of the stuff. I don’t think they trust the devil dogs out of the kennel without a leash.”

      “No, sir.”

      “Don’t worry. It’ll dissolve and be out of your system within forty-eight hours.”

      “I’m very glad to hear that, sir.”

      “Open it up,” Warhurst growled at the guard.

      The guard touched a control at his belt, and a panel in the transparency slid aside. Garroway, Womicki, Lobowski, and Eagleton all walked out of the cell.

      The Marines were wearing bright lime-green prison utilities, unlike the civilians in the holding cell. “Sir, about our uniforms. …” Womicki began.

      “I know. They told me at the front desk.”

      “Sir, we were robbed!”

      According to the report he’d seen coming in, Raphael security forces had arrived at the Starstruck to find all six Marines unconscious and naked. There was nothing unusual in that, perhaps, so far as the condecology police were concerned, and they’d turned them over to the East LA police without comment. The Marines had regained consciousness an hour later in the police infirmary, insisting that someone at the party had taken their things, including their asset cards.

      The police had already put a stop on the cards. As for the uniforms, there wasn’t much that could be done. Warhurst shook his head. What the hell did civilians want with Marine Class A’s? Costumes for a costume ball?

      Or maybe it had just been a damned prank.

      The guards led them back to the front receiving area, where a clerk offered a screen panel for Warhurst’s thumbprint. “Thumb here, sir. And here.”

      “I’ll have someone return the prison uniforms later.”

      “Don’t bother,” a beefy police sergeant said. “They’re disposables.”

      “Okay. These people have any effects to sign out?”

      “No, sir, They came in stripped bare.” The man smirked. “You Marines really like to party, huh?”

      “These Marines were robbed, Sergeant. I will be filing a report to that effect.”

      The man shrugged massive shoulders. “Suit yourself. But maybe next time your boys and girls won’t come where they’re not wanted, tendo?”

      “Yeah.” Warhurst said, his voice tight. “We tendo.”

      He’d been warned. Things had changed in the twenty years they’d been away.

      And in some ways, things hadn’t changed much at all.

       4

       7 NOVEMBER 2159

       Navy/Marine XT Training Facility Fra Mauro, Mare Imbrium, Luna 0920 hours GMT

      Hospitalman Second Class Phillip K. Lee was trying to run, but he was having a bit of trouble. His feet kept leaving the ground, turning him into a small low-altitude spacecraft, and he was having a hard time controlling his vector.

      Overhead, Earth hung half-full in a midnight sky, an achingly beautiful glory of blue and white; the sun was just above the horizon at Lee’s back, and the shadows he and the dust cloud cast stretched for long meters across a flat and barren plain.

      “Slow down, damn it!” he heard over his helmet headphones. “What are ya tryin’ to do, bounce into orbit?”

      His feet hit powdery gray dust, kicking up a spray of the stuff. He tried to stop, overbalanced, and tumbled onto the ground. For a moment, he lay there, listening to the rasp of his own breathing. Readouts beneath his visor showed the workings of both his suit and his body. His heart rate and respiration were up, but otherwise he was okay. His armored suit, built to take rough usage in the field, was intact.

      Good. Because if it wasn’t, he was in deep trouble.

      Awkwardly, he tried to roll over. He was wearing Mark VIII vac armor, bulky and massive. In some ways, it was a self-contained spacecraft. And he was having some trouble developing the coordination and skills he needed to fly the damned thing.

      “Lee, you fucking idiot!”

      “Sorry, Gunnery Sergeant,” he said. “Got a bit carried away there.”

      “You get carried away in this environment, sailor,” the voice told him with a growl, “and you are dead. Move slow. Move deliberate. Move methodical. Know what the fuck you’re doing, and why.”

      Well, he knew what he was doing. He was trying to reach the form of a space-suited Marine sprawled in the dust eighty meters ahead. And why?

      Well, he was a Navy hospital corpsman. And that’s what corpsmen did, even if this was a particularly realistic bit of training, rather than a real combat deployment.

      Carefully, he rose on unsteady feet and began moving forward again, more cautiously this time. Under lunar gravity, his body weight plus his armored suit and equipment weighed less than 24 kilos … but it still massed 144, which meant that once he got himself moving in any direction, stopping or turning could be a bit tricky. He’d done this sort of thing plenty of times in simulation … but this was his first time in a suit working in hard vacuum.

      It was tough to see his target. Marine chamelearmor responded to ambient lighting and reflected the colors and forms of the environment, allowing it to blend in with the background to an amazing degree. The effect wasn’t perfect in a complicated environment like a city or forest, but the surroundings here were simple: stark black sky and gray powder dust. At this range, Lee couldn’t see his target at all with his own eyes; his helmet display, responding to a suit transponder, threw a bright green reticule onto his visor to mark the target’s position.

      Moving more deliberately now, he crossed the gently rolling regolith, following his own leaping shadow. Ahead, a featureless mound, one among many, resolved itself into a space-suited male figure, lying on his side.

      He put on the metaphorical brakes before he reached the body, dropping to a kneeling position as he came to a halt in a spray of powder-fine dust. The patient had his back to Lee. He pulled the man over, peering down into the helmet visor. A fist-sized hole high in the right shoulder was leaking air; Lee could see the sparkle of ice crystals dancing above the tear and see crimson blood bubble as it welled up into a vacuum and froze. An ugly mass of frozen blood partly filled the wound.

      “You’re gonna be okay, mac,” he called over the combat frequency. “Hang on and we’ll get you patched right up!” There was no response—not that he was really expecting one. The patient’s suit display on his chest showed winking patterns of red, green, and yellow. The suit breach was sealed around the wound, but the heaters were out, commo was out, and O₂ partial pressure was dropping fast.

      The suit’s AI was still working, though. Lee pulled a cable connect from the left sleeve of his own armor and snicked it home in the receptacle at the side of the patient’s helmet. A second later, a full readout on the patient’s condition was scrolling down through his awareness, the words overlaid on the lower-right side of his visual field. The wound, he learned, had been caused by a probable laser hit estimated at 0.8 megajoule. The bolt had burned through his shoulder armor, which had scattered much of the energy. There was no exit hole, so the energy that had not been dispersed by armor or the explosive release of fluid from superheated tissue had stayed put, cooking muscle and bone. Nasty.

      Lee began going through the oft-practiced checklist. The challenge with giving combat field first-aid to someone in a vacuum was that you had to work through the