Battlespace. Ian Douglas

“They tell you what’s going on?”

      “Negative,” Dunne said. “The word is to sit tight and all will be revealed.”

      “Hurry up and wait,” Garroway said. “The litany of the modern Marine Corps.”

      “Fuck that shit,” Sergeant Wes Houston said. “It’s been that way since Sargon the Great was a PFC.”

      Garroway continued to eat, but he was somewhat unsettled. Kat’s crack about his famous ancestor had caught him by surprise. His great-grandfather had been Sands of Mars Garroway, a tough old-Corps Marine who’d led his men on a grueling march through the Vallis Marineris during the U.N. War of 2042 to capture an enemy-held base. The man was one of the legends of the Corps, another live-forever name like Dan Daily, Smedley Butler, and Chesty Puller. When he’d gone through his Naming Ceremony, he’d deliberately chosen his mother’s maiden name—Garroway—hoping, perhaps, that some of the luster of that name would rub off on him.

      Now that he was a Marine himself, though, he frequently found himself wishing it wouldn’t rub off quite so much. Officers and NCOs tended to expect more from him than of others, and everyone else assumed the name meant he had things easy.

      The fact was that there was no favoritism in the Corps—not below the rank of colonel, at any rate, not that he’d been able to detect.

      “There’s one piece of good news,” Dunne said. “The TIG promos are probably gonna go through. That’s something, at least.”

      Appreciative claps, whistles, and cheers sounded from around the mess table. It was good news.

      In the service, being promoted from one rank to the next required passing advancement tests, but more it required TIG—time-in-grade. Garroway had boarded the Derna right out of boot camp as a wet-behind-the-ears private first-class, pay grade E-2. The voyage out to Lalande 21185 had taken ten years, objective time, though relativistic effects contracted that to four years, ship’s time.

      His promotion to E-3, lance corporal, had been pretty much automatic. Technically, he’d needed six months as an E-2 and four years subjective counted, even if he’d slept through most of it in cybehibe. He’d received his chevron above crossed rifles while serving on Ishtar.

      He’d been on Ishtar for less than a year, however, before being packed onboard the Jules Verne and popped back into cybehibe for the return voyage. The promotion to the next rank, corporal, required a year in-grade plus a test. He would be an NCO, a noncommissioned officer, at E-4, with more responsibility and higher expectations regarding his performance.

      So here he was … ten years objective and four years subjective later. Technically, he had the time in grade. What he did not have was the experience.

      Still, it was embarrassing to be a Marine with—according to his Earthside records—twenty-one years in, and he was only an E-3. If he’d not gone to the stars, if he’d stayed in and stayed out of trouble, he would be a goddamned sergeant major by now, at the exalted pay grade of E-9.

      Scuttlebutt had it that the brass was considering a blanket set of promotions for the men and women of Operation Spirit of Humankind, with everyone bumped up a pay grade and given a hefty out-system combat bonus to boot. There was talk of a special download training session to implant the necessary skills and knowledge that went with the rank.

      Of course, if they kept that up, they’d have a whole platoon of gunnery sergeants. He wondered how they would handle the tendency for units to go top-heavy like that.

      “There’s also some other news,” Sergeant Dunne went on, “though I can’t vouch for it. Word is they may be about to offer us another deployment.”

      That brought shocked silence to the table. “Another deployment?” Kat asked. “Where?”

      Dunne shrugged. “I was talking to the senior revival tech a while ago. All he knew was that we were being kept here for a while, possibly with the idea of letting us volunteer to go out-system again.”

      Out-system again? Garroway thought about it, and he didn’t care for it. He’d just gotten back, and there were things he wanted to do, damn it. Like see how things had changed in twenty years. And, oh yeah … see if he could find his father and kill the bastard.

      Anyway, the usual routine in both the Navy and the Marines was to rotate personnel between ship and shore assignments or between overseas or off-world duty stations and duty back in the World.

      “This is just gonna be for volunteers, right, Sergeant?” he asked.

      “I’d imagine so,” Dunne said. “Unless the Corps’s changed one hell of a lot in the past twenty years.”

      “On the other hand,” Houston said thoughtfully, “we are all Famsit one or two. I’d imagine that’s a resource kind of scarce in the Corps, y’know?”

      “Yeah,” Corporal Regi Lobowski said. “Maybe there’s no one else to send.”

      “The question is,” Kat said, “send where? Any idea, Sarge?”

      “Nope. Not that there are that many possibilities.”

      Garroway had already uplinked to the platoon net, with a search query. How many out-system missions were going on right now?

      And the choices were fairly limited. Marine detachments had been assigned to several extrasolar archeological missions, but most of those had been recalled due to budgetary constraints. The Chiron mission, at Alpha Centauri A, had been reopened two years ago after a ten-year suspension, and the Diego Vasquez, with exoarcheologists, planetologists, and Marines, was now en route to begin again the exploration of that desert world’s dead cities, but Kali/Ross 154 and Thor/61 Cygni A both remained abandoned. There were Marines stationed at Rhiannon/Epsilon Eridani and at Poseidon/Tau Ceti, both worlds with ruins apparently going back to the long-vanished Builders.

      And there was a detachment onboard the Spirit of Discovery, a deep explorer now en route for 70 Ophiuchi, and another on the Wings of Isis expedition to Sirius. That brought a wistful pang to Garroway. Lynnley was assigned to that shipboard detachment. He wondered where she was now … en route home? She ought to be by now. He hoped so.

      What else? Outposts on Janus, on Hecate, and on Epona. There were no Marines stationed on those desolate worlds, but if there was trouble, Marines might be sent—assuming the need justified the colossal expense of an interstellar military expedition.

      “Betcha it’s Rhiannon,” Corporal Anna Garcia said. “I heard the Builder ruins there are even bigger and more extensive than on Chiron, and the EU would just love to snatch that little gem right out from under our noses.”

      “Nah,” Lobowski said. “Gotta be Chiron. Makes sense, right? I mean, we have a base there, we’re diggin’ up all kinds of cool shit, and then we pull out when the money dries up. But now we’re sending out another expedition to the place. Either there’s some highly classified shit goin’ down out there, stuff the big boys don’t want to talk about, or the EU is about to make a grab for the place. And the Feds want the Marines to handle it.”

      Womicki laughed. “Shee-it. Y’wanna know what I think?”

      “Not really.”

      “I think they’re sending us back to Ishtar. Wouldn’t that be just like the Corps? Send us out there to fight the Frogs, haul us back, and then as soon as we’re back, they ship us out to the same place again. SOP—standard operating procedure.”

      “You’re full of it, Wo. Your eyes are brown.”

      Garroway wasn’t sure what to think. Alpha Centauri … Epsilon Eridani … Tau Ceti … Sirius. Which was it?

      Sergeant Houston’s comment about famsits was a good one. Where possible, the Corps only sent Famsit one and two personnel to the stars … men and women who had no close family on Earth. That was for the