by Ian Douglas
“Belay that, Lee,” Gunnery Sergeant Eckhart’s voice told him. “The exercise is concluded.”
“But Gunnery Sergeant—”
“I said belay that! Mount up on the Bug and come on home.”
“Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant,” he replied. From the sound of Eckhart’s voice, he’d screwed this one up pretty badly. He looked over one of the Marine’s shoulders at the patient and saw the deadly wink of red lights: PATIENT TERMINATED.
Damn, what had he missed? He’d followed procedure right down the list.
He mounted the UT-40, popularly known as a “medibug,” or “bug” for short. The passenger compartment wasn’t much more than an open framework of struts, with a bit of decking underfoot. The two Marines were strapping the patient onto a carry stretcher slung portside outboard, but without the usual formalities of connecting life support and condition monitors. The exercise was over.
The patient, of course, wasn’t really dead, had never been alive to begin with in the traditional sense. It was a high-tech dummy, a quite sophisticated robot, actually, with a very good onboard AI that let it realistically simulate a wide range of combat wounds, injuries, traumas, various diseases, and even potentially fatal conditions such as drop-sickness-induced vomiting, followed by choking inside a sealed helmet. He was called “Misery Mike,” and he and his brothers had helped train a lot of Navy corpsmen for SMF duty. He couldn’t really die of vacuthorax because he wasn’t alive to begin with…but how Lee had treated his problems could mean life or death for Lee’s hopes to ship out with the Marines.
The UT-40’s plasma thrusters fired, the blasts both silent and invisible in the lunar vacuum. Dust billowed out from beneath the bug’s belly as the ugly little vehicle rose into the black sky. After a moment’s acceleration, the thrusters cut out, and the medibug drifted along on a carefully calculated suborbital trajectory, the cratered and dust-cloaked terrain slipping smoothly past a hundred meters below.
He spent the time going over his treatment of the last casualty. He knew he should have been more careful about moving the suit. If he’d left the wound in the shade, kept it below freezing, he might not have damaged the patient’s lungs as badly. But the lungs had already been damaged and vacuthorax would still have been an issue. Damn, what had he missed?
Minutes later, the medibug was descending over the powdery desert of Fra Mauro. Ahead, the Navy–Marine Lunar Facility was spread out in the glare of the early morning sun, its masts, domes, and Quonset cylinders casting oversized shadows across the surface.
The Fra Mauro facility had started life a century and a half ago as a U.N. base, with attendant spaceport. Taken over by U.S. Marines in the U.N. War of 2042, it had been converted into a joint Navy–Marine lunar base. It now consisted of over one hundred habitat and storage modules clustered about the sunken landing bay, including the blunt, pyramidal tower of the Fra Mauro Naval Hospital, ablaze with lights. A secondary landing dome at the base of the hospital was already open to receive the bug, which bounced roughly—still in complete silence—as the pilot jockeyed the balky little craft in for a landing.
Twenty minutes later, Lee, shed of his armor but still wearing the utility undergarment with its weave of heat-transfer tubes and medinano shunts, palmed the access panel to a door marked GSGT ECKHART. “Enter,” sounded in Lee’s thoughts over his implant and the door slid aside.
The room was small and tightly organized, as were all work spaces in the older part of the facility. Deck space was almost completely occupied by a desk and two chairs. Most of the bulkheads were taken up with storage access panels, though there was room for a holoportrait of President Connors, another of Commandant Marshke, and a framed photograph of an FT-90 in low orbit, the dazzling curve of Earth’s horizon below and beyond its sleek-gleaming hull.
“Hospitalman Second Class Lee, reporting as ordered, Gunnery Sergeant.”
“At ease, at ease,” Eckhart waved him toward the chair. “I’m not an officer and we don’t need the formal crap. Copy?”
“Uh…sure, Gunnery Sergeant. Copy.” He took the offered seat. Was this the prelude to a chewing out? Or to his being booted out of the program?
“Relax, son,” Eckhart told him. “And call me ‘Gunny.’”
“Okay, Gunny. Uh, look. I’ve been reviewing my procedure for that last casualty and I see what went wrong. I shouldn’t have rolled the wound into sunlight—”
Eckhart waved him to silence. “Your dedication is duly noted, son. And we’ll debrief your session later, with the rest of the class. Right now I want to review your request for SMF.”
Lee went cold, as cold as the shade on the Lunar surface, inside. “Is there a problem?”
“Not really. I just think you need to have your head examined, is all. What the hell do you want to ship out-system for, anyway?”
Lee took a deep breath, hesitated, then let it out again. How did you answer a question like that?
“Gunny…I just want to go, that’s all. I’ve been space-happy since I was a kid, reet? ‘Join the Navy and see the stars.’”
“You’re in space now, in case you haven’t noticed. Most space-happy kids never get as far out as the moon. Or even low-Earth orbit. You know that.” He leaned forward, hands clasped on the desktop before him. “You made it! You’re in space. Why are you so all-fired eager to take the Big Leap?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call the moon space, Gunny.” He pointed at the overhead. “I mean, Earth’s right there, and everything, in plain view.”
“There are always billets on Mars. Or Europa. Or on Navy ships on High Watch patrol. I want to know why you want to go to another fucking star. That’s what you put in for on your dreamsheet, right?”
He sighed. “Yes, Gunny. I did.”
“You want to sign on for a deployment that might last twenty to thirty years objective. You come back home aged maybe four years and find yourself completely out of pace with everything. Everyone you knew is thirty years older. Your implant is out of date. You don’t understand the language. Hell, the culture might seem as alien to you as anything you’ll run into XT. You won’t fit in anymore.”
“Gunny, I don’t really have anything here, on Earth, I mean. Nothing but the Corps.”
“Uh-huh.” Eckhart’s eyes glazed over as he reviewed some inner download of data. “It says here you just went through a divorce.”
“Yes, Gunny.”
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “My wife and husband both filed for divorce. I came home from my last deployment and found the locks had been changed on my condhome. They didn’t recognize my palmprint any longer. I found out later they’d filed a couple of months earlier, but the formal DL hadn’t caught up with me yet.”
“Why the split? They tell you why?”
“‘Irreconcilable differences,’ but what the fuck does that mean?”
“Problems with you in the service?”
“Well, yeah, I guess. I know Nance didn’t like me always going on long deployments. Egypt. Siberia. That last six months at the LEO spaceport. Still, she could’ve waited, could’ve talked to me, damn it! Ten years of marriage, zip! Down the black hole. I know now that Chris is a slimy, two-faced, twisted sick-fuck bastard who’s in love with melodrama and the sound of his own voice. I’m not sure how he convinced Nance, though. I…I thought we really had something. Something permanent.”
“Right. So you find it’s not permanent and you figure twenty years or so out-system will let you get away from your problems. Or…maybe you’re in it for the revenge? Come back four years older, when your siggos, your significant others, are twenty years older?”
“What’s the point of that? We’d all still be middle-aged. But I guess I do want to get away from everything, yeah.”
“Well, I damn well guess you do. But is cutting yourself off from every soul you’ve known on Earth, cutting yourself off from the ties you were born to, is that all really worth it? You can’t run away from yourself, you kn
ow.”
“I’m not running away from myself. If anything, I’m running away from them.”
“Son, I’ve heard this story before, you know. Maybe about a thousand times. You’re not the first poor schmuck to get shit-canned by a dearly beloved siggo or kicked in the teeth by people he believed in and trusted. And it hurts, I know. Gods of Battle, I know. And I also know you’re carrying the pain here.” He pointed at Lee’s chest. “That’s what you really want to get away from, and that’s what you’re going to carry with you. You can run all the way to Andromeda, son, and the pain will still be there. Question is, is the attempt worth losing everything else you know on Earth as well?”
“Gunny,” Lee said, “I’d still have the Corps. Even in Andromeda. Semper fi.”
“Ooh-rah,” Eckhart said, but with a flat inflection utterly devoid of enthusiasm. “Son, it’s my job to talk you out of this, if I can.”
“Huh? Why?”
“To stop you from screwing up your life.”
“Well, you’ve got my request, Gunny. All you need to do is add your request denied to the form, and it’s as good as shit-canned.”
“I may still do that, Lee, if you don’t convince me pretty quick. Trouble is, I have to tell you that we need volunteers for SMF. And we need them bad. We have a big one coming up soon, a big deployment. And your class, frankly, is all we have to work with. It’s worse than that, actually. Three of you have a Famsit rating of one, out of a class of thirty-eight, and seven have a rating of two. Everybody else has close family.”
“So, let me get this straight. You need Corpsmen for SMF, but you have to try to get us to back out after we volunteer? That doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.”
Eckhart sighed. “This is the Marine Corps, son. It doesn’t always make sense. I’ll approve your request—if you can convince me that you are not making the big mistake of your sorry young life.”
“I…see….”
And he did. His heart leaped. Eckhart was just giving him a chance to back out of this.
Yes! He was going to the stars!…
“I’m not sure what you want to hear, Gunny. I want to go. I have nobody I’m attached to on Earth. You said the culture here would be different, that I might have trouble fitting in when I got back. Well, you know what? I’ve never fit in, not really. Not until I joined the Navy. Hell, maybe I’ll like what I find here better in twenty years, fit in better than I do now, y’know?”
Eckhart nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I do know. Tell me something. Why did you become a corpsman?”
“Huh? Well, when I first enlisted, I had this idea of going on someday and becoming a doctor. I figured what I learned in Corps School would give me a leg up, know what I mean? And then there was the fact that my dad was a Marine. He used to tell me stories about the company’s ‘Doc,’ that special relationship between the Marines and their corpsmen. I’d always been interested in biology, physiology, stuff like that, and I was good at them in school. It just seemed like the right choice.”
Damn it, he wanted to go Space Marine Force. As a Navy Hospital Corpsman, the equivalent of an Army medic for Navy and Marine personnel, he’d enjoyed working with the Marines already. Going SFM simply took things a step or ten farther.
A century or two back, the equivalent of today’s SMF had been assignment with the Navy’s FMF—the Fleet Marine Force. The force included Navy doctors and corpsmen who shipped out with the Marines, sailed with them on their transports, and went ashore with them in combat. It was a long and venerable tradition, one that went back at least as far as the Navy pharmacy mates who hit the beaches in the Pacific with the Marines during World War II, and arguably went even further back to the surgeon’s mate’s loblolly boys of the sailing ships of a century before that.
He’d volunteered for SMF almost two months ago, just after the completion of his six-month deployment to LEO.
Just after the divorce became final.
Damn it, the hell with Earth. He wanted to go to the stars.
“Gunny, the Navy…and, well, now the Marines, if I go SMF, they’re my family now. I’ve been taking overseas and off-world deployments for the last four years, since I joined up. It’s time for me to re-up. I want to re-up. I’ve always wanted the Navy to be my career.”
Eckhart grinned. “A lifer, huh?”
“Yeah, a lifer. And it’s my life.”
“The government might point out that your life belongs to it.”
“Okay, but in so far as I do have a free choice, this is what I want to do with my life. ‘Join the Navy and see other worlds,’ right? So why can’t I re-up with a shot at really seeing some new territory?”
“How does Sirius sound to you, son?”
“Sirius? I thought there were no planets there?”
Eckhart grinned. “There aren’t. But there’s…something. An artifact. A space habitat. They didn’t tell me much in the report I saw, but there’s something. And the word is, a full MIEU is being sent out there. And they need Corpsmen. A bunch of ’em.”
An artifact. Another remnant of one of the ancient civilizations that had been kicking around this part of the galaxy thousands of years ago. Maybe the An. Or maybe it was something really special…something left by the Builders at about the same time that Homo erectus was in the process of making the transition to Homo sapiens.
“Sirius sounds just fine, Gunny.”
Okay, there wouldn’t be a planetfall. But a chance to see a high-tech artifact left by a vanished, starfaring civilization? And whatever the thing was, it would have to be damned huge if they were sending a whole Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit—a force that would number over a thousand men and women, all told. What the hell had they found out there?
“Does that mean I’m in?”
Eckhart grinned. “You’re in, Doc.”
I’m going to Sirius! I’m going to another star!…
He almost didn’t hear what Eckhart said next.
“You’ll continue your training here for the rest of the month,” Eckhart was saying. “After that, you and the other Corpsmen from this class who make the grade, the ones who’ve volunteered for extrasolar deployment, will ship for L-4 for your XS training and final assignment. And just let me say, Doc…welcome aboard!”
“Thanks, Gunny! Uh, does that mean you’re coming too?”
“Yes, it does. The brass is doing some scrambling right now, looking for famsit ones and twos.” He grinned. “I figured you damned squids’d need me to keep an eye on you!”
“That sounds decent, Gunny.”
“Now get your sorry ass down to debrief. We’re gonna want to hear, in exacting detail, just what you did wrong on that last field exercise!”
Vacation over. “Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”
“For one thing, you could’ve used a thermalslick.” He grinned. “Chief Hart is gonna tell you all about that!”
Lee blinked. He hadn’t even thought of that. Thermal-slicks were part of each corpsman’s field kit—a tough, polymylar sheet like aluminum foil on one side, jet black on the other. It could reflect sunlight or absorb it and the black side had the added trick of a layer of carbon buckyball spheres that made it almost frictionless—great for dragging the dead weight of an injured man.
But then, he hadn’t even thought about the problem of sunlight melting the wound’s clot until it was too late.
At the moment, none of that mattered.
I’m going to Sirius….
Alpha Company Headquarters Office
Star Marine Force Center
Twentynine Palms, California
1535 hours, PST
“Comp’ny…atten…hut!”
Sharply dressed in newly issued green utilities, Garroway and his five fellow Marines came to attention. They were standing in Captain Warhurst’s office at Twentynine Palms, a fairly Spartan compartment made warm by the desert sunlight streaming through the transparent overhead. Staff Sergeant Dunne had marched them in; Warhurst himse
lf was behind his low, kidney-shaped desktop, hand on a palm reader as he downloaded a report in his noumenal space.
After a moment, his glazed expression cleared, and he looked up. “Staff Sergeant?” he said.
“Sir!” Dunne rasped. “Corporals Garcia, Lobowski, Vinton, Lance Corporals Womicki, Garroway, and Eagleton, reporting for captain’s nonjudicial punishment, sir!”
“Very well, Staff Sergeant.” Warhurst folded his hands and looked at the six, studying each of them in turn. “Will all of you accept nonjudicial punishment? You all have the option of requesting formal courts-martial, at which time you would be entitled to legal representation.”
“Sir,” Garroway said. They’d agreed earlier on that he would be their spokesperson. They’d been invited to the party by his friend, after all. “We accept the NJP.”
“Very well. We’ll keep this short and simple then.” He leaned back in his swivel chair. “What the hell were you young idiots thinking, getting into a brawl ashore? Were you, each of you, aware of the delicate nature of the relationship between Marines and civilians here just now?”
“Yes, sir,” Garroway replied.
“What about the rest of you? You all downloaded the spiel before you went on liberty? The one about being good ambassadors for the Corps while ashore?”
All of them nodded, with a few mumbled “Yes, sirs” mixed in.
“I didn’t hear that.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Right now, ladies and gentlemen, the Marines can not afford a major firefight with the civilian sector. Brawling in a bar in downtown San Diego is one thing. Smashing up a condecology in the high-rent district of East Side LA is something else entirely.”
As Warhurst spoke, Garroway wondered what was in store for them. Warhurst had told them they were on report when he’d bailed them out of that police holding tank. “Captain’s nonjudicial punishment” was an old tradition within both the Navy and the Marines, a means of noting and punishing minor infractions short of the far more serious proceedings of an actual court-martial. It was more commonly called “captain’s mast,” from the ancient practice of holding these proceedings in front of the mast on board old-time sailing ships at sea.
