by Ian Douglas
“Fuckin’-A, Gunnery Sergeant,” Corporal Marin Delazlo put in. “We’re due some freakin’ down time!”
“Maybe,” Ramsey said, taking in the noise and bustle of their surroundings with a grin, “just maybe this is it!”
The six of them were in the Comet Fall, a popular bar and nightlife center on the Seventh Ring Grand Concourse. It was large, murkily red-lit, and crowded; perhaps half of the other tables had privacy fields up, making them look like hazy, translucent ruby domes. The house dancers on-stage and the wait staff navigating among the tables all were stylishly nude, with eye-tugging displays of light and color washing across every square centimeter of exposed skin. The club patrons, both those at non-shielded tables and up on the stage with the professional dancers, wore everything from nothing at all to elaborate formal costumes. Music throbbed and pounded, though you needed a sensory helm for the full effect. Ramsey and the other Marines had elected not to wear helms, preferring unfiltered conversation instead.
His mind drifting, Ramsey found himself following the gyrations of one young woman on-stage wearing what looked like a swirling, deck-sweeping cloak of peacock feathers, a glittering gold sensory helm, and a dazzling corona flammae; she’d been enhanced either genetically or through prosthetics with an extra pair of arms, and her dance movements were eerily and compellingly graceful.
He was feeling wretchedly out of place. Aquinas and Gonzales both were wearing fairly conservative civvie skin-suits, but the rest of them were in undress blacks. Both sets of attire, by regulations, were acceptable wear for liberty, but it tended to make them stand out somewhat against the gaudy and sometimes extravagant background of evening wear sported by the other patrons in the establishment.
“Like hell,” Gonzales said after a long moment. “I don’t know about you clowns, but me, I’m just getting started! I’m not ready to redeploy!”
“That’s right,” Chu said. “I have a lot of catching up to do in the drinking and socializing departments before my next deployment!”
“Ooh-rah!” the others chorused, and Colver raised her glass in salute. “To downtime!”
“Downtime and down the hatch!” Ramsey added, lifting his own glass, then tossing it off. “Semper fi!”
The drink was called a solar flare, and the name was apt. He felt the burn going down, then the kick, and finally the rolling swell of expanding consciousness as the drink’s nano activators kicked in.
If his platoon implant AI had been activated, he thought, it would be screaming at him by now. Marines were not supposed to imbibe implant-activators, for fear it would scramble their hardware and invalidate their government warranties or whatever. He didn’t care. After Alighan, he needed this. Hell, they all did.
How the hell could they just give it away, after what we went through out there?
“Well, the brass is ramping up for something big,” Ramsey told the others, perhaps three or four flares later. He had to focus on each word as he brought it to mind, then tried to say it. He was pleased. No slurring of speech at all, at least that he could detect. “I just heard this morning that we’re getting a shuttle load of fungies in from RTC Mars.”
“Yeah,” Delazlo said, nodding. His speech was slurred, but it didn’t matter. “’Sh’right. I heard that, too.”
“Shit. Check your daily downloads, guys, why don’t ya?” Vallida put in. “The fungies arrived yesterday. Forty of them, straight out of Noctis Labyrinthus.”
“No shit?” Ramsey asked. He hadn’t heard about that. Still, Samar was such a huge vessel, and she was swarming right now with technicians, computer personnel, cargo handlers, mechs, and shipwrights. A freaking regiment could have come on board and he wouldn’t have noticed.
“No shit,” Vallida said. “Seems they want all units up to full strength, even if we have to raid a nursery to do it.”
“Shee-it,” Gonzales said with considerable feeling. He was looking a bit the worse for the wear as multiple solar flares continued to burn their way through his circulatory system. “Just what we need. Babies to baby-sit.”
“Hey,” Colver said with a shrug. “Fresh meat. Don’t knock it.”
“We all had to start somewhere,” Chu said, the words slurring slightly.
“The Corps is home, the Corps is family,” Ramsey recited. It was an old mantra focused on the belonging of Marines. “And to hell with the politicians.”
A waitress walked up to their table, her face a brilliant, sapphire blue, with rainbow luminescence rippling across the rest of her body. “You folks with the 55th MARS?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Ramsey said. He felt a cold chill prickling at the back of his neck, and some of the drunken haze began evaporating from his mind. The Comet Fall was one of hundreds of nightspots along this stretch of Ring Seven. How the hell could they have tracked the six of them?
“You heard about us, eh, babe?” Gonzalez said, leering as he reached for her.
“Nope,” the waitress said, slapping his hand away. “Can’t say that I have. But your CO sure has. You’re wanted back at your ship, immediately. All of you. What’d you do, switch off your AIs?”
“How about another round for the table?” Aquinas asked.
“To hell with that,” the waitress said, as she began collecting empty and half-empty glasses. “I could get fired and the boss could lose his license! You people just move on now, before the SPs show up.”
“So, what have we here?” a young man seated at the next table over exclaimed. “Pretty-boy Muh-rines?”
The atmosphere turned suddenly cold. That next table was a big one, with fifteen tough-looking men seated around it, all of them with similar patterns of blue-white luminous tattoos on the left sides of their faces—which meant either a punk gang or a fraternity. The privacy screen had been up until a few moments ago, but now it looked like they’d just taken an unhealthy interest in the party next to them.
“You’d better go,” the waitress told the Marines, dropping her voice.
“The lady’s right,” Ramsey told his friends, pressing his palm to the credit reader on the table to pay the outstanding bill, then standing. “Let’s move on. We don’t want trouble.”
“Yeah!” a civilian called from the next table. He sniggered. “Run home to mommy and daddy!”
“Back off, mister,” Ramsey growled. “This isn’t your business.”
“Not my business, Muh-rine?” the kid said, standing and turning to face Ramsey. “I’ll fucking make it my business if I want. You freaks aren’t wanted here.”
“That’s right,” another of the punks said. “You pretty-boy gyrines’re nothin’ but trouble. Who let you out without your keepers, huh?”
“You lousy little civilian shit—” Aquinas said, starting forward.
Ramsey put a hand on his arm. “Belay that, Marine. Outside. Now.”
A moment later, they stepped onto the plaza beneath the Comet Fall’s strobing sign. The concourse was a wide, sweeping mall lined with multi-tiered shops, bars and eateries, with a vast arch of transparency stretched overhead. Earth, half-full, hung directly overhead.
Chu looked up at the blue and white-mottled orb, frowning through his alcoholic haze. “Why aren’t we falling?”
The question, though garbled, wasn’t as drunken-wrong as it sounded. Each structure within the Rings circled Earth once in twenty-four hours, maintaining geostationary position. They should all have been in free fall, but the gravity here was roughly equivalent to the surface gravity on Mars, about three-tenths of a G.
Vallida laughed at him. “Jesus! You just now noticing, Chu-chu?”
“Gravity…” Ramsey started to say, then tripped over a hiccup. “Gravity engineering,” he finally said. “Quantum-state phase change in the…in the…” He stamped his foot. “Down there. Subdeck infrastructure. Haven’t you ever been to th’ Rings?”
“Nope. Born’n raised on Mars. Never left until I joined up, and they fuckin’ send me to Alighan….”
“T
here they are!”
Harsh voices sounded behind them. Ramsey turned, and saw the gang from the Comet Fall spilling out into the street. They were looking for trouble, looking for a fight.
“Heads up, Marines,” Ramsey said. He was fumbling through the mental commands that would revive his personal AI. If he could connect with the watch on board Samar…or even with the nearest Shore Patrol base….
“You pretty-boys need to be taught a lesson!” one of the gangers growled. He was big, heavily muscled, and evidently having some trouble focusing. “You pretty-boys shouldn’t be coming into our part of th’Ring….”
“They ain’t all pretty-boys,” another civilian said. He pointed at Colver and Vallida. “Them two are kinda cute, for Muh-rines.”
“Then we’ll be gentle with them,” the first said, with a nasty laugh.
“Yeah,” another said. “We’ll give them special treatment. But the rest of ’em—”
Ramsey slammed the heel of his palm into the kid’s nose before he completed the statement, snapping his head sharply back. The other Marines flowed into action in the same instant; Ramsey heard the crack of one punk’s arm as Vallida broke it, heard another ganger choke and gurgle as Gonzales drove stiffened fingers into his larynx, but he was already stepping across the body of the one he’d downed to block a punch thrown by a screaming punk, guiding the fist harmlessly past his head, locking the wrist, and breaking it. The kid shrieked in pain, then went silent and limp as Ramsey hammered the back of his head with an elbow.
The whole encounter was over within five seconds. The six Marines stood above fourteen bodies, some of them unconscious, some writhing and groaning as they cradled injured limbs or heads or groins. A fifteenth punk was disappearing down the street, running as fast as his legs could carry him.
“Not bad, Marines,” Colver said. “Considering our, uh, slowed reaction times.”
“Slowed, nothin’,” Ramsey said. He reached down and extracted a tingler from the unconscious grip of one of the civilians. He checked it, switched it off, then snapped the projector in half, flinging the pieces across the street. Several of the punks were armed, and the other Marines proceeded to similarly disable the weapons. “We just gave them the first shot…to be…to be fair. Right?”
“Whatever you say, Gunnery Sergeant,” Gonzalez said. “But maybe we should hightail it before the SPs show up.”
“Yeah,” Vallida said. “Someone’s bound to’ve reported this.”
“Roger that.” He looked around. She was right. Habitats, even extraordinarily large ones like the Ring habs orbiting Earth, tended to have lots of cameras and other unobtrusive sensor devices, both to monitor the environment and to watch for trouble of a variety of types—including crime. He didn’t see any cameras, but that meant nothing; most covert surveillance cameras, such as the ones the Marines themselves used to monitor battlespace, tended to be smaller than BBs, floating along on silent repulsor fields.
As he completed a full three-sixty of the concourse terrain, he became aware of another problem, one more immediate than having the local police watching the Marines mop up with some local thugs. “Uh…which way?”
His hardware included navigational systems, but he’d not bothered to engage them when they left the Samar earlier that evening. He suddenly realized that, in his current somewhat befogged state, he had no idea as to which way Dock 27 and the Samar might be.
“I think, boys,” Colver said, “we’d better switch on our AIs. Otherwise we’re going to be going in circles.”
That was easier said than done.
Most enlisted Marines learned how to disable their company AIs temporarily within days of leaving boot camp, and some probably figured out how to do it while they were still boots. Hell, for that matter, Garroway was pretty sure that officers did it, too, right out of OCS or the Naval Academy. No one ever talked openly about it, of course, because it was against regs. Getting caught was at the very least worth “office hours,” as commanding officer’s nonjudicial punishment had long been known in the Corps, and in some situations, like combat or while embarked on board ship, it could get you a general court and a world of hurt.
The process was simple enough, and involved visualizing a certain set of code numbers and phrases, which you brought to mind one by one and held for a second or so. It provided a kind of back door to the AI’s programming. It saw and recorded the code, then promptly forgot about having seen it, or anything at all about the person doing the coding, until another set of codes was visualized to reset the software.
The problem was that you needed to have a clear and highly disciplined mind to be able to pull the visualization trick off. At the moment, all six of the MARS Marines were somewhat less than clear in the mental department. Not only were their minds sluggish with alcohol, but under the influence of the nano activators in their drinks they were having trouble focusing on anything with much clarity or discipline, much less memorized strings of alphanumeric characters.
“Wait a sec,” Chu said. He was standing still, eyes closed, arms outstretched. “I almost have it….”
They waited, expectant.
“No. I guess I don’t.”
“Someone write the code down. We can focus on that.”
“No…no…” Colver said. “I’ve got it. Yeah! There….”
She was silent for a moment, as the other Marines waited. “C’mon, c’mon,” Gonzales said. “We gotta move!…”
“Okay,” Colver said. “Dock 27 is that way.”
“I coulda told you that,” Chu said miserably.
“And I have the recall coming through. Shit. I think we’re all gonna be AWOL. They passed the word at 1830 hours. We were supposed to check in at 2000.”
Absent without leave meant NJP for sure. The six of them had checked out at Samar’s quarterdeck at 1800 hours, and switched off the company AI minutes after that. It was now just past 2300 hours, three hours after they were supposed to be back on board.
“Well, let’s get the hell back there, then,” Ramsey said. “We’ll just have to face the music.”
“Sure,” Colver said. “What can they do to us…ship us back to Alighan?”
“Don’t even joke about that, Staff Sergeant!” Delazlo scolded.
Unsteadily, the Marines began making their way back toward Dock 27 and the Samar.
Unfortunately, as soon as Colver’s AI was switched back on, the Shore Patrol had a fix on her, and her name was flagged as being AWOL.
And so the six Marines of 55th MARS ended up spending the rest of the local night in the brig at Shore Patrol headquarters.
15
2811.1102
Platoon Commander’s Office
UCS Samar
Dock 27, Earth Ring 7
0910 hrs GMT
“What the hell were you thinking, Marines?” Either Lieutenant Kaia Jones was furious, or she was one hell of an actress. The muscles were standing out like steel rods up the sides of her neck, and the anger behind her words could have melted through Type VII hull composite. “Switching off your AI contacts like that?” She paused, sweeping the six Marines standing in front of her desk with a gaze like a gigawatt combat laser. “Well?”
“Sir, we were not thinking, sir!” Ramsey snapped back, his reply militarily crisp.
“No, I should think the hell you weren’t.”
The six of them stood at attention in Jones’ office on board the Samar. After an uncomfortable night in the SP brig ashore, they’d been escorted back to the ship by a pair of square-jawed Navy petty officers with no-nonsense attitudes and little to say. Master Sergeant Adellen had met them at the quarterdeck, signed off on them, and ordered them to stay in the squad bay, except for meals, until they could see the Old Man.
“Old Man,” in this case, was a woman; long usage in the Corps retained certain elements of an ancient, long-past era when most Marines were male. The commanding officer was the Old Man no matter what his or her sex. Just as a superior officer wa
s always sir, never ma’am.
Of course, the joke in Alpha Company was that in Jones’ case, you couldn’t really tell. She’d been a Marine for twenty-three years—fifteen of them as enlisted. She’d been a gunnery sergeant, like Ramsey, before applying for OCS and going maverick, and her face was hard and sharp-edged enough that she looked like she’d been a Marine forever.
Rumor had it that she’d been a DI at RTC Mars, and Ramsey was prepared to believe it.
“What about the rest of you?” Jones demanded. “Any of you have anything to say?”
“Sir…”
“Spit it out, Chu.”
“I mean, sir, everyone does it. If we didn’t have some privacy once in a while, we’d all go nuts!”
Jones leaned back in her chair and watched them for a moment, her gaze flicking from one to the next.
“Privacy to jack yourself on nanostims,” Jones said at last.
“Sir!” Gonzales looked shocked. “We would never—”
“Spare me, Gonzo,” Jones said, raising her hand. “You were all medscanned at the Shore Patrol HQ, and I’ve downloaded the reports. You were all buzzed. The wonder of it was that you were still able to stand up…much less incapacitate that group of…young civilians.”
“Sir, you…know about that, too?” Ramsey asked.
“Of course. Your little escapade was captured on three different mobile habcams, as well as through the EAs of two of your…targets the other night. As it happens, you single-handedly took out half of the hab’s local militia.”
“What?” Colver exclaimed. “Those punks? Sir! There’s no way!”
“Don’t give me that, Colver. You’ve been in the Corps long enough to know about gangcops.”
Ramsey digested this. He’d run into the practice at several liberty ports, but he’d not been expecting it at a high-tech, high-profile facility like Earth Ring 7. Gangcops and police militias were widely tolerated and accepted as a means of ensuring the safety of the larger cities and orbital habs.
It was the modern outgrowth of an old problem. Police enforcement could not be left entirely to AIs, neither practically nor, in most places, by the law. When local governments had problems recruiting a police force, they sometimes resorted to enlisting one or another of the youth gangs that continued to infest the more shadowy corners of most major population centers. The idea was to clean them up and give them a modicum of training—“rehabilitate them,” as the polite fiction had it—and send them out with limited-purview electronic assistants tagging along in their implants. Whatever they observed was transmitted to a central authority, usually an AI with limited judgment, keyword response protocols, and a link to city recorders that stored the data for use in later investigations or as evidence in criminal trials.
