Star Strike

by Ian Douglas

  “And Marines—these Marines—have selflessly chosen service to country at considerable personal risk, have chosen service to others above comfort, above profit, above every other mundane consideration popular with young civilians these days….”

  Garroway listened to the words, but somehow they didn’t connect for him. The seats above and behind him, he knew, were filled almost to capacity, but not one of the Giangreco line had come out to watch his graduation. Not one.

  Estelle, he knew, had wanted to come, but an e-transmit from her last week had told him the money for a flight out to Mars just wasn’t there. He wondered if that was the reason…or if Delano Giangreco had put his pacifist foot down. Delano, he knew, held the purse strings for the entire Giangreco line family.

  He wished that, at least, his birth mother could have been there.

  McCulloch was still talking.

  “…and it is within the Corps that these young people learn the heart and soul of altruism. They learn to value the person standing next to them more than they value themselves, learn to regard sacrifice as the sacred gift they give to their comrades, and to their home.

  “There was a time, a thousand years or more ago, when service in the military was a prerequisite for public service as a leader of the community or of the larger state. It was the military that taught a young person character, and half or more of the people attending the institutions of higher learning first served in the military.

  “Eventually, however, and unfortunately, such service, such altruism, became unfashionable. Today, I might point out, only a tiny fraction of our leaders actually have military service in their records.

  “Does that mean that our Commonwealth leaders are of poor character? No…and I wouldn’t be allowed to say so if they were.” That brought a small chuckle from the audience. The commandant, Garroway thought, was skating kind of close to the edge, here. Service personnel were required to be completely apolitical so long as they were in uniform.

  “But I do wonder,” McCulloch continued, “just where in this day and age a future leader can better develop that altruistic ethic, that willingness to sacrifice for others, that comes from military service in general, from service as a Marine in particular….”

  Garroway stifled a yawn. His feet were hurting, and his back, and he thought-clicked the appropriate anodynes into his system, mixed with a mild stimulant. He was operating now less on a willingness to sacrifice than terror of what Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst would do to him if he screwed up.

  “Duty,” McCulloch said, the word reverberating through the Arean Promenade. “Honor. Loyalty…to comrades, to country, to the Corps….”

  There was more, lots more, but the rhetoric ended at last. Warhurst, at the head of the graduating class, crisply attired in Marine full dress, rasped out the command. “Comp’ney, forrard…harch!” As one, forty new Marines stepped out, left foot first, the sharp clash of sound shivering the air as they began the first leg of their march around the Arean Promenade.

  “Right turn…harch!” and they swung in-column, four abreast to the right. As they passed the reviewing stand, Warhurst snapped, “Comp’ney, eyes…right!” He then raised a sharp salute toward the stand. A live band waiting in the wings burst into the surging strains of the Marine Corps Hymn.

  Garroway snapped his head to the right, and so was able to see the assembled brass in the reviewing stand rise to their feet and return the salute….

  Afterward, they attended one hell of a party.

  * * * *

  Sloan Residence

  Ares Ring, Mars

  1720 hrs GMT

  Warhurst stepped off the elevator and onto a broad, open deck of artificial wood overlooking a lake. A forest crowded close around the house—he couldn’t tell if the trees were real or artificial, but they smelled real in the gentle breeze. Whichever they were, the illusion was that of a forested mountain on Earth; the illusion broke down only when the visitor looked up, toward the hub, and, beyond the hub’s artificial sun, saw the green and sculpted landscape—woods, streams, and other buildings—etched into the other side of the colony arching overhead.

  And, of course, when he turned around, he found himself looking through the hab’s transparent end cap, to see the green and ocher half-disk of Mars turning gently with the rest of the sky. Stars and an endless night rotated beyond the opposite end cap, the two transparencies sandwiching between them this strip of green and blue.

  “Welcome, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst!” a young servant in scarlet livery announced.

  Warhurst had never met the man, and he assumed that the guy had just pulled his ID off the local Net. “Thank you. It was kind of you to invite me.”

  “It was the senator’s pleasure. Would you care for a drink?”

  A serving robot hovered at the man’s side, a selection of drinks of various sizes, shapes, and colors on its tray.

  “Not just now, thank you,” Warhurst replied. He looked about, puzzled. “I’m not the first one here, am I?”

  The servant laughed. “Certainly not, sir! People have been coming in since early this morning!”

  “Oh. Good.” He felt terribly awkward. He wanted to ask if Julie, Callie, Donal, or Eric were here…or if they were expected. He didn’t want to see them right now, or relive any of those memories, not the pain, not the injustice, not the anger.

  God it still hurt….

  But the servant was still speaking, gesturing toward the sliding glass doors leading into the main house. “You’ll find refreshments inside, sir. Or you can follow the guidelight on the deck around the corner, there, and go straight back to the pools. Make yourself at home, have a good time…and happy birthday!”

  “Thank you,” Warhurst replied, terse. He didn’t like being here alone. And quite apart from his…personal problems, social galas like this one always gave him a pain.

  As did the pretensions of the rich. But he appreciated the greeting.

  Wherever there was a Corps presence, the date of 1011—the tenth day of November, old-style—was celebrated, the birthday of the U.S. Marines.

  On that date, in 1775, the Second Continental Congress had enacted legislation, resolving that “two battalions of Marines be ‘inlisted’ to serve for and during the present war between Great Britain and the colonies.” Two weeks later, a Quaker innkeeper named Samuel Nicholas had been commissioned as the first officer of the Marines, and recruiting had begun at the Tun Tavern in Philadelphia. Less than four months after that, on 3 March 1776, four full months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Captain Nicholas led 268 Marines ashore on New Providence Island in the Bahamas, capturing two forts, cannons, and a supply of gun powder in the Corps’ very first amphibious operation.

  Eleven hundred two years later, the Corps continued to celebrate that birthday, in this case with an elaborate party. The graduation of class 4102 had been arranged to coincide with the festivities.

  Normally, Marines took care of their own celebrations. The festivities within the Arean Ring, though, had been hijacked this year. Warhurst made a face as he looked around the expansive, rotating hab module. Senator Sloan was not a Marine. According to his Net bio, he hadn’t even served in the military.

  But he was one of four Commonwealth senators representing Mars, and the two chief pillars of the Martian economy were xenoarcheological research and the Marines. Both the 1st Marine Division and the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force had moved their headquarters to Mars centuries ago, and any political representative of that world knew that his hopes of staying in office resided with the Marine constituents.

  Danis Sloan was also ostentatiously rich, as the lavishness of his personal quarters suggested. The hab was enormous, a squat, rotating cylinder similar in design to some of the larger O’Neil-type space colonies, but only about 1 kilometer long, and twice that in diameter. The ends were capped in transplas, giving constantly turning views of the stars, the sun, Mars, and the other nearby habs making up
this portion of the Arean Ring as the structure rotated, producing its out-is-down spin gravity. Visitors docked at the hub airlock, then traveled out and down one of the elevators to reach the landscaped terrain. The main house, where the party was being held, occupied nearly ten percent of the hab’s internal terrain, tucked in between one of the transparent end caps, and a broad, sparkling lake.

  And the whole damned thing belonged to Danis Sloan.

  Half a million years ago, the Builders had left a vast array of faster-than-light communicators in a subsurface complex called the Cave of Wonders, beneath a weathered plateau in Cydonia. Those communicators still possessed real-time visual and audio links with similar devices on Chiron, Ishtar, and elsewhere, but it had taken centuries to reverse-engineer the process and learn how to use quantum entanglement to instantly bridge distances measured in light-years.

  A quantum dynamicist named Victor Sloan, among others, had been instrumental in making modern FTL communication possible, and that, in turn, made both interstellar business and government possible.

  The Sloan fortune now was rumored to exceed the economies of several small nations. Hell, the guy could probably buy small countries if he had a use for them. Warhurst had heard that Sloan’s Arean Ring hab was only one of his dwellings, that a larger one existed in Earth’s First Ring, and that others existed in at least three other star systems. The guy, through his company, Sloan Stellartronics, had his own FTL starship, for God’s sake, and that was certainly no cheap date.

  Fair enough. FTL communication was vital in tying together the far-flung worlds of Humankind. The Commonwealth wouldn’t have been possible without it. More than that, humanity’s survival might depend upon it; late in the twenty-sixth century, shortly after they’d become commercially feasible, faster-than-light starships had caught up with the Argo and the other fleeing asteroid starships, offering to share the new technology, and offering them evacuation, a chance to come home. The offers in every case had been rejected, but Argo and her sisters all had accepted Sloan units in order to maintain real-time communications with Earth.

  Likely, Warhurst thought, they wanted to know if and when the Xul found and destroyed Earth, thereby justifying their flight.

  But if that hadn’t happened, if Argo had not possessed an FTL transmitter quantum-entangled with a Sloan unit back in the Solar System, Perseus would not have been able to flash news of the Xul appearance instantly back to Earth, and word of Argo’s destruction would not have been received on Earth for more than another four hundred years.

  By then it almost certainly would have been too late.

  So Sloan was welcome to his fortune. His family had come by it honestly, at least. Warhurst just wished the man wasn’t so damned ostentatious about it. Importing and growing those gene-tailored trees alone must have cost tens of millions of newdollars…enough to fully equip a modern Marine rifle company at least.

  Possibly, he thought as he followed the guidelight moving before him across the decking, the problem lay in the implication that the Marines—or at least 1MarDiv—somehow belonged to Sloan personally. That wasn’t the case, to be sure, but the press and often parts of the Commonwealth government seemed to think it was. Sloan had been chairperson of the Defense Advisory Council three times running, losing out in the elections four years ago only because Marie Devereaux and the Peace Party had insisted on the change as part of the price of their support.

  He wondered if the Peace Party’s swing to support the Constitutionalists would bring Sloan back to chairpersonship of the council. He doubted it. Current politics were way too volatile to permit long-term government fiefdoms.

  And there were all those rumors that Danis Sloan hoped to launch his own bid for the presidency four years from now.

  Warhurst stepped around the corner of the house and onto the raised deck above the pool area behind the house. Sonic suppressor fields had kept the noise levels low, but as he stepped through the field interface, the babble of conversation, laughter, music, and noise assaulted his ears. Sloan had been planning a lavish ball in honor of the Marines for a long time, and the party promised to be a long one—several days at least.

  Several hundred people were gathered on the tiers of decks behind the residence already. Perhaps a quarter, he saw, wore Marine dress uniforms, complete with gloves, glowribbons, and red-striped trousers. The rest wore a dazzling array of costumes, from formal ball gowns and dressuits to holographic light displays and sim projections to complete and fashionable nudity. Sloan’s invitation, obviously, had gone out to his own social set as well as Marine personnel…and that griped Warhurst as well. This…this ritual honoring this date in history belonged to the Corps. Civilians shouldn’t have any part of it, no matter how rich or well connected they might be.

  “Sergeant Warhurst, is it?” a woman’s voice said at his back. “Michel?”

  He turned. The speaker was a tall and beautifully sculpted blond woman, technically nude, but with a fan of what looked like gorgeously colored peacock feathers arranged in a full, 2-meter circle behind her body, reaching from her knees to well above her head, and with nanorganic emitters within her skin giving off a constant, golden radiance that perfectly matched her hair. Her nipples alone, he estimated, were giving off enough light to read by, had it been dark.

  “Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst, ma’am,” he said, correcting her.

  “Larissa Sloan,” she told him, extending a hand. “Danis’s first wife, don’t you know. Welcome to our little gathering!”

  He took her hand and gave a slight, perfunctory bow above it. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.”

  “Now, Sergeant! Don’t ‘ma’am’ me! I’m Rissa to my friends!”

  He made a noncommittal sound, more of a grunt than an assent, but softening it with a smile. Warhurst wasn’t entirely sure yet if the woman was actually offering that level of friendship…or if he should accept it if she did. Her exuberance was just a little disturbing, as was her misunderstanding of the Marine rank structure.

  For a moment, she had a faraway look in her eyes as she accessed data. “And are your wives and husbands here yet?” she asked brightly. “I haven’t seen them so far….”

  “Actually, I’m here alone tonight, Ms. Sloan.”

  “Oh, but you must know this affair is for Marines and their spouses and other partners! Feel free to call them and have them come right over!”

  Briefly, he considered replying with a blunt, “I’m divorced. They kicked me out a month ago.” If the woman had bothered to look more deeply into his public data stats, past the front page, at least, she would have seen that.

  But it didn’t matter. And he certainly didn’t want to have to explain the circumstances to this…naked butterfly. He let the comment pass. She was already taking him by the arm and leading him deeper into the crowd. “There are so many people for you to meet! Please, help yourself to food, drink, drugs, whatever suits your fancy! And inside there’s so much going on. If you want a companion, we have a number of lovely girls here as personal entertainers…boys too, if you prefer.” She patted his arm. “I might look you up myself after a while, if your partners don’t mind!”

  “Ah, excuse me, ma’am,” he said, stopping abruptly. “I see a couple of Marines over there I know. If you’ll forgive me?”

  He disentangled his arm and strode across the deck, not waiting to find out if he was forgiven or not. He came up between two young PFCs in full dress blacks at a buffet and put his arms over their shoulders. “Semper fi, Marines,” he said.

  The two Marines started, whirled, and came to attention. “Sir, yes, sir!”

  Warhurst grinned and shook his head. “You can always tell the ones straight out of boot camp. Danvers? Garroway? What are you two fucking dipshits doing in a galahole like this?”

  Garroway stammered, swallowed, and tried again. “Sir! We were invited, sir!”

  Warhurst raised an admonishing white-gloved finger. “Negative on the ‘sir,’ son. You both are Marines, n
ow, and that means that I am no longer a ‘sir.’ I may still be God, so far as you sorry-assed PFCs are concerned, but I do work for a living. ‘Gunnery Sergeant’ will do perfectly well.”

  “Thank you, s-, uh, Gunnery Sergeant.”

  “That’s better.” He looked around. “So this is how the other half lives.”

  Garroway turned, his eyes following a small group of attractive and naked young women as they made their way through the crowd toward the pool. “Must be nice,” he said. “I wouldn’t mind having a couple of mil, if it meant living like this.”

  “Dream on,” Ami Danvers told him. “You’d need a couple of bil for a spread like this!” Eyeing a couple of equally nude men who’d just joined the women, “Of course, I must admit that the scenery is very nice.”

  Garroway sighed dramatically. “Such a tough job, living like this, but someone has to do it.” He popped a purple-iced something into his mouth and chewed reflectively. “At least they feed well.”

  “So, Gunnery Sergeant,” Danvers said conversationally. “Now that 4102 has flown the nest, will you be taking on a new boot company?”

  “Negative, Danvers. I’ve had it with diaper duty and babysitting. I’ve put in for 1MIEF.”

  “Maybe we’ll be serving together, then,” Garroway said. “Our orders are for 1MIEF, too!”

  “I know,” Warhurst said, nodding. “The whole company. God help me. I thought I was free of you clowns.” He shrugged. “But, hey, who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky and they’ll stick me on a listening post on some God-forsaken asteroid at the other end of the galaxy instead. Then at least I wouldn’t have to look at the likes of you two!”

  “We love you, too, Gunnery Sergeant,” Danvers said.

  “Where do we go around here to get a drink?”

  Garroway pointed to a bar at the other side of the nearest swimming pool. “They’ve got booze there. Or there’s a bigger bar inside.”

  “Marines, I’m going to attach myself to you two—just temporarily—because I am using you for protective cover. Shall we perform a reconnaissance in force?”