Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  “Cease fire!” Warhurst called over the command channel. “All squads, cease fire. They’ve had it.”

  The attackers continued to flee, leaving several hundred dead and wounded in the desert; none had come within twelve hundred meters of the Marine lines. Most had fallen well beyond the range of their own weapons. No Marines had been hit.

  “Good old Yankee high-tech scores again!” Private Gordon called over the tac channel. “They didn’t even touch us!”

  “Belay the chatter,” Warhurst warned. “Keep alert. Petro? Anything in front of you?”

  He had to assume that the brash, frontal rush had been a feint, something to pin the Marines’ attention to the northeast while the real attack was staged from another quarter.

  “Negative, sir,” Gunny Petro replied. She was in charge of the northwest sector. “No targets.”

  “Rodriguez?”

  “All clear, Skipper.”

  “Cooper?”

  “Nothing on my front, sir.”

  The robot sentries out in the desert were very sensitive, fully able to detect the approach of a single man by his body heat, his movement, his radar signature, even his scent. When Warhurst called up a tactical overhead view of the perimeter, he could see his own troops huddled in their fighting positions…but no sign of enemy troops closer than three kilometers.

  But there would be another attack, and soon. He looked up into the early evening sky and wondered what the hell was happening to their relief.

  Esteban Residence

  Guaymas, Sonora Territory

  United Federal Republic, Earth

  1545 hours PT

  “The Marines?” his mother cried. “Goddess, why would you want to join the Marines?”

  John Garroway Esteban stood a little straighter, fists clenched at his side. “You had no right!” he said, shouting at his father, defiant. “My noumen is mine!”

  “It’s my house, you’re my son!” his father shouted back, raging. The elder Esteban had been drinking, and his words were slurred. “I paid for your implant, and I can goddamn do anything in, to, or through your goddamn noumen I goddamn want!”

  “Carlos, please,” John’s mother said. She was crying now. This was going to be a bad one.

  They’d had this argument before, many times. John’s Sony implant created the inner, virtual world through which he could access the World Net, communicate with friends, and even operate noumenally keyed devices, from thought-clicked doors to the family flyer. Noumenon was the conceptual opposite to phenomenon; where a phenomenon was something that happened outside a person’s thoughts, in the real world, a noumenon was entirely a creation of thought and imagination, a virtual reality opened within his mind…but the one was no less real than the other. As the saying went, just because it was all in your head didn’t mean it wasn’t real.

  It was also personal, keyed to John’s own thoughts and implant access codes. His father, however, insisted on supervising him through the implant, and the almost daily invasions of his privacy gnawed at John constantly.

  Lots of kids had implants with parental controls, if only to monitor their study downloads and keep track of the entertainment Net sites they visited. Carlos Esteban went a lot further, eavesdropping on his conversations with Lynnley, reading his private files, and now downloading his conversation with the Marine recruiter three days ago. Every time John managed to assemble a counterprogram, like the yellow warning light, his father found a way around it…or simply bulled his way right in.

  And his father was, of course, furious at his decision to join the Marines. He’d expected his father’s anger but had hoped his mother would understand. She was del Norte, after all, and a Garroway besides.

  “No son of mine is going to be part of those butchers,” his father was saying. “The Butchers of Ensenada! No! I will not permit it! You will join me in the family business, and that is that!”

  “I don’t want to be a part of the damned family business!” John shot back. “I want—”

  “You are eighteen years old,” his father said, his voice rich with scorn. “You have no idea what it is you want!”

  “Then maybe this is how I’ll find out!” He swung his arm angrily, taking in the quietly sophisticated sweep of the hacienda’s E-room and dining area, including the floor-to-ceiling viewall overlooking the silver waters of the Sea of Cortez below Cabo Haro. “I won’t if I stay here the rest of my life!”

  A tone sounded. The house was signaling them: someone was at the door. He wanted to snatch the excuse, to pull up the visitor’s ID through his implant and go open the door…but his father was glaring into his eyes, furious, and the brief wandering of his thoughts would have been immediately noticed.

  “You have here the promise of a good education!” Carlos continued, shouting. If he’d heard the announcement tone, he was ignoring it. “Of a place in the family business when you graduate. Security! Comfort! What more could you possibly need or want?” Carlos Jesus Esteban took another long sip from the glass of whiskey he held. He’d been drinking more and more heavily of late, and his temper had been getting shorter.

  “Maybe I just want the chance to get those things for myself. To get an education and a job without having them handed to me!”

  “Eh? With the Marines? What can they teach you? How to kill people? How to shed whatever civilized instincts you may have acquired and become an animal, a sociopathic murderer? Is that what you want?”

  The house butler rolled in. “Excuse me,” it said. “There is—”

  “Get out!” the elder Esteban screamed.

  “Yes, sir.” Obediently, the robot spun about and glided out of the room once more, as though it was used to Carlos’s violent moods.

  “You just want to go with those worthless gringo friends of yours,” his father continued. “You think military service is some sort of glamorous game, eh?”

  “Have you thought about joining the Navy, Johnny?” his mother asked helpfully, with a worried, sidelong glance at his father. “Or the Aerospace Force? I mean, if you want to travel, to go offworld—”

  “All of the services are parasites!” Carlos shouted, turning on her. “And the Marines are the worst! Invaders, oppressors, with their boots on our throats!”

  “My grandfather was a Marine,” John said with more patience than he felt. “As was his father. And his mother and father. And—”

  “All your mother’s side of the family,” his father snapped. He drained the last of his whiskey, then moved to the bar to pour himself another. He appeared to be calming down. His voice was quieter, his movements smoother. A dangerous sign. “Not mine. Always, it is the damned Garroways—”

  “Carlos!” his mother said. “That’s not fair!”

  “No? Please excuse me, Princessa del Norte! The gringos are always in the right, of course!”

  “Carlos—”

  “Shut up, puta! This worthless excuse for a son is your fault!”

  The house had been signaling for several moments, first with an audible tone, then with a soft voice transmitted through John’s cerebral implants. No doubt the butler had been dispatched with the same warning: someone was still at the front door. A quick check with the house security camera showed him Lynnley Collins’s face.

  Now might be his only chance.

  “I’ll, um, see who’s at the door,” he said, and slipped as unobtrusively as possible from the room. His father was still screaming at his mother as he rode the curving line of moving steps from the E-center to the entranceway, alerting the house as he descended to open the door.

  Lynnley was standing on the front deck, looking particularly fetching in a yellow sunsuit that bared her breasts to the bright, golden warmth of the Sonoran sun. Her dark-tanned skin glistened under her body’s UV-block secretions. Her eyes, with her sunscreen implants fully triggered, appeared large and jet-black.

  “Uh, hi,” he said, slipping easily into English. Lynnley was the daughter of a norteamericano family
stationed at the naval base up at Tiburón. She spoke excellent Spanish, but he preferred using English when he was with her.

  She glanced past him as he stepped outside, brushing back a stray wisp of dark blond hair. The door hissed shut, cutting off his father’s muffled shouts.

  “Whoo,” she said. “Bad one?”

  He shrugged. “Pretty much what I expected, I guess.”

  “That bad?” She touched his arm in sympathy. “So what are you going to do?”

  “What can I do? I already thumbed the papers. We’re Marines now, Lynn.”

  She laughed. “Well, not quite. There are a few minor formalities to attend to first. Like basic training, remember?”

  He walked to the side of the deck, leaning against the redwood railing and staring out over the glistening waters of the Gulf of California. La Hacienda Esteban clung to the summit of a high hill overlooking the cape. The sprawl of the town of Guaymas, the harbor crammed with fishing boats, the clutter of resorts along the coast, provided a bright, tropical splash of mingled colors between the silver-gray sea and the sere brown of the hills and cliff sides. God, I hate it here, he thought.

  “Having second thoughts?” Lynnley asked.

  “Huh? Hell no! I’ve got to get out of here!”

  “There are other ways to leave home than joining the Marines.”

  “Sure. But I’ve always wanted to be a Marine. Ever since I was a kid. You know that.”

  “I know. It’s the same with me. It’s in the blood, I guess.” She moved to the railing beside him, leaning against it and looking down at the town. “Is it just the Marines your dad hates? Or all gringos?”

  “He married a gringo, remember. And she was a Marine’s daughter.”

  “Hell, the war was over twenty years before he was born, right? What’s his problem?”

  John sighed. “Some of the families down here have long memories, you know? His grandfather was killed at Ensenada. He doesn’t like the government, and he doesn’t like the military.”

  “What is he, Aztlanista?”

  “I don’t know anymore. Some of his drinking buddies are, I’m pretty sure. And I know he subscribes to a couple of different Aztlan nationalist netnews sites. He likes their ideas, whether he’s a card-carrying member or not.”

  “S’funny,” Lynnley said. “Most of the Aztlanistas are poor working class. Indios, farmers. You don’t usually see the big landowners messing with the status quo, joining revolutionary organizations and all that.” She tossed her head, indicating the hacienda and the surrounding hilltop lands. “And your family does have money.”

  He shrugged. “I guess. We don’t talk about where the money came from, of course.” His father’s family had become fabulously wealthy in the years before the UN War, when parts of Sonora and Sinaloa—then states of the old Mexican Republic—had furnished a large percentage of several types of illicit drugs for the huge and wealthy northern market.

  “But it’s not just the money,” he went on. “There’s still such a thing as national pride. And all of the big-money families around here stand to come out on top of the heap if Aztlan becomes a reality. The new ruling class.”

  “Huh. You think that could happen?”

  “No,” he replied bluntly. “Not a snowball’s chance on Venus. But the possibility is going to keep the locals stirred up for a long time.”

  Baja, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua were the newest dependent territories of the burgeoning United Federal Republic, a political union that included the fifty-eight states of the United States plus such far-flung holdings as Cuba, the Northwest Territory, and the UFR Pacific Trust. Acquired during the Second Mexican War of ’76–’77, all four north Mejican territories were in line to be granted statehood, as the fifty-ninth through the sixty-second states, respectively, pending the outcome of a series of referendum votes scheduled in two years. Heavily dependent both on Yankee tourism and on northern markets for seafood and marijuana products, the region of old Mexico surrounding the Gulf of California had closer ties to the UFR than to the Democratic Republic of Mejico, and statehood was likely to pass.

  But many in the newly acquired territories favored independence. The question of Aztlan, a proposed Latino nation to be carved out of the states of northern Mejico and the southwestern United States, had been one of the principal causes of the UN War of almost a century ago. The then–United Nations had proposed a referendum in the region, with a popular vote to determine Aztlanero independence. Washington refused, pointing out that the populations of the four U.S. states involved were predominantly Hispanic and almost certain to vote in favor of the referendum, and that federal authority superceded local desires. The war that followed had raged across the Earth, in orbit, and on the surfaces of both the Moon and Mars.

  In the end, with the disintegration of the old UN and the rise of the U.S./UFR-Russian-Japanese–led Confederation of World States, Aztlan independence had been all but forgotten…save by a handful of Hispanic malcontents and disaffected political dreamers scattered from Mazatlan to Los Angeles.

  The dream remained alive for many. John’s father, his family long an important clan with connections throughout Sonora and Sinaloa, had been more and more outspoken against the gringo invaders who’d migrated south since the Mexican War. “Carpetbaggers,” he called them, a historical allusion to a much earlier time.

  But he’d not been able to convince John, and for the past four years their relationship, already shaky with Carlos’s drinking and his notoriously quick temper, had grown steadily worse.

  “Have you ever thought,” Lynnley said quietly, “that you and your dad could end up on opposite sides, if fighting breaks out?”

  “Uh-uh. Won’t happen. The government can’t use troops on federal soil.”

  “A war starts down here, and all it would take is a presidential order. The Marines would be the first ones to go in.”

  “It won’t come to that,” he said, stubborn. “Besides, I want space duty.”

  She laughed. “And what makes you think they’ll take what you want into consideration?”

  “Hey, they gave me a dream sheet to fill out.”

  “So? I got one too, but once we sign aboard, our asses are theirs, right? We go where they tell us to go.”

  “Yeah…” The idea of coming back to Sonora to put down a rebellion left him feeling a bit queasy. He thought he remembered reading, though, that the government never used troops to put down rebellions in the regions those troops called home. That just didn’t make sense.

  It wasn’t going to come to that. It couldn’t.

  “You need to get out of the house for a while?” Lynnley asked him. “I thought we might fly out to Pacifica. Maybe do some shopping?”

  John glanced back at the front door. He could hear the faint and muffled echoes of his father, still shouting. “You stupid bitch! This is all your fault!…”

  “I…don’t think I’d better,” he told her. “I don’t want to leave my mom.”

  “She’s a big girl,” Lynnley said. “She can take care of herself.”

  But she doesn’t, he thought, bitter. She can’t. He felt trapped.

  After talking with the Marine recruiter over an implant link three days ago, he and Lynnley had gone to the Marine Corps recruiter in Tiburón the next day and thumbed their papers. In less than three weeks they were supposed to report to the training center at Parris Island, South Carolina. Somehow he had to tell his parents…his mother, at least. How?

  More than once in the past few years, Ellen Garroway Esteban had left the man who was, more and more, a stranger. Two years ago John had tried to get between his parents when his father had been hitting his mother and he’d received a dislocated shoulder in the subsequent collision with a bookcase. And there’d been the time when his father chased her out of the house with a steak knife…and the time she ended up in the hospital, claiming to have fallen down the stairs. John had begged her to pack up and leave, to get out while she still cou
ld. Others had done the same—her sister Carol in San Diego, the social worker who’d counseled her after her stay in the hospital, Mother Beatrice, their priest. Each time, she’d agreed the marriage was unsavable and nearly left for good…but each time, she found a reason to stay or to come back home.

  One day, John was terribly afraid, she was going to come back home and Carlos was going to kill her. It would be an accident, of course. Injuries he inflicted on others always were.

  John hated the thought of leaving his mother, of just walking out and abandoning her. He felt like a coward for running away like this. At the same time, he knew there was nothing else he could do to help her. Goddess knew, he’d tried, but, damn it, she kept coming back, she refused to press charges, she covered up for her husband when the police showed up in response to his panicked calls, made excuses for his behavior: “Carlos is just under a lot of stress right now. He can’t help it, really…”

  His mother would have to decide to help herself. He would be gone.

  But not just yet. “No,” he told Lynnley. “You go ahead. I’d better hang around and see how this plays out.”

  “Suit yourself,” she told him. “Just remember, you won’t be able to protect her when you’re with the Corps off on Mars or someplace.”

  “I know.” Am I doing the right thing?

  He wished there was an answer to that.

  3

  5 JUNE 2138

  IP Packet Osiris

  En route, Mars to Earth

  1337 hours Zulu

  Colonel Ramsey lay snug within the embrace of a linking couch, only marginally aware of the steady, far-off vibration that was the packet’s antimatter drive. It converted a steady stream of water into plasma and hard radiation, blasting it astern to accelerate the blunt, bullet-shaped vessel with its outsized heat radiators at a steady one gravity. Twenty hours after boosting clear from Mars orbit, the Osiris was already traveling at over 700 kilometers per second and had covered well over 25 million kilometers.