The Complete Legacy Trilogy: Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines. Ian Douglas
…
He hadn’t seen her, hadn’t even linked with her, since arriving on Parris Island. Male and female recruits were kept strictly apart during recruit training, though he had glimpsed formations of women Marines from time to time across the grinder or marching off to one training exercise or another. The old dream of serving with her on some offworld station seemed remote right now. Had she changed much? Did she ever even think about him anymore?
Hell, of course she’s changed, he told himself. You’ve changed. So has she.
He’d been on the skinny side before, but two months of heavy exercise and special meals had bulked him up, all of the new mass muscle. His endurance was up, his temper better controlled, the periodic depression he’d felt subsumed now by the daily routine of training, exercise, and discipline.
And a lot of things that had been important to him once simply didn’t matter now.
He had been allowed to vid family grams to his mother, out in San Diego. She was still living with her sister and beginning the process of getting a divorce. That was good, he thought, as well as long overdue. There were rumors of unrest in the Mexican territories—Recruit Training Center monitors censored the details, unfortunately—and scuttlebutt about a new war.
He kept thinking about what Lynnley had said, back in Guaymas, about him having to fight down there against his own father.
Well, why not? He felt no loyalty to that bastard, not after the way he’d treated his mother. So far as he was concerned, he’d shed the man’s parental cloak when he’d reclaimed the name Garroway.
“Garroway!” Makowiecz barked.
“Sir! Yes, sir!”
“Come with me.”
The DI led him down a corridor and ushered him into another room with a brusque “In there.”
A Marine major, a tall, slender, hard-looking woman in dress grays, sat behind a desk inside.
“Sir! Recruit Garroway reporting as ordered, sir!” In the Corps, to a recruit, all officers were “sir” regardless of gender, along with most other things that moved.
“Sit down, recruit,” the woman said. “I’m Major Anderson, ComCon Delta Sierra two-one-nine.”
He took a seat, wondering if he’d screwed up somehow. Geez … it had to be something pretty bad for a major to step in. During their day-to-day routine, Marine recruits rarely if ever saw any officer of more exalted rank than lieutenant or captain. From a recruit’s point of view, a major was damned near goddesslike in the Corps hierarchy, and actually being addressed by one, summoned to her office, was … daunting, to say the least.
And a comcon? That meant she was part of a regular headquarters staff, probably the exec of a regiment. What could she possibly want with him?
“I’ve been going over your recruit training records, Garroway,” she told him. “You’re doing well. All three-sixes and higher for physical, psych, and all phase one and two training skills.”
“Sir, thank you, sir.”
“No formal marriage or family contracts. Your parents alive, separated.” She paused, and he wondered what she was getting at. “Have you given much thought yet to duty stations after you leave the island?”
That stopped him. Recruits were not asked to voice their preferences, especially by majors. “Uh … sir, uh … this recruit …”
“Relax, Garroway,” Anderson told him. “You’re not on the carpet. Actually, I’m screening members of your platoon for potential volunteers. I’m looking for Space Marines.”
And that rocked him even more. He’d wanted to be a Marine for as long as he could remember, true, ever since he’d learned about his famous leatherneck ancestors, but the real lure to the Corps had always been the possibility of offworld duty stations. The vast majority of Marines never left the Earth; most served out their hitches in the various special deployment divisions tasked with responding to brushfire wars and threats to the Federal Republic’s interests around the globe.
A very special few, however …
“You’re asking me to volunteer for space duty?” Excitement put him on the edge of the seat, leaning forward. “I mean, um, sir, this recruit thinks that, uh—”
“Why don’t we drop the formalities, John? That third-person recruit crap gets in the way of real communication.”
“Thank you, si—uh, ma’am.” He sighed, then took a deep breath, trying to force himself to relax. The excitement was almost overwhelming. “I … yes. I would be very interested in volunteering for a duty station offworld.”
“You might want to hear about it first,” she cautioned. “I’m not talking about barracks duty on Mars.” She went on to tell him, in brief, clipped sentences, about MIEU-1, a Marine expeditionary unit tasked with a high-profile rescue-recovery mission at Llalande 21185 IID, the Earthlike moon of a gas giant eight light-years distant.
“That’s where the human slaves are, right, ma’am?” he asked her. The newsfeeds had been full of the story around the time he’d signed up. The enforced e-feed blackout during his training period had pretty well cut him off from all news of the outside world, but there’d been plenty of rumor floating around the barracks for the past couple of months. “We’re going out there to free the slaves?”
“We are going to protect federal interests in the Llalande system,” she replied, her voice firm. “Which means we’ll do whatever the President directs us to do. The main thing you have to think about right now is whether you want to volunteer for such a mission. Objective time will be at least twenty years. Ten years out in cyhibe, ten back, plus however long it takes us to complete our mission requirements. Things change in twenty years. We won’t be coming back to the same place we left.”
That sobered him. His mother was, what? Forty-one? She’d be sixty-one or older by the time he saw her again. Regular anagathic regimens and nanotelemeric reconstruction made sixty middle age for most folks nowadays, but twenty years was still a hell of a chunk out of a person’s life. How much would he still have in common with any of the people he left behind?
“We’ll be in hibernation for the whole trip?”
“Hell, yes! That transport is going to be damned cozy for thirteen hundred or so people. We’d kill each other off long before we reached the mission objective if we weren’t. Besides, they wouldn’t be able to pack that much food, water, and air for that long a flight.”
“No, ma’am.” In a way, he was disappointed. Part of his dream included the thrill of the journey itself, flying out from Earth on one of the great interplanetary clippers or boosting for the stars on a near-c torchship.
Anderson was accessing some records with a faraway look in her eyes. “I’m checking your evaluations,” she told him. “Your DI thinks highly of you. Did you know you’re up for selection for embassy duty?”
“Huh? I mean, no, ma’am.” The way Makowiecz and the other DIs kept riding him, he’d not even been sure they were going to recommend him for retention in the Corps, much less … embassy duty? That was supposed to be the softest, best duty in the Corps, standing guard at the UFR embassy in some out-of-the-way world capital. You had to be absolutely top-line Marine for a billet like that, and be able to keep yourself and your uniform in recruiting poster form. But the duty was the stuff dream sheets were made of …
“It’s true,” she told him. “And I won’t bullshit you. The Ishtar mission is a combat op. We’ll be going in hot, weapons free, assault mode. The abos are primitive, but they have some high-tech quirks that are guaranteed to raise some damned nasty surprises. So … what’ll it be? A soft billet at an embassy? Or a sleeper slot and a hot LZ?”
He knew what he wanted. Plush as embassy duty was supposed to be, he’d always