Star Strike. Ian Douglas
in heavy fighting at the north end of the island. P.M./2 Bradley will be wounded by shrapnel from a mortar round.”
The men completed doing whatever it was they were doing to the pipe. Grasping it, moving together, they dug one end into a hole in the gravel and lifted the other end high. A flag unfurled with the breeze; nearby, one man turned suddenly and snapped an image with a bulky, old-style 2-D camera, while another man stood filming the scene.
The whole flag raising took only seconds. As the flag fluttered from the now upright pipe, however, Garroway could hear the cheering—from other Marines on the crest of Suribachi and, distantly, from men on the lower reaches of the island to the north. The rattle of gunfire seemed to subside momentarily, replaced by a new thunder … the low, drawn-out roar from thousands of voices, so faint it nearly was lost on the wind.
“Have a peek down there on that beach,” Warhurst told them. As Garroway turned and looked, it seemed as though his vision became sharply telescopic, zooming in precipitously, centering on a party of men wading ashore from one of the boxlike landing craft. Two of the figures appeared to be important; they were unarmed, though they wore helmets and life preservers like the others around them. One took the elbow of the other, pointing up the slope toward Garroway’s position. He appeared jubilant.
“That,” Warhurst continued, “is the secretary of the Navy, James Forrestal, just now coming ashore with Marine General Holland ‘Howlin’ Mad’ Smith. When they see the flag up here, Forrestal turns to the general and says ‘Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.’”
There was a surreal aspect to this history lesson—especially in the way Warhurst was describing events in the present and in the future tense, as though these scenes Garroway was experiencing weren’t AI recreations of something that had happened 937 years ago, but were happening now.
“As it happens, the future of the Marine Corps was far from secure,” Warhurst told them. “Only a couple of years after this battle, the President of the United States attempted to enact legislation that would have closed the Corps down. He referred to the Marines as ‘the Navy’s police force,’ and sought to merge them with the Army. The public outcry over this plan blocked it … but from time to time, cost-cutting politicians looked for ways to slash the military budget by eliminating the Marines.”
The simulation had continued as Warhurst spoke, the primitively armed and equipped Marines on that volcanic slope continuing to move about as the flag, an archaic scrap of cloth with red and white stripes and ranks of stars on a blue field, continued to flutter overhead.
Gradually, though, the scene began to fade in Garroway’s mind. He was sitting once again in a simcast amphitheater back at the training center on Mars, his recliner moving upright along with all of the others arrayed in circles about a central stage. The image of six men raising a flag continued to hover overhead, a holographic projection faintly luminous in the theater’s dim light.
Warhurst paced the stage, lecturing, but with an animated passion. This, Garroway thought, was not just information to be transmitted to another class of recruits, but something burning in Warhurst’s brain and heart.
“As Forrestal predicted, however,” Warhurst went on, “the Corps did endure for the next five hundred years—and then for over three hundred years after that. For most of that time, the politicians tended to dislike us … or at least they never seemed to know what to do with us. We’ve been on the budgetary chopping block more times than we can count. Civilians tend to like us, however. They see us as the holders of an important legacy—one embracing duty, honor, faithfulness. Semper fi. Always faithful.
“In fact, though, the raising of the flag on Suribachi probably had less to do with the Corps’ survival than did certain other factors. A century after the Battle of Iwo Jima, we left the shores of our home planet, and discovered the Ancient ruins on Mars and on Earth’s moon, and later at places like Chiron and Ishtar. Both the Builders and the An left a lot of high-tech junk lying around on worlds they visited in the past … the Xul, too, for that matter, if you count what we found out on Europa. Started something like a twenty-first-century gold rush, as every country on Earth with a space capability tried to get people out there to see what they could find. Xenoarcheology became the hot science, since it was thought that reverse-engineering some of that stuff could give us things like faster-than-light travel or FTL radio. The Navy, logically enough, became the service branch that ran the ships to get out here … and where the Navy went, the Marines came along. The Battle of Cydonia. The Battle of Tsiolkovsky. The Battle of Ishtar. The Battles of the Sirius Gate, and of Night’s Edge. ‘From the Halls of Montezuma, to the ocher sands of Mars.’ We’ve written our legacy in blood across a thousand years and on battlefields across two hundred worlds.
“And in all that time, and on all those worlds, the Marine Corps has done one thing … what we’ve always done. We win battles!
“And you, recruits, have come here to Mars in order to learn how to do just that.”
Garroway felt a stirring of pride at that—not at the promise that they would win battles, but at the way Warhurst was addressing them now. This was now the twelfth week of training, with just four more weeks to go. At some point during the last couple of months—and Garroway honestly could not remember when—Warhurst had stopped calling the men and women of Recruit Company 4102 children, and started calling them recruits.
Step by step, their civilian individuality had been broken down; step by step Warhurst and the other DIs had been building them back up, forging them into … something new. Garroway wasn’t sure what the difference was yet, but he felt the difference, a sense of confidence, of belonging that he’d never before known.
The feeling that he belonged had just taken a major boost skyward, of course. The nano injected into his system on 0710 had grown into standard-Corps issue cereblink hardware, and now, for the first time in three months, he was again connected.
It had been a rough time without connections—no downloads, no direct comm. Or, rather, downloads and incoming comm messages had entered his brain via his ears and his eyes, without mediation or enhancement by AI software. It had been like starting all over again, learning how to learn, rather than allowing headware and resident AIs to sort and file his memories for him.
He had a new personal electronic assistant, too … or, rather, a Corps platoon EA guide he shared with everyone else in the company. The EA’s name was Achilles; Warhurst had told them to think of him as a kind of narrowly focused platoon sergeant. Achilles was a bit short in the personality department, but the system was very fast, very efficient, and was working hard at its first task, helping him learn how to get the most out of the new headware.
Later, at evening chow, he discovered one down side to Achilles.
“So, whatcha think of the new headware?” he asked Sandre Kenyon, a recruit who’d been born and raised in one of the new arcologies off the coast of Pennsylvania. She’d been a vir-simmer, a programmer of simulation AIs, before she’d joined the Corps. He followed her out of the chow line and toward a couple of empty seats at one of the tables. Noise clattered and echoed around them; meals were among the very few times when recruits were free to socialize with other recruits, at least after the first month of training.
“It’s okay, I guess,” she said. “It’s gonna take some getting used to, though.”
“I know. It’s so damned fast. …”
“It’s also damned creepy,” she told him.
“What do you mean?”
“Having your platoon sergeant perched on your shoulder every minute of every day? Watching everything you do? Even everything you think? And reporting it all back to HQRTC, complete with images in glorious color and infrared? I don’t know about you, Aiden, but there are a few things I do or think about doing that I don’t care to share with half the base, y’know?”
“Oh …”
He’d