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  And now, the recruits of Company 4102 were about to lose that technology and, for the first time in their lives, would face the world without it.

  The thought was terrifying.

  “Okay, recruits! First five in line! Through the hatch, on the double!”

  The first five recruits stumbled up the steps as the door cycled open for them and vanished into the building. Garroway watched them go.

  He thought about quitting.

  This was the one part of recruit training that he’d wondered about, wondered whether or not he could make it through. Oh, he knew he would survive, certainly. Millions did, and most went on to be U.S. Marines. And if he could get through these next few weeks, his old hardware would be reconnected and he would get new implants as well. Marines were hard-wired with internal gadgetry and high-tech enhancements that most civilians didn’t even know existed.

  But the thought of being cut off like that…

  Many of the humans now living on Earth, he understood, were pre-tech…meaning they went through their lives, from birth to grave, as completely organic beings. No technological chelates cradling their brains and brain stems, no nanocircuitry growing through their neural pathways.

  No EM telepathy, so no way to talk to those around you unless you were actually in their presence or you happened to have a portable comm unit with you. No translator software; if your friend didn’t happen to speak your language, you were out of luck. No e-conferencing in noumenal or virtual space. No e-Net linking you with every other person and every electronic service across the Solar System.

  No way to access news, or weather—assuming you were on Earth which actually had weather—or med access, or e-pedia information feeds, or travel directions, or life journals, or any of the hundreds of other data downloads necessary in today’s fast-paced life.

  No sims. No download entertainment. No way to interact with either the stored or broadcast simvids that let you take the role of hero or villain or both.

  No way to buy the most basic necessities. Or to find them, since most shops now were on-line.

  No driving ground cars, piloting mag skimmers, or accessing public transit.

  No books, unless you could find the old-fashioned printed variety…and that was assuming you could read them. No more educational feeds…and no access to personal e-memory. Gods, how was he going to remember anything?…

  And there was Aide. For Garroway, that felt like the worst…losing access to Aide, the AI mentor, secretary, and personal electronic assistant he’d had since he was a kid.

  Without his hardware, the world was suddenly going to be a much smaller, much more difficult, much narrower place…and knowing that he would survive that narrowing did not make the prospect any more bearable.

  Cut off from technological civilization, from society, from everything that made life worth the living….

  “I know it seems extreme, kids,” Warhurst said, using a telepathic feed to whisper inside their minds. “You feel like we’re cutting you off from the universe. In boot camp we call it the empty time.”

  Garroway wondered whether the DIs had some secret means of accessing their implants and hearing their thoughts…or if he just knew and understood what the recruits would be thinking now. Probably the latter. It was against the law to sneak into another’s private thoughts and eavesdrop, wasn’t it?

  “The thing is,” Warhurst went on, “there will be times as a Marine when you won’t have the Net to rely on. Imagine if you’re on a combat drop and something goes wrong. You end up a thousand kilometers behind enemy lines. You don’t have the local Net access codes. Worse, if you try to link in, the local authorities will spot you. Somehow, you have to survive without the Net until you can make contact with your sibling Marines.

  “Or maybe you just have to go into a hot DZ on a planet with no Net at all, and there’s a screw-up and the battlefleet Net isn’t up and running for, oh, a standard day or two or ten. Believe me, it happens. What can go wrong will go wrong. What are you going to do then?

  “The answer, of course, is that you will be Marines, and you will act like Marines. You will be able to draw upon your own resources, your training, your experience, and you will survive. More than survive, you will kick ass and emerge victorious, because victory is the tradition of the Corps!”

  Garroway felt a little better after Warhurst’s speech. Not good…but better. He gave a mental click to increase neural serotonin levels and help lift his mood. Hell, that was another thing he’d be missing in the next few weeks—the ability to alter his own emotional state as necessary. He felt a tiny, sharp stab of fear, and instantly suppressed it.

  How did Marines control the fear if they didn’t have access to neural monitoring software or the ability to deliberately tailor their emotional state? Or were the wild stories true, stories to the effect that Marine combat feeds eliminated fear and boosted such emotions as rage and hatred for the enemy? He’d always assumed those tales were nonsense, the product of civilian ignorance. Still…

  “If you children want to be Marines,” Warhurst’s whisper continued, “we have to know who and what you are. How you react under stress. We need to know your character. And we need to take you, all of you, down to your most basic, most elementary level and build you up, one painful layer at a time. At the end of these sixteen weeks, you will not be the men and women you were. You will be Marines…if you make it through.”

  It made sense, of course, what Warhurst was saying. Boot camp always had required an initial breaking down, so that the drill instructors could mold recruits into Marines. And there were other factors besides…like cutting the recruits off from outside sources of information so that they were utterly dependent on their instructors. Like taking away anything that would distract them from the grueling physical and intellectual training ahead.

  Like getting them to rely upon themselves.

  “Believe me,” Warhurst added, and Garroway swore he could hear a grin in the man’s inner voice, “for the next few weeks you children won’t need your tech-toys, and you’ll be way too busy to miss ’em! Besides, you’ll have me to tell you what you need to know! Next five in line! Through the hatch!”

  Garroway thought one last time about quitting, and shoved the thought aside.

  “Don’t worry, Aiden,” his inner AI whispered in his mind. “I’ll be back. You’ll see.”

  Together with four other recruits, he bounded up the steps and into the unknown.

  3

  0407.1102

  Green 1, 1-1 Bravo

  Meneh, Alighan

  0824/38:22 hours, local time

  “Okay, Marines. How are we going to do this?”

  Ramsey considered the question. Staff Sergeant Thea Howell rarely asked for advice. When she did, the problem was certain to be a certified bitch.

  With the vantage point of the gods, he looked down on the city. In the noumenon, the imaginal inner space of his mind’s eye, he was hovering above the city center and starport as if from a giant’s towering perspective. Physically, in fact, he was crouched in what had been a basement, shielded from view by several tons of rubble, and the closest Marine to his current position was nearly five hundred meters away, but he was only distantly aware of any of that. His cereblink and the fleet’s SkyNet, however, allowed them to share a noumenal conference space, complete with tiny red icons marking the position of each known Muzzie soldier, gun, and vehicle, green for Marines, white for civilians or unknowns.

  The tacsit was clear enough. Theocrat riflemen had holed up in another skyscraper, an eighty-three-floor tower at the edge of the central plaza, and they’d turned the place into a fortress, with portable rocket launchers and at least one light plasma cannon. Life scans had revealed a heavy concentration of civilians in the smaller buildings clustered about the tower’s base; smash the tower with close-air ground support or orbital fire, and several hundred civilians would die.

  So rather than standing off and bombing the Theocrat
s, the Marines would have to do this the old-fashioned away, with a direct CQB assault.

  And it was going to get damned messy.

  “From the top down,” Ramsey said after a moment, answering Howell’s question. Under his control, green lines of light flicked across the imaginal landscape, taking advantage of available cover, then vaulting into the sky to converge on the tower roof from four directions. “Has to be. Otherwise we fight our way up that tower one floor at a time.”

  “Agreed,” Howell said. “But that rooftop is over 250 meters straight up. Too far for jumpjets.”

  “Then we’ll need to ride Specter guns,” Sergeant Chu pointed out. “And we’ll need to move straight up and fast.”

  “Roger that,” Corporal Ran Allison said. “Looks like a lucky two-fiver.”

  The slang referred to twenty-five percent casualties…if they were lucky. It was a grim and chillingly sobering assessment.

  “Ten of us,” Howell said, noting the green icons surrounding the tower, a kilometer distant. The icons flashed, one after another, as she ran through the names. “Me, Beck, and Santiago on one. Hearst and Daley on two. Rodriguez and Gertz on three. Ramsey, Allison, and Chu on four. Coordinate on me. I’ve put the call out, and our rides will be here in two mikes. Everyone get set.”

  Ramsey dropped out of the noumenal link and began shouldering upward through the layer of debris above him, his combat suit’s paramusculature allowing him to move aside several tons of debris as he climbed. Heaving aside a 3-meter chunk of ferrocrete, he emerged again into the smoke-stained light of the Alighan morning.

  The pace of the battle had slowed considerably, now that the defenders had been reduced to a few isolated pockets of resistance scattered across a ruined city. In less than the promised two minutes, a Specter gun hissed overhead, an awkward-looking fragment of one of the landing vehicles that had brought the Marines down to the planet’s surface hours before. Piloted by an independent AI, kept aloft by agrav pods and protected by a ball-turret plasma gun, the flier looked like a black insect, complete with gangly, slender legs equipped with powerful grapples. Reaching up, he grabbed hold of one of those legs and locked on; the jointed member retracted partially, pulling him clear of the wreckage and into the air.

  Corporal Allison and Sergeant Chu were already on board the tactical carrier, grappled to the aircraft’s other legs and retracted up into the partial shelter of the machine’s body. The rubble dropped away as the vehicle swiftly ascended, rotating and banking toward the distant tower.

  The helplessness and the sense of being exposed were sharper now than during the landing craft descent earlier. The gun was sharply maneuverable, however, and the artificial intelligence piloting it possessed inhumanly fast reflexes. It was easier on the stomach not to watch. Ramsey closed his eyes and merged with the assault team gestalt, watching again from the gods’ perspective as four green icons representing the fast-moving Specter guns converged on the objective.

  All four aircraft street-skimmed in toward the tower, zig-zagging all the way to take every possible advantage of buildings, trees, and rubble. Hivel rounds snapped past the flier, and once Ramsey felt the solid shock of a heavy detonation close by. His helmet readout warned of a gamma pulse; someone was firing antimatter rounds at them. He felt another thump as the gun’s plasma weapon fired, knocking down an incoming rocket that had targeted them.

  He saw a sudden flare as one of the incoming Specter guns took a direct hit despite its evasive maneuvering. According to his link, both Daley and Hearst jumped clear as the aircraft crumpled and slammed into the rubble-clogged street below.

  The remaining three tactical carriers reached the base of the skyscraper at the same instant, changing vectors to travel straight up the sides of the tower in a stomach-wrenching maneuver that was only partly eased by the inertial dampers in Ramsey’s armor.

  Three seconds, the pilot AI whispered in his mind, and he opened his eyes in time to see of blur of ferrocrete and structural ornamentation flashing past.

  Two seconds…one second…

  Another gut-twisting shift in vector, and the Specter gun slipped over the rampart encircling the top of the tower. A mental command, and he was released from the craft’s unfolding leg, dropping onto the roof, striking, rolling, coming up with his mag-pulse rifle raised, his helmet electronics already tracking the nearest threat. The weapon was set to AI control, and he let his suit guide him; the weapon triggered as soon as it had a solid targeting lock.

  The first Muzzie rifleman went down, his armor hammered by a rapid-fire barrage of magnetic pulses. The top of the building became a bewildering and rapidly unfolding blur of motion and weapons fire, as two of the other Specter guns came up over the ramparts and released their payloads of Marines.

  The Specter gun carrying Howell, Beck, and Santiago took a direct hit as it hovered above the rampart, an antimatter blast flashing with deadly brilliance at the edge of the tower. Ramsey overrode his weapon control and shifted aim to the Muzzie gunner—a low threat because he was facing away from Ramsey as he manhandled the massive A.M. accelerator for a second shot, but he was trying to target the three Marines on that side of the tower as they fell from the burning transport. Ramsey triggered his weapon, and the enemy soldier folded backward around the kinetic impulse slamming into his spine, his weapon cartwheeling across the roof with the impact.

  A warning went off in his mind; gunners were targeting him. He cut in his jumpjets and sailed across the roof, pivoting in midair to target one of the Muzzie gunners who was standing up behind a waist-high ferrocrete barrier, tracking Ramsey as he sailed through the air.

  The stricken Specter gun slammed into the edge of the tower, metal burning furiously, catching and holding for a moment before rocking back and off the roof, crashing to the street eighty-four-stories below. The remaining two guns hovered above opposite sides of the building, ninety meters apart, coordinating their plasma weaponry with the fire from the eight Marines now fanning out across the roof.

  A transparent wall overlooked the rooftop, a penthouse or upper story of some sort, enveloped in hanging plants, and with a sunken interior that formed a well-protected redoubt. The transparency—plastic and shatterproof—melted as someone inside detonated a thermal charge. An instant later, a swarm of APerMs emerged and arced into the sky before descending on hissing contrails—antipersonnel missiles, each the size of a man’s forefinger, each with an on-board AI smart enough to identify an enemy’s armor signature and home on it relentlessly, each with a dust-speck’s worth of antimatter in magnetic containment. Ramsey’s armor fired a countermeasures charge, and flashes of actinic brilliance from the hovering guns picked individual missiles out of the air with hivel kinetic-kill rounds each the size of a grain of sand. The sky turned to white fire….

  At first he thought the threat had been neutralized, and he started moving forward once more. In the next instant, his helmet display flashed warning; there were still APerMs in the air.

  He triggered another countermeasure burst…but it was too little, too late, and he couldn’t get them all. APerMs slashed into Howell and Beck, who was bounding alongside her, blasting gouts of molten laminate from their armor, knocking the two Marines backward.

  “Thea!” Ramsey screamed, and then he was standing twenty meters from the open penthouse, hosing the low, cavern-like opening in front of him with his flamer. One of the hovering Specter guns with a good line of sight added lance after flaring lance of plasma energy to his fire; Ramsey could see figures writhing and incinerating within the flames.

  Turning, he bounded across the rooftop to the two fallen Marines. Corporal Gerry Beck was dead, his helmet punctured, then exploded from within. There was a lot of blood, and only smoking, blackened shards remained of helmet and skull.

  Staff Sergeant Thea Howell, however, was still alive. The AP round had struck her in the chest, shattering ribs, rupturing a lung, flooding her torso with hard radiation, but her diagnostic feed showed she was
still alive as her armor struggled to control the damage. She was already deep in medical support stasis.

  Thea….

  Crouching above her body, he turned his fire against a last remaining clump of Muzzie gunners behind a ferrocrete wall. One of the Specter guns burned down the last of them, and the firefight came to an abrupt end.

  But Ramsey continued to hold the broken body of Thea Howell, letting his own armor make automatic feed connections and linkages so that he could bolster her suit’s damaged support systems.

  Besides being a fellow Marine and the platoon’s senior NCO, Thea was an old friend, and frequently his lover.

  She was family.

  And he didn’t want to see her die….

  * * * *

  USMC Recruit Training Center

  Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

  1045/24:20 local time, 2003 hrs GMT

  Garroway felt…alone. Alone and utterly empty.

  And he couldn’t even mind-click himself a serotonin jolt to lift the settling black mist of depression…or ask Aide for help.

  “I know you’re all feeling a bit low right now,” Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst said, smiling. “But I have just the ticket! We’re going to run. Comp’ney, lef’ face! For’ard harch! Double time, harch!…”