The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human. Ian Douglas

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СКАЧАТЬ Terran Commonwealth

       Earth Ring

       1445 GMT

      It was, Alexander thought, a less than auspicious start to his mission to Earth. He’d expected the Commonwealth Senate to debate his plan for combating the Xul threat. That much went without saying. He’d not expected that the Marine Corps itself would be within the Senate’s sights, that they would actually be debating whether or not to bring the Corps’ eleven-hundred-year history to a close.

      After reviewing the data transmitted back from Puller 659, he’d routed the full text back to Earth, to USMC-HQ, to the Military Intelligence Agency, and, as required by regulations, to the Senate Military Oversight Committee. The reaction of that last was uncharacteristically swift; he’d been ordered to return to Earth Ring in person, to face a full Senate meeting and to present his recommendations.

      To that end, he’d taken the somewhat unusual step of pulling Skybase out of its paraspace anchorage and returning it to the Sol System. The Quantum Sea, existing outside of the normal boundaries of four-dimensional space/time, did not relate to space/time with a point-to-point correspondence. If you had a well-plotted set of special coordinates, it was possible to use paraspace as a means to bypass enormous distances in 4D space.

      Dropping into Sol space had enabled him to get back to Earth Ring much more quickly than an FTL shuttle. He was wondering, however, if the trip had been worth it. He’d delivered his recommendation—a carefully parsed blueprint for action by the 1st Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force—1MIEF—minutes ago.

      And already the vultures were descending like harpies, scenting blood and eager for a meal.

      Madam Marie Devereaux drew herself up to her full 150 centimeters, chin held high, defiant. She was standing at her seat in the Commonwealth Senate, an enclosed box high up within one of the ascending ranks of Senatorial platforms, but her repeater holo image stood at the chamber’s center, towering over the Senate Chamber pit, matching each move, each dramatic pose, each gesture and expression. Alexander wondered if the holo was projecting the woman’s personal e-filters to achieve that seeming perfection of face and form, or if what he was seeing reflected reality.

      Not that reality had that much to do with this charade. He grimaced. Devereaux was putting on the show of her life. She appeared to be relishing this moment.

      “Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate,” she declaimed. “We’ve heard the arguments in favor of striking at the Xul, heard them endlessly in round upon round of discussion within these sacred halls, both in open debate and in closed committee. Is anyone else here as tired as I am, as sick to death as I am, I wonder, of hearing yet more excuses for this collection of odd bits and pieces of military technology and tradition and self-serving alarmist brinksmanship that calls itself the U.S. Marine Corps?”

      A chorus of boos and shouted catcalls sounded from the surrounding rings of seats … but Alexander heard cheers and applause as well. It was impossible at this point in the proceedings to calculate whether the Senate was going to go along with his recommendation … or side with the newly constituted Peace Party.

      What he’d not anticipated, though, was that this session was going to become a referendum on the very survival of the Corps.

      “The Marines,” Devereaux continued, “may once have had a place in history, a role to play within the disparate collection of military services that once served the United States of America.” The huge, holographically projected face smiled down beatifically at the watching senators. “They were very good, I understand, at scrambling up into the rigging of ancient warships, back in the Age of Sail, and shooting enemy officers on other ships. Some centuries later, they served as a kind of police force on American wet-navy vessels, and as ceremonial guards at American embassies in other countries. I suspect they were chosen because of how pretty their red, white, and blue dress uniforms were. …”

      Chuckles and isolated bits of laughter rose from several quarters, and Alexander scowled. Damn the woman. Playing politics with the Corps at a deadly time like this. …

      “Many of us love and admire the Marines, admire them for their sense of duty, their sense of tradition going back over eleven hundred years, now. But even as we admire them, we must admit to ourselves that these Marines have never really fitted in with their brothers-at-arms in the other services … the Army, the Air Force, even with the Navy, though historically they draw their strongest support from them. The Marines, admittedly, have served us well in the past, but we see from this incident just brought to our attention that the U.S. Marines are … extremist in their views. And this is not a time, Senators, for extremists.

      “You see, the Marines, as we have seen repeatedly in the past, are not … not team players, as the old expression puts it. They take a disproportionate share of scarce resources and financing for their own service needs—for training, for supply, for transport, for administration—and give nothing back.

      “They do nothing that the Army could not do just as well. Once, perhaps, the argument could be made that the Marines served a vital role as a ready amphibious landing force. In the days of wet navies, they could land on any beach, anywhere in the world, creating a beachhead through which regular Army forces could arrive and deploy.

      “But the day of amphibious landings is long, long past, Senators. Marines have for centuries deployed through suborbital transports or orbit-to-surface landing craft, not wet-navy boats. Their very name—Marines—reflects a bygone age when ‘marine soldiers’ could be deployed on Navy ships to carry out missions on Earth’s seas. Why, I wonder, deploy them into space? Because the Navy builds and operates the majority of our military spacecraft? Is that reason enough to keep them … like aging pets? Marines, I submit, are anachronisms, a piece of our past as anachronistic as armored knights on horseback.

      “But more than being military anachronisms, I submit, Senators, that Marines are political anachronisms. Ask any Marine. Ask General Alexander, up there in the visitor’s gallery, who brought this affair to our attention. Their first loyalties are not to Humankind, nor to our Commonwealth, but to an outmoded political concept called America, and to the Marine Corps itself.

      “And that, Senators, that makes them, to my way of thinking, just a little dangerous.”

      Again, that smattering of applause. Alexander closed his eyes, trying to feel the emotion in the room. How many supported Devereaux? How many supported the lame duck administration?

      How many simply hadn’t yet made up their minds?

      “Senators,” Devereaux went on, “the Marines like to present themselves as being the guardians of our liberty. But when their heavily armed mobile base appears off our Ring docking ports, when Marines in their pretty uniforms and with their steely expressions suddenly walk the corridors of our orbital habitats … how safe, how free can we actually feel?”

      Alexander’s fist closed. He nearly stood, nearly shouted protest, but forced himself to remain in his seat. Damn it,

      He’d ordered Skybase to transit out of paraspace and dock at Earth Ring. It was unusual, but it was the fastest means of getting here. Strictly speaking, Skybase was not a space craft, but a deep space habitat, similar to the colony facilities in use in the Asteroid Belt and the mining settlements out in the Oort Cloud. It had no motive power of its own, other than station-keeping thrusters, and it required a small fleet of tractor tugs to move it around in normal space. The bulky structure was designed to dock periodically at major port СКАЧАТЬ