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

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СКАЧАТЬ towered over the assembly. He tried not to look at it. The scowl, the craggy eyebrows, the jut of the chin all conspired to make him look angry, even darkly sinister, and that made him self-conscious.

      “Ladies and gentlemen of the Senate,” he began, keeping his voice low, “I am not, of course, a member of this body. I am a guest and, I suppose, a kind of expert witness, whom you have kindly invited to come here and share my views on the Argo incident, and on the necessity of adopting War Plan 102–08.” A babble of voices, protests, and catcalls rose, and he shouted through the noise. “Yes, necessity! Because if we duck back into our shells and ignore the crisis before us, I promise you that we will cease to exist as a species, that you, me, and every man, woman, and child in this system, on the world beneath us, and among the stars around us, will be hunted down and exterminated!

      “But before I get to that, I feel that I must comment, briefly, on some of the things Madam Devereaux has said. You see … as it happens, I agree with her, in two important ways, at least.”

      At that moment, the Senate chamber became deathly silent. Currently, there were within the Commonwealth government 494 senators, two representing each state, district, major orbital colony, and world within the Commonwealth, and even some major corporate entities as well. Each of those senators had his or her own oval seating box, and each was accompanied by his or her own entourage of secretaries and personal assistants. Several thousand people were watching Alexander at that moment in complete and utter silence.

      And a far vaster audience, he knew, was present virtually, watching through their personal links from home.

      “Madam Devereaux has said that she believes Marines to be ‘a little dangerous.’ I really must take exception to that. Marines are not a little dangerous. We are very dangerous. We are trained to kill, and we are very, very good at what we do.

      “She has also called us extremists, pointed out that we are not a part of the overall culture of Humankind, and suggested that our extremism is more of a threat than are the Xul.

      “Extremists? Maybe so. We are extreme in our pride. We are extreme—I would say we are insufferable—in our devotion to our Brotherhood, to one another, and to what we stand for. We are extremists in that way, in the depth of our devotion, to our Corps, to our traditions, and to the memory of those Marines who’ve gone before, to the blood shed by all of the Marines who have served in the past eleven hundred years.

      “And we are extremists when it comes to our devotion to duty, to service, to country, to you senators, and to the people and the government you represent.

      “Marines are different from the men and women of the other branches of service. I admit that. I am proud of that. And that distinction is an important one.

      “In the Army, you have riflemen … and you have supply clerks, and you have cooks, and you have electronics specialists and sims technicians and cartographers and comm personnel and pilots and drivers and military police and all the rest. What is it, now … four, maybe five hundred distinct military specialties?

      “In the Marines, though, it’s different. We have specialization skills, yes … but in the Marines every man and woman is a rifleman first. I don’t care if a Marine is unloading cargo pallets at a spaceport, or flying an A-410 Kestrel, or programming combat sims at Skybase, or sneaking drones through a Stargate into a Xul base at the Galactic Core. I don’t care if that Marine is a general officer, or fresh out of boot camp. He or she is a Marine combat rifleman first.

      “I daresay General Lisa Devi, the General of the Army, would not call herself a soldier. The General of the Aerospace Force would not call himself an aerospaceman. The Chief of Naval operations does not call himself a sailor. General McCulloch, the Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, however, is damned proud to call himself a Marine. As I am proud to call myself a Marine.

      “Does that make us extremists? Maybe … but if it does, I submit, ladies and gentlemen of the Senate, that the Commonwealth needs that kind of extremism. That kind of dedication. That sense of purpose and that devotion to duty!

      “In five more days, ladies and gentlemen, the Marine Corps will have its birthday, celebrating eleven hundred and three years of service, first to the United States of America, then to the Commonwealth of Terra. Eleven hundred years.

      “It’s true, you know, that the Marines have their own culture. I admit that. In fact, I’m damned proud of that. We call a floor a deck, a door a hatch, a hat a cover, our living spaces quarters, a bed a rack. We have our own brand of humor, jokes only Marines can appreciate or even understand. Marines have had their own culture ever since they lived crowded together on the stinking lower decks of wind-driven wet-navy sailing ships, ever since seven of them led an army of revolutionaries across the Sahara Desert to Derna, ever since they charged time after time after bloody time the German machine-gun nests in Belleau Wood. It’s a part of being a member of this fraternity, this brotherhood of heroes.

      “Is that such a bad thing? We still have God knows how many distinct cultures on Earth, and we call it diversity and say it’s an important part of being human. And the people living in Earth Ring have their own distinct way of looking at things … as do people in Mars Ring, or in Luna, or out in the Belts or the Jovians or Chiron or Ishtar or anywhere else where humans have gone and made homes for themselves. We Marines are no different. We’ve made a home for ourselves within the family we call the Corps. If we’re proud of that, it’s no worse than being proud of being American, or Japanese, or Lunan.

      “How does having a unique culture make us a threat?

      “Yes, we have our ‘pretty uniforms,’ as Madam Devereaux said, where each part carries its own tradition, each color its own meaning. Black for space, blue for the ancient oceans of Earth. And red. Let’s not forget the red in that thin red stripe down the trouser legs of our full-dress uniforms. Red for the blood of Marines shed at places like Chapultepec and Belleau Wood, Suribachi and the Chosin Reservoir, Cydonia and Ishtar.

      “Blood, I might add, shed for your ancestors, so that they, and you, might be free to hold these deliberations in this chamber today!”

      Alexander was startled by a sudden burst of applause from the chamber. He hesitated, looking across the pit, wondering what it was that had inspired this display. He didn’t think of himself as a demagogue, and certainly not as a politician or a speechmaker. He’d been speaking from the heart, from a very angry heart, not so much trying to sway the audience as to simply get them to hear, to understand.

      He took a deep breath, calming himself. He did have their attention now, so if he was going to make his point, now was the time to do it.

      “You have a choice before you, Senators. You can do nothing, and wait for the Xul to arrive … and they will arrive, I promise you that. Sooner or later, they will be here, just as they were here in 2314, but this time it will be an armada flinging rocks or worse at Mars, not a solitary, arrogant, and cocksure huntership.

      “And if that happens, I promise you that the Marines will stand and fight. We will fight, as we have always fought in desperate actions, and we will die protecting you, and your children, and our children, and our worlds. We will stand and we will fight and we will die … because there will be no place else to which we can withdraw if the enemy comes to us with his full, vast, and overwhelmingly advanced technological might.

      “Do you understand that? We will die. Earth will die. And on every one of 512 planets scattered across eight hundred light-years, Humanity will die! We know something similar happened СКАЧАТЬ