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

Чтение книги онлайн.

       10

       1011.1102

       USMC Recruit Training Center Command

       Ares Ring, Mars

       1020 hrs GMT

      Like Earth, Mars possessed a ring.

      Like its counterpart encircling the Motherworld of Humankind, the Ares Ring was not solid, but was composed of some tens of thousands of separate orbital facilities, colony habs, nanufactories and power stations, dockyards and spaceports, research stations and living quarters. Each structure pursued its own orbit about the planet, though many were magnetically locked with the neighbors, creating the illusion of a solid structure. They were positioned at about 20,000 kilometers above the planet’s surface, locking them in to an arestationary orbit—the equivalent of geostationary for Earth. From this height, Mars appeared some eleven times larger than did the full moon from Earth, and four times brighter.

      Unlike Earth, Mars possessed only a single ground to synchronous-orbit elevator, the Pavonis Mons Tower. Pavonis Mons, the middle of the striking set of three volcanoes in a row southeast of the vast swelling of Mons Olympus, reached seven miles into the sky and by chance exactly straddled the Martian equator—the perfect ground-end anchor for a space elevator. The habitat housing the Marine Recruit Training Center Command was positioned close by the nexus with the P.M. Tower, which looked like a taut, white thread vanishing down into the mottled ocher and green face of Mars.

      PFC Aiden Garroway stood at attention on the Grand Arean Promenade, together with the thirty-nine other Marines of Recruit Company 4102 who’d completed boot training, and tried not to look down. The deck they were standing on was either transparent or a projection of an exterior view from a camera angled down toward Mars—the resolution was good enough that it was impossible to tell which—and it was easy to imagine that the company was standing on empty space, with a twenty-thousand-kilometer fall to the rusty surface of the planet far beneath his feet.

      The effect of standing on empty space, the gibbous disk of Mars far beneath his feet, could be unnerving. He could just glimpse the planet when he turned his eyes down, while keeping his head rigidly immobile.

      Garroway and his fellow newly hatched Marines had spent a lot of time looking at that sight since they’d made the ascent from Noctis three days before. The world was achingly beautiful—red-ocher and green, the pristine sparkle and optical snap of icecaps, the softer white swirls and daubs and speckles of clouds, the purple-blue of the Borealis Sea.

      For many of them, those from Earth’s Rings, Garroway included, it brought with it a pang of homesickness. Not that Mars resembled Earth all that closely, even with its reborn seas and banks of clouds … but the oceanic blues and stormy swirls of white echoed the world they’d watched from Terrestrial synchorbit; for the handful of recruits from Earth herself, it was the colors—the blues and greens, especially—that reminded them of home.

      All things considered, perhaps it was best that he was standing at attention and looking straight ahead, not gawking at the deck. Somewhere behind him were the ranks of seats filled with friends and families of graduating Marines. No less a luminary than General McCulloch, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, was delivering a speech, his head and shoulders huge on the wallscreen ahead and slightly to Garroway’s right.

      “The Marines,” McCulloch was saying, “have been criticized for being different, for being out of step with the society that they are sworn to protect. And it’s true. Marines look at the world around them differently than most people. Marines are dedicated to the ideal of service.

      “I don’t mean to say that joining the Marines constitutes the only valid form of service. Certainly not. Nor do I mean that military service is the only way to serve one’s country.

      “But military service is one of the very few, unambiguous ways by which a young man or woman can declare themselves in support of the common good. It’s one of the few means remaining today by which young people can make a deep and lasting difference, both in their own lives, and in support of their homeland, even their home world.

      “And Marines—these Marines—have selflessly chosen service to country at considerable personal risk, have chosen service to others above comfort, above profit, above every other mundane consideration popular with young civilians these days. …”

      Garroway listened to the words, but somehow they СКАЧАТЬ