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

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      “So? How does it feel?” PFC Sandre Kenyon asked him.

      Garroway blinked, testing the mental currents. “It feels … empty. Kind of like back in boot camp. When we didn’t have our implants activated, y’know?”

      She nodded. “That’s exactly what it’s like. Because that’s what it is, at least up to a point. You still have Net access, comm access—”

      “But we can get Achilles back?”

      “Oh, sure! He’s still there,” she reassured him. She laughed and nudged Garroway in the ribs with an elbow. “He just doesn’t know what he’s missing!”

      They were sitting side by side on one of the benches in the locker, surrounded by the silent, hanging shapes of emergency pressure suits. All of his attention, however, was focused inward as he took a self-inventory of his electronic systems. His implant software was still running. Achilles, however, the platoon AI, did not appear to be on-line.

      He shook his head, partly in confusion, partly in admiration. “How the hell did you learn this, Sandre?”

      She shrugged. “I’m a vir-simmer, remember? Back in my misspent civilian youth, I programmed the micro-AIs in sensory helms. I knew there had to be a back door. I just needed to find it.”

      “It’s still amazing.”

      Garroway continued testing the feel of his internal hardware. In a way, it was like that horrible stretch of time in boot camp, the empty time, when he’d been deprived of any cereblink hardware at all. He still had most of his connections for communication, for linking into other computers, or for downloading data off the Net. What was missing was Achilles, the AI Electronic Assistant that served both as guide through the military cyberworld and as an unofficial tattletale and voice of authority.

      “Yeah, well, I had some expert help, too,” Sandre told him. “Did a favor for Vince, down in the 660 maintenance shack back at RTC Mars. He uploaded some secure code for me, gave me a head start.”

      “Vince? Staff Sergeant Gamble?”

      “That’s right.”

      “I didn’t think that old son-of-a-bitch ever had a helpful thing to say to anyone!” He made a face, and imitated Gamble’s acid tones. “Especially puke-recruits.”

      She laughed. “You never tried, um, feminine wiles on the poor dear. Besides, we’re not recruits any more. We’re Marines.”

      “Ooh-rah.” He said it automatically, almost sarcastically, but he still felt a small, sharp chill of excitement as he spoke. Boot camp was over, the initiation complete, the metamorphosis from civilian to Marine accomplished.

      Even so, he’d been feeling a bit of anticlimax. For almost two weeks after their graduation ceremony on the tenth of November, Garroway and the rest of the newly minted Marines had sat around in a temporary barracks at Noctis Labyrinthus. The forty survivors of Recruit Company 4102 had expected to be shipped out to different units almost immediately, but when their orders didn’t come, speculation and rumor—”scuttlebutt” in ancient Marine and naval parlance—had fast become their primary, if highly unreliable, source of intel. Day after day, they’d stood watch, held practice drills, and carried out field days in various buildings across the compound, scrubbing, mopping, waxing, and polishing, “doing the bright work” until, as Ami Danvers had put it, the rising albedo of the base threatened them all with blindness. Robots and nanocleaning aerosol fumigants, Garroway had observed, could have done the job with far greater, microscopic precision; all of the hard manual labor, it was patently obvious, was make-work, designed to keep them busy and out of trouble.

      They’d still had plenty of free time, though, and a lot of the conversation in the squad bay had turned naturally enough to their new life as Marines, in addition to the more traditional topics like sex, liberty ports, and more sex. The fact that they all now housed an artificial intelligence—Achilles—griped a lot of them. Achilles was, in effect, the eyes and ears of their superiors, always watching, always listening. When they were busy, Achilles’ presence didn’t bother them much; when they were practicing a combat evolution, he was treated as a part of the company, linking them, all together and guiding their movements, warning them of danger, and linking them into the larger combat net.

      But when they were just sitting around the squad bay talking, Achilles’ presence became a constant stressor, invisible, not discussed, but always there.

      And morale had plummeted.

      But Sandre, evidently, had decided to do something about it. She’d struck up a friendly acquaintance with one of the base personnel, and learned how to switch Achilles off.

      A few days later, Company 4102 had been loaded on board a tiny military intersystem transport and shuttled to Earth Ring, where they’d been hustled across to their new duty station, a titanic assault transport named Samar. The word around the squad bay was that Samar had just returned from Alighan with the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce on board, or what was left of it, and that the forty new Marines were destined to fill out the 55th’s combat-depleted ranks.

      But their orders still hadn’t arrived.

      A short time before, Sandre had approached Garroway on the mess deck, with the suggestion that he accompany her down to the emergency suit locker after chow. He’d readily agreed; the two of them had snuck some playtime several times during the long stretch in the holding barracks at Noctis, and he’d been hoping to pursue the relationship.

      With Achilles blocked, he would be able to continue his trysts with Sandre. Not that the AI had caused them any trouble at Noctis. Their platoon commander had probably been informed of all of their meetings up until he’d received the software that let him disconnect from the AI, but had chosen not to intervene—quite probably because morale had been so bad, and disciplining a couple of Marines because they’d been having sex after hours would have made things a whole lot worse.

      Still, so far as Garroway was concerned, it would be a lot better if Achilles was out of the picture entirely, at least once in a while. After sixteen weeks of boot camp, he valued his privacy more than ever, and grated under the knowledge that anything he did, from scratching his balls in the head to just thinking about how he hated Gunny Warhurst could be recorded and fed up the chain of command. And almost everyone else in Company 4102 he’d talked to felt the same way.

      “You’re sure Achilles doesn’t know he’s being cut out?” Garroway asked. He was trying to imagine the AI’s point of view. Wouldn’t he know that he wasn’t getting data from certain members of the company, and become suspicious?

      “The way it was explained to me,” Sandre told him, “is that he’s only programmed to respond to certain situations, thoughts, or words. We don’t know what those triggers are, of course, but as long as he doesn’t receive them, he’s content. Artificial intelligences aren’t curious unless they’re programmed to be curious.”

      “Or suspicious, I guess.”

      “Exactly.”

      “So,” Garroway said, with just a trace of hesitation in his voice, “this means you and I could? …”

      “Of course. Why do you think I did it?”

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