The Complete Legacy Trilogy: Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines. Ian Douglas

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ that. He just—”

      “I’m not interested in the details, son. But hear me, and hear me loud and clear. All abusive behavior by parents or stepparents or line-marriage parents—or by anyone else in authority over a kid, for that matter—does incalculable damage. Doesn’t matter if it was sexual abuse or physical abuse with routine beatings or ‘just’ emotional abuse with screaming fits and head games. And it doesn’t matter if the adult is alcoholic or addicted to c-link sex feeds or is just a thoroughgoing abusive asshole. It’s really impossible to say which is worse, which kid gets hurt the most, because every kid is different and responds to the abuse in different ways.”

      “My father yelled a lot,” Garroway said, “but he never hit me. Uh, not deliberately, anyway.” He didn’t add that Carlos Esteban had hit his mother, frequently, and threatened more than once to do the same to him, or that he was an alcoholic who’d disabled the court-appointed cybercontrols over his behavior.

      “Doesn’t matter. It says here your mother has filed for divorce. She’s out of the house?”

      “Yes, sir. She’s staying with a sister in California now.”

      “Good. She’s better off out of this guy’s way, and you’ll be better off knowing she’s okay.” He got a faraway look in his eyes as he scrutinized the data feed flowing through his link. “It says here you were hospitalized once with a dislocated shoulder after a domestic altercation.”

      “That was an accident, sir.”

      “Uh-huh.” The sergeant didn’t sound at all convinced. “Your father has been cited seven times … domestic violence … disturbing the peace … assault … This bastard should have been locked away and rehabbed a long time ago.”

      “There are … political factors, sir. He’s a pretty big man in Sonora, where we live. He’s good friends with the local sheriff and with the governor.”

      “Shit. Figures.”

      “Sir … I don’t understand where this is going. Are you saying I’m not qualified to be a Marine because my father—”

      “You’re qualified, son. Don’t worry about that. What we’re concerned about right now is your c-link. Your implant is a Sony-TI 12000 Series Two Cerebralink.”

      “Uh, yessir. It was a birthday present from my parents.”

      “Do you have a resident AI?”

      “A personality, you mean? No, sir.” Most cerebralinks had onboard AI, for net navigation if nothing else. He didn’t have one with a distinct personality, though. His father hadn’t believed in that sort of thing.

      “Cybersex partner?”

      “Uh … no …” He’d linked into a number of sex sites, of course, for a few hours of play with various fantasy partners. Everyone did that. But he didn’t have a regular playmate.

      “Cyberpet?”

      “No, sir.” His father had been pretty insistent about his not having any artificial personalities—a waste of time and money, Carlos had said, and a threat to his immortal soul—and he’d done a lot of e-snooping to make sure his orders were obeyed.

      “What did you do for companionship?”

      “Well … there’s my girlfriend. …”

      “Lynnley Collins. Yes. You’re pretty close with her?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “A fuck buddy? Or something closer?”

      “She’s a friend. Sir.” He had to bite back his rising anger. This kind of cross-examination was the sort of thing his father did, stripping him of any semblance of privacy.

      Of course, he’d known he would be surrendering most of his privacy rights when he signed up. But this prying, this spying into his private life … damn it, it wasn’t right.

      “I know, son,” Makowiecz said gently, almost as if he was reading Garroway’s mind. “I know. This is as intrusive, as downright abusive, as anything your old man ever did to you. But it’s necessary.”

      “Sir, yes, sir. If you say so, sir.”

      “I do say so. Does it surprise you that we pay pretty close attention to a recruit’s private life here? We have to.” He pulled his hand off the contact panel on the desk and leaned back in his chair. Outside, clearly audible through the thin walls of the DI’s barracks office, a boot company jogged past, sounding off to a singsong cadence to the beat of footsteps thundering together.

       “Am I right or am I wrong?

       Each of us is tough and strong!

       We guard the ground, the sea, the sky!

       Ready to fight and willing to die!”

      “It’s a damned paradox, Garroway,” Makowiecz said as the chanting faded away across the grinder. “Lots of kids join the Marines who had bad childhoods. For a lot of ’em, the Corps is their mother and father put together. I know. That’s the way it was for me. And we have to put you through six kinds of hell, have to break you in order to build you up into the kind of Marine we want. If that’s not abuse, I don’t know what is.”

      “A history feed I downloaded once said that it used to be that Marine DIs couldn’t even swear at the recruits. Sir.”

      Makowiecz nodded. “True enough. That was back, oh, 150 years ago or so. We couldn’t lay hands on recruits then either. A number of Marine DIs were discharged, even court-martialed and disgraced, for not following the new guidelines. They’d grown up in the old Corps, after all, and they thought that harassment and even physical abuse toughened the recruits, made them better Marines.

      “We know better now. Still, the rules have relaxed a bit since then, because it was discovered that we couldn’t make Marines without imposing discipline … and sometimes some well-placed profanity or grabbing a recruit by the stacking swivel and giving him a shake is just what is needed to get the message through his damned thick recruit skull. You copy?”

      “Yes, sir.”

      “We have to invade each recruit’s private life, right down to his soul—if he has one. We need to know what makes him tick. How he’ll react under stress. And how we can transform him into a U.S. Marine.”

      “I understand that, sir.” And he did, reluctantly … and with a few reservations.

      “Good. You understand too that we have to remove your cerebralink.”

      “Yes … sir.”

      “You don’t sound so sure of that.”

      “Well, it’s kind of scary, thinking about being without it. I’ll be getting a Marine Corps model, right?”

      “That’s affirmative. Eventually. But first you will learn how to function without any electronic enhancement at all.”

      “Without СКАЧАТЬ