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

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">       Parris Island, South Carolina

       1430 hours ET

      “Garroway!”

      “Sir, yes, sir!”

      “Through that hatch!”

      “Aye aye, sir!”

      Garroway banged through the door that had already swallowed half of Company 1099. Inside was the familiar, sterile-white embrace of seat, cabinets, AI doc, and the waiting corpsman.

      “Have a seat,” the corpsman said. It wasn’t the same guy he had met in there before. What was his name? He couldn’t remember.

      Not that it was important. New faces continually cycled through his awareness these days. Without his implants he could only memorize the important ones, the ones he was ordered to remember.

      Of course, that was about to change now. He suppressed the surge of excitement.

      “Feeling okay?” the corpsman asked.

      “Sir, yes, sir!”

      “No injuries? Infections? Allergies? Nothing like that?”

      “Sir, no, sir!”

      “Do you have at this time any moral or ethical problems with nanotechnic enhancement, implant technologies, or nanosomatic adjustment?”

      “Sir, no, sir!”

      The corpsman wasn’t even looking at him as he asked the questions. He wore instead the far-off gaze of someone linked into a net and was probably scanning Garroway now with senses far more sophisticated than those housed in merely human eyes or ears.

      “He’s go,” the man said.

      The AI doctor unfolded from the cabinet. One arm with an airjet hypo descended to his throat, and Garroway steeled himself against the hiss and burn of the injection.

      “Right,” the corpsman said. “Just stay there, recruit. Give it time to work.”

      This was it, at long last. It felt as though he’d been without an implant now for half his life, though in fact it had only been about six weeks. Six weeks of running, of learning, of training, all without being able to rely on an internal uplink to the local net.

      It was, he thought, astonishing what you could do without a nexus of computers in your brain or electronic implants growing in your hands. He’d learned he could do amazing things without instant access to comlinks or library data.

      But that didn’t mean he wasn’t eager to get his technic prostheses back.

      Outside of a slight tingle in his throat, though, he didn’t feel much of anything. Had the injection worked?

      “Okay, recruit. Off you go. Through that door and join your company.”

      “Sir … I don’t feel—”

      “Nothing to feel yet, recruit. It’ll take a day or two for the implants to start growing and making the necessary neural connections. You’ll be damned hungry, though. They’ll be feeding you extra at the mess hall these next few days to give the nano the raw materials it needs.”

      He fell into ranks with the rest of his company and waited as the last men filed through the sick bay. Damn. He’d been so excited at the prospect of getting his implants that he’d not thought about how long it might take them to grow. He’d been hoping to talk to Lynnley tonight. …

      He hadn’t seen her, hadn’t even linked with her, since arriving on Parris Island. Male and female recruits were kept strictly apart during recruit training, though he had glimpsed formations of women Marines from time to time across the grinder or marching off to one training exercise or another. The old dream of serving with her on some offworld station seemed remote right now. Had she changed much? Did she ever even think about him anymore?

      Hell, of course she’s changed, he told himself. You’ve changed. So has she.

      He’d been on the skinny side before, but two months of heavy exercise and special meals had bulked him up, all of the new mass muscle. His endurance was up, his temper better controlled, the periodic depression he’d felt subsumed now by the daily routine of training, exercise, and discipline.

      And a lot of things that had been important to him once simply didn’t matter now.

      He had been allowed to vid family grams to his mother, out in San Diego. She was still living with her sister and beginning the process of getting a divorce. That was good, he thought, as well as long overdue. There were rumors of unrest in the Mexican territories—Recruit Training Center monitors censored the details, unfortunately—and scuttlebutt about a new war.

      He kept thinking about what Lynnley had said, back in Guaymas, about him having to fight down there against his own father.

      Well, why not? He felt no loyalty to that bastard, not after the way he’d treated his mother. So far as he was concerned, he’d shed the man’s parental cloak when he’d reclaimed the name Garroway.

      “Garroway!” Makowiecz barked.

      “Sir! Yes, sir!”

      “Come with me.”

      The DI led him down a corridor and ushered him into another room with a brusque “In there.”

      A Marine major, a tall, slender, hard-looking woman in dress grays, sat behind a desk inside.

      “Sir! Recruit Garroway reporting as ordered, sir!” In the Corps, to a recruit, all officers were “sir” regardless of gender, along with most other things that moved.

      “Sit down, recruit,” the woman said. “I’m Major Anderson, ComCon Delta Sierra two-one-nine.”

      He took a seat, wondering if he’d screwed up somehow. Geez … it had to be something pretty bad for a major to step in. During their day-to-day routine, Marine recruits rarely if ever saw any officer of more exalted rank than lieutenant or captain. From a recruit’s point of view, a major was damned near goddesslike in the Corps hierarchy, and actually being addressed by one, summoned to her office, was … daunting, to say the least.

      And a comcon? That meant she was part of a regular headquarters staff, probably the exec of a regiment. What could she possibly want with him?

      “I’ve been going over your recruit training records, Garroway,” she told him. “You’re doing well. All three-sixes and higher for physical, psych, and all phase one and two training skills.”

      “Sir, thank you, sir.”

      “No formal marriage or family contracts. Your parents alive, separated.” She paused, and he wondered what she was getting at. “Have you given much thought yet to duty stations after you leave the island?”

      That stopped him. Recruits were not asked to voice their preferences, especially by majors. “Uh … sir, uh … this recruit …”

      “Relax, СКАЧАТЬ