Star Corps. Ian Douglas

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      “Only the federal government can afford to give us a cruise back to Earth in such luxury,” Hanson said with a sneer, glancing around the cramped, gray-green compartment that was quarters to her and three Marines for the duration.

      “Well, they’re not my people. We’re as much in the dark about this redeployment as you are.”

      “I was talking with Lieutenant Kerns a little while ago,” Staff Sergeant Krista Ostergaard put in. “The scuttlebutt is that we’re being reassigned to a new mission. An out-Solar mission.”

      “That means Llalande,” Master Sergeant Vanya Barnes said. “Shit.”

      “You don’t want to go to the stars, Van?” Ostergaard said.

      “I don’t want to be gone twenty years.”

      Horst shrugged. “Hell, why not? The time’ll pass like that,” she snapped her fingers, “thanks to old Einstein. And it’s not like we have families back home.”

      “The Corps is home,” Ostergaard said.

      “Fuckin’-A,” Horst said, and she exchanged a high-five hand slap with Ostergaard. “Semper fi!”

      Hanson frowned and looked away. She was uncomfortable with these women, with the posing and the brassy-cold hardness of body and of mind that she was coming to associate with all of the members of this peculiar subspecies of human known as U.S. Marines.

      The Osiris was a small vessel, mounting an eighty-five-ton hab module normally outfitted for eight people, two to a cabin, not counting the AIs at the controls. A small lounge area, a galley, and the communications suite completed the amenities. For this passage, though, the admin constellation of Marines on board, composed of six women and six men, had been packed into the four compartments, with the one extra slot—for the ship’s sole civilian passenger—provided in the lounge. Hanson had been given a choice of sleeping there or in one of the two compartments assigned to the women. She’d chosen to share quarters because the lounge, which connected all four cabins and the galley, was less than private, with Marines of both sexes tramping through at all hours of the vessel’s artificial day and night.

      She’d begun regretting the decision within hours of boosting out of Mars orbit. These female Marines made her nervous with their bad-ass attitudes and nanosculpted bodies. They were rough, strong, and as foul-mouthed as their male Marine counterparts, flat-chested and hard-muscled, with technically enhanced eyes that seemed to look right through her.

      They’d been polite enough, true, but her forced incarceration had left her irritable and sour. She was at least a borderline claustrophobe, and none of the compartments on board the Osiris was larger than a small bedroom. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d been in free fall; even the tiniest hab compartment seemed roomy with three-dimensional floating space in microgravity. But the steady one-g acceleration—three times what she was used to after a year on Mars—kept her pinned to the deck, and most of the time strapped into her couch. She didn’t understand how Horst and the others could move about with such casual disregard for the acceleration dragging at them every minute of the long ship-day.

      Then something one of the Marines had just said managed to register in her weight-numbed mind. “Wait a minute,” she said. “What was that about Llalande?”

      “Llalande 21185,” Barnes said, staring at her with her peculiarly dark nanoaltered eyes. “It’s a red dwarf star about eight light-years from—”

      “I know what it is,” Hanson snapped. “We’ve been watching it from Mars. What did you mean about an out-Solar mission there?”

      “Stands to reason, honey,” Ostergaard said, grinning. “That’s where the action is. My money’s riding on a relief expedition. You’re an archie, right?”

      “Xenoarcheotechnologist,” she replied.

      “Whoa, the lady’s using damned big words,” Barnes said.

      “Positively sesquipedalian,” Horst said, with just a hint of a sneer.

      Ostergaard laughed. “I’ll bet a month’s pay they want you out on the Llalande planet to check out the xenotech they’ve been finding. Right, Marines?”

      “Fuckin’-A,” Barnes said. “Assuming there’s any left when we get there, ten years from now.”

      “I’m not going to Ishtar!” Hanson said. She didn’t want to admit it, but these people were scaring her now. “My work is here, on Mars.”

      “You’re not on Mars now, honey,” Horst reminded her. “You’re en route to Earth on very special orders. Either you really pissed someone off back there or you’re headed for Ishtar.” She grinned, an evil showing of teeth. “And maybe both!”

      Traci Hanson was used to having things her own way, to charting her own course and the hell with what others thought. It had gotten her this far, head of mission research at the Cydonian complex, and only a few scars the worse for wear. If they thought they could just order her to drop everything to go haring off to the stars, they were crazy. What did they think AIs were for?

      Robinson. She would take this up with Robinson as soon as she got back.

      Or … as soon as she was able to get up and walk around again, after this brutal week of acceleration.

      Then she remembered that the packet’s acceleration matched the gravitational acceleration of Earth itself, that this hell was going to go on and on.

      Shit …

       Headquarters, PanTerra Dynamics

       New Chicago, Illinois

       United Federal Republic, Earth

       1455 hours CT

      Gavin Norris had never seen a demonstration like this. The chanting throngs filled the circular PanTerra Plaza and spilled over into all of the surrounding thoroughfares. Police in full armor were everywhere, trying to maintain order and keep the main walkways open. The demonstration, he gathered, was an anti-An gathering, and tempers were burning high. Pro-Anners were there as well, and demonstration and counterdemonstration were threatening to erupt into full-scale civil war.

      Norris ignored the chanting crowds as best as he could, making his way toward the slender, black pinnacle that was his destination. The PanTerra Building soared two kilometers into the thin, cold air of the midwestern sky, rising from the Highland Park district to look down on a cloud-mottled Lake Michigan to the east and the still empty ruin of the Barrens to the south.

      The destruction of Old Chicago during the UN War a century ago had killed millions—no one would ever know the precise death toll—and extinguished one of the largest and most prosperous cities on the planet. Plutonium from the reaction mass heating grid of the French spacecraft that had broken up above Lake Michigan had scattered radioactive dust southwest across the city, leaving a poisoned footprint fifty kilometers long burned into the soil of northern Illinois. Detox robots and crews in sealed crawlers continued to work both in the desert ashore and in the waters offshore, but the most optimistic calculations indicated that the Barrens would remain hazardous for another five centuries at least.

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