Battlespace. Ian Douglas

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       2

       27 OCTOBER 2159

       Marine Receiving Barracks Star Marine Force Center Twentynine Palms, California 1825 hours, PST

      “So what’s the dope, Gare?” Lance Corporal Roger Eagleton asked. “You hear anything?”

      “Nope,” Garroway said around a mouthful of steak-and-cheese. “You think they tell me anything?”

      “You’re the one with the famous Marine ancestor,” Kat Vinton told him.

      “I guess. So why would that mean they’d tell me what’s going on?”

      “I don’t know. With your name, we figured they were grooming you for a recruiting tour, y’know?”

      “Yeah,” Corporal Bill Bryan added. “Just to keep you happy, so’s you can be convincing with your sales pitch. You know. ‘Join the UFR/US Marines! Travel to exotic climes! Explore strange new cultures! Meet fascinating people! Kill them.’”

      “Ooh-rah.”

      They were seated at a long mess table, showered, dressed in newly issued utilities, and packing in their first meal in ten years. The chow was first-class and there was lots of it, but now that their stomachs had gotten rid of the last of that damned packing gel and had some time to settle, they were hungry. Even three-lies-in-one field rations would have seemed like food of the gods under the circumstances.

      “How about you, Sarge?” Kat asked the big man at the end of the table. Staff Sergeant Richard “Well” Dunne was acting platoon sergeant now and the platoon’s liaison with all higher authority. “They tell you what’s going on?”

      “Negative,” Dunne said. “The word is to sit tight and all will be revealed.”

      “Hurry up and wait,” Garroway said. “The litany of the modern Marine Corps.”

      “Fuck that shit,” Sergeant Wes Houston said. “It’s been that way since Sargon the Great was a PFC.”

      Garroway continued to eat, but he was somewhat unsettled. Kat’s crack about his famous ancestor had caught him by surprise. His great-grandfather had been Sands of Mars Garroway, a tough old-Corps Marine who’d led his men on a grueling march through the Vallis Marineris during the U.N. War of 2042 to capture an enemy-held base. The man was one of the legends of the Corps, another live-forever name like Dan Daily, Smedley Butler, and Chesty Puller. When he’d gone through his Naming Ceremony, he’d deliberately chosen his mother’s maiden name—Garroway—hoping, perhaps, that some of the luster of that name would rub off on him.

      Now that he was a Marine himself, though, he frequently found himself wishing it wouldn’t rub off quite so much. Officers and NCOs tended to expect more from him than of others, and everyone else assumed the name meant he had things easy.

      The fact was that there was no favoritism in the Corps—not below the rank of colonel, at any rate, not that he’d been able to detect.

      “There’s one piece of good news,” Dunne said. “The TIG promos are probably gonna go through. That’s something, at least.”

      Appreciative claps, whistles, and cheers sounded from around the mess table. It was good news.

      In the service, being promoted from one rank to the next required passing advancement tests, but more it required TIG—time-in-grade. Garroway had boarded the Derna right out of boot camp as a wet-behind-the-ears private first-class, pay grade E-2. The voyage out to Lalande 21185 had taken ten years, objective time, though relativistic effects contracted that to four years, ship’s time.

      His promotion to E-3, lance corporal, had been pretty much automatic. Technically, he’d needed six months as an E-2 and four years subjective counted, even if he’d slept through most of it in cybehibe. He’d received his chevron above crossed rifles while serving on Ishtar.

      He’d been on Ishtar for less than a year, however, before being packed onboard СКАЧАТЬ