Battlespace - Ian Douglas

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years objective for the dubious pleasure of facing the Hunters of the Dawn. It’s too much!”

      “Too much for the Marines?” Shugart said with an unpleasant smile. “I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

      “They’ll go as volunteers,” Ramsey told him, “or not at all.” He owed that much to his people, at least.

      “I have to agree, Mr. Shugart,” Kinsey said. “These are Marines, people, we’re dealing with. Not chess pieces.”

      “I don’t believe you or the colonel fully understand,” Shugart said. “This will be a direct presidential order. The Federal Directorate has precedence over national interests.”

      And that, Ramsey had to admit, was one aspect of modern politics he did not understand, and it was becoming more confusing by the decade. The sudden growth of the old United States of America during the collapse of Canada and the wars with the U.N. and Mexico in the last century had resulted in huge, new territories added to the continental United States. To manage those territories, and to prepare them for admission as new states, the United Federal Republic of America had emerged as an organizational step above the United States.

      And so, technically, the Corps was now the UFR Marines. Still, tradition dies hard in the Corps. So far as most Marines were concerned, they were still the United States Marines, a title no leatherneck would surrender without a fight. While the President of the United States was also President of the Federal Republic, technically the two were not the same, and, legally, it was the United Federal Republic that called the shots now … in the name of organizational efficiency.

      Not that bureaucrats ever seemed that concerned about efficiency.

      Ramsey didn’t like the change, which had been well under way before the MIEU’s departure for Ishtar, and which was now very well entrenched with the new Federal capitol being constructed in New Chicago. He felt, he imagined, much as an advocate of states’ rights might have felt as the Federal government superseded mere state governments around the time of the American Civil War.

      The upshot of it was that the political situation—always something of concern for the Corps—was becoming damned hard to understand.

      “We can offer inducements for volunteers,” Kinsey suggested. “Surely that is preferable to simply ordering them to turn around and keep marching off into the future.”

      “Perhaps,” Shugart said. “The Federal Advisory Council will leave those decisions to the Marine brass and to the American Congress. But Mr. Ramsey and his people are going to Sirius. One way or another.”

      Ramsey wondered if the phrase United States of America even had meaning any longer. Just who was the Corps supposed to be fighting for now?

       3

       5 NOVEMBER 2159

       Starstruck Condecology Tower Raphael Level 486 East Los Angeles, California 2028 hours, PST

      The magflier public transport deposited them on the landing shelf of the tower, almost five hundred stories above the brilliantly lit sprawl of Greater Los Angeles. Garroway, Anna Garcia, Roger Eagleton, Regi Lobowski, Tim Womicki, and Kat Vinton stepped onto the platform, resplendent in newly issued Class A dress uniforms. A stiff wind off the ocean chilled and Garroway pulled his formal cloak a little closer about him. Eagleton paid off the transport with a wave of his newly issued asset card.

      “You sure we belong here, Gare?” Kat asked him.

      “I gave the flier’s AI the address,” Garroway told her. “This must be it.”

      “It” was a graceful series of curving walls and partial domes built into the side of one of Greater LA’s newer skytowers. The landing platform was broad and edged with walled gardens and gene-tailored landscaping. Several other skytowers gleamed in the night in the near-distance, self-contained arcologies, some 5 kilometers high and each holding a small city in its own right. The one named Raphael, an implant download told Garroway with a whispering in his mind, had been completed ten years ago and packed 950 stories into a column 3.8 kilometers tall. It housed 15,000 people in spacious luxury, as well as hundreds of shops, stores, restaurants, theme malls, indoor parks and plazas, recnexi, and tobbos … whatever those were. People could live out their entire lives in Raphael or one of the other condecologies and never set foot outside.

      To Garroway, that seemed a sterile kind of life, hardly worthy of the name. Still, different people, different customs. …

      “Hey, even if it’s the wrong address, it’s worth it just getting offbase for a bit,” Anna Garcia said. “I didn’t think they were going to let us go.”

      “I sure don’t know what the hassle is, that’s for damned sure,” Womicki said. “With all the form screens we had to thumb, you’d’ve thought we were trying to smuggle in ancient high-tech artifacts or something.”

      “Whoa,” Eagleton said, nudging Garroway in the ribs. “Look at this!”

      A woman walked out to meet them in a swirl of luminescence. She was strikingly nude; nanoimplants within her skin glowed in constantly shifting colors visible through the translucence of her skin, pulsing between deep ultramarine blue and emerald green. Her delicate tuft of neatly coiffed pubic hair had been treated as well; it glowed brightly, cycling from bright yellow to orange to red to gold to yellow again, creating interesting contrasts of hue against the deeper, inner glow of her thighs and belly. Her face and hair, however, were masked behind a silver, visorless helm. A spray of optical threads created a dazzling cascade of moving green and amber light rising over her head and spilling down each side to the ground.

      “You didn’t tell us we had to dress for dinner, Gare,” Anna whispered at his side.

      “Johnny!” the woman cried. “So glad you downjacked!”

      “Uh … Tegan?”

      “Who else?”

      He gave an awkward grin. “Sorry. I didn’t recognize you … uh … dressed like that. I appreciate your asking us out here tonight.”

      “Hey, no skaff.” The cold didn’t appear to bother her. “The mere the meller, reet? These your hangers?”

      He blinked. Her speech was quite rapid and laced with unfamiliar words. “I guess so. Uh … these are my friends, the ones I told you about. This is Corporal Kat Vinton, Corporal—”

      “Vix the IDs,” Tegan said, waving a glowing hand. “Leave it for the noumens.”

      “I beg your pardon?”

      “You don’t expect me to downrem names, do you?” She laughed. “Grampie, you are synched out! C’mon!”

      “Does ‘grampie’ mean what I think it does?” Anna asked.

      “‘Grandparent’?” Eagleton replied sotto voce. “‘Grandpa’? That’s my guess.”

      “Are you understanding any of this, Gare?” Kat asked him in a whisper as they followed the woman toward the building entrance.

      “Oh, a word here and there,” Garroway admitted.

      “‘Johnny’?” Eagleton said and snickered.

      “That was my civvie name,” he said. “John Garroway Esteban. But I dropped the Esteban on my naming day, and I lost the John in boot camp.”

      He wondered just how much in common he had with Tegan now. He’d given her a netcall as soon as they’d been informed that the com interdict had been lifted, and she’d sounded happy to hear from him. She’d

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