LITMIR.BIZ

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hospital was already open to receive the bug, which bounced roughly—still in complete silence—as the pilot jockeyed the balky little craft in for a landing.

      Twenty minutes later, Lee, shed of his armor but still wearing the utility undergarment with its weave of heat-transfer tubes and medinano shunts, palmed the access panel to a door marked GSGT ECKHART. “Enter,” sounded in Lee’s thoughts over his implant and the door slid aside.

      The room was small and tightly organized, as were all work spaces in the older part of the facility. Deck space was almost completely occupied by a desk and two chairs. Most of the bulkheads were taken up with storage access panels, though there was room for a holoportrait of President Connors, another of Commandant Marshke, and a framed photograph of an FT-90 in low orbit, the dazzling curve of Earth’s horizon below and beyond its sleek-gleaming hull.

      “Hospitalman Second Class Lee, reporting as ordered, Gunnery Sergeant.”

      “At ease, at ease,” Eckhart waved him toward the chair. “I’m not an officer and we don’t need the formal crap. Copy?”

      “Uh … sure, Gunnery Sergeant. Copy.” He took the offered seat. Was this the prelude to a chewing out? Or to his being booted out of the program?

      “Relax, son,” Eckhart told him. “And call me ‘Gunny.’”

      “Okay, Gunny. Uh, look. I’ve been reviewing my procedure for that last casualty and I see what went wrong. I shouldn’t have rolled the wound into sunlight—”

      Eckhart waved him to silence. “Your dedication is duly noted, son. And we’ll debrief your session later, with the rest of the class. Right now I want to review your request for SMF.”

      Lee went cold, as cold as the shade on the Lunar surface, inside. “Is there a problem?”

      “Not really. I just think you need to have your head examined, is all. What the hell do you want to ship out-system for, anyway?”

      Lee took a deep breath, hesitated, then let it out again. How did you answer a question like that?

      “Gunny … I just want to go, that’s all. I’ve been space-happy since I was a kid, reet? ‘Join the Navy and see the stars.’”

      “You’re in space now, in case you haven’t noticed. Most space-happy kids never get as far out as the moon. Or even low-Earth orbit. You know that.” He leaned forward, hands clasped on the desktop before him. “You made it! You’re in space. Why are you so all-fired eager to take the Big Leap?”

      “I wouldn’t exactly call the moon space, Gunny.” He pointed at the overhead. “I mean, Earth’s right there, and everything, in plain view.”

      “There are always billets on Mars. Or Europa. Or on Navy ships on High Watch patrol. I want to know why you want to go to another fucking star. That’s what you put in for on your dreamsheet, right?”

      He sighed. “Yes, Gunny. I did.”

      “You want to sign on for a deployment that might last twenty to thirty years objective. You come back home aged maybe four years and find yourself completely out of pace with everything. Everyone you knew is thirty years older. Your implant is out of date. You don’t understand the language. Hell, the culture might seem as alien to you as anything you’ll run into XT. You won’t fit in anymore.”

      “Gunny, I don’t really have anything here, on Earth, I mean. Nothing but the Corps.”

      “Uh-huh.” Eckhart’s eyes glazed over as he reviewed some inner download of data. “It says here you just went through a divorce.”

      “Yes, Gunny.”

      “What happened?”

      He shrugged. “My wife and husband both filed for divorce. I came home from my last deployment and found the locks had been changed on my condhome. They didn’t recognize my palmprint any longer. I found out later they’d filed a couple of months earlier, but the formal DL hadn’t caught up with me yet.”

      “Why the split? They tell you why?”

      “‘Irreconcilable differences,’ but what the fuck does that mean?”

      “Problems with you in the service?”

      “Well, yeah, I guess. I know Nance didn’t like me always going on long deployments. Egypt. Siberia. That last six months at the LEO spaceport. Still, she could’ve waited, could’ve talked to me, damn it! Ten years of marriage, zip! Down the black hole. I know now that Chris is a slimy, two-faced, twisted sick-fuck bastard who’s in love with melodrama and the sound of his own voice. I’m not sure how he convinced Nance, though. I … I thought we really had something. Something permanent.”

      “Right. So you find it’s not permanent and you figure twenty years or so out-system will let you get away from your problems. Or … maybe you’re in it for the revenge? Come back four years older, when your siggos, your significant others, are twenty years older?”

      “What’s the point of that? We’d all still be middle-aged. But I guess I do want to get away from everything, yeah.”

      “Well, I damn well guess you do. But is cutting yourself off from every soul you’ve known on Earth, cutting yourself off from the ties you were born to, is that all really worth it? You can’t run away from yourself, you know.”

      “I’m not running away from myself. If anything, I’m running away from them.”

      “Son, I’ve heard this story before, you know. Maybe about a thousand times. You’re not the first poor schmuck to get shit-canned by a dearly beloved siggo or kicked in the teeth by people he believed in and trusted. And it hurts, I know. Gods of Battle, I know. And I also know you’re carrying the pain here.” He pointed at Lee’s chest. “That’s what you really want to get away from, and that’s what you’re going to carry with you. You can run all the way to Andromeda, son, and the pain will still be there. Question is, is the attempt worth losing everything else you know on Earth as well?”

      “Gunny,” Lee said, “I’d still have the Corps. Even in Andromeda. Semper fi.”

      “Ooh-rah,” Eckhart said, but with a flat inflection utterly devoid of enthusiasm. “Son, it’s my job to talk you out of this, if I can.”

      “Huh? Why?”

      “To stop you from screwing up your life.”

      “Well, you’ve got my request, Gunny. All you need to do is add your request denied to the form, and it’s as good as shit-canned.”

      “I may still do that, Lee, if you don’t convince me pretty quick. Trouble is, I have to tell you that we need volunteers for SMF. And we need them bad. We have a big one coming up soon, a big deployment. And your class, frankly, is all we have to work with. It’s worse than that, actually. Three of you have a Famsit rating of one, out of a class of thirty-eight, and seven have a rating of two. Everybody else has close family.”

      “So, let me get this straight. You need Corpsmen for SMF, but you have to try to get us to back out after we volunteer? That doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.”

      Eckhart sighed. “This is the Marine Corps, son. It doesn’t always make sense. I’ll approve your request—if you can convince me that you are not making the big mistake of your sorry young life.”

      “I … see. …”

      And he did. His heart leaped. Eckhart was just giving him a chance to back out of this.

      Yes! He was going to the stars! …

      “I’m not sure what you want to hear, Gunny. I want to go. I have nobody I’m attached to on Earth. You said the culture here would be different, that I might have trouble fitting in when I got back. Well, you know what? I’ve never fit in, not really. Not until

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