Star Corps (19 page)

“Tell us, Mr. Buckner,” Chieu said, eyes narrowing to hard, cold slits, “what happens if the population of Earth at
large gets wind of this scheme of yours? You realize, of course, that any one of us here could upset your plans simply by net-publishing your report.”

“Is that a threat, Mr. Chieu?” Buckner sighed. “I'd thought better of you. Each and every one of you answers to your own corporate interests. You will need to consult with them before taking such an irretrievably drastic step…one, I might add, that would reveal your own complicity in these deliberations. PanTerra would respond as necessary to minimize the damage, to put a good spin on things. We would emphasize the benevolent nature of our business dealings on Ishtar, the great public good we were providing. Even slavery, you see, can be presented as good, as a social or an economic or a religious necessity, if there is a carefully nurtured will to believe…. Am I correct, Mr. Haddad? True, our profits might be adversely impacted to some degree, but I doubt there would be major problems in the long run.

“Of course, whoever leaks that information would find their corporate interests cut off from the deal. My God…we're not leaving you out. We're making you our partners! Secrecy, you see, is more in your interests than in ours. Play along, and each of you becomes the sole agent for the distribution of what we bring back from Ishtar to your own countries. New science. New knowledge. New medicines, perhaps, or new outlooks on the universe. And, of course, the chance to offer Ishtaran domestics to the upper strata of your populations, at a
very
healthy profit for yourselves.

“Mr. Chieu, why would you possibly want to jeopardize that for yourself or the people of the Chinese People's Hegemony?” He shrugged. “You all can discuss it as much as you want. Take it up with the Confederation Council, if you like. The simple fact is, PanTerra will be at Ishtar six months before the joint multinational expedition gets there. And I happen to know that the Marines will have orders not only to safeguard human interests on the planet, but to safeguard Confederation interests as well…and that means UFR interests, ladies and gentlemen. PanTerran interests. I tell you
this in the hope that we can avoid any expensive confrontations, either here or on Ishtar.” He spread his hands, pouring sincerity into his voice. “Believe me when I say we want a reasonable return on our investment—no more. PanTerra is not the evil ogre you seem to believe it is. We are happy to share—for a fair and equitable price. Ishtar is a
planet
, a
world
, with all of the resources, wonders, and riches that a planet has to offer, with fortunes to be made from the exchange of culture, philosophy, history, knowledge.”

“And if anyone can put a price tag on that knowledge,” Haddad said wryly, “PanTerra can. Friends, I think we have little alternative, at least for now.”

“I agree,” Fortier said. “Reluctantly. We don't have to
like
it….”

“We understand the need for secrecy, Señor Buckner,” Dom Camara said. “But how can you guarantee that word of this—this plan of yours will not leak anyway? You can threaten to cut us off from our contracts with you…but not the Marines. Or the scientists.” Camara cocked his head to one side. “This civilian expert you've hired…Dr. Hanson? Suppose she doesn't go along with your ideas of charity and enlightenment for the Sag-ura?”

“Dr. Hanson is, quite frankly, the best in the field there is. We brought her on board to help us identify and acquire xenotechnoarcheological artifacts that may be of interest. She is a PanTerran employee. If she doesn't do her job to our satisfaction, we will terminate her contract.”

He didn't elaborate. There was no reason to share with these people the darker aspects of some of the long meetings he'd held here in New Chicago with other PanTerran executives. The truth of it was that anyone who got in PanTerra's way on this deal would be terminated.

One way or another.

“And the Marines?” Camara wanted to know.

“They work for the FR/US government, of course, and are not, as such, directly under our control. They will do what they are sent out there to do, however. And we have
taken…certain steps to ensure that our wishes are heard and respected.

“Believe me, people, we are not monsters. We are not some evil empire bent on dominating Earth's economy. What we at PanTerra are simply doing is ensuring that there is not a mad scramble for Ishtar's resources.” He cocked an eye at Chieu. “We certainly do not want an unfortunate repeat of what happened in China three centuries ago, with half the civilized world snapping like dogs at a carcass. We propose order, an equitable distribution of the profits, and, most important, profits for everyone.”

“Including the Ahannu, Mr. Buckner?” Chieu asked.

“If they choose to accept civilization,” Buckner replied, “of course. They cannot wall off the universe forever. But as they adopt a less hidebound form of government, a freer philosophy, they will benefit as our partners and as our friends.” He was quite sincere as he spoke.

He almost meant everything he said.

2
SEPTEMBER
2138

Combat Center, IST
Derna
Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4
0810 hours Zulu

“Maybe we should get up,” Ramsey said. “The day's half over.”

“And just what,” Ricia Anderson asked, “do you mean by
up
?”

“Insubordinate bitch!” he said playfully. “You know what I mean!”

In fact, there was no up, no down, no sense of direction save the words neatly stenciled across one bulkhead:
THIS END DOWN DURING ACCELERATION
.

“Bitch,” Ricia said, cheerful. “That's me. Beautiful…intelligent…talented…creative…and hard to please.”

He chuckled. “Hard to please? You didn't sound hard to please a little while ago.”

She snuggled closer. “Mmm. That's because you're rather talented and creative yourself.”

They floated together, naked, still surrounded by tiny glistening drops of perspiration and other body fluids adrift in microgravity. The compartment they occupied was small, only a couple of meters across in its narrowest dimension, an equipment storage space and access tunnel to the
Derna
's logic centers. The electronics housing the various AIs run
ning on board—including Cassius and the
Derna
's own artificial intelligence—lay just beyond an array of palm panels on the “ceiling” and one bulkhead. Tool lockers and storage bins took up most of the remaining surfaces, with a narrow, circular hatch in the deck leading aft to the centrifuge collar. Ramsey could hear the gentle, grinding rumble of the centrifuge beyond the hatch.

“Yeah, well,” he said, ripping open the Velcro closure on the body harness joining them. “If somebody comes up forward through that hatch to check on the logic circuits, we'll have some explaining to do.”

He pulled the harness off their hips and they drifted apart, reluctantly. Ricia rotated in space, plucking from the air behind her a towel she'd brought for the purpose, and began sopping up the floating secretions. Ramsey grabbed his T-shirt and helped, taking special care to wipe down the gleaming surfaces of the storage bins and lockers around them. He knew that every Marine on board must know what went on in there, even those who didn't use it for recreational purposes, but it wouldn't do to leave behind such obvious evidence of their tryst. The
Derna
's Navy crew could get testy about the grunts and the messes they made.

Getting dressed together in those close confines was almost as much fun as getting undressed earlier. It was easier when they helped one another, since there was hardly room enough to bend over. It would be nice, Ramsey thought with wry amusement, if the people who designed these ships would acknowledge that people needed sex, and included sufficient space for the purpose—maybe a compartment with padded bulkheads and conveniently placed hand-and footholds—not to mention locker space for clothing and perhaps a viewall for a romantic panorama of a blue-and-white-marbled Earth hanging against a backdrop of stars.

But unfortunately, that just made too damned much sense.

The
Derna
, first of a first generation of interstellar mili
tary transports, was designed with efficiency of space, mass, and consumable stores in mind, not the erotic frolickings of her passengers. She had to keep thirteen hundred people alive for a voyage lasting years, even with relativistic effects, which meant that every cubic centimeter was carefully planned for and generally allotted to more than one purpose.

If the damned sleep cells had been just
a little
larger…but they were designed for one occupant apiece. Having sex in one of those hexagonal tubes was like coupling in a closed coffin. Ramsey knew. He'd tried it during the past month…twice with Ricia and once with Chris DeHavilland. They would be claustrophobic in micro-g; they were impossible under spin-gravity. Besides that, everybody on the hab deck would know who was sleeping with whom, and the Corps simply wasn't that liberal yet.

Everyone knew it was done, of course. The whole point of command constellations was
supposed
to be that teams that worked well together should be kept together, especially on long deployments. There was nothing wrong with that. But the fact that they'd been deliberately chosen because they had few family ties on Earth meant that there
would
be ties, both casually recreational and seriously romantic, among team members. They were, after all, human.

But few things about human nature ever changed, or, when they did, the change took a long time to manifest. The likely response among civilian taxpayers who paid for the Marines—not to mention their spartan accommodations in deep space—would have been horror at such scandalous goings-on. And the senior staff was always at pains to make certain that nothing scandalous about the Corps ever got into general circulation among civilians…
especially
civilian lawmakers.

Ramsey thought of an old Corps joke—the image of a Marine kept perpetually in cybehibe, with a sign on the sleep tube, “In case of war, break glass.” Marines weren't supposed to have families, friends, or lives.

And they certainly weren't supposed to have
sex
.

They finished dressing—shipboard uniform of the day was black T-shirts, khaki slacks, and white sweat socks—gently spun one another in midair for a quick once-over for incriminating evidence of their past few hours, then pulled close in a parting hug. “Again tonight, after duty?” he asked.

“Sorry, T. J.,” she told him. She kissed him gently. “I'm going to be with Chris. And tomorrow I'm shifting to the third watch. Maybe in two weeks?”

He nodded, masking his disappointment. “Sure.” Relationships within the command group created what sometimes amounted to a large, polyamorous family. Social planning, however, could be a real problem at times, especially when complicated by ever-shifting duty schedules.

Well, it beats the hell out of living with civilians
, he thought. He'd been married once—a five-year contract that Cindy and George had elected not to renew with him. If you were going to sleep with someone, it helped if they had some notion of what it was you did for a living, what it cost you, and why you did it.

Making their way aft through the docking bay, they paused on the quarterdeck to chat with Lieutenant Delgado, floating at his duty station in front of the big American flag. “Logic center is clear,” he told Delgado, sotto voce.

“Aye aye, sir.” Zeus Delgado was not a member of the command constellation, but he knew what went on forward. He'd promised to flash Ramsey over his link if someone was heading toward the logic center access who couldn't be turned aside.

At the centrifuge collar, Ramsey followed Ricia into an elevator and together they swiftly dropped outshaft into the familiar tug of spin gravity once more. Emerging on Deck 1 of Hab 3, they stepped into a crowded, hot, and noisy bustle of activity.

Eighty percent of the MIEU's troop complement was on board, but so far fewer than half of those had entered cybe
hibe. That meant crowding on all decks and a battle for the shipboard environmental systems as they struggled to vent all of that excess heat. Supplies were arriving at the L-4 space docks at the rate of two freighters every three days, most of them carrying either water or C-sludge, the hydro-carbon substrate used in the nanoprocessor tanks to make food. The
Derna
needed water especially, a small ocean of water, in fact, filling the huge mushroom cap forward. Water was
Derna
's primary consumable, necessary not only for the drinking and washing needs for her crew and passengers, but also as their source of oxygen, their AM-drive reaction mass, and as radiation shielding at near-
c
velocities.

But the MIEU's weapons and equipment were arriving on board as well, and those Marines who hadn't yet gone into cybehibe were busy unpacking gear, checking it for wear, damage, or missing parts, and stowing it for the long voyage ahead. Everything from Mark VII suits and laser rifles to spy-eye floaters and TAL-S Dragonflies had to be unpacked, examined, up-or down-checked for maintenance, and entered into the virtual ship's manifest. Each individual Marine was responsible for her or his personal gear, including armor and primary weapon, so the hab deck was packed with men and women unshipping, inspecting, and cleaning everything from LR-2120s to KW-6000 power packs to M-780 grenades and CTX-5 demo packs. It was a job that would have been more happily carried out groundside, especially in the case of the high explosives, but the troops were arriving piecemeal, as were their weapons, on different flights from different spaceports scattered across the Earth. Especially considering the need to check all equipment after it had made the trip up to L-4, the most efficient place to bring the two together was on board the
Derna
.

But it made for a hell of a lot of chaos.

As Ramsey threaded his way past busy groups of enlisted Marines, he reopened his implants to shiplink traffic. He'd
shut them down to afford some peace for his tryst with Ricia, and now he had to brace himself against the onslaught of messages and requests that had backlogged during his virtual absence.

“Good morning, Colonel,” Cassius said. “You have forty-seven link messages waiting, twenty-nine of them flagged ‘urgent' or higher. Two are flagged as Priority One. You also have seventeen requests for face meetings, and twenty-one requests for virtual conferencing. Also, there will be a delay in the shipment of the Dragonflies from Palo Alto. This may mean an additional delay in mission departure time.”

Take a couple hours off for a quick docking maneuver, he thought, and all hell breaks loose.

“Two Priority Ones?” he asked the AI-symbiont aloud. “Shit, why didn't you tag me?” The command group's AI could reach him at any time, whether his link was online or not, and standing orders were to let Priority One and Two messages come through no matter what his link status.

“I felt you needed the downtime, sir,” Cassius replied. “You've been pushing quite hard and showing both emotional and physiological signs of stress. I exercised discretionary judgment according to the specific parameters of—”

“Can it. What were the calls?”

“One from General King. He wished to know the status of the Dragonfly shipment. In your persona, I routed him through to the TAL-S maintenance center at Seven Palms.”

“I see.” He would have done the same. “And the other?”

“From General Haslett, sir, requesting an immediate virtual conference on the political situation. I pointed out that
Derna
is on Zulu, that you had been up quite late overseeing the arrival of the last stores freighter and were currently on sleep shift. I offered to wake you, and he said it could wait. I have scheduled you for a virtual conference with the general in…two hours, seventeen minutes from now.”

Again he couldn't fault the AI's judgment…which was the reason they made such exceptional personal secretaries.
Both priority calls had been less than truly urgent, but both needed handling by means both courteous and expeditious.

“Very well,” he told Cassius. “Let's see the urgents.”

“You may wish to greet Captain Warhurst first, sir.”

“Eh?” Warhurst's dress khakis were a bit more up-to-date than his icon garb, Ramsey noted. “Oh. Of course.”

Warhurst was uncovered so he did not salute, but he came to a crisp attention. “Captain Martin Warhurst reporting on board, sir.”

“Ah, Captain Warhurst, yes,” Ramsey replied. “Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Check with my exec, here, Major Anderson, for your berthing assignments. Are your people getting settled in?”

“Yes, sir. But my company is only at half strength…eighty-two troops out of 150 on my TO and E.”

“Affirmative, Captain. But I'm afraid the rest of your team will be newbies.” He saw Warhurst's face fall at that news. “Don't worry, son. You'll have time to whip them into shape before deployment.”

“Yes, sir. Uh…fresh meat out of Lejeune, sir?”

“Yup. Volunteers from recruit companies 1097, 1098, and 1099. They'll be arriving over the next three weeks or so.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Major Anderson has the specs and stats. You can review their recruit records online, of course, and you can interview them, if you wish, before they embark. Problem, Captain?”

Warhurst made a face. “No, sir. It's just…”

“Yes?”

“My mission brief has my company hitting Objective Krakatoa. I would have thought you'd want an experienced Mobile Assault Team on that one, sir.”

“Ideally, yes. I'm afraid we don't have that luxury, however. Groundside HQ is holding back the best MATs against the situation in Mejico and the Southwest territories. We get what's left, I'm afraid.”

“I see, Colonel.”

“Don't worry, son,” Ramsey said with an easy grin. “If your people aren't experienced now, they sure as hell will be by the time they've taken Krakatoa!”

“The ones who survive will be experienced, yes, sir,” Warhurst told him. “The rest will be dead.”

“That's the way it always is, Marine. You have your orders. Carry on!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

Warhurst was not happy, but that couldn't be helped. Weeks ago, Ramsey had downloaded the captain's combat record and guessed that Warhurst was at least as worried about his own qualifications for the assignment as he was about the experience of his men. He'd only taken part in one combat mission so far—the brief, bitter assault on Giza last June—and he must be wondering about why he'd been recruited for a berth with the MIEU, much less why he was supposed to lead the first assault onto Ishtar.

No matter. He was a good man and would come through when he had to.