Читать книгу The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 50

“So, did y’hear the latest scuttlebutt?” Staff Sergeant Shari Colver asked.

“About what?” Ramsey asked.

“Yeah,” Sergeant Vesco Aquinas said. “The rumor mill’s been grinding overtime lately. Everything from peace with the Xul to war with the PEzzles.”

“It’d damned well be better than your last butt-load of scuttlebutt,” Sergeant Richard Chu said. “I didn’t like that one at all.”

“Roger that,” Ramsey said. “They fucking gave it away. …”

The entire platoon had been grumbling since their arrival back in the Sol system, with morale at absolute rock-bottom. The word was—still unconfirmed but apparently solid—that the Commonwealth was giving back Alighan. Two hundred five Marines hit, Ramsey thought with dark emotion, over half of them irries … and they fucking go and give that shit hole back to the Muzzies. …

Colver leaned forward at the table in approved conspiratorial fashion. “It’s war with the PanEuropeans,” she said in a throaty half-whisper. “They’re shipping us out next week.”

“And how do you happen to be privy to that little tidbit?” Ramsey asked.

“Yeah,” Sergeant Ela Vallida added. “You been talking with the commandant lately?”

“No, but I have been talking with Bill Walsh.” Walsh was a staff sergeant over in Ops Planning. “He says it’s already decided. They’re pulling together the battlefleet now. And the 55th is on the ship-out list.”

“Aw, shit!” Corporal Franklo Gonzales said.

Chu shook his head. “Well, our luck’s true to form, isn’t it?”

“Shit,” Ramsey said. “Can’t be. We just freakin’ got back from Alighan!” Even as he spoke the words, though, he knew how hollow they were. The Corps could do anything it damned well wanted.

“Fuckin’-A, Gunnery Sergeant,” Corporal Marin Delazlo put in. “We’re due some freakin’ down time!”

“Maybe,” Ramsey said, taking in the noise and bustle of their surroundings with a grin, “just maybe this is it!”

The six of them were in the Comet Fall, a popular bar and nightlife center on the Seventh Ring Grand Concourse. It was large, murkily red-lit, and crowded; perhaps half of the other tables had privacy fields up, making them look like hazy, translucent ruby domes. The house dancers on-stage and the wait staff navigating among the tables all were stylishly nude, with eye-tugging displays of light and color washing across every square centimeter of exposed skin. The club patrons, both those at non-shielded tables and up on the stage with the professional dancers, wore everything from nothing at all to elaborate formal costumes. Music throbbed and pounded, though you needed a sensory helm for the full effect. Ramsey and the other Marines had elected not to wear helms, preferring unfiltered conversation instead.

His mind drifting, Ramsey found himself following the gyrations of one young woman on-stage wearing what looked like a swirling, deck-sweeping cloak of peacock feathers, a glittering gold sensory helm, and a dazzling corona flammae; she’d been enhanced either genetically or through prosthetics with an extra pair of arms, and her dance movements were eerily and compellingly graceful.

He was feeling wretchedly out of place. Aquinas and Gonzales both were wearing fairly conservative civvie skin-suits, but the rest of them were in undress blacks. Both sets of attire, by regulations, were acceptable wear for liberty, but it tended to make them stand out somewhat against the gaudy and sometimes extravagant background of evening wear sported by the other patrons in the establishment.

“Like hell,” Gonzales said after a long moment. “I don’t know about you clowns, but me, I’m just getting started! I’m not ready to redeploy!”

“That’s right,” Chu said. “I have a lot of catching up to do in the drinking and socializing departments before my next deployment!”

“Ooh-rah!” the others chorused, and Colver raised her glass in salute. “To downtime!”

“Downtime and down the hatch!” Ramsey added, lifting his own glass, then tossing it off. “Semper fi!”

The drink was called a solar flare, and the name was apt. He felt the burn going down, then the kick, and finally the rolling swell of expanding consciousness as the drink’s nano activators kicked in.

If his platoon implant AI had been activated, he thought, it would be screaming at him by now. Marines were not supposed to imbibe implant-activators, for fear it would scramble their hardware and invalidate their government warranties or whatever. He didn’t care. After Alighan, he needed this. Hell, they all did.

How the hell could they just give it away, after what we went through out there?

“Well, the brass is ramping up for something big,” Ramsey told the others, perhaps three or four flares later. He had to focus on each word as he brought it to mind, then tried to say it. He was pleased. No slurring of speech at all, at least that he could detect. “I just heard this morning that we’re getting a shuttle load of fungies in from RTC Mars.”

“Yeah,” Delazlo said, nodding. His speech was slurred, but it didn’t matter. “’Sh’right. I heard that, too.”

“Shit. Check your daily downloads, guys, why don’t ya?” Vallida put in. “The fungies arrived yesterday. Forty of them, straight out of Noctis Labyrinthus.”

“No shit?” Ramsey asked. He hadn’t heard about that. Still, Samar was such a huge vessel, and she was swarming right now with technicians, computer personnel, cargo handlers, mechs, and shipwrights. A freaking regiment could have come on board and he wouldn’t have noticed.

“No shit,” Vallida said. “Seems they want all units up to full strength, even if we have to raid a nursery to do it.”

“Shee-it,” Gonzales said with considerable feeling. He was looking a bit the worse for the wear as multiple solar flares continued to burn their way through his circulatory system. “Just what we need. Babies to baby-sit.”

“Hey,” Colver said with a shrug. “Fresh meat. Don’t knock it.”

“We all had to start somewhere,” Chu said, the words slurring slightly.

“The Corps is home, the Corps is family,” Ramsey recited. It was an old mantra focused on the belonging of Marines. “And to hell with the politicians.”

A waitress walked up to their table, her face a brilliant, sapphire blue, with rainbow luminescence rippling across the rest of her body. “You folks with the 55th MARS?” she asked.

“Yeah,” Ramsey said. He felt a cold chill prickling at the back of his neck, and some of the drunken haze began evaporating from his mind. The Comet Fall was one of hundreds of nightspots along this stretch of Ring Seven. How the hell could they have tracked the six of them?

“You heard about us, eh, babe?” Gonzalez said, leering as he reached for her.

“Nope,” the waitress said, slapping his hand away. “Can’t say that I have. But your CO sure has. You’re wanted back at your ship, immediately. All of you. What’d you do, switch off your AIs?”

“How about another round for the table?” Aquinas asked.

“To hell with that,” the waitress said, as she began collecting empty and half-empty glasses. “I could get fired and the boss could lose his license! You people just move on now, before the SPs show up.”

“So, what have we here?” a young man seated at the next table over exclaimed. “Pretty-boy Muh-rines?”

The atmosphere turned suddenly cold. That next table was a big one, with fifteen tough-looking men seated around it, all of them with similar patterns of blue-white luminous tattoos on the left sides of their faces—which meant either a punk gang or a fraternity. The privacy screen had been up until a few moments ago, but now it looked like they’d just taken an unhealthy interest in the party next to them.

“You’d better go,” the waitress told the Marines, dropping her voice.

“The lady’s right,” Ramsey told his friends, pressing his palm to the credit reader on the table to pay the outstanding bill, then standing. “Let’s move on. We don’t want trouble.”

“Yeah!” a civilian called from the next table. He sniggered. “Run home to mommy and daddy!”

“Back off, mister,” Ramsey growled. “This isn’t your business.”

“Not my business, Muh-rine?” the kid said, standing and turning to face Ramsey. “I’ll fucking make it my business if I want. You freaks aren’t wanted here.”

“That’s right,” another of the punks said. “You pretty-boy gyrines’re nothin’ but trouble. Who let you out without your keepers, huh?”

“You lousy little civilian shit—” Aquinas said, starting forward.

Ramsey put a hand on his arm. “Belay that, Marine. Outside. Now.”

A moment later, they stepped onto the plaza beneath the Comet Fall’s strobing sign. The concourse was a wide, sweeping mall lined with multi-tiered shops, bars and eateries, with a vast arch of transparency stretched overhead. Earth, half-full, hung directly overhead.

Chu looked up at the blue and white-mottled orb, frowning through his alcoholic haze. “Why aren’t we falling?”

The question, though garbled, wasn’t as drunken-wrong as it sounded. Each structure within the Rings circled Earth once in twenty-four hours, maintaining geostationary position. They should all have been in free fall, but the gravity here was roughly equivalent to the surface gravity on Mars, about three-tenths of a G.

Vallida laughed at him. “Jesus! You just now noticing, Chu-chu?”

“Gravity …” Ramsey started to say, then tripped over a hiccup. “Gravity engineering,” he finally said. “Quantum-state phase change in the … in the …” He stamped his foot. “Down there. Subdeck infrastructure. Haven’t you ever been to th’ Rings?”

“Nope. Born’n raised on Mars. Never left until I joined up, and they fuckin’ send me to Alighan. …”

“There they are!”

Harsh voices sounded behind them. Ramsey turned, and saw the gang from the Comet Fall spilling out into the street. They were looking for trouble, looking for a fight.

“Heads up, Marines,” Ramsey said. He was fumbling through the mental commands that would revive his personal AI. If he could connect with the watch on board Samar … or even with the nearest Shore Patrol base. …

“You pretty-boys need to be taught a lesson!” one of the gangers growled. He was big, heavily muscled, and evidently having some trouble focusing. “You pretty-boys shouldn’t be coming into our part of th’Ring. …”

“They ain’t all pretty-boys,” another civilian said. He pointed at Colver and Vallida. “Them two are kinda cute, for Muh-rines.”

“Then we’ll be gentle with them,” the first said, with a nasty laugh.

“Yeah,” another said. “We’ll give them special treatment. But the rest of ’em—”

Ramsey slammed the heel of his palm into the kid’s nose before he completed the statement, snapping his head sharply back. The other Marines flowed into action in the same instant; Ramsey heard the crack of one punk’s arm as Vallida broke it, heard another ganger choke and gurgle as Gonzales drove stiffened fingers into his larynx, but he was already stepping across the body of the one he’d downed to block a punch thrown by a screaming punk, guiding the fist harmlessly past his head, locking the wrist, and breaking it. The kid shrieked in pain, then went silent and limp as Ramsey hammered the back of his head with an elbow.

The whole encounter was over within five seconds. The six Marines stood above fourteen bodies, some of them unconscious, some writhing and groaning as they cradled injured limbs or heads or groins. A fifteenth punk was disappearing down the street, running as fast as his legs could carry him.

“Not bad, Marines,” Colver said. “Considering our, uh, slowed reaction times.”

“Slowed, nothin’,” Ramsey said. He reached down and extracted a tingler from the unconscious grip of one of the civilians. He checked it, switched it off, then snapped the projector in half, flinging the pieces across the street. Several of the punks were armed, and the other Marines proceeded to similarly disable the weapons. “We just gave them the first shot … to be … to be fair. Right?”

“Whatever you say, Gunnery Sergeant,” Gonzalez said. “But maybe we should hightail it before the SPs show up.”

“Yeah,” Vallida said. “Someone’s bound to’ve reported this.”

“Roger that.” He looked around. She was right. Habitats, even extraordinarily large ones like the Ring habs orbiting Earth, tended to have lots of cameras and other unobtrusive sensor devices, both to monitor the environment and to watch for trouble of a variety of types—including crime. He didn’t see any cameras, but that meant nothing; most covert surveillance cameras, such as the ones the Marines themselves used to monitor battlespace, tended to be smaller than BBs, floating along on silent repulsor fields.

As he completed a full three-sixty of the concourse terrain, he became aware of another problem, one more immediate than having the local police watching the Marines mop up with some local thugs. “Uh … which way?”

His hardware included navigational systems, but he’d not bothered to engage them when they left the Samar earlier that evening. He suddenly realized that, in his current somewhat befogged state, he had no idea as to which way Dock 27 and the Samar might be.

“I think, boys,” Colver said, “we’d better switch on our AIs. Otherwise we’re going to be going in circles.”

That was easier said than done.

Most enlisted Marines learned how to disable their company AIs temporarily within days of leaving boot camp, and some probably figured out how to do it while they were still boots. Hell, for that matter, Garroway was pretty sure that officers did it, too, right out of OCS or the Naval Academy. No one ever talked openly about it, of course, because it was against regs. Getting caught was at the very least worth “office hours,” as commanding officer’s nonjudicial punishment had long been known in the Corps, and in some situations, like combat or while embarked on board ship, it could get you a general court and a world of hurt.

The process was simple enough, and involved visualizing a certain set of code numbers and phrases, which you brought to mind one by one and held for a second or so. It provided a kind of back door to the AI’s programming. It saw and recorded the code, then promptly forgot about having seen it, or anything at all about the person doing the coding, until another set of codes was visualized to reset the software.

The problem was that you needed to have a clear and highly disciplined mind to be able to pull the visualization trick off. At the moment, all six of the MARS Marines were somewhat less than clear in the mental department. Not only were their minds sluggish with alcohol, but under the influence of the nano activators in their drinks they were having trouble focusing on anything with much clarity or discipline, much less memorized strings of alphanumeric characters.

“Wait a sec,” Chu said. He was standing still, eyes closed, arms outstretched. “I almost have it. …”

They waited, expectant.

“No. I guess I don’t.”

“Someone write the code down. We can focus on that.”

“No … no …” Colver said. “I’ve got it. Yeah! There. …”

She was silent for a moment, as the other Marines waited. “C’mon, c’mon,” Gonzales said. “We gotta move! …”

“Okay,” Colver said. “Dock 27 is that way.”

“I coulda told you that,” Chu said miserably.

“And I have the recall coming through. Shit. I think we’re all gonna be AWOL. They passed the word at 1830 hours. We were supposed to check in at 2000.”

Absent without leave meant NJP for sure. The six of them had checked out at Samar’s quarterdeck at 1800 hours, and switched off the company AI minutes after that. It was now just past 2300 hours, three hours after they were supposed to be back on board.

“Well, let’s get the hell back there, then,” Ramsey said. “We’ll just have to face the music.”

“Sure,” Colver said. “What can they do to us … ship us back to Alighan?”

“Don’t even joke about that, Staff Sergeant!” Delazlo scolded.

Unsteadily, the Marines began making their way back toward Dock 27 and the Samar.

Unfortunately, as soon as Colver’s AI was switched back on, the Shore Patrol had a fix on her, and her name was flagged as being AWOL.

And so the six Marines of 55th MARS ended up spending the rest of the local night in the brig at Shore Patrol headquarters.