for over three hundred years after that. For most of that time, the politicians tended to dislike us … or at least they never seemed to know what to do with us. We’ve been on the budgetary chopping block more times than we can count. Civilians tend to like us, however. They see us as the holders of an important legacy—one embracing duty, honor, faithfulness. Semper fi. Always faithful.
“In fact, though, the raising of the flag on Suribachi probably had less to do with the Corps’ survival than did certain other factors. A century after the Battle of Iwo Jima, we left the shores of our home planet, and discovered the Ancient ruins on Mars and on Earth’s moon, and later at places like Chiron and Ishtar. Both the Builders and the An left a lot of high-tech junk lying around on worlds they visited in the past … the Xul, too, for that matter, if you count what we found out on Europa. Started something like a twenty-first-century gold rush, as every country on Earth with a space capability tried to get people out there to see what they could find. Xenoarcheology became the hot science, since it was thought that reverse-engineering some of that stuff could give us things like faster-than-light travel or FTL radio. The Navy, logically enough, became the service branch that ran the ships to get out here … and where the Navy went, the Marines came along. The Battle of Cydonia. The Battle of Tsiolkovsky. The Battle of Ishtar. The Battles of the Sirius Gate, and of Night’s Edge. ‘From the Halls of Montezuma, to the ocher sands of Mars.’ We’ve written our legacy in blood across a thousand years and on battlefields across two hundred worlds.
“And in all that time, and on all those worlds, the Marine Corps has done one thing … what we’ve always done. We win battles!
“And you, recruits, have come here to Mars in order to learn how to do just that.”
Garroway felt a stirring of pride at that—not at the promise that they would win battles, but at the way Warhurst was addressing them now. This was now the twelfth week of training, with just four more weeks to go. At some point during the last couple of months—and Garroway honestly could not remember when—Warhurst had stopped calling the men and women of Recruit Company 4102 children, and started calling them recruits.
Step by step, their civilian individuality had been broken down; step by step Warhurst and the other DIs had been building them back up, forging them into … something new. Garroway wasn’t sure what the difference was yet, but he felt the difference, a sense of confidence, of belonging that he’d never before known.
The feeling that he belonged had just taken a major boost skyward, of course. The nano injected into his system on 0710 had grown into standard-Corps issue cereblink hardware, and now, for the first time in three months, he was again connected.
It had been a rough time without connections—no downloads, no direct comm. Or, rather, downloads and incoming comm messages had entered his brain via his ears and his eyes, without mediation or enhancement by AI software. It had been like starting all over again, learning how to learn, rather than allowing headware and resident AIs to sort and file his memories for him.
He had a new personal electronic assistant, too … or, rather, a Corps platoon EA guide he shared with everyone else in the company. The EA’s name was Achilles; Warhurst had told them to think of him as a kind of narrowly focused platoon sergeant. Achilles was a bit short in the personality department, but the system was very fast, very efficient, and was working hard at its first task, helping him learn how to get the most out of the new headware.
Later, at evening chow, he discovered one down side to Achilles.
“So, whatcha think of the new headware?” he asked Sandre Kenyon, a recruit who’d been born and raised in one of the new arcologies off the coast of Pennsylvania. She’d been a vir-simmer, a programmer of simulation AIs, before she’d joined the Corps. He followed her out of the chow line and toward a couple of empty seats at one of the tables. Noise clattered and echoed around them; meals were among the very few times when recruits were free to socialize with other recruits, at least after the first month of training.
“It’s okay, I guess,” she said. “It’s gonna take some getting used to, though.”
“I know. It’s so damned fast. …”
“It’s also damned creepy,” she told him.
“What do you mean?”
“Having your platoon sergeant perched on your shoulder every minute of every day? Watching everything you do? Even everything you think? And reporting it all back to HQRTC, complete with images in glorious color and infrared? I don’t know about you, Aiden, but there are a few things I do or think about doing that I don’t care to share with half the base, y’know?”
“Oh …”
He’d not thought about that aspect of things, at least not before now.
In fact, privacy was an alien concept in boot camp. Male and female recruits trained together, shared the same barracks, and used the same head. Toilets had stalls but no doors, and no recruit was ever really alone for more than a few moments at a time. In fact, come to think of it, standing barracks fire watch in the middle of the night was probably the closest any recruit came to having some private time—but then you never knew when the sergeant of the guard was going to show up on one of his rounds.
Mostly, it wasn’t a hardship. The recruits were too damned busy, moving at a flat run from reveille to taps every day, for it to be a problem … and most human cultures accepted casual social nudity as the norm.
“Is Achilles listening to you gripe about it now?”
She shrugged. “I asked it. It told me it monitored everyone in the company for breaches of regulations and compliance to orders … but that it didn’t record or transmit anything else. It … it’s a machine. A program, rather, so I guess it shouldn’t bother me. Still … how do we know?”
Garroway began digging into his meal—a nanassembled steak indistinguishable in taste and texture from live steaks culture-grown in the Ring agros. One thing you had to say about the Marines: they fed well.
He assumed Sandre was talking about sex. Technically, fraternization between recruits was forbidden, though in fact the authorities didn’t seem to pay much attention to occasional and harmless breaches of the rules. If a recruit on fire watch was caught in the rack with a fuck buddy, they both would probably be bounced out of the Corps and back to Earth or wherever they’d come from so fast their eyes would be spinning in their heads, but Garroway knew that several recruits in Company 4102 were enjoying one another’s physical companionship—at least if their break-time war stories could be believed.
His only question was how they found the time—or the energy—with the daily schedule that ruled their lives—up at zero-dark thirty, followed by eighteen hours of marching, drilling, classroom work, lectures, testing, and downloading, with lights out at 2200 hours.
Having a personal daemon was nothing new. Most humans had them, the only hold-outs being the various neoluddite or neoprimitive cultures which had abandoned high-tech for religious, esthetic, or artistic reasons. Achilles was a daemon, nothing more. In fact, he seemed just like Aide, except that he was more powerful, faster, and he linked all of the recruits in Company 4102 into a close-knit electronic network.
But he had to admit that Sandre had a point. Having Achilles watching him was just like having Warhurst watching him, except that the watching was taking place every second of every day. His stomach tightened at the thought.
“Recruit
