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 I joined the Navy. Hell, maybe I’ll like what I find here better in twenty years, fit in better than I do now, y’know?”
Eckhart nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I do know. Tell me something. Why did you become a corpsman?”
“Huh? Well, when I first enlisted, I had this idea of going on someday and becoming a doctor. I figured what I learned in Corps School would give me a leg up, know what I mean? And then there was the fact that my dad was a Marine. He used to tell me stories about the company’s ‘Doc,’ that special relationship between the Marines and their corpsmen. I’d always been interested in biology, physiology, stuff like that, and I was good at them in school. It just seemed like the right choice.”
Damn it, he wanted to go Space Marine Force. As a Navy Hospital Corpsman, the equivalent of an Army medic for Navy and Marine personnel, he’d enjoyed working with the Marines already. Going SFM simply took things a step or ten farther.
A century or two back, the equivalent of today’s SMF had been assignment with the Navy’s FMF—the Fleet Marine Force. The force included Navy doctors and corpsmen who shipped out with the Marines, sailed with them on their transports, and went ashore with them in combat. It was a long and venerable tradition, one that went back at least as far as the Navy pharmacy mates who hit the beaches in the Pacific with the Marines during World War II, and arguably went even further back to the surgeon’s mate’s loblolly boys of the sailing ships of a century before that.
He’d volunteered for SMF almost two months ago, just after the completion of his six-month deployment to LEO.
Just after the divorce became final.
Damn it, the hell with Earth. He wanted to go to the stars.
“Gunny, the Navy … and, well, now the Marines, if I go SMF, they’re my family now. I’ve been taking overseas and off-world deployments for the last four years, since I joined up. It’s time for me to re-up. I want to re-up. I’ve always wanted the Navy to be my career.”
Eckhart grinned. “A lifer, huh?”
“Yeah, a lifer. And it’s my life.”
“The government might point out that your life belongs to it.”
“Okay, but in so far as I do have a free choice, this is what I want to do with my life. ‘Join the Navy and see other worlds,’ right? So why can’t I re-up with a shot at really seeing some new territory?”
“How does Sirius sound to you, son?”
“Sirius? I thought there were no planets there?”
Eckhart grinned. “There aren’t.
