A red light winked in the upper left corner of his HUD, along with the word LOCKED. C-3 had locked out the laser weapons of everyone in the company, a precaution against someone jumping the gun. “Take it easy, people,” Major Warhurst’s voice said over the company frequency. “Let’s see what they want.”
“I don’t think they’re waiting for an invitation to come aboard!” Lance Corporal Porter said.
“Maybe they want to surrender!” Sergeant Quincy said, laughing.
“We know what they freaking want!” Tone’s voice added, just a little shrill. “They sure as hell ain’t coming over here to borrow coffee!”
“Keep it down, Tonelli,” Kuklok said. “The Major knows what he’s doing. All of you, can it! Com discipline!”
The chatter stilled, and the only sound Lucky heard was the hiss-rasp of his own breathing inside his helmet, the pounding of his own heart.
He hated being this afraid.
He’d been the tough guy on the block, back in the projects, the one with the swagger, the jazz, the balls, the one to stand up in front of the enemy gang and face them down—or throw the first one with chain or shiv, with zippie or hobnailed stomper. He’d never been able to admit to the rest of the Skullz how terrified he’d been at every encounter, how dry his mouth was, how hard his heart was hammering. To admit weakness of any stripe would have meant loss of face; the Skullz had been known to turn on their own with the ferocity of a wolf pack killing the weak of their own species. Lucky hadn’t heard of Darwin then, but he recognized the imperative. The strong survive at the expense of the weak.
For three years, he’d been the leader of the Skullz…and terrified the entire time. In the end, the stress had been too damned much; he’d joined the Marines to get away.
And why the Marines, for God’s sake? He watched the moving squares and triangles of light on his HUD, superimposed on the bleak panorama of the Cadmus Linea, and he had to admit that now he didn’t know.
Well, the Marines had the rep for being tough. Always. The recruiting vids for the other services carried the same general type of message: Join the Navy and see the world; join the Army and get a career; join the Air Force and go to college. The Marines, though, were different: We’re looking for a few good men…
…and women. They didn’t bar people on the basis of sex. Hell, since the early ’20s, women had served in frontline combat units just as they did in the other services. But the Marines were exclusive, an elite. They didn’t let just anybody in. You had to be good enough, had to prove yourself, to be one of them.
And he’d been a gangbanger from the Met who’d never even seen the stars, who desperately wanted to get into space. The Navy, more and more, was expanding their credo of “see the world” to “see the worlds,” using their long expertise at training men and women to live in close, artificial environments for months at a time to become America’s space service—but it was the Marines who did the real fighting, the real dirty work, who had the rep as killers.
So he’d joined the Corps, partly because it preserved his tough-kid image, partly because—he could admit it now—he’d been trying to prove to himself that he had what it took to stay on top of the food chain.
Seven hundred meters.
LOCKED.
Damn…when were they going to let him fire?
The tough kid from the Met had survived for perhaps ten days in Boot Camp at Parris Island. Constant supervision, an exhausting schedule balancing physical challenges with intensive training, good food in a supervised diet—a regimen calculated to break him down to nothing both physically and emotionally—had destroyed the old Lucky. They’d then built him back up almost literally muscle by muscle and thought by thought, remaking George Sidney Leckie into a “mean, green fighting machine,” a creature as alien to that ragged street punk as the surface of Europa was to the trash piles of Riverside Drive.
And yet, despite all that, the old fear remained.
He licked his lips, took a sip from the water nipple, then licked them again. He could feel the familiar weakness spreading from the pit of his stomach to his knees, his elbows, his hands. He could taste the hot sting of vomit at the back of his throat.
Marine training was good, but it couldn’t take away the fear. Use your fear, his DIs in boot camp had told him. You can channel the fear into strength. Let your training take over. Use your mind to control the panic, use it.
He’d never been in combat. Oh, he’d faced plenty of problems in tactical combat sims, sure, but no matter how realistic those might be, they were nothing compared to the real thing. This was his first time ever up against a real, live, shooting enemy. Compared to these guys, armed with Type-80 missile launchers and Type-110 auto-assault rifles and Taiyang lasers, a bang-bang with the kids on West Broadway or Morningside Heights was a friendly and somewhat lighthearted session of shooting the shit.