“Heads up, Marines and Berets!” the lieutenant’s voice called. “We have incoming friendlies, coming in near South Two! Hold your fire to ground targets!”
Friendlies! Kaminski stopped crawling and searched the sky toward the southern direction markers. He couldn’t see a thing…and then the bug switched on its landing lights, a quad of dazzling stars casting moving circles of illumination across the crater floor. Dust swirled as the vehicle gentled in for a landing not far from the wreckage of the downed UN hopper. The troops that came spilling out of the open cargo bay all bore green pips on Kaminski’s HUD display, and he felt a surge of sheer joy. Someone—the company commanders, or maybe Lieutenant Garroway—had come up with one hell of an idea, sending Alfa Company’s Second Platoon off to some nearby hidey hole beyond the crater rim as a strategic reserve. Once the UN forces had committed themselves to the counterattack, the reserves had come in, and now, suddenly the UN deployment was dissolving, their attack teams breaking into small groups of men, most of them now breaking for their remaining two hopper transports.
“Ski!” David called out suddenly. “On your left!”
Kaminski turned and saw a group of five or six red-orange heat images loping toward him. They were running in the general direction of one of the unloaded UN hoppers, and he and Alexander were squarely in their path.
He raised his ATAR, checked for green pips…and when he saw none he squeezed the firing button, sending a stream of 4.5mm rounds slashing into the running troops at a range of less than fifty meters. Two of the space-suited figures went down…then a third, his visor exploding in a spray of plastic shards and pink mist that froze instantly into an icy cloud as it blossomed from the helmet. The two survivors dropped prone, and puffs of dust exploded from the rim of the excavation as they returned fire.
“Hold your fire!” Kaitlin’s voice cried over the general combat channel. “Damn it, hold your fire! Kaminski! Hold fire! Those are friendlies!”
Oh, God….
NINE
MONDAY, 21 APRIL 2042
Parris Island Recruit Training
Center
0725 hours EDT
Jack Ramsey—Private Jack Ramsey, US Marine Corps—stood at a rigid, fair approximation of attention on the recruit battalion grinder, gaze focused on the tops of the palmetto palms in the distance. Parris Island, they said, was slowly sinking as the world’s sea levels continued to rise. Scuttlebutt had it that the whole island was already beneath sea level, like Holland, and the only thing holding the Atlantic at bay were the rings of seawalls, dikes, and tide barriers erected by the Army Corps of Engineers and a few thousand Marines.
Jack was less interested at the moment in the possibility of a storm’s fury sweeping over the low-lying island than he was in the fury of another force of nature. Moments before, Recruit Platoon 4239 had met their drill instructors, and, in an old and venerable tradition of the Corps, they were enduring their first inspection and their welcoming speech, delivered by the platoon’s senior DI, Gunnery Sergeant Harold Knox.
“Never, never in my entire military career,” Knox was saying as he stalked along the solitary line of recruits, “have I seen such sorry specimens!” The expression on his leathery face gave every appearance of a man appalled by what he had just had the misfortune of witnessing. His voice, crackling with the authority known throughout the Marine Corps as the Command Voice, bore the punch and edge necessary to carry above a howling storm…or a pitched battle. The stress he laid on certain words gave his oration an almost singsong, mesmerizing quality, holding the recruits spellbound. “It makes me sick to think that my beloved Corps could someday be in your pale, flabby hands!”
The Voice went on, and Jack swayed slightly on his feet. He was exhausted…running about ten hours minus on sleep at the moment. It felt like he’d been here for days already, and yet he’d only arrived at Parris Island that morning. Somehow, confusion and sleep deprivation had conspired to keep him from clicking in with the routine.
Every waking moment for the past month had been geared toward this moment, from his last on-line discussion with the recruiter, Staff Sergeant Henson, to his physical in Pittsburgh, to his swearing in at the recruiter’s office. The maglev bringing him down from Pittsburgh had arrived in Charleston late on the previous afternoon, but the bus to take them the final short leg to the Parris Island Marine Recruit Depot—a clattering wreck with a gasoline engine, no less—had been mysteriously delayed. They’d not arrived at the base until 2:00 A.M.—0200 hours, in Marine parlance—a bit of disorganization that Jack was convinced had been done on purpose. Arriving in the middle of the night, told to “hit the beach” by screaming Marine NCOs and made to line up on yellow-painted footprints on the pavement, bullied, harassed, and screamed at some more, had resulted in the forty-three men and women aboard the bus feeling as cut off from their former lives as they might have been on the farside of the Moon.