Twenty-one hundred dead Ishtarans at least; the full number might never be known, since so many bodies had been utterly destroyed in the fighting. After the first arranged truce meeting ten days ago, a vast panoply of Ahannu warriors had appeared north of the Legation compound, holding high a forest of urin battle standards and keening in their strange, rasping voices. The Marines learned later that the Ahannu song had bestowed an honor of their own upon the men and women of 1 MIEU, as well as a new name.
They called the Marines nir-gál-mè-a, which according to Aiken and the other old Ishtar hands, meant “respected in battle.” The Fighting 44th had immediately adapted the name to its own use—the Nergal May-I, or Nergs for short.
Garroway smiled at that. The Corps carried a number of nicknames handed to it over the centuries. Leathernecks, for the stiff collars worn by Marines in the nineteenth century, supposedly to protect the throat from sword cuts but actually a means of making recruits stand up straight. Jarheads, a pejorative for the “high-and-tight” haircuts of the twentieth century. Devil Dogs, from Teufil Hundin, a name bestowed on them by their German enemies after the Battle of the Marne, originally as an insult, since hundin meant “bitch,” but ever after one of the proudest of the Corps’ noms de guerre.
And now they were Nergs.
The Marines had made their mark, it seemed, out here among the stars. The folks back home would never understand, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore.
The folks back home. Garroway swallowed and bit back the stinging in his throat and eyes. Two days after the fight on Suribachi, communications had at last been established with Earth through the FTL screen in the Chamber of the Eye. There’d been all kinds of scuttlebutt flying through the MIEU about mysterious delays or problems in opening the channel, but the link had been established at last, with an instantaneous two-way connection with Mars, and an added twenty minutes for the Mars-to-Earth link one-way. Regular calls for the Marines hadn’t been authorized yet, but a few familygrams and special messages had been routed through from Quantico.
And one of them had been a ’gram for Lance Corporal John Garroway, from his aunt in San Diego. His mother was dead.
He was still having trouble wrapping his mind around that one. According to the brief message, limited to a barren and emotionless twenty-five words or fewer, she’d been found dead a year after the Derna had boosted out of Earth orbit. The death was listed as accidental, of course…a fall down the steps in front of the Esteban home.
Garroway didn’t believe that for a moment. He knew she’d gone back to Esteban before he was shipped up to the Derna. He’d dreaded this very possibility, that she would go back to that abusive bastard one time too many….
There wasn’t a lot he could do now, except grieve. His mother had died nine years ago, while he’d still been asleep in cybehibe on board the Derna, outbound from Earth. As for his father, well, apparently there wasn’t much news. According to CNN briefs relayed over the net from home, the abortive Aztlan Antistatehood Insurrection of 2042 had driven the ringleaders into hiding.
Carlos Esteban among them, apparently.
Garroway found himself fervently hoping his father was dead.
No…No, on second thought it would be better by far if the bastard were alive. That way, he might be able to present his biological father with a bill of reckoning someday. He looked down at his hands, flexing them. His left arm—broken by a gauss round in the battle—was still sore, but it was working now, thanks to the calcium nanochelates and fastheal the corpsmen had given him. He was going to survive this deployment, and he was going to get back home.
And someday, he would meet his father again.
Someday…
He looked up into the darkening sky. The brightest stars were beginning to show as the eclipse deepened the twilight. He uplinked to the net to check which stars were visible and where.
At least the net was working now. The Navy personnel left on board the Derna, plus the command constellation’s AI, had brought the full net back online only three days ago. Garroway and the others were still getting used to having that much information a thought-click away once more. In some ways, things had been simpler when they’d had to rely on their own memories and on such primitive-tech anachronisms as radio, human and robotic scouts, and sign language.
Data flowed through his thoughts. Yes…that bright one there, low in the north. The brightest star in what at home would be the constellation Scutum, just north of Sagittarius.
The sun of home.
Yeah. Someday.
Gavin Norris
Chamber of the Eye
Pyramid of the Eye
New Sumer, Ishtar