PFC Aiden Garroway stood at attention on the Grand Arean Promenade, together with the thirty-nine other Marines of Recruit Company 4102 who’d completed boot training, and tried not to look down. The deck they were standing on was either transparent or a projection of an exterior view from a camera angled down toward Mars—the resolution was good enough that it was impossible to tell which—and it was easy to imagine that the company was standing on empty space, with a twenty-thousand-kilometer fall to the rusty surface of the planet far beneath his feet.
The effect of standing on empty space, the gibbous disk of Mars far beneath his feet, could be unnerving. He could just glimpse the planet when he turned his eyes down, while keeping his head rigidly immobile.
Garroway and his fellow newly hatched Marines had spent a lot of time looking at that sight since they’d made the ascent from Noctis three days before. The world was achingly beautiful—red-ocher and green, the pristine sparkle and optical snap of icecaps, the softer white swirls and daubs and speckles of clouds, the purple-blue of the Borealis Sea.
For many of them, those from Earth’s Rings, Garroway included, it brought with it a pang of homesickness. Not that Mars resembled Earth all that closely, even with its reborn seas and banks of clouds … but the oceanic blues and stormy swirls of white echoed the world they’d watched from Terrestrial synchorbit; for the handful of recruits from Earth herself, it was the colors—the blues and greens, especially—that reminded them of home.
All things considered, perhaps it was best that he was standing at attention and looking straight ahead, not gawking at the deck. Somewhere behind him were the ranks of seats filled with friends and families of graduating Marines. No less a luminary than General McCulloch, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, was delivering a speech, his head and shoulders huge on the wallscreen ahead and slightly to Garroway’s right.
“The Marines,” McCulloch was saying, “have been criticized for being different, for being out of step with the society that they are sworn to protect. And it’s true. Marines look at the world around them differently than most people. Marines are dedicated to the ideal of service.
“I don’t mean to say that joining the Marines constitutes the only valid form of service. Certainly not. Nor do I mean that military service is the only way to serve one’s country.
“But military service is one of the very few, unambiguous ways by which a young man or woman can declare themselves in support of the common good. It’s one of the few means remaining today by which young people can make a deep and lasting difference, both in their own lives, and in support of their homeland, even their home world.
“And Marines—these Marines—have selflessly chosen service to country at considerable personal risk, have chosen service to others above comfort, above profit, above every other mundane consideration popular with young civilians these days. …”
Garroway listened to the words, but somehow they didn’t connect for him. The seats above and behind him, he knew, were filled almost to capacity, but not one of the Giangreco line had come out to watch his graduation. Not one.
Estelle, he knew, had wanted to come, but an e-transmit from her last week had told him the money for a flight out to Mars just wasn’t there. He wondered if that was the reason … or if Delano Giangreco had put his pacifist foot down. Delano, he knew, held the purse strings for the entire Giangreco line family.
He wished that, at least, his birth mother could have been there.
McCulloch was still talking.
“… and it is within the Corps that these young people learn the heart and soul of altruism. They learn to value the person standing next to them more than they value themselves, learn to regard sacrifice as the sacred gift they give to their comrades, and to their home.
“There was a time, a thousand years or more ago, when service in the military was a prerequisite for public service as a leader of the community or of the larger state. It was the military that taught a young person character, and half or more of the people attending the institutions of higher learning first served in the military.
“Eventually, however, and unfortunately, such service, such altruism, became unfashionable. Today, I might point out, only a tiny fraction of our leaders actually have military service in their records.
“Does that mean that our Commonwealth leaders are of poor character? No … and I wouldn’t be allowed to say so if they were.” That brought a small chuckle from the audience. The commandant, Garroway thought, was skating kind of close to the edge, here. Service personnel were required to be completely apolitical so long as they were in uniform.
“But I do wonder,” McCulloch continued, “just where in this day and age a future leader can better develop that altruistic ethic, that willingness to sacrifice for others, that comes from military service in general, from service as a Marine in particular. …”
Garroway stifled a yawn. His feet were hurting, and his back, and he thought-clicked the appropriate anodynes into his system, mixed with a mild stimulant. He was operating now less on a willingness to sacrifice than terror of what Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst would do to him if he screwed up.
“Duty,” McCulloch said, the word reverberating through the Arean Promenade. “Honor. Loyalty … to comrades, to country, to the Corps. …”
There was more, lots more, but the rhetoric ended at last. Warhurst, at the head of the graduating class, crisply attired in Marine full dress, rasped out the command. “Comp’ney, forrard … harch!” As one, forty new Marines stepped out, left foot first, the sharp clash of sound shivering the air as they began the first leg of their march around the Arean Promenade.
“Right turn … harch!” and they swung in-column, four abreast to the right. As they passed the reviewing stand, Warhurst snapped, “Comp’ney, eyes … right!” He then raised a sharp salute toward the stand. A live band waiting in the wings burst into the surging strains of the Marine Corps Hymn.
Garroway snapped his head to the right, and so was able to see the assembled brass in the reviewing stand rise to their feet and return the salute. …
Afterward, they attended one hell of a party.
Sloan Residence
Ares Ring, Mars
1720 hrs GMT
Warhurst stepped off the elevator and onto a broad, open deck of artificial wood overlooking a lake. A forest crowded close around the house—he couldn’t tell if the trees were real or artificial, but they smelled real in the gentle breeze. Whichever they were, the illusion was that of a forested mountain on Earth; the illusion broke down only when the visitor looked up, toward the hub, and, beyond the hub’s artificial sun, saw the green and sculpted landscape—woods, streams, and other buildings—etched into the other side of the colony arching overhead.
And, of course, when he turned around, he found himself looking through the hab’s transparent end cap, to see the green and ocher half-disk of Mars turning gently with the rest of the sky. Stars and an endless night rotated beyond the opposite end cap, the two transparencies sandwiching between them this strip of green and blue.
“Welcome, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst!” a young servant in scarlet livery announced.
Warhurst had never met the man, and he assumed that the guy had just pulled his ID off the local Net. “Thank you. It was kind of you to invite me.”
“It was the senator’s pleasure. Would you care for a drink?”
A serving robot hovered at the man’s side, a selection of drinks of various sizes, shapes, and colors on its tray.
“Not just now, thank you,” Warhurst replied.