And there were regulations about having sex with someone in your own platoon, and even stronger ones about sleeping with your leading NCO—with anyone higher or lower on the chain of command, in fact. The fact was, though, that everyone did it, and for the most part the powers-that-were turned a blind eye to casual sex between fellow enlisted Marines.
The emphasis was on the word casual and on the word enlisted. If two Marines became so close that they wanted to establish a formal contract, one was generally transferred to a different platoon, because no Marine could be permitted to show favoritism to a sex partner over another fellow Marine in combat. If jealousy became an issue, the Marine with the problem would have to enter therapy, possibly to have the possessive aspects of his or her libido adjusted.
And officers never slept with enlisted personnel. That particular sin could lead to a general court and dismissal from the Corps for both parties, as it had since women had first entered the Corps in 1918. The same went for pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease, though neither issue was the problem it had been before the advent of medinano late in the twenty-first century.
The fact that Ramsey had been sleeping with his platoon sergeant for ten months might well be reported, and it could come back to bite him. Hell, he thought, as another wave of depression surged up from the blacker corners of his mind, it had already bitten him. He’d damned near been incapacitated when Thea had been hit on Alighan. They never had let him see her; her wounds were serious enough that she’d been popped straight into cybe-hibe and loaded into a medical support capsule for medevac back to Mars.
Two months afterward, word had finally trickled back down the chain of command to the 55th MARS, still deployed in mopping up Muzzie resistance on the planet. At the Naval Hospital in the Arean Ring, on 3007, Staff Sergeant Thea Howell had been declared an irretrievable.
She was dead, and he hadn’t even been able to tell her goodbye.
“What was that?” Karla asked him.
“What was what?”
“You just registered an extremely strong surge of emotion while you were speaking—extremely depressive emotion. Was it thinking about Staff Sergeant Howell that triggered it?”
He sighed, leaning back on the boulder and closing his eyes. “Of course. What did you think it was? Fucking indigestion?”
“Emotion does not map linguistically … at least, not with one-to-one correspondence. I can easily sense the emotion within you, but the source, the triggering thought or thoughts, can be numerous and they can be subtle.”
“Look, it’s not complicated,” he told the AI. “I was in love with Thea—with Staff Sergeant Howell, okay? She was my platoon leader, but we had a … a thing. We were sex partners, yeah, but we also cared for each other. A lot. We’d been—” He stopped himself. He’d felt as though once the words started flowing, he wouldn’t be able to hold them back, wouldn’t be able to hold back the emotion, or the memories that caused them.
“You’d been what?”
“We’d started talking about a long-term contract. Marriage.” He said the words with an almost defiant edge to them.
“I see.” The program paused for a moment, as though considering the best way to reply. That, Ramsey knew, was sheer nonsense. Even expert software as complex as a psych AI ran so much faster than human thought that any pause in the conversation at all would be for the program the equivalent of waiting hours before responding.
No, the hesitation, he knew, was a tool the AI was using to let him better respond to it as if it were a human.
“Charel, I know you must be concerned about telling me this. Regulations prohibit relationships of this sort, particularly when they result in harm to the Marines involved, to general productivity, good order, and discipline, and especially to the mission.”
“Yeah.” He thought about it. “You know, I had a buddy once, a PFC, who fell asleep while sunbathing, back on Earth. Second-degree burns over half his body. When he got out of the hospital, he got a court-martial. The charge was ‘damaging government property,’ meaning him.”
“What happened to him?”
Ramsey shrugged. “A slap on the wrist. I think they fined him part of his pay for three months. And he got himself a new asshole drilled by his platoon sergeant.”
She nodded. “Legally, Charel, Marines are not ‘government property,’ as you put it. But regulations do allow military personnel to be charged and punished if their actions, inattention, or irresponsibility causes them bodily or psychological harm, or causes others to be harmed.
“However, I do not foresee that to be the case in this instance. Others in your company have suffered psychological injury simply from the fact that many of you had close friends and comrades irretrievably killed on Alighan.” Again, a human-sounding pause. “Five hundred eighty Marines of the 55th MARS made the combat assault on Alighan. During the assault, they suffered two hundred five casualties—and one hundred twelve of those were irretrievables. That’s over nineteen point three percent killed, Charel.”
He shrugged. “We knew it would be rough going in.”
“For most military units throughout history, losses of anything above ten or twelve percent were considered crippling. The unit in question effectively ceased to operate as a fighting group, especially when it was a company-sized unit or smaller, where most of the personnel actually knew one another, where the losses represented friends or, at the least, acquaintances.
“In your assault on the Theocrat position on top of the building, two of the ten involved were killed. Twenty percent. And the ten of you knew one another, were close to one another, on a personal level.”
“So? Allison said we’d be lucky if it was twenty-five. What’s your point?”
“That everyone in your unit suffered considerable loss. You would not be human if all of you weren’t grieving.”
“None of the others in my squad are here, I notice,” he said. “Maybe they’re grieving, but they’re handling it, right?”
“Each person handles grief differently. How are you handling it, Charel?”
He shrugged again. “I don’t know. Mostly, I guess I’m not. I was thought-clicking stim releases off my implants for a while, to kind of keep me going, get me moving in the morning, y’know? But after a couple of weeks my software reported me.”
“Yes. And for a good reason. Nanostims are not addictive physically, but it is very easy to become psychologically reliant on them. And that would reduce your usefulness to the Corps.”
“Yes. Always the Corps. First, last, and always.”
“You sound bitter.”
“About being one tiny circuit in a very large board? A number, one among hundreds of thousands? Now, why would that make me bitter?”
“I will assume that you mean that sarcastically. You knew when you enlisted that the needs of the Corps came first, that you would surrender certain rights and privileges in order to become a Marine.”
“Yes. …”
“That the good of the mission comes first, then the good of the Marine Corps, then that of your own unit … and only then can your personal good be considered.”
“I know all that.”
“Good.” Another hesitation. “Were you aware that Lieutenant Johnson, your platoon CO, has recommended you for platoon sergeant?”
That startled him. “Shit. No. …”
“It’s true. The decision has been deferred, pending my recommendation.”
“Don’t defer on my