First Deployment (Corporate Marines Book 3) Read online

Two just looked at him. “I don’t care how they get their data. They may be using crystal balls for all I know. I do know that no matter how many smaller items are incorrect, the big ones are always accurate. We’ve got a few months before some sort of big actions are happening out here. Bigger than anything we’ve ever seen. We need to get our act together. I can see HQ putting in another section if we can’t.”

  Six looked at Two. “What would they do with us, then? There aren’t enough of us in the first place!”

  Two shrugged. “Remember, there are three circles. We are the best, so we’re on the outside. They could pull us back to Sol to work back up to full capacity again and push the middle group out.”

  There was silence. Jane spoke up from the speakers and a projection appeared on the wall just over the diagnostic bench that we used to troubleshoot problem areas in the armour. “Two? Why don’t I start the analysis debrief?”

  Two just sat down and pulled out a small juice container, which she started drinking from.

  We all moved forward into a semi-circle. On one side of the projection was a list of our names—well, our numbers, actually. Next to that were several numbers, with some highlighted in yellow and red.

  Firing scores and statistics. Great.

  There I was. Eight. Everything was red. Those scores were the worst I had ever had.

  Jane began the debrief. She never appeared as an avatar to us. Just a disembodied voice speaking through the ship’s systems in the armour room. She simply ran down the list. When she wanted to stress or point out when someone had done something well—or really poorly, which was more common—there was footage. Usually from many different angles.

  Everyone had made mistakes. One had, and so had Two. I didn’t feel as horrible when I heard this, but I still felt pathetic by the time Jane was done evaluating me. I had made every mistake possible.

  Yet when Jane finished the rundown on an individual, there were positive notes at the end. Mine were coldly presented, but I understood what was being said and I recognized that she was right. “All members, when they first deploy, do poorly. The reality of the situation means that they have to mentally reset themselves. Out here in the depths of space, you will kill. Give it some time, Eight. You need to reset and adapt, so do not blame yourself for the poor scores. Everyone is off when they are new. Thankfully, you have time to work yourself back up.”

  After individual evaluation, Jane took us through the deployment and how we did as teams. The three teams had done well. Except for me and Seven, because I took off on that run.

  Yet again, at the end Jane had some more words for me and the section. “This section was together for quite a while with no casualties. This is not a normal sequence of events for a military unit. Because of this, the ability of the section to work together was higher than normal. The drawback was that when a casualty happened, the section lost its effectiveness. The loss has hit everyone harder than it should have. So your effectiveness as a section is much lower right now. With the introduction of Sam as a replacement, Eight, you will need to go through more action and training to get back up toward the previous effectiveness. This Eight will work and operate differently than our last. It will take time to learn and return to the previous level, but it can be done.”

  When Jane had stopped talking, Two stood up, put her juice container in the recycling unit, and then looked at us. “OK, this was our first real training together. We’ll do better next time, and hopefully nothing big comes up before we’ve got the old juice back. Carry on with the normal routine. Dismissed.”

  We all filed out. I had a lot to think about.

  The next few days passed and I continued working on the armour when I had the time. Now that I was in the section and starting to settle in, I sort of felt like I belonged. Every time I really felt good about the section, though, someone was good enough to come along and point out how new I was.

  This was nothing like what I had expected my deployment to be like. Really, I had nothing to compare this to. I was from The Projects; bad things happened, which I tried not to dwell on, and then I ended up a fully trained Marine replacement. Now I was out here in the depths of space with one of the top Marine sections tasked with keeping humanity safe.

  I thought about how I had come out here to the edges of known space every night when I went to bed.

  As I fell asleep that night, I felt myself falling back and I started reliving what had come before.

  The Past

  I was finally a Marine. A specialist, highly trained and outfitted with the newest powered armour that existed. I could lift more, run farther and faster, and interface directly with my armour, making me one of the nastiest killing machines that humanity has ever seen in a single human being.

  I don’t work for the government, though. After Earth was invaded by a small army of killer robots years before I was born, the different governments finally realized that they couldn’t stave off something like an invasion, or really properly explore and expand out to space.

  That would bankrupt any country on the planet. No single corporation at the time could have done it, either, even with some funding.

  So in the wreckage after an invasion that saw kinetic weapons (big rocks) get dropped across the planet and an invasion of the East Coast of the U.S. by killer robots, all the governments of the world sat down, and while there was complaining and arguing, realizing that the death toll was almost a billion people really motivated everyone to hammer out an agreement.

  There were a few smaller countries that absolutely would not sign off on what everyone had wanted to create.

  I read the files including information not open to the public. The answer by everyone else was simple:

  Sign off on it and publicly agree and smile, or forget any assistance in recovery.

  From that, the Glentol Corporation (Intergalactic) was formed. Several large companies were merged together, and the new business was given a charter:

  Protect humanity.

  They grew and gained public trust because they were the leaders in helping the world rebuild. They were profit-based, with a strong system of checks and balances in place to stop excesses. The president of the Corporation was never seen. No one even knew his name. There were always rumours going around that he was a survivor of the invasion and that he wanted nothing more than to save humanity after the horrors that he had seen.

  The Corporation had to be ruthless in those days right after the alien invasion. There were warlords that wouldn’t want to give up what they had gained.

  The Corporation had used mercenaries and crushed them absolutely. It didn’t matter if they had been on the African coast, deep in the Mideast, in parts of Asia, or even in control of a city in the U.S. They died, or fell into line.

  Slowly humanity had rebuilt and we had advanced. Things were better than right after the invasion.

  That was when the cracks had started to appear in the “world government.” Different countries now were putting their own interests first. There was complaining that the Corporation was costing too much. Greed was coming ahead of the “needs of the people,” unless it was the needs of their own “people.” Like the people in charge in most cases.

  But the Glentol Corporation was based on making a profit. It had the funding now to expand, and never did need any handouts from any government.

  The Corporation was also like a huge monster with fingers in every pie. If the Corporation was to shut down tomorrow, then the world economy would be damaged for years, maybe even decades.

  One ongoing complaint was that The Projects—the post-invasion living quarters for the millions of people in the first world—needed to be shut down. There was no real need for them anymore.

  Because of all the homelessness and devastation, The Projects had been built. They were huge reinforced concrete structures designed to house some of the millio
ns of displaced people right after the invasion. They were meant to be short term. They were thrown up fast and cheap, and they were definitely looking old and run down now. But the buildings were large and solid. They were still around today, and in use even though there was always talk about shutting them down. But then where would the poor and downtrodden go and live?

  After all, those hardworking lower-class people were mostly one step away from being homeless on the street. I should know; I came from there.

  Some of the kids in my school got together and killed my dad and sister. They burned everything and it was covered up as an “accidental fire.”

  They showed me pictures of what they had done and laughed at me. The four of them had gone over to where I lived to beat me up. I had been out having fun with some friends, and they had killed my family as payback for wasting their time. I went cold inside then.

  I ended up killing them, and then off to jail I went.

  Now I was a Marine on my way to my first deployment to one of the sections that is running around at the edge of human space looking for trouble, keeping an eye on our outposts and small bases, and waiting for orders to go raid other races’ facilities if something special or unique ever came up.

  But the truth was that space was just too big for us. The dream of technology fixing everything and allowing us to move between different systems in a day or two were just that: dreams. A starship was expensive with a capital E. They took a long time to build, cost a fortune including maintenance costs, and star travel was sort of safe, but there were rumours of ships that had been lost. That was not hard to imagine, as a starship could end up coming out of star drive in the wrong place. Or a breakdown could happen in the systems that had triple or better redundancy. The trip out from Earth started interesting and stayed interesting all the way out to my new post.

  Heading For Deep Space

  I had gone through the briefings about space and what it felt like to be out there. You could be in space for a year on a ship moving in a circuit from outpost to base to outpost. The biggest ship that we had was the Mama Pig, a bulk freighter that had been created out of an asteroid. On that you had the same small room like you had on every ship, but the ship itself was big enough that you could walk around it up and down the corridors. On a smaller ship, that space and distance was not there. Every starship kept the passages clear so that you could move around. And every starship had a gym and exercise area so that you could work out. There were even sun lamps or tables so that you could soak up the Vitamin D and look tanned. But there was no real sun, no wind in your face. I had heard that outposts had larger rooms set up with real or sometimes fake grass. Those rooms doubled as hydroponics as well. But life on a ship was crap. You had to be insane to take on the yearlong circuit. That, or enjoy isolation.

  Better and worse in a way were the different outposts or bases that were spread throughout deep space. Really there were just a few of them, and if they were on a planet or moon, there would be more space. Yet there were a few stations orbiting suns or set up specifically to watch whatever was wonderful and mysterious in a system, and it just wouldn’t do to have an outpost on a planet.

  That would be like living on a starship. But those tours were usually closer to two years and there was no real extra space.

  If you were in the Sol system, then there was much more human interaction. Communications and traffic were all over the system. But the spaces never really got much bigger.

  Every station had to be assembled at the location. What would hopefully one day become a colony had to have every nut, every bolt, every bite of food—everything—shipped in. That took up space on a starship. All that mass had to come from somewhere. That somewhere was mostly still the Sol system.

  There were huge costs associated with moving all these things as well. Yet it was all controlled by the Glentol Corporation. So when a ship took food, spare parts, personnel, and even entertainment out for delivery, it came back with the holds full of something. Even if that something was only data pulled from observation satellites around a star.

  With the degree of automation that was possible with a Level 1 or 2 AI in charge of a site, it would be possible to extract billions of dollars’ worth of rare resources. Those materials were then processed back at home and turned into things that humanity could use. I had been told that a huge stockpile of materials was needed for starship production. That way, as capacity expanded, there would not be an immediate shortage of material.

  Given that the Mama Pig had been around for over a generation and was still not paid off, I was sceptical. While we could use more ships like this, I couldn’t see how humanity was going to be able to afford to buy the additional two that the Corporation was pushing to build. The governments wouldn’t provide the assistance and the Corporation was stretched too thin right now.

  My original point was that space was limited in space. To go to space today or for the foreseeable future meant that personal space would be almost non-existent and any open space would be at a premium.

  To go to space, you had to be a bit nuts.

  I thought back to some of the classes that we went through during recruit training at the end, right before one of the phases of training that took us one step closer to becoming a Marine.

  My instructors had warned me about deep space casually, in passing, like they were discussing the weather. The only instructor that had really mentioned it was Professor Salazaar, who always spoke with a strong Spanish accent. He was a short, wizened man who was an expert in social manipulation and exploitation. He primarily talked about the manipulation of the social media outlets and what the governments and Corporation usually used. He also talked about the problems inherent with living in confined spaces. I can still remember his discussion on that; he’d talked about it for the whole forty-minute period of instruction.

  Professor Salazaar had been standing at the front of the auditorium. This had been shortly before the armour fitting and we were down to less than twenty candidates out of the original three hundred. “In every case that I can pull up from recorded history on those living in small enclosed spaces and how they dealt with it, there is one problem. This does not relate to you.” He had paused and squinted, which was the indication that he was using his implants. Behind him on the wall, images started popping up. Submarines, space stations, spaceships, and standard images of the earliest solar colonies. “Each one of these examples dealt with highly trained individuals just like you will be. The true difference is that given the rarity of individuals that can successfully become Marines, many have not truly volunteered. No matter how much you may feel you want to be here doing this, the reality is that you may not have the deeply ingrained mindset that means you should be here doing this. Let me put this in a more simplistic way for you so that you clearly understand what I am trying to make clear to you. If I were to put you in a large metal shipping container with nine other candidates and leave you there for a few months with only work, some sim interaction, and each other, in a few months some of you would be insane, some dead, and a few would be contentedly carrying on like the world had never changed. In the past, the decision to live in a shipping container was made by the individual, who would then be tested. Many of those people failed. In fact, unless this was during warfare, the odds of failing were much higher, as were the costs. So if you wish to complete your training and not end up dead after months of travel in a shipping container followed by short bursts of action that most would class as insane, I would recommend this. Take a deep breath and examine why you are doing this. You can make a choice now to be involved with this and attempt to save humanity from whatever is out there waiting for us now. We will give you methods to deal with being in the shipping container.”

  The professor had stopped at this point and looked around at all of us. The light from reflected off of his glasses, giving him an insect-like appearance that was eerie. “You e
ither end up hanging from a supporting element with a rope around your neck; possibly you make it through your tour and end up drinking or using other substances heavily to deal with the extreme trauma; or you get through it. Be a survivor or get out is my answer to you. If you cannot figure out how to flip the switch that everyone has buried in the back of their brain to deal with this, then do not be there. It is not even the cost of training and equipping you that I am worried about. I am concerned with the rest of your section. About the starship that is in use transporting all of you and the crew. All these represent hundreds of years of cumulative experience and a percentage—yes, a small percentage, but a percentage—of the Earth’s planetary GDP as well. Decide, and decide well.”

  That had sort of made sense to me. Living in a small enclosed area would be difficult. But I was doing it right out of training. I had not realized the full impact of what he was saying back then.

  As I started my trip from Earth, out toward the boundary where I would board a starship and head for my first deployment, I was a bit nervous and excited. I kept comparing myself to an early submariner or one of the earliest astronauts as they headed off for the moon to help build that first real installation.

  I thought of the fear and the worry that they must have gone through.

  It hadn’t prepared me for this at all.

  I realized later that those first few days where I was on a freighter heading toward the edge of the system were basically a holiday for me. I was able to get all the sleep that I felt I hadn’t had on my course. Of course, I found I no longer needed that much sleep. If I could get a solid six hours, I always woke up feeling refreshed and aware of my surroundings. Back before I had started training, I was used to at least eight hours of sleep a night and there were days where I didn’t feel aware at all. It was like I had been walking around in a fog.

  Once in a while I would question myself in the back of my mind. Was this because I was trained and my body needed less sleep naturally? Or was this because of the nannites and who knows what else had been put into my body that I had never been told about?