Star Corps by Ian Douglas Read Free Book Online Page B

her out of the house with a steak knife…and the time she ended up in the hospital, claiming to have fallen down the stairs. John had begged her to pack up and leave, to get out while she still could. Others had done the same—her sister Carol in San Diego, the social worker who’d counseled her after her stay in the hospital, Mother Beatrice, their priest. Each time, she’d agreed the marriage was unsavable and nearly left for good…but each time, she found a reason to stay or to come back home.
    One day, John was terribly afraid, she was going to come back home and Carlos was going to kill her. It would be anaccident, of course. Injuries he inflicted on others always were.
    John hated the thought of leaving his mother, of just walking out and abandoning her. He felt like a coward for running away like this. At the same time, he knew there was nothing else he could do to help her. Goddess knew, he’d tried, but, damn it, she kept coming back, she refused to press charges, she covered up for her husband when the police showed up in response to his panicked calls, made excuses for his behavior: “Carlos is just under a lot of stress right now. He can’t help it, really…”
    His mother would have to decide to help herself. He would be gone.
    But not just yet. “No,” he told Lynnley. “You go ahead. I’d better hang around and see how this plays out.”
    â€œSuit yourself,” she told him. “Just remember, you won’t be able to protect her when you’re with the Corps off on Mars or someplace.”
    â€œI know.” Am I doing the right thing?
    He wished there was an answer to that.

3
    5 JUNE 2138
    IP Packet Osiris
En route, Mars to Earth
1337 hours Zulu
    Colonel Ramsey lay snug within the embrace of a linking couch, only marginally aware of the steady, far-off vibration that was the packet’s antimatter drive. It converted a steady stream of water into plasma and hard radiation, blasting it astern to accelerate the blunt, bullet-shaped vessel with its outsized heat radiators at a steady one gravity. Twenty hours after boosting clear from Mars orbit, the Osiris was already traveling at over 700 kilometers per second and had covered well over 25 million kilometers.
    Within his thoughts, stroked by the virtual reality AI of the Osiris communications suite, he was in a huge auditorium, the Pentagon Briefing Center, located some kilometers beneath the Potomac River. The faint, steady thrum of the packet’s main drive, starcore furies rattling just above the level of detectability in deck and titanium-ceramic bulkheads, was all but submerged by the incoming sensations of the padded auditorium seat, the murmured conversations and rustling movements of people around him, the glare off the big screen behind the podium, magnifying the features of the speaker.
    â€œGentlemen, ladies, AIs,” General Lawrence Haslett said, addressing both those gathered physically in the briefingcenter and the much larger audience present electronically as well, “as of zero-nine-thirty this morning, Operation Spirit of Humankind is go. President LaSalle signed the executive order authorizing the Llalande Relief Expedition, and both House and Senate approval are expected by tomorrow. Admiral Ballantry has cleared the use of our newest IST, the Derna , for the op, and given the orders to begin rigging her for the voyage.”
    Haslett, Army Chief of Staff for the UFR/U.S. Central Military Command, gripped the sides of the podium as he spoke, his words as clear as if he were physically standing in the cramped comm suite on board the Osiris . It was hard for Ramsey to remember that the images he was seeing were already ten minutes and some seconds old. That was how long it took the comm lasers bearing the sensory data to reach Osiris from Earth.
    â€œI needn’t tell all of you,” Haslett went on, “that this is a singularly important deployment,