Free Battlespace by Ian Douglas

someone at the party had taken their things, including their asset cards.
    The police had already put a stop on the cards. As for the uniforms, there wasn’t much that could be done. Warhurst shook his head. What the hell did civilians want with Marine Class A’s? Costumes for a costume ball?
    Or maybe it had just been a damned prank.
    The guards led them back to the front receiving area, where a clerk offered a screen panel for Warhurst’s thumbprint. “Thumb here, sir. And here.”
    â€œI’ll have someone return the prison uniforms later.”
    â€œDon’t bother,” a beefy police sergeant said. “They’re disposables.”
    â€œOkay. These people have any effects to sign out?”
    â€œNo, sir, They came in stripped bare.” The man smirked. “You Marines really like to party, huh?”
    â€œThese Marines were robbed, Sergeant. I will be filing a report to that effect.”
    The man shrugged massive shoulders. “Suit yourself. But maybe next time your boys and girls won’t come where they’re not wanted, tendo?”
    â€œYeah.” Warhurst said, his voice tight. “We tendo.”
    He’d been warned. Things had changed in the twenty years they’d been away.
    And in some ways, things hadn’t changed much at all.

4
    7 N OVEMBER 2159
    Navy/Marine XT Training Facility
Fra Mauro, Mare Imbrium, Luna
0920 hours GMT
    Hospitalman Second Class Phillip K. Lee was trying to run, but he was having a bit of trouble. His feet kept leaving the ground, turning him into a small low-altitude spacecraft, and he was having a hard time controlling his vector.
    Overhead, Earth hung half-full in a midnight sky, an achingly beautiful glory of blue and white; the sun was just above the horizon at Lee’s back, and the shadows he and the dust cloud cast stretched for long meters across a flat and barren plain.
    â€œ Slow down, damn it !” he heard over his helmet headphones. “What are ya tryin’ to do, bounce into orbit?”
    His feet hit powdery gray dust, kicking up a spray of the stuff. He tried to stop, overbalanced, and tumbled onto the ground. For a moment, he lay there, listening to the rasp of his own breathing. Readouts beneath his visor showed the workings of both his suit and his body. His heart rate and respiration were up, but otherwise he was okay. His armored suit, built to take rough usage in the field, was intact.
    Good. Because if it wasn’t, he was in deep trouble.
    Awkwardly, he tried to roll over. He was wearing MarkVIII vac armor, bulky and massive. In some ways, it was a self-contained spacecraft. And he was having some trouble developing the coordination and skills he needed to fly the damned thing.
    â€œ Lee, you fucking idiot !”
    â€œSorry, Gunnery Sergeant,” he said. “Got a bit carried away there.”
    â€œYou get carried away in this environment, sailor,” the voice told him with a growl, “and you are dead . Move slow. Move deliberate. Move methodical. Know what the fuck you’re doing, and why .”
    Well, he knew what he was doing. He was trying to reach the form of a space-suited Marine sprawled in the dust eighty meters ahead. And why?
    Well, he was a Navy hospital corpsman. And that’s what corpsmen did, even if this was a particularly realistic bit of training, rather than a real combat deployment.
    Carefully, he rose on unsteady feet and began moving forward again, more cautiously this time. Under lunar gravity, his body weight plus his armored suit and equipment weighed less than 24 kilos…but it still massed 144, which meant that once he got himself moving in any direction, stopping or turning could be a bit tricky. He’d done this sort of thing plenty of times in simulation…but this was his first time in a suit working in hard vacuum.
    It was tough to see his target. Marine chamelearmor responded to ambient lighting and reflected the colors and