He smiled again. “You know very well you can.” He reached out and took her hand in his, but he didn’t move, still standing along the rail, staring out over the gentle surf. Erik Cain had his share of demons keeping him up at night. He’d seen terrible things as a child; indeed, as an angry teenager he’d performed some fairly reprehensible deeds himself. His rage against the government and the criminals who’d murdered his family was justified, but taking it out on the innocents compelled to live their meager existences in the hellish slums wasn’t. He was sorry for much of what he’d done back then, though he’d more or less made a tentative peace with it.
Cain had fought in many battles, and he’d commanded thousands of Marines. His troops had been in the thick of some of the bloodiest combats of the war, and many of his men and women had died following his orders, a burden Cain continually struggled to bear. The ghosts kept him up nights for sure, but that wasn’t what was bothering him now. It was the future he was worried about.
The war had been over for three years, and Cain had held a series of boring, out of the way posts ever since. Things were not all well in the Corps, and he was troubled. He mistrusted Alliance Gov with an intensity bordering on paranoia, and now he felt something fundamental had changed in the century-long relationship between the Marines and the Earth authorities. The Corps had always occupied a unique place in the overall structure of the Alliance. It had no military role on Earth; its sole purpose was to defend Alliance colonies outside the solar system. As such, it was answerable both to the colonies themselves and the government back on Earth. When the Corps was small and the colonies few, this worked just fine. But now there were many Alliance colonies – more than ever since the war was won – and the Corps was the dominant military force in occupied space.
There was growing tension between Alliance Gov and the colonies, and the Corps was caught in the middle. Many Marines had come to think of themselves as the military force of the colony worlds, which, in many ways, they were. But that characterization became problematic when conflict between the colonies and Alliance Gov became a realistic probability. Cain doubted that most Marine officers would obey an order to attack Alliance colonists, but would they engage other Federal forces to protect those same colonists? He didn’t know, and he suspected that most Marine commanders prayed to avoid such a choice.
The government was also unsure of the answer, and it had been picking away at the provisions of the Marine Charter, the original document that authorized the modern Corps and defined its rights and obligations. The assignment of political officers, initially instituted late in the war as a temporary program, was one way the authorities were trying to assert greater control over what the politicians perceived as a dangerously independent Marine Corps. The political officers, universally unpopular in the Corps, were made a permanent part of the Marine organizational structure after the Treaty of Mars was signed. Cain had protested, along with most of the serving officers, but to no avail. For generations, Marine commandants had resisted the encroachments of Alliance Gov into the privileges granted the Corps in the Charter, but General Samuels had done little since he’d moved into the top command two years before.
Cain had known the Corps would demobilize once the war was over, but he was shocked at how it had been done. I Corps had been broken up, many of its veterans pushed into retirement, the rest scattered around, dispersed to petty garrisons on the Rim. Cain’s own special action teams, a great success by any measure, were disbanded, the program discontinued. General Holm himself had fought to keep the teams together, but he’d been overruled by Samuels.
Erik realized with a start that he had drifted deep into thought. Sarah was standing next to him, silent, the side of her face pressed against his shoulder. She was used to him drifting off this way, and she usually just let him work quietly through whatever was on his mind. He loved her completely; she was the only person who’d ever made him feel completely at ease, even if such moments were rare. In a life filled first with pain and the fight to survive, and later with duty and the weight of guilt and responsibility, she was the one purely good thing that had ever happened to him. It’s not fair to her, he thought sadly. I don’t think I will ever know true peace. She deserves better than to share my nightmares.
Sarah Linden had her own recollections from a hellish past, no less painful than Erik’s. Abused and victimized by a powerful politician when she was a child, she too had found salvation in the Corps. As a surgeon, she mourned every patient she lost, but most of the Marines who found their way to her survived – Erik couldn’t make the same boast. In fifteen years of war he’d been in more than his share of the conflict’s bloody meatgrinders, and thousands had died following his orders. He’d always expected the survivors to hate him, but they loved him instead, which only made it harder.
Sarah had been the senior medical officer for I Corps during the hellish fighting on Carson’s World. Cut off from fleet support and driven into the planet’s deep caverns by enemy shelling, she’d put together a makeshift field hospital and worked wonders in caring for the corps’ shattered soldiers.
Low on supplies and overwhelmed by sheer numbers of casualties, her people managed to pull through over 95% of those who made it to their care alive. Horribly wounded men and women, many tangled in the twisted wreckage of their armor, poured into the field hospital in quantities she couldn’t have imagined. Strung out on stims, operating with robotic efficiency, her team worked non-stop for days. As long as the wounded kept coming in, her people kept working. And on Carson’s World, the wounded kept coming.
Her field hospital management techniques were so innovative and effective, she was asked to head a training program for new mobile medical units. She and Erik took six months’ leave together, after which she reported to Armstrong to take up her new post, a job that came with a promotion to colonel.
When Erik reported back he found there was very little duty available. General Holm had gotten his brigadier’s stars confirmed as promised, despite considerable blowback on the issue. Cain was a great combat leader and one of the heroes of the Corps, but he’d proven to be singularly incapable of playing political games. His political officer had filed a stack of complaints against him, not surprising since Cain had come close to standing the fool in front of a firing squad. But in this strange post-war world, things were different in the Corps, and despite Holm’s steadfast support, Erik Cain was definitely out of favor.
He’d spent the first year after leave bouncing from one administrative posting to another, bored out of his mind. Finally, he managed to secure the assignment to command Armstrong’s garrison. It was a major’s posting, a colonel’s at best – not the job an ambitious young general would normally accept. But there was a shortage of assignments and a surplus of officers, and Erik really didn’t care anyway. He was disgusted with the way things were going, and the last thing he was thinking about was career advancement. Besides, there was one perk to the job that couldn’t be matched. His office was less than a kilometer away from Sarah’s. The six month’s they had spent on leave were the best of his life, and he was tired of the endless separations and stolen moments.
He spent 18 months organizing and reorganizing the battalion and a half charged with defending Armstrong and its massive Marine hospital. It was a backwater posting, and the troops, somewhat accustomed to lethargic supervision, found Cain’s drive and attention to detail to be quite a shock. There was some grumbling at first, but the unit came to accept, and eventually love, its aggressive new commander. By the time Cain left Armstrong, the garrison there was drilled up to the standards of any assault unit in the Corps, and they had the pride to match.