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rifles while serving on Ishtar.
    He’d been on Ishtar for less than a year, however, before being packed onboard the Jules Verne and popped back into cybehibe for the return voyage. The promotion to the next rank, corporal, required a year in-grade plus a test. He would be an NCO, a noncommissioned officer, at E-4, with more responsibility and higher expectations regarding his performance.
    So here he was…ten years objective and four years subjective later. Technically, he had the time in grade. What he did not have was the experience.
    Still, it was embarrassing to be a Marine with—according to his Earthside records—twenty-one years in, and he was only an E-3. If he’d not gone to the stars, if he’d stayed in and stayed out of trouble, he would be a goddamned sergeant major by now, at the exalted pay grade of E-9.
    Scuttlebutt had it that the brass was considering a blanket set of promotions for the men and women of Operation Spirit of Humankind, with everyone bumped up a pay grade and given a hefty out-system combat bonus to boot. There wastalk of a special download training session to implant the necessary skills and knowledge that went with the rank.
    Of course, if they kept that up, they’d have a whole platoon of gunnery sergeants. He wondered how they would handle the tendency for units to go top-heavy like that.
    â€œThere’s also some other news,” Sergeant Dunne went on, “though I can’t vouch for it. Word is they may be about to offer us another deployment.”
    That brought shocked silence to the table. “Another deployment?” Kat asked. “Where?”
    Dunne shrugged. “I was talking to the senior revival tech a while ago. All he knew was that we were being kept here for a while, possibly with the idea of letting us volunteer to go out-system again.”
    Out-system again? Garroway thought about it, and he didn’t care for it. He’d just gotten back, and there were things he wanted to do, damn it. Like see how things had changed in twenty years. And, oh yeah…see if he could find his father and kill the bastard.
    Anyway, the usual routine in both the Navy and the Marines was to rotate personnel between ship and shore assignments or between overseas or off-world duty stations and duty back in the World.
    â€œThis is just gonna be for volunteers, right, Sergeant?” he asked.
    â€œI’d imagine so,” Dunne said. “Unless the Corps’s changed one hell of a lot in the past twenty years.”
    â€œOn the other hand,” Houston said thoughtfully, “we are all Famsit one or two. I’d imagine that’s a resource kind of scarce in the Corps, y’know?”
    â€œYeah,” Corporal Regi Lobowski said. “Maybe there’s no one else to send.”
    â€œThe question is,” Kat said, “send where? Any idea, Sarge?”
    â€œNope. Not that there are that many possibilities.”
    Garroway had already uplinked to the platoon net, with a search query. How many out-system missions were going on right now?
    And the choices were fairly limited. Marine detachments had been assigned to several extrasolar archeological missions, but most of those had been recalled due to budgetary constraints. The Chiron mission, at Alpha Centauri A, had been reopened two years ago after a ten-year suspension, and the Diego Vasquez , with exoarcheologists, planetologists, and Marines, was now en route to begin again the exploration of that desert world’s dead cities, but Kali/Ross 154 and Thor/61 Cygni A both remained abandoned. There were Marines stationed at Rhiannon/Epsilon Eridani and at Poseidon/Tau Ceti, both worlds with ruins apparently going back to the long-vanished Builders.
    And there was a detachment onboard the Spirit of Discovery , a deep explorer now en route for 70 Ophiuchi, and another on the Wings of Isis expedition to Sirius. That brought a wistful pang to Garroway. Lynnley was