Starfist: A World of Hurt by David Sherman & Dan Cragg Page A

quiet so he wouldn't interfere. Now it was all right for him to say something, and he did.
    "How did this happen?" he asked Kerr.
    Kerr looked at the platoon sergeant's hovering face through his own clear screen and shook his head. "I don't know. I checked, his cooler was working properly before we moved out this morning. He never said anything about a problem with it."
    "Can you hear me, Doyle?" Hyakowa asked, turning his face to the reclining man.
    "Yes," Doyle said weakly.
    "What happened?"
    "I was cold. Turned it off."
    "Don't you know how to adjust the cooler?"
    There was a pause while Doyle took a sip of water. "Yes."
    "Why didn't you adjust the temperature instead of turning the cooler off?"
    "Too cold. Off was faster."
    Hyakowa bit off a disgusted response and turned to Hough. "How long will he be down?"
    he asked.
    Doyle was still sweating heavily, but not quite as much, and his pulse was a bit stronger.
    "Half an hour, maybe," the corpsman answered.
    "Does he need to be medevacked?"
    "No, he'll be all right."
    "Can you get him up and moving sooner than a half hour?"
    "I don't know. Maybe. It depends."
    "Do what you can."
    "Aye aye."
    The platoon was on the move again twenty-five minutes later. This time, Doyle kept his uniform's cooling unit adjusted for comfort, instead of turning it off when it got too cold.
    Corporal Doyle wasn't the only member of the infantry battalion to have a heat problem.
    He wasn't even the only one to turn his cooler off instead of adjusting it. None of the units failed. And that was important to Brigadier Sturgeon: he had to know whether the cooling units would function properly in a wetland environment after not having been used for so long, and whether his Marines remembered how to properly use them.
    Thirty-fourth FIST, like most Marine units, relied very heavily on its junior noncommissioned officers to conduct patrols and other missions without the supervision of senior NCOs or officers, so the exercise included training specifically designed for the fire team leaders. Each fire team was taken to an isolated position, given a map with a starting point and a destination marked on it, and told to go from "here" to "there." They were instructed not to initiate any radio contact with company headquarters unless they had an emergency that required a medical evacuation. And their satellite-based geosync positioning systems were taken away from them--they had to rely on the inertial guidance system built into their maps.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Mud, mud, and more mud. Nothing but mud. And it seemed like all of the mud was underwater. Not deep underwater, like under the ocean. No, if it was under the ocean, they wouldn't have to be slogging through it. This mud was under boot-top water, ankle-deep water, knee-deep water, crotch-- oof! --deep water. That was why they had to slog through all that mud--it wasn't under the ocean, so they could slog through it. Mud that clung to their boots, clutched at their trousers--tried to suck their damn boots right off their feet! They didn't dare drop anything, or the mud would suck it straight down to the center of the world, never to be seen again until it went through the entire geologic cycle of tectonic plate subduction and came back in an upwelling of volcanic magma! Try explaining that to the supply sergeant!
    If the mud wasn't bad enough by itself, the local trees shot out roots at all kinds of improbable angles, ready to trip unwary feet and drench the men who tripped over them. It wasn't as if the Marines could see the roots--the trees were heavily canopied, and moss hung from branches in thick mats, blocking out most of the light. At high noon the place looked like dusk. Some of them tried to use their infra shields, and the damp, moss-covered roots didn't show up through them at all. Not as well as the naked eye showed them, anyway, and the naked eye hardly showed them at all.
    The water itself was murky and almost felt alive. That was likely because