“Oh, maulk,” Berg said, his eyes wide.

“You’re replacing Harson,” Hocieniec continued, sitting down at his desk, “because the dick-for-brains broke his grapping femur on a fast-rope climb two days ago.”

“Welcome to Hell, Nugget,” a staff sergeant said, looking up from some paperwork. “Staff Sergeant Summerlin. You’re going to be with Jaen, Charlie Team.” The staff sergeant was medium height and slim with dark brown hair.

“Summerlin’s Alpha Team Leader and assistant platoon sergeant,” the gunny said. “Jaen and Hatt are over on the ship doing maintenance on their Wyverns. So while Summer here does my paperwork for me, I’m going to get you into the barracks and through in-processing.”

“And this is the gaming room,” Sergeant Jaenisch said, opening the door.

The barracks and training area for the Space Marines was about a quarter mile from the headquarters. The barracks were pretty decent, “starbase” apartment barracks left over from the Navy when they’d pulled most of their people out of Newport News. There was enough room that the Marines were rattling around in them like peas. They even got individual rooms since there were enough barracks for a regular battalion much less a Space Marine company, which was about the size of a regular platoon.

A “company” is a variable term. Originally the term simply meant a body of companions. Latterly, it came to mean a group of about one hundred infantry personnel under the leadership of an officer who was not quite a junior, not quite a senior, usually a captain.

However, companies varied in size. Force Recon companies had ranged as high as two hundred when all the supports were added over the years. With the shift to Space Marines, the Marine Corps commandant had taken a step back. Since the Recon companies were going to be ship based, the Navy could damned well handle support. And given their firepower, training and individual lethality, the size of the actual unit could be dropped.