"He was supposed to. On the other hand," O'Shaughnessy looked at his granddaughter thoughtfully, "he told me that nothing ever seemed to faze you. I think he was almost a little worried. Thought he might be losing his touch, or something. In fact, he said he sometimes thought you were actually enjoying Mackenzie."

"I was," she said, her tone surprised.

"Enjoying Mackenzie?" O'Shaughnessy looked at her, and she shrugged, as if surprised by his attitude.

"Oh, parts of it weren't exactly among the most pleasant moments of my life," she admitted. "And I had more trouble with the augmentation surgery than I'd expected. But over all? I had a blast, Grandpa. It was fun."

O'Shaughnessy leaned back, eyebrows arched. The most astonishing thing about it was that she seemed perfectly serious.

Camp Mackenzie, on its island off the southeastern coast of Old Earth's United States Province, had been a training site for Marines for over a thousand years—since long before there'd been an Imperial Marine Corps, or even an Empire for it to serve. It still was (although there were some on New Dublin who felt that their home world would have been a better site), and he knew why that was. Old Earth remained the imperial capital, the heart of the Empire, after all. And no location on the mother world could have been better chosen to provide the maximum summer heat, humidity, mosquitoes, and sandfleas to test a new recruit's mettle ... or to melt him down into the properly malleable alloy required for the Empire's steel.

Not that the Corps hadn't found ways to make it still better than nature alone had intended. O'Shaughnessy had always more than half believed the rumors about the Corps shipping in alligators to make sure the Mackenzie population was maintained at ample levels, for instance. But whether that was true or not, there was no question but that the merciless training regimen was deliberately designed to create a hell on Earth.