Marines by Jay Allan

support several nuclear weapon delivery systems, delivering warheads of up to 20 kt.
    Of course you can kill almost anyone just by punching them.  The fighting suit vastly increases the strength of the user, allowing us to literally run through walls and jump 20 meters straight up.  A skilled marine can deliver fire from mid-jump, reaching target locations that are blocked from the ground.
    We were all anxious to start blasting the countryside with our new weapons, but the first month of training was spent learning how to walk.  We'd had a few casualties during our war games and maneuvers, but these were mostly the results of scattered accidents.  It was during suit training that the general's prediction that many of us wouldn't survive really came back to haunt us.
    We lost 5 on the first day we actually wore the suits, mostly because they didn't listen to the instructors and tried to do too much, too fast.  I started suit training with a healthy respect for the danger, and this only increased when I saw the bloody results of recruits who tried to run or jump without the right training.
    Jumping wasn't difficult, but landing was another matter, at least landing safely.  The suits provided a lot of protection, but you could still mess yourself up falling hard from 15 meters.  It took a lot of practice to learn to land safely and even more to do it without losing a beat.  After all, when we were in the show we'd be doing this under enemy fire.  If you managed not to hurt yourself jumping, but you stumbled and faltered on the battlefield you could end up very dead, very quickly.
    Once we were proficient with our suits we redid all the war games, fully armored this time.  The final event was a full scale simulated assault against an entrenched defender.  Half of us were attackers and half defenders.  When we finished, we switched sides and did it all again.  Projected casualties for the attacking forces were over 50%.  I hoped we'd do better than that when we hit dirt somewhere for real.  I knew from my studies that the average assault force in the Second Frontier War lost 18.2% killed and wounded, which was bad enough, but it was a hell of a lot better than 50%+.
    At the end of our fourth year we left Camp Puller and boarded a transport for the orbital transfer facility.  There we were loaded onto a ship called the Olympia and we headed out toward Sol Warp Gate #2, bound for Van Maanen's Star and the base located on the second planet of the system.
    We were ready to start assault landing exercises and begin training for fighting in space.  The Sol system was demilitarized by the Treaty of Paris, so all of our bases conducting anything but maintenance and refueling had to be located in other systems. 
    The trip was hard on a lot of our class.  None of us had ever been in space, and the zero gravity and acceleration periods were rough on the digestive system.  Cleaning up partially digested rations in a zero gravity environment might have been my least favorite part of training.  We did have a number of methods though, and we got quite good at it.
    I'd read an account of a sailor from the old wet navy who said that recruits got used to the waves and that their seasickness passed in a couple weeks.  Well, I can tell you that it takes longer than two weeks in space, but the principal still holds.  By the time we made our third jump and entered the Van Maanen's Star system, most of us had adapted to normal space travel.  We'd get another chance to acclimate to the wild maneuvers preceding an orbital insertion, but that pleasure was still a few months away.
    The next two years were filled with training similar to what we'd had already, but in increasing difficult and dangerous circumstances.  We practiced on Van Maanan's 2, but we also did maneuvers on the sun-baked first planet and on a moon of the seventh planet where the temperature hovered a balmy 40 degrees above absolute zero.
    We let loose with all of