by Douglas, Ian
“Fighters?”
“Two Starhawk squadrons at Oceana, sir.”
“Get them in the air.” He hesitated. He wanted to send one to Tsiolkovsky, but didn’t dare. If the Confederation was making a grab for Konstantin, it might also take advantage of the moment to grab the Periphery, those stretches of flooded USNA coastline abandoned by Columbus . . . and only now being reclaimed. “One to the Manhat Ruins, one to Washington, D.C.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell them if Confed forces show up, don’t shoot until I give the order. We want to keep open the possibility of a peaceful resolution if we can.”
A communications request chime sounded in his head. It was Ilse Roettgen.
“Excuse me, Marcus.” Within his mind, he opened the link. “President Koenig.”
“Yes, Alex,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Were you just trying to call me?”
Ilse Roettgen, as president of the Confederation Senate, was as close to a supreme leader of the Earth Confederation as the World Constitution permitted. She was also president of the European Union.
“What the hell are fifteen Type 770 gunrafts doing attacking Tsiolkovsky?” Koenig demanded. He was stretching things a little, hoping to get more information. The 770s hadn’t actually attacked Tsiolkovsky yet . . . and it was possible that Roettgen would call them back if she realized the assault had been detected before they were in place.
He saw a flicker of surprise in her eyes, quickly concealed. “Attacking? Mr. President, I am sure I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Koenig had been expecting that ploy. “Then permit me to bring you up to date, Madam President.” He thoughtclicked a mental icon, dropping the forward scanner data feed recorded by Konstantin into the link.
“How did you . . . ?” She shut down the emotional response.
“Kind of hard to sneak up on us when we can peek over the shoulders of your pilots.”
She changed tactics. “The Tsiolkovsky Array has been declared a strategic asset of the Confederation, Mr. President. The Confederation will control access to Konstantin from now on. Those gunrafts have merely been deployed to . . . to facilitate the peaceful transition of control.”
“I must protest, Madam President,” Koenig said. “Konstantin was created by USNA facilities, with USNA funding. His programming was carried out primarily by USNA AIs. In any case, if you feel you have a claim, I suggest that you take it up with the World Court, and not try to sneak in and steal it while the majority of our fleet is out-system.”
Koenig could feel the woman’s fury as she severed the link.
“Well,” he told Whitney, “that went well, I think.”
His eyebrows arched higher. “She’s calling them off?”
“Oh, no. She thinks she has the high hand . . . and that very well might be true. But she’s also angry, now, and angry people make mistakes.”
“I . . . see, sir.”
“You don’t agree?”
“It seems to me, sir, that if you’re trying to keep open the possibility of a peaceful resolution—your words, I believe, sir—making the other person mad is the last thing you’d want to do.”
“The other guy just threw the first punch, Marcus,” Koenig replied. “But we might still be able to make her miss and fall on her face. Now . . . what Marine assets do we have at Mars?”
Tsiolkovsky Array
Tsiolkovsky, Lunar Farside
0846 hours, EST
“Move it, move it, move it!” Gunnery Sergeant Christopher Ames bellowed as Marines thundered past him into the ready room. “I want to see nothing but amphibious green blurs, do you read me?”
The members of First Platoon, Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion of the 2/3 Marines pounded past Ames with a thunder of bare feet, banging equipment lockers, and massive gear being slung into place. They were clambering into the shells of their Mark 1 battlesuits, and helping one another with the heavy backpacks of He64 meta. The moon’s gravity, just one-sixth of a G, meant they could hoist loads onto their backs that would have required powered exoskeletons on Earth, but the rocket packs each still had a mass of nearly two hundred kilos, and a careless movement could send the wearer stumbling out of control.
First Lieutenant Jennifer Burnham watched the evolution, as Marines loaded one another up, squeezing into the shells that hissed shut around them, then checking one another for loose buckles, snaps, or straps. As each Marine checked ready, he or she then toed the line, falling in along three parallel green stripes painted on the steel deck.
As the last Marines took their positions, Ames pivoted to face Burnham, and snapped off a crisp salute. “First Platoon ready for exovehicular deployment, sir!”
Tradition—the deep-down bones of the Corps. Burnham was sir, not ma’am, at least for formal evolutions . . . and they were about to go “exovehicular” even though they were inside a sealed and pressurized underground cave within Tsiolkovsky Crater’s central mountain. Within the Marine lexicon, a shore base was always treated like a ship, with bulkheads, not walls, and decks, not floors.
“Thank you, Gunnery Sergeant,” she said. “No time for speeches, Marines. Hostiles are closing on the base from the north. We’re going to stop them. We will accomplish this by meta-vaulting sixty-two kilometers to the crater north rim, spreading out in a defensive partial perimeter, and holding the high ground. Questions?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lance Corporal Rodriguez said, raising a heavily armored hand.
“Rodriguez? Make it quick!”
“Uh . . . scuttlebutt says we’re up against humans, not Shads. Is that true, ma’am?”
Scuttlebutt, Burnham thought. The only form of communication faster than light. “True. We appear to be under attack by Confederation forces, and we have been ordered to intercept them. Other questions?”
“But that means this is a fuckin’ civil war,” Sergeant Daystrom said.
“About fucking time,” Corporal Thomas growled. “Freedom!”
“All that will concern you, Marines, are my orders. We’re not here to debate politics. We’re here to defend USNA property and personnel. Do I make myself clear?”
“Sir, yes, sir!” the three ranks of Marines chorused, a bellow ringing back from the steel bulkheads.
“Gunnery Sergeant Ames!”
“Sir!”
“Move ’em out!”
“Aye, aye, sir! Okay, Marines! You heard the LT! Lef’ face! Forrar harch!”
Thirty-six Marines, massive, hulking figures in their battle armor, and with meta tanks each half again as large as a complete battlesuit precariously balanced on their shoulders, shuffled toward the main lock.
And Burnham decided that she’d lied, that this really was a political debate. The Marines were called in when the talking failed . . . but who was it who’d said that war was simply a continuation of politics by other means? She pulled down an answer off the Tsiolkovsky Base Net. Von Clausewitz, of course.
She wondered what the famous Prussian military theorist would think of flying Marines.
Burnham followed the Marines out into the vast emptiness of the hangar airlock, moving toward what appeared to be a taut, black sheet stretched against the far bulkhead. In two columns, the Marines marched straight into the sheet, which stretched, bulged, and filled in around them as they walked through and vanished.
Nanoseal technology allowed movement between pressurized compartments and the hard vacuum of space without the need for pumping out atmosphere and cycling through locks. The material molded itself to Burnham’s battlesuit as she stepped into it, offering a tug of resistance, as though she were stepping through something like a sheet of molasses.
And then she was outside the base cavern, walking north down a barren, powder-covered slope, a desolate panorama of bare rock, intense sunlight, and midnight-black shadow. The reactive nanocoati
ng of the Marines armor did its best to match the surrounding colors and intensity of light, creating patchworks of harsh white and black.
“First Squad! Assume launch positions!” Ames called over the tactical net, as the Marines fell in to extended squad formations, each man or woman well clear of those to either side. “Link in with tac-AI. One bounce! In three . . . two . . . one . . . launch!”
In utter silence, the regolith beneath the first twelve Marines exploded in a swirl of heavy white dust, and the battlesuits turned into tiny, one-man spacecraft.
Meta was a so-called exotic rocket fuel that had been in use since the late twenty-first century. High-energy lasers were used to pack helium gas into a meta-stable configuration—He64—that remained inert at temperatures close to absolute zero, but which released that stored energy when it leaked into a reaction chamber and was heated. A three-second burst was sufficient to kick an armored Marine and his equipment and fuel load into a low, soaring trajectory calculated to bring him down just over 60 kilometers from the base.
Burnham watched the last of the Marines fire their meta boosters, then linked in with the tactical AI, allowing it to calculate the exact thrust and vector. She felt a hard, noiseless jolt, and then she was flying . . . drifting at high speed across the black maria on the floor of Tsiolkovsky . . . a dark regolith that swiftly gave way to bright, harsh, and rapidly rising bare rock.
Tsiolkovsky Crater was about 180 kilometers across, but the central mountain was offset toward the north. Sixty-some kilometers from the base, the crater’s ring scarp rose over 1400 meters—very nearly a mile—in a near-vertical cliff like a white wall of rock. Burnham’s trajectory was just high enough to clear the rock wall . . . and then her suit’s jets automatically fired, bringing her down on the regolith with a hard thump.
The tac-AI had dispersed the three squads, as per plan . . . spreading them across nearly 25 kilometers of bare rock. The timing, she noted, could not possibly have been any tighter.
The enemy 770s were already in sight.
Lieutenant Donald Gregory
VFA-96, Black Demons
36 Ophiuchi A System
0847 hours, TFT
At long last they were moving, accelerating in-system.
At 0805 hours, the last of the emerging ships of the fleet had checked in, and the fleet admiral had given the order to begin accelerating at ten thousand gravities toward the heart of the 36 Ophiuchi A star system. During that time, the twelve Black Demon fighters had been edging farther and farther away from America, circling around to port, moving ahead, and increasing the separation from the carrier. They masked the move as a series of course corrections and station-keeping maneuvers. No one had said anything, but he was pretty sure that someone on board the carrier—CAG Fletcher or possibly even the skipper himself—had given the order for CAP One to maneuver away from the ship in such a way that the Confederation officers wouldn’t be aware of it unless they were paying close attention. Delattre and his people wouldn’t be watching CAP deployments, but would be more interested in the capital ships.
Gregory had to admit that it actually felt good to do something of which Delattre wouldn’t approve—a way of striking back in a very small way against Confed officiousness. It had been Geneva and Delattre’s people who’d made the final determination that the fleet would liberate Arianrhod instead of Osiris.
America was nearly a hundred kilometers distant, now, invisible to the unaided eye, but showing as a bright green blip on Gregory’s AI-enhanced navigational feed. Forty minutes ago, the long-awaited order had come through, and the carrier battlegroup had begun accelerating toward the star’s inner system. At ten thousand gravities and with deceleration beginning at the halfway point, they would arrive at Arianrhod in a little over five and a half hours. The Black Demons had matched America’s acceleration, taking advantage of the boost to slip a bit farther out, positioning themselves between the carrier and Tango One.
By now, Gray thought, the Slan of Tango One were aware of the battlegroup’s arrival. Enough time had passed by now to allow the light bearing news of the fleet’s emergence to reach the alien ships.
There’d not been enough time for the light showing the enemy’s response, however, to make the return trip. It was called c-fog, that peculiar fog of war caused by the snail’s pace of light.
Gregory felt blind and helpless, knowing the enemy was watching them . . . and being unable to see exactly what they were about to do in response. . . .
Chapter Ten
12 November 2424
Marine Perimeter
Tsiolkovsky Crater North Rim, Lunar Farside
0847 hours, EST
“Here they come!” Gunny Ames called. “On my command . . .”
Burnham watched from behind a low slab of a boulder as the hostiles deployed. The ground up here along the lip of the crater was a labyrinth of broken blocks of stone, offering plenty of cover. At her back, the cliff dropped away in a near-vertical descent a mile deep, and near the horizon was the uneven rise of Tsiolkovsky’s central peak.
Her eyes, however, were on a pair of dust clouds far off on the northern horizon, fuzzy patches against the bright regolith, well separated and vanishingly minute. Her in-head data feed showed ranges of 51 and 55 kilometers, approaching at nearly 120 kilometers per hour.
Privates Duncan and Salvatore were crouched in the shadow of a nearby boulder, a slender 3-meter tube on a small tripod between them.
“Ready to fire, Lieutenant,” Karen Salvatore said. “Uh . . . if you want to move, ma’am, now would be a real good time. CB fire, you know . . .”
Counterbattery fire. The enemy would home in on the incoming and backtrack on it, slamming the area with fire within seconds.
“That’s okay, Marine,” she replied. “I’ll duck when you do.”
She could almost hear the other’s shrug, the rolling eyes, the unspoken mutter of “Officers.” “Whatever you say, ma’am. . . .”
It didn’t matter. Burnham wanted to see the firefight, to evaluate it with her own eyes rather than through the swarms of battlespace drones and robot cameras along the crater lip. She had a vested interest in this.
This wasn’t Jenny Burnham’s first time in combat. Three years earlier, as a newly minted second lieutenant, she’d been part of a Marine deployment to the embattled state of Gujarat, on the northwestern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Slowly submerging beneath the rising Arabian Sea for the past couple of centuries, Gujarat had revolted against Northern India, probably with help by anti-WC Islamists out of Paskistan. Her platoon had gotten into a running firefight with Muslims in Benap, a few kilometers from the border.
The White Covenant was a touchy subject for both Muslims and Hindus, and was seen by both as a government sanction against not only religion, but against national and cultural identities. When the Marines captured a pair of Muslim infiltrators in the seacoast village, the Confederation Military Command had ordered them to release the men and stand down. Four Marines had been killed in that fight by a Pakistani robotic drone; Burnham, her commanding officer, and the men and women in her platoon had been sworn to secrecy, on pain of imprisonment for up to ten years.
Burnham had protested the orders in writing to her superiors in Columbus. She’d been court-martialed, first by the Confeds, then, when the Hexagon brought pressure to bear, by the USNA Marines. She’d avoided a jail sentence but had damned near found herself bounced out of the Corps. Instead, she’d been fined three months’ pay, and found herself assigned here, on the ass side of the moon, protecting a glorified electronic calculator.
Yeah, she had a score to settle with the Confederation. It was personal. Her beloved Corps had done its best to protect her, she thought, but the politicians in both Geneva and Columbus had a hell of a lot to answer for.
She was going to enjoy this.
“Multiple targets acquired
,” Ames’s voice said in her mind. “Waiting on your order, Lieutenant.”
“Kill the bastards,” she said.
According to the on-line warbook, the Type 770 was an armored personnel transport nearly 20 meters long, each carrying up to a platoon’s worth of men and equipment, and mounting two turrets topside armed with either high-energy lasers or with railguns. They were designed for work on airless worlds like this one, boosted along low, suborbital trajectories by fusion-fired plasma jets, though they also had four sets of track units for crawling on the ground. They had thick armor, especially forward, and sophisticated sensor and navigational suites.
And fifteen of them meant that Bravo Company was facing over six hundred troops—a full battalion’s worth.
“Clear to six,” Salvatore said, checking the area behind their weapon.
“Firing,” Private Duncan announced. “Move!”
The next few seconds were a blur. Duncan and Salvatore triggered their weapon, a Mark V man-portable KK railgun known colloquially as a gauss rifle. It used a powerful magnetic field to accelerate a steel-jacketed lump of depleted uranium to almost 50,000 kps, a significant percentage of the speed of light. A tightly focused plasma jet out the back end reduced—but could not eliminate—the weapon’s savage recoil. The tube jumped . . . but was snatched up immediately by Duncan, who grasped the carry handle over its breech and triggered his meta jets in the same, endlessly practiced instant.
Burnham fired a burst of her meta as well, soaring away from the gun position in a low, regolith-skimming arc.
And then the sky went white.
Executive Office, USNA
Columbus, District of Columbia
United States of North America
0849 hours, EST
“Mr. President,” the voice of Konstantin said in his mind, “the engagement has commenced.”
“So I see.”
He was receiving a direct image download from Konstantin, a montage of scenes from various robot cameras and drones along Tsiolkovsky’s north rim, and from the top of the central peak as well. Several of the camera views turned to snowstorms of static at the same instant; the long-range view from the crater’s central peak showed a dozen white flashes of light along the rim, as though someone had switched on a string of lights.