Star Marines

by Ian Douglas

  That electronic psychic trauma was precisely what billions of humans experienced when the Global Net collapsed. Abruptly cut off from friends, from family, from news about what was happening as the sky continued to rain fire, millions of people panicked. The veneer of civilization is always agonizingly thin, and never more so than when the government infrastructure begins breaking down. Without Net access, local power grids failed, fire and emergency services were paralyzed, and civil authorities could see only what was happening outside their own doors, with no access at all to the larger emergency picture.

  As the panic spread, cities burned from Paris to St. Louis and from Caracas to James Bay, looters roamed streets in hordes, and mobs battled one another in the ruins even before the scouring waves rolled in.

  Other effects of the impact were even more serious, farther reaching, and more threatening to Humankind’s survival.

  Several cubic miles of seawater had been vaporized by the impact, and more had boiled away over the next few hours as liquid water tried to reach the incandescent crater on the sea floor. Rising in a vast, churning column, the steam cloud had peaked low in the stratosphere and begun spreading out, an immense and fast-growing disk of cloud.

  After the first few cataclysmic moments, the air pressure near the impact was significantly lower than the pressure farther out. The cloud began to rotate, hurricane-like, counterclockwise. Unlike a hurricane, the storm remained anchored in place by the rising column of hot gas; from that column, the storm continued to draw energy, growing larger and more powerful hour by hour. Wind velocities near the central eye approached the speed of sound.

  By the time the sun set over the tortured region, the storm’s super cell covered a quarter of the planet, from Labrador to central Africa, and eighty percent of Earth’s surface, all but in the extreme north and the extreme south, was socked in under a solid and impenetrable cloud deck.

  At first, temperatures at the surface rose. The multiple impacts of that long and fiery night had dumped a very great deal of energy into the atmosphere as heat, and that heat was trapped by the cloud layer. For three centuries, global warming had slowly but steadily transformed the face of the planet, completely melting the North Polar ice cap, and melting all of the permanent sea ice around Antarctica and even much of the ice on solid ground. Sea levels had risen by several meters over the course of centuries, and even in midwinter at high latitudes, temperatures rarely fell more than a few degrees below freezing.

  Now, in the mid-February winter of the northern hemisphere, temperatures rose steadily and inexorably, to thirty-five degrees, as hot as a sweltering midsummer’s day.

  But that was not to last. Those clouds retained a great deal of heat at first, but, as the days passed, and with the dramatic increase in the planet’s albedo, temperatures fell and the water began to condense into droplets.

  A week after the impact, it began to rain—worldwide.

  And two weeks after that, so much solar radiation was being reflected back into space that temperatures continued falling, and swiftly. In places as far south as Mexico City, Hawaii, Canton, and the inundated streets of Cairo, it began to snow.

  And snow.

  And snow.

  For three centuries, the two greatest threats to human survival had been incessant worldwide warfare and the effects of global warming. Both now were stopped cold—literally. Out of a total world population of 15.7 billion people, an estimated four billion—over a quarter—had been killed immediately, or within a few hours of the impact. In the coming months, billions more would die of starvation, disease, and exposure to the brutal and unending global winter.

  Global warming had been completely and irrevocably reversed with the onset of a new ice age. As for war…the survivors had all they could do just staying alive as the snow grew deeper around them. War—at least anything of that name larger and more organized than armed gangs battling over food in the ruins—was a thing of the past.

  At least for the time being.

  Sixty-five million years before, a twenty-kilometer-wide asteroid had fallen into the sea that one day would be the coast of Yucatán. Much larger than the moonlet of 2127-VT, it hit the planet with a velocity of only eleven kilometers per second, and liberated perhaps one percent of the total kinetic energy released by the Doomsday Impact of 2314. The Cretaceous Impact had set the North American continent ablaze, and created a global winter that drove seventy percent of all life on Earth to extinction—ending the ancient reign of the dinosaurs.

  One hundred times more powerful than the dinosaur killer, the Xul Strike of 2314 was the hammer blow of Armageddon.

  And the very survival of the human species now hung in the balance.

  9

  14 FEBRUARY 2314

  Assault Detachment Alpha

  Navy Sierra One-one

  Location unknown

  0308 hrs, GMT

  Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway lay in a tangled jumble of combat armored suits on the AUT’s forward cargo compartment bulkhead, waiting to die.

  The AUT was tumbling end over end, centrifugal force creating a simulation of gravity—Garroway estimated about half a G—at both the forward and the aft ends of the cargo compartment. He’d actually started out at the aft bulkhead, but hours ago, he’d made the tortuous climb up what had been the deck, using seat backs as ladder rungs, to the deck’s midpoint where “down” shifted from aft to forward. From there, he’d descended to the forward deck—in order to be with Chrome.

  Fourteen Marines of Detachment Alpha remained alive inside the autie, all of them injured. Garroway’s own wounds were limited to massive bruising and contusion—and what he suspected was a fatal dose of gamma radiation. His suit’s automated med unit had engaged the medical nano already in his blood stream, and was working to keep the pain at manageable levels and the nausea in abeyance. At this point, he wasn’t certain what would kill them first—the radiation burns or suffocation when their air supplies gave out.

  That would be in another twenty to twenty-four hours, depending on how active they were in the meantime.

  He leaned over, touching his helmet to Chrome’s, speaking to her through direct conduction. “How you doing, baby?”

  “Fucking…hurts…” he heard her say, her voice weak and very far away through the armor. “Just want…t’sleep….”

  “You stay with me, Chrome!” he shouted, his voice ringing off the walls of his own helmet. “Stay alert, Marine!”

  Even as he said it, he wondered if it really mattered any more. Drifting off to sleep and never waking up sounded like a pretty decent way to go.

  But as long as they were alive, they were Marines…and Marines didn’t give up.

  He held her close with one arm, awkwardly with both of them encased in combat armor. The rest of Alpha Detachment lay around them—or on what now was the ceiling somewhere in the pitch darkness twelve meters overhead. Half of them were dead, according to their suit readouts.

  There was no power in the ship. Zero. They still had suit power, but communications had been lost when the local Net went down. Emergency backup suit radios were supposed to be shielded against EMP, but the powerful pulse from the blast appeared to have slagged the circuitry anyway. At least Garroway and the handful of Marines he’d been able to talk with suit-to-suit had no radio communications left. If any other Marines had working suit radios, he hadn’t heard from them yet.

  How long had it been? His implant timer told him that some thirty-four hours had passed since the detonation. Was that all? It seemed like so much longer….

  He checked Chrome’s medical readouts. She had her oxygen flow set low, and he nudged it a bit higher. Everyone was trying to conserve expendables—power and O2, especially—but it wouldn’t do to shortchange yourself into hypoxia. The readouts on her armor suggested she was suffering from internal bleeding. Not good, especially since he couldn’t crack her suit. The AUT’s cargo deck was still in hard vacuum, and the only medical aid available wa
s what the rather limited medinano in her system could provide, coupled with her suit’s first-aid computer. It did appear to be slowing the bleeding, but she was still deep in shock, and getting worse. Blood pressure ninety over twenty…pulse one-sixty but weak.

  Damn! He was losing her.

  Garroway had met Staff Sergeant Angelina O’Meara at Camp Lejeune four years earlier, when they’d both been DIs assigned to recruit training at the MCRD at Parris Island. His relationship with O’Meara—always “Chrome” and never Angelina—had started off on the prickly side. The woman was brassy, loud, and as unabashedly in-your-face as the animated tattoos crawling over sixty percent of her body, and he still wasn’t quite sure how they’d finally ended up in bed during that liberty at Hilton Head.

  But they’d been close—and frequent if not exclusive bed partners—ever since.

  They were careful with the relationship. The Corps did not condone physical liaisons between Marines, though there was a lot more latitude for men and women stationed offworld and a long way from home. Groundside duty, though, was different. They’d managed to keep their trysts at Parris Island secret, at least from the brass, which was the only way they’d been able to wangle an offworld billet together, with 1RST on Mars and Phobos. Once offworld, most commanding officers were willing to look the other way, so long as morale and discipline did not suffer.

  As it turned out, Colonel Ramsey was a good CO, tough without being anal about regs, fair without being distant or unapproachable.

  But wangling that offplanet billet didn’t seem like such a hot idea right now. If they’d still be stationed at the MCRD, training recruits, he and Chrome both would be alive, and with every expectation of staying that way.

  Unless…

  His thoughts wandered back to the Xul incursion. He wondered if any of the rocks the bad guys had tossed at Earth had made it through. Probably not. He felt a sharp thrill of pride, of accomplishment. Alpha had stopped the xenophobic bastards before too many asteroids had been redirected toward Earth, and the High Guard, whose job it was to protect against just such an attack, had some damned decent technology to back them up.

  The thought that Earth had made it through the attack okay was all that had kept him sane for the past day and a half. The mere possibility that Alpha’s sacrifice had been in vain…

  Travis Garroway refused to let his mind follow that particular track.

  He tried to peer into Chrome’s visor, but couldn’t see much. Light within the crippled transport was limited to the glimmer from medical readouts, and from self-powered glow strips providing dim emergency lighting along the AUT’s cargo deck. He couldn’t see past the smear of dim reflections on her faceplate.

  “Chrome? You still with me?”

  He heard an answer, mumbled and all but inaudible.

  “Hang on, Chrome! Damn it…Angelina! Wake up! get with the program!”

  “Damn…you…Trigger,” he heard through the helmet connection. “Said…never…fuckin’ call me…that….”

  “Stay with me, damn you!”

  From this angle, he could see a sliver of open space through the still-open ramp at the aft end of the deck. There wasn’t much to see—just stars slowly drifting past as the AUT continued its slow and relentless spin.

  He wondered—not for the first time—where they were now.

  Garroway remembered having downloaded a bit of history off the Global Net, an eon or two ago, about something called Project Orion back in the second half of the twentieth century. The idea—which had never gotten beyond the theorizing stage—had revolved around a search for peaceful uses for the nuclear arsenal that then was beginning to threaten the survival of civilization. A physicist named Freeman Dyson had suggested that a spacecraft might be built that employed fission bombs, detonated in a steady stream, one every few seconds, just astern of the ship. A massive pusher plate equipped with prodigious shock absorbers, would catch the plasma wave of each blast and let it propel the ship forward. Using hydrogen-pellet fusion, a thermonuclear version could take a ship to the stars. The then-British Interplanetary Society had even designed an unmanned, two-stage starship, called Daedalus, that might have carried an instrument package from Earth to Barnard’s Star in sixty years…again, on paper only.

  What had happened to the AUT had been a kind of working model of the old Orion concept. The detonation of several nuclear devices two hundred meters astern had created a plasma shock wave that had accelerated the autie into deep space at high speed. With nothing to slow them down, the surviving Marines were continuing to travel at that new velocity, with the burned-out hulk of the AUT tumbling slowly as it fell.

  So where were they now? Somewhere outside the orbit of Mars, obviously…but a more precise determination simply could not be made. The local Net was down or inaccessible—due, no doubt, to the fact that the AUT’s electronics all were fried into useless hash, and Quincy3 appeared to have died—if that was the right word—in the detonation. There was no way to determine the AUT’s current vector—neither speed nor course—nor was there any way of determining where they now were, or how far they’d come.

  What were the chances of someone spotting them? Not very large, he guessed.

  In all of the adventure vids and entertainment sims dealing with this sort of situation, the hero always was able to cobble something together using spare parts and raw, human ingenuity…a flare using bottled oxygen, or a do-it-yourself radio set, or a laser signaling device using the ruby in the wealthy heroine’s necklace.

  But rubies were in short supply just now, as were pressurized combustible gases and spare parts for radios with enough signal strength to manage interplanetary ranges. A careful inventory of supplies remaining on the AUT had turned up nothing that would reach another ship, or create a beacon bright enough to serve as a signal to searchers who might be out there. Garroway had no doubt that there were searchers in the area—Marines did not abandon their own—but the AUT was very tiny and very dead, and it was falling through an extremely large volume of empty night.

  The one possible exception was the energy weaponry on board—laser rifles and a couple of man-portable particle guns. Charges were low, but energy could be diverted from the storage cells in some of the combat armor worn by dead Marines on the cargo deck.

  The trouble with that bright little brainstorm lay in the fact that lasers and, to a lesser degree, pigs, had such tightly focused beams. A shooter would have to aim directly at the target ship for the beam to register, and when the targets couldn’t even be seen…

  Hell, from out here, even Earth and Mars each were just bright stars. Anything as small as a ship was invisible. And, to make matters worse, that endless end-for-end spin made anything like careful aiming impossible. The entire detachment, what was left of it, could fire off their weapons randomly from now until their air gave out, and the chances that anyone would notice were so vanishingly small as to be essentially equal to zero.

  Even at that, Garroway had considered sending Marines out to hang over the edge of the half-open ramp and fire at Mars and Earth as they circled past. Even a vanishingly small chance was still a chance, right?

  In the end, though, as he looked at alternatives, it seemed a better course of action to conserve the remaining air as much as possible. All of that scrambling back and forth to fire of lasers in the hope of signaling someone would burn up enough oxygen to substantially shorten their remaining survival time. It seemed to be a better use of resources to give any searchers out there as much time as possible to find the tumbling autie, with someone still alive on board.

  As the hours passed, though, that, too, began looking like a bad call on Garroway’s part. Every passing minute carried the AUT farther from their starting point, alongside the Xul intruder.

  Whatever their chances of rescue had been yesterday at this time, they were much dimmer now.

  He shook his head inside his helmet as he cradled Chrome’s CAS. Hopeless….

  Commodore Edward
Preble

  Outbound from Mars

  0420 hours GMT

  “General Garroway! I really must insist that you give up on this useless search! We have more important things to consider!”

  Garroway looked up at the speaker, a rangy, sharp-featured man with an acid tongue and a prissy manner. Brigadier General Walter Hudson was an Army officer assigned to the Phobos training center as the American Union Congressional liaison.

  As a major general, Garroway outranked the unpleasant man, but Hudson’s role as an NAU representative technically gave him authority over merely U.S. military affairs.

  Well…that was the theory. In strict chain-of-command terms, a liaison officer only served as a go-between, a kind of glorified messenger boy between the NAU Congressional Military Affairs Bureau and the staff to which he was assigned. The NAU could issue orders to Garroway using Hudson as an official conduit, but at the moment, the NAU did not appear to exist, not as a coherent and operational government body.

  And Hudson was assuming authority which he simply did not possess. Not here, and not now.

  But Garroway had so far resisted the temptation to chuck Hudson out of his office. The situation on Earth was as yet unknown, though the general assumption was that things must be pretty bad. Still, Garroway’s commissioning oaths included oaths to support the North American Union as well as the government of the United States of America; despite popular belief, the two were not the same, any more than the NAU was the sole voice and authority of the World Union.

  Hudson might not have the authority to give Garroway orders, but Garroway was determined to observe proper government and military protocol. At the moment, protocol—and the shared illusion that something like government might still exist on any level—might be all that was holding human civilization together.