Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  “It feels…like I’m sinking.” Thoughts of drowning tugged at her mind. She wasn’t thinking clearly, and she was having trouble formulating the questions she wanted to ask. “Will…I dream?”

  “Maybe a little, when you’re going under, and when you’re coming out. The AI doc will be initiating REM sleep as it takes you down. But most of the time? No.”

  One of the other techs laughed. “I know I wouldn’t care to have to deal with a decade’s worth of dreams,” she said, “especially knowing I couldn’t wake up!”

  “I…think the Ahannu sergeant is Cydonia at the Institute. Ahannu Buckner is a real bastard. Manipulative. Make me rich…”

  “I’m sure that’s true, Doctor. Would you mind counting backward from a hundred for me?”

  “Counting…backward? Sure. Saves power. But what about the Hunters of the Dawn? They won’t have to wait in line, not with PanTerra. A hunnerd…ninety…uh, no…ninety-seven. Eight…nine…Ishtar. It’s beautiful there, I understand….”

  “You’ll be able to see that for yourself, Doctor, very, very soon now.”

  Hab 3, Deck 1, IST Derna

  Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

  1405 hours Zulu

  The surface of the world of Ishtar blurred beneath the hurtling Dragonfly, jagged mountains and upthrust volcanic outcroppings among gentler rivers of gleaming ice. This was Ishtar’s anti-Marduk side, the hemisphere held in the grip of perpetual winter as the moon circled its primary in tidal lock-step.

  But the ice was thinning, the land greening. New Sumer lay just beyond the curve of the red-purple horizon up ahead, another hundred kilometers or so….

  “Black Dragons,” Warhurst announced over the tactical net, using the assault force’s new call sign. “Stand by…three minutes.”

  One by one the other dragons responded. Six Dragonfly reentry vehicles, laden with APC landers, hugged the terrain as they swung into the final approach, skimming scant meters above the boulders and ice whipping past below. Abruptly, rocks and ice gave way to open water, and the sextet of deadly black skimmers howled over the sea, raising rooster tails of spray in their sonic-boom footprints.

  Ahead, just visible now, the black, conical mountain designated Objective Krakatoa lifted slowly above the horizon. Following plans logged with their onboard AIs, the shrieking aerospacecraft began weaving back and forth, spreading out to make themselves harder targets to hit.

  Forty kilometers from the target the sky exploded in dazzling, blue-white radiance. Dragonfly Three, touched by that nova heat, melted away in an instant. Dragonfly Five, jolted by the blast’s shock wave, lost control and struck the water in a cartwheeling spray of foam and metallic debris.

  Damn, he thought. Not again!

  It just wasn’t working….

  And then the mountain was rising to meet them, vast and black and ominous. Dragons One and Two flared nose-high, dumping forward velocity, then hovering briefly above flash-blasted rock and cinder, before releasing their saucer-shaped payloads—“personnel deployment packages” in mil-speak. Dragons Four and Six howled low overhead, reaching farther up the mountain slope before settling with their PDPs.

  Each saucer lander, cradled in the gap behind the Dragonfly’s bulging nose and intakes and the tail-boom mounted rear plasma thrusters, carried a section of twenty-five Marines and their equipment—two to a fifty-man platoon. The Marines, strapped into wire-basket shock frames, were jolted hard back and forth within their harnesses as the saucers plowed into the burned-over side of the mountain.

  Then the pilot AIs released the harnesses and cracked open the side hatchways, and the Marines spilled out into the dim red twilight of Ishtar.

  Warhurst followed, though his proper post was the HQ command center in Dragon One’s lander. They’d already lost, and there was no sense in continuing….

  “End program,” he called, and in a flicker of blurred motion the towering mountain, the red and purple sky, the charging Marines, all vanished, and he was again in the simulation couch in his office on Deck One, Hab Three, of the IST Derna.

  The simulated attack had failed the moment he’d lost a third of his assault team to Krakatoa’s searing, antimatter-powered beam.

  “You should have continued the assault, Martin,” Major Anderson’s voice said over his link. “You might have learned something.”

  “I really don’t care to get killed again, Major,” he said. “Neither do my people. That sort of thing can’t be good for morale.”

  Actually, he was more concerned with his troops picking up careless habits than about poor morale. Losing your life in a VR simulation like this one was no worse than losing a game sim, but Warhurst wondered if too much reliance on painless simulations led to Marines taking chances on the battlefields of the real world…chances that could leave them dead and jeopardize a critical mission.

  “So what happened?” Colonel Ramsey asked over the link.

  “Same as before, Colonel. We lost two of the Dragonflies going in. We can’t take that whole damned mountain with only a hundred Marines.”

  “Mmm. And we won’t have the resources to use human wave tactics. The troops or the equipment.”

  “No, sir,” Warhurst replied. Colonel Ramsey wasn’t serious about human wave tactics, of course. Marine tactical doctrine emphasized finesse rather than brute force. Ramsey was gently pointing out that this particular tactical problem was not one that could be solved by throwing more troops at it.

  “Recommendations?”

  “Hard to make any, sir, since we don’t really know what to expect. But if these worst-case scenarios prove out, then we’re screwed. We need to hit Objective Krakatoa with at least two full companies to be sure of getting through with one.”

  The only information they had about the An planetary defense weapon had been based on the account FTL-transmitted by a young Marine at the New Sumer compound moments before it was overrun by the An rebel forces. They knew that the An facility, hidden in the mountain they called An-Kur, could shoot down a spacecraft in orbit, and that it could shift the aim of the beam by as much as ten degrees out of the vertical to aim at a specific target.

  Could that beam be aimed at a target hugging the surface of Ishtar only a few kilometers away, as well as claw starships out of orbit? No one knew. Was the beam generated, as most analyses suggested, by matter-antimatter interaction? Pure conjecture, based on the fact that no one knew of another energy source with the same star-hot output. Was there a recycle time on the beam, meaning a force could slip in after it fired once, while it was still recharging? No one knew. So far as anyone on Earth was aware, the An-Kur beam had fired exactly once. Hell, there was a possibility that the thing was a one-shot weapon, like the old X-ray laser technique that used the detonation of a nuclear weapon to generate the needed X rays, destroying the gun as it fired. The Marines might get to Objective Krakatoa and find nothing left there but a ten-year-old glass-bottomed crater.

  But they couldn’t count on that, not with so much riding on the question.

  Damn it all! How the hell was he supposed to train himself and his company for an assault when next to nothing was known about the target?

  Warhurst’s stomach rumbled, and he realized again how hungry he was. He didn’t notice it when he was in sim, but once he was back in the real world, he wanted to eat, and he didn’t care what his implants told him he was supposed to feel. This fasting business, he thought, was strictly for the religious fanatics. The thought made him smile, though. He was going to get to see the An in person, which was more than most of Earth’s fanatics could hope for, whether they were with the Human Dignity League or the Anist Creators Church.

  He just wished he didn’t have to starve to do it.

  Warhurst covered his face with his hands, thinking. “Okay,” he said at last. “If I only have one company, that’s all I have. The best approach we’ve tried was Scenario Five. We only lost one Dragonfly that way. Splitting up over the horizon and angling in fro
m all directions is bound to scatter the enemy’s defenses somewhat and may keep our casualties down. The only other possible approach is to land farther out and make the approach on foot.”

  “Which runs up against the time problem,” Anderson put in.

  “Agreed.”

  “I’d throw in a tactical reserve if we had one,” Ramsey said, thoughtful. “But we’re stretched way too thin as it is. Trying to invade a whole damned planet with twelve hundred Marines…it’s like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. We just don’t have the assets to spare, in personnel or in logistical transport.”

  “Don’t I know it. I’ve been thinking about this lots, Colonel. If my people don’t take Krakatoa, we’re pretty much screwed no matter what…unless the whole thing is a paper tiger anyway. And I’m not betting the farm on that possibility.”

  “Nor am I, Martin. Nor am I. Doesn’t make sense to turn a mountain into a gun that’s only good for one shot.”

  “Unless, of course, they have lots of mountains around New Sumer, each with its own superpopgun,” Anderson said.

  “Lovely thought,” Ramsey told her. “I’ll recommend you for command of the World Pessimists Legion.”

  “No thanks. I probably wouldn’t like that.”

  “Fortunately,” Ramsey said, “there’s no indication of more than one planetary defense element. We have to start somewhere, and the Chiefs of Staff are starting this one with the assumption that we have one target—An-Kur—and that the An aren’t going to be too eager to point that devastating a weapon at anything below their own horizon. Tell you what. We go with Scenario Five. I’ll cut back on the first ground assault at New Sumer by…make it two Dragonflies. That’s one more platoon. We’ll treat Black Dragon as a reinforced company of four platoons. How’s that sound?”

  “Best we can do, I guess,” Warhurst agreed. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Not a problem. It’s my job to make your life and career a living hell. How’m I doing?”

  “Quite well, actually. I’m impressed.”

  “Glad to know we’re all doing what we’re best at. Okay, Major Anderson and I have to split for a senior staff meeting. Do you need anything more from us?”

  “A steak would be nice, Colonel. Rare. With onions.”

  “You’ll have to wait twenty years for that, Captain, but I’m sure it can be arranged when we get back home. Talk to you later.”

  And the voices in his head were gone.

  So…not as good as he’d hoped, but better than he’d feared. Hitting Krakatoa with eight Dragonflies instead of six was a little better, anyway. The worst part of the whole situation was the fact that his company included so many relatively inexperienced men and women, the newbies coming out of the past month’s crop at Parris Island. The assault on An-Kur was not something he wanted to throw unseasoned people into, not if the idea was to keep down casualties.

  But Captain Warhurst was a Marine. He made do with what he was given. Or with what he could steal…

  Stomach still growling, he linked into Cassius in order to begin working on a rewritten TO&E for the Black Dragon assault.

  Hab 3, Deck 1, IST Derna

  Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

  1430 hours Zulu

  The virtual meeting space had the look and feel of a large, Earthside conference room, complete with chairs, American flag, and a floor-to-ceiling viewall currently set for the GlobalNet Evening news. In the virtual reality unfolding within his mind, Colonel Ramsey leaned back in one of the glider chairs at the table, watching the broadcast with the dozen or so other people in the room.

  “Yes, Kate,” an earnest-looking reporter said, staring into the pickup. “Here at New York City’s Liberty Plaza, enthusiasm is building for the imminent launch of Operation Spirit of Humankind, the relief expedition to the world of Ishtar. Folks have been gathering here for the past twenty-four hours to show their solidarity with the American forces who will be departing our Solar system soon, bound for the world of another star.”

  At the reporter’s back a vast throng of demonstrators carrying torches sang beneath the reflected glare of floater lights. Liberty Plaza was a broad, sweeping esplanade built fifty years earlier to raise the Statue of Liberty above the slowly encroaching waters of the Upper Bay. The plaza was filled now with demonstrators, picked up by a far-flung array of hovering cameras as scene followed scene. Batteries of powerful, ground-mounted searchlights beamed the reflective floaters a hundred meters up, which scattered a frosty, blue-white radiance across a veritable sea of singing, chanting, swaying people. In the distance, across the bay, the vast and translucent city dome of lower Manhattan shone like an enormous, iridescent pearl in the ghostly glow, as arc lights sent slender needles of white radiance vertically into the night sky.

  “Let my people go! Let my people go! Let my people go!…” The background chanting rose and fell, a muted thunder of thousands of voices. An enormous projection screen had been raised at the foot of Lady Liberty, high enough to reach above her waist, displaying a view of the Derna floating free at L-4 against a background dusting of stars.

  “Satellites counting the crowd here tell us over sixty thousand people have come to Liberty Plaza tonight to witness the historic departure of the first MIEU, scheduled for some forty hours from now,” the reporter was saying. “I don’t think these camera images can ever possibly convey the sense of excitement and purpose and sheer dedication displayed here in what must be one of the biggest and grandest parties ever thrown in the Greater New York City area. I’m told that deliveries of food to Liberty Plaza exceed 150 tons in the past twenty-four hours alone, delivered by air, by hovercraft, by tunnel. At that, most of the people I’ve talked to aren’t eating and aren’t sleeping. They’ve set their implants to take care of their bodily needs so they can concentrate on what one of the demonstration organizers here called, and I quote, ‘A group mind experience that will shake the very walls of reality.’ And I have to tell you, Kate, that the atmosphere here is like nothing I’ve—”

  “Screen mute,” President LaSalle said, and the reporter’s voice fell silent. “You see, General, what we’re up against. The political repercussions of further delay in this project could be devastating.”

  General King nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “This whole thing is wildly out of hand. All of the different religious factions are at each other’s throats, either hailing the An as gods or attacking them as demons. And everyone who isn’t working to start a new round of religious wars is marching or demonstrating for a crusade to free the slaves on Ishtar. And in addition to all of that, we have the second relief mission being assembled at L-5. They’re breathing down our necks right now. So…tell me again, in words that I can understand…why the new delay?”

  General King glanced at Ramsey before answering, then across the table at Admiral Vincent Hartman, who would be commanding the naval assets of the mission. “Madam President…the cybernetic hibernation personnel on board the Derna are just running too far behind sched. They can only put people into hibernation so fast, you know. And more Marines keep arriving, making for extremely crowded conditions. It’s…well, it’s pretty chaotic up there.”

  Which was something of an understatement, Ramsey thought, even though King hadn’t yet been physically on board the ship. Things were chaotic. With crowding, heat, and tempers all rising, there’d been four fights on the lower decks already, and it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt or threw a punch that could not be ignored or downplayed by the officers.

  “What can be done to speed things up?” General Gabriowski said. He looked at the President. “If things slip much further, the Europeans and Brazilians will beat us to Ishtar. Then they’ll dictate to us how things are played.”

  “Unacceptable,” LaSalle said. She looked at Ramsey. “Colonel? The bottleneck seems to be in your backyard. What do you propose?”

  “Madam President—” He stopped, suddenly uncomfortable. There was som
ething that could be done, but he’d been putting off suggesting it. It would be hard on the men, especially the newer ones.

  “Go on, Colonel,” Gabriowski told him.

  “Yes, sir. Madam President, there are still about four hundred Marines on Earth, waiting for passage up to L-4. One reason they’re not moving faster is that the D-480s—the personnel transfer shuttles we’ve been using—can only carry thirty people at a time, and they have a long turnaround time on the ground.”

  “You can’t blame the Navy for that,” Vice Admiral Cardegriff put in. Cardegriff was the Navy’s representative on the Joint Chiefs, and a senior member of the National Security Council. His word hauled a lot of mass.

  “No, sir. The Navy’s been doing all that’s expected, and a hell of a lot more. But we might be able to speed things significantly by putting the Marines straight into cybehibe on the ground and shipping them up as cargo.”

  “As cargo, Colonel?” President LaSalle said. “That seems a bit…indelicate.”

  “Marines aren’t exactly what you would call ‘delicate,’ ma’am. I’ve been looking at this for a while now, wondering if we’d need to go this way. With more technicians and more room on the ground, we can pop out people into hibernation a lot faster than we can at L-4. They’ve been on their diets now for several days already and getting the preliminary nano injections, so we can start processing them through pretty quick. Best of all, they can be loaded straight into their cells on the Derna once they stop the hab rotation. Zero g’ll make things a hell of a lot easier. And they won’t be using consumables—water and air, mostly—if they’re hibernating.”

  “You don’t sound happy about it, Colonel.”

  “No, Madam President. I’m not. Most of those four hundred Marines are fresh out of recruit training. I was hoping to start them on simulation combat training once they reached the Derna and were waiting to be dropped into hibe. Besides, it’s kind of a dirty trick to pull on them, shipping them up like slabs of frozen meat. I imagine a lot of them are looking forward to the flight up, and now they’re going to miss it.”