Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  “I’ll remind you, Colonel,” Gabriowski said, “that this is the Corps we’re talking about, not a travel agency. These people didn’t sign on for a scenic tour.”

  “No, sir.”

  “How fast can you do it?”

  Ramsey already had the figures stored in his implant. “Here’s the data,” he told them. “The short story is that we can have them all aboard within the next five days. If we wait for the D-480s, it’ll be another nine days before they’re all aboard, and it will be at least two weeks after that before the last of them are in cybehibe.”

  “I don’t think we have much choice,” the President said. “Do you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then do it. Do what you have to to get the Derna under way within the next week. That’s October sixteenth at the latest. At the latest. Am I clear?”

  “Clear, ma’am.”

  “Very well. Keep me informed of further developments.” And the President of the United Federal Republic vanished from the conference room.

  “Dismissed, gentlemen,” Admiral Cardegriff said. And the fiction of the conference room faded from Ramsey’s awareness.

  He was back on board the Derna, lying back in his VR couch.

  His people weren’t going to like this. Not the section leaders who needed to see to it that everyone was up to speed on the training sims. Not the logistics personnel, who were looking forward to the use of a few hundred more backs to help shift cargo into Derna’s holds. And not the men and women themselves, who were going to be taken by surprise by this change. Marines were creatures of habit that never liked unexpected change.

  How in all of the hells of the Corps was he going to break this to them?

  14

  INTERLUDE

  16 OCTOBER 2138 TO

  24 JUNE 2148

  IST Derna

  En route to Llalande 21185 IID

  Launch…

  The trio of starships, IST Derna and the two cargo ships ISC Regulus and ISC Algol, drifted at L-4 well clear of the building docks and the Vesuvius AM complex. Because AM-enhanced fusion torch exhaust consisted of very high-energy particles, their torches would not be lit until they were well clear of heavily trafficked regions of the inner Solar system. Instead, each was attached to one of the new Cerberus-class tugs, massive, blocky-looking nuclear-chemical workhorses with fifty million kilograms of thrust apiece.

  Derna’s centrifuge rotation had already been stopped and her three hab modules folded back against her spine as loading work continued in microgravity. The last of Derna’s passengers arrived on board already in cybernetic hibernation and were transferred with the last few hundreds of tons of equipment and supplies. Meanwhile, cybehibe techs on board processed the last of the MIEU’s waking personnel—Colonel Ramsey and members of the unit’s command constellation—and hooked them into the ship’s nanocybernetic suspension system.

  Algol and Regulus, unmanned vessels both, were already cleared for launch.

  Across the world a half million kilometers away, humankind seemed to watch with an indrawn psychic breath. Manned expeditions to the stars had been boosting out-system for fifty years but always on missions strictly limited to science and diplomacy. The Smithsonian archeological expeditions to Chiron at Alpha Centauri and Volos at Barnard’s Star, the diplomatic and science legation at Ishtar, and the science missions at Thor and Kali had all been deployed to the stars on strictly peaceful missions. Now, for the first time, humankind was going to the stars armed and armored for war.

  Derna’s complement of 145 naval personnel remained awake, monitoring the prefire and launch systems, but the launch itself was handled entirely by the onboard AI, unofficially known as “Bruce.” The countdown, which had been running now for days, trickled down at last to zero, and the main engines of the three Cerberus tugs flared white-hot.

  Fifty thousand tons of thrust seemed barely to nudge the giant starships, but the acceleration, which lasted for all of five minutes, was enough to nudge the trio off-station and start them in a long half-million-kilometer fall toward the Earth.

  In Washington, D.C., President LaSalle delivered a speech proclaiming the need to safeguard human life and interests at Ishtar, emphasizing that Operation Spirit of Humankind was not a mission of vengeance or retaliation but one of rescue and recovery.

  Elsewhere, riots flared into what amounted to open warfare, as devotees of the An-creator gods battled with the legions of Earth First and traditional religious forces. The Catholic world, already sundered a generation earlier by the election of the Papessa Mary to the seat of St. Peter at the Holy See, was shattered by pitched battles in Asuncion and Ciudad de Mejico, in Madrid and Paris, in Roma, Manila, and even in the suburbs of Boston. The Papessa, in the Vatican, called for a holy crusade to free the human Sag-ura slaves held on Ishtar and to prove once and for all that the An were neither gods not angelic creative spirits acting as God’s agents. Pope Michael at the Counter-Vatican in Lausanne preached crusade against those who would deliberately bury the scientific evidence that humankind had been created by agencies from the stars, and urged a dialogue with the An to reveal at long last the Hidden Truth.

  Radical militant Anists, meanwhile, attacked both branches of the Church, calling for a return of man to his rightful place at the feet of the wise and powerful Universal Creators. Anist-led riots in Munich, Belgrade, and Los Angeles killed thousands. The battle in South Los Angeles alone claimed 918 lives, and the burning of both Catholic and Counter-Catholic churches triggered a wave of pro-Aztlan, antigringo demonstrations and rioting.

  Four days later Derna, Algol, and Regulus, still in close formation and with the Cerberus tugs detached, whipped past the Earth in a hyperbolic trajectory, accelerated by gravity. Ten days after that, as the trio hustled outbound past the ten-million-kilometer mark, the main drives cut in. Minute quantities of antimatter were fed into the hydrogen slush entering the aft thruster reaction chambers, triggering a pulsing chain of fusion explosions at a rate of eight per second, each one contained, then expelled by powerful magnetic fields. Thrust built steadily until the starships were accelerating at ten meters per second per second, just a nudge more than one g.

  Riding nova flares of incandescence hot with gamma radiation in the 511 keV band of positron annihilation, Derna, Algol, and Regulus accelerated out-system. Four and a half days later, traveling now at four thousand kilometers per second, they hurtled past the south pole of Jupiter, using that giant planet’s gravity for a second slingshot acceleration and to swing onto a new course, high up above the Solar ecliptic. They were aimed now at right ascension eleven hours, thirty-seven seconds, declination +36 degrees 18.3 minutes…in the southern reaches of the constellation Ursa Major.

  Three months after 1 MIEU’s departure a second, larger military force departed from the shipyards at L-5. Built around the ISTs Soares Dutra and Jules Verne, and the cargo vessels L’Esperance, Sternwind, and Teshio Maru, the International Interstellar Relief Expedition, as it was now called, followed a similar outbound course, picking up a gravitational assist from Earth and then another, stronger boost from Jupiter as they hurtled together into the interstellar night.

  Eleven months after launch the three ships of 1 MIEU were traveling at just beneath the speed of light, fast enough that time itself had slowed to a crawl. The Navy crew on board Derna had by then joined their Marine passengers in cybehibe, and the operation that followed was carried out entirely by the ships’ AIs. Together to the millisecond, the AM drives cut off and the starships fell through an interstellar void strangely distorted by their velocity, with the entire sky appearing to be crowded ahead of their mushroom-cap prows in a doughnut-shaped smear of starlight. Thanks to time dilation, a week of shipboard time was the equivalent of over two months on Earth.

  In the outside universe, time continued in its normal fashion. President LaSalle, battered by the politics of secession in the Southwest, lost the election of ’40 to John Marshal Cabot, a Boston Neodemocr
at who rejected military intervention in Mejico, favored adoption of AI metacontrol of the World Bank, and advocated peaceful negotiations with the Ahannu. The MIEU flotilla by that time, however, was over half a light-year away, well beyond the range of any normal-space communications net. New orders, if any, would have to be relayed to the Marines via the FTL Pyramid of the Eye, if and when they were able to retake it.

  In fact, the Cabot administration made no official announcement of policy changes in regard to the Llalande situation. Much could still happen, both at Ishtar and back on Earth. Besides, the poll numbers did not lie. Americans still favored freeing the Ishtaran slaves, and by a whopping majority of seventy-three percent.

  Perhaps because he maintained a low political profile so far as the Llalande situation was concerned, Cabot was reelected by a narrow margin in ’44. The World Bank Crisis of ’45 and the resultant financial crash led to calls for an end to extrasolar adventurism. In fact, the archeological outposts on Chiron, Kali, and Thor were abandoned as funding for them dried up Earthside. Nothing could be done about the expeditions already outbound, however. The MIEU and the Isis Expedition to Sirius were both five light-years out, traveling in nearly opposite directions, both utterly beyond the hope of recall.

  Besides, the American public still favored freeing the slaves on Ishtar, by a majority of fifty-eight percent.

  On board the Derna, the Marines remained unaware of such political niceties, so deeply asleep now that even dreams were banished. The air within their sleep cells was chilled to a constant five degrees Celsius, just warm enough to prevent tissue damage from ice formation.

  Meanwhile, the United Federal Republic found itself fighting three nasty little wars, in South China, in New Liberia, and in Nicaragua. In 2146 the situation in Egypt, never wholly settled, exploded into the Great Jihad War, with the EU and the UFR against the Kingdom of Allah. What began as a battle to save world cultural treasures in Egypt swiftly devolved into all-out religious war, with Anists and various antislavery factions in uneasy alliance against the rabidly anti-Anist Islamic militants. The Giza Plateau remained secure in western hands once French, Ukrainian, German, and British commandos took Cairo, but the fighting merely spread to Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Turkey. Some netnews reporters began calling the conflagration a new world war. Elements of the 1st Marines were committed to fighting in Indonesia and, a year later, in the Philippines. Other Marine units reported to the moon, Mars, and Jupiter space to protect various xenoarcheological sites, including the Singer in the icy embrace of Europa. The Kingdom of Allah had minimal space capability, but the threat of infiltration and sabotage was thought to be serious.

  Perhaps because of the seriousness of the military situation on Earth, interest in the MIEU was waning fast. In October of 2146, a netnews poll reported that only four percent of Americans now favored military intervention at Ishtar. Nearly ten percent felt that the expedition should refuel and return to Earth as soon as it reached the Llalande system, without even awakening the sleeping Marines.

  By the middle of 2147 the Great Jihad War had officially been elevated in status to World War V, at least by the various news media. Opinion polls indicated that forty-one percent of Americans now favored military intervention in An affairs and that, significantly, seventy-three percent admitted to strong anti-An political or religious views. Some thirty-one percent felt that negotiation with the An was the better way to go, a figure that had doubled in the past ten years; almost twenty percent were unaware that human slaves were held by the An, and twenty-eight percent more knew but didn’t care. In July, President Cabot called an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the fact that a military mission was entering an alien star system intent on waging a war that no longer enjoyed a broad base of popular support at home. The only agreement reached was that the greatest threat to the mission now was the International Interstellar Relief Expedition six months behind the Derna. The troops on board included both KOA and anti-An Traditional Catholic forces from Brazil. They might well pose a greater threat to the Marines than the An, now that they were enemies in the world war raging back home. A full briefing was prepared, both for standard radio transmission and for FTL relay through the Cydonian facility on Mars.

  The question was when—and if—the Marines would get the word, and whether the enemy troops in the IIRE, who would also have access to the FTL site at New Sumer’s Pyramid of the Eye, would learn of their change in status first.

  Eight light-years away, the Derna, Algol, and Regulus all had spun end for end, folded their hab modules, and refired their AM drives. Backing down the acceleration curve, now, they were less than half a light-year from their destination. This was, arguably, the most dangerous point of the flight. For three years of shipboard time the crew and passengers of the Derna had been protected from high-energy impacts by the vast bulk of the reaction mass storage tank forward. Now, though, with the AM drives pointed at the destination and with the craft still moving at close to c, the hab modules were exposed to stray bits of matter incoming at relativistic speeds. The drive flare itself, together with the magnetic fields used to focus the exhaust plume, was supposed to clear the way, but the technique was still highly experimental. Inflatable balyuts—a doughnut of balloons filled with water—unfurled aft of the hab modules to provide some extra protection, but mission experts on Earth could only cross figurative fingers and wonder what was happening. Derna should be slowing now, but they wouldn’t know about it on Earth until either the Pyramid of the Eye was recaptured intact or a radio signal made it back to Earth in another eight and a half years.

  The Marines remained asleep, though by now Derna’s medical AI had begun warming the sleep cells slowly to body temperature, as nano injections prepped their brains for reawakening. The Navy crew would be revived first. They’d been lucky on this passage; out of 145 naval personnel, only seven had failed to survive the trip.

  By March 2148 the Derna and her escorts were falling into the Llalande system, still decelerating at one g. Drives were focused to initiate end-course corrections that would bring the trio of vessels into Marduk space. Potential disaster was averted when Algol’s ship AI failed to make the necessary course changes; high-speed particles had degraded elements of Algol’s navigational software, deleting key commands. Derna’s crew transmitted software patches over the laser communications link, however, and brought the cargo vessel back onto the proper course.

  Derna, meanwhile, deployed twenty-five Argus probes—robot fliers cocooned inside ceramic-sheathed TAV transport modules. They would arrive at the objective days ahead of the hard-decelerating starships.

  Another month passed, and giant Marduk loomed huge beyond the flaring drive plumes of the slowing ships. The end-course corrections had in part been designed to bring the vessels in a long, looping passage across Marduk’s day side, burning off the last of their excess velocity in an aero-braking maneuver that slung them into a tight, hard loop back into deep space, then back on an infalling path toward Ishtar’s night side. The drives switched off and the hab modules extended and began rotating, generating one g of spin gravity in the outer decks.

  And on the 24th of June, 2148 by Earth time, but only a bit more than four years after launch by shipboard time, the first of Derna’s Marine passengers began waking up.

  Deck 3, Hab 3, IST Derna

  12 million kilometers from Ishtar

  0950 hours ST (Shipboard Time)

  Strange thoughts and images flooded Garroway’s brain. I thought we weren’t supposed to dream, he thought, struggling against a thick, hot, and oppressive sense of drowning. He’d been falling…falling…falling among myriad stars toward a dazzling red beacon at the bottom of an infinitely deep well. The beacon was growing brighter with each passing moment, but somehow he never seemed to reach it….

  The strangling sensation grew sharper, and then he was awake, coughing and gasping, struggling to clear his lungs of a viscous jelly plugging nose and mouth and windpipe. He gave a
final convulsive cough and hit his head against the roof of his cell. It took him a few moments to connect with where he was. His last memories were of the processing center at Seven Palms, of being led into a cavernous room with perhaps half of his graduating boot company, of being ordered to remove all clothing, jewelry, and personal adornments and log them in with a clerk, of lying down on a thin mattress on a hard, narrow metal slab that made him think about morgues and autopsies. A voice had been talking to him through his implant, having him count backward from one hundred. And then…

  His arm burned slightly, and a robotic injector arm withdrew into a side compartment. “Lie still and breathe deeply,” a voice told him. “Do not try to leave your cell. A transition medical team will be with you momentarily.”

  He was aware now of more and more sensations, of a growing light in his sleep cell, of the feeling of weakness pervading every muscle of his body, of the warm and wet stickiness of some kind of gel melting beneath his hips and back, of ravenous hunger in the pit of his belly, of the incredible stink filling the coffin-sized compartment. Goddess, what kind of hell was he awakening to?

  Struggling against a paralyzing weakness, he managed to roll onto his left elbow and found he could breathe a bit more easily than he could while flat on his back. His shrunken stomach rebelled then and he tried to vomit, but his retching produced only more of the all-pervasive jelly, a kind of translucent slime mingled with white foam.

  Abruptly, the end of his sleep cell cracked open with a sharp hiss, and his pallet slid partway out into the hab compartment. After the claustrophobic confines of the cell, the open space of the hab deck was dizzying.

  Two Marines in utility fatigues, a man and a woman, peered down at him. “How ya doin’, Mac?” the woman asked him. “What’s your name?”