Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  “Garroway,” he replied automatically. “John. Recruit private, serial number 19283-336—”

  “He checks,” the man said. “He’s tracking.”

  The woman patted his shoulder. “Hang in there, Marine. Welcome to 2148.”

  The two moved away then, edging along a walkway hugging the face of the hab module bulkhead to the next open sleep cell in line.

  Garroway tried to make sense of the confused thoughts clogging a brain that simply wasn’t working yet. What, he wondered, had gone wrong? They’d all been told that there’d been a change of plan, that they were to enter cybehibe while still on the ground. The compartment looked like the interior of a fairly large hab module. Was he still on Earth? Or was he on the transport, and something had gone wrong while putting him under?

  No…no, one of the Marines had said something…had it been Welcome to 2148?

  Realization washed over him, leaving him feeling cold and dizzy. Somehow, in the time between when he’d been counting backward on that pallet in Seven Palms and now, ten years had slipped away. He sagged back down on his pallet, working to assimilate that one small bit of overwhelming information.

  Ten years. What had happened during that time to his mother…to Lynnley…to Earth herself?

  And did that mean…

  Urgently, he thought-clicked, opening his cerebral implant. The link must be working; he’d heard a voice a few moments ago telling him to stay put.

  “Link,” he thought. “Query. Navigational data.”

  “Please wait,” the voice said in his mind. “The system is busy.”

  Well, that made sense. If a whole transport-load of Marines was waking up around him, they must be accessing the onboard AI pretty heavily. Even a shipboard intelligence like the one running the Derna would have a bit of trouble processing twelve hundred simultaneous requests for data.

  He waited for nearly five minutes by his internal clock before the voice said, “Navigational data now open, Private. This is Cassius speaking.”

  “Cassius. Did we make it?” he asked aloud. “Are we at Llalande?”

  “The Derna crossed the arbitrary astronomical delineation of the Llalande 21185 system 2,200 hours ago,” the voice told him, “and is currently slightly less than twelve million kilometers from the objective world of Ishtar.”

  A diagram unfolded within his mind, showing the MIEU’s inbound course as a blue line drawing itself across the black backdrop of space. Llalande 21185 was a bright red point of light along the way, and Garroway thought he knew now where the half-forgotten dream imagery of a red beacon had come from. He saw how the Derna and her consorts had already looped past giant Marduk and were falling now back toward the miniature solar system that was Marduk and its whirling collection of moons. Snatches of alphanumerics floating next to the ship symbols showed the flotilla’s velocity and delta V.

  “How come I was able to see that red star in my dreams?” he asked, suddenly curious.

  “The human mind seems designed to extract information from its surroundings, no matter what the circumstances,” Cassius replied. “A number of Marines in the MIEU have reported dream imagery that appears to have leaked across the data interface with the ship navigational AI. This does not appear to represent a problem or a fault in the nanoimplant hardware. Is there another question?”

  “How—How long until we debark?”

  “H-hour for the main assault group has yet to be determined. The special assault task force code-named Dragon will be debarking in twenty-two hours, fifteen minutes. Debarkation of the main force will depend at least partly on the success of the special task force. Is there another question?”

  “Uh…I guess not.” He felt the connection in his head go empty.

  He knew he’d been assigned to TF Dragon. They’d told him as much during his final briefing on Earth. But he didn’t know anything about the mission or what was expected of him, didn’t know most of these people, didn’t even know who his commanding officer was.

  He felt very much alone, very much lost.

  “Those of you who can move, shake a leg!” someone bellowed from the deck below. “C’mon, you squirrels! Out of your trees! That’s reveille, reveille, reveille! All hands on deck!”

  The familiar litany galvanized Garroway into movement. He still felt sluggish, and every muscle in his body ached, but he was able to sit up on his pallet, sling his legs over the side, and find the nearest set of rungs set into the bulkhead, allowing him to shakily climb down to the deck.

  Dozens of Marines were already there, talking, standing, sitting, exercising in a tangled press of nude bodies. A line had already formed in front of the shower cell, a passageway in the bulkhead leading through to the shower head and dry compartment and back out again to the main deck. Others were gathering in front of the chow dispensers, accepting with grumbling ill grace the squeeze tubes of lightly flavored paste that would be their food for the next several days, until their digestive systems got used to the sensations of dealing with real food once more.

  Garroway wrestled for a moment with the choice…clean or food? His body was coated with a thin, slick film of mingled sweat and the residue from the support gel he’d been lying in for the past decade, and he felt as though he were choking on his own stink. But at the same time his stomach was twisting and growling in spite of the punishment it had just taken. Food, he thought after a moment. He needed food more.

  “All personnel with last names beginning A through M will fall in for showers,” the voice in his head said. “Personnel N through Z will report for chow.”

  Yeah, figures. The Corps likes to run every detail of your life, he thought with a wry inner shrug. And no matter what you wanted, the Corps would tell you to do something else.

  In a way, though, it was pleasant to have someone tell him what to do, even if the someone was only a disembodied voice in his head. He was still feeling a bit muzzy, like he’d just awakened after a night of pretty heavy drinking, and didn’t entirely trust his own thought processes.

  “Haven’t seen you around,” a muscular, naked man told him as he stepped into the shower queue. “Newbie?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “Company 1099.”

  “Don’t mean shit here,” the man said. “You’re 1st Marine Div now. How’dja make out on the pool?”

  “Pool?”

  “Yeah. The death-watch pool.”

  “Don’t pay any mind to this shithead,” a flat-chested woman in line behind Garroway said. “Some of these jack-offs think it’s cute to run a pool on how many people don’t survive cybehibe. Everybody puts in five a share and picks a number. The closer your number is to the CH attrition, the more money you get.”

  “What’d you win, Kris? Zip, as per SOP?”

  “Ten newdollars profit.”

  “Eat shit, Staff Sergeant. Twenty-five.”

  “Screw you.”

  “Your place or mine?”

  “Wait a second,” Garroway said, breaking into the exchange. “You’re saying people died during the passage?”

  “Sure,” the man said. “Whadja expect?”

  “Thirty-seven Marines didn’t make it,” the woman said. “Three percent attrition. That’s actually not that fucking bad. Sometime’s it’s as high as five.”

  “Hey. One cybehibe passage to Europa lost twelve out of sixty,” the man said with infuriating nonchalance. “One out of five. That was a real tech-fuck.”

  Garroway felt as though a cold draft had brushed the back of his neck. He’d not realized that nanotechnic hibernation was that much of a crapshoot.

  “Stop it, Schuster,” the woman said. “You’re scaring the kid.” She extended her hand. “Staff Sergeant Ostergaard,” she told him. “The jackoff in front of you is Sergeant Schuster, and don’t let him get to you, he’s a teddy bear. Welcome to the Fighting 44th.”

  “Sir, thank you, sir. Recruit Private Garroway.”

  “Don’t sir me,” Ostergaard told him. “I work for a li
ving.”

  “You can drop the boot camp crap, kid,” Schuster added. “Officers are ‘sir.’ NCOs are addressed by rank or last name. The quicker you stop sirring everything that moves, the quicker you’ll fit in.”

  “Aye aye, s—uh, Sergeant.”

  “That’s better. You’re not ‘recruit private’ anymore, either. You’re a private first class now, unless they Van Winkle you.”

  “Van Winkle? What’s that?”

  “Promote you on the basis of your time served subjective,” Ostergaard said.

  “Objectively,” Schuster told him, “you’ve been in the Corps ten years. Subjectively, you’ve been in for four, even though you were asleep for most of that time. Can’t have a PFC with four-slash-ten years in. Looks real crappy on his service record.”

  Garroway remembered downloading that information in boot camp…hell, it seemed like a month ago. It had been a month ago, so far as his waking mind was concerned. This was going to take some getting used to.

  “So I might have gotten a promotion already?”

  Ostergaard shrugged. “You’ll just have to wait and see what the brass hats say. But…you know? Out here rank isn’t quite as important as they made it out to be back at Camp Lejeune.”

  “Heresy,” Schuster said.

  “S’truth. Way out here? The Corps is more like family than military.”

  The line moved forward enough that the three were able at last to file through the shower area, bombarded by water and by ultrasonic pulses that melted the accreted slime from their bodies. Hot air let them dry without requiring laundry facilities, and by the time they emerged back on the Hab Module deck, a laser sizer and uniform dispenser had been set up and was cranking out disposable OD utilities. The food paste tasted like…well, Garroway thought, like food paste, but it staunched the hunger pangs and helped him begin to feel more human.

  Which was important. It was slowly starting to dawn on him that he was eight light-years from home, twelve from Lynnley, surrounded by strangers…and utterly unsure of his chances of survival over the next twenty-four hours.

  Somehow, as thorough and rigorous as boot camp had been, it hadn’t prepared him for this—a devastating loneliness mingled with soul-searing fear.

  15

  25 JUNE 2148

  Lander Dragon One

  Approaching Ishtar

  1312 hours ST

  “…and four…and three…and two…and one…release!”

  A surge of acceleration pinned Captain Warhurst against his seat as powerful magnetic fields flung the TAL-S Dragonfly clear of the vast, flat underbelly of Derna’s reaction mass tank and into empty space. Seven additional Dragonflies, each with its attached lander, drifted out from the transport’s docking bays at the same moment, the formation perfectly symmetrical with Derna at the center. Derna’s massive AM drive had been shut down, since the gamma emissions from matter-antimatter annihilation would have fried the landers and all on board.

  Long minutes passed, and the landers continued to pace the Derna, sharing with the huge transport her current velocity toward the planet ahead. Once the landers were well clear of the deadly kill zone of Derna’s AM drive venturi, the transport and her two consorts again triggered their drives, continuing to decelerate.

  From the point of view of the eight landers, Derna, Algol, and Regulus appeared to be accelerating back the way they’d come at ten meters per second per second. In free fall, the Dragonflies hurtled toward the looming curve of the planet, now some two million kilometers ahead.

  Dragon One’s microfusion plasma thrusters kicked in as the craft pirouetted into its proper alignment, accelerating. They would hit Ishtar’s atmosphere six hours before the transports decelerated into orbit, a critical timing element of the Krakatoa mission.

  Still strapped immobile in his seat, encased in his Mark VII armor and with his LR-2120 clipped to its carry mount on his front torso, Warhurst closed his eyes and reviewed the op program.

  “D-day, the sixth of June 1944,” the voice of General King echoed in his noumenal reality, a replay of the general’s address of some hours before. “The Allied invasion forces were threatened by massive shore battery emplacements at Pointe du Hoc, west of Omaha Beach. Elements of the U.S. Army Rangers assaulted the battery from the sea, scaling forty-meter cliffs with mortar-fired grapnels trailing climbing ladders and ropes.”

  In his noumenal display Warhurst could see the grainy, black-and-white images of historical documentary films, showing primitively clad soldiers climbing sheer cliffs from tiny, tin-box boats bobbing in the surf at the base of the rocks as King’s voice droned on.

  “After a fierce firefight at the top of the cliffs, with opposing forces at times only meters apart, the Rangers overran the position, suffering heavy casualties in the process. Their heroism and dedication to achieving their mission were in no way lessened by the fact that the shore batteries thought to have been mounted at Pointe du Hoc had, in fact, been removed. The gun emplacements were empty.”

  One of the great minor ironies of military history, Garroway thought, but not the sort of thing to inspire the troops before the big fight. Marines liked to think their actions counted for something.

  “Objective Krakatoa is very much of a stripe with the Pointe du Hoc shore batteries,” King’s voice went on. The image unfolding in Warhurst’s noumenon showed the mountain, An-Kur, seen from the air by computer imagery. “Since it has been ten years objective since the planetary defense batteries within that mountain fired, we can hope the facility has been abandoned or fallen into disrepair. The modern Ahannu do not possess the technological prowess of their ancient ancestors.”

  And that, Warhurst thought, was a royal load of crap. Whatever else you said about the An of ten thousand years ago, they built their machines and tools to last. The likelihood of the An-Kur facility being a one-shot weapon was so remote as to be practically invisible. Certainly, the Marine assault team wasn’t going to bet the farm on the possibility.

  The recitation finally reached the part of the record he was interested in. He could have fast-forwarded through the recorded memories, but he’d wanted to marvel again at King’s clumsy exhortation.

  All too little was known about the objective, save what had been gleaned from orbit by mapping satellites. Two point heat sources were known, one near the peak, the other on the mountain’s east slope, about one-third of the way up from the base. The mountain was clearly a natural landform, but one that had been extensively reworked, probably over millennia. The slopes were preternaturally smooth, and terraced in places, with stacked rocks holding back walls of earth. Absolutely nothing was known of the mountain’s interior workings, but infrared scans suggested a tunnel complex of considerable extent and in three dimensions, connecting the two hot spots, which were almost certainly entrances of some sort.

  Computer analysis of the IR readings had produced a 3D map of the complex. What could not be analyzed or deduced was what might be waiting for them down there. There were some similarities to underground works discovered during the past century on Earth’s moon, especially in the Tsiolkovsky Crater site on the lunar far side. Created by An colonizers ten thousand years ago, the Tsiolkovsky complex was thought to be typical of ancient An military defenses, and as such it might hold clues for an assault on An-Kur. Every man in Black Dragon had a complete set of floor plans for both Tsiolkovsky and An-Kur in their Mark VII armor computers.

  But…was it defended? That remained to be seen. Pointe du Hoc had been an empty emplacement vigorously defended by German troops; perhaps An-Kur was the reverse, a live weapon not defended at all.

  Maybe. And maybe pigs could fly without the benefits of genetic engineering.

  The Dragonfly gave a hard jolt as it encountered the first tenuous wisps of Ishtar’s atmosphere at a velocity of close to forty thousand kilometers per hour.

  Lander Dragon Three

  Ishtar, approaching Krakatoa LZ

  1620 hours ST

  P
rivate First Class John Garroway—his rank had not been Van Winkled after all—closed his eyes, trying to ignore the irritating tickle of sweat between his eyes, unreachable behind his helmet visor. The Dragonfly was trembling, bucking, lurching unsteadily in its descent, the roar of atmosphere building now like a waterfall just beyond the lander’s thin hull. The TAL-S was using the lander module slung beneath its wasp-waist belly as a heat shield now, riding the disk-shaped module down on a cushion of flame.

  An image was being fed to Garroway’s noumenon from a camera mounted forward beneath the craft’s bulbous cockpit, but there was boringly little to see. They were coming into Ishtar’s atmosphere on the night side, which also, by design, was currently the anti-Marduk side. Marduk itself was invisible, hidden behind the curving loom of Ishtar; the star Llalande 21185 was a shrunken red ember just above the bloody crescent of Ishtar’s horizon, little more at this distance than a ruby star. Ishtar’s night side was completely black, a featureless darkness swiftly expanding to fill the noumenal feed.

  Even so, Garroway couldn’t quite bring himself to close the feed window and sever that slender, less-than-helpful link with the universe outside of Dragon Three’s shuddering hull. The alternative was the claustrophobic near-darkness of the LM’s squad bay, fully armed and armored Marines crammed into seats so narrow they were literally wedged against one another’s shoulders and gear packs. Unable even to turn his helmet, Garroway could only stare at the back of the seat in front of him or down at his own lap below the LR-2120 clipped to his torso mount. Watching the darkness blotting out the stars in his noumenon was infinitely preferable to simply waiting out the thunder of reentry, blind as well as helpless.

  The men and women around him were not quite the strangers they’d been when he’d emerged from cybehibe. He’d been expecting either the hazing traditionally handed out to newbies in a military unit or the ostracism reserved for men who’d not yet proven themselves in combat. The 44th Marine Regiment, however, was a newly created ad hoc unit thrown together expressly as a part of 1 MIEU. As such, it included both veteran Marines and kids right out of boot camp.