Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  “I serve the sacred memory of Nibir-Anu,” Tu-Kur-La said.

  “Go, then, Dingir-Gubidir, and serve.”

  He blinked his eyes twice in the ritual Gesture of Respectful Assent and hurried out.

  16

  25 JUNE 2148

  Lander Dragon Three

  Ishtar, approaching Krakatoa LZ

  1634 hours ST

  The Dragon skimmed broken rock and black sand, flashing across the last few kilometers toward the target. The sky was overcast, the clouds boiling in the wake of the mountain’s last shot. The strobe of that titanic gun had seared the Dragon’s chin camera, leaving the Marines on board momentarily dazzled, but as his noumenal vision cleared, Garroway could see the mountain clearly, a vast, tar-black cone rising from a flame-blasted plain, its top hollowed by a yawning crater.

  According to the infrared data coming over the link, the ground had been blast-and flash-heated to almost forty degrees Celsius, while the crater was still glowing red-hot. It was impossible to tell if there were any organic defenders down there; the ground was so hot, their IR signatures would have been swallowed in the background heat. Here and there, scattered points of red and orange glows marked the fall of hot debris from the mountain’s summit.

  “What a monster!” someone said over Garroway’s tac channel.

  “Yeah! How’re we supposed to fight that?”

  “Can the chatter,” Valdez snapped. “Get ready to jump. Twenty seconds!”

  Garroway felt sharp deceleration tug him forward against his seat harness. The Dragonfly was angling toward a broad, open terrace a third of the way up from the mountain’s base. Nose high, air brakes spread wide, ventral thrusters shrieking, the lander drifted over the rock shelf in a swirling cloud of grit and sand. Magnetic grapples released the saucer-shaped landing module from beneath the Dragonfly’s gently curved, mid-hull strut. Relieved of the lander’s weight, the Dragonfly bounded back into the sky, sleek now and wasp-waisted; the landing module dropped to the ground, the leading edge plowing into loose gravel, the impact cushioned by mag floaters and chemical thrusters.

  Inside the lander, the shock slammed Garroway against his seat harness, bruising his chest and shoulders even within padded armor. The noise—a grating, rasping shriek—sounded like a world’s ending; the saucer bulldozed through loose rock and sand, skewing slightly before it came to rest at a ten-degree list.

  Panels all around the saucer’s rim exploded up and out, releasing HK-20 combat robots and a cloud of sensor drones. Broader hull panels, shaped like the slices of a pie, unfolded, opening the interior of the module to the outside.

  “Grounded!” Valdez shouted over the tac channel. “Go! Go! Go!”

  Garroway’s harness automatically disengaged and he tumbled forward, thrown off balance by the cant of the lander’s deck, but he braced himself on an overhead strut, unshipped his laser rifle, and started moving forward. All around him the other armored Marines of 1st and 2nd Squads crowded toward the openings, pounded down the deck gratings of the debarkation ramps, and scrambled clear of the grounded landing module.

  Something slammed into the LM’s hull just above Garroway’s helmet as he stepped into the open. Another something hit the rock nearby with a sharp, metallic crack and a scatter of sparks. It took him an awkward moment to recognize what was happening. “Shit!” Hollingwood shouted at the same moment. “They’re shooting at us!”

  Training took over then. Don’t freeze, don’t bunch up. Exit the LM and form a perimeter. Hunched over as if leaning into a stiff wind, Garroway ran through loose gravel, counting out the paces until he was fifty meters from the downed module. Throwing himself down on his belly, he brought his rifle up and thought-clicked the targeting display. Instantly, a bright red target reticle popped into his field of vision, overlaying the multispectral view from his helmet pickups. The reticle, transmitted by his rifle’s computer, marked the weapon’s precise aim point.

  The only trouble was, he couldn’t see a target. Ahead, the mountain rose like a solid, jet-black wall, its top still glowing with a fierce red heat. To either side, other 2nd Squad Marines were dropping into place on the perimeter as HK robots strode ahead on scissoring black legs gleaming with an oily, reflected light. Incoming fire continued to snap and crack across the rock plain, but he couldn’t see where the shots were coming from. Twenty meters ahead, though, an HK had frozen in mid-stride, its twin-camera “head” smashed into trailing ribbons of torn metal and plastic.

  There! Garroway’s helmet radar had detected the flash of a solid, high-speed projectile, and the Mark VII’s computer backtracked its path, marking the shooter’s position at the base of the rock wall with a small red circle. He moved his rifle until the reticle centered on the circle, which twisted itself into a red diamond, indicating a target lock, then pressed the firing button.

  The laser’s bolt was invisible; with most of its energy in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum, it left only a thin, backscattered sparkle of ionization as it burned through the air. The pulse showed clearly enough in Garroway’s optics, but he couldn’t tell whether he’d hit the shooter or not. With no fresh targeting data, the target symbol vanished. Damn, had he hit the sniper, or not?

  A winking red light on his display switched to green as the rifle’s chargers powered up for another shot. Rising, he darted forward another five meters, keeping low, trying to pierce the very rock around him with his electronic senses, searching for a target, any target, any threat at all. He felt nakedly exposed out there beneath the eight-hundred-meter loom of the mountain.

  A stuttering flicker of pulsing light snapped from the small dome turret on top of the lander module, a rapid-fire laser mount directed by the LM’s AI. Overhead, the Dragonfly swooped and circled against the night, seeking targets, as a second TAL-S drifted in from the north, slowing its descent, releasing its LM in a swirling cloud of dust. Around Garroway, the tortured landscape of rock steamed and smoked in hellish light, an obscene premonition of a dark and flame-shot Hell.

  “Squads One and Two, ready,” the voice of Lieutenant Kerns said in his head. “Overwatch advance. Squad Two, move up!”

  “Right!” Valdez shouted. “Second Squad! You heard the man! We’re up! On your feet!”

  Garroway scrambled to his feet again and trotted forward. Small arms fire continued to pepper the section, but the defenders appeared to be split now in their attention between his unit and the lander that had just grounded on the terrace plain a hundred meters to the left. The incoming rounds, according to his data feed, were small, solid chunks of metal massing no more than a few tens of grams, but accelerated to velocities of around five hundred meters per second.

  Bullets, in other words. Definitely primitive tech, propelled either by chemical explosions or a very low-powered gauss accelerator. One of them slammed into his chest, jolting him hard but causing no damage. If that was the best they could do…

  He stumbled, his boot coming down in a hole, and he fell to his hands and knees, almost dropping his rifle. Private Pressley stopped beside him, reaching for his arm. “Hey, watch that first step, pal,” Pressley said over the tac channel. “It’s a real—”

  Pressley’s armored torso splattered then, a gaping hole opening as his upper body and shoulders ceased to exist save as a thin, red spray of mist.

  Garroway screamed; he was holding Pressley’s left arm by the hand, an arm no longer attached to a body. Pressley’s legs and lower torso, still encased in armor, collapsed steaming onto the rock as his helmet bounced away, his head still inside.

  Dropping the dead arm, Garroway folded back onto the ground, still screaming, his universe awash in blood, horror, and death.

  Combat Information Center

  IST Derna, approaching Ishtar

  Orbit

  1635 hours ST

  Ramsey studied the analysis as it unscrolled through his noumenal awareness. “A relativistic cannon,” he said, nodding. “I suppose we should have guessed that.”<
br />
  They were within Derna’s CIC, floating amid a tangle of feed cables and harness straps. The compartment was growing more crowded by the hour as officers floated in. Admiral Vincent Hartman, the MIEU’s naval commander, and several members of his staff had entered and linked in only a few moments before.

  “The energies released are within estimated ranges for an AM detonation,” Cassius said over the CIC’s main noumenal channel. “However, the lack of concomitant radiations clearly indicates no matter-antimatter annihilation is taking place. That, and the presence of an extremely powerful magnetic pulse with each energy release, suggests the acceleration of small amounts of matter to near-c velocities. The resultant high-speed plasma impacts the target with kinetic and thermal effects similar to those of a large-scale thermonuclear detonation.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” Ricia Anderson said.

  “So how are they hitting targets just coming over their horizon?” Ramsey asked. “That’s a deflection of better than ninety degrees off the vertical.”

  He was watching one of the video feeds from the surface—a shot from a camera mounted on Dragonfly One’s grounded lander module. Marines crouched in the twilight, firing toward the vast black shadow of the mountain called An-Kur…and Krakatoa. The mountain had not fired again since the destruction of the second Dragonfly, but time enough had passed for the thing to recharge, if the time delay between the first and second shots was any indication.

  “High relativistic masses would be extremely difficult to deflect by more than a few degrees as they emerged from the mountain’s throat,” Cassius replied. “The plasma bolt would, therefore, be easily directed only at targets within, I estimate, ten to twelve degrees of the vertical, but could not be aimed at targets approaching from the horizon. However, by the time the initial projectile mass approached relativistic velocities, and while it was still within the mountain’s central bore, it would have been reduced to an extremely hot, possibly fusing plasma. The magnetic field generating the bolt’s velocity could be used to bleed off a small amount of that plasma near the mountain’s crater and direct it at any target within line-of-sight.”

  “So they can throw the equivalent of a thermonuke at targets in orbit,” Ramsey said, “or split off a tactical nuke’s worth for close-in point defense. Slick.”

  “But that kind of mass acceleration would require incredible energy,” General King protested. “Where are they getting their power? Damn it, the Frogs are supposed to be primitives!”

  Ramsey wished that King would get off that particular soapbox. The An were what they were, and complaining about their abilities—or their technological inconsistencies—was not going to help.

  “Analyses of the subsurface structures beneath the mountain suggest deep thermal sources,” Cassius replied. Within their minds, the command center AI unfolded a schematic of the tunnels and shafts inside and beneath An-Kur Mountain, as suggested by Emissary gravitometric scans and orbital reconnaissance. A pair of shafts, slender on the computer noumenal display but probably each measuring several tens of meters across, plunged from the extinct volcano’s throat deep, deep into Ishtar’s crust.

  “An energy pump facilitating heat exchange with the planet’s deep crust via those twin vertical shafts would be essentially self-contained and self-sufficient,” Cassius continued. “Such a system could have been put in place thousands of years ago and remained functional without refueling or other technical intervention from outside, especially if the ancient An possessed sophisticated robotic systems for maintenance and repair.”

  “Which also means they don’t have an antimatter production facility down there,” Ramsey pointed out. “That’s one piece of good news, at least.” A serious concern of the mission planning staff had been that the Ahannu might be able to spit chunks of antimatter at the approaching Earth transports. Not that blobs of plasma accelerated to near-c velocities were all that much better from the target’s point of view…

  “What kind of range does a thing like that have?” Admiral Hartman demanded.

  “Unknown, and I am unable to extrapolate from the given data,” Cassius said. “We know only that the Emissary was destroyed by a single shot while in orbit around Ishtar, at an altitude of approximately 312 kilometers.”

  “Krakatoa is still over the horizon from us,” Ricia put in. “We won’t have line-of-sight for another…four hours, twelve minutes.”

  “Then they have that long to take that thing out,” King said, his voice grim. “And God help us all if they fail!”

  “They won’t fail,” Ramsey said. “Failure is not in the Marine lexicon.”

  “A brave sentiment, Colonel,” King said. “I just wish I could be as certain of it as you. Admiral Hartman? Perhaps you’d best pass the word to have Regulus and Algol extend their range from us and from one another. We don’t want to be caught bunched together up here like shooting range targets.”

  “It’s our men and women on the ground right now that I’m worried about,” Ramsey said. “If Krakatoa can divert some of the energy from a shot aimed straight up to cook targets nearby, what’s to stop the An from frying the ARLT?”

  “Maybe they can’t shoot at their own slope,” Ricia said. “That would be, I don’t know, like shooting themselves in the foot? It might have a minimum range as well as a maximum. Threats any closer would be dealt with some other way.”

  “Right,” Ramsey said. “I’ll buy that. So now the question is, what other defenses does Krakatoa have?”

  “I imagine our people will be finding out pretty soon now,” Ricia said. “And Goddess help them when they do.”

  ARLT Section Dragon Three

  Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

  1642 hours ST

  “C’mon, son!” Valdez said gently but firmly. Stooping, she slapped the back of his armored shoulder, urging him up and forward. “You can’t help him now!”

  Garroway had dropped Pressley’s severed arm moments before, but he continued to lie in a shallow depression in the rock a meter away from the Marine’s blood-drenched lower torso. Pressley’s helmet lay nearby, the man’s black-irised eyes and gaping mouth clearly visible behind the blood-smeared visor.

  “Garroway!” Valdez rasped. “Snap to, Marine!”

  “A-Aye aye,” he managed to say.

  “Hit your backbone,” she told him. “Do it!”

  Backbone was Corps slang for the nanoneurotransmitters within his implanted technics that adjusted certain key chemical, muscular, and mental responses. They didn’t exactly banish fear at a thought-click, but they could help a Marine on the verge of going into shock to pull out of it, to focus on the task at hand, to keep from getting sick or simply having his legs fail beneath him.

  Garroway nodded inside his helmet and focused on the mental code that activated the appropriate NNTs. He felt an inner rush, a kind of emotional flutter in his gut, and then he drew a sharp, deep breath. He could still feel the horror of Pressley’s death, but it was cocooned somehow, more distant, less immediate. He felt the strength coming back into his legs and belly, felt the shaking stop. “Thanks, Gunny,” he told Valdez.

  “Keep moving, Marine,” she told him. “We have a mountain to take.”

  She moved off without looking back. He picked up his weapon and followed.

  ARLT Command Section, Dragon

  One

  Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

  1642 hours ST

  Captain Warhurst remained harnessed inside Lander One, though he was almost completely unaware of his surroundings. As CO of the ARLT, he was expected to stay safe and give orders, coordinating the attack from the presumed security of the armored LM. The training invested in modern military officers was simply too expensive, too valuable, to allow them to lead from the front; indeed, they’d not done so for two centuries or more.

  Warhurst listened to the rattle of small arms fire off the lander module’s hull and wondered who they were kidding with that kind of blatant rationalizati
on. The LM was a definite target—a large and quite attractive one, in fact—while individual Marines wearing stealthy armor were able to literally fade into their surroundings and become very hard to hit.

  And that too, he realized, was his own form of rationalizing things. The fact was, he wanted to be out there with his people right now, not stuck behind in this glorified tin can, watching an AI run the data link switchboard and holding the collective hands of the command staff still on planetary approach.

  His noumenal awareness was crowded with images, feeds, and downloads. With a thought-click he could tune in on the helmet sensor array of any of his Marines. At the same time, he was aware of several members of the command staff “riding his link,” looking over his virtual shoulder from the Derna’s CIC. Majors Anderson, DuBoise, and Ross were all there, as were Lieutenant Colonel Harper, Colonel Ramsey, and both General King and Admiral Hartman. The electronic ghosts of a dozen other command staff officers and technicians were there as well, sifting through the flood of incoming data. Theoretically, they were there to offer advice and watch to see that he didn’t miss anything. In practice, it was a micromanagement cluster-fuck waiting to happen. Warhurst concentrated on doing his job and ignoring that particular unpleasant possibility.

  An aerial view of the LZ was spread out beneath him in his noumenal awareness. Robotic drones, battlefield management probes, and the sensor feeds from the Marines outside all contributed their data streams to build up a more or less coherent picture of the engagement as it unfolded. Four landing modules—one hundred Marines—were on the ground now and advancing toward an apparent door in the side of the mountain. Two more were angling in from opposite directions, north and south. Enemy resistance was heavy—twelve Marines dead so far, plus fifteen HK-20 robots knocked out—but the troops were advancing. The worst danger at this point of the assault was that the Marines would be pinned down, unable to move; instead, they seemed to have momentum enough to carry them into the mountain, despite sleeting small arms fire.