Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  “You okay, Garroway?” Valdez asked. She sounded concerned.

  “I’m okay,” he said. “I’m okay.” The mental image of Pressley’s arm dangling in his hand flashed before him only briefly, but bearing with it all the shock and horror of that nightmare moment. He wondered if he would ever be able to forget….

  “We wait for orders,” Valdez told them, with a sidelong look at Garroway. “The next assault’ll be on New Sumer. We hold this mountain and the BFG for the techies…and move to reinforce the main attack if they need us.”

  “Hurry up and wait,” Deere said, grinning. “That’s the Corps for you, all the way!”

  “BFG?” Garvey asked. “What’s that?”

  Deere grinned wolfishly. “‘Big fuckin’ gun,’ kid. A big fuckin’ gun.”

  “We’ve pulled the fangs on the Frog planetary defenses,” Valdez added. “Now we watch the rest of the MIEU mop up!”

  Garroway leaned back against a boulder and picked at his meal, watching his squad mates as he did so. Their reactions, he thought, were interesting. The vets among them all seemed to be taking this pretty casually, though he suspected that some of the bravado was a kind of verbal protective shell. Of all of them, Valdez seemed to have the most genuine and matter-of-fact responses—those of a professional doing an unpleasant but necessary job.

  The two other newbies left in the squad, though, were taking wildly different tacks. Garvey seemed to be doing his best to imitate the veterans in the outfit, cracking jokes and laughing. Kat Vinita, on the other hand, had said very little since the end of the battle and seemed to be withdrawing into herself. He’d seen Valdez sitting with her, talking quietly a while ago, but she hadn’t joined in the banter.

  Most of the time she was staring into that incredible, glowing sky.

  A bit self-consciously, Garroway got up and walked over to Kat, dropping down next to her. “Can I join you?”

  She shrugged, still looking into the sky.

  “You okay?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  It was his turn to shrug. “Self-therapy, I guess. I got the whim-whams a bit, back there. I thought talking to someone else might help.”

  She sagged inside her armor. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to bite your head off.”

  “No problem. Chewy or crunchy?”

  “Huh?”

  “My head.”

  “Oh.” She looked up into the sky again. After a long time she said, “Why does it glow like that?”

  “What, the sky? Auroras. Ishtar has a pretty strong magnetic field.” He’d already accessed the Derna’s noumenal net, wondering the same thing. “And a good thing too, or we wouldn’t be able to uncork our armor. Marduk throws off a hell of a lot of radiation. Ishtar’s magnetic field traps a lot of it up there, where it excites free atoms of oxygen and other stuff and gives off that glow. If it wasn’t for that—”

  “We’d be fried, I know. But I thought planets had to rotate to generate a magnetic field. Ishtar is tide-locked to Marduk. It rotates, but slowly, once in six days. And it has a strong one too, almost five gauss. A lot stronger than Earth’s.”

  “I never thought of that.” He reached into the net for an answer but found none.

  “I already did a search,” she said, sensing his uplink. “Some planetologists think the tidal flexing that keeps Ishtar at livable temperatures also stirs up the core enough to generate the mag field. But nobody knows for sure. There’s so much we don’t know….”

  He was surprised. She didn’t talk like a Marine…certainly not like a private. Of course, neither did he—or Lynnley either, for that matter—but her quiet intelligence seemed out of place. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, the Marines still bore the unpleasant stereotype of all muscle, no brains.

  “Shit!” Dunne snapped from the other side of the circle. “What do those bastards think they’re doing?”

  “What’s wrong, Well?” Deere asked.

  “Apricots! Goddamn apricots!”

  Garroway exchanged a long, quizzical look with Kat. Apricots?

  Dunne pulled the foil cover back from one corner of his ration container. The refrigerated portion contained some pale white-orange slices of soft substance and dubious origin. He flung the tray aside. “Bastards should know better’n that!”

  “Settle down, Sarge,” Valdez told him. “We’re not riding armored vehicles.”

  “Yeah?” Dunne said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the lander. “What the hell is that? Or, Jesus, the Derna, for that matter?”

  “What’s his problem?” Garroway asked.

  Deere, seated at Garroway’s right, chuckled. “An old, old Marine Corps tradition,” he said. “Nineteenth century, at least. It’s bad luck to eat apricots. Your APC is bound to break down if you do.”

  “They didn’t have armored personnel carriers in the nineteenth century,” Womicki pointed out. “Horses, yes. APCs, no.”

  “Okay, okay, twentieth century,” Deere said.

  “Everything’s cool, Sarge,” Garvey said. “The LMs got us down in one piece, right?”

  “Yeah. And how the shit are we gonna get over to New Sumer?” Dunne asked. “Or back up to the Derna? Walk?”

  At first Garroway had thought it was a joke, but Dunne was genuinely angry and upset. Over a silly superstition involving…apricots?

  He looked down at the ration pack in his lap. He’d already peeled back the foil from the refrigerated part and eaten half of what was there. Funny. He’d not been very hungry before. He was less so now. He set the pack aside.

  “It’s just superstition, man,” Womicki said. “Don’t sweat it.”

  “Yeah, well,” Valdez said, “that’s just for track drivers, not spacecraft.”

  “Still ain’t right to take chances,” Dunne said. “Not this far from home….”

  Relative quiet descended over the circle then, though Garroway noticed that the other Marines either weren’t eating or weren’t eating all of their rations. Marines, he decided, were superstitious critters.

  “So, how come you’re in the Marines?” he asked Kat quietly.

  The other Marine stood up abruptly and rushed off. He’d seen tears in her eyes.

  “What…?”

  “Let her go, Garroway,” Valdez said.

  “Is she okay?”

  “She joined the Corps because her partner joined the Corps. Goddamned stupid reason to sign up. And a damned stupid stunt, lying about it to Personnel.”

  “Her…partner?”

  “Her lover. Tom Pressley.”

  The name hit Garroway square in the gut. “Oh.”

  “She’s riding some NNTs that should cut the grief, but her emotions are going to be swinging pretty wildly for a while. She needs time, is all.” Valdez shook her head. “Damn idiots! If I’d just known!”

  “What…could you have done?” He tried to imagine what it would have been like if that had been Lynnley who’d been blown apart out there; tried, and failed.

  “The Corps tries to avoid Sullivans.”

  A quick check of the net acronym and mil-term listing jogged his memory. He’d heard about Sullivans before, back when he and Lynnley had talked about joining up together, being shipped out together. The Sullivans were five brothers in the U.S. Navy, back in one of the wars of the twentieth century. All had been assigned to the same ship, and all were killed when their ship was sunk in battle. Nowadays the name referred to close relatives or partners serving on the same ship or in the same combat theater.

  “If I’d known,” Valdez continued, “one or the other of them would’ve damn well stayed on Earth. I could have at least had them assigned to different companies in the MIEU. Now we have two casualties instead of just the one.”

  “Two casualties?”

  “Even with the NNTs, it’s going to catch up with Vinita sooner or later. We’ll need to evac her out of the combat zone and back up to the Derna as soon as we can arrange it.” Valdez turned away. “Finish your chow,
Marine, and then sack out. I’m putting you on the 0200 perimeter watch, and I want you rested.”

  “Aye aye, Gunny.”

  He watched Valdez walk away, a tired, lonely figure. Garroway was beginning to appreciate that she carried the burdens of all of the squad as well as her own.

  Goddess. When they shipped Kat back up to orbit, the squad would be down to six. Fifty percent casualties.

  And the exchange had left him shaken. Shit, he and Lynnley had done the same as Vinita and Pressley—joining the Marines with the idea of staying together.

  Where was she right now? Garroway stared again into that impossible sky. Hell, where was he right now?

  And, more important, why? Finding answers, he was learning, was a lot harder than reaching up into the noumenal data stores.

  Chamber of Seeing

  Deeps of An-Kur

  Seventh Period of Dawn

  A seismic quake sent gentle, rumbling shudders through the An-Kur Deeps, but Tu-Kur-La didn’t feel it. He was too lost now in the Zu-Din, the Godmind of the Abzu, to feel anything but exaltation.

  More and more Keepers of Memory were entering the Abzu now as they were awakened from the Sleep of Ages and engulfed by the Abzu-il. He could feel their presence, a thronging host of mind and thought and will. As the Zu-Din grew, so too did Tu-Kur-La’s power and the scope and depth of his vision. Before, linked with the Abzu, he’d still been himself, albeit with access to seemingly limitless information. Now, however, as a kind of critical mass was reached by the minds linking in…

  This was what it truly meant to be a god, omnipresent and omniscient, a thousand minds working together in parallel as one with a speed and clarity impossible for any purely natural sentience. Tu-Kur-La’s individuality was fading swiftly now; he was no longer Tu-Kur-La of the House of In-Kur-Dru, but the mind and soul of the Abzu itself, the Godmind summoned from the Deeps to once again defend the world of Enduru.

  The Race of the Gods would survive.

  He watched from a thousand vantage points as the enemy warriors penetrated the Kikig Kur-Urudug, watched as they placed the package beneath a control panel. Sensors within the Abzu-il, which lay like thick jelly on the floors and dripped from the cavern walls, analyzed the device and identified it as a compact thermonuclear device easily large enough to wreck the upper levels of the An-Kur facility.

  He could sense too the electromagnetic signals passing between the device and a series of relays set up in the corridors leading to the outside of the mountain. Traps and sensors within the device would probably detonate it if it were tampered with. The problem would require some thought.

  The Godmind was both highly intelligent in its own right and supremely fast. The Abzu-il that lay like a gelatinous blanket through much of An-Kur’s underground workings was a biological construct, something created countless cycles ago to connect the various Keepers of Memories. It possessed an artificial intelligence of high order and considerable volition; that AI had been charged with the defense of An-kur, and had responded to the attack a few periods ago on its own initiative. Now, however, that intelligence expanded dramatically as living Ahannu minds linked in.

  In the skies over Enduru three large but primitive spacecraft were entering orbit. Through remote sensors scattered about the planet, the Godmind could sense the cloud of smaller ships debarking from the larger. Enduru was being invaded.

  Briefly, the Godmind mourned. So much, so very much, had been lost since the coming of the Hunters of the Dawn. These invaders, descendants of the Sag-ura of lost Kia, were primitives, their ships not even capable of faster-than-light travel. Unfortunately, the Ahannu’s own assets were badly depleted, their weaponry especially. Enduru’s defenders would rely on weapons more primitive than those of the invaders.

  No matter. Numbers—and the superior speed and intellect of the Godmind—would be enough to preserve Enduru. And the Godmind saw now what needed to be done to stop the detonation of the nuclear device in the control center.

  With a thought, the Godmind summoned again the defenders of An-Kur….

  19

  25 JUNE 2148

  Combat Information Center

  IST Derna, approaching Ishtar orbit

  2317 hours ST

  Within the link, Ramsey looked down on Ishtar from space, the virtual presences of Dr. Hanson and Gavin Norris hovering by his shoulders. From their noumenal vantage point they seemed to be moving swiftly above the swirl and stippling of a broad swath of clouds, clouds tinged with red and gold from the light of the distant sun. Breaks in the cloud cover revealed glimpses of a tortured landscape, sere desert crisscrossed by vast, yawning fault valleys and rugged mountains; stretches of salty sea filling low-lying rifts like fingers; glaciers clinging to broad, mountain plateaus; savage storms each the size of a subcontinent; and everywhere the black-smudge plumes of active volcanoes.

  “Not exactly the sort of neighborhood where you want to raise your kids,” Norris said quietly. “You wouldn’t think anything could live down there.”

  “That’s almost certainly why the Ahannu colony survived,” Hanson explained. “The Hunters of the Dawn must have swept through this part of the galaxy, destroying every trace of sentient life and civilization they could find. We know they wiped out every Ahannu colony on Earth and on Earth’s moon.

  “But their search wasn’t perfect. They missed scattered bands of human survivors on Earth—overlooked them or ignored them—or else we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. And they missed the Ahannu colony here.”

  “Why?” Ramsey asked.

  He felt her noumenal shrug. “Perhaps they were searching for evidence of technology…radio transmissions, neutrino leakage from fusion reactors, that sort of thing. That’s probably why our ancestors escaped on Earth. Flint-knapping and campfires don’t show up very well from space. Out here…well, like Mr. Norris said, this isn’t exactly prime real estate. Ishtar is five times farther from its star than Earth is from the sun, and Llalande is a cool red dwarf. Anything this far out ought to be frozen solid at ten or twenty degrees Kelvin.”

  “It’s not because Marduk is a brown dwarf, right?” Norris said. “A failed star.”

  “Incorrect,” the voice of Cassius said. “The gas giant Marduk is of insufficient mass to be classified as a true brown dwarf.”

  “Actually,” Hanson added, “the gas giant does give off a lot more heat than it receives from the star, but not enough on its own to make Ishtar habitable. Most of Ishtar’s heat comes from tidal sources—volcanism and seismic activity—caused by the constant tug-of-war on it between the gas giant and the other major satellites of Marduk. It’s like Io and Jupiter in our own Solar system, though not quite so extreme. Instead of the entire crust turning itself inside out, the tidal flexing gradually liberates heat that is trapped by Ishtar’s atmosphere and oceans.”

  “Still, you’d think the Hunters of the Dawn would have noticed the anomaly,” Ramsey said. “A planet-sized moon, warm and with an atmosphere, this far out…”

  “There are lots of unusual things about Ishtar,” Hanson said. “The tidal friction is just enough to create a habitable band around the Marduk twilight zone…not too much, not too little. The atmosphere is thick enough to trap the heat released through volcanism and crustal movements. There’s enough of an ionosphere and a planetary magnetic field to deflect the worst of the radiation from Marduk. The storms caused by the constant heating of Ishtar’s oceans are incredible, but some of the fault valleys in the twilight band offer shelter enough for a small civilization to survive. All things considered, the chances of finding a livable world here must be somewhere between damned slim and nonexistent.”

  “Is it possible Ishtar is the product of planetary engineering?” Ramsey wondered. “I mean, with that many coincidences…”

  “We were actually wondering about that for a while,” Hanson replied. “After all, Mars shows evidence of having been terraformed half a million years ago. We thought for a while it might be po
ssible that the Ahannu were responsible.

  “But the Ahannu don’t appear to have ever possessed that level of technology. Star travel, yes…but not changing climates and atmospheres on a planetary scale. No, the civilization we call the Builders terraformed Mars 500,000 years before the Ahannu came on the scene. The Builders were wiped out by an even more technically proficient civilization, the race that created ‘the Singer’ that we found out on Europa.”

  “The Hunters of the Dawn,” Norris said.

  “Mmm. Possibly,” Hanson said. “It doesn’t seem likely that the same folks who wiped out the Builders on Mars and the civilization we found at Alpha Centauri would have survived half a million years, to be on hand in time to wipe out the Ahannu.”

  “Though both predatory species have been called ‘Hunters of the Dawn’ in popular literature,” Cassius observed, “the time span involved makes it extremely unlikely that the same ‘Hunters’ destroyed both the Builder civilization and the starfaring Ahannu culture. In any case, the Singer discovered beneath the ice at Europa represents a technology far beyond the probable technology of the destroyers of the Ahannu colonies half a million years later. There are considerable xenoarcheological problems inherent in identifying the two as one.”

  “Can’t you shut that damned thing off?” Norris asked.

  Ramsey grinned. “Not likely. Cassius is a part of our Command Constellation. Besides, Cass, you were out there at the Singer, weren’t you?”

  “Correct. Though there was scant opportunity for exploration. My primary task on Europa was guard duty.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s no sign of the Dawn Hunters nowadays,” Norris pointed out, ruffled. “Except for the mess they left behind.”

  “We hope,” Ramsey added. He’d downloaded enough data on the Ahannu and on the Builders to know something of current xenohistorical theory. “From what I’ve DLed, galactic civilization comes and goes in waves. Things are just starting to tick along smoothly, then along comes a predator race—like the Hunters—who follow the notion that the best survival strategy is to eliminate the competition. All of the competition. Then they destroy themselves, and the stage is set for the next turn of the wheel. Is that right, Dr. Hanson?”