Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  Ramsey felt himself slam against a real-world bulkhead just before the noumenon snapped off, draining from his mind and leaving him in a dazed fog of disorientation and pain. It was pitch-black—power failure. He could hear the thrashing and panicked cries of others in the CIC and in the hab deck outside.

  “Cassius!” he called. “Cassius! Are you online?”

  There was no answer. He tried to rise, but the normal spin-gravity of the hab module was complicated now by the additional vector of Derna’s tumble. It made navigation almost impossible in the darkness. A chair broke free of a deck fitting and slammed against a bulkhead a few meters away.

  “God damn it!” That was General King. “What the hell happened?”

  “We took a piece of the Algol, sir,” Ramsey replied.

  “Lights!” Ricia called in the darkness. “Someone hit the emergency lights!”

  Shit. They should have come on automatically. How bad was the Derna hit?

  And how long before the Ahannu fired their weapon a second time…and finished the job?

  20

  26 JUNE 2148

  Lander Dragon Three

  Krakatoa LZ, Ishtar

  0004 hours ST

  “Everyone back to your landers,” Captain Warhurst called, his voice coming over straight radio now instead of the netlink. “Emergency evac, everyone but Task Force Kerns! Move! Move!”

  Garroway froze in place for a moment, uncertain what to do, where to go. His squad and platoon leaders were headed for the gateway leading into the mountain, along with a dozen other Marines from several different squads. Task Force Kerns? Valdez had told him he wasn’t trained for this. With a sudden, sharp presentiment, he realized what Task Force Kerns was trying to accomplish.

  Private Vinita stood nearby, obviously as lost at the moment as he. “C’mon, Kat. Back to the LM.” Overhead, Dragon Three was circling toward the lander, strobes flashing brilliantly on belly and wing tips.

  “Where are they going?” she asked.

  “At a guess, I’d say to blow up that damned mountain. Our orders are to evac. Now.”

  “I can’t reach the net….”

  “Worry about that later. Run!”

  Together, he and Vinita jogged toward Lander Three. Womicki, Dunne, and Garvey were the only other members of their squad there. Deere must have gone with Valdez, Garroway and Vinita banged up one of the open ramps, along with several Marines from a different platoon just as the ramps began to slowly close.

  The net was definitely down, and he felt an aching loneliness nearly as acute as when they’d yanked his implant in boot camp. Radio messages were coming through on his helmet’s communications suite, but they were scattered and erratic, requiring his active concentration to make any sense out of what was being said. The words no longer simply materialized in his head, already filed and processed.

  “Move! Move! Get those ramps up!

  “Kerns to ARLT Command! We’re inside the first tunnel. We’ve got bandits in here, Captain. Lots of ’em!”

  “Kerns, Warhurst! Don’t stop to play. Keep moving to Waypoint One!”

  “Roger that. Moving!”

  The Dragon nestled down over the landing module with a metallic clang and the thump of grapples slamming home. With a lurch, the module was plucked from the ground, the shock sending close-packed Marines staggering into one another, armor clashing against armor. Garroway tried to uplink to get an image from an outside camera and got the system error signal again. Damn. He’d forgotten.

  The next minute was an eternity, crowded into the lander, standing room only, unable to move, unable to see out, unable to know what was happening outside. The comm channels were flooded with radio chatter as other Marines tried to find out what was going down.

  “Does anybody have a link connect?”

  “What the fuck is going on?”

  “Gunny! Gunny Kendrick!”

  “Did the bastards nail the Derna?”

  “They’ll target us next.”

  “Nah. They’ll be busy picking the starships out of orbit. Shit!”

  “All right, people! Ice it down! Can the chatter!”

  “This is Captain Warhurst. Now hear this. Our communications and data nets are down. As near as we can tell, one of the supply transports was hit by a shot from that Frog cannon, but we have also lost direct contact with the Derna. Our AI says she’s still in orbit but possibly damaged. I’ll give you more news as it comes through.

  “In the meantime, do not panic. We are Marines. We improvise. We adapt. We overcome, whatever the situation. Right now our greatest enemy is panic.

  “You will also remain silent. Do not access the net until I pass the word that it is safe to do so. Keep radio silence except in the strict line of duty. Now stand by. We may be in for a bit of a rough ride here.”

  And that, Garroway thought, was a sure bet.

  Lander Dragon One

  In flight, Ishtar

  0005 hours ST

  Warhurst was struggling to get a partial Net back on-line.

  Any net, from the first DARPA Net two centuries before to the GlobalNet that currently enmeshed Earth and various Solar colonies and expeditions in a complex web of computing nodes, linked by data-sharing protocols. Those links could be copper or optical cable, broadband radio, maser, IR laser, or polyphasic quantum entanglement; the important thing was the transmission of data. Until moments before, the fledgling Ishtar Net had consisted of the AI systems on three starships, the relay nodes of two communications satellites, and several hundred smaller processors, from the AIs of the lander modules and TAL-S Dragonflies, to the thumbnail-sized digital assistants in the helmet of each Marine, to the even tinier mesh of nanochelated conductors grown inside each Marine’s cerebral cortex.

  The MIEU Network, already operating at only a fraction of its full capacity, had been dealt a deadly blow. One of the starship AIs was completely destroyed, while the major complex of processing nodes, Derna herself, was offline and also possibly destroyed. The Command Constellation AI, Cassius, which had been overseeing the operation and deployment of the network, had been isolated on board Derna and was out of touch. Worse, the relay/router satellites, an incomplete beginning to the necessary full array of redundant communication links, had been linked to Derna and were also out of the running. What Warhurst had at his disposal now was a scattered and disorganized array of computers with an aggregate processing power equivalent to perhaps five percent of Cassius and the Derna’s network system alone.

  What he hoped to do, however, was reestablish the orderly flow of data within a truncated portion of the MIEU Net. He needed to know where each of his Marines was, what his status was, and what he was doing. The Marines all needed to talk with one another and with personnel up the chain of command, as well as interface with their weapons’ aiming and ammo programming systems. Ideally, they needed access to everything from basic information on Ishtar and the Frogs to ballistics tables, stores and logistical lists, and interactive maps.

  More, Warhurst knew he needed to reestablish a message routing system that would let him talk with any subset of the ARLT he desired, whether that be all of the Marines, only the squad leaders, the officers, the pilot AIs, or any other combination imaginable. To that end, he had the talents of Lander One’s AI, a utilitarian Corps-issue, Honeywell-Sony Mark XL that had the personality of a rock and an initiative to match, but a fair set of software tools for jury-rigging a new command/control network.

  In the meantime, he had radio communications on twelve available channels. They could work with that…at least for now. Given time and half a chance, he might even be able to restore partial linkage through the Marines’ neural implants—faster, more secure, and less prone to garbling than straight radio.

  The trouble was, they didn’t have much time at all. That monstrous gun would keep firing until the starships were destroyed, and then it would turn on the ARLT, unless Task Force Kerns was able to carry out its suicidal mission.
>
  Damn it! Why hadn’t he given the order to destroy that damned weapon as soon as they’d had the chance? The hell with the civilians’ needs to study everything in sight!

  Now everything, everything, depended on the next few minutes….

  Task Force Kerns

  Depths of An-Kur, Ishtar

  0007 hours ST

  They raced down the stone passageway, searching for the proper turning of the way. Without the net, they no longer had access to the maps and 3D scans either of An-Kur’s tunnel complex or of the similar complex at Tsiolkovsky on Earth’s moon. What they had instead were their own memories of this alien labyrinth, memories acquired only hours ago under less than optimum conditions.

  “This way!” Valdez snapped. “Lieutenant! Down this way!” She recognized the opening in the wall to the right, the basaltic rock to either side scarred by laser pulses and shrapnel from RPG bursts. A pair of Frog warriors emerged from the opening, brandishing spears with curved blades. Honey Deere burned them both down before anyone else could manage a target lock.

  There were fourteen Marines in the hastily assembled task force, counting Valdez and Lieutenant Kerns. The rest were a motley collection of NCOs from several platoons pulled from the LZ because they each had a key asset highly prized by Marine field vets: experience. The lowest ranking of them all was Corporal Luttrell, and in his six years of service so far he’d managed to see action in Egypt, China, and Colombia, pick up a Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts, and be busted twice for insubordination.

  There would be no room in these narrow tunnels for men or women who hadn’t been under fire and learned how to cope with it. That was why Valdez had turned Garvey, Garroway, and Vinita away, along with several other newbies who’d volunteered. They’d done well enough in the firefight earlier, all of them…but often the second time under fire was the telling one, the moment when a Marine steeled himself to go knowingly into Hell’s jaws, dead certain of what awaited him there. She’d seen Marines who’d gone through their first firefight without a quiver freeze solid on their second encounter with the demon of combat. She was taking no chances.

  Ahannu warriors and human slaves spilled into the tunnel ahead, dimly seen figures throwing weirdly flickering shadows from the Marines’ helmet lamps. Deere’s plasma gun stuttered, the flashes strobing wildly in the near darkness. Lasers, their beams made visible in the dust and smoke filling the tunnel, crisscrossed in brief, snapping flashes, and an RPG hissed through the air, swerving to turn a corner ahead, then detonating with a savage blast. A naked, tattooed human wielding a massive, double-headed ax charged to within two meters of the Marine column; Valdez triggered her 2120, twitching the muzzle up, the pulse slashing the man from groin to sternum, spilling his intestines to the ground in a bloody gush.

  The slaughter in those close quarters was indescribable, a bloody, searing, nightmare of darkness and burned flesh; of hideous shrieks; of bodies piled four deep on the cavern floor, gruesomely burned, blast-torn, and mutilated.

  And then the Ahannu forces dissolved away, fleeing as the Marines advanced. The tunnel opened into a broader chamber, and now the Marines came under fire as Ahannu god-warriors carrying a variety of clumsy-looking gauss-fired weapons opened up from perches on the cavern walls and from the cover of a spill of boulders ahead. Sergeant DaSilva staggered, then collapsed, a neat, round hole punched through her helmet faceplate. Staff Sergeant Stryker screamed as his left arm was torn away by a massive round ripping through his shoulder. And there were more of those damned giant Ahannu up there at the end of the tunnel, firing their bigger-than-life gauss guns.

  For the next ten seconds—an eternity in a close and desperate firefight like this one—lasers and plasma bolts snapped and crackled across the cavern. A barrage of grenades crashed among the boulders at the far end of the room.

  Valdez feared that the detonations were about to bring the walls of the cave down on top of them all. “Hold the grenade fire!” she called out. “We’ll cause a cave-in!”

  “I doubt it, Gunny,” Staff Sergeant Ostergaard replied, shouting to be heard above the racket. “After a few thousand years of major seismic quakes and the shock of that BFG going off, I doubt there’s anything we can do worse!”

  Valdez digested this, then nodded in her helmet. “Right, Marines! Hit ’em with everything you got!”

  Again the Ahannu defenders began to melt away, scurrying off into side tunnels or vanishing up the curve of the main passageway ahead. The Marines advanced, all save Stryker, who was rapidly fading into shock. Sergeant Knowles looked up at Kerns and shook her head. “His suit medic is fried, Lieutenant. I can’t stop the bleeding.”

  “We can’t leave him here,” Valdez said.

  “And we can’t spare the assets to send him back,” Kerns decided. “Bring him along.”

  Valdez noticed an amber light blinking weakly on her helmet display. With the net down, they were relying solely on radio communications now. The amber light indicated that they were picking up the signal from the backpack nuke in the control center, somewhere up ahead.

  “Hey, Lieutenant—”

  “I see it, Valdez.”

  “Yeah. This is the cavern where we left the relay. The warhead ought to be another two hundred meters up that way.”

  “We got company, gang,” Gunnery Sergeant Horst warned. “Ahead and behind!”

  Ahannu god-warriors were spilling back into the cavern. The Marines had advanced far enough that that they were in danger of being surrounded, as enemy fighters emerged from tunnel mouths and cave passageways…including the opening of the narrow tunnel from which they’d just emerged.

  “Perimeter defense!” Kerns ordered. “Fire at will!”

  “Bad guys at three o’clock!”

  “Pour it on ’em!”

  “Task Force Kerns, Task Force Kerns, do you copy? Over…”

  “Hold it, people!” Valdez yelled. “Quiet! Radio call comin’ through!”

  “Task Force Kerns, this is Dragon One. Do you copy?” The words were badly distorted, blurred by static.

  “We hear you, Dragon One!” Kerns shouted. “You’re weak! Repeat, transmission weak!”

  “Report—…pon magnetic…building…hurry—” The static built to a shrill squeal.

  “Say again, Dragon One!” Kerns shouted. “Repeat and boost your gain! Your message breaking up!”

  “I say again…mountain…mag…field building up. We think…Derna…”

  “Shit,” Ostergaard said. “The Frogs are getting ready to fire their BFG again.”

  The Ahannu rushed the circle of Marines. For several seconds nothing could be heard above the crack and snap of lasers, the shrieks of horribly burned and wounded attackers, the battle yells of the beleaguered Marines.

  Valdez’s helmet indicators were showing it now, the steady, throbbing pulse of Objective Krakatoa’s magnetic field, building steadily toward a deadly climax. She couldn’t hear the radio call from Dragon One any longer.

  “Lieutenant?” she called. “I don’t think we’re gonna make it through to the nuke in time!”

  “I know,” Kerns replied, snapping off a trio of laser pulses as the Ahannu horde surged forward. “Any suggestions?”

  Valdez concentrated for a moment on her own fire, coolly taking down one of the giant Ahannu just before it fired its gauss gun. The idea behind Task Force Kerns had originally been to reprogram the nuke with a time delay, enough to let them get out of the mountain before the thing blew. She had to admit to herself that it had never looked like a real good possibility since any attack by the enemy would have thrown a major wrench into the works.

  They couldn’t trigger the nuke from here. It had been reset to detonate only with the proper authorization code, a set of alphanumerics transmitted either from Dragon One or from orbit. And without the relay…

  “I think we have to act as a new relay, Lieutenant,” she said, “if we can get a clear signal through to the captain.”

  �
�Roger that,” Lieutenant Kerns said. “I’m afraid I don’t see any other way….”

  Lander Dragon One

  In flight, Ishtar

  0011 hours ST

  Success! Warhurst felt the familiar tingle of the net going online, the flow of data unfolding itself within his mind. The noumenon opened…narrow and poorly defined, but with resolution enough for him to begin directing his efforts toward establishing a stronger radio link with Task Force Kerns. The Lander One AI had done the trick. It might not have the high-powered processing thrust of a CS-1289, Series G-4, Model 8 like Cassius, but it knew how to set up network protocols.

  He could see outside now. The Dragon carrying Lander One was racing low across a purple-red forest, skimming the canopy at treetop level. Behind, ten kilometers distant, now, An-Kur rose above the jungle, a vast, black, flat-topped cone.

  He was still getting a faint radio signal from within the mountain, transmitted and magnified by a relay left on the ground at the LZ.

  “Enhance signal, Channel Five,” he ordered over the net. “Boost it!”

  Damn, but this pocket version of the MIEU Net was ragged! His internal cerebralink hardware was so much faster than this cobbled-together monstrosity, he felt himself waiting with dragging impatience after each set of commands.

  “…Kerns! Dragon One, this…Force Kerns. Come in!”

  “This is Warhurst. I copy!” He shot a coded mindclick up the link. Clean this freaking signal up!

  “This is Kerns. We’re surrounded and can’t reach the nuke. Suggest using me as a relay for detonation. Over!”

  Warhurst stared in sick horror at An-Kur. “Roger that, Lieutenant. I…copy…”

  Task Force Kerns

  Depths of An-Kur, Ishtar

  0012 hours ST

  Again the enemy was falling back, but four more Marines—Knowles, Luttrell, Muhib, and Couture—were dead, brought down by heavy gauss-gun fire. Rounds continued to crack and snap around them, as hidden snipers fired from behind the surrounding rocks.

  “This is Kerns. We’re surrounded and can’t reach the nuke. Suggest using me as a relay for detonation. Over!”