Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  The beings he invoked, spirits representing the traditional elements of air, fire, water, and earth, he understood as metaphors that let him grasp the unknowable; if they had any objective reality at all, they were not bound by the limits of time and space. Still, the hard, rationalist, left-brained part of him questioned if the ritual made any sense at all.

  If there were such things as elemental spirits, or gods, or guardians of the soul…could they hear him out here, so far from home?

  He felt a bit self-conscious, aware that there were Marines lounging nearby who could see him.

  The hell with them. Freedom of religion was an absolute and basic right in the Corps, even back in boot camp. Lots of the other men and women in the MIEU were Wiccan, World of the Goddess, or pagan of various other stripes, and he knew he could have found others to join him in this ritual.

  But he wanted to do this one solo, just him and the universe. Normally, he would have performed it inwardly, a simulation within the noumenal world, but with the net down he was left to do it in the phenomenal world instead. His father hadn’t allowed him to use the Sony-TI 12000 for Wiccan rites either, so he’d learned how to do it the traditional way, with athame blade and imagination. He’d found as private a corner as he could, off on the south edge of the open compound area they were now calling “the grinder,” an out-of-the-way spot for the ritual that would make this patch of ground sacred space.

  “Brothers and sisters of the north, spirits of earth, spirits of practical things, of daily life…hail, and welcome…”

  He completed the imagined circle of blue fire, a perimeter around him now sealed by four pentagrams. Stooping, he touched the ground with the point of his blade.

  “Great Mother…Goddess…Maiden, Mother, and Crone, I invite you to this circle. Be here now.”

  In many Wiccan traditions the Goddess represented Gaia, the spirit of Earth herself. Could she find her way across the light-years? Or did Ishtar have its own goddess spirit? The thought stirred sudden inspiration, and he added, “Goddess of ancient Sumeria and Babylon, Goddess who is called Inanna, Astarte, and Ishtar…Goddess of Love and Goddess of Battles, hail and welcome.”

  Standing, he raised his blade high. The gas giant Marduk hung vast and banded in the west. “God of Light, God of the Sun, known as Utu, Shamash, and Marduk, be here now. Hail and welcome.” He wasn’t entirely sure that Marduk could properly be linked mythologically with the earlier Mesopotamian gods of the sun, but it didn’t matter. It was the idea behind the words that mattered.

  He closed his eyes and imagined Ishtar and Marduk, queen and consort, standing within his circle within a blaze of radiant light. A small but rational part of his mind noted that those deities likely had their origins with the An colonists in ancient Sumer ten thousand years ago. Most of the oldest Sumerian gods, it seemed—Utu and Enki, Ea and An and Nanna—had been real beings, or at least personalized composites drawn from actual encounters between early proto-Sumerian nomads and the Anunnaki, “Those Who Came from Heaven to Earth.”

  Not that this mattered either. Humankind had long ago refashioned all of the gods in its own image. He doubted that the modern Ahannu would recognize what he called upon now.

  More disturbing, the rational part of him thought, was the idea of a twenty-second-century high-tech Marine invoking spirits in a ritual two centuries old, one drawn, it was claimed, from beliefs and practices thousands of years older—older even than the starfaring gods of ancient Sumeria.

  He pushed the intruding thought aside, focusing instead on the inner pacing of the solitary ritual, on the metaphors that allowed him to tap deep, deep into his own unconscious, to draw on the guidance, the symbols, the energy residing there. Religion, the religious impulse, whatever its outward trappings and whatever its origin, was undeniably as much a part of humankind as language, politics, or even breathing.

  “By the earth that is her body, by the air that is her breath, by the fire of her bright spirit, by the living waters of her womb, this circle is cast.”

  He opened his eyes, turning them toward a momentarily clear, crystalline blue-green twilight sky alive with pale auroras and the banded beauty of ringed Marduk. A meteor flared briefly at the zenith. “I stand now between the worlds.”

  He smiled at that. In a sense, he was between the worlds. But more…he might be light-years from Earth, but the connection he sought with the divine was something he carried within himself, the god and goddess both parts of his own being. The deities he called to this place were not so distant after all. They were a part of his own noumenal world, as opposed to the phenomenal world of sight, sound, and matter.

  Facing east once more, he concentrated on raising inner energy for the working he had in mind. He heard laughter and opened his eyes. Yeah…he was being watched. A group of Marines offloading supplies from a cargo LM nearby were taking a break, and several were watching his ritual. Let them. This was his time, his sacred space, and their laughter meant nothing.

  The spiritual feeding of the men and women of 1 MIEU was an undertaking nearly as complex and as daunting as feeding them physically. There were a number of chaplains with the MIEU, all of them tasked with multiple spiritual duties. Captain Walters, for instance, served as priest for both the Catholics and the counter-Catholics, as well as the Episcopalians—a reconciliation of viewpoints that, Garroway thought, must require a fascinating set of mental gymnastics. Lieutenant Steve Prescott was chaplain for the less fundamentalist Protestants, the Church of Light, the Spiritualists, the Taoists, the Neo-Arians, and several other faiths, while a staff sergeant from C Company named Blandings took care of the fundy sects, Four-Squares, Baptists, and Pentecostals. There were two rabbis for the Jews, two imams for the Muslims, a priest for the Hindus, and a young lieutenant named Cynthia Maillard who watched out for the spiritual needs of the pagans, the Native American shamanic traditions, the Mithraists, and five different ancient astronaut sects. He’d heard somewhere that there were all of sixty-five different faiths represented among the MIEU’s personnel complement, not counting the atheists, agnostics, and personal faiths. Arguably, the only major religion not represented were any of the radical Anist sects. While the Corps was enjoined by law not to discriminate on the basis of religious belief, people who believed that the An were literal gods or that humankind was intended to be a slave race were not the best recruits for a Marine deployment to an Ahannu world.

  If he needed counseling during the deployment to Llalande, Garroway’s assigned chaplain was Lieutenant Maillard. He doubted that he would need to talk with her, however. Wiccans, for the most part, handled their own priestly duties without the need of clergy.

  He did wonder why this ritual, this time set apart, was so important to him now but decided he didn’t need to look further than the bewildering avalanche of sights, sounds, emotions, and impressions of the past twenty-some hours. Pressley’s shocking death…the news that the Derna had been crippled in orbit…the destruction of An-Kur…the battle at the north wall…He felt as though he’d lived years in a day’s span of time.

  Now there was an interesting twist on the whole question of objective versus subjective time.

  An old, old saying held that religion was for those who feared Hell, while spirituality was for those who’d been there.

  He felt the faint, nails-on-blackboard tingle on his spine that he thought of as energy rising from the earth, filling him, recharging him. He needed this as much as he needed sleep; it was a reminder of who he was, of what he was, and why. An old military saying held that there were no atheists in foxholes.

  If his religion had not been important to him before, save as a weapon to wield against an abusive and drunken father, it was vitally important to him now.

  He was scared. Alone and scared.

  The word had come down from the LM command post earlier that day, along with the news of the promotions and medals. They were looking for forty-eight volunteers for an airborne assault on the pyramid in the eas
t. He’d given it some thought, then decided to put in his name.

  He still wasn’t entirely sure why he’d done it. Hell, “never volunteer” was the unwritten cardinal rule for all enlisted personnel, a rule probably going back to the time of Sargon the Great. But he was still feeling a bit…detached was the only way he could phrase it. Numb. The loss of so many men and women he’d come to know over the past subjective days had left him feeling as though he needed to reach out and reattach himself, to put down new roots, forge new bonds.

  Volunteering for what they were calling Operation Suribachi seemed the best way to do that.

  Of course, they might turn him down for lack of experience, the way Gunny Valdez had. Somehow, though, he felt now as though he carried an entire world of experience squarely on his back.

  The Wiccan ritual was a good way to ground himself with earth and with now as well.

  “God and Goddess, Marduk and Ishtar…speed the passing of friends and comrades from this world to the next. Make bright their ways. Strengthen those they’ve left behind…”

  A long time later—all of thirty minutes, perhaps, though it seemed like hours—Garroway closed his circle and returned to the phenomenal world of space and time.

  He still felt numb, but he did feel stronger. A little, anyway.

  He sheathed his athame—a standard Corps-issue Mk. 4 combat knife once again—and returned to the patch of open ground in front of Building 12, where he’d stowed his sleep roll and gear.

  Now, he thought, he might be able to sleep.

  MIEU Command Center

  Legation Compound

  New Sumer, Ishtar

  1545 hours ALT

  “The walkers are through the east gate,” Major Anderson reported. “No contact.”

  “Very well, Major,” Colonel Ramsey said as he continued watching the big monitor screen mounted on one bulkhead of the command LM. The view was of a dusty New Sumer street, a view that lurched unsteadily from side to side as the camera platform stalked ahead on two scissoring plasteel and carbon fiber legs. The legend at the bottom of the screen reported that the image was being transmitted from Gunwalker Seven. A red crosshair reticle floated about the scene, marking the aim point of the walker’s Gatling laser.

  To Ramsey’s left a line of seven Marine technicians sat at a long, makeshift console with bread-boarded processor blocks and salvaged monitors. Each watched his or her own screen closely, making moment-to-moment adjustments on the joystick controls in front of them.

  “So far, so good,” General King said, edging up beside Ramsey and peering up at the big screen. “How much farther?”

  “Half a kilometer, General, thereabouts.”

  “Coming up on East Cagnon and Rosenthal Street, Colonel,” one of the techs said. “Making the turn north onto Rosenthal.” The image on the screen swung sharply as the teleoperated walker veered left; Ramsey caught a glimpse of another walker making the turn—an ungainly looking device that reminded him of a neckless ostrich cast as modern sculpture. The Gatling laser, slung beneath the body and between the legs in blatantly phallic display, pivoted left and right, seeking targets. “Still no contact.”

  Ramsey checked a small, hand-drawn map taped to the console in lieu of a noumenal map feed. The streets around the Pyramid of the Eye had been given names for ease of navigation—Souseley, Block, Cagnon, Hayes, Strank, Bradley. Those six were the names of the men—a PFC, three corporals, a sergeant, and a Navy corpsman—who’d raised the famous flag on Suribachi on 23 February 1945. Rosenthal was Joe Rosenthal, the Associated Press photographer who’d snapped the icon photo. Other streets—Schrier, Thomas, Michelis, Charlo, Lindberg, Hansen—were named for the Marines who’d raised the first flag on Suribachi, before Rosenthal had arrived on the scene.

  Marines remembered their own, with a body of histories, parables, and mythologies as passionate as that of any religion.

  Ramsey felt a small shiver of presentiment at that thought. Men of Third Platoon, E Company, of the 28th Marines, had raised both flags on Suribachi. Of forty men in the company, only four had avoided being wounded or killed in the fighting. Three of the six photographed by Rosenthal that morning—PFC Souseley, Corporal Block, and Sergeant Strank—were later killed on Iwo. Of the six who’d raised the first flag, three had been killed and two wounded; only Lieutenant Schrier emerged from the fighting unscathed.

  A small bit of Corps trivia, that…and a testament to the ferocity of the fighting on Iwo Jima, one of the bloodiest amphibious assaults of World War II. But a bit of superstitious worry gnawed at Ramsey as well. The Pyramid of the Eye was a natural defensive position.

  Might that damned pyramid turn out to be a second Suribachi, in bloody kind as well as in name?

  Something clanged from the side of Walker Seven, sending the image lurching heavily to the side. “Contact!” the technician announced. “We have hostiles inbound, moving in from north, east, and south.”

  The monitor image jarred again, nearly falling over, then pivoted sharply, the crosshairs locking onto a running, human figure. The Gatling fired with a shrill whine, and the running figure exploded in a gory red spray.

  “Walkers One, Three, Five, and Six, move to block east and south,” Ramsey ordered. “Two, Four, and Seven…keep moving north, double-time. Punch through them!”

  One of the technicians gave a loud exclamation, something between a curse and a groan, and threw up her hands as her screen went dead. “Walker Two is down!”

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” Ramsey told her. “Stand by your station, please.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  “Walker Six is out of the running, Colonel,” another technician said. “They’re nailing us with high-velocity gauss rifles.”

  “Understood.”

  “This is too expensive,” General King said. “We don’t have the gunwalkers to spare for this sort of thing.”

  Ramsey looked at King. “Better this than sending Marines out there, sir. I do not want to send in the airmobile detachment without seeing the east side of Suribachi.”

  “Agreed,” King said, though with some reluctance. “But they’re a damned expensive substitute for floater remotes.”

  Ramsey smiled. King was painfully aware of the logistical limitations 1 MIEU faced. With a small supply of teleoperated gunwalkers on hand, there were none left when those were gone.

  After flirting with robotic weaponry for almost three hundred years, the American military still maintained a remarkably tentative relationship with military robots. Arguing that only a human could make kill-or-spare decisions in combat, true robot soldiers, running sentient AI programs, had never been wholeheartedly embraced, even though robot mines, robot bombs, antimissile guns, even robotic fighter aircraft all had been employed in combat since the end of the twentieth century. The fact of the matter was that robotic senses were far superior to those of human warriors in the smoke and confusion of a firefight, their reaction times were far shorter, and they were unaffected by shortcomings such as fear, pain, anger, or traumatic shock. Fearful that general purpose military robots could be hijacked by a technically proficient enemy and turned on their creators, the Pentagon had rejected sentient robotic soldiers time after time. The closest thing to a true robot so far adopted were robot sentries, which guarded set fields of fire and couldn’t move, and hunter-killer gunwalkers, which had only a limited decision-making capacity. Walkers had extremely quick reactions and a deadly aim, but they were best employed as teleoperated weapons…with a human driver behind the lines, piloting the machine through a link via the net.

  With the net down, of course, they’d lost full function on the walkers, but by posting Marines on the far northern and southern portions of the compound’s east wall, they were able to maintain line-of-sight communications with the walkers. The reception was good enough that they were running seven walkers at about eighty percent of their usual performance capacity.

  Correction. Five walkers.

  “I’ve g
ot the objective in sight, sir,” one of the techs called. “Walker Four.”

  “Punch it up,” Ramsey told Anderson. “Let’s see it on the big screen.”

  The scene shifted to the vantage point of another walker, farther up Rosenthal Street. The walker had halted in the middle of the street and was rotated slightly to the left, looking up at the gleaming white slope of the Pyramid of the Eye.

  The pyramid was enormous. It measured 106 meters along each side at the base and was nearly sixty meters tall, which made it almost as broad and as tall as the smallest of the Great Pyramids at Giza. The slope of the walls felt more like that of a typical Mayan pyramid, much steeper and more precipitous than the slopes of the pyramids at Giza. The five-tier construction was reminiscent of the step-pyramids or ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia. Broad, half-meter-high stone steps ran up the center of each of the four sides.

  From the vantage point of the HK gunwalker, the Pyramid of the Eye seemed to tower overhead, giving the vertiginous impression that it was about to come crashing down on the street.

  The walker’s point of view dropped back to street level, focusing on a handful of human Sag-ura rushing toward it armed with clubs, spears, and gauss guns. The Gatling laser opened up, shredding the charge in bloody disarray.

  But more and more rounds were striking home, knocking the walker to left or right. Walker Four took another dozen steps forward, then the screen filled with static and went black.

  “Four is down,” Anderson said. “Bringing up Walker Seven.”

  “Walker One is down. Enemy forces advancing from the east.”

  “Damn them,” King muttered as the camera view of the last remaining northbound walker winked on. “Why gauss rifles when the sons of bitches are still carrying spears? Why not black powder?”

  “Gauss guns are remarkably simple in concept, General,” Major Anderson pointed out. “And pretty hard to break. A hollow tube with a mechanism for sending a powerful electromagnetic pulse down the barrel at high speed…as long as they have a way to recharge the power pack, they could store those things for thousands of years. Gunpowder would go stale before too long, especially in a humid climate like this one.”