Star Corps

by Ian Douglas

  “We’ll have to bum a lift, sir,” Aiken replied. “We got all our people out here on board three old Starhauler TAVs. We had to make a bunch of trips, though, to get everyone out, and ten years sitting in the jungle afterward didn’t do their power plants any good. They’re just rusty junk now.”

  “Not a problem. We can deploy a Dragonfly with a landing module and bring at least some of you back. How many survivors are there?”

  Aiken pursed his lips. “Well, sir…our current roster has eighteen Marines and 158 civilians. Twenty-seven of those last are children.”

  “Children?” Ramsey exclaimed. “What children?…Oh.”

  “Yes, sir. It has been ten years.” He grinned. “And the natives are friendly.”

  “Natives?”

  “Yes, sir. We’re living at a village of…well, they call themselves dumu-gir. It means a native child in the Ishtaran common tongue…but it means ‘freeborn.’”

  “You mean these are humans? Free humans? Escaped from the Ahannu?”

  “Some are runaways, yes, sir. Most of them have always been free. They’re descendants of humans who got away from the Frogs, oh, over the past few thousand years, I guess. Maybe going all the way back to when humans were first brought here as slaves. A few must have escaped even back then and set up communities out in the jungle. The Ahannu…they don’t come out in the wild all that much. They tend to be content to stay where they are, inside their cities and tunnel complexes.”

  “The Ahannu try to recapture them, surely.”

  “Oh, once in a while. Sometimes the Frogs band together and try to catch them or stomp them out, but the dumu-gir have learned a few things, living out here in the jungle all these years. Sir, they’re good. The Marines could learn a few things from them.”

  “How many natives are there?”

  “Oh, about a hundred at last count. In this village, anyway.”

  “A hundred? A hundred free Ishtaran humans?”

  “There are other villages, of course. No one knows how many. They don’t go in much for governments and such here. Nothing more than a tribal council, anyway. They took us in when we got out of Dodge…uh, I mean, when we retreated from New Sumer. We’ve been teaching them a few tricks, helping them develop weapons and tactics against the Frogs.”

  “You speak the local language, then?”

  “A bit, sir. Our expert is Dr. Moore. She was our xenosoc expert, and she’s gone on to learn a lot about the Ishtarans, both the humans and the Ahannu. And a lot of the dumu-gir speak pretty good English now. They’ve been learning it for ten years.”

  “Master Sergeant, you may have just saved this expedition’s collective ass. Whose bright idea was it, anyway, to leave a survivalcam screen in the Chamber of the Eye?”

  Aiken grinned. “Mine, actually, sir. I figured the Marines would be coming, and one of the first things they’d do was get the Chamber of the Eye back, so they could talk to Earth. One of our locals, Kupatin, volunteered to sneak in and put it in place, since he could look the part of a Sag-ura, with all those tattoos and stuff, and I couldn’t. That was maybe…oh, a year ago, maybe. When we began to think that you guys would be showing up any day now. And actually, sir, to tell the truth, I was under the impression that it was you who were saving our ass.”

  “Either way. That was damned good thinking on your part. We’re sending a Dragonfly for you. Please report to me…with your Marines and any senior Legation people who want to come. We’d particularly like to see Dr. Moore, if she’s available.”

  “She sure is, sir.” He grinned. “Happens I married the lady, a few years back.”

  “Ah! Well. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you, sir. But our people have been intermarrying with the locals too. There haven’t been any problems at all in that regard. The biggest difference between Earth humans and Ishtaran humans is in the psychological conditioning. And the dumu-gir have managed to break most of that conditioning.”

  Gavin Norris had been watching and listening in silence to the entire exchange. Suddenly, he stepped up close to the table. “Master Sergeant Aiken,” he said. “Is Randolph Carleton among the survivors, by chance?”

  “Who are you?”

  “The PanTerra Dynamics trade representative on this planet.”

  “I see. Yeah, Carleton’s here.”

  “Tell him to come along as well.”

  Aiken looked at Ramsey, who nodded. “Tell him, Master Sergeant. We’ll see you in a few more hours.”

  “It’s gonna be good, Colonel. Damned good! Five years we were here since Emissary arrived, and then ten more out in the sticks. I tell you, sir, we’ve gotten more than a little tired of the same old faces!”

  “We’ll see you soon, Master Sergeant. New Sumer out!” He turned to Warhurst. “Quite a stroke of luck,” Ramsey said. “If one of your men hadn’t spotted that comm cloth…”

  “Yes, sir. Although Master Sergeant Aiken indicated that they have been expecting us. They’ve probably had locals watching New Sumer for our arrival and would have been able to contact us sooner or later.”

  “Right. But we’re in contact now. And we need people who speak the language.” Ramsey looked across the room. Their most recent captive, the unarmed Ahannu taken in the Chamber of the Eye a short while ago, was tied to a chair, his face and expression unreadable.

  “You said you did hear that Frog speak English?” General King asked. “I haven’t heard anything from him except gibberish.”

  “Yessir. Clearly. He hasn’t spoken since we got him back down here?”

  “Not since I ordered some of our people to clean him up.”

  “Sir?”

  “That purple jelly. It must’ve been rolling in the stuff, or something. I thought at first that it might be blood and had a corpsman start washing—”

  Warhurst’s eyes widened. “General…I don’t know what that purple stuff is, but we’ve found it on several Ahannu corpses. Not on all of them, but on a few.”

  “You think it’s something for communication?” Ramsey asked.

  “Yes, sir. I do. Look, for primitives, these guys have been doing pretty damned good at coordinating their attacks. Up there on top of the pyramid, they started coming up out of a hole behind us at the same instant they were coming up over the sides of the building. Some of their other attacks have shown a high degree of synchronization too. Somehow they manage to talk to each other. That guy was up in the Chamber of the Eye, which gave him a perfect OP from which to watch us. He wasn’t armed. He wasn’t a sniper…which means he was watching us and passing on information to his HQ.”

  “But how would that help him speak English?” King demanded.

  “Well, we know some Ahannu spoke English ten years ago. They learned it from the Terran Legation, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So…what if the Frogs have something like our net? A means of transmitting data among themselves very quickly? An Ahannu who knew English could have been listening in when we captured this one and been telling him what to say.” Warhurst shrugged. “Or maybe the purple gunk is just the local equivalent of a computer translator. Whatever it is, we’ve got to be damned careful not to make assumptions about things we don’t understand based on our human experience.”

  “Good advice, Captain,” Ramsey said. “What do you suggest so far as talking with our friend here goes?”

  “Well, sir, like you said, we have some people coming now who speak the lingo. But if you want to talk to the Ahannu leadership, our best bet might be to take our friend here right back up to the Chamber of the Eye.”

  “Hmm.” Ramsey considered this. “I’m not sure I want to trust him up there. Like you said, we can’t afford to make assumptions about things we don’t understand. That includes what passes for their technology. We’ll wait and see what a translator makes of it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ramsey stared long and hard into the unblinking golden eyes of the prisoner.

  What
was it thinking? How did it think? Like humans…or in some way utterly and fundamentally different—alien, in other words?

  What did it know?

  And would it ever be possible to communicate with something that alien?

  26

  15 JULY THROUGH 23

  JULY 2148

  Pyramid of the Eye

  New Sumer, Ishtar

  1930 hours ALT

  “You know, they used to call this kind of party a steel beach,” Dunne said.

  “Steel beach?” Garroway asked. “How do you mean?”

  “Navy and Marine personnel on big, oceangoing ships,” Dunne replied. “Like aircraft carriers, y’know? They’d have some time off, they’d go out and sun themselves on the deck, maybe smuggle in some liquid contraband.” He raised a can of beer in explanation. “They called it a steel beach ’cause all there was to lie on was steel.”

  “We’re not on a ship, Sarge,” Vinita pointed out.

  “Sure, Kat. But remember your basic Marine terminology. It’s a ‘hatch,’ not a ‘door,’ a ‘ladder,’ not stairs. Even ashore.” He waved the beer can to take in the Legation compound, the alien green sky, the distant purple jungle, the untidy sprawl of New Sumer. “We’re ashore. We treat the place like a ship, anyway. Hence…‘steel beach.’”

  “With not a single bit of steel in sight,” Womicki said, looking around at the flat expanse of the pyramid’s top. “Makes as much sense as anything in the Corps.”

  “Fuckin’-A!” Dunne exclaimed. He drained the last of the beer, then smashed the can against his forehead, crumpling it flat. A small pile of flat, crumpled disks on the ground in front of them paid mute testimony to beverages already consumed.

  Garroway still wasn’t sure how they’d managed it. Dunne claimed that he and Honey Deere had smuggled a couple of cases of brew onto a supply pallet destined for the Regulus before their departure from Earth. Those cases had been hidden inside supply containers marked “dietary supplements” and seemed to have survived the four-years-subjective voyage in reasonable taste. Beer smuggling was by now a grand tradition in the spacefaring Corps. Old-timers liked to regale newbies with the exploits of a Marine unit at Cydonia seventy years ago. Some of old Sands of Mars Garroway’s Marines, it seemed, had managed to smuggle a few cases of beer to Mars. Garroway’s famous ancestor had appropriated it and turned it into makeshift chemical weaponry against the occupying UN forces.

  Modern Marines delighted in finding new and original means of smuggling beer to remote duty stations, an activity still listed as very much a crash-and-burn in both Navy and Marine Corps regulations. If they were caught, the standard excuse was, “We were just following Corps tradition, sir!”

  Sometimes it even worked.

  Garroway took a sip from his can, grimacing. He didn’t really like the taste of the stuff but didn’t want to admit it to the others. Besides, it was a kind of honor, a right of passage, even, to be included in this simple Corps ritual.

  And it was a ritual, one every bit as meaningful and as sacred as anything Garroway had performed as a Wiccan. With each can opened and held toward that glorious sky, the name of another fallen comrade was toasted. Dunne had toasted Valdez and Deere, and Kat Vinita had remembered Chuck Cawley and Tom Pressley. Womicki toasted Brandt and Foster, while Garroway saluted his two comrades from boot camp, Hollingwood and Garvey.

  The four of them were seated on the pavement atop the Pyramid of the Eye, in armor because they were on call, but with gloves and helmets off. They’d been reorganized once again into a new unit—First Platoon, Alfa Company—all from veterans of the fight for Objective Suribachi three weeks before.

  Members of the company had taken to calling themselves the “Pyramidiots,” and the name had stuck.

  Garroway turned his head, studying the darkening panorama around them as the eclipse slowly deepened. He thought-clicked his visual center, opening his nano-enhanced irises wider to suck in more light. Other members of the company stood guard around the top of the pyramid or lounged in front of the nanocrete dome erected beside the crater as a firebase HQ. The American flag fluttered from a much taller mast now, above the HQ building. Native workers, dumu-gir from the free village of Ha-a-dru-dir, continued to clear the crater of loose stone and rubble under Marine engineer supervision. In the distance, a pair of Wasps circled high above New Sumer on ever-vigilant patrol.

  Somehow, he managed to gulp down the last of his beer and hand the empty across to Dunne.

  “Ooh-rah!” Dunne said, and crumpled the can flat.

  “Your turn for a toast, Gare,” Womicki told him, handing him another can from the opened supplement container.

  “What?” He almost didn’t recognize his Corps handle. “Gare Garroway” wasn’t all that inspired, but for him it was a final break from his old civilian identity as “John,” a name he hadn’t used, it seemed, in centuries.

  “Your turn. Who’s next?”

  Shit, who was left? They’d toasted all of the fallen in the old assault force squad. And there were so many more…Marine men and women he’d never gotten to know but who’d fought and died for this small and distant patch of alien soil. “I think you’re just trying to get me drunk,” he told them.

  “Of course,” Dunne replied, grinning. “That’s part of the ceremony.”

  “Well…” He thought for a moment, then popped the tab and raised the can. “To fallen comrades, past and future,” he said. “And to the cease-fire. Long may it hold!”

  “Amen!” Womicki called.

  “Most righteous,” Dunne added, raising a new can of his own. “Ooh-rah!”

  They chugged the toast. Dunne accepted Garroway’s empty can and smashed it against his forehead.

  “How do you do that?” Vinita asked.

  Dunne grinned. “Got an implant here,” he said, running a hand across his forehead. “Solid nanochelated carbotitanium replacing a chunk of my skull. From a little present I picked up in Colombia, y’know?” He knocked his forehead with a fist. “Hard head.”

  “Figures,” Womicki said. “He is a Marine, after all.”

  The sky was rapidly darkening as the Llalande sun settled behind Marduk in its once-in-six-days eclipse, scattering brilliant sunset colors halfway around the gas giant’s full-circle horizon. Theoretically, this was the third eclipse since their landing twenty-one days ago, but thick clouds and rain had blocked both of the others.

  Yeah, like they said. If you didn’t like the weather on Ishtar, just wait a minute.

  The cease-fire still seemed too good to be true. Three shipboard days after the fighting on Suribachi, however, Sumerian-speaking Marines from the old Legation expedition had met with a delegation of Ahannu leaders, a meeting arranged by the Frog they’d captured in the Chamber of the Eye. They said his name was Tu-Kur-La.

  According to Tu-Kur-La, the Ahannu had been terribly hurt by their failed assault on the pyramid, a battle that had cost the Marines fifty-one dead and thirty-eight wounded, including the casualties in the compound fighting as well as those at the top. Exact Ahannu casualties were unknown but were believed to exceed twelve hundred Ahannu god-warriors, seven hundred Sag-ura, and nearly two hundred of their specially bred kur-gal-gub, the “mountain-great-warriors” the Marines called “trolls.”

  Twenty-one hundred dead Ishtarans at least; the full number might never be known, since so many bodies had been utterly destroyed in the fighting. After the first arranged truce meeting ten days ago, a vast panoply of Ahannu warriors had appeared north of the Legation compound, holding high a forest of urin battle standards and keening in their strange, rasping voices. The Marines learned later that the Ahannu song had bestowed an honor of their own upon the men and women of 1 MIEU, as well as a new name.

  They called the Marines nir-gál-mè-a, which according to Aiken and the other old Ishtar hands, meant “respected in battle.” The Fighting 44th had immediately adapted the name to its own use—the Nergal May-I, or Nergs for short.

 
Garroway smiled at that. The Corps carried a number of nicknames handed to it over the centuries. Leathernecks, for the stiff collars worn by Marines in the nineteenth century, supposedly to protect the throat from sword cuts but actually a means of making recruits stand up straight. Jarheads, a pejorative for the “high-and-tight” haircuts of the twentieth century. Devil Dogs, from Teufil Hundin, a name bestowed on them by their German enemies after the Battle of the Marne, originally as an insult, since hundin meant “bitch,” but ever after one of the proudest of the Corps’ noms de guerre.

  And now they were Nergs.

  The Marines had made their mark, it seemed, out here among the stars. The folks back home would never understand, but that didn’t seem to matter anymore.

  The folks back home. Garroway swallowed and bit back the stinging in his throat and eyes. Two days after the fight on Suribachi, communications had at last been established with Earth through the FTL screen in the Chamber of the Eye. There’d been all kinds of scuttlebutt flying through the MIEU about mysterious delays or problems in opening the channel, but the link had been established at last, with an instantaneous two-way connection with Mars, and an added twenty minutes for the Mars-to-Earth link one-way. Regular calls for the Marines hadn’t been authorized yet, but a few familygrams and special messages had been routed through from Quantico.

  And one of them had been a ’gram for Lance Corporal John Garroway, from his aunt in San Diego. His mother was dead.

  He was still having trouble wrapping his mind around that one. According to the brief message, limited to a barren and emotionless twenty-five words or fewer, she’d been found dead a year after the Derna had boosted out of Earth orbit. The death was listed as accidental, of course…a fall down the steps in front of the Esteban home.

  Garroway didn’t believe that for a moment. He knew she’d gone back to Esteban before he was shipped up to the Derna. He’d dreaded this very possibility, that she would go back to that abusive bastard one time too many….

  There wasn’t a lot he could do now, except grieve. His mother had died nine years ago, while he’d still been asleep in cybehibe on board the Derna, outbound from Earth. As for his father, well, apparently there wasn’t much news. According to CNN briefs relayed over the net from home, the abortive Aztlan Antistatehood Insurrection of 2042 had driven the ringleaders into hiding.