Star Corps (10 page)

And there
was
a lot, but with just twenty minutes pre
cisely in which to eat it. Chipped beef piled over toast, scrambled eggs, salad—a
salad
for breakfast!—orange juice, fresh oranges…

But as he wolfed down the meal, he was already wondering if he'd made a terrible, terrible mistake….

21
JUNE
2138

Building 12, Xenocultural Mission
Terran Legation Compound
New Sumer
Ishtar, Llalande 21185 IID
27:13 hours Local Time

“Come
on
, Moore! They're coming over the north wall!”

Dr. Nichole Moore kept retrieving her data mems, pulling double handfuls of the domino-sized crystalline chips from the lab's storage compartment and stuffing them into the Marine seabag Sergeant Aiken had given her.

“I'm almost done,” she replied.

Carleton, the senior PanTerran representative, pounded on a desktop with a clenched fist. “Damn it, they'll be here any minute!
Forget
that crap!”

She whirled on him, eyes blazing. “This is five years of research, Carleton!” she yelled. “Five years of my
life!
I'm not leaving it to be burned!”

“Stay then!” Carleton snapped, and vanished into the passageway outside. She could hear the wail of the assembly siren over in the Marine compound. She knew Carleton was right. There wasn't much time.

But she had to save her records. Five Terran years of patient work with the An and their human pets. She raked the last of the mems into the bag, added her personal recorder and the desktop computer, which still had several thousand
photographs and several megabytes of notes that hadn't been mem-stored yet, then sealed the opening.

The Marine seabag had little in common with the all-purpose stowage bags of centuries past. It was more like a square satchel, but with smartthreads woven into the fabric. A couple of tugs on the carry straps unfolded it into a backpack; as she pushed her arms through the straps and hoisted it into place, she heard the whine of servos adjusting the balance on her back and felt the grip of shoulder distributors snugging down over her shoulders. She had nearly thirty kilos of notes, mems, and electronic gear inside, and lugging it out of the compound would have been a real bitch without the technic assist.

Nichole took a last look around her office, feeling the tug of regret. Five years…

Damn
Geremelet and his Destiny Faction anyhow…and damn the High Emperor for trying to appease them, and damn the Trade Mission for interfering with the millennia-old balance of social forces on this world, and damn the Humankind Party on Earth for stirring things up, and, yes, damn herself and her xenocultural team for digging into questions that perhaps should not have been uncovered. Of
course
slavery was immoral, unjust, and obscenely wrong…but when the slaves were actually happy with their lot, had been bred to be happy for generation upon untold generation…

Satisfied at last that she'd managed to grab the most critical of her research data, she accessed her neurimplants, logging onto the Legation network one last time. The main network AI was still offline, though, and all she could see within her electronically enhanced mind's eye was the same warning that had been up and broadcasting for the past twenty hours—all civilian personnel were to gather a minimum of necessary belongings and report to the Pyramid of the Eye for evacuation. The base's two ground-to-orbit transports had been shuttling up and down constantly for the past twelve hours or so, hauling people up to the relative
safety of the
Emissary
, in Ishtar orbit. The evacuation was perhaps half complete. According to the posting on the net-cast, another transport would be lifting within forty minutes.

And she would be on it. She took a last look around the room, then, on impulse, used a stylus to scrawl a brief message on a notebook, leaving it on a countertop. Someday she might be able to return. More likely, though, it would be someone else, someone trying to figure out what had gone wrong here. The message might help. She hurried out into the hallway, palm-locking the door behind her.
As if I'll be back to work here at the next shift,
she thought, bitter.

Building 12 was a gray, ground-extruded nanocrete dome near the east side of the XC Mission quarter, ugly as sin, as her grandmother back in Michigan used to say, but it had been home and office for five Terran Standard years. She emerged from light and air-conditioned coolness on the elevated walkway halfway up the side of the curved wall, plunging into the steamy heat outside.

Spread out below her within the tight perimeter of the Legation walls, the embassy compound was submerged in murky red twilight, with only the bright gleam of a handful of lights in scattered windows to show where Earthers had left them burning after leaving for the evacuation pickup. Gunfire crackled and snapped from the north, where a company of Marines was trying to hold off the incoming tidal flood of Anu god-warriors and their Sag-ura slaves. Smoke stained the red sky at a dozen different points—most of them marking burning 'villes outside the wall, but a few were inside, set by fanatics within the embassy compound or by firebombs lobbed over the wall.

It was late morning—not that the Terran Legation staff ever paid much attention to local time. Ishtar circled giant Marduk in 133 hours, which meant that its day-night cycle was five and a half Earth days long. The Legation's work and rest periods were based on a standard twenty-four-hour cycle matched to Greenwich Mean Time on distant Earth, a necessary concession to the biological needs of a much dif
ferent world's evolution. In any case, the light from the primary, red-dwarf Llalande 21185, was so wan that the landscape always seemed to be shrouded in twilight, even at high noon.

At the moment, the sun was a red-ember pinpoint gleaming high in the eastern sky, well above the haze-shrouded Ahtun Mountains, too tiny and too distant to lend Ishtar more than a trickle of heat. In the west, above the black cone of God Mountain, Marduk hung against the deep green and purple sky, a baleful scarlet eye poised to fall upon the exotically lush landscape of Ishtar and crush it. Though gibbous and waning now, the sliver of Marduk's night side visible at the moment glowed almost as brightly as the sunlit side. Stirred and stressed by the constant gravitational tug-of-war with its largest satellite, the gas giant radiated far more heat than it received from its star, heat sufficient to warm its Earth-sized satellite to tropical temperatures on the side forever facing Marduk in tide-locked captivity.

Nichole spared only a moment for the red-gloom beauty of the landscape. The gunfire in the north was growing steadily in intensity, and she could see the black sprawl of Geremelet's hordes surging through the shattered main gate. A cluster of rockets rose from the jungle beyond, trailing orange flame. The flames winked out; moments later, a scattering of flashes popped and strobed across the northern quarter of the compound, followed seconds later by the dull thud of the explosions. The Marines wouldn't be able to hold that army of Ahannu fanatics back much longer.

A Marine Wasp droned overhead, its insectlike body painted in stripes of yellow and dark blue-black. It angled across the compound toward the north, and she guessed that it was searching for the launch site of those rockets.

Shouldering her pack, she moved quickly down the stairway curving along the wall of Building 12. The streets of the city were almost lost in the near-darkness. Not for the first time, she wished she had microimplant optics like the
Marines used, to help her pick her way through the shadows. Normally, the Legation's streets and walkways were brilliantly lit, but the power had failed hours before and the streetlights were out. The ground was littered with debris—scattered chunks of rock and broken nanocrete from the Ahannu rocket barrages—and twice she nearly stumbled with her heavy load.

“Halt! Who's there?” a voice demanded from the shadows to her left.

“I'm Dr. Moore,” she said. “Xeno-C Mission.”

A figure stepped forward from the shadows, man-shaped but bulkier, heavier, and clad in black military armor. Gauntlets grasped a massive laser rifle, which was connected to the armor's backpack by a trio of thick cables. The armor was dented and scarred in several places. The name
AIKEN, G
. was stenciled across the top of the helmet, above where the visor would have been had it had one, and a master sergeant's insignia decorated the upper left arm, painted in dark gray against the darker black of the armor.

“Hey, Doc,” Aiken said. His voice, amplified through the suit's speaker system, echoed off nearby walls. “I hoped that was you. Lemme give you a hand.”

She pulled back. “I…I can manage just fine, Master Sergeant.”

“Sure you can.” The speaker's volume was lower now. “But I can do it faster.” He reached out and lifted the pack from her shoulders as lightly as if it were empty. “We've got to hustle.”

“What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you guys were holding the north wall.”

“That's Company G. Companies C and E are checking to make sure all the civilians get out. And we're late for rendezvous with our transport. Anyone else back there?”

She knew he meant the mission and shook her head. “I don't think so.”

The armored figure seemed to be listening or hesitat
ing…and then she realized Aiken was talking to someone else on his radio. “Okay. The rest of my team will go through the mission, just to make sure. You come with me.”

He turned and strode down the rubble-littered street without looking back to see if she was following. She hesitated…but then realized he had all of her notes and records. She had to follow to keep her claim to them.
Damn
him.

Nichole didn't like the Marines, didn't like their presence here on Ishtar. She felt that militarism had no place on an alien world, had no place at all for a first contact with a sentient alien species. As far as she was concerned, the Marine contingent accompanying the science and diplomatic missions only increased the tension and mistrust between the humans on the one hand and the Ahannu on the other.

Even so, she had to admit that when things turned sour with the locals, the Marines were all that had stood between members of the civilian missions and death. She couldn't help wondering, though, if things would have been different had there been no military to provoke Geremelet and his fanatics in the first place.

Well, the Marines were here, and the damage done. She wondered how things could be patched up with the locals, wondered if there was any way, now, to find a common ground with them. Goddess! Between Geremelet here and the Humankind Party back on Earth…

Another Ahannu rocket banged into the roof of a compound building nearby, sending up a shower of swirling red sparks. Ahannu technology was such a bizarre mix of the antiquated and the advanced. Some few among their elite warrior units carried weapons more advanced than anything in the Terran arsenal…and yet they used gunpowder rockets, primitive firearms, swords, and
chakhul
—a kind of pike or spear with a long and wickedly curved blade. The high-tech stuff was believed to be working artifacts left over from the Ahannu glory days of ten thousand years before—
god weapons
, the Ishtaran natives called them. Ishtar was all that was left of a spacefaring empire that once had spanned at
least a dozen worlds, including ancient Earth. The Ahannu and the humans they'd brought with them from Earth had survived the collapse of their civilization, which continued only here in sharply abbreviated and primitive form.

Current xenoarcheological thought was sharply divided at the moment between two mutually opposing theories. Traditional dogma held that the Ahannu Empire had been utterly destroyed ten thousand years ago by the enigmatic race known as the Hunters of the Dawn, that somehow the Hunters had overlooked this oddball world, largest moon of a gas giant in a red dwarf star system.

Nichole preferred the newer, more daring theory, advanced by Dr. Hayakawa and others. It posited that the Hunters of the Dawn were long dead when the Ahannu first reached Earth sometime toward the end of the last ice age. The Hunters had been a predatory species ranging this part of the galaxy perhaps half a million years ago, at the time when an earlier cycle of galactic civilization called the Builders had been terraforming Mars and tinkering with what would become the human genome. They and their technology, represented by the immense artifact discovered almost eighty years ago on one of Jupiter's moons, had destroyed a thriving interstellar community encompassing some hundreds of races scattered throughout this region of space. The Hayakawa Solution held that the Ahannu had been destroyed in a war with themselves, a civil war that devastated all but one of their handful of worlds—Ishtar. It was much easier to accept that idea than the notion that any technic species could have survived—and still be wiping out potential competitors—in nearly historical times.

It was also a bit more comforting. Any killer species like the near-mythical Hunters that could survive half a million years would have godlike powers by now…and it was arrogant presumption to assume they'd lasted long enough to destroy the Ahannu Empire, then conveniently faded into extinction. No, the Hunters
must
have destroyed themselves, she believed, or simply retired from the galactic stage at
some point in the distant past, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Not that any of that was of any great importance now, she thought, as another rocket exploded overhead, and bits of red-glowing, smoking shrapnel clinked and chattered on the pavement. “You okay, Doc?” Aiken asked her.

She nodded, then realized he couldn't see her with his back to her. “Yes,” she said. “Homemade rockets. Primitive stuff.”

“It's still deadly enough,” he replied. “Especially if you're not wearing armor. C'mon. Down this way.”

He led her sharply right, into the mouth of a narrow alley between a storehouse and Building 4, the Mission Recreational Center. He was moving at a jog that ate up the ground, and she found herself having to run all out to keep up with him.
Damn, I'm not used to this
, she thought.
Too much sitting around in the office trading gossip and eating native sholats.
She was sweating heavily in the humid heat, and her jumpsuit was rapidly soaking through.