Star Corps (31 page)

“PanTerra organized the international follow-up expedition, Colonel, and to win the cooperation of so many foreign governments, they had to make certain…concessions. Among those was to choose as supreme commander for the MIEU, a man all could agree on. General King has had a great deal of experience working in diplomatic circles with various of the other governments, including Brazil and the Kingdom of Allah. He was the best compromise candidate among available senior Marine officers.”

“I see.” Ramsey hadn't expected a straight answer from the man. “Then if he's that experienced, why—”

“The man has family,” Norris said. “Two husbands, a wife, and two kids. He is a deliberate exception to the military's famsit rules.”

Which explained a lot. There wouldn't be many senior officers available who were domestically unattached.

“He must have volunteered, surely,” Hanson said. Exceptions could always be made in any set of regulations.

“Sure. And to get him, PanTerra is providing very well indeed for the general and for the members of his immediate family—including anagathic treatments that will keep them in step with him over the course of a twenty-year-objective mission. Jesus, you know how expensive
those
are. Just the same, a man isn't as trustworthy out here if he's separated from a family.”

“General King is a Marine,” Ramsey said. “He'll do what has to be done.”

Ramsey cared little for General King and hadn't been impressed with the man so far. He'd never expected to find himself defending King to anyone else.

But Norris was the outsider here. The Marines did not abandon their own.

Chamber of Seeing
Deeps of An-Kur
Eleventh Period of Dawn

The Zu-Din gave the command:
Attack!

God-warriors spilled from narrow access passageways into the main caverns, shrieking battletruth and grappling with the enemy. The enemy warriors, three of them protected by layers of impossibly tough armor, did not go under with the first onslaught, but the sheer ferocity of the assault knocked them back and swept them along, like wood chips on a flood.

Sag-ura
gudibir
, human slave-warriors, joined the attack this time, rushing forward with shrill yells, brandishing their weapons, and the Godmind noticed an interesting fact. The enemy warriors
hesitated
at the sight of members of their own species, hesitated and held their fire until the advancing mass was almost upon them.

The enemy opened fire at the last possible moment, their
flame-weapons ripping through the packed mass of lightly armored or naked slave-warriors to hideous, shrieking effect. And then the defenders were slammed back against the cavern wall. Through the artificial senses of the Abzu-il, the Godmind watched and listened as the three became two…then one. Then the enemy warriors were dead; a human slave danced in the passageway, holding high a bloody head still encased in an armored helmet.

Another held the relay, a small, silver canister resting on tripod legs on the floor of the passageway.

The Godmind communicated its orders, and the warriors returned to the side passages. In moments, as the relay was carried deeper into the mountain, the transmission between the nuclear device and the enemy forces outside was severed.

There'd been a possibility, of course, that loss of signal would trigger the device, but the Godmind felt secure in probabilities. Military devices would be designed to allow for power failures or equipment breakage. With a weapon as powerful as the nuclear device left in An-Kur's control center, the Enemy would want positive control, the ability to trigger the thing deliberately rather than risk an accident with potentially devastating consequences.

It had a great deal of experience with humans and human reactions from which to draw.

The Enemy would be reacting to the Godmind's assault very swiftly now, however. Sensors buried in the surface of the mountain's peak scanned the sky, watching for the spacecraft in orbit. The calculations would have to be extraordinarily precise, with no room for error….

The mountain's sensors picked up the heat and radar signatures of a number of spacecraft coming in from the east…but these were too small and too fast to be the primary targets. Another invasion wave, then, landing craft bearing more ground troops. The Godmind overrode the simple and somewhat limited artificial intelligence of the Kur-Urudug. Wait…wait…there! Rising now above the
eastern horizon…the signatures of three huge, orbiting spacecraft.

The Godmind targeted the lead vessel, as the power within An-Kur's deep core swiftly mounted.

ARLT Command Section, Dragon
One
Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar
2354 hours ST

They'd underestimated the Ahannu, and badly…that, or the Marine ARLT had just had its legs cut out from under it by one hell of a coincidence. And in Captain Warhurst's experience, coincidence was nothing more than a myth used to explain relationships that no one understood.

He was kicking himself mentally for not having followed his first impulse and deploying a sizable contingent of Marines to guard the nuclear warhead in the alien control center. General King's orders had been specific, though, and he wouldn't have been able to leave troops in the mountain's control center without risking direct insubordination.

But damn it, if he'd even left a ready-strike team in place within easy reach of the nuke, just in case something went wrong…

And things certainly were wrong now, with the telltale magnetic flux within the mountain building, the relay in Ahannu hands, and all contact with the nuclear weapon lost. Someone with the appropriate trigger codes would have to go inside the mountain again to get within range of the weapon in order to set it off. That meant Lieutenant Kerns, with a fire team in support.

If
that was the order to come through from orbit. The trouble was, he'd put through an up-link call to either Colonel Ramsey or General King, but so far neither had responded.
The suddenness of the renewed attack had caught everyone off balance.

If the order didn't come through…would he be able to blow that mountain anyway? Against orders? He might have to in order to save the
Derna
.

ARLT Section Dragon Three
Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar
2354 hours ST

The alarm in Garroway's head brought him to full alertness, and he sat upright so sharply his head struck a projecting ledge on the bulkhead beside him.

He'd been trying to get some shut-eye, as Valdez had ordered, lying on a sleeping bag unrolled on the deck inside the Dragon Three LM. A command to his implant had begun to close down the waking portions of his brain, leaving him in a comfortable state of half-awareness when the alert came in.

Rubbing his head, he grabbed his helmet, gloves, and rifle and stumbled from the lander, along with several other Marines who'd been similarly awakened. “What the hell?” Corporal Womicki said. “I can't link through!”

Garroway was trying to download an AI update through his link as well, and also without success. He kept getting the tone indicating a system error. The local node, however, was online, providing the disturbing news that a magnetic field was building inside the mountain's core.

The bastards were getting ready to fire that god-awful gun again.

He saw Valdez, Lieutenant Kerns, and a handful of other Marines running across the LZ toward the gateway to the mountain. “Gunny!” he called out. “Where do we go?”

Valdez turned and looked at him, her face pale and sharp-edged. “Stay here, Private. You're not trained for this.”

Trained for what?
“I can learn, Gunny. Where do you want me?”

“Stay here! That's an order!” And she was gone, jogging after Lieutenant Kerns.

Combat Information Center
IST
Derna,
in Ishtar orbit
2358 hours ST

The net had jammed.

It hadn't gone down—thank all the gods of technology for that—but data could only flow from node to node through the system so fast, and when the data packets began queuing up, taking their turn in line, bottlenecks were sure to form.

Extremely tight, extremely
dangerous
bottlenecks.

A frequent problem in the early days of the Internet was narrow bandwidth, with too-small channels creating a traffic jam of data. Something of the sort was happening now, as more and more demands were placed on the transmission carriers, data-routing AIs, and relay nodes, both those on board the starships and those already on the planet.

The
Algol
had already launched two of the five communications satellites that would provide for full-time data access, but the net so far was operating only at about forty percent of full efficiency, with most of the storage, switching, and retrieval functions handled by Cassius on board the
Derna
. The streams of broadband data uploading continually to
Derna
's CIC had already severely taxed the system.

Now, as the alert went out, the system slowed. First to be cut out were the low-ranking data requests—Marines on the ground, mostly, querying the system to see what was going on. As additional ground sensors kicked in to monitor events inside An-Kur, though, the communications blackout spread to upper echelons as well. Cassius was working to pull the system back into balance, but the effort would take a minute or two more yet….

Chamber of Seeing
Deeps of An-Kur
Eleventh Period of Dawn

The Godmind had a firm target lock.
Fire!

The magnetic flux surged, sparking violet lightnings within the mountain core. A tiny sliver of rock, accelerated to nearly the speed of light, was transformed into a bolt of high-energy plasma flicking up the mountain's throat in a tiny instant of time, deflected at the peak by powerful directional fields and sent searing through tortured atmosphere toward the target.

A hit!

Combat Information Center
IST
Derna,
in Ishtar orbit
2359 hours ST

Ramsey was still trying to open the data-stream channel between
Derna
and the LZ when the bolt flashed clear of Ishtar's atmosphere and struck the
Algol,
in orbit less than fifty kilometers ahead of the
Derna
and the
Regulus
. In the noumenon, he could see the
Algol
as a bright star adrift above the slow-turning expanse of gold and violet clouds that was Ishtar's curved horizon, saw the clouds suddenly burn blue-white…and in the same instant the star marking the transport flared to nova brightness.

Another instant passed…and then
Derna
's AI sounded a ship alarm within the noumenon. “Debris on collision course. Debris on—”

Something struck the
Derna
, punching through the reaction mass tank like a bullet through cardboard. The shock sent the huge vessel into a tumbling roll.

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?

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.