Star Strike
Corporal Allison and Sergeant Chu were already on board the tactical carrier, grappled to the aircraft’s other legs and retracted up into the partial shelter of the machine’s body. The rubble dropped away as the vehicle swiftly ascended, rotating and banking toward the distant tower.
The helplessness and the sense of being exposed were sharper now than during the landing craft descent earlier. The gun was sharply maneuverable, however, and the artificial intelligence piloting it possessed inhumanly fast reflexes. It was easier on the stomach not to watch. Ramsey closed his eyes and merged with the assault team gestalt, watching again from the gods’ perspective as four green icons representing the fast-moving Specter guns converged on the objective.
All four aircraft street-skimmed in toward the tower, zig-zagging all the way to take every possible advantage of buildings, trees, and rubble. Hivel rounds snapped past the flier, and once Ramsey felt the solid shock of a heavy detonation close by. His helmet readout warned of a gamma pulse; someone was firing antimatter rounds at them. He felt another thump as the gun’s plasma weapon fired, knocking down an incoming rocket that had targeted them.
He saw a sudden flare as one of the incoming Specter guns took a direct hit despite its evasive maneuvering. According to his link, both Daley and Hearst jumped clear as the aircraft crumpled and slammed into the rubble-clogged street below.
The remaining three tactical carriers reached the base of the skyscraper at the same instant, changing vectors to travel straight up the sides of the tower in a stomach-wrenching maneuver that was only partly eased by the inertial dampers in Ramsey’s armor.
Three seconds, the pilot AI whispered in his mind, and he opened his eyes in time to see of blur of ferrocrete and structural ornamentation flashing past.
Two seconds … one second …
Another gut-twisting shift in vector, and the Specter gun slipped over the rampart encircling the top of the tower. A mental command, and he was released from the craft’s unfolding leg, dropping onto the roof, striking, rolling, coming up with his mag-pulse rifle raised, his helmet electronics already tracking the nearest threat. The weapon was set to AI control, and he let his suit guide him; the weapon triggered as soon as it had a solid targeting lock.
The first Muzzie rifleman went down, his armor hammered by a rapid-fire barrage of magnetic pulses. The top of the building became a bewildering and rapidly unfolding blur of motion and weapons fire, as two of the other Specter guns came up over the ramparts and released their payloads of Marines.
The Specter gun carrying Howell, Beck, and Santiago took a direct hit as it hovered above the rampart, an antimatter blast flashing with deadly brilliance at the edge of the tower. Ramsey overrode his weapon control and shifted aim to the Muzzie gunner—a low threat because he was facing away from Ramsey as he manhandled the massive A.M. accelerator for a second shot, but he was trying to target the three Marines on that side of the tower as they fell from the burning transport. Ramsey triggered his weapon, and the enemy soldier folded backward around the kinetic impulse slamming into his spine, his weapon cartwheeling across the roof with the impact.
A warning went off in his mind; gunners were targeting him. He cut in his jumpjets and sailed across the roof, pivoting in midair to target one of the Muzzie gunners who was standing up behind a waist-high ferrocrete barrier, tracking Ramsey as he sailed through the air.
The stricken Specter gun slammed into the edge of the tower, metal burning furiously, catching and holding for a moment before rocking back and off the roof, crashing to the street eighty-four-stories below. The remaining two guns hovered above opposite sides of the building, ninety meters apart, coordinating their plasma weaponry with the fire from the eight Marines now fanning out across the roof.
A transparent wall overlooked the rooftop, a penthouse or upper story of some sort, enveloped in hanging plants, and with a sunken interior that formed a well-protected redoubt. The transparency—plastic and shatterproof—melted as someone inside detonated a thermal charge. An instant later, a swarm of APerMs emerged and arced into the sky before descending on hissing contrails—antipersonnel missiles, each the size of a man’s forefinger, each with an on-board AI smart enough to identify an enemy’s armor signature and home on it relentlessly, each with a dust-speck’s worth of antimatter in magnetic containment. Ramsey’s armor fired a countermeasures charge, and flashes of actinic brilliance from the hovering guns picked individual missiles out of the air with hivel kinetic-kill rounds each the size of a grain of sand. The sky turned to white fire. …
At first he thought the threat had been neutralized, and he started moving forward once more. In the next instant, his helmet display flashed warning; there were still APerMs in the air.
He triggered another countermeasure burst … but it was too little, too late, and he couldn’t get them all. APerMs slashed into Howell and Beck, who was bounding alongside her, blasting gouts of molten laminate from their armor, knocking the two Marines backward.
“Thea!” Ramsey screamed, and then he was standing twenty meters from the open penthouse, hosing the low, cavern-like opening in front of him with his flamer. One of the hovering Specter guns with a good line of sight added lance after flaring lance of plasma energy to his fire; Ramsey could see figures writhing and incinerating within the flames.
Turning, he bounded across the rooftop to the two fallen Marines. Corporal Gerry Beck was dead, his helmet punctured, then exploded from within. There was a lot of blood, and only smoking, blackened shards remained of helmet and skull.
Staff Sergeant Thea Howell, however, was still alive. The AP round had struck her in the chest, shattering ribs, rupturing a lung, flooding her torso with hard radiation, but her diagnostic feed showed she was still alive as her armor struggled to control the damage. She was already deep in medical support stasis.
Thea. …
Crouching above her body, he turned his fire against a last remaining clump of Muzzie gunners behind a ferrocrete wall. One of the Specter guns burned down the last of them, and the firefight came to an abrupt end.
But Ramsey continued to hold the broken body of Thea Howell, letting his own armor make automatic feed connections and linkages so that he could bolster her suit’s damaged support systems.
Besides being a fellow Marine and the platoon’s senior NCO, Thea was an old friend, and frequently his lover.
She was family.
And he didn’t want to see her die. …
USMC Recruit Training Center
Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars
1045/24:20 local time, 2003 hrs GMT
Garroway felt … alone. Alone and utterly empty.
And he couldn’t even mind-click himself a serotonin jolt to lift the settling black mist of depression … or ask Aide for help.
“I know you’re all feeling a bit low right now,” Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst said, smiling. “But I have just the ticket! We’re going to run. Comp’ney, lef’ face! For’ard harch! Double time, harch! …”
Garroway still felt dazed and lost. After his ten-minute session with the Navy corpsmen in the sickbay, he’d been led back out into the weak sunshine of the Martian morning and marched to chow.
He’d barely tasted the food, and ate it automatically. After that there’d been an indoctrination class, with an assistant DI lecturing the company on Corps tradition, and on what it meant to be a Marine.
And now, they were out in the cold once more, running. Who the hell was he trying to kid? His first six hours in the Corps, and already he wanted to quit.
Something, though, was keeping him going … one tired foot after the other.
Aiden Garroway had been born and raised in the 7-Ring orbital complex in Earth orbit, a son of an extended line marriage, the Giangrecos; on his Naming Day, he’d taken his name from Estelle Garroway, the woman who’d also passed on to him his fascination with the Corps.
It had been Estelle who’d told him about other Garroways who’d been Marines. There was one, a real character who’d fought in the UN War of the mid-twenty-first century, who was still remembered in Marine histories. “Sands of Mars Garroway,” he was known as, and he’d led a grueling march up the Vallis Marineris only a couple of thousand kilometers from this spot to attack a French invasion force.
And later there’d been John Garroway, a gunnery sergeant who’d made first contact with the N’mah, an alien civilization at the Sirius Stargate a century later … and General Clinton Vincent Garroway who’d fought and won the critical Battle of Night’s Edge against the Xul in 2323. And other Garroways had served in the Corps with distinction ever since, first in the old United States Marines, then, with the gradual assimilation of the old U.S. into the United Star Commonwealth, in the old Corps’ modern successor, the United Star Marine Corps.
It had been Estelle who’d suggested he join the Corps. She’d known how unhappy he was at home.
Not that home life had been abusive or anything like that. Most of his mothers and fathers were okay, and he deeply loved his birth mother. But with twenty-five spouses and one hundred eighty-three children and grandchildren underfoot, along with numerous aunts, uncles, in-laws, and cousins, the living quarters allotted to the Giangreco line family, though spacious enough, tended to be something of a zoo. There was always someone to put him down, tell him what to do, or shove him out of the way. His job in the aquaculture farms was boring and dead-end. There were no better options for educational downloads until he specialized in a career, and farming water hyacinths for the Ring filtration matrices decidedly was not what he intended to do for the next century or two. Hell, life at home with that many parents and sibs was like life in a barracks, anyway; the Marines seemed a logical option.
The problem was Delano Giangreco, the patriarch of the line, and a committed pacifist. A member of the Reformed Church of the Ascended Pleiadean Masters, he didn’t quite insist that everyone in the family follow Church doctrine regarding diet, luminous tattoos, or ritual nudity, but he did insist on observance of the Masters’ Pax. No mention of war within the house, no downloads touching on military history, battles, or martial arts. Garroway had been twelve before he’d even heard of the Marines, and then only because of the electronic emancipation laws. Once you were twelve and had chosen your name, no one else could censor your thoughts or your data feeds, even for religious purposes.
But those feeds could be monitored by parents or guardians until a person was eighteen, and Garroway had received almost weekly lectures on the evils of war and the falsity of such historical lies as military glory, honor, or duty.
Somehow, though, the lectures had only increased his determination to learn about the Corps, and about all those other Garroways who’d served country and, later, Commonwealth. By the time he was sixteen, he’d picked up some semi-intelligent software, with Aide’s help, which let him partition his personal memory storage, and keep parts of it secret from even the most determined morals-censoring probes.
But the need to do so, to keep his guard up against his senior father’s intrusions, had been a powerful incentive to get himself out of the home and off on his own.
His senior father had disowned him when he learned Garroway had enlisted. No matter. He had a new family now. …
If he could keep up with it. If he quit, if he gave up, he would be right back in the Rings looking for work—probably in one of the environmental control complexes or, possibly, the nanufactories.
Hell, he’d rather run himself to death.
“Christ,” Mustafa Jellal muttered at Garroway’s side. “Is the bastard gonna run us all the way up Olympus?”
The recruit company had been running steadily west for almost an hour, now, slogging uphill almost all the way. Somewhere over the western horizon was the staggering mass of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the Solar System, though its peak was still far over the curve of the Martian horizon. Jellal’s mutterings were purely fictional, of course. The mountain known as Olympus Mons was five hundred kilometers across at the base, and reached twenty-one kilometers above the surrounding terrain; the raw, new, artificially generated atmosphere on Mars was still only a step removed from hard vacuum at the summit.
The Noctis Labyrinthus lay at the eastern rim of the Tharsis Bulge, the vast, volcano-crested dome marking a cataclysmic upwelling of the Martian mantle 3.5 billion years before. The broken, canyon-laced terrain of the Noctis Labyrinthus—the “Labyrinth of Night”—was the result of floods released by the sudden melting of permafrost during that long-ago event. The ground, as a result, was a difficult tangle of rocks and channels that made footing treacherous and the climb exhausting.
“Save your … wind … for running,” Garroway muttered between pants for breath. His side was starting to shriek pain at him, and the thinness of the incompletely terraformed atmosphere was dragging at his lungs and his endurance. How much farther? …
Jellal suddenly fell out of the formation, stepping to the side, hands on his knees as he started to vomit. Garroway maintained his pace, staring straight ahead. Behind him, he could hear one of the assistant DIs talking to Jellal, though he couldn’t hear what was being said. In a moment, the column had continued up a dusty hill covered in patches of gene-tailored dunegrass, and passed well beyond earshot of what was being said.
A minute or two later, however, just over the crest of that hill, Warhurst bellowed for the company to halt. The recruits had become strung out over a half kilometer of ground, and it took minutes more for the trailing runners to catch up with the main body. Garroway stood at attention as more and more recruits fell in to either side, breathing hard, savoring the chance to suck down cold gulps of air and try to will his racing heart to slow.
After a few heavy-breathing minutes, he was glad to see Jellal jog past and take a place farther up the line. He’d met the young Ganymedean Arab at the receiving station up in the Arean Ring. Mustafa Jellal had been friendly, cheerful, and outgoing, and seemed like a good guy. Garroway had started talking with him at chow last night, partly out of a sense of isolation kinship. There was a lot of anti-Muslim sentiment throughout the Sol System right now, had been ever since the outbreak of hostilities against the Theocracy, and during the conversation Garroway had had the sense that Jellal was feeling lonely, a bit cut off.
Garroway had been wrestling with loneliness as well—he wasn’t prepared to call it homesickness just yet—and felt a certain kinship with the dark-skinned Ganymedean recruit. After chow, they’d gone back to the center’s temporary barracks, and there they’d opened a noumenal link and shared bits of home with each other—Jellal taking him on a virtual tour of the Jellal freestead complex at Galileo, on Ganymede, with Jupiter looming banded and vast just above the horizon, and Garroway showing him Sevenring, with Earth huge and blue and white-storm-swirled through the arc of the Main Gallery’s overhead transparency.
He wondered how the guy was feeling now, with his implants switched off.
It was actually a pleasant respite, a chance to simply stand and breathe. Warhurst waited a few minutes more, until the last tail-end Charlie straggled over the top of the ridge and took his place in line.
“Glad you could join us, Dodson,” the DI said with a sour growl to his voice. “Okay, recruits, listen up. A few hours ago, we let you see a Marine action now taking place on Alighan, a few hundred light-years from here. We’ve just received a feed from USMC Homeport. The Marines on Alighan report both the starport and planet’s capital city are secure. Army troops are now deploying to the surface to take over the perimeter.
“Lieutenant General Alexander, in command of the Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Force, has reported that the op went down according to plan and by the book. He singled out the 55th Marine Aerospace Regimental Strikeforce, which spearheaded the assault on the planethead, saying that despite heavy casualties, they distinguished themselves in the very best traditions of the Corps.
“So let’s give a Marine Corps war-yell for the Fighting Fifty-fifth! Ooh-ra!”
“Ooh-ra!” the company yelled back, but the response was ragged and weak, the recruits still panting and out of breath.
“What the hell kind of war-yell is that?” Warhurst demanded. “The Marines fight! They overcome! They improvise! And they fucking kick ass! Let me hear your war-yell!”
“Ooh-ra!”
“A good war-yell focuses your energy and terrifies your opponent! Again!”
“Ooh-ra!”
“Again!”
“Ooh-ra!”
“Oh, I am so terrified.” He sighed, shaking his head. “Children, I can tell we have a lot of work to do. Down on the deck! One hundred push-ups! Now!”
The respite was over.
Green 1, 1–1 Bravo
Meneh Spaceport, Alighan
1158/38:22 hours, local time
An enemy sniper round cracked overhead, striking the side of a building a hundred meters away with a brilliant flash and a puff of white smoke. Ramsey looked up without breaking stride, then glanced at Chu. “Five,” he said. “Four … three … two …”
Before he could reach “one,” a blue-white bar of light flashed out of the heavily overcast sky and speared a building nearly two kilometers away. Six seconds passed … and then another, much louder crack sounded, a thunderous boom with a time delay. By this time, remote drones and battlefield sensors had scattered across some hundreds of square kilometers, and any hostile fire or movement was instantly pinpointed, tracked, and dealt with—usually with a high-velocity KK round from orbit.
“You’re a little off on your timing,” Chu told him. “Count faster.”
“Ah, the guys in orbit just want to make liars out of us.”
“Not guys,” Chu said, correcting him. “AIs. That response was too fast for organics.”
“Even worse. We’re into the game-sim phase of the op, now. No combat. Just electronic gaming. The bad guys poke a nose out of hiding, the AIs in orbit draw a bead and lop it off.”
“You sound bitter.”
“Nah. I just wonder how long it’ll be before they don’t need us down here on the ground at all. Just park a task force in orbit and pop bad guys from space, one nose at a time.”
“Never happen,” Chu said. “Someone’s gotta take and hold the high ground, y’know?”
“That’s what they taught us in boot camp,” Ramsey agreed. “But that doesn’t mean things won’t change.”
Despite the scattered sniper fire, the worst of the fighting appeared to be over, and the Marines of the 55th MARS had emerged victorious. Not that there’d been doubt about the outcome, of course. The enemy’s technological inferiority, tactical and logistical restrictions, surprise, and morale all had been factored into the initial ops planning. The only real question had been what the butcher’s bill would be—how many Marines would be lost in the assault.
The two Marines were walking across the ferrocrete in front of one of the shuttle hangars at the spaceport, still buttoned up in their 660 combat cans. Off in the distance, an enormous APA drifted slowly toward the captured starport, hovering on shrill agravs. Another APA had already touched down; columns of soldiers were still filing down the huge transport’s ramps.
Smoke billowed into the sky from a dozen fires. The damage throughout this area was severe, and they had to be careful picking their way past piles of rubble and smoldering holes melted into the pavement. Nano-D clouds had drifted through on the wind hours before, leaving ragged, half-molten gaps in the curving walls and ceiling, and the shuttle itself had been reduced to junk. A large area of the floor had been cleared away, however, and the structure was being used as a temporary field hospital, a gathering point for casualties awaiting medevac to orbit. Several naval corpsmen were working in the hangar’s shadowed interior, trying to stabilize the more seriously injured.
Staff Sergeant Thea Howell was in there someplace. After that last firefight atop the tower, Ramsey had crouched beside his wounded friend until a combat medevac shuttle had arrived, then helped load her aboard. That had been three hours ago. As soon as Army troops had started filtering in from the starport, Ramsey and the others from 1–1 Bravo had hiked back to the port. Ramsey had located Howell on the platoon Net, and was hoping to see her.
“Ram! Chu! What the hell are you guys doing here?”
The two Marines turned, startled. Captain Baltis had a way of appearing out of nowhere. “Sir!” Ramsey said. Neither he nor Chu saluted, or even came to attention; standard Marine doctrine forbade ritual in the field that might identify officers to enemy snipers. “One of our buddies, sir. Howell. We’d like to know if—”
“Haul your ass clear of here and let the docs do their work,” Baltis snapped. “We’ll post the status of the wounded when we get back to the ship.”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“We will post their status when we get back aboard ship.”
Ramsey sagged. “Aye, aye, sir.”
“Get your asses over to the Fortress. We’ll be disembarking from there.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
The Fortress—what was left of it—loomed above the skyline of Meneh not far from the ocean. It was called El Kalah, which in the creole-Arabic spoken throughout the Theocracy meant “fortress.” Originally a vast dome half a kilometer across bristling with ball turrets, each turret mounting plasma, A.M., or hivel accelerator weapons, El Kalah had been the first target in the pinpoint orbital bombardment of the planet, and there was little left of the complex now save the shattered, jagged fragments of dome enclosing a smoking ruin open to the sky. The weapons turrets had been neutralized in rapid succession, and the remaining complex pounded for hours with everything from antimatter to tunneler rounds to knock out any deeply buried bunkers. Much of what was left had melted in the nano-D clouds.
Close by the Fortress was an area that had been a residential zone, stone and cast ‘crete housing set in orderly rows among parkland and market squares. At least that was how the downloaded maps described the area. Though the region had not been deliberately targeted, it was now an almost homogenous landscape of rubble and partially melted stone.
As they picked their way through the wreckage, Ramsey and Chu came upon a scene of nightmare horror.
Several Marines in armor were clearing rubble, revealing what had been a basement. On the basement floor, dimly visible in smoky light …
“Jesus,” Chu said … and then Ramsey heard retching sounds as the Marine turned away suddenly. Ramsey continued staring into the pit, unable to stop looking even as he realized that he would never be able to purge his brain of the sight. There must have been thirty or forty people huddled in the basement, though the nano-D cloud had made sorting one body from another difficult. The tangled, tortured positions of the bodies suggested they’d known what was happening to them, and that death had not been quick.