Star Corps (24 page)

Another month passed, and giant Marduk loomed huge beyond the flaring drive plumes of the slowing ships. The end-course corrections had in part been designed to bring the vessels in a long, looping passage across Marduk's day side, burning off the last of their excess velocity in an aero-braking maneuver that slung them into a tight, hard loop back into deep space, then back on an infalling path toward Ishtar's night side. The drives switched off and the hab modules extended and began rotating, generating one g of spin gravity in the outer decks.

And on the 24th of June, 2148 by Earth time, but only a bit more than four years after launch by shipboard time, the first of
Derna
's Marine passengers began waking up.

Deck 3, Hab 3, IST
Derna
12 million kilometers from Ishtar
0950 hours ST (Shipboard Time)

Strange thoughts and images flooded Garroway's brain.
I thought we weren't supposed to dream
, he thought, struggling against a thick, hot, and oppressive sense of drowning. He'd been falling…falling…falling among myriad stars toward a dazzling red beacon at the bottom of an infinitely deep well. The beacon was growing brighter with each passing moment, but somehow he never seemed to reach it….

The strangling sensation grew sharper, and then he was awake, coughing and gasping, struggling to clear his lungs of a viscous jelly plugging nose and mouth and windpipe. He gave a final convulsive cough and hit his head against the
roof of his cell. It took him a few moments to connect with where he was. His last memories were of the processing center at Seven Palms, of being led into a cavernous room with perhaps half of his graduating boot company, of being ordered to remove all clothing, jewelry, and personal adornments and log them in with a clerk, of lying down on a thin mattress on a hard, narrow metal slab that made him think about morgues and autopsies. A voice had been talking to him through his implant, having him count backward from one hundred. And then…

His arm burned slightly, and a robotic injector arm withdrew into a side compartment. “Lie still and breathe deeply,” a voice told him. “Do not try to leave your cell. A transition medical team will be with you momentarily.”

He was aware now of more and more sensations, of a growing light in his sleep cell, of the feeling of weakness pervading every muscle of his body, of the warm and wet stickiness of some kind of gel melting beneath his hips and back, of ravenous hunger in the pit of his belly, of the incredible
stink
filling the coffin-sized compartment. Goddess, what kind of hell was he awakening to?

Struggling against a paralyzing weakness, he managed to roll onto his left elbow and found he could breathe a bit more easily than he could while flat on his back. His shrunken stomach rebelled then and he tried to vomit, but his retching produced only more of the all-pervasive jelly, a kind of translucent slime mingled with white foam.

Abruptly, the end of his sleep cell cracked open with a sharp hiss, and his pallet slid partway out into the hab compartment. After the claustrophobic confines of the cell, the open space of the hab deck was dizzying.

Two Marines in utility fatigues, a man and a woman, peered down at him. “How ya doin', Mac?” the woman asked him. “What's your name?”

“Garroway,” he replied automatically. “John. Recruit private, serial number 19283-336—”

“He checks,” the man said. “He's tracking.”

The woman patted his shoulder. “Hang in there, Marine. Welcome to 2148.”

The two moved away then, edging along a walkway hugging the face of the hab module bulkhead to the next open sleep cell in line.

Garroway tried to make sense of the confused thoughts clogging a brain that simply wasn't working yet. What, he wondered, had gone wrong? They'd all been told that there'd been a change of plan, that they were to enter cybehibe while still on the ground. The compartment looked like the interior of a fairly large hab module. Was he still on Earth? Or was he on the transport, and something had gone wrong while putting him under?

No…no, one of the Marines had said something…had it been
Welcome to 2148
?

Realization washed over him, leaving him feeling cold and dizzy. Somehow, in the time between when he'd been counting backward on that pallet in Seven Palms and now, ten years had slipped away. He sagged back down on his pallet, working to assimilate that one small bit of overwhelming information.

Ten years. What had happened during that time to his mother…to Lynnley…to Earth herself?

And did that mean…

Urgently, he thought-clicked, opening his cerebral implant. The link must be working; he'd heard a voice a few moments ago telling him to stay put.

“Link,” he thought. “Query. Navigational data.”

“Please wait,” the voice said in his mind. “The system is busy.”

Well, that made sense. If a whole transport-load of Marines was waking up around him, they must be accessing the onboard AI pretty heavily. Even a shipboard intelligence like the one running the
Derna
would have a bit of trouble processing twelve hundred simultaneous requests for data.

He waited for nearly five minutes by his internal clock before the voice said, “Navigational data now open, Private. This is Cassius speaking.”

“Cassius. Did we make it?” he asked aloud. “Are we at Llalande?”

“The
Derna
crossed the arbitrary astronomical delineation of the Llalande 21185 system 2,200 hours ago,” the voice told him, “and is currently slightly less than twelve million kilometers from the objective world of Ishtar.”

A diagram unfolded within his mind, showing the MIEU's inbound course as a blue line drawing itself across the black backdrop of space. Llalande 21185 was a bright red point of light along the way, and Garroway thought he knew now where the half-forgotten dream imagery of a red beacon had come from. He saw how the
Derna
and her consorts had already looped past giant Marduk and were falling now back toward the miniature solar system that was Marduk and its whirling collection of moons. Snatches of alphanumerics floating next to the ship symbols showed the flotilla's velocity and delta V.

“How come I was able to see that red star in my dreams?” he asked, suddenly curious.

“The human mind seems designed to extract information from its surroundings, no matter what the circumstances,” Cassius replied. “A number of Marines in the MIEU have reported dream imagery that appears to have leaked across the data interface with the ship navigational AI. This does not appear to represent a problem or a fault in the nanoimplant hardware. Is there another question?”

“How—How long until we debark?”

“H-hour for the main assault group has yet to be determined. The special assault task force code-named Dragon will be debarking in twenty-two hours, fifteen minutes. Debarkation of the main force will depend at least partly on the success of the special task force. Is there another question?”

“Uh…I guess not.” He felt the connection in his head go empty.

He knew he'd been assigned to TF Dragon. They'd told him as much during his final briefing on Earth. But he didn't know anything about the mission or what was expected of him, didn't know most of these people, didn't even know who his commanding officer was.

He felt very much alone, very much lost.

“Those of you who can move, shake a leg!” someone bellowed from the deck below. “C'mon, you squirrels! Out of your trees! That's reveille, reveille, reveille! All hands on deck!”

The familiar litany galvanized Garroway into movement. He still felt sluggish, and every muscle in his body ached, but he was able to sit up on his pallet, sling his legs over the side, and find the nearest set of rungs set into the bulkhead, allowing him to shakily climb down to the deck.

Dozens of Marines were already there, talking, standing, sitting, exercising in a tangled press of nude bodies. A line had already formed in front of the shower cell, a passageway in the bulkhead leading through to the shower head and dry compartment and back out again to the main deck. Others were gathering in front of the chow dispensers, accepting with grumbling ill grace the squeeze tubes of lightly flavored paste that would be their food for the next several days, until their digestive systems got used to the sensations of dealing with real food once more.

Garroway wrestled for a moment with the choice…clean or food? His body was coated with a thin, slick film of mingled sweat and the residue from the support gel he'd been lying in for the past decade, and he felt as though he were choking on his own stink. But at the same time his stomach was twisting and growling in spite of the punishment it had just taken. Food, he thought after a moment. He needed food more.

“All personnel with last names beginning A through M will fall in for showers,” the voice in his head said. “Personnel N through Z will report for chow.”

Yeah, figures. The Corps likes to run every detail of your
life,
he thought with a wry inner shrug. And no matter what you wanted, the Corps would tell you to do something else.

In a way, though, it was pleasant to have someone tell him what to do, even if the someone was only a disembodied voice in his head. He was still feeling a bit muzzy, like he'd just awakened after a night of pretty heavy drinking, and didn't entirely trust his own thought processes.

“Haven't seen you around,” a muscular, naked man told him as he stepped into the shower queue. “Newbie?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “Company 1099.”

“Don't mean shit here,” the man said. “You're 1st Marine Div now. How'dja make out on the pool?”

“Pool?”

“Yeah. The death-watch pool.”

“Don't pay any mind to this shithead,” a flat-chested woman in line behind Garroway said. “Some of these jack-offs think it's cute to run a pool on how many people don't survive cybehibe. Everybody puts in five a share and picks a number. The closer your number is to the CH attrition, the more money you get.”

“What'd you win, Kris? Zip, as per SOP?”

“Ten newdollars profit.”

“Eat shit, Staff Sergeant. Twenty-five.”

“Screw you.”

“Your place or mine?”

“Wait a second,” Garroway said, breaking into the exchange. “You're saying people died during the passage?”

“Sure,” the man said. “Whadja expect?”

“Thirty-seven Marines didn't make it,” the woman said. “Three percent attrition. That's actually not that fucking bad. Sometime's it's as high as five.”

“Hey. One cybehibe passage to Europa lost twelve out of sixty,” the man said with infuriating nonchalance. “One out of five. That was a real tech-fuck.”

Garroway felt as though a cold draft had brushed the back of his neck. He'd not realized that nanotechnic hibernation was that much of a crapshoot.

“Stop it, Schuster,” the woman said. “You're scaring the kid.” She extended her hand. “Staff Sergeant Ostergaard,” she told him. “The jackoff in front of you is Sergeant Schuster, and don't let him get to you, he's a teddy bear. Welcome to the Fighting 44th.”

“Sir, thank you, sir. Recruit Private Garroway.”

“Don't sir me,” Ostergaard told him. “I work for a living.”

“You can drop the boot camp crap, kid,” Schuster added. “Officers are ‘sir.' NCOs are addressed by rank or last name. The quicker you stop sirring everything that moves, the quicker you'll fit in.”

“Aye aye, s—uh, Sergeant.”

“That's better. You're not ‘recruit private' anymore, either. You're a private first class now, unless they Van Winkle you.”

“Van Winkle? What's that?”

“Promote you on the basis of your time served subjective,” Ostergaard said.

“Objectively,” Schuster told him, “you've been in the Corps ten years. Subjectively, you've been in for four, even though you were asleep for most of that time. Can't have a PFC with four-slash-ten years in. Looks real crappy on his service record.”

Garroway remembered downloading that information in boot camp…hell, it seemed like a month ago. It
had
been a month ago, so far as his waking mind was concerned. This was going to take some getting used to.

“So I might have gotten a promotion already?”

Ostergaard shrugged. “You'll just have to wait and see what the brass hats say. But…you know? Out here rank isn't quite as important as they made it out to be back at Camp Lejeune.”

“Heresy,” Schuster said.

“S'truth. Way out here? The Corps is more like family than military.”

The line moved forward enough that the three were able at last to file through the shower area, bombarded by water and by ultrasonic pulses that melted the accreted slime from
their bodies. Hot air let them dry without requiring laundry facilities, and by the time they emerged back on the Hab Module deck, a laser sizer and uniform dispenser had been set up and was cranking out disposable OD utilities. The food paste tasted like…well, Garroway thought, like food paste, but it staunched the hunger pangs and helped him begin to feel more human.

Which was important. It was slowly starting to dawn on him that he was eight light-years from home, twelve from Lynnley, surrounded by strangers…and utterly unsure of his chances of survival over the next twenty-four hours.

Somehow, as thorough and rigorous as boot camp had been, it hadn't prepared him for this—a devastating loneliness mingled with soul-searing fear.

25
JUNE
2148

Lander Dragon One
Approaching Ishtar
1312 hours ST

“…and
four
…and
three
…and
two
…and
one
…
release!
”

A surge of acceleration pinned Captain Warhurst against his seat as powerful magnetic fields flung the TAL-S Dragonfly clear of the vast, flat underbelly of
Derna
's reaction mass tank and into empty space. Seven additional Dragonflies, each with its attached lander, drifted out from the transport's docking bays at the same moment, the formation perfectly symmetrical with
Derna
at the center.
Derna
's massive AM drive had been shut down, since the gamma emissions from matter-antimatter annihilation would have fried the landers and all on board.

Long minutes passed, and the landers continued to pace the
Derna
, sharing with the huge transport her current velocity toward the planet ahead. Once the landers were well clear of the deadly kill zone of
Derna
's AM drive venturi, the transport and her two consorts again triggered their drives, continuing to decelerate.

From the point of view of the eight landers,
Derna
,
Algol
, and
Regulus
appeared to be accelerating back the way they'd come at ten meters per second per second. In free fall, the
Dragonflies hurtled toward the looming curve of the planet, now some two million kilometers ahead.

Dragon One's microfusion plasma thrusters kicked in as the craft pirouetted into its proper alignment, accelerating. They would hit Ishtar's atmosphere six hours before the transports decelerated into orbit, a critical timing element of the Krakatoa mission.

Still strapped immobile in his seat, encased in his Mark VII armor and with his LR-2120 clipped to its carry mount on his front torso, Warhurst closed his eyes and reviewed the op program.

“D-day, the sixth of June 1944,” the voice of General King echoed in his noumenal reality, a replay of the general's address of some hours before. “The Allied invasion forces were threatened by massive shore battery emplacements at Pointe du Hoc, west of Omaha Beach. Elements of the U.S. Army Rangers assaulted the battery from the sea, scaling forty-meter cliffs with mortar-fired grapnels trailing climbing ladders and ropes.”

In his noumenal display Warhurst could see the grainy, black-and-white images of historical documentary films, showing primitively clad soldiers climbing sheer cliffs from tiny, tin-box boats bobbing in the surf at the base of the rocks as King's voice droned on.

“After a fierce firefight at the top of the cliffs, with opposing forces at times only meters apart, the Rangers overran the position, suffering heavy casualties in the process. Their heroism and dedication to achieving their mission were in no way lessened by the fact that the shore batteries thought to have been mounted at Pointe du Hoc had, in fact, been removed. The gun emplacements were empty.”

One of the great minor ironies of military history, Garroway thought, but not the sort of thing to inspire the troops before the big fight. Marines liked to think their actions counted for something.

“Objective Krakatoa is very much of a stripe with the
Pointe du Hoc shore batteries,” King's voice went on. The image unfolding in Warhurst's noumenon showed the mountain, An-Kur, seen from the air by computer imagery. “Since it has been ten years objective since the planetary defense batteries within that mountain fired, we can hope the facility has been abandoned or fallen into disrepair. The modern Ahannu do not possess the technological prowess of their ancient ancestors.”

And that, Warhurst thought, was a royal load of crap. Whatever else you said about the An of ten thousand years ago, they built their machines and tools to
last.
The likelihood of the An-Kur facility being a one-shot weapon was so remote as to be practically invisible. Certainly, the Marine assault team wasn't going to bet the farm on the possibility.

The recitation finally reached the part of the record he was interested in. He could have fast-forwarded through the recorded memories, but he'd wanted to marvel again at King's clumsy exhortation.

All too little was known about the objective, save what had been gleaned from orbit by mapping satellites. Two point heat sources were known, one near the peak, the other on the mountain's east slope, about one-third of the way up from the base. The mountain was clearly a natural landform, but one that had been extensively reworked, probably over millennia. The slopes were preternaturally smooth, and terraced in places, with stacked rocks holding back walls of earth. Absolutely nothing was known of the mountain's interior workings, but infrared scans suggested a tunnel complex of considerable extent and in three dimensions, connecting the two hot spots, which were almost certainly entrances of some sort.

Computer analysis of the IR readings had produced a 3D map of the complex. What could not be analyzed or deduced was what might be waiting for them down there. There were some similarities to underground works discovered during the past century on Earth's moon, especially in the Tsiolkovsky Crater site on the lunar far side. Created by An colonizers ten
thousand years ago, the Tsiolkovsky complex was thought to be typical of ancient An military defenses, and as such it might hold clues for an assault on An-Kur. Every man in Black Dragon had a complete set of floor plans for both Tsiolkovsky and An-Kur in their Mark VII armor computers.

But…was it defended? That remained to be seen. Pointe du Hoc had been an empty emplacement vigorously defended by German troops; perhaps An-Kur was the reverse, a live weapon not defended at all.

Maybe. And maybe pigs could fly without the benefits of genetic engineering.

The Dragonfly gave a hard jolt as it encountered the first tenuous wisps of Ishtar's atmosphere at a velocity of close to forty thousand kilometers per hour.

Lander Dragon Three
Ishtar, approaching Krakatoa LZ
1620 hours ST

Private First Class John Garroway—his rank had not been Van Winkled after all—closed his eyes, trying to ignore the irritating tickle of sweat between his eyes, unreachable behind his helmet visor. The Dragonfly was trembling, bucking, lurching unsteadily in its descent, the roar of atmosphere building now like a waterfall just beyond the lander's thin hull. The TAL-S was using the lander module slung beneath its wasp-waist belly as a heat shield now, riding the disk-shaped module down on a cushion of flame.

An image was being fed to Garroway's noumenon from a camera mounted forward beneath the craft's bulbous cockpit, but there was boringly little to see. They were coming into Ishtar's atmosphere on the night side, which also, by design, was currently the anti-Marduk side. Marduk itself was invisible, hidden behind the curving loom of Ishtar; the star Llalande 21185 was a shrunken red ember just above the bloody crescent of Ishtar's horizon, little more at this dis
tance than a ruby star. Ishtar's night side was completely black, a featureless darkness swiftly expanding to fill the noumenal feed.

Even so, Garroway couldn't quite bring himself to close the feed window and sever that slender, less-than-helpful link with the universe outside of Dragon Three's shuddering hull. The alternative was the claustrophobic near-darkness of the LM's squad bay, fully armed and armored Marines crammed into seats so narrow they were literally wedged against one another's shoulders and gear packs. Unable even to turn his helmet, Garroway could only stare at the back of the seat in front of him or down at his own lap below the LR-2120 clipped to his torso mount. Watching the darkness blotting out the stars in his noumenon was infinitely preferable to simply waiting out the thunder of reentry, blind as well as helpless.

The men and women around him were not quite the strangers they'd been when he'd emerged from cybehibe. He'd been expecting either the hazing traditionally handed out to newbies in a military unit or the ostracism reserved for men who'd not yet proven themselves in combat. The 44th Marine Regiment, however, was a newly created ad hoc unit thrown together expressly as a part of 1 MIEU. As such, it included both veteran Marines and kids right out of boot camp.

The command constellation, Garroway had learned, had quite a bit of experience, as did his platoon commander, Lieutenant Kerns. Gunnery Sergeant Valdez, who ran 2nd Squad, had fought in Uzbekistan, Venezuela, and Egypt. She was a fifteen-year veteran from Escondido, California, and had the war stories to tell to prove it. The squad's plasma gunner was Sergeant Nathaniel Easton Deere—“Honey” Deere to his squad mates—a kid from El Dorado, Kansas, with a nasty scar on his forehead and quite a few war stories of his own, even though he'd only been in for eight. Sergeants Foster and Dunne, Lance Corporals Womicki and Brandt, and PFC Cawley had had some time in, ranging
from two years for Chuck Cawley, a red-haired agroworker from Iowa, to seven years for Sergeant Richard “Well” Dunne, a onetime underdome 'combganger from the wastelands west of the Chicago Desert.

Tom Pressley and Kat Vinita were both brand-new Marines fresh out of boot company 1097, however, and Roger Hollingwood and Gerrold Garvey—“Hollywood” and “Gravy” to their buddies—both were alumni of Company 1099. The five of them were the FNGs of 2nd Squad, Third Platoon; the idea was that five fucking new guys could learn from the seven experienced Marines in the squad, a kind of do-or-die on-the-job training.

But all of them, experienced or not, were quite literally in the same boat. If there were any tendencies toward newbie-baiting in 2nd Squad, they were being well controlled by Gunny Valdez and Honey Deere.

Second Squad had spent most of the past twenty-two hours—all but three hours of forced cybesleep that ship-morning, followed by a twenty-minute sermon by General King—running through training sims downloaded from the command constellation's AI, Cassius.

“You don't need to be fucking heroes,” Valdez had told them all as they sat on a noumenal hillside at the edge of an AI-generated Ishtaran forest, a tangled mass of purples, blacks, and reds. The light there was dim, a perpetual red twilight from a ruby-hued, shrunken sun little larger than a bright star. “We want live Marines on this op, not dead heroes. You new guys…keep your heads down and stay out of the line of fire. I especially want you to keep well to either side of Honey's thundergun. The fringe-bleed from a PG-90 will fry your ass if you're too close, armor or no armor. You old hands…keep an eye on the newbies in your fire teams. Don't let them get lost, don't let them shock-freeze, don't let them play hero. Remember the first time you all were in a firefight, and think about what it's like for them.”

That lecture had been a damned sight more useful than the canned talk by General King—a warmed-over hash of
platitudes served up around some historical two-vees about Army troops landing in Europe a couple of hundred years before. The pep talk hadn't exactly been encouraging; of the 150 Rangers who'd stormed the Pointe du Hoc cliffs on June 6, 1944, only ninety were left when they were relieved two days later—forty percent casualties to take a battery of guns that had, in fact, already been moved. If that was the stuff of heroism, Garroway wanted no part of it.

Numbers in the lower right corner of his noumenal inner window gave the dwindling range to the LZ and estimated time to landing. Another fifteen minutes to go.

The LM gave another lurch, then dropped sharply, like a string-cut puppet.

Fists clenched in carbon-fiber gauntlets, sweat dribbling incessantly and maddeningly down his unreachable face, Garroway wondered if he was going to be sick inside his armor.

Lander Dragon One
Ishtar, approaching Krakatoa LZ
1625 hours ST

They'd dropped at last below the cloud deck, and Warhurst shifted to his tactical noumenon. A composite image generated by the lander's AI presented the visible spectrum overlaid by infrared and a 3D contour map showing elevations, targets, and way points in lines and symbols of white light. Dragon One was over Ishtar's night side, but the lander's chin cameras rendered the scene with near-noontime illumination; some of the contour lines didn't quite match up with the landforms rushing past below, however. Either the terrain had changed a bit in ten years, or the first expedition's mapping satellites had transmitted less than precise data on Ishtar's topography.

At the moment—and thanks to careful work by the MIEU's planning staff, both human and cybernetic—Ishtar's night side was also the side forever tide-locked, fac
ing away from the super giant planet Marduk. The red dwarf star Llalande 21185 provided Ishtar's daylight, but the heat came from the sullenly glowing super-Jovian gas giant called Marduk and from the friction of internal tidal stresses. According to the briefing information downloaded to Warhurst's implant, surface temperatures on Ishtar ranged from over forty degrees Celsius on the side facing Marduk, to minus fifty on the anti-Marduk side, temperatures only slightly affected by the cycles of night and day induced by the distant red-dwarf sun.

The landscape below was one of glaciers and ice-locked mountains. Volcanoes glowed and thundered on the horizon in every direction, and in some places rivers of lava encountered ice in searing explosions of steam and molten rock. In a flash, a tortured plain of cracked and fractured ice-rimed rock gave way to water, huge, dark swells thick with drifting mountains of ice. Alphanumerics in the corner of Warhurst's noumenal vision identified the water as the western edge of the Abgal, the Great Sea that bordered Ishtar's habitable belt between ice and fire.

None of the other Dragonflies was visible, again according to plan. The eight landers had scattered across half a hemisphere as they entered Ishtar's atmosphere, with the idea that the more scattered the targets, the tougher it would be for the ground defenses to target them. Warhurst was gladder than ever now that he'd insisted on the additional landers and troops. So much could go wrong, and they faced odds that made the Giza Plateau look like a pleasant afternoon in a sandbox.