Star Corps (25 page)

Lightning flared ahead, illuminating the bellies of thickening clouds. The imbalance of temperatures in the opposite hemispheres, hot and cold, meant lots of energy in Ishtar's weather systems, and that meant large and frequent storms across the habitable belt. Maybe that storm ahead would scramble the enemy's tracking system.

Maybe…maybe…

The trouble was, so little was known about the modern
Ahannu, and even less about the ancient An who'd built Ishtar's defenses. Ten thousand years ago they'd forged an interstellar empire and colonized parts of Earth with a technology humankind had yet to match. They'd already thrown a nasty surprise at the first expedition; what other surprises were hidden down there, in clouds and darkness?

The lander gave a savage jolt, rolling hard to the left and dropping sharply. The AI pilot extended the stubby wings a bit, angling them to grab the air, and increased the power to the plasma thrusters in the Dragonfly's belly. Four minutes to the target…

Ishtar's planetary defenses were almost certainly automated, running on programs written thousands of years ago. That was both a major problem and a slender hope for the assault team. Automated weapons would have faster than human reflexes and responses; at the same time, they would lack the flexibility of a living mind at the trigger.

That, at least, was the hope. And there was the hope too that after ten thousand years the weapon inside Objective Krakatoa had only one shot in it.

None of the Marines was counting on that, though.

Light flared in the distance far to the north, a momentarily day-bright snap of radiance. Warhurst blinked. Had that been lightning?

The shock wave hit minutes later, slamming the Dragonfly to the right and nearly knocking it out of the sky. The AI boosted power to the rear thrusters, however, and clawed for altitude as the waves below surged past the lander's belly. A quick check of the team's telemetry confirmed the worst: Dragonfly Four had just vanished in a torrent of energy directed from up ahead.

The assault force was under fire.

Combat Information Center
IST Derna
,
approaching Ishtar orbit
1632 hours ST

“Dragonfly Four is down,” Cassius said in maddeningly even tones. “I repeat, Dragonfly Four is down.”

Ramsey had seen the point of bright blue light representing Dragonfly Four wink out in his noumenal feed, had read the cascade of data describing energy levels, bearings, azimuth, and angle. Krakatoa had fired a second time and taken one of the Dragonflies out with a burst of raw energy roughly equivalent to a thousand-megaton thermonuclear explosion. The lander and twenty-five Marines must have evaporated like a snowflake caught in the flame of a blowtorch.

So Krakatoa was still very much operational. The question now was…how long did it take to warm up for another shot?

“Fuck!”

The explicative startled Ramsey, and he turned to look at General King, floating in harness next to him.
Derna
's CIC was a relatively small and cluttered compartment located in the ship's spine, aft of the centrifuge coupler, and housed an impressive array of communications consoles and displays. Most of the men and women micro-g floating there at the moment, however—each wearing a harness to keep them from drifting into equipment or other Marines—were linked directly into the ship's noumenal feeds. Ramsey could see in his mind's eye the incoming data from the Black Dragon assault group, could watch the eight—no, now
seven
—blue stars moving across the multispectral map representation of Ishtar's night side, and he could hear Cassius's dry commentary in his mind.

At the same time, however, he could still hear the voices of the people in the compartment around him with his phenomenal—as opposed to noumenal—ears, and with an inner thought-click he could push the visual feeds into the background and see with his real-world eyes. Despite his immersion in the noumenon, General King's verbal anger had fully captured his attention.

“We expected losses, sir,” he said quietly. Indeed, the
Dragonflies had gotten a lot closer to the objective than anyone on the planning staff imagined possible before drawing fire. Dragon Four had been less than forty kilometers from the LZ. That suggested there was only one defense complex on Ishtar like Krakatoa, and that its line of fire was limited to targets above its horizon.

“That strike force had better take that thing down,” King said with a growl, “or we are dead.
Dead.
”

Major Anderson was floating near a console on the other side of King, obviously aware of the conversation. Ramsey exchanged a dark glance with her before she shrugged and looked away.

General King was still something of an enigma, a strange fact given that they'd met him ten years ago objective. Between time dilation and their long cybehibe nap, it felt as though they'd welcomed him aboard only a few days ago, and the only times they'd worked with him were in the various staff planning sessions, where he tended to be remote, almost disinterested. So far as the mission was concerned, it might as well have been Ramsey and his command constellation who were actually bossing this mission. King had a managerial style better suited to a major corporation than to a Marine Expeditionary Unit. And now…hell. Ramsey was beginning to think that the man was afraid—no, terrified—and that he was using a remote and delegating command style to hide his own fear.

That did
not
bode well for the integrity of their mission.

“So much for command by political appointee,” Ricia's voice said over their private link channel.

“Are you as worried as I am?” Ramsey asked her. “He hasn't been outside of his own orbit since the Dragons launched.”

“More worried, I think. He was telling me earlier that he shouldn't even be here, that his personal AI could've handled all of this in proxy. Something has him worried, and it's not just the Ahannu.”

“The mission itself, maybe,” Ramsey suggested. “There's
a lot of political capital riding on this, including the possibility of war back home if we fail here.”

“Well, he'd better get his act together, or we're all in deep shit,” Anderson replied. “Uh-oh. Heads up. Dragon Seven is coming over Krakatoa's horizon.”

Ramsey wrenched his attention back to his noumenon. The attack plan had called for all of the Dragons to enter Krakatoa's line-of-sight more or less simultaneously in completely different directions, but vagaries of wind, reentry orientation, and navigation could not be predicted with perfect accuracy, and as expected, there'd been some scattering. Dragon Four had approached from the west. Seven was coming into the mountain's line of fire now from the north; Dragon Three would enter it from the southeast in another thirty seconds.

And the seconds continued to flutter past without an outward response from Krakatoa.
Good…good!
Maybe there
was
a delay in recharge for that damned thing. If so, they could use it to good advantage by—

Sensors in the Dragonfly landers, the reconnaissance satellites over Ishtar, and on board the
Derna
all picked up the sudden build and surge of an immense magnetic field pinpointed deep beneath the mountain. A surge of radiation—of fusion-hot plasma—and an instant later the blue star marking Dragonfly Seven flared and winked out. Another LM, another twenty-five Marines, gone. Twenty-five percent of the assault force lost already, and the first lander hadn't even touched down yet.

This was going to be rough….

Chamber of Warrior Preparation
Deeps of An-Kur
Third Period of Dawn

He felt the mountain shudder and made the gesture of
gizkim-nam
, the Sign of Destiny, a warning to the universe not to mismanage the affairs of the Dingir. The Enemy was upon them. The only question was
which
Enemy it was.

His name was Tu-Kur-La, and he was
dingir-gubidir-min
, a god-warrior of the second rank, of the house of In-Kur-Dru and a Keeper of the Memories. The particular memory line-age he bore was no less than that of the House of Nin-Ur-Tah herself, and so he remembered the Sag-ura of Kia, remembered the Ahannu colony there and the creation of the Sag-ura, the Blackhead slaves of that world.

Yes, he remembered….

All around him other Ahannu god-warriors were gathering, awakened from the Sleep of Ages to once again defend the sacred vales and mountains of Enduru. Drones and males born for their purpose, they filed into the Chamber of Weapons, taking down the lesser
anenkara
from the racks along the bare stone walls. There were too few of the ancient devices for even one in twelve to carry one; most god-warriors, the drones who could no longer breed, would carry
mitul
, curved
chakhul
and thrusting
shukur
, and blunt-tipped
tukul
, primitive weapons, though effective when deployed in large numbers. And the Sag-ura
gudibir
, of course, had weapons of their own.

He ran a slender, six-fingered hand along the elegantly graven barrel of his
anenkara.
God-weapons. Weapons forged by the gods-who-came-before, forged and stored here in the depths of Enduru against the coming of the Hunters of the Dawn.

Yes. He remembered…

The colony cities on the fair, blue world of Kia, like vast, stone flowers unfolded in the sun, remembered especially the great capital of Eridu at the confluence of the two rivers, Buranun and fast-flowing Idigna.

He remembered the skies darkened by the Hunters when they came, remembered the battle over desolate Kingu, Kia's solitary moon, Defender of Kia. At that time, of course, “he” was a she, a biotechnician named Lul-Ka-Tah, storing memories of the conflict for transmission back to Anu.

And he remembered the time of sadness that followed, re
membered the chunk of rock, like a burning mountain, plunging out of space into the Greater Sea south of Eridu. The Hunters of the Dawn had judged the Gods of An and determined to scour them from existence.

And not just on Kia…but on Giris, on Abalsil, on Gal-Mul, even on sacred Nibir-Anu itself…on all of the worlds of the Anunnaki, flame, flood, and destruction rained from the skies.

But among the galaxy's suns, numbering in the hundreds of billions, there were so many worlds, worlds enough that a few might be overlooked even by the Destroyers of the Gods. Here, on Enduru, the Ahannu colony had survived, overlooked by the Hunter fleets searching for them among the stars.

Had the surviving An been discovered at last?…

Lul-Ka-Tah had been dust for millennia, but her memories survived, regrown in Tu-Kur-La's brain before his birth. In a way, she lived once again, as Tu-Kur-La would live again someday, when the need was great.

Her memories, of course, flocked like birds around the Great Destruction that had come from the stars, the Hunters of the Dawn and their sick thirst for the extinction of all who were not like them. That part of Tu-Kur-La that was Lul-Ka-Tah was certain that the attack threatening Enduru now must be the Libir-Erim, the Ancient Enemy that had smashed the far-flung empire of the gods millennia ago.

But Tu-Kur-La had last been awakened from the Sleep of Ages a mere two cycles ago, when strange Blackheads, ignorant of their place and bearing weapons of power, had descended from the skies of Enduru, demanding equal standing with the gods.

The thought was sheer foolishness, of course. None were the equal of the Dingir, not even the Ancient Enemy who, after all, had failed in his quest for the extinction of the Ahannu. And as for the former
slaves
of the gods, the domesticated creatures of the lost world of Kia, such could
never aspire to be gods themselves. Such would be
erinigargal
, an utter and monstrous abomination that the universe itself could never permit to exist.

The information coming through now from the Kikig—the control center—suggested that these attackers were the wild descendants of
zah-sag-ura
, no more. They'd been dealt with once before, they would be dealt with again. Permanently.

“To the defenses!” A commander-of-sixties hissed the order, and the Ahannu god-warriors chanted their response and started for the door.

“Not you, Tu-Kur-La,” the commander-of-sixties said. “You are a Keeper of Memories, is it true?”

“Truth, Commander.”

“Then your place is at Kikig Kur-Urudug. They will need you there, in the Abzu.” Kur-Urudug. The Mountain of the Thunderstorm Weapon. “Give your weapon to another.”

He handed his
anenkara
to a drone warrior nearby, who dropped his heavy
mitul
with a glad shout at the unexpected gift.

“I serve the sacred memory of Nibir-Anu,” Tu-Kur-La said.

“Go, then, Dingir-Gubidir, and serve.”

He blinked his eyes twice in the ritual Gesture of Respectful Assent and hurried out.

25
JUNE
2148

Lander Dragon Three
Ishtar, approaching Krakatoa LZ
1634 hours ST

The Dragon skimmed broken rock and black sand, flashing across the last few kilometers toward the target. The sky was overcast, the clouds boiling in the wake of the mountain's last shot. The strobe of that titanic gun had seared the Dragon's chin camera, leaving the Marines on board momentarily dazzled, but as his noumenal vision cleared, Garroway could see the mountain clearly, a vast, tar-black cone rising from a flame-blasted plain, its top hollowed by a yawning crater.

According to the infrared data coming over the link, the ground had been blast-and flash-heated to almost forty degrees Celsius, while the crater was still glowing red-hot. It was impossible to tell if there were any organic defenders down there; the ground was so hot, their IR signatures would have been swallowed in the background heat. Here and there, scattered points of red and orange glows marked the fall of hot debris from the mountain's summit.

“What a monster!” someone said over Garroway's tac channel.

“Yeah! How're we supposed to fight
that
?”

“Can the chatter,” Valdez snapped. “Get ready to jump. Twenty seconds!”

Garroway felt sharp deceleration tug him forward against his seat harness. The Dragonfly was angling toward a broad, open terrace a third of the way up from the mountain's base. Nose high, air brakes spread wide, ventral thrusters shrieking, the lander drifted over the rock shelf in a swirling cloud of grit and sand. Magnetic grapples released the saucer-shaped landing module from beneath the Dragonfly's gently curved, mid-hull strut. Relieved of the lander's weight, the Dragonfly bounded back into the sky, sleek now and wasp-waisted; the landing module dropped to the ground, the leading edge plowing into loose gravel, the impact cushioned by mag floaters and chemical thrusters.

Inside the lander, the shock slammed Garroway against his seat harness, bruising his chest and shoulders even within padded armor. The noise—a grating, rasping shriek—sounded like a world's ending; the saucer bulldozed through loose rock and sand, skewing slightly before it came to rest at a ten-degree list.

Panels all around the saucer's rim exploded up and out, releasing HK-20 combat robots and a cloud of sensor drones. Broader hull panels, shaped like the slices of a pie, unfolded, opening the interior of the module to the outside.

“Grounded!”
Valdez shouted over the tac channel.
“Go! Go! Go!”

Garroway's harness automatically disengaged and he tumbled forward, thrown off balance by the cant of the lander's deck, but he braced himself on an overhead strut, unshipped his laser rifle, and started moving forward. All around him the other armored Marines of 1st and 2nd Squads crowded toward the openings, pounded down the deck gratings of the debarkation ramps, and scrambled clear of the grounded landing module.

Something slammed into the LM's hull just above Garroway's helmet as he stepped into the open. Another something hit the rock nearby with a sharp, metallic crack and a scatter of sparks. It took him an awkward moment to recog
nize what was happening.
“Shit!”
Hollingwood shouted at the same moment. “They're
shooting
at us!”

Training took over then.
Don't freeze, don't bunch up. Exit the LM and form a perimeter
. Hunched over as if leaning into a stiff wind, Garroway ran through loose gravel, counting out the paces until he was fifty meters from the downed module. Throwing himself down on his belly, he brought his rifle up and thought-clicked the targeting display. Instantly, a bright red target reticle popped into his field of vision, overlaying the multispectral view from his helmet pickups. The reticle, transmitted by his rifle's computer, marked the weapon's precise aim point.

The only trouble was, he couldn't see a target. Ahead, the mountain rose like a solid, jet-black wall, its top still glowing with a fierce red heat. To either side, other 2nd Squad Marines were dropping into place on the perimeter as HK robots strode ahead on scissoring black legs gleaming with an oily, reflected light. Incoming fire continued to snap and crack across the rock plain, but he couldn't see where the shots were coming from. Twenty meters ahead, though, an HK had frozen in mid-stride, its twin-camera “head” smashed into trailing ribbons of torn metal and plastic.

There!
Garroway's helmet radar had detected the flash of a solid, high-speed projectile, and the Mark VII's computer backtracked its path, marking the shooter's position at the base of the rock wall with a small red circle. He moved his rifle until the reticle centered on the circle, which twisted itself into a red diamond, indicating a target lock, then pressed the firing button.

The laser's bolt was invisible; with most of its energy in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum, it left only a thin, backscattered sparkle of ionization as it burned through the air. The pulse showed clearly enough in Garroway's optics, but he couldn't tell whether he'd hit the shooter or not. With no fresh targeting data, the target symbol vanished. Damn, had he hit the sniper, or not?

A winking red light on his display switched to green as the rifle's chargers powered up for another shot. Rising, he darted forward another five meters, keeping low, trying to pierce the very rock around him with his electronic senses, searching for a target, any target, any threat at all. He felt nakedly exposed out there beneath the eight-hundred-meter loom of the mountain.

A stuttering flicker of pulsing light snapped from the small dome turret on top of the lander module, a rapid-fire laser mount directed by the LM's AI. Overhead, the Dragonfly swooped and circled against the night, seeking targets, as a second TAL-S drifted in from the north, slowing its descent, releasing its LM in a swirling cloud of dust. Around Garroway, the tortured landscape of rock steamed and smoked in hellish light, an obscene premonition of a dark and flame-shot Hell.

“Squads One and Two, ready,” the voice of Lieutenant Kerns said in his head. “Overwatch advance. Squad Two, move up!”

“Right!” Valdez shouted. “Second Squad! You heard the man! We're up! On your feet!”

Garroway scrambled to his feet again and trotted forward. Small arms fire continued to pepper the section, but the defenders appeared to be split now in their attention between his unit and the lander that had just grounded on the terrace plain a hundred meters to the left. The incoming rounds, according to his data feed, were small, solid chunks of metal massing no more than a few tens of grams, but accelerated to velocities of around five hundred meters per second.

Bullets
, in other words. Definitely primitive tech, propelled either by chemical explosions or a very low-powered gauss accelerator. One of them slammed into his chest, jolting him hard but causing no damage. If
that
was the best they could do…

He stumbled, his boot coming down in a hole, and he fell to his hands and knees, almost dropping his rifle. Private
Pressley stopped beside him, reaching for his arm. “Hey, watch that first step, pal,” Pressley said over the tac channel. “It's a real—”

Pressley's armored torso splattered then, a gaping hole opening as his upper body and shoulders ceased to exist save as a thin, red spray of mist.

Garroway screamed; he was holding Pressley's left arm by the hand, an arm no longer attached to a body. Pressley's legs and lower torso, still encased in armor, collapsed steaming onto the rock as his helmet bounced away, his head still inside.

Dropping the dead arm, Garroway folded back onto the ground, still screaming, his universe awash in blood, horror, and death.

Combat Information Center
IST
Derna,
approaching Ishtar
Orbit
1635 hours ST

Ramsey studied the analysis as it unscrolled through his noumenal awareness. “A relativistic cannon,” he said, nodding. “I suppose we should have guessed that.”

They were within
Derna
's CIC, floating amid a tangle of feed cables and harness straps. The compartment was growing more crowded by the hour as officers floated in. Admiral Vincent Hartman, the MIEU's naval commander, and several members of his staff had entered and linked in only a few moments before.

“The energies released are within estimated ranges for an AM detonation,” Cassius said over the CIC's main noumenal channel. “However, the lack of concomitant radiations clearly indicates no matter-antimatter annihilation is taking place. That, and the presence of an extremely powerful magnetic pulse with each energy release, suggests the acceleration of small amounts of matter to near-c velocities. The
resultant high-speed plasma impacts the target with kinetic and thermal effects similar to those of a large-scale thermonuclear detonation.”

“That's one way of putting it,” Ricia Anderson said.

“So how are they hitting targets just coming over their horizon?” Ramsey asked. “That's a deflection of better than ninety degrees off the vertical.”

He was watching one of the video feeds from the surface—a shot from a camera mounted on Dragonfly One's grounded lander module. Marines crouched in the twilight, firing toward the vast black shadow of the mountain called An-Kur…and Krakatoa. The mountain had not fired again since the destruction of the second Dragonfly, but time enough had passed for the thing to recharge, if the time delay between the first and second shots was any indication.

“High relativistic masses would be extremely difficult to deflect by more than a few degrees as they emerged from the mountain's throat,” Cassius replied. “The plasma bolt would, therefore, be easily directed only at targets within, I estimate, ten to twelve degrees of the vertical, but could not be aimed at targets approaching from the horizon. However, by the time the initial projectile mass approached relativistic velocities, and while it was still within the mountain's central bore, it would have been reduced to an extremely hot, possibly fusing plasma. The magnetic field generating the bolt's velocity could be used to bleed off a small amount of that plasma near the mountain's crater and direct it at any target within line-of-sight.”

“So they can throw the equivalent of a thermonuke at targets in orbit,” Ramsey said, “or split off a tactical nuke's worth for close-in point defense. Slick.”

“But that kind of mass acceleration would require incredible energy,” General King protested. “Where are they getting their power? Damn it, the Frogs are supposed to be
primitives!
”

Ramsey wished that King would get off that particular soapbox. The An were what they were, and complaining
about their abilities—or their technological inconsistencies—was not going to help.

“Analyses of the subsurface structures beneath the mountain suggest deep thermal sources,” Cassius replied. Within their minds, the command center AI unfolded a schematic of the tunnels and shafts inside and beneath An-Kur Mountain, as suggested by
Emissary
gravitometric scans and orbital reconnaissance. A pair of shafts, slender on the computer noumenal display but probably each measuring several tens of meters across, plunged from the extinct volcano's throat deep, deep into Ishtar's crust.

“An energy pump facilitating heat exchange with the planet's deep crust via those twin vertical shafts would be essentially self-contained and self-sufficient,” Cassius continued. “Such a system could have been put in place thousands of years ago and remained functional without refueling or other technical intervention from outside, especially if the ancient An possessed sophisticated robotic systems for maintenance and repair.”

“Which also means they don't have an antimatter production facility down there,” Ramsey pointed out. “That's one piece of good news, at least.” A serious concern of the mission planning staff had been that the Ahannu might be able to spit chunks of antimatter at the approaching Earth transports. Not that blobs of plasma accelerated to near-
c
velocities were all that much better from the target's point of view…

“What kind of range does a thing like that have?” Admiral Hartman demanded.

“Unknown, and I am unable to extrapolate from the given data,” Cassius said. “We know only that the
Emissary
was destroyed by a single shot while in orbit around Ishtar, at an altitude of approximately 312 kilometers.”

“Krakatoa is still over the horizon from us,” Ricia put in. “We won't have line-of-sight for another…four hours, twelve minutes.”

“Then they have that long to take that thing out,” King said, his voice grim. “And God help us all if they fail!”

“They won't fail,” Ramsey said. “
Failure
is not in the Marine lexicon.”

“A brave sentiment, Colonel,” King said. “I just wish I could be as certain of it as you. Admiral Hartman? Perhaps you'd best pass the word to have
Regulus
and
Algol
extend their range from us and from one another. We don't want to be caught bunched together up here like shooting range targets.”

“It's our men and women on the ground right now that I'm worried about,” Ramsey said. “If Krakatoa can divert some of the energy from a shot aimed straight up to cook targets nearby, what's to stop the An from frying the ARLT?”

“Maybe they can't shoot at their own slope,” Ricia said. “That would be, I don't know, like shooting themselves in the foot? It might have a minimum range as well as a maximum. Threats any closer would be dealt with some other way.”

“Right,” Ramsey said. “I'll buy that. So now the question is, what other defenses does Krakatoa have?”

“I imagine our people will be finding out pretty soon now,” Ricia said. “And Goddess help them when they do.”