Star Corps (29 page)

“Awright!” Valdez exclaimed. “The word's just come through.
Derna
and the transports are in orbit! The next wave of LMs is already coming down.”

“Outstanding!” Deere said. “About time those assholes quit lounging about in zero g and got their dead asses down here to give us a hand!”

“Who needs a hand, Sarge?” Womicki asked, laughing. “We got this place secured without 'em!”

“Krakatoa, maybe,” Valdez said, cocking an eye on the mountaintop looming above them. “But there's still the little matter of New Sumer and the Legation compound. You feel up to tackling those on your own?”

“Hell, no, Gunny,” Womicki said, jerking a thumb skyward. “Like Honey says, let
those
guys upstairs do something for a change!”

What was left of 2nd Squad was seated on the ground in a circle not far from their LM, peeling open their self-heating rations and eating. They'd removed helmets and gauntlets but were still encumbered by the heavy shells of their Mark VIIs.

Some six hours had passed since the battle. After a brief rest, the platoon had been assigned to pickup detail, going over the whole LZ, moving Frog bodies and picking up weapons. A science team off the
Derna
, they'd been told, would examine the bodies. The alien weapons were sorted and deposited in piles for later study. And now there was nothing to do but sit, sleep, eat, and talk, while taking turns with the other platoons on perimeter guard.

The sky was definitely lighter now, and the clouds that had shrouded the LZ earlier were breaking up, but it was still darker than an Earthly twilight to unaided eyes. In the east, a line of scarlet-gold light rimming the clouds masking the horizon marked the rise of Llalande 21185. In the west, swollen Marduk loomed vast and wan and ringed in a green and indigo darkness, its banded face pocked with oval storm patterns, each as big or bigger than the Earth. Overhead, a meteor blazed brightly, scratching a thread of light across a
sky already aglow with the soft reds and greens of the Ishtaran auroras.

The literally unearthly beauty of this place, Garroway thought, was hypnotic, supremely compelling. It was possible to lose yourself in that sky….

“So what's on the agenda, Gunny?” Gerrold Garvey asked. “Are we out of the war yet?”

“You wish,” Valdez said, and the others laughed.

“I don't think the Frogs beat that easy,” Deere added.

“You call that
easy
?” Garroway asked sharply, looking up. “We got kicked in the ass today!”

“We
won
, kid,” Sergeant Dunne told him. “Right now, that's what counts.”

Garroway stared at his hands. They were trembling, the adrenaline-laced aftershocks of the NNTs he'd ridden.

“You okay, Garroway?” Valdez asked. She sounded concerned.

“I'm okay,” he said. “I'm okay.” The mental image of Pressley's arm dangling in his hand flashed before him only briefly, but bearing with it all the shock and horror of that nightmare moment. He wondered if he would ever be able to forget….

“We wait for orders,” Valdez told them, with a sidelong look at Garroway. “The next assault'll be on New Sumer. We hold this mountain and the BFG for the techies…and move to reinforce the main attack if they need us.”

“Hurry up and wait,” Deere said, grinning. “That's the Corps for you, all the way!”

“BFG?” Garvey asked. “What's that?”

Deere grinned wolfishly. “‘Big fuckin' gun,' kid. A big fuckin' gun.”

“We've pulled the fangs on the Frog planetary defenses,” Valdez added. “Now we watch the rest of the MIEU mop up!”

Garroway leaned back against a boulder and picked at his meal, watching his squad mates as he did so. Their reactions, he thought, were interesting. The vets among them all
seemed to be taking this pretty casually, though he suspected that some of the bravado was a kind of verbal protective shell. Of all of them, Valdez seemed to have the most genuine and matter-of-fact responses—those of a professional doing an unpleasant but necessary job.

The two other newbies left in the squad, though, were taking wildly different tacks. Garvey seemed to be doing his best to imitate the veterans in the outfit, cracking jokes and laughing. Kat Vinita, on the other hand, had said very little since the end of the battle and seemed to be withdrawing into herself. He'd seen Valdez sitting with her, talking quietly a while ago, but she hadn't joined in the banter.

Most of the time she was staring into that incredible, glowing sky.

A bit self-consciously, Garroway got up and walked over to Kat, dropping down next to her. “Can I join you?”

She shrugged, still looking into the sky.

“You okay?”

“What's it to you?”

It was his turn to shrug. “Self-therapy, I guess. I got the whim-whams a bit, back there. I thought talking to someone else might help.”

She sagged inside her armor. “Sorry. Didn't mean to bite your head off.”

“No problem. Chewy or crunchy?”

“Huh?”

“My head.”

“Oh.” She looked up into the sky again. After a long time she said, “Why does it glow like that?”

“What, the sky? Auroras. Ishtar has a pretty strong magnetic field.” He'd already accessed the
Derna
's noumenal net, wondering the same thing. “And a good thing too, or we wouldn't be able to uncork our armor. Marduk throws off a hell of a lot of radiation. Ishtar's magnetic field traps a lot of it up there, where it excites free atoms of oxygen and other stuff and gives off that glow. If it wasn't for that—”

“We'd be fried, I know. But I thought planets had to rotate to generate a magnetic field. Ishtar is tide-locked to Marduk. It rotates, but slowly, once in six days. And it has a strong one too, almost five gauss. A lot stronger than Earth's.”

“I never thought of that.” He reached into the net for an answer but found none.

“I already did a search,” she said, sensing his uplink. “Some planetologists think the tidal flexing that keeps Ishtar at livable temperatures also stirs up the core enough to generate the mag field. But nobody knows for sure. There's so
much
we don't know….”

He was surprised. She didn't talk like a Marine…certainly not like a private. Of course, neither did he—or Lynnley either, for that matter—but her quiet intelligence seemed out of place. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, the Marines still bore the unpleasant stereotype of all muscle, no brains.

“Shit!”
Dunne snapped from the other side of the circle. “What do those bastards think they're doing?”

“What's wrong, Well?” Deere asked.

“
Apricots!
Goddamn
apricots
!”

Garroway exchanged a long, quizzical look with Kat. Apricots?

Dunne pulled the foil cover back from one corner of his ration container. The refrigerated portion contained some pale white-orange slices of soft substance and dubious origin. He flung the tray aside. “Bastards should know better'n that!”

“Settle down, Sarge,” Valdez told him. “We're not riding armored vehicles.”

“Yeah?” Dunne said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the lander. “What the hell is
that
? Or, Jesus, the
Derna,
for that matter?”

“What's his problem?” Garroway asked.

Deere, seated at Garroway's right, chuckled. “An old, old
Marine Corps tradition,” he said. “Nineteenth century, at least. It's bad luck to eat apricots. Your APC is bound to break down if you do.”

“They didn't
have
armored personnel carriers in the nineteenth century,” Womicki pointed out. “Horses, yes. APCs, no.”

“Okay, okay, twentieth century,” Deere said.

“Everything's cool, Sarge,” Garvey said. “The LMs got us down in one piece, right?”

“Yeah. And how the shit are we gonna get over to New Sumer?” Dunne asked. “Or back up to the
Derna
? Walk?”

At first Garroway had thought it was a joke, but Dunne was genuinely angry and upset. Over a silly superstition involving…apricots?

He looked down at the ration pack in his lap. He'd already peeled back the foil from the refrigerated part and eaten half of what was there. Funny. He'd not been very hungry before. He was less so now. He set the pack aside.

“It's just superstition, man,” Womicki said. “Don't sweat it.”

“Yeah, well,” Valdez said, “that's just for track drivers, not spacecraft.”

“Still ain't right to take chances,” Dunne said. “Not this far from home….”

Relative quiet descended over the circle then, though Garroway noticed that the other Marines either weren't eating or weren't eating
all
of their rations. Marines, he decided, were superstitious critters.

“So, how come you're in the Marines?” he asked Kat quietly.

The other Marine stood up abruptly and rushed off. He'd seen tears in her eyes.

“What…?”

“Let her go, Garroway,” Valdez said.

“Is she okay?”

“She joined the Corps because her partner joined the Corps. Goddamned stupid reason to sign up. And a damned stupid stunt, lying about it to Personnel.”

“Her…partner?”

“Her lover. Tom Pressley.”

The name hit Garroway square in the gut. “Oh.”

“She's riding some NNTs that should cut the grief, but her emotions are going to be swinging pretty wildly for a while. She needs time, is all.” Valdez shook her head. “Damn idiots! If I'd just known!”

“What…could you have done?” He tried to imagine what it would have been like if that had been
Lynnley
who'd been blown apart out there; tried, and failed.

“The Corps tries to avoid Sullivans.”

A quick check of the net acronym and mil-term listing jogged his memory. He'd heard about Sullivans before, back when he and Lynnley had talked about joining up together, being shipped out together. The Sullivans were five brothers in the U.S. Navy, back in one of the wars of the twentieth century. All had been assigned to the same ship, and all were killed when their ship was sunk in battle. Nowadays the name referred to close relatives or partners serving on the same ship or in the same combat theater.

“If I'd known,” Valdez continued, “one or the other of them would've damn well stayed on Earth. I could have at
least
had them assigned to different companies in the MIEU. Now we have two casualties instead of just the one.”

“Two casualties?”

“Even with the NNTs, it's going to catch up with Vinita sooner or later. We'll need to evac her out of the combat zone and back up to the
Derna
as soon as we can arrange it.” Valdez turned away. “Finish your chow, Marine, and then sack out. I'm putting you on the 0200 perimeter watch, and I want you rested.”

“Aye aye, Gunny.”

He watched Valdez walk away, a tired, lonely figure. Garroway was beginning to appreciate that she carried the burdens of all of the squad as well as her own.

Goddess. When they shipped Kat back up to orbit, the squad would be down to six. Fifty percent casualties.

And the exchange had left him shaken. Shit, he and Lynnley had done the same as Vinita and Pressley—joining the Marines with the idea of staying together.

Where was she right now? Garroway stared again into that impossible sky. Hell, where was
he
right now?

And, more important, why? Finding answers, he was learning, was a lot harder than reaching up into the noumenal data stores.

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

A seismic quake sent gentle, rumbling shudders through the An-Kur Deeps, but Tu-Kur-La didn't feel it. He was too lost now in the Zu-Din, the Godmind of the Abzu, to feel anything but exaltation.

More and more Keepers of Memory were entering the Abzu now as they were awakened from the Sleep of Ages and engulfed by the Abzu-il. He could feel their presence, a thronging host of mind and thought and will. As the Zu-Din grew, so too did Tu-Kur-La's power and the scope and depth of his vision. Before, linked with the Abzu, he'd still been himself, albeit with access to seemingly limitless information. Now, however, as a kind of critical mass was reached by the minds linking in…

This was what it truly meant to be a god, omnipresent and omniscient, a thousand minds working together in parallel as one with a speed and clarity impossible for any purely natural sentience. Tu-Kur-La's individuality was fading swiftly now; he was no longer Tu-Kur-La of the House of In-Kur-Dru, but the mind and soul of the Abzu itself, the Godmind summoned from the Deeps to once again defend the world of Enduru.

The Race of the Gods
would
survive.

He watched from a thousand vantage points as the enemy
warriors penetrated the Kikig Kur-Urudug, watched as they placed the package beneath a control panel. Sensors within the Abzu-il, which lay like thick jelly on the floors and dripped from the cavern walls, analyzed the device and identified it as a compact thermonuclear device easily large enough to wreck the upper levels of the An-Kur facility.

He could sense too the electromagnetic signals passing between the device and a series of relays set up in the corridors leading to the outside of the mountain. Traps and sensors within the device would probably detonate it if it were tampered with. The problem would require some thought.

The Godmind was both highly intelligent in its own right and supremely fast. The Abzu-il that lay like a gelatinous blanket through much of An-Kur's underground workings was a biological construct, something created countless cycles ago to connect the various Keepers of Memories. It possessed an artificial intelligence of high order and considerable volition; that AI had been charged with the defense of An-kur, and had responded to the attack a few periods ago on its own initiative. Now, however, that intelligence expanded dramatically as living Ahannu minds linked in.