Ian Douglas
The Legacy Trilogy Books 1–3

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Star Corps

Battlespace

Star Marines

By Ian Douglas

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

STAR CORPS
BOOK ONE OF THE LEGACY TRILOGY
IAN DOUGLAS

Table of Contents

Title Page

Eight Light Years From Home

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Epilogue

EIGHT LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME

“All is quiet on the perimeter, Captain,” Aiken said. “Sounds like the Frogs’re pretty riled up in the ’ville, though. Do you think they’ll attack us?”

“It could happen,” Pearson replied. “The ambassador still hasn’t answered Geremelet’s ultimatum.”

“They’re not talking about … surrendering, are they?”

“Not that I’ve heard, Master Sergeant. Don’t worry, it won’t come to that.”

“Yeah. The Marines never surrender.”

“That’s what they say. Keep a sharp watch.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Aiken turned and looked into the southern sky, where the first stars were beginning to appear. Eight light-years from home had not much altered the familiar constellations, though the dome of the sky was strangely canted against the cardinal directions. There was a bright star, however, in the otherwise dim and unremarkable constellation Scutum, not far from the white beacon of Fomalhaut.

Sol. Earth’s sun. As always, the sight of that star sent a shiver down Aiken’s spine. So far away, in both space and time.

Eight point three light-years. Help from home could not possibly arrive in time …

Prologue

12 MAY 2138

Firebase Frog

New Summer

Ishtar, Llalande 21185 IID

72:26 hours Local Time

Master Sergeant Gene Aiken leaned against the sandbag barricade and stared out across the Saimi-Id River. Smoke rose from a half-dozen buildings, staining the pale green of the early evening sky. Marduk, vast and swollen, aglow with deep-swirling bands and storms in orange-amber light, hung immense and sullen, as ever just above the western horizon. The gas giant’s slender crescent bowed up and away from the horizon where the red sun had just set; its night side glowed with dull red heat as flickering pinpoints, like twinkling stars, marked the pulse and strobe of continent-size lightning storms deep within that seething atmosphere.

The microimplants in Aiken’s eyes turned brooding red dusk to full light, while his battle helmet’s tactical feed displayed ranges, angles, and compass bearing superimposed on his view, as well as flagging thermal and movement targets in shifting boxes and cursor brackets.

The sergeant studied Marduk’s blood-glow for a moment, then looked away. At his back, with a shrill whine of servomotors, the sentry tower’s turret swiveled and depressed, matching the movements of his head.

He could hear the chanting and the drumming, off to the east, as the crowds gathered at the Pyramid of the Eye. It was, he thought, going to be a very long night indeed.

“How’s it going, Master Sergeant?”

Aiken didn’t turn, not when he was linked in with the sentry. His battle feed had warned him of Captain Pearson’s approach.

“All quiet on the perimeter, Captain,” he replied. “Sounds like the Frogs’re pretty riled up down in the ’ville, though.”

“Word just came through from the embassy compound,” Pearson said. “The rebel abos have seized control in a hundred villages. The ‘High Emperor of the Gods’ is calling for calm and understanding from his people.” The way he said it, the title was a sneer.

Abos, abs, aborigines; Frogs, or Froggers. All were terms for the dominant species of Ishtar … ways of dehumanizing them.

Which was a damned interesting idea when you realized how not human the Ahannu were.

“Do you think they’ll attack us?”

“It could happen. The ambassador still hasn’t answered Geremelet’s ultimatum.”

A gossamer flitted in the ruby light, twisting and shifting, a delicate ribbon of iridescence. Aiken lifted the muzzle of his 2120 and caught the frail creature, watching it quiver against the hard black plastic of the weapon’s barrel in bursts of rainbow color. Other gossamers danced and jittered in the gathering darkness, delicate sparkles of bioluminescence.

“They’re not talking about … surrendering, are they?”

“Not that I’ve heard, Master Sergeant. Don’t worry. It won’t come to that.”

“Yeah. The Marines never surrender.”

“That’s what they say. Keep a sharp watch. There’ve been reports of frogger slaves trying to gain entrance at some of the other bases. They might be human, but we can’t trust them.”

“Aye aye, sir.” The Ahannu slaves, descendants of humans taken from Earth millennia ago, gave Aiken the creeps. No way was he letting them through his part of the perimeter.

“Good man. Give a yell if you need help.”

“You don’t need to worry about that, sir.” He hesitated, looking up at the vast and seething globe of Marduk. “Hey, Captain?”

“What?”

“Some of the guys were having a friendly argument the other night. Is Ishtar a planet or a freakin’ moon?”

Pearson chuckled. “Look it up on the local net.”

“I did. Didn’t understand that astrological crap.”

“Astronomy, not astrology. And it’s both. Marduk is a gas giant, a planet circling the Llalande sun. Ishtar is a moon of Marduk … but if it’s planet-sized and has its own internally generated magnetic field and atmosphere and everything else, might as well call it a planet, right?”

“I guess. Thanks, sir.”

Pearson walked off into the gloom, leaving Aiken feeling very much alone. He turned and looked into the southern sky, where the first stars were beginning to appear. Eight light-years from home had not much altered the familiar constellations, though the dome of the sky was strangely canted against the cardinal directions. There was a bright star, however, in the otherwise dim and unremarkable constellation Scutum, not far from the white beacon of Fomalhaut. Aiken might not know astronomy from astrology, but he’d pulled downloads enough to know what he was looking at now.

Sol. Earth’s sun. As always, the sight of that star sent a small shiver down Aiken’s spine. So far away, in both space and time …

Eight point three light-years. Help from home could not possibly arrive in time.

1

2 JUNE 2138

Giza Complex

Kingdom of Allah, Earth

0525 hours Zulu

The trio of TAV Combat Personnel Carrier transports came in low across the Mediterranean Sea, avoiding the heavily populated coastal areas around El Iskandariya by crossing the beach between El Hammam and El Alamein. Skimming the Western Desert at such low altitudes that their slipstreams sent rooster tails of sand exploding into the pale predawn sky, the TAVs swung sharply south of the isolated communities huddled along the Wadi El Natrun, dumping velocity in a series of weaving banks and turns. Ahead, silhouetted against the brightening eastern horizon and the lights of Cairo, their objective rose like three flat-sided mountains above the undulating dunes.

The defenders would know that something was happening; even with stealth architecture, the three transatmospheric vehicles had scorched their radar signatures in ion reentry trails across the skies of Western Europe as they’d descended from suborbit, and the mullahs of the True Mahdi had been expecting something of the sort. The only question was how long it would take them to react.

Captain Martin Warhurst, CO of Bravo Company, sat hunched over in his travel seat in the rear of CPC Delta’s red-lit troop compartment, crowded torso to armored torso with the men and women of 1st Squad, First Platoon. There were no windows in the heavily armored compartment, no viewscreens or news panels, but a data feed painted a small, brightly colored image within his Helmet Data Overlay, showing the outside world as viewed through a camera in the TAV’s blunt nose.

There wasn’t a lot to see, in fact—abstract patterns of light and darkness wheeling this way and back with the TAV’s approach maneuvers. The area beyond the Giza complex, along the west bank of the Nile, was brightly lit. The extensive archeological digs behind the Sphinx and between the two northern pyramids, those of Khufu and Khafre, were bathed in harsh spotlights reflected from aerostats hovering high above the ground-based beam projectors.

He knew the mission orders, knew the lay of the land and the location of the company’s objectives, but it was almost impossible to make sense of what he was seeing on his HDO display. Balls of yellow and red light floated up from the ground—fire from enemy antiaircraft positions. Colored lines and symbols glowed among alphanumerics identifying targets, way points, ranges, and bearings. His cranialink provided analysis, based on data jacked through from the CPC’s combat computer. He could see the area marked as the platoon’s drop-off point, midway between the Sphinx and Khafre’s pyramid.

“Captain Warhurst,” the phlegmatic, female voice of the TAV’s AI pilot said in his helmet receiver. “Thirty seconds. Hot LZ.”

“I see it,” Warhurst replied. His grip tightened on his weapon, a General Electric LR-2120 Sunbeam pulse laser, with its M-12 underbarrel 20mm RPG launcher and data hotlink to his Mark VII armor. He’d been in the Marines for six years and made captain two years ago, but this would be his first time in combat, his first hot drop, his first time in command with a live enemy.

God, don’t let me screw it up. …

The TAVs made a final course adjustment, shrieking low above the sands between the middle and southern pyramids, their dead-black hulls slipping through crisscrossing targeting radar beams like ghosts, evading hard locks. Air brakes unfolded like ungainly wings as their noses came up, and billows of sand exploded from the hard-driving plasma thrusters arrayed at wing roots and bellies.

“Hold on,” the AI’s voice said, as deceleration tugged at Warhurst’s gut and the steel deck tilted sharply beneath his booted feet. “We’re going in.”

“Hang onto your lunches, boys and girls,” he called over First Platoon’s comm channel. “We’re grounding!”

A jolt … a moment of suspense and silence … and then another, harder jolt as the TAV decelerated on shrieking thrusters to a slow-drifting hover. With a shrill whine of hydraulics, the first CPC was extruded from the side of the TAV’s fuselage on unfolding davits as raw noise banged and shrieked inside the sealed troop compartment. Plenum thrusters already spooling howled now as all four onboard hovercraft personnel carriers swung free of the floating TAV and detached their cables. Sand blasted around the hovercraft as they floated half a meter above the surface, skittering sideways to clear the overhang of their huge, black transport while the TAV engaged full thrusters and rose clear of the drop zone. “Good luck, First Platoon,” the AI pilot’s voice announced.

“We’re clear of the TAV, Captain!” Lieutenant Schulman, the CPC commander, yelled over the vehicle’s comm system. Hammer blows clanked and pinged and sang from the hull outside. They were taking small-arms fire. “Objective in sight, range two-three-five. Moving!”

“Roger that!” Warhurst’s helmet display feed had shifted automatically to a pickup on the CPC’s hull now that the hovercraft was free of its ride. He could see the flash and wink of gunfire in the darkness, the streaking tracers of heavy automatic weapons. Somewhere in the distance a round of HE went off with a deep-throated crump, briefly lighting the dune shadows nearby. The CPC’s turret shrilled as it rotated in its collar above and forward of the troop compartment, and Warhurst felt the steady thud-thud-thud of the 50mm autocannon slamming high explosive rounds into an enemy gun position.

The armored Marines remained strapped in their seats, weapons muzzle up between their knees, silent while boiler room noise boomed and banged around them. Once, the CPC lurched heavily to the left as a near miss rocked the hovercraft over on its plenum skirts like a boat listing in heavy seas, but Schulman righted the stubborn, tough-hulled machine and swerved hard as armor-seeking missiles strobed in dazzling cacophony outside.

“Coming up on the drop-off, Captain!” Schulman warned. “Ten seconds!”

“Roger that!” He checked the map on his HDO. They were on target. With a focused thought, he shifted to the platoon freak. “Ten seconds, people! Go to IR!”

With a thought focused through his implant, Warhurst engaged his helmet’s infrared overlay, and the red-lit shapes around him faded into gloom, nearly invisible, with only enough heat leakage from joints and peripheral gear to give each Marine in the compartment a faint, ghostly aura.

The hovercraft slewed sideways, and the aft hatch opened up, ramp dropping and shields unfolding to reveal a cold black sky above the grays and midnight blues and black-greens of a chill desert landscape painted in infrared. Warhurst hit the quick release on his harness and was on his feet, ducking to step beneath the hatch. “C’mon, Marines!” he shouted. “Ooh-rah!”

In a double line, twelve Marines stormed down the drop ramp and onto the sand as point-defense lasers on the CPC’s upper deck tracked incoming mortar rounds and flashed them to metallic vapor. Warhurst raced ahead, conscious only of the press of the Marines around him, of the rattle and pop of weapons fire, the flicker of muzzle flashes in front of him.

He threw himself down on the slope of a dune, scrambling up and forward until he could bring his weapon to bear. The 2120’s sighting camera was linked by computer to his helmet display. A red-glowing reticle crosshaired whatever the laser’s muzzle was pointed at, together with flickering numbers giving range, bearing, and probable target ID. He took aim at the muzzle flashes fifty meters to his northeast and thumbed the lever to engage his RPG autolauncher. He let the weapon’s sight record the target—dimly seen shapes of yellow emerging from the inky blue-green backdrop. His computer tagged the guns as teleoperated sentries, but the body heat of a dozen enemy soldiers showed as vague shapes through the dune itself and as pillars of moist heat moving above the sand. Field sensors detected the RF leaked by electrical systems, probably the sentries’ motors and power packs.

Good enough. He squeezed the trigger. The boxlike hard plastic case of the weapon vibrated within the grip of his gloves as he loosed a burst of grenades, cycling at twelve rounds per second, fanning eight rounds in a spread along the crest of the sand dune ahead. Accelerated to eight hundred meters per second by the launcher’s mag driver, each round unfolded in flight, a tiny ramjet engine kicking on as microvanes steered the projectile toward its chosen target. Like steadily glowing fireflies against the night, the string of ramjet-propelled grenades streaked through the darkness, rising high above the sand dune sheltering the enemy gunners, then angling suddenly and sharply down, detonating behind the ridge in a chain of explosions, each as powerful as the blast from a fist-sized lump of CRX-80.

Shrieks and screams rose from the target area as clouds of sand geysered into the sky, mixed with chunks of plastic, metal, and more grisly debris. A running figure showed briefly at the crest of the ridge; Warhurst thumbed his weapon to laser and triggered a pulse. The target flopped out of sight, but Warhurst wasn’t sure whether he’d scored a kill or not.

Explosions continued to thump and boom all around them. The other members of First Platoon had spread out along the dune, laying down a devastating curtain of explosive firepower, driving the enemy gunners to cover.

With a thought, he engaged his helmet’s data link with the CPC. What’s up ahead?

The CPC sensors were far sharper and more observant than those packed in a Mark VII combat armor suit. In addition, Lieutenant Schulman had by now deployed a small army of recon floaters, marble-sized sensor packs riding their magfields across the battlefield, allowing the CPC computer to build up a coherent and complete view of the entire engagement.

A picture inset opened for him at the top of his helmet’s field of view. Symbols moved slowly across a 3D model of the surrounding terrain—green squares, circles, and triangles for Bravo Company’s Marines; reds for known hostiles; yellows for unknowns. Dropping the resolution to a hundred meters, he was able to narrow the feed to just First Platoon, checking on their position, then open it again to the entire battlefield.

The sand dune ahead was clear. No living targets, no operating machinery or electrical devices. The flanks were clear as well, as Second and Third Platoons completed their deployments to either side. “First Section, First Platoon, move out!” he called over the platoon’s command channel. “Second Section, overwatch.”

He was struggling to find the right rhythm of command. In a sense, he was wearing two hats—commander of Bravo Company as well as CO of First Platoon. He couldn’t neglect one for the other and needed to stay well-grounded in the scope and depth of the entire battle.

This despite the fact that he was only directly aware of the fighting in his immediate vicinity, at squad level. Even his HDO electronics and satellite-relayed downlinks couldn’t entirely lift the eternal fog of war.

Scrambling to his feet, Warhurst jogged across the sand until he reached the explosives-chewed berm. A tangle of bodies lay on the far side—Kingdom militia, from the look of them, in a mix of dark fatigues, chamelecloth, and civilian clothing. A black beret on the sand bore the green and silver crescent flash of the True Mahdi. The weapons were mostly Chinese lasers and Shiite Persian K-90s; the charred and scattered fragments of casings, ammo boxes, and squat tripods were probably the remnants of Chinese Jixie Fangyu automated sentry guns, JF-120s.

The two squads of First Section fanned out along the slope, providing cover as Second Section moved up to join them. Ahead and to the left a blaze of light showed eerily luminescent in Warhurst’s IR view. Several man-sized heat sources jogged past the base of a small building with lighted windows. He raised his weapon, switching to RPG and tracking the figures, but a targeting interrupt appeared on his helmet display, blocking the shot. The targets were hostiles, no question of that; he’d thought for a moment that his weapon had detected the IFF signatures of other Marines moving into his field of fire. The readout said otherwise. The company’s primary objective lay in that direction, just behind the building. His rifle was telling him that a miss might cause unacceptable collateral damage.

Slapping the selector switch back to laser, he triggered a stuttering burst of laser fire on the hostiles, scoring at least one hit. He saw the man beneath the targeting crosshairs flail wildly and go down. The rest appeared to be scattering back across the desert, toward the river.

Advancing again by sections, First Platoon rushed forward, taking small-arms fire from the building but nothing powerful enough to more than ding their armor. A five-ton cargo hovertruck lay on its side half buried in the sand, its turbine box blazing against the darkness. The twelve CPCs drifted slowly among the dunes, laying down intense covering fire. Overhead, the airborne TAVs darted and hovered like immense black dragonflies while the ground units called down fire from the sky.

Warhurst ran up to the building, a squared-off office module of the sort designed to be moved by truck or floater to where it was needed temporarily. Throwing himself down on the sand, he took aim at the single door. “Come out!” he yelled. At his mental command, his suit’s comm suite translated his words into Arabic. “Yati!”

Other Marines joined him, and a burst of automatic fire snapped from the module window. Warhurst sent a burst of laser pulses back in reply, burning through the thin plastic walls of the building and eliciting shouts and screams inside.

Someone shouted something in guttural Arabic, and Warhurst’s suit translated: “Do not shoot! Do not shoot!” A moment later the door banged open and two KOA troops stumbled out, holding their Chinese lasers above their heads. A moment passed, and two more emerged, supporting a third man, a wounded comrade, between them.

“Out! Out!” Warhurst yelled, and Sandoval and Kreuger leaped forward. They pulled the weapons from the prisoners’ hands, tossed them aside, and shoved the captives back and away from the building. Michaelson and Smith banged through the door and rolled inside, checking the building, then emerged again to report it secure.

Gunfire crackled in the distance as Second and Third Platoons established a company perimeter. At the building, though, there was momentary peace, an eerie calm. After ordering Kreuger to keep watch on the prisoners, now lying facedown on the sand a few meters away, Warhurst checked in with his other platoon commanders. Both reported the enemy on the run, light casualties, and a secure regimental LZ. Gunnery Sergeant Petro reported that First Platoon now controlled the main objective. The defenders were fleeing … or had been neutralized, one way or another.

Walking out across the desert toward the company’s objective, Warhurst opened the command channel. “Backstop, Backstop, this is Sharp Edge One. Objective Stony Man secure.”

“Sharp Edge One, Backstop. Roger that. You have some people back here who’ve been holding their breath ever since you went in.”

“Well, don’t let them breathe yet. There was heavy—repeat heavy—enemy activity in the LZ.” So much for that easy in, easy out op they’d promised, Warhurst thought. “Local resistance has been broken, but I don’t want to get too fat and happy out here.”

Just ahead, Objective Stony Man rose from a broad, steep-walled pit carved into hard-packed sand and limestone bedrock … a long, low, weathered body lying on a pedestal like a crouching lion … the head ancient, secretive, facing east across the black sparkle of the Nile.

The Sphinx of Giza, sentinel of the Great Pyramids, still silent after all these millennia. He could make out a faint, reflective gleam from the plastic shell that had been added a century ago to prevent further erosion.

Warhurst’s proximity motion detector chirped at him, and he turned in the indicated direction. A small, gray sphere, marble-sized and pulsing with a superconductor-driven magnetic induction field, was moving left to right ten meters away. He brought his weapon up, but his targeting interrupt cut in. The object IFFed as a Net News Network remote camera.

Damn, he thought, Triple N, as usual, had better intelligence than the Pentagon. How the hell had they picked up on the Giza op so quickly?

He considered overriding the cutouts and bringing the camera down. Troops in the field had the right to do so if a wandering news camera might reveal positions or movements to the enemy. In fact, the mullahs across the Nile in Cairo were probably watching live Triple N news coverage at that moment. He resisted a comic-relief impulse to wave.

Still, the networks were generally pretty good about keeping their equipment back from the immediate front lines, if only because those flying robotic eyes were damned expensive and tended to draw fire. If newsies were around, it was a good sign that the enemy wasn’t. Anyway, the one he’d seen was traveling at a pretty good clip, heading toward the river. He let it go.

Warhurst returned his attention to the Sphinx once more. After a moment’s thought, he slung his weapon, then reached up and unsnapped the catches on his combat helmet. He wanted to see that ancient wonder with unaugmented eyes.

The light surprised him and made him blink. The sky was bright and pale blue, only minutes from sunrise. The Sphinx continued to stare at the eastern horizon, as though patiently waiting for yet another in a chain of three million dawns.

He turned then, facing west, and caught sight of a glorious panorama—the three pyramids rising above the Giza Plateau; the nearest, Khafre’s, just two hundred meters away. The upper half of each glowed a brilliant orange-yellow, bathed in light from a sun still below the horizon; the lower halves were still gray with night shadow.

Soldiers! Forty centuries look down upon you! So, it was said, Napoleon had addressed his men in 1798, just before the Battle of the Pyramids. Those enigmatic, artificial mountains had seen more than their share of blood upon the sand already.

Stuttering automatic gunfire punctuated that thought. It sounded like Cooper and Third Platoon were slugging it out with the locals near the base of Khufu’s pyramid. He could hear the radio chatter in his earclip speaker.

“Shooters! Shooters on the pyramid, north side!”

“Roger that. I’ve got ’em.”

“Haley! Wokowski! Circle left!”

“North side clear!”

The fighting was dying down … but this had only been the opening round. The angry mobs occupying the Giza Plateau had retired as usual last night to the comfort and security of Cairo, north and across the Nile, but they would be back as soon as they realized that the UFR/USA had intervened in the crisis militarily, and they would have Mahdi Guards and crack Saladin with them. The Marines had seized the plateau just west of the Nile; now they would have to hold it.

Warhurst didn’t know why the Marines were there, and frankly, he didn’t care. Scuttlebutt had it that KOA was threatening to shut down the archeological digs in and around Giza and evict all foreign xenoarcheologists, but the premission briefing had stressed only that hostile forces in the area around the Sphinx and the Great Pyramids—including both regular troops and large numbers of poorly armed militia—were threatening vital American interests in the region and needed to be neutralized … without causing collateral damage to the monuments, archeological digs, and foreign personnel in the area. The three TAVs bearing First, Second, and Third Platoons of Bravo Company, 3rd Marines, had lifted off from Runway Bravo at Camp Lejeune just forty minutes ago, traversing the Atlantic south of Greenland on a great circle suborbital flight that had brought them down over Egypt. More troops—2nd Regiment’s Alfa, Charlie, and Delta Companies—were on the way; Bravo Company was tasked merely with clearing the LZ and securing the perimeter.

He hoped the relief force came fast. Right now they were terribly exposed—eighty-four Marines, twelve lightly armored CPCs, and three TAVs, holding a few hundred hectares of sand and stone monuments that just hours ago had been swarming with screaming, religious-fanatic mobs.

And those mobs would be back. Guaranteed.

In the east the sun flared above the flat horizon, an explosion of golden light illuminating the dunes and casting long, undulating shadows that filled each depression and indentation in the sand. Warhurst settled his helmet back over his head, resealing the latches.

The counterattack, when it came, would come soon and from the direction of Cairo, fourteen kilometers to the northeast.

Esteban Residence

Guaymas, Sonora Territory

United Federal Republic, Earth

1055 hours PT

John Garroway Esteban relaxed in the embrace of his sensory couch, opening himself to the images flooding through his mind. Gunfire snapped and crackled in the distance, as a mob of swarthy men in a mix of military uniforms and civilian clothing swarmed across a bridge, some in trucks or cargo floaters, most on foot. The news anchor’s voice-over described the scene as data windows opened with sidebar data. live from cairo floated in blue letters above the confused and chaotic panorama.

“Demonstrations began in Cairo three days ago,” the anchor was saying, “when the Mahdi declared that the monuments of Giza existed to declare God’s glory and that attempts to excavate them in order to prove extraterrestrial influences in ancient human affairs were blasphemous and, therefore, illegal under the religious laws of the Kingdom of Allah. All archeological excavations in Egypt were ordered halted when—”

With a focused thought, John shifted feeds. Show me the Marines.

It felt as though he were drifting above the desert. It was mid-morning, and men in chamelearmor almost indistinguishable from the sand around them crouched in holes scratched into the shelter of a dune. Robot sentries, solitary pylons capped by laser turrets, scanned the horizon, as an American flag fluttered in the breeze from a makeshift pole. In the background the scarred and age-smoothed face of the Sphinx looked over the desert, and behind it rose the golden apex of one of the pyramids. A velvet-black, stub-winged aircraft circled overhead. “Silim,” he whispered, an Ahannu word currently in vogue with the xenophilic set, meaning “good” or “with it.”

“Just before dawn this morning,” the narrator said, “elements of the 3rd Marine Division were suborbited into Giza, neutralizing local forces and setting up a defensive perimeter, establishing what President LaSalle called ‘a safe zone to protect both American and Confederation interests in the region.’”

For minutes more, he took in the scenes relayed from the battlefield, views of American Marines crouched under cover, of robotic fliers patrolling sandy wastes, of a team of Confederation archeologists debarking from a transatmospheric lander and being escorted by Marines to the base of the Great Pyramid.

The scene blurred and shifted, and John found himself sitting in a folding chair in the White House Rose Garden. President LaSalle stood behind a podium a few meters away, her face drawn and tired, as though she’d been up all night. “One of my predecessors,” she said, “called the U.S. Marines the Navy’s police force. In fact, for the past 150 years they have been the President’s police force, the first of this nation’s military forces to be deployed to any spot on the globe where our vital interests are being threatened. I did not make the decision to deploy our young men and women to this region lightly. Ongoing excavations at Giza are in the process of uncovering remarkable discoveries of inestimable value in understanding our past and the nature of repeated extraterrestrial interventions upon this world of ours thousands of years ago. It is vital to all of us that these discoveries remain intact, that they not fall into the hands of radical religious extremists. …”

For John, it was as though he were sitting right there with the reporters, listening to the President’s speech. The clarity and realism of the noumen’s sensory input were nearly as sharp as real life. His implant was an expensive, high-end set, with almost two thousand protein processor nodes grown from microscopic nanoseeds scattered throughout his cerebral cortex and clustered within the nerve bundles of the corpus callosum. His father had insisted on a top-of-the-line Sony-TI 12000 Series Two Cerebralink, complete with social interactive icon selection, high-speed interfaces, emotional input, and multiple net search demons, and for once John was happy that his father was who and what he was, able to pull that much thrust. The 12000 was an executive model, the sort of cranialink nanohardware favored by high-powered CEOs and techers, light-years beyond what the other kids had had for schoolinks.

John was eighteen and well into his first year of online university work. Carlos Jesus Esteban was determined that his son would get his degree in business management. John knew that his father might differ with him about his future career, but at least—

A yellow light winked against the upper right corner of the news window in John’s mind. Shit!

He mindclicked the link, closing the window, but the warning program he’d written for his Sony-TI simply wasn’t fast enough to beat the parental insertion. The window froze before it collapsed completely, then expanded again to show President LaSalle caught in foolish-looking mid-word.

His father’s noumetic icon exploded into his consciousness, a mustached giant, vast and stern, in violet business smartsuit, with lightning flickering about his brow. “What the hell are you doing?” The elder Esteban’s voice was like thunder, and John, out of long-polished habit, cringed, then flared back.

“This is my feed!”

“You think so, smart kid? I bought you that fancy nanoware, and I won’t have you nouming that damned political pornography. Not as long as you’re in my house!”

The image of President LaSalle winked out, and John floated alone in cyberspace with his father. He tried to adjust his own icon presentation so he felt less like a tiny satellite orbiting a planetary giant, but he found the mental input controls beyond his reach. His father was running his noumenal feed now.

Pretty soon I’ll be able to noum what I want to. The thought came to mind unbidden.

Somehow—could his father do that?—Esteban caught the thought or its echo. “What do you mean by that crack?” his father said. “Where do you think you’re going?”

John felt the shifting cybercurrents of moving data packets. Damn! His father was sifting through his files. If he found out—

“What are you hiding, muchacho? Huh? What do you have in here?”

Abruptly, desperately, John mindclicked and severed the link. He sat once again in his sensory couch, the familiar surroundings of his home E-room around him. He lay there for a moment, breathing hard. Damn, damn, damn his father! These encounters always left him shaking, weak, and feeling violated. Just because his father felt that he had the right to monitor everything that he did on the net …

Sometimes that translated as the right to monitor everything that he thought, and to John, that blatant invasion of privacy, self, and boundaries was as personal and as direct as a slap across the face.

If his father was angry at him for following Triple N’s coverage of the Egyptian crisis, he would have been absolutely furious to learn that in a few days’ time his son would be leaving home for good.

Tough, he thought. John Garroway Esteban had been a free agent since turning eighteen three months ago. For much of his life he’d dreamed about being a Marine, ever since his mother had told him about her ancestors, the Garroways, and the roles they’d played in wars from Korea to Mexico.

Soon he would be a Marine himself, and he could kick off the mud of this damned planet and begin to see the worlds.

Silim! …

Marine Planetary Base

Mars Prime, Mars

1914 hours Zulu

Some 210 million kilometers from John Esteban’s E-center musings, Colonel Thomas Jackson Ramsey—“TJ” to his friends—touched the announce pad at the doorway to the office of his commanding officer. The door slid open in response. “General Cassidy? Reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Enter,” William Cassidy said without looking up from his work station.

Ramsey entered, centering himself on the hatch, hands clasped stiffly at his back. He didn’t know why he’d been summoned here. He didn’t think he was in trouble, but with Brigadier General Cassidy—a tough, no-nonsense character with dark mahogany skin, silver hair, and a hard-ass attitude reputed to curdle milk at fifty meters—you never knew.

“At ease, at ease,” Cassidy said after a moment. He pulled the link circlet from his head and tossed it aside on the desk, then rubbed his eyes. “Drag up a chair.”

Ramsey floated a glider chair across the deck and anchored it with a thought. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

“Yes, damn it. You’ve got new orders.”

Ramsey’s eyebrows lifted themselves toward his hair line. “Sir? I’ve only been here eight months.” The usual length of off-world deployments was two years.

“I know. And I’m going to hate like hell to lose you.” Cassidy gave him a sidelong look. “What’s your famsit?”

Curiouser and curiouser. A Marine’s family situation was only raised for offworld deployments. “No current contract, sir. I had one before I shipped out for Mars.” Cheryl hadn’t been willing to wait for him, and he couldn’t say he blamed her. It still hurt, though. …

“Any kids?”

“No, sir. Do I take it that I’m being reassigned out-Solar, General?”

“I guess you could say that. It’s volunteers only, and it’s long term. Very long term. But it’s carrying a Career Three.”

“Goddess! Where are they sending me?”

“That,” Cassidy said, “is classified. They won’t even tell me. But they want you back on Earth so they can talk to you about it. Open up and I’ll pass you what I have.”

Ramsey uplinked to the local netnode with a coded thought and tuned to the general’s channel. Information flickered through his awareness, resolving itself into stark words hanging before his mind’s eye. There wasn’t much.

FROM: USMCSPACCOM, QUANTICO, VIRGINIA

TO: THOMAS JACKSON RAMSEY, COLONEL, USMC HQ DEPOT USMC MARS PRIME

FROM: DWIGHT VINCENT GABRIOWSKI, MAJGEN, USMC

DATE: 2 JUN 38

SUBJ: ORDERS

YOU ARE HEREBY REQUIRED AND DIRECTED TO REPORT TO USMCSPACCOM WITH YOUR COMMAND CONSTELLATION, DELTA SIERRA 219, FOR IN-PERSON BRIEFING AND POSSIBLE VOLUNTARY REASSIGNMENT.

THE IP PACKET OSIRIS (CFT-12) WILL BE MADE READY TO TRANSPORT COMMAND CONSTELLATION DELTA SIERRA 219 TO USMC SPACEPORT CAMP LEJEUNE, DEPARTING MARS PRIME NO LATER THAN 1200 HOURS LT 3 JUNE 2138, ARRIVING CAMP LEJEUNE SPACEPORT NO LATER THAN 9 JUNE 2138.

OFFERED MISSION REQUIRES FAMSIT CLASS TWO OR LOWER. RECENT CHANGES IN INDIVIDUAL FAMSITS SHOULD BE UPLINKED TO USMCSPACCOM PRIOR TO SCHEDULED DEPARTURE.

OFFERED MISSION ASSIGNMENT CARRIES CAREER THREE RATING.

SIGNED: D.V. GABRIOWSKI

This, Ramsey reflected, would not be an ordinary duty reassignment. Career Three meant a big boost to his career track … the equivalent of a major combat-command assignment or a long-term independent command, possibly both. The famsit requirement could only mean a long deployment, a couple of years at least.

Where the hell were they sending him, Europa?

Which reminded him …

“They want my whole constellation to go Earthside with me,” he said.

“I know Captain DeHavilland and Sergeant Major Tanaka are at Cydonia,” General Cassidy replied. “A C-5 has already been dispatched to bring them in. The rest of them are here at Prime, aren’t they?”

“Actually, sir, I was thinking of Cassius. He was seconded to Outwatch when I was assigned here. He’s been on Europa for eight months.”

“I don’t have any information about your sym, Colonel. But this is damned hot. I would imagine that Quantico has already made provisions to bring him back as well.”

If so, this assignment was hot, hotter than a class-four solar flare. The Corps was not in the habit of casually shuttling command constellations from Mars to Earth just for a briefing … and sure as Chesty Puller was a devil dog, it wasn’t in the habit of ferrying a lone AI symbiont all the way back from Outwatch duty in the Jovians.

Where were they being sent?

He had a pretty good idea already—there weren’t that many possibilities—and the thought both thrilled and terrified. …

2

2 JUNE 2138

Listening Post 14, the Singer

Europa

1711 hours Zulu

And further still from Earth, some 780 million kilometers from the warmth of a shrunken, distance-dwindled sun, a solitary figure crouched on top of the half-surfaced ruin of a half-million-year-old artifact, high above the swarming camps of humans who studied it. The figure was not human, and in this modality didn’t share even a basic humanoid shape with his builders. Humans called this model “the spider,” because of the low-slung, flattened body, the eight spindly legs, and the cluster of eye lenses and manipulators set into his forward armored casing.

He was patient, as only an artificial intelligence could be patient. AI-symbiont CS-1289, Series G-4, Model 8, known to his human companion as Cassius, had waited here in the icy cold for just over 4.147 megaseconds now, some forty-eight days in human terms. By slowing his time sense by a factor of 3,600, however, his wait thus far had seemed more like nineteen hours, and even those hours, passing uneventfully, were accepted without emotion or anxiety, as much a part of Cassius’s environment as the ice and the near-perfect vacuum around him.

The surrounding landscape—icescape would be a more appropriate term—was a jumble of crushed and broken structures, towers, pylons, Gothic arches, and towering stacks of smoothed and round-cornered buildings, all encrusted with mottled gray-black and white ice. The swollen orb of Jupiter hung low in the sky, just above one of the radiation-blasted pressure ridges that crisscrossed the icy moon’s frozen surface. Europa circled Jupiter in just over three days, thirteen hours. With the time compression, eighty-five hours passed in what seemed to Cassius like a minute and forty-one seconds; shrunken sun and unwinking stars drifted across the sky from horizon to horizon in just fifty seconds. The swollen orb of Jupiter itself always remained in the same area of the sky, bobbing with Europa’s libration as the moon orbited in tide-locked step about its primary, but the banded disk waxed and waned through a complete cycle of phases, from full to crescent and dark, then back to full, all in a single time-compressed “day.” The other Jovian moons, from the silvery disk of Ganymede to a handful of stars, circled the giant planet, each at a different pace. Beneath that spectacular light show, across Europa’s frozen surface, shadows swung along the undulating ice, shrinking with the fast-rising sun, vanishing at high noon, then lengthening into the darkness of the short night, a cycle three days long compressed into a perceived handful of seconds.

From time to time Cassius was aware of humans moving through his circle of awareness, brief, blurred flickers of motion. He checked each, but at a subliminal, unconscious level. Had any lacked the requisite IFF codes or trespassed into unauthorized zones, his time sense would at once have defaulted to one-to-one, allowing him to challenge the interloper.

A human might have been lonely, but Cassius accepted the isolated duty as simply another mission within his design specs and parameters. He was aware of human activity in the area, of course. The tilted, roughly disk-shaped bulge of the Singer exposed above the frozen wastes of Europa’s world-ocean ice cap was ringed by a dozen small camps, pressure domes, habs, and radshield generators providing access to the mountain-sized mass of alien technology locked in the broken ice. Lights blazed around the perimeter, each casting pools of warm yellow radiance to hold the cold and darkness at bay, but Cassius was more aware of the radio chatter and telemetry, voices and streams of data whispering just above the eternal hiss and crackle of Jupiter’s radiation belts.

The human activity was all routine, electronic exchanges depersonalized to the point of tedium.

Seventy-one years before, the Singer had been discovered deep in Europa’s ocean, locked away beneath the eternal, planetwide ice cap. Europa’s seas were host to teeming, myriad life-forms—sulfur-based thermovores thriving around the Europan equivalent of deep-sea volcanic vents. The Singer, however, was from somewhere else, somewhere outside the Solar system, a product of an advanced technology that had mastered star travel at just about the same time that Homo erectus was evolving—or was being evolved, rather—into archaic Homo sapiens. Half a million years ago the Singer had been involved in a fight of some kind, a battle that resulted in the destruction of a colony of different aliens then thriving on the surface of Mars, at Cydonia. Damaged, it had crashed through the Europan ice cap and was stranded.

But not killed. The bizarre machine intelligence that called itself Life Seeker, which humans dubbed “the Singer” because of its eerie, ocean-locked wail, had waited out the millennia, eventually sinking into insanity—some believed out of sheer loneliness. When humans had approached it seventy-one years before, it roused itself from schizophrenic dreamings and attempted to break free. Piercing the ice, it transmitted a broadband radio pulse of incredible power to the stars and then, its scant energy reserves exhausted, died.

The Singer had been silent ever since.

Silent, that is, save for the noisy monkey-pack swarmings of human explorers, archeotechnologists, xenosophontologists, and exocyberneticists. As soon as the brief Sino-Confederation War of 2067 had ended, a steady stream of human ships made their way into the Deeps beyond the orbit of Mars, voyaging to the coterie of moons circling Jupiter. The Singer might be dead, but the kilometer-wide corpse was a solid mass of advanced alien technologies, an immense computer, essentially, that once had housed a self-aware intelligence far exceeding humankind’s. For seven decades human science had been plumbing the depths of the Singer, gleaning a host of technological tricks, arts, and secrets. There were endless promises of new and near-magical means of generating limitless power, of bending gravity to human will, of generating nucleomagnetic fields powerful enough to block a thermonuclear blast and sever the fabric of space itself, of new structural materials millennia beyond current manufacturing understanding, of computers and AIs of superhuman speed and capability, even—whisper the mere possibility softly—of the chance that one day humans might venture to the stars at speeds vastly exceeding that of light.

Such were the promises of the inert Singer … promises still far from being realized. In seventy-two years, Earth’s best scientists had barely begun to catalog the wonders still locked away inside that dead and ice-bound hulk. It might be centuries more before hints, guesses, speculations, and grueling work in the frozen hell of Europa’s 140-degree-Kelvin embrace generated useful technology.

Those promises, however, were so golden that accredited scientists were not the only mammals scavenging through the Singer’s dark, cold corridors. Five years ago a couple of research assistants with a Pakistani archeotechnological team had been caught by Marine security personnel with nearly forty kilos of Singer material—bits and pieces of structural support members and paneling, the equivalent of computer circuit boards, dozens of the fist-sized crystals believed to be used as memory storage media, and several oddly shaped artifacts of completely alien design and unknown purpose.

That hadn’t been the first time site robbers managed to infiltrate the legitimate science teams and smuggle out pieces of the alien ship. Bits of Singer technology had been appearing on Earth for at least the past ten years. Collectors reportedly had paid as much as fifteen million newdollars for fragments mounted and privately displayed as … art. The most startling case on record was the three-meter-wide slice of alien hull metal found hanging behind the altar of the Church of the Gray Redeemers in Los Angeles. When that had been smuggled back to Earth, and how, was anybody’s guess.

The U.S. Marines had been the guarantors of the Singer archeological site’s security ever since the end of the Sino-Confederation War. Once it was realized that covert looters were making off with fragments of the alien ship and selling them as curios, as art, and even as religious relics, the newly formed Confederation Department of Archeotechnology authorized the use of military AIs as sentries. Cassius had been assigned to Outwatch duty eight months ago, when the rest of his constellation—the twelve Marine officers and NCOs of cybergroup Delta Sierra 219—had been deployed to Cydonia. There was little need of team AIs on Mars, where the duty was routine and the local net provided reliable data and technoumetic access. On Europa his considerable skills and more-than-human senses could be put to good use patrolling the Singer artifact, protecting it and the Confederation science teams.

In eight months there’d been no incidents. Everything was strictly routine … which was, after all, the best way for things to be. Another sixteen months, and he would be able to rejoin his constellation back on Earth. Though it was difficult to say whether what he felt for his teammates was truly akin to human emotion, he did miss them… .

A radio signal caught his attention, and he instantly shifted back to standard temporal perception. The sun stopped its rapid drift across the sky, coming to a halt just above the golden-orange crescent of Jupiter. The shadows froze motionless in the patterns of mid-afternoon.

A Navy lander was descending from the west, balancing itself down gently with plasma thrusters against Europa’s 131-centimeters-per-second-squared gravitational tug. IFF tagged the dull black and silver sphere as a lander from the Outwatch frigate Kamael, currently in Europa orbit.

And a radio transmission from the Singer main base was already calling him in. “Cassius, this is Outwatch Europa. RTB, repeat, RTB.”

Return to base? He was not scheduled to leave Listening Post 14 for another 105 hours.

But more so than for a human, even for a human Marine, orders were decidedly orders. He extended his spider legs to full length and began picking his way down the icy slope of the Singer’s hull, making his way rapidly toward the main base.

The lander had been sent for him. He wondered why.

Giza Complex

Kingdom of Allah, Earth

1815 hours Zulu

“Here they come!” Captain Warhurst yelled. A thousand armed men, at least, sprinted into the open, screaming and firing wildly. Most were on foot, but a number of vehicles were mixed in with the surging mob—open-topped flatbed trucks with gun crews in the back, and light cargo hovercraft of various sizes and descriptions. “Commence firing!”

Warhurst leaned forward against the low wall of sandbags, moving his weapon to drag the targeting reticle into line with one of the charging Mahdi shock troops, a big man in mismatched pieces of Chinese and Persian armor, carrying a K-90 assault rifle. A touch of the firing stud, and the LR-2120 hummed, the vibration of the charge cycler flywheel barely perceptible through his armor.

There was no flash or visible pulse of light. Such wasteful displays of pyrotechnics belonged solely to the noumenal fantasies of VR thrillers. The laser pulse lasted for only one hundredth of a second, far too brief a period to register on the human eye even if there’d been dust or smoke in the atmosphere to make the light visible. The LR-2120 had a pulse output of fifty megawatts; one watt for one second equals one joule, so the energy striking the target equaled half a million joules—equivalent to the explosive power released by the detonation of fifty grams of CRX-80 blasting compound, or a tenth of a stick of old-fashioned dynamite.

The pulse explosively vaporized a fist-sized chunk of the man’s polylam breastplate as well as the cloth, flesh, and bone underneath, slamming him back a step before he crumpled to the sand. Warhurst shifted targets and fired again … and again …

The attack had been gathering all day. Kingdom of Allah troops and Mahdi fanatics had begun spilling across the Giza and Duqqi bridges out of Cairo early that morning, shortly after the Marines secured their slender perimeter about the Giza complex, but they stayed within the cluttered, narrow streets between Giza and the river, mingling with a fast-swelling crowd of civilians who chanted and waved banners. The Marines found it amusing. The signs and banners, for the most part, were in English, as were the chants. Clearly, the demonstration was for the benefit of the net news services and their floating camera eyes, which by now saturated the battlefield area as completely as the Marines’ own recon probes.

By mid-afternoon, however, the demonstrators had dwindled away, most of them crossing the Nile bridges back into Cairo proper. The shock troops and militia had remained, and the Marines braced themselves, knowing what to expect.

The attack finally came, boiling out from among the ramshackle buildings and narrow streets and into open ground. The Marines had orders not to fire on civilian structures, but they had deployed a line of RS-14 picket ’bots fifteen hundred meters from the Marine perimeter. The baseball-sized devices had buried themselves in the sand and emerged now to transmit data on the range, numbers, and composition of the attacking force, and to paint larger targets, like trucks and hovercraft, with lasers.

With accurate ranging data transmitted from the pickets, Marines inside the perimeter began firing 20mm smartround mortars, sending the shells arcing above the oncoming charge, where they detonated, raining special munitions across the battlefield. Laser-homing antiarmor shells zeroed in on the vehicles. Shotgun fléchette rounds exploded twenty meters above the ground, spraying clouds of high-velocity slivers across broad stretches of the battlefield. Concussion rounds buried themselves in the sand, then detonated, hurling geysers of sand mixed with screaming, kicking bodies into the air.

Only one TAV was airborne at the moment. They were being kept up one at a time to conserve dwindling supplies of the liquid hydrogen used to fuel them. One was sufficient, however, to stoop like a hawk out of the sun, scattering a cloud of special munitions bomblets in a long, precisely placed footprint through the middle of the crowd. A truck and two hovercraft exploded, sending a trio of orange fireballs into the intense blue of the late afternoon sky.

All of the Marines along the northeastern sector of the perimeter were firing now, along with robot sentries and gunwalkers. Warhurst switched his weapon to burst fire; laser rifles had to recycle between each shot, so true full-auto wasn’t possible, but he could trigger up to six bursts at a cyclic rate of two per second before the weapon had to take a three-second pause to recharge. Another truck exploded.

Dozens of KOA troops were falling, caught in a devastating fire from the Marine positions and from directly overhead. The front ranks wavered, hesitating in the face of that deadly wind as those farther back kept pressing forward. In another moment the attack had dissolved into a bloody, thrashing tangle of people, some holding their ground, most trying desperately to flee to the rear and the imagined safety waiting for them back across the Nile.

“Cease fire!” Warhurst called over the command channel. “All squads, cease fire. They’ve had it.”

The attackers continued to flee, leaving several hundred dead and wounded in the desert; none had come within twelve hundred meters of the Marine lines. Most had fallen well beyond the range of their own weapons. No Marines had been hit.

“Good old Yankee high-tech scores again!” Private Gordon called over the tac channel. “They didn’t even touch us!”

“Belay the chatter,” Warhurst warned. “Keep alert. Petro? Anything in front of you?”

He had to assume that the brash, frontal rush had been a feint, something to pin the Marines’ attention to the northeast while the real attack was staged from another quarter.

“Negative, sir,” Gunny Petro replied. She was in charge of the northwest sector. “No targets.”

“Rodriguez?”

“All clear, Skipper.”

“Cooper?”

“Nothing on my front, sir.”

The robot sentries out in the desert were very sensitive, fully able to detect the approach of a single man by his body heat, his movement, his radar signature, even his scent. When Warhurst called up a tactical overhead view of the perimeter, he could see his own troops huddled in their fighting positions … but no sign of enemy troops closer than three kilometers.

But there would be another attack, and soon. He looked up into the early evening sky and wondered what the hell was happening to their relief.

Esteban Residence

Guaymas, Sonora Territory

United Federal Republic, Earth

1545 hours PT

“The Marines?” his mother cried. “Goddess, why would you want to join the Marines?”

John Garroway Esteban stood a little straighter, fists clenched at his side. “You had no right!” he said, shouting at his father, defiant. “My noumen is mine!”

“It’s my house, you’re my son!” his father shouted back, raging. The elder Esteban had been drinking, and his words were slurred. “I paid for your implant, and I can goddamn do anything in, to, or through your goddamn noumen I goddamn want!”

“Carlos, please,” John’s mother said. She was crying now. This was going to be a bad one.

They’d had this argument before, many times. John’s Sony implant created the inner, virtual world through which he could access the World Net, communicate with friends, and even operate noumenally keyed devices, from thought-clicked doors to the family flyer. Noumenon was the conceptual opposite to phenomenon; where a phenomenon was something that happened outside a person’s thoughts, in the real world, a noumenon was entirely a creation of thought and imagination, a virtual reality opened within his mind … but the one was no less real than the other. As the saying went, just because it was all in your head didn’t mean it wasn’t real.

It was also personal, keyed to John’s own thoughts and implant access codes. His father, however, insisted on supervising him through the implant, and the almost daily invasions of his privacy gnawed at John constantly.

Lots of kids had implants with parental controls, if only to monitor their study downloads and keep track of the entertainment Net sites they visited. Carlos Esteban went a lot further, eavesdropping on his conversations with Lynnley, reading his private files, and now downloading his conversation with the Marine recruiter three days ago. Every time John managed to assemble a counterprogram, like the yellow warning light, his father found a way around it … or simply bulled his way right in.

And his father was, of course, furious at his decision to join the Marines. He’d expected his father’s anger but had hoped his mother would understand. She was del Norte, after all, and a Garroway besides.

“No son of mine is going to be part of those butchers,” his father was saying. “The Butchers of Ensenada! No! I will not permit it! You will join me in the family business, and that is that!”

“I don’t want to be a part of the damned family business!” John shot back. “I want—”

“You are eighteen years old,” his father said, his voice rich with scorn. “You have no idea what it is you want!”

“Then maybe this is how I’ll find out!” He swung his arm angrily, taking in the quietly sophisticated sweep of the hacienda’s E-room and dining area, including the floor-to-ceiling viewall overlooking the silver waters of the Sea of Cortez below Cabo Haro. “I won’t if I stay here the rest of my life!”

A tone sounded. The house was signaling them: someone was at the door. He wanted to snatch the excuse, to pull up the visitor’s ID through his implant and go open the door … but his father was glaring into his eyes, furious, and the brief wandering of his thoughts would have been immediately noticed.

“You have here the promise of a good education!” Carlos continued, shouting. If he’d heard the announcement tone, he was ignoring it. “Of a place in the family business when you graduate. Security! Comfort! What more could you possibly need or want?” Carlos Jesus Esteban took another long sip from the glass of whiskey he held. He’d been drinking more and more heavily of late, and his temper had been getting shorter.

“Maybe I just want the chance to get those things for myself. To get an education and a job without having them handed to me!”

“Eh? With the Marines? What can they teach you? How to kill people? How to shed whatever civilized instincts you may have acquired and become an animal, a sociopathic murderer? Is that what you want?”

The house butler rolled in. “Excuse me,” it said. “There is—”

“Get out!” the elder Esteban screamed.

“Yes, sir.” Obediently, the robot spun about and glided out of the room once more, as though it was used to Carlos’s violent moods.

“You just want to go with those worthless gringo friends of yours,” his father continued. “You think military service is some sort of glamorous game, eh?”

“Have you thought about joining the Navy, Johnny?” his mother asked helpfully, with a worried, sidelong glance at his father. “Or the Aerospace Force? I mean, if you want to travel, to go offworld—”

“All of the services are parasites!” Carlos shouted, turning on her. “And the Marines are the worst! Invaders, oppressors, with their boots on our throats!”

“My grandfather was a Marine,” John said with more patience than he felt. “As was his father. And his mother and father. And—”

“All your mother’s side of the family,” his father snapped. He drained the last of his whiskey, then moved to the bar to pour himself another. He appeared to be calming down. His voice was quieter, his movements smoother. A dangerous sign. “Not mine. Always, it is the damned Garroways—”

“Carlos!” his mother said. “That’s not fair!”

“No? Please excuse me, Princessa del Norte! The gringos are always in the right, of course!”

“Carlos—”

“Shut up, puta! This worthless excuse for a son is your fault!”

The house had been signaling for several moments, first with an audible tone, then with a soft voice transmitted through John’s cerebral implants. No doubt the butler had been dispatched with the same warning: someone was still at the front door. A quick check with the house security camera showed him Lynnley Collins’s face.

Now might be his only chance.

“I’ll, um, see who’s at the door,” he said, and slipped as unobtrusively as possible from the room. His father was still screaming at his mother as he rode the curving line of moving steps from the E-center to the entranceway, alerting the house as he descended to open the door.

Lynnley was standing on the front deck, looking particularly fetching in a yellow sunsuit that bared her breasts to the bright, golden warmth of the Sonoran sun. Her dark-tanned skin glistened under her body’s UV-block secretions. Her eyes, with her sunscreen implants fully triggered, appeared large and jet-black.

“Uh, hi,” he said, slipping easily into English. Lynnley was the daughter of a norteamericano family stationed at the naval base up at Tiburón. She spoke excellent Spanish, but he preferred using English when he was with her.

She glanced past him as he stepped outside, brushing back a stray wisp of dark blond hair. The door hissed shut, cutting off his father’s muffled shouts.

“Whoo,” she said. “Bad one?”

He shrugged. “Pretty much what I expected, I guess.”

“That bad?” She touched his arm in sympathy. “So what are you going to do?”

“What can I do? I already thumbed the papers. We’re Marines now, Lynn.”

She laughed. “Well, not quite. There are a few minor formalities to attend to first. Like basic training, remember?”

He walked to the side of the deck, leaning against the redwood railing and staring out over the glistening waters of the Gulf of California. La Hacienda Esteban clung to the summit of a high hill overlooking the cape. The sprawl of the town of Guaymas, the harbor crammed with fishing boats, the clutter of resorts along the coast, provided a bright, tropical splash of mingled colors between the silver-gray sea and the sere brown of the hills and cliff sides. God, I hate it here, he thought.

“Having second thoughts?” Lynnley asked.

“Huh? Hell no! I’ve got to get out of here!”

“There are other ways to leave home than joining the Marines.”

“Sure. But I’ve always wanted to be a Marine. Ever since I was a kid. You know that.”

“I know. It’s the same with me. It’s in the blood, I guess.” She moved to the railing beside him, leaning against it and looking down at the town. “Is it just the Marines your dad hates? Or all gringos?”

“He married a gringo, remember. And she was a Marine’s daughter.”

“Hell, the war was over twenty years before he was born, right? What’s his problem?”

John sighed. “Some of the families down here have long memories, you know? His grandfather was killed at Ensenada. He doesn’t like the government, and he doesn’t like the military.”

“What is he, Aztlanista?”

“I don’t know anymore. Some of his drinking buddies are, I’m pretty sure. And I know he subscribes to a couple of different Aztlan nationalist netnews sites. He likes their ideas, whether he’s a card-carrying member or not.”

“S’funny,” Lynnley said. “Most of the Aztlanistas are poor working class. Indios, farmers. You don’t usually see the big landowners messing with the status quo, joining revolutionary organizations and all that.” She tossed her head, indicating the hacienda and the surrounding hilltop lands. “And your family does have money.”

He shrugged. “I guess. We don’t talk about where the money came from, of course.” His father’s family had become fabulously wealthy in the years before the UN War, when parts of Sonora and Sinaloa—then states of the old Mexican Republic—had furnished a large percentage of several types of illicit drugs for the huge and wealthy northern market.

“But it’s not just the money,” he went on. “There’s still such a thing as national pride. And all of the big-money families around here stand to come out on top of the heap if Aztlan becomes a reality. The new ruling class.”

“Huh. You think that could happen?”

“No,” he replied bluntly. “Not a snowball’s chance on Venus. But the possibility is going to keep the locals stirred up for a long time.”

Baja, Sonora, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua were the newest dependent territories of the burgeoning United Federal Republic, a political union that included the fifty-eight states of the United States plus such far-flung holdings as Cuba, the Northwest Territory, and the UFR Pacific Trust. Acquired during the Second Mexican War of ’76–’77, all four north Mejican territories were in line to be granted statehood, as the fifty-ninth through the sixty-second states, respectively, pending the outcome of a series of referendum votes scheduled in two years. Heavily dependent both on Yankee tourism and on northern markets for seafood and marijuana products, the region of old Mexico surrounding the Gulf of California had closer ties to the UFR than to the Democratic Republic of Mejico, and statehood was likely to pass.

But many in the newly acquired territories favored independence. The question of Aztlan, a proposed Latino nation to be carved out of the states of northern Mejico and the southwestern United States, had been one of the principal causes of the UN War of almost a century ago. The then–United Nations had proposed a referendum in the region, with a popular vote to determine Aztlanero independence. Washington refused, pointing out that the populations of the four U.S. states involved were predominantly Hispanic and almost certain to vote in favor of the referendum, and that federal authority superceded local desires. The war that followed had raged across the Earth, in orbit, and on the surfaces of both the Moon and Mars.

In the end, with the disintegration of the old UN and the rise of the U.S./UFR-Russian-Japanese–led Confederation of World States, Aztlan independence had been all but forgotten … save by a handful of Hispanic malcontents and disaffected political dreamers scattered from Mazatlan to Los Angeles.

The dream remained alive for many. John’s father, his family long an important clan with connections throughout Sonora and Sinaloa, had been more and more outspoken against the gringo invaders who’d migrated south since the Mexican War. “Carpetbaggers,” he called them, a historical allusion to a much earlier time.

But he’d not been able to convince John, and for the past four years their relationship, already shaky with Carlos’s drinking and his notoriously quick temper, had grown steadily worse.

“Have you ever thought,” Lynnley said quietly, “that you and your dad could end up on opposite sides, if fighting breaks out?”

“Uh-uh. Won’t happen. The government can’t use troops on federal soil.”

“A war starts down here, and all it would take is a presidential order. The Marines would be the first ones to go in.”

“It won’t come to that,” he said, stubborn. “Besides, I want space duty.”

She laughed. “And what makes you think they’ll take what you want into consideration?”

“Hey, they gave me a dream sheet to fill out.”

“So? I got one too, but once we sign aboard, our asses are theirs, right? We go where they tell us to go.”

“Yeah …” The idea of coming back to Sonora to put down a rebellion left him feeling a bit queasy. He thought he remembered reading, though, that the government never used troops to put down rebellions in the regions those troops called home. That just didn’t make sense.

It wasn’t going to come to that. It couldn’t.

“You need to get out of the house for a while?” Lynnley asked him. “I thought we might fly out to Pacifica. Maybe do some shopping?”

John glanced back at the front door. He could hear the faint and muffled echoes of his father, still shouting. “You stupid bitch! This is all your fault! …”

“I … don’t think I’d better,” he told her. “I don’t want to leave my mom.”

“She’s a big girl,” Lynnley said. “She can take care of herself.”

But she doesn’t, he thought, bitter. She can’t. He felt trapped.

After talking with the Marine recruiter over an implant link three days ago, he and Lynnley had gone to the Marine Corps recruiter in Tiburón the next day and thumbed their papers. In less than three weeks they were supposed to report to the training center at Parris Island, South Carolina. Somehow he had to tell his parents … his mother, at least. How?

More than once in the past few years, Ellen Garroway Esteban had left the man who was, more and more, a stranger. Two years ago John had tried to get between his parents when his father had been hitting his mother and he’d received a dislocated shoulder in the subsequent collision with a bookcase. And there’d been the time when his father chased her out of the house with a steak knife … and the time she ended up in the hospital, claiming to have fallen down the stairs. John had begged her to pack up and leave, to get out while she still could. Others had done the same—her sister Carol in San Diego, the social worker who’d counseled her after her stay in the hospital, Mother Beatrice, their priest. Each time, she’d agreed the marriage was unsavable and nearly left for good … but each time, she found a reason to stay or to come back home.

One day, John was terribly afraid, she was going to come back home and Carlos was going to kill her. It would be an accident, of course. Injuries he inflicted on others always were.

John hated the thought of leaving his mother, of just walking out and abandoning her. He felt like a coward for running away like this. At the same time, he knew there was nothing else he could do to help her. Goddess knew, he’d tried, but, damn it, she kept coming back, she refused to press charges, she covered up for her husband when the police showed up in response to his panicked calls, made excuses for his behavior: “Carlos is just under a lot of stress right now. He can’t help it, really …”

His mother would have to decide to help herself. He would be gone.

But not just yet. “No,” he told Lynnley. “You go ahead. I’d better hang around and see how this plays out.”

“Suit yourself,” she told him. “Just remember, you won’t be able to protect her when you’re with the Corps off on Mars or someplace.”

“I know.” Am I doing the right thing?

He wished there was an answer to that.

3

5 JUNE 2138

IP Packet Osiris

En route, Mars to Earth

1337 hours Zulu

Colonel Ramsey lay snug within the embrace of a linking couch, only marginally aware of the steady, far-off vibration that was the packet’s antimatter drive. It converted a steady stream of water into plasma and hard radiation, blasting it astern to accelerate the blunt, bullet-shaped vessel with its outsized heat radiators at a steady one gravity. Twenty hours after boosting clear from Mars orbit, the Osiris was already traveling at over 700 kilometers per second and had covered well over 25 million kilometers.

Within his thoughts, stroked by the virtual reality AI of the Osiris communications suite, he was in a huge auditorium, the Pentagon Briefing Center, located some kilometers beneath the Potomac River. The faint, steady thrum of the packet’s main drive, starcore furies rattling just above the level of detectability in deck and titanium-ceramic bulkheads, was all but submerged by the incoming sensations of the padded auditorium seat, the murmured conversations and rustling movements of people around him, the glare off the big screen behind the podium, magnifying the features of the speaker.

“Gentlemen, ladies, AIs,” General Lawrence Haslett said, addressing both those gathered physically in the briefing center and the much larger audience present electronically as well, “as of zero-nine-thirty this morning, Operation Spirit of Humankind is go. President LaSalle signed the executive order authorizing the Llalande Relief Expedition, and both House and Senate approval are expected by tomorrow. Admiral Ballantry has cleared the use of our newest IST, the Derna, for the op, and given the orders to begin rigging her for the voyage.”

Haslett, Army Chief of Staff for the UFR/U.S. Central Military Command, gripped the sides of the podium as he spoke, his words as clear as if he were physically standing in the cramped comm suite on board the Osiris. It was hard for Ramsey to remember that the images he was seeing were already ten minutes and some seconds old. That was how long it took the comm lasers bearing the sensory data to reach Osiris from Earth.

“I needn’t tell all of you,” Haslett went on, “that this is a singularly important deployment, demanding diplomacy, tact, and a clear set of mission objectives and priorities.” He paused. “I also needn’t remind you that time is very much against us. While the FTL communicator on Ishtar provides an instantaneous link with the comm array on Mars, it will take ten years, objective, for the Derna to reach the Llalande system. By that time, of course, anything can have happened. New Sumer may have fallen, almost certainly will have fallen, if the situation continues as it has for the past few weeks. We need to proceed on the assumption that our colony will have been overrun by the rebels by that time, and craft the expeditionary force’s orders with that in mind.”

A chirp sounded over Ramsey’s implant, a question signaled from someone in the audience.

“Yes,” Haslett said.

“Yes, sir,” one of the men seated in the auditorium, an Aerospace Force colonel, said, his image thrown up on the big screen at Haslett’s back. Biographical data scrolled down the right corner of Ramsey’s vision, identifying him as Colonel Joshua Miller. “If the Llalande contact mission is already doomed, what’s the point of sending another ship out there? Is this a punitive expedition?”

“Not punitive, Colonel Miller. Not solely punitive, at any rate. You must know what the polls are saying about the situation on Ishtar.”

“I didn’t realize we were running our wars according to the poll numbers,” another officer put in, and a number of people in the auditorium chuckled.

Haslett scowled and cleared his throat. “The mission commander will have full discretionary powers to deal with the situation as he sees fit, once he arrives at Ishtar. We will be sending along firepower enough that a full range of possible military options will be available.”

“They’d damned well better,” the woman on the recliner to Ramsey’s left muttered, sotto voce, as if the people within the virtual reality transmission playing itself out within their heads might hear. “It’s a hell of a long way to call for reinforcements if the Marines get into trouble!”

“You noticed that, did you?” Ramsey said, and smiled. Major Ricia Anderson was his executive officer within their constellation. “This op is going to be a logistical nightmare.”

“Nothing new there, Colonel. The Corps always gets the short end.”

“Seal it, Rish. I want to hear.”

“This operation was originally conceived as a task force comprising a single Marine expeditionary unit,” Haslett was saying in response to another question. “The Ishtar garrison is a Marine unit, and Spirit of Humankind is being presented to the public as a relief operation.”

Ramsey brought up a text readout and scrolled down through the last few moments. Yeah, there it was. A Confederation liaison officer had asked about the possibility of a multinational task force. There’d been a lot of speculation about that in the netfeeds over the past few months.

“Even so,” Haslett went on, “New Sumer Base is a multinational expedition. Euro-Union, Japan, Russia, the Brazilian Empire, Kingdom of Allah, the People’s Hegemony, they all have science teams and contact specialists on Ishtar or in orbit. And every other nation with interests in the Llalande system wants a piece of the action. Whether we make this a multinational task force or not, we can expect at least four other nations to launch expeditions of their own within the next year or so.

“The latest word from the National Security Council is that there will be two expeditionary forces sent. The idea will be to get the American relief force to Ishtar as quickly as possible, which means assembling, training, and launching it within the next few months. Meanwhile, a second contingent, probably Army Special Forces, will be assembled to accompany any multinational force sent to Llalande, both as backup for the MEU and to safeguard American interests with the multinationals.

“This dual-force strategy has a number of advantages. Perhaps most important, the second force will be able to take direction from the first during its approach and alter its strategy to conform with the situation on the ground. And, of course, we’ll also have the advantage of already being in control of key targets and bases when the multinationals arrive.”

Ramsey sighed. Politics and politicians, they never changed. Was Washington more afraid of the rebellion spreading among the Ahannu or of the possibility of Chinese or Brazilians gaining control of Ishtar’s ancient, jungle-smothered secrets?

Well, it didn’t matter much, really. As usual, the Marines would be going in first.

Burning curiosity—and some fear—gnawed at him, though. As yet, no one had told him or the other members of his constellation why they were being summarily redeployed to Earth, but his private suspicions were validated when a laser comm message to Osiris had directed him and the other members of his constellation to link in for Haslett’s Pentagon briefing.

Ever since he’d been called into General Cassidy’s office at Prime three days ago, Ramsey assumed that the mysterious new orders would involve the Llalande crisis. Nothing else he could think of could possibly justify the expense of loading an entire Marine administrative constellation on board an antimatter-drive packet and shipping them back to Earth on an expensive, high-speed trajectory. Marines—even Marine colonels and their staffs—rarely rated such first-class service. Interplanetary packets, with their antimatter drives capable of maintaining a one-g acceleration for their entire transit, cut the flight time between Earth and Mars from months to five days, but even now, a century after their first deployment, they were hellishly expensive to operate.

What else could it be? As always, there were a few dozen hot spots and minor wars scattered across the face of the Earth. The recent Confederation intervention in Egypt had been much in the news of late; Marines had landed in Giza a couple of days ago to seize vital archeological sites from the hands of Mahdi religious fanatics. There was still the threat of a major political break with the Kingdom of Allah, even the possibility of war, but they wouldn’t ship twelve Marines back from Mars just for that.

Same for the unrest in the American Southwest. There’d been rumblings in the states of Sonora and Chihuahua for years now, the possibility of civil unrest, even civil war. But again, there were plenty of Marines and other UFR forces on hand to deal with that.

Besides, there was the Famsit Two requirement, which suggested a long deployment off-Earth, the sort of deployment that would destroy marriage contracts and long-term relationships. The Corps had begun classifying men and women with family-situation ratings shortly after the UN War, when they’d begun assigning personnel to out-Solar duty in the thin, cold reaches beyond the orbit of Mars.

The Outwatch had been created as a joint UFR/U.S./Confederation military force with the awesome responsibility of patrolling the asteroid belt and the Jovian system. The destruction of Chicago in 2042 during a French warship’s unsuccessful attempt to drop a small asteroid on the central United States had alerted the entire world to the threat of small powers being able to nudge large rocks into Earth-intercepting orbits that would wreak incalculable havoc when they struck. No fewer than twelve large vessels were kept in solar orbit within the belt or beyond, tracking and intercepting all spacecraft that might rendezvous with a planetoid in order to alter its course … and they’d been given the responsibility for watching over Confederation interests on Europa, with the Singer excavations, as well.

With the beginning of large scale mining operations within the Belt, the Outwatch’s personnel needs had sky-rocketed. There were plans to increase the Navy-Marine presence in the Belt to twenty ships within the next five years, and there would be a desperate need for Famsit One and Two personnel to man them.

But even that wouldn’t justify bringing constellation Delta Sierra 219 to Earth. Outwatch assignment needs were ongoing and long-term, typically lasting a couple of years. Any emergency need to fill an out-Solar billet could be taken care of by screening new Marines coming out of Camp Lejeune.

Which left the Ishtar crisis.

Everyone in the constellation felt the same sharp curiosity, sharing scuttlebutt and speculation with urgent fervor. Ricia and Chris DeHavilland had both already told him that they thought 219 was being tapped for command of the Ishtar relief force.

It was a pretty good bet. Delta Sierra 219 had a lot of experience under its communal belt, including command of a regiment in the Philippine Pirate War six years ago. That was before Ramsey had come aboard, but he’d downloaded all of the sims and data stores, all but experiencing directly that savage guerrilla conflict at sea and in the jungles of Luzon. They’d also done plenty of air inserts and during the past eight months on Mars had trained with the new combat suits in an extraterrestrial environment.

It was only beginning to sink in for Ramsey now. He was going to be offered a chance to go to the stars. The stars …

And with a regimental command, no less. He would be in charge of the Marine air-ground components of the MEU, probably under a general’s overall mission command. That was the sort of plum assignment that came along once in a Marine’s career, and it could well open the door to a general’s stars in his future.

“Final selections for the expeditionary command staffs are being made now,” Haslett was saying. “We should have the command teams by the end of next week. The selection boards are still reviewing the records of several general officers for Mission Command. In the meantime, all Earthside Marine Corps evolutions for Operation Spirit of Humankind will fall under the command of Major General Gabriowski.” Haslett looked off to the side. “General? Would you care to add anything?”

General Dwight Gabriowski walked across the stage to the podium, a stout, muscular man with a bullet-smooth head and a Marine DI’s scowl. Gabriowski. That clinched it, then. He was the man who’d ordered DS 219 back to Earth.

“Thank you, General Haslett,” Gabriowski said. “I don’t have much to say … except that I consider it an honor that the Marine Corps has again been called upon to lead the way. We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the Corp’s redundancy … again … and it’s a pleasure to be able to prove that we have as important a role in safeguarding our national interests, wherever they might lie, in the twenty-second century as in the twenty-first, or the twentieth, or the nineteenth. I want to add that …”

“Oh, Goddess, give me strength,” Ricia said from the couch next to Ramsey’s.

“Politics as usual,” Ramsey said. These days, it seemed that the Corps spent as much money and attention on public relations—on the delicate job of persuading each President and each session of Congress that the Marine Corps was not the anachronism its enemies claimed. “You’d think that after Garroway’s March—”

Gabriowski was still talking. “By the end of the month, we will be able to begin building the MEU from volunteer candidates Corpswide. This is an extraordinary mission, of extraordinary importance. It demands the best of our people, the very best of us, all of us together. Marines. Army. Navy. Aerospace. Ad astra!”

“Too bad he doesn’t have a full marching band playing behind him,” Ricia observed. “‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ … or maybe the ‘Luna Marine March.’”

“Ooh-rah!” But he couldn’t completely share her sarcasm. It was a moving moment for him. “The Corps is going to the stars, Ricia,” Ramsey said. “It’ll sure as hell count for something come time for the next military appropriations, right? Semper fi!”

“Yeah,” his exec said, dark and bitter. “Semper fucking fi.”

Giza Complex

Kingdom of Allah, Earth

1615 hours Zulu

Captain Martin Warhurst pulled himself up and onto the final tier of stone blocks, grateful that he was in good enough shape to have made the climb, irritated that some of the Marines made the trek look easy. Sergeant Maria Karelin watched him with wry amusement as he paused to catch his breath, then stood up and walked over to the sniper’s nest where she and Lance Corporal Lambeski, her spotter, had constructed their perch.

And perch it was, an eagle’s eyrie. They were halfway up the eastern face of the Great Pyramid, some seventy meters above the desert floor. Their vantage point, in the pyramid’s afternoon shadow and behind a low, sandbag wall erected on one of the two-and-a-half-ton stone blocks that made up most of the mountainous structure, gave them a magnificent view out over the desert and the tumultuous sprawl of the city Cairo. Ramshackle stone buildings shouldered one another in cluttered confusion on both sides of the Nile, tumbling across the silver-blue sheen of the river to the very edge of the Giza excavations. The hundreds of bodies that had fallen on the sand during the battle three days ago were gone.

Right now it looked as though the entire civilian population of Cairo had spilled out across the bridges over the Nile and begun gathering at the edge of the Giza complex two kilometers away, a vast, seething throng of humanity carrying banners and chanting slogans. Warhurst stepped up his helmet’s magnification to study the angry, upturned faces in the crowd.

“We’ve got one of the high muckety-mucks tagged, Captain,” Karelin told him. She stroked the butt of the massive MD-30 gauss sniper rifle propped up on the sandbags by its bipod. “Want us to pop him?”

“Let me see.” He slaved his helmet display to her rifle. She leaned into the stock and swung the muzzle slightly. The image shifted left and magnified some more, coming to rest with red crosshairs centered on a bearded, angry-looking man in a turban and caftan, gesticulating savagely from the hood of a military hovertruck as he harangued the crowd. Warhurst queried his suit’s computer, uplinking the image to Mission G-2. An ID came back seconds later, the words scrolling down the side of Warhurst’s helmet display. “Abrahim ibn-Khadir,” Warhurst said, reading it. “One of the Mahdi’s number-one mullahs.”

“Say the word, Captain,” Karelin said, “and he’ll be one of the Mahdi’s former mullahs.”

“That’s a negative,” Warhurst replied. “We shoot in self-defense. No provocative acts. You know the drill.”

“Yes, sir,” she said slowly. “But we don’t have to like it. I’m in favor of proactive self-defense. Nail the bastard before he nails you.”

“Yeah, or before he stirs up his pet fanatics, gets ’em to launch a suicide charge,” Lambeski added.

“Orders is orders,” Warhurst said lightly. He’d been concerned about just such a possibility, though the op commanders didn’t seem to be at all worried. A suitable demonstration of superior force and firepower, they’d told him, would be enough to hold the Islamic forces at bay.

The Marines had provided that demonstration of force and firepower … but Warhurst wasn’t at all sure the lesson had been learned.

“Shit,” Karelin said. “You think the fat asses back in Washington know what they’re doing? We were supposed to be relieved two days ago, as I recall!”

“Affirmative,” Warhurst replied. He continued to study ibn-Khadir’s face on his helmet display. “And the political situation has changed. You’ll recall that. So we will sit right where we are, defend our perimeter, and wait for the relief … which will be deployed soon. You have a problem with that, Sergeant?”

“No … sir,” she replied, but he heard the bitterness in her voice, and the touch of sarcasm.

The situation, he thought, was rapidly getting out of hand.

The original op plan had called for the assault force to seize the Giza Plateau and establish a perimeter, then hold it until a detachment of Confederation peacekeepers arrived to relieve them. That deployment was to have taken place at dawn on June 3.

Late on the second, however, while the Marines fought off the counterattack by the Mahdi’s forces, the Chinese delegation had called a special meeting of the Confederation Security Directorate. The CSD, successor of the long defunct UN, provided a legal arena for the world’s nation-states, including those, like China, that were not Confederation members. China had declared the deployment of American troops to Egypt to be an act of aggression as defined under Article II of the Confederation Charter and demanded a withdrawal. The issue was now being fought not in the desert outside of Cairo, but in the council chambers and meeting rooms of the CSD headquarters in Geneva.

The Confederation Joint Military Command had elected to hold back the relief expedition until America’s legal standing on the issue was better defined. And, after all, so long as the Marines were not under direct attack …

Unfortunately, Warhurst knew, that left Marines in a precarious position, holding a perimeter far larger than tactical doctrine allowed, growing short on sleep as they stood watch and watch, with supplies of food and especially water tightly rationed. The water supply to the Giza complex had been cut at the pumping stations on the Nile and not restored. Every indication suggested that another attack was imminent. The Pentagon had promised that reinforcements were only thirty minutes away, should the Marines’ position grow too precarious.

But a hell of a lot could happen in thirty minutes.

“Let’s see what he’s telling them,” Warhurst said.

Uplinking again to Brigade Intelligence, he requested a consecutive translation. The wildly shouting mullah was too distant for the Marines to pick up his words through their armor sensor suites, but the AI he connected with had been programmed both for Arabic and for lip-reading. Within another few seconds, a flat, atonal voice began speaking over his helmet headset, the emotionless quality of the words oddly contrasting with their evident content.

“The Western satans think to deprive us of our heritage,” ibn-Khadir was saying. “They poke and dig among our monuments, desecrate our grave sites and holy places, then tell us that these symbols of our people, these holy testaments to the power of Allah, were constructed by another people, by foreigners … with the aid of demons from another star. They corrupt these holy places and defile the name of Allah!” Ibn-Khadir turned his head, and the AI lost the next few lines of his speech.

It sounded like the standard propaganda line, though. Archeological discoveries over the course of the past two centuries had proven that the principal structures on the Giza Plateau—the three Great Pyramids of Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, and the Sphinx—all had been raised, at least in preliminary form, eight thousand years before the traditionally accepted dates of their building, long before the Neolithic tribes who would later be known as Egyptians had migrated to the Nile Valley. The Egyptian government and, later, after the Mahdi had unified the far-flung Kingdom of Allah, the Principiate of Cairo, had insisted that the Sphinx and Great Pyramids were an expression of the soul of the Egyptian people and not of alien invaders who’d established colonies on Earth over ten thousand years ago.

That battle was not new. Variants of it had been ongoing since the last decade of the twentieth century, when American archeologists and geologists had first noted that erosion patterns in the flanks of the Sphinx were characteristic of rain, which suggested that it was considerably older than the traditionally assigned date of 2400 B.C. Dr. David Alexander, the noted Egyptologist who later gained fame as the father of xenoarcheology on Mars, had been expelled from Egypt because his theories and finds contradicted long established traditions of Egyptian history.

Seventy years had passed, but the delicate balance of politics, religion, and national pride hadn’t changed. Two months ago archeologists from both the European Union and the UFR had opened a new chamber hewn from bedrock almost fifty meters beneath the hindquarters of the Sphinx. Artifacts discovered there tended to support the theory of extraterrestrial design, and a new tunnel had been found—one hinted at by Herodotus and other ancient writers—leading back toward the Great Pyramid of Khufu, where recent sonar and deep radar imaging suggested that a vast labyrinth of chambers remained yet undiscovered.

A deep bedrock labyrinth that could not possibly have been chipped out with the use of stone tools and wooden mallets.

A preliminary publication on the find in an archeological journal had triggered excitement worldwide, as well as a sharp rejection by the Islamic Kingdom of Allah. The local government authorities had ordered the Giza excavations closed down and all foreign archeologists to leave the country. From then on, all excavations in Egypt and other Kingdom of Allah states would be carried out by approved Islamic archeologists, under the direct supervision of the Islamic Directorate of History in Baghdad.

To Warhurst, it sounded like a hell of a stupid way to do science.

“We will not let the foreign satans take truth and twist it into blasphemy!” ibn-Khadir was shouting to the crowd. “The time has come to throw the foreigners out, to reclaim our history for ourselves, in the blessed name of Allah!”

The cheer that went up from the mob was audible across two kilometers of open ground. Warhurst felt an uneasy chill, despite the heat of the afternoon. Ibn-Khadir was bringing their fervor to a boil, and it wasn’t hard to guess what would happen next.

“They’re going to try a goddamned puppy rush,” Karelin said, echoing Warhurst’s own thoughts.

A puppy rush. Shit. Most of the people in that crowd were unarmed, as far as Warhurst could tell from the MD-30’s magnified sniperscope image, though a few Chinese and Iranian assault rifles were in evidence. Many were women, many more teenagers and younger. The KOA militia leaders might well have decided to rush the Marine perimeter with civilians, hoping that the Americans wouldn’t “kick the puppies,” that they would at least hesitate and not open fire until armed militiamen could get close enough to begin killing Marines.

The hell of it was that a civilian charge, or an assault shielded by unarmed civilians, was a lose-lose proposition for the Marine defenders. If they held their fire, the enemy would break through the perimeter and be among them; no matter how good the Americans’ mil-tech, they would be too badly outnumbered to survive a close-quarters battle.

But if the Marines opened fire, the up-close-and-personal images of unarmed Islamic civilians being slaughtered at long range would be uploaded to every e-news server on the Net, to be replayed time after time in gory and colorful detail on the viewalls and HVs of half the people on the planet. It would be a moral nightmare from which the UFR might never recover.

But maybe there was a different way.

“Downsize a click,” he told Karelin. “And fire up your see-through.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The generator in her rifle began spooling up to speed. The view of ibn-Khadir seemed to pull back twenty meters, revealing all of the truck he was standing on and more of the surrounding crowd. “Smile for the camera,” Karelin said, and she fired the X-ray scatter pulse.

The image in Warhurst’s display blanked out, showing nothing but green light. In a few seconds, however, the gun’s computer built up a composite image from the backscattered X rays, an image that turned sheet metal, plastic, cloth, and flesh into faint translucence, revealing denser structures like bone and the solid titanium steel of the hovertruck’s engine block in light green, yellow, and pale green-white.

To avoid burning people in the target area, the pulse lasted for only a handful of nanoseconds, so the initial image was frozen in time. The computer superimposed that image on the real-time view, however, animating it to match the moving reality.

“There,” Warhurst said. “See the flywheel on the drive train?”

“Roger that,” Karelin said. The targeting reticle shifted again, coming to rest over the circular mass of the hovertruck’s flywheel. Dopplered readings on the back-scatter radiation showed that it was in motion.

The Egyptian hovertruck was powered by pretty old tech, a hydrogen-burning power cell array that in turn powered the turbine compressors of two large lift fans in the vehicle’s chassis. The fans were off, the vehicle grounded on its plenum chamber skirts, but the power assembly was still running, storing energy in the massive, fast-spinning flywheel that provided both extra power on demand and gyroscopic balance.

“See if you can nick that wheel,” Warhurst said.

“Ay-firmative, Skipper!” Karelin leaned into the stock of her weapon again. There was a faint whine as its magfield generators came up to full power, and then a piercing crack as she squeezed the trigger.

Gauss rifles, rail guns, mass drivers—all terms for the same simple concept. The MD-30—MD for “mass driver”—was a sniper’s rifle, using an electromagnetic pulse to launch a 250-gram sliver of steel-jacketed depleted uranium with a muzzle velocity of approximately Mach 25.

The truck beneath ibn-Khadir’s feet jerked sharply with the impact, the engine access panels snapping open, the plastic windshield shattering. The impact smashed the engine block wide open, smashed the durasteel-armored flywheel housing, and cracked the flywheel itself. In an instant the truck’s body was flipped into the air, sending the Mullah ibn-Khadir flying in a thrashing tangle of robes and limbs. The vehicle’s steel and plastic shell absorbed most of the high-speed shrapnel from the flywheel, but torque ripped the vehicle open and bounced it onto its roof.

The crowd, cheers turned to shrieks of terror, broke and scattered in all directions. The hovertruck’s hydrogen cells, ripped open by the impact, ignited, sending a ball of orange hydrogen flame blossoming into the sky. In an instant the more or less orderly gathering was reduced to chaotic pandemonium, as civilians and militia troops fled the burning wreckage. Several dozen bodies lay around the truck, hit by shrapnel or stunned by the sonic crack of the hyperprojectile—it was impossible to tell which. Ibn-Khadir was sprawled ten meters from the wreck, weakly moving as two of his braver supporters tried to help him to his feet.

“Taking kind of a chance, aren’t you, Skipper?” Lambeski asked with a matter-of-fact expression. “Burning civilians like that …”

“Burning hydrogen rises,” Warhurst replied. “That’s why only thirty-some people died on the Hindenburg.”

“The what?”

“Never mind. We might have hit a few civilians with flying chunks of truck, but it happened so quickly, I doubt the newsie remotes saw what happened or could reconstruct it. And I don’t think they’ll be eager to try another mob rush, do you?”

“You got that right, sir,” Karelin said. “Look at ’em run!”

She’d stepped the magnification on her scope down to take in the entire sweep of the west bank of the Nile, from El Giza north to the University of Cairo and beyond to the district of El Duqqi. The panicked mob was dispersing back across the Gama and Giza bridges.

The mullahs might be able to assemble the mob again, but it would take time.

And maybe help would arrive by then.

Maybe.

4

5 JUNE 2138

Giza Complex

Kingdom of Allah, Earth

1838 hours Zulu

Like a large and exceptionally ugly beetle, all angles and planes and outstretched landing jacks, the first dropship drifted down out of the evening sky on shrieking plasma thrusters, moving toward the bare patch of desert south of the Sphinx marked by the brilliantly pulsing green landing beacon.

Unlike the suborbital TAVs that had brought in the Marines, these were true spacecraft, big UD-4 Navajo cargo landers generating a million pounds of thrust through their six Martin-Electric plasmadyne jets. Air scoops gaped now, fans howling, gulping down air as reaction mass, saving precious water for higher altitudes, where the air ran thin or trailed away into vacuum.

Sand exploded in swirling clouds from beneath the lander as it touched down, sagging slightly as its hydraulics took up the shock of landing. Belly doors gaped open, interlocking square teeth sliding apart to disgorge eight light Rattlesnake robot tanks, four Cobra medium MBTs, a pair of massive Gyrfalcon mobile artillery crawlers, two twenty-ton cargo floaters, and four armored personnel carriers. The dropship lifted again in a sandblasting whirlwind as soon as its cargo was clear. Other dropships were touching down at marked LZs elsewhere across the Giza Plateau.

Warhurst trotted up to the lead APC, which was just beginning to unbutton. The markings indicated American rapid-deployment infantry. He was surprised, having expected a joint Confederation unit coming in by TAV from the UK, not American troops. And the UD-4s meant they’d deployed from orbit, probably from the Army’s Rapid Deployment Force Orbital Station in low orbit.

A man in an Army active-camo armor cuirass and brown fatigues, with a major’s oak leaf insignia painted on his shoulder pieces and the RDF’s lightning bolt insignia on his breast, clambered down the aft ramp as a line of fully armored troops piled out of the APC and jogged out onto the sand.

“Who’s in charge here?” the major demanded.

“Captain Warhurst, 2nd Regiment, U.S. Marines.” He didn’t salute. Standing orders required a suspension of any military protocol that might allow the enemy to target officers.

“Major Rostenkowski, 5th Light Infantry.”

“Welcome to Egypt, Major.”

“Good to be here. You are relieved, Captain,” the major said. “The Army has the situation in hand.”

“About damned time, Major,” Warhurst said. He turned his head to watch the soldiers falling into line as a sergeant bawled orders at them. “What happened to the Confed relief?” The last he’d heard, his relief was supposed to be a couple of Russian platoons, some light German armor, and a detachment of Brits.

Rostenkowski grinned. “Bogged down in politics, as per SOP. Washington is getting it from all sides these days, and the Confederation isn’t sure they want to play along. The Joint Chiefs elected to send us instead. You and your boys and girls are to hustle ass back to Quantico for debrief. What’s your tacsit?”

“Give me your feed channel, sir.”

They matched ’ware frequencies, and Warhurst thought a packet of detailed tactical data to Rostenkowski’s biocybe system, providing him with detailed information on the initial assault, the counterattack, and the overall situation since.

“Nice twist, using a sniper to discourage that attack,” the major said. “Any civilian casualties?”

“We’re not sure. Our spotters saw ambulance crews picking up four people, but we don’t know if they were dead or just badly hurt when the truck exploded.”

“Well, the important thing was to keep that sort of thing out of the newsies’ eyes. Good work, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir.” He was somewhat irritated by Rostenkowski’s brusque manner. His Marines had done a hell of a job these past four days, and he was being congratulated for his public relations skills in keeping the collateral damage he’d inflicted out of the netnews downloads.

“This is an Army deployment area now, Captain. Tell your people to stand down unit by unit as we relieve them.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Oh, and you’d better get yourself presentable.”

“Sir?”

“A special TAV is being vectored in to pick you up. Should be grounded within fifteen mikes.”

Warhurst looked down at himself. He was wearing his armor, sans helmet and gauntlets, and the active camo surface was sand-pitted, gritty, and streaked with grime. His one-piece underneath was sweat-soaked and rank; he’d not had a bath in four days, and he knew his depilatory had worn off a couple of days back, leaving him with a distinctly unregulation shadow on his face.

He’d not brought much in the way of toiletries or spare uniforms … not for a deployment that was supposed to last for a day, two at the most.

“A TAV? Taking me where?”

Rostenkowski shrugged. “Back to Quantico. Don’t know why. All I know is to tell you to be ready to go … and to leave your people in charge of your number two.” Rostenkowski turned then and began shouting orders at the soldiers unloading supply crates from one of the transport floaters.

Warhurst used his internal mapping biocybes to locate his XO. He would have to let her know what was going down.

And where the hell was he going to find a clean uniform?

Esteban Residence

Guaymas, Sonora Territory

United Federal Republic, Earth

0902 hours PT

“I’m leaving, Mom. I have to.”

They strolled along the stone-strewn beach, the oily gray surf of the Sea of California lapping at their feet, the muddy breakers just ankle high. The sun blazed low above the mountains in the east, promising another sweltering day. Both John and his mother wore lightweight bodysuits against the UV and the heat, and their faces glistened with blocking oils generated by antisun nanotreatments.

“I know, Johnny. I just wish you weren’t joining the Marines, is all.”

“Why?” He tried a grin. “It’s not like we don’t have it in our blood. Garroway’s March?”

“Oh, it’s in your blood, all right. Damn it.”

“The thing is, I don’t want to leave you. Dad can be … tough to live with.”

She sighed. “Don’t I know it? But … he means well. He’s just … under a lot of stress lately, is all. …”

“Damn it, Mom, I wish you’d quit making excuses for him. He drinks too much, and when he’s drunk, he loses his temper. The cybercontrols don’t seem to be helping him much.”

“He disabled them.”

“What?”

She nodded. “About six months ago. He admitted it to me, during a fight. He said the control implant made him feel like he wasn’t himself.”

“Does his doctor AI know?”

“I don’t know. It’s his business, not mine.”

“It’s your business if he hits you! If he makes your life miserable!”

“He’s only … gotten physical a couple of times. …”

“That’s a couple of times too damned many!” He shook his head. “Maybe I shouldn’t leave after all. …”

“No, Johnny. No, you were right the first time. You’ve got to go. Maybe if you do, there won’t be as much holding me here.”

“I worry about you, Mom.”

“Don’t. I can look out for myself.”

“Mom, I’ve been researching this, downloading stuff from the psych library in Hermosillo. Dad is an abuser. A clinically abusive personality. If we stay here—if you stay here—he’ll hurt you. Maybe worse. You’ve got to get out.”

“It’s not that bad, Johnny. Really. It’s just sometimes he can’t control himself.”

“Bullshit.”

“What?”

“I said, bullshit. Look … the last time he hit you … if there’d been a cop in the living room that time, or even a security robot, recording what happened, do you think he would have touched you?”

“That’s not—”

“Would he have hit you if anyone was there?”

She struggled with the thought for a moment. “Well … no.”

“Then he can control himself. Don’t you see? He hits you because he can, because he knows he can get away with it, and it’s a way of exercising power. And it’s not just the hitting. Words can hurt as much as fists sometimes, you know? What the downloads I’ve been looking at call emotional abuse. And the way he spies on us, tries to go through our private cyberfiles …” John shook his head, feeling desperate. “That’s why I’ve got to leave, now. I just can’t take it any longer. If I don’t leave now—”

“I know, son. I want you to go.”

“But I don’t want to abandon you.”

“You’re not. I told you to go, didn’t I?” She managed a smile. “Don’t worry about me. I’ve been thinking … I’ve been thinking about my sister in San Diego, maybe going up and seeing her.”

“If you do, Mom, don’t come back. Please?”

“We’ll see. As for you … you’ll be careful?”

“As careful as they’ll let me be.”

“It’s just that … Wouldn’t the Navy be … well … cleaner?”

He laughed. “No muddy foxholes on a high guard cruiser, that’s for sure. But, no. I’ve wanted to go with the Corps ever since I read Ocher Sands.” He’d liked the downloaded drama so much that he’d bought the hardcopy book as well. He’d been enticed by the fact that it was about his great-grandfather, “Sands of Mars Garroway,” and his grandmother, Caitlin. But he’d been permanently hooked by the tales of Marine men and women serving off-world, on the moon, Mars, and the Jovian satellites.

“I hear it’s awfully hard. The training, I mean.”

He reached down, picked up a flat stone the size of the palm of his hand, and sent it skipping out across the waves three … four … a fifth skip before it sank. “Yeah. And I’ll tell you the truth, Mom. I don’t know if I can cut it. But I know I have to try.”

“I imagine with that kind of attitude, you’ll make it. I’m proud of you, Johnny.”

“Thanks, Mom. Are you … you’re sure you’ll be all right?”

“I’ll be fine. Will you be okay?”

“Sure! Plenty of fresh air and exercise? Plenty to eat? And plenty of friendly, helpful drill instructors to remind me of Dad in his more emotional moments, just so I don’t get homesick.” He didn’t add that Lynnley would be there too. His mom knew he and Lynnley had been seeing each other, but he didn’t think she would understand their pact. She might think he was joining the Marines just because Lynn was joining, and that wasn’t the way things were at all.

“One question, son.”

“Shoot.”

“Do you still want to be assigned to space duty?”

“Well … sure. I’ll take SMF if it’s offered. That’s where the real excitement’s at, you know.”

She made a face. “Yes. I know. But you might be gone … a long time.”

“Probably. A couple of years, maybe, for a hitch on Mars. That’s not so bad.” He hadn’t told her that he’d already dreamsheeted for Space Marine Force duty with the recruiter. Not that he was all that likely to land a space billet, but he wanted the chance, and bringing that bit of news into the conversation would … complicate things.

“Let’s just wait and see what happens, okay?” he told her.

She smiled. “Okay.”

They turned around and began strolling back up the beach toward the steps leading up the cliffs to the house.

IP Packet Osiris

En route, Mars to Earth

1847 hours Zulu

Dr. Traci Hanson was still furious, two days after she’d left Mars. How dare they interrupt her work at Cydonia? There couldn’t be anything so demanding of her particular attention and expertise back home that warranted dragging her away from the Cydonian xenocomplex, to say nothing of the sheer, insane cost of stuffing her on board a constant-g packet that would have her back on Earth within a week.

“The hell of it is,” she growled at one of her cabin mates, “the institute ordered me home, but I think your people are pulling the strings.” She was lying on her couch, flat on her back and feeling miserable.

Gunnery Sergeant Athena Horst snorted. “Who? The Corps?”

“No. The Pentagon. The government. Hell, whoever it is who’s running the show these days.”

“You didn’t do so hot in civics in school, did you, babe?”

“Only the federal government can afford to give us a cruise back to Earth in such luxury,” Hanson said with a sneer, glancing around the cramped, gray-green compartment that was quarters to her and three Marines for the duration.

“Well, they’re not my people. We’re as much in the dark about this redeployment as you are.”

“I was talking with Lieutenant Kerns a little while ago,” Staff Sergeant Krista Ostergaard put in. “The scuttlebutt is that we’re being reassigned to a new mission. An out-Solar mission.”

“That means Llalande,” Master Sergeant Vanya Barnes said. “Shit.”

“You don’t want to go to the stars, Van?” Ostergaard said.

“I don’t want to be gone twenty years.”

Horst shrugged. “Hell, why not? The time’ll pass like that,” she snapped her fingers, “thanks to old Einstein. And it’s not like we have families back home.”

“The Corps is home,” Ostergaard said.

“Fuckin’-A,” Horst said, and she exchanged a high-five hand slap with Ostergaard. “Semper fi!”

Hanson frowned and looked away. She was uncomfortable with these women, with the posing and the brassy-cold hardness of body and of mind that she was coming to associate with all of the members of this peculiar subspecies of human known as U.S. Marines.

The Osiris was a small vessel, mounting an eighty-five-ton hab module normally outfitted for eight people, two to a cabin, not counting the AIs at the controls. A small lounge area, a galley, and the communications suite completed the amenities. For this passage, though, the admin constellation of Marines on board, composed of six women and six men, had been packed into the four compartments, with the one extra slot—for the ship’s sole civilian passenger—provided in the lounge. Hanson had been given a choice of sleeping there or in one of the two compartments assigned to the women. She’d chosen to share quarters because the lounge, which connected all four cabins and the galley, was less than private, with Marines of both sexes tramping through at all hours of the vessel’s artificial day and night.

She’d begun regretting the decision within hours of boosting out of Mars orbit. These female Marines made her nervous with their bad-ass attitudes and nanosculpted bodies. They were rough, strong, and as foul-mouthed as their male Marine counterparts, flat-chested and hard-muscled, with technically enhanced eyes that seemed to look right through her.

They’d been polite enough, true, but her forced incarceration had left her irritable and sour. She was at least a borderline claustrophobe, and none of the compartments on board the Osiris was larger than a small bedroom. It wouldn’t have been so bad if they’d been in free fall; even the tiniest hab compartment seemed roomy with three-dimensional floating space in microgravity. But the steady one-g acceleration—three times what she was used to after a year on Mars—kept her pinned to the deck, and most of the time strapped into her couch. She didn’t understand how Horst and the others could move about with such casual disregard for the acceleration dragging at them every minute of the long ship-day.

Then something one of the Marines had just said managed to register in her weight-numbed mind. “Wait a minute,” she said. “What was that about Llalande?”

“Llalande 21185,” Barnes said, staring at her with her peculiarly dark nanoaltered eyes. “It’s a red dwarf star about eight light-years from—”

“I know what it is,” Hanson snapped. “We’ve been watching it from Mars. What did you mean about an out-Solar mission there?”

“Stands to reason, honey,” Ostergaard said, grinning. “That’s where the action is. My money’s riding on a relief expedition. You’re an archie, right?”

“Xenoarcheotechnologist,” she replied.

“Whoa, the lady’s using damned big words,” Barnes said.

“Positively sesquipedalian,” Horst said, with just a hint of a sneer.

Ostergaard laughed. “I’ll bet a month’s pay they want you out on the Llalande planet to check out the xenotech they’ve been finding. Right, Marines?”

“Fuckin’-A,” Barnes said. “Assuming there’s any left when we get there, ten years from now.”

“I’m not going to Ishtar!” Hanson said. She didn’t want to admit it, but these people were scaring her now. “My work is here, on Mars.”

“You’re not on Mars now, honey,” Horst reminded her. “You’re en route to Earth on very special orders. Either you really pissed someone off back there or you’re headed for Ishtar.” She grinned, an evil showing of teeth. “And maybe both!”

Traci Hanson was used to having things her own way, to charting her own course and the hell with what others thought. It had gotten her this far, head of mission research at the Cydonian complex, and only a few scars the worse for wear. If they thought they could just order her to drop everything to go haring off to the stars, they were crazy. What did they think AIs were for?

Robinson. She would take this up with Robinson as soon as she got back.

Or … as soon as she was able to get up and walk around again, after this brutal week of acceleration.

Then she remembered that the packet’s acceleration matched the gravitational acceleration of Earth itself, that this hell was going to go on and on.

Shit …

Headquarters, PanTerra Dynamics

New Chicago, Illinois

United Federal Republic, Earth

1455 hours CT

Gavin Norris had never seen a demonstration like this. The chanting throngs filled the circular PanTerra Plaza and spilled over into all of the surrounding thoroughfares. Police in full armor were everywhere, trying to maintain order and keep the main walkways open. The demonstration, he gathered, was an anti-An gathering, and tempers were burning high. Pro-Anners were there as well, and demonstration and counterdemonstration were threatening to erupt into full-scale civil war.

Norris ignored the chanting crowds as best as he could, making his way toward the slender, black pinnacle that was his destination. The PanTerra Building soared two kilometers into the thin, cold air of the midwestern sky, rising from the Highland Park district to look down on a cloud-mottled Lake Michigan to the east and the still empty ruin of the Barrens to the south.

The destruction of Old Chicago during the UN War a century ago had killed millions—no one would ever know the precise death toll—and extinguished one of the largest and most prosperous cities on the planet. Plutonium from the reaction mass heating grid of the French spacecraft that had broken up above Lake Michigan had scattered radioactive dust southwest across the city, leaving a poisoned footprint fifty kilometers long burned into the soil of northern Illinois. Detox robots and crews in sealed crawlers continued to work both in the desert ashore and in the waters offshore, but the most optimistic calculations indicated that the Barrens would remain hazardous for another five centuries at least.

North of the Barrens, though, the rebuilding had been proceeding with an enthusiasm born of victory in the determination not to see the brawling, big-shouldered city of Sandburg’s poem forever extinguished. The cities of Highland Park and Waukegan had merged, becoming the nucleus of the new metropolis. The lake itself was all but dead now, but construction had begun extending out over the water almost as soon as the radiation there dropped to reasonable levels.

The PanTerra Building, with its distinctive black panther logo perched high atop the revolving dome that housed its executive suites, had foundations sunk deep within the bedrock beneath what once had been open water. The PanTerra Plaza consisted of open grounds and pavement immediately in front of the main entrance, centered on a towering water fountain symbolizing the Spirit of Chicago.

The demonstration was well under way by the time Norris approached the building. All traffic—ground and air—had been blocked from the Highland Park district as far south as Central and as far west as Sheridan, and the slide-ways had been turned off. He had to park his flier at a port garage near Central Park and walk five blocks through streets packed with thronging mobs. When he saw how packed the plaza was, he turned away and found an entranceway to the transit levels. Most of the major buildings in New Chicago were connected by floater tubes beneath the ground level.

An elevator took Norris from the PanTerra Building’s transit access bay to the lobby. A separate elevator, one with a security check panel that tasted the DNA on his palm and electronically probed his briefcase and his clothing, took him then to the 540th floor, so far above the demonstration that the mobs simply vanished into the geometrical intricacies of street, building, and plaza.

Allyn Buckner met him in another lobby, this one with soaring, curving walls that were either completely transparent or remarkably large and seamlessly joined viewall panels. The PanTerran panther hung above the entrance to the conference center, ten meters high, muscles rippling in realistically animated holography.

“Mr. Norris,” Buckner said, extending a hand. He was a thin, acid-looking man with an insincere smile, one of the small army of PanTerran vice presidents whom Norris had dealt with in the past. “Thank you for coming in person.”

“Not a problem, Mr. Buckner,” Norris replied. “You never know who’s got access to your VR link codes. I prefer face-to-face.”

“Indeed. We can guarantee the security of our conversation here. This way, please?”

Norris jerked his head to the side, indicating the crowds far below. “So, what the hell is that all about?”

“War, Mr. Norris,” Buckner said as he led Norris beneath the giant panther and into the conference suite. “There is going to be a war very soon now. The first war, I might add, to be fought across interstellar distances.”

“Llalande?”

“Of course. The people are quite upset over the, um, slavery issue.”

“There was a pretty sizable pro-An contingent down there too.”

“Religious nuts, Mr. Norris. The lunatic fringe. The people are demanding that the human slaves on Ishtar be freed.”

That, Norris thought, was something of an oversimplification. The number of separate factions on Earth clashing over the issue of contact with the An and the sociopolitical situation on distant Ishtar was simply incalculable. True, the loudest voices right now were those of outrage over the discovery of the Exiles—descendants of humans taken from Mesopotamia thousands of years ago and transplanted to the An world as a slave population. But there were other voices as well. The entire Islamic block wanted all dealings with the An halted … and an end to archeological research both on Earth and off-world that tended to relegate humankind to a less-than-glorious set of beginnings. That was what the fighting right now in Egypt was all about. And then there were the countless religions, cults, and movements worldwide that viewed the An as gods, figuratively or even literally.

But there were also groups who saw considerable profit in closer ties with the An. Most of the major megacorporations of Earth were vying now for the technological spin-offs coming out of the xenoresearch off-world.

And of course that was where the real power lay, Norris thought … not with the “people,” but with the multitrillion-newdollar corporate entities who truly controlled the planet.

Inside the conference suite, Buckner guided Norris to a carpeted, soundproofed room with an elaborate array of viewalls, link centers, and screens. “Computer,” Buckner said, addressing the air. “Security, level one.”

“Security, level one initiated, Mr. Buckner,” a female voice replied. “Do you require a record?”

“No. Switch off.”

“Switching off, Mr. Buckner.”

“I don’t even like the AIs listening in to some of this,” Buckner explained. “What we’re on to here is so fantastic—”

“Are you sure the mikes and recorders are really off?”

“Of course. The software was developed in this very building. Have a seat.”

Norris sank into the embrace of a chair that molded itself to his back and shoulders. “So, I gather you have another assignment for me.”

“We do.” Buckner took a seat opposite his. “A very important one. A lucrative one.”

“You’ve got my attention, Mr. Buckner.”

“We have been scanning our personnel records for a particular person. You were the first of the troubleshooters on our list. And the best, I might add. You have all of the qualities we are looking for—young, dynamic, ambitious. No family to speak of, no long-term commitments or contracts. Not even any casual lovers.”

Norris raised an eyebrow. They didn’t know about Claire, evidently. Good. “What’s your point?”

“We need a liaison, Mr. Norris, on a very, very special operation.”

“What kind of operation?”

“You’ll be fully briefed later, if you accept.”

“How can I accept if I don’t know what it is?”

Buckner smiled, an oily tug at the corner of his mouth. “Oh, we may be able to offer suitable inducements.”

“Such as?”

“We are offering you a long-term contract. A very long-term contract, in fact. Minimum time—twenty years.”

Norris’s eyes widened. “Is that a business proposition or a prison term?”

“A little of both, I fear. If you accept, you won’t be able to terminate. Not … conveniently, at any rate.”

A twenty-year contract? Buckner must be out of his mind. “This doesn’t exactly sound like a promotion, Mr. Buckner. What are the inducements you mentioned?”

“A nice, round figure, Mr. Norris. One billion newdollars, and a shot at senior management, when you return. Perhaps even a seat on the board.”

“One billion!.” Norris hung on the shock for a comic moment, mouth gaping. “One billion?” Then he heard the rest of Buckner’s sentence. “What do you mean, when I return? Where are you sending me?” He already knew he was going, wherever it was. A billion newdollars? Was the man serious?

The viewalls at Buckner’s back lit up in response to a linked thought. A swollen gas giant hung low in a russet sky. Oddly twisting, purple-hued vegetation clotted an undulating landscape. Pyramids reflected the gold-red light of a tiny, shrunken sun.

“Ishtar, Mr. Norris. We’re sending you to Ishtar, eight light-years away.”

“My God!”

He hoped Claire wouldn’t be too hurt when he told her goodbye.

5

20 JUNE 2138

U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center

Parris Island, South Carolina

0215 hours ET

“Now I want you maggots off of my bus … move! Move! Move!”

John stumbled down the steps in a sleep-deprived haze, crowding forward with the other recruits as they piled off the ancient and weather-beaten magbus that had brought them there from Charleston in the middle of the night. The Marine sergeant who’d ridden the bus with them all the way from the Charleston skyport, a grimly taciturn man in spotless khakis, had been singularly uncommunicative for the entire trip. Now, though, he was bellowing at the recruits, chivvying them from their seats and into line. Lights glared overhead, casting weirdly moving shadows and making it light enough to see the footprints painted on the ground, neatly spaced in a single long rank.

Another sergeant was waiting for them, hands on hips, the infamous “Smokey Bear” hat square-set on his head. “Fall in! I said fall in, damn it! Feet on the prints! Stand at attention!”

The mob of civilians shoved and bumped into line, each of them taking on his or her own semblance of standing at attention … or at least a half-informed guess as to what such a posture might be like. John’s loving study of the Marine Corps in past months had included a download of several Corps training manuals, and he’d been practicing in front of the E-center’s holopickup a lot lately. The footprints on the ground were closely spaced, so close that each recruit was shouldered in tightly to left and right, ahead and behind, a single, anonymous mass of tired humanity.

“Jesus, Quan Yin, and Buddha!” the second sergeant bawled. “I ask for recruits and they send us this? The boss is not gonna like it!”

John stood rigidly in line, eyes fixed on the letters reading U.S. GOVERNMENT on the sloping gray side of the magbus, endeavoring to keep them fastened there as the sergeant stalked past his line of sight. The night air was steamy, a blanket of heat and humidity that dragged at each breath and brought sweat dripping from brow and nose.

The sergeant from the bus prowled down the line of scared and sleep-deprived recruits. “You! Square away! Shoulders back! Get rid of any cigs or gum. And you! Yeah, you, maggot! Quit gawking around and hold those eyeballs front and center or I will personally pop them out of your miserable maggot’s skull and eat them for breakfast!”

John was pretty sure he knew what was coming, courtesy of family stories from his mother about life in the Corps—disorientation, confusion, controlled but deliberate terror, sleep deprivation, all in the name of breaking down civilians and rebuilding them as Marines. Forewarned was forearmed, as far as he was concerned. Whatever they dished out, he could take. He was a Garroway now, in name as well as by birth.

He did wish Lynnley were here, though. She’d flown out from Tiburón to Charleston, while he’d accompanied his mother north to San Diego first, then caught a sub-O flight out of Salton Spaceport. They’d planned to meet up at the Charleston skyport yesterday, but all incoming female recruits had been rounded up as soon as they arrived and whisked off to some other receiving area. He’d found himself herded on board the ancient magbus with thirty-seven other young men and the taciturn Marine sergeant.

That sergeant was taciturn no longer. “On behalf of Major General Phillip R. Delflores, commanding officer of this installation, and on behalf of the United States Marine Corps, welcome to Parris Island,” he bellowed, somehow making the ear-ringing yell effortless, somehow doubling the volume of select words for emphasis, as though a bellow was his normal and everyday manner of speech. “I am Staff Sergeant Sewicki, and my assistant here is Sergeant Heller. I will keep this short and simple, so that even brainless civvy maggots like you can understand.

“This is my island, this is my Marine Corps, and you maggots are my responsibility! Today you are embarking on a twenty-one-week course of Marine Corps recruit training, commonly known as boot camp. You are not at home any longer. You are not at school, you are not in your old neighborhood, you are not back in the world that you once knew. During these next few weeks, you will obey all orders given to you by any Marine. Just so there’s no confusion on this point, you people are not Marines. You are recruits. You must earn the title of U.S. Marine. To do that, you must prove to your officers, your drill instructors, your comrades, and yourselves that you are worthy of the uniform and the title of a United States Marine! Do you recruits understand me?”

The question was greeted by a mumbled chorus of “Yes,” and “Yes, sir,” and even the occasional “Sure.”

Sewicki exploded. “When you open your maggot mouths, the very first word you utter will be the word sir! The very last word your maggot mouths utter will be the word sir! … Do you understand me?”

“Sir, yes, sir!” was the response, somewhat ragged and quavering.

“No! No! No!” Sewicki’s eyes bulged, his face reddened, and for an instant John wondered if the man was going to have a stroke. “What do you people think this is, the goddamn Army? When I ask if you understand me, when I give you an order, the correct and proper response is, ‘Sir, aye aye, sir!’ Do you understand me?”

“Sir, aye aye, sir!”

“‘Aye, aye’ means ‘I understand and I will obey!’ Do you understand me?”

“Sir, aye aye, sir!”

“What? I can’t hear you!”

“Sir, aye aye, sir!”

“Again! Louder!”

“Sir, aye aye, sir!”

He cupped a hand to his ear. “What?”

“Sir, aye aye, sir!”

“You!” He spun suddenly, face and forefinger inches from the face of a terrified recruit three men to John’s right. “What is your name?”

“Sir! H-Hollingwood, sir!”

“Hollywood! What kind of a name is that?”

“Sir—”

“Let me see your war face!”

“S-Sir! Aye … what?”

“Let me see your goddamn war face! Do you know how to make a war face? This is a war face! Arrrr! Now you do it!”

With his eyes rigidly front, John could only imagine what was going on, but he heard the recruit give a terrified yelp.

“That is pathetic! You do not frighten me, Hollywood! Hit the deck! Ten push-ups!”

The recruit dropped.

“On your goddamn feet, Hollywood! What did I just tell you?”

“Sir, I—”

“When I give you an order, you will respond with ‘Sir, aye aye, sir!’ Do you understand me?”

“Sir, aye aye, sir!”

“What was that? I can’t hear you!”

“Sir, aye aye, sir!”

“Now hit the deck and give me twenty push-ups!”

“Sir, aye aye, sir!”

As the recruit began grunting through his push-ups, attended closely by the other sergeant who was shouting out the cadence, Sewicki continued his prowl in front down the ranks.

“I am an easy man to get along with. All you need to do to get along with me is to obey my commands instantly, without hesitation, without argument, do you understand me?”

“Sir, aye aye, sir!” the ranks chorused.

“You!” Sewicki moved so fast he appeared to dematerialize, rematerializing in front of a recruit in the front rank four to John’s left, face glowering, finger pointing. “What’s your name?”

“Sir! Garvey! Sir!”

“Gravy, is that gum you have in your mouth?”

“Uh, sir, I mean, it’s—”

“Is that or is that not gum you have in your maggot mouth?”

“It’s—It’s counterhum, sir.”

“Remove it.”

Garvey spat the offending wad into his hand.

“Place it on your nose.”

“S-Sir …?”

“On your nose, recruit.”

“Sir! Aye aye, sir!”

“And it had better stay there until I tell you to get rid of it!” He spun, addressing them all. “As for the rest of you, we are going to march—or perform the best simulation of a march that you yahoos are capable of performing—into that building behind you, and there you will deposit in a bin that we will provide any and all contraband you may have on your persons, including guns, knives, weapons of any kind, cigs, lighters, candy, food, soda, liquids of any type, gum, stims, all drugs including analgesics, mem boosters, and sleepers, nano dispensers of any kind including hummers and joggers, game players, personal communications and recording devices, personal entertainment systems, neural plug-ins, pornographic material of all types—including naked holopics of your girlfriends, boyfriends, and/or parents—do you understand me?”

“Sir! Aye aye, sir!”

“I don’t care what you used, smoked, tapped, smacked, licked, drank, charged, plugged, or popped back in the World. You people with electronic enhancements will be losing them tomorrow. While you are in my Corps and on my island, you will be clean.”

John blinked. He couldn’t mean all electronics, could he?

Sergeant Sewicki’s face suddenly filled his vision, glowering down at him, a mask of red fury. “You! What’s your name?”

“Sir! Garroway! Sir!”

Sewicki’s war face softened a bit with surprise … but only a bit. “That name has a special meaning around here, recruit,” he growled. “You big enough to carry it?”

“Sir, I hope so, sir.”

“There’s no hope for you here, recruit. And in the future, you will not refer to yourself as ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘my.’ You will refer to yourself as ‘this recruit.’ Now, do you know who Sands of Mars Garroway was?”

“Sir, he was one of my … uh, one of this recruit’s ancestors, sir.”

Sewicki’s eyes glazed over for a moment, as though he was studying something within, an implant download, perhaps. “Says here on my roll that your name is Esteban.”

So the bit with Sewicki demanding the names of individual recruits had been simple theater.

“Sir, I had—”

“What did you say?”

“Uh, sir, I—”

“You are not an I! None of you maggots rates an I! The only first person on this deck is me! The only time you maggots say the word ‘I’ is when you declare that you understand and will obey an order, and you will do so by saying ‘aye aye’! Do you understand me?”

“Sir! Aye aye, sir!”

“Every time you wish to refer to yourselves, you will do so in the third person! You will say ‘this recruit’ and you will not say the word ‘I’! When you refer to yourselves, you will do so as ‘recruit,’ followed by your last name. Do I make myself clear?”

“Sir, aye aye, sir!”

“Jesus, Quan Yin, and Buddha, are you that stupid, maggot? You say ‘aye aye’ when you understand and will obey an order! If I ask a question requiring of you a simple yes or no answer, you will reply with the appropriate yes or no! Do you understand?”

“Uh … Sir, yes, sir!”

“What was that? I heard some static in your reply!”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Now, what is it you had to say to me?”

John had to grope for what it was Sewicki had originally asked him. Exhaustion and disorientation were beginning to take their toll, and his mind was fuzzy.

“Sir! This recruit had a naming last week. I … uh … this recruit took his mother’s name. Sir.”

“You’re a little old for that, aren’t you, son?”

Save for the members of a handful of conservative religious groups, women rarely took the names of the men they married anymore, which meant that a person’s last name was now a matter of conscious choice. Throughout most of western culture, for at least the past fifty years, boys took their father’s last name, girls their mother’s, until about the age of fourteen, when the child formally chose which name he or she would carry into adulthood. John originally had his naming ceremony on his fourteenth birthday at his father’s church in Guaymas.

There was nothing in the rules, though, that said he couldn’t have a second naming and change his last name from Esteban to Garroway. He’d gone to a notary in San Diego with his mother as soon as they’d left Sonora, paid the twenty-newdollar fee, and thumbed the e-file records to make it official. He would never be John Esteban again.

“Sir—” he began, wondering how to explain.

“I think you’re a goddamn Aztie secessionist, maggot, trying to hide your Latino name.”

The sheer unfairness of the charge surged up in his throat and mind like an unfolding blossom. “Sir—”

“I think you’re trying to be something you’re not. I think you’re an Aztie trying to infiltrate my Corps—”

“That’s not true!”

“Hit the deck, maggot!” Sewicki exploded. “Fifty push-ups!”

“Sir! Aye aye, sir!”

Face burning, John dropped to hands and toes and began chugging off the repetitions. As Sewicki pounced on another victim farther down the line, the other sergeant loomed over him, counting him down. His Marine career, he decided, was off to a very rocky start. It wasn’t that he thought the Garroway name would buy him any favors, exactly, but he sure hadn’t figured on it buying him any trouble.

He’d only reached fifteen, arms trembling, when Sergeant Heller swatted him on the back of his head and barked, “On your feet, recruit!” Sewicki was leading the rest of the group off to a building behind the paved area at a dead run, and he had to scramble to catch up, jogging through the humid night.

By now he was beginning to wonder if he would ever catch up.

The building was a featureless gray cinder-block structure, unadorned and almost unfurnished, save for a desk with a nano labeler operated by a bored-looking civilian. As the recruits filed in, the civilian touched each on the back of the left hand with the wand. Within seconds the numeral 1099 began gleaming from each recruit’s hand in self-luminous neon-orange light.

“That,” Sewicki told them, “is the number of your recruit training company, Company 1099. It is your address. It is who you are and where you are in the training schedule. You will be required to memorize it!”

Next, they filed past a large, plastic bin beneath the hawk-sharp gaze of Heller and Sewicki, dropping into it everything the two sergeants considered to be “contraband.” Most of what they collected were handheld electronics and microcircuit jewelry, hummers, sensory stims, and the like.

A few of the more expensive units were sealed in plastic with the recruit’s name, to be returned to him after he left boot camp. Most, though, went into the bin, along with a growing pile of gum, candy, pornoholo cards, prophylactic pills, analgesics, wakers, sleepers, memmers, magazine sheets, and disposable personal comms. One recruit, a bulky, heavy-set guy who claimed to be from Texas, surrendered a bowie knife he had strapped to his leg, claiming with a broad, easy drawl that he was an experienced knife fighter and that he’d heard Marines could choose their own personal blades.

Sewicki held out a hand. “Hand it over, recruit,” he said with a dark and surprising gentleness, “or I will take it from you, and I might accidentally break an arm doing it.” The recruit looked like he was going to argue but then appeared to think better of it, much to John’s relief. He knew that one troublemaker could make it hell for the entire company, and he didn’t like the idea of his comfort depending on what some hypertestosteroned commando wannabe with more bravado than brains thought was a cool idea.

John had nothing on him but a wadded-up sheet of magazine card, e-loaded with the latest issues of Newtimes and Wicca Today, that he’d picked up at the skyport in San Diego to read on the trip. He tossed it into the bin with the rest of the trash, thinking of the gesture as a symbolic break with his civilian past. Whatever Sewicki said, he was a Marine now, at very long last.

After that they were told to sit on the linoleum tile floor and were given more facts to memorize.

“Listen up, all of you. You are not yet Marines, but you are no longer civilians. Your lives are no longer governed by the Constitution of the United States, which all of you have sworn to uphold and protect, but by the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

“During the next few weeks, you will become familiar with the UCMJ, but for now you will memorize only three articles of that document. Article 86 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits absence without leave. Article 91 prohibits disobedience to any lawful order. Article 93 prohibits disrespect to any senior officer. Now feed ’em back to me! Article 86 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice prohibits absence without leave!”

The recruits repeated the phrase in a ragged, partly mumbled chorus, barely intelligible among the echoes from the bare concrete walls.

“I think I just heard a freaking mouse squeak,” Sewicki yelled, cupping his right hand to his ear. “What did you maggots say?”

They repeated the article, stronger this time, and more in unison.

“Again!”

Half an hour later, the three UCMJ articles still ringing in their ears, they were brought to attention and run back into the night, this time to another building nearby. There, a trio of bored-looking civilians buzzed flat palm depilators over their scalps, leaving them completely bald as the discarded hair piled up on the floor to ankle depth. John had just begun to recognize some of the other members of the recruit platoon by sight … and now all were transformed into curiously subhuman-looking creatures with glazed eyes and hairless scalps gleaming in the overhead fluorescents.

As he stood at attention waiting for his turn with the barber, he decided that he could accept most of what was happening philosophically, though his run-in with Sewicki earlier still rankled. The stories he’d heard about boot camp were proving to be fairly accurate. The name-calling and constant, shouted verbal harassment didn’t bother him. He’d heard that in the old days, a couple of centuries back, drill instructors had actually been forbidden to hit their men, to use racial or personal slurs, even to swear in front of them or call them names.

That had been an ideologically charged era, a scrap of ancient history when the Corps had been forced by circumstance and a fast-changing American culture to adopt a politically correct attitude requiring that recruits be handled with gentleness, understanding, and respect.

“Damn you, maggot! Get those eyeballs off of me now if you want to keep them!”

Those days were long gone now. The purpose of boot camp had always been to reduce all incoming recruits to a common level, break them of their civilian habits and attitudes, and rebuild them as Marines. The breaking had begun the moment they’d stumbled off the bus, and it was proceeding apace, with no sign of letup.

It took all of twenty seconds for John’s longish brown hair to join the furry blanket on the floor. After that they ran to yet another building, this time to pass through a web of laser light while computers measured his body, then to receive a seabag and pass down a line of tables where still more bored civilians dropped item after item of clothing and gear into the bags as the recruits held them open and sergeants bellowed for them to move it up, move it up. The gear they were issued included everything from “Mk. 101 cleaning kit, M-2120, laser rifle, for care of” to “shoes, shower” to “cream, facial depilatory.” Uniform items included multiple sets of underwear, shorts, T-shirts, socks, shoes, work caps, and the ubiquitous utilities known as BDUs—battle dress uniforms—all but the underwear and shoes in the same shade of basic olive drab.

The sun was just coming up over the broad, silver-limned reach of the Atlantic Ocean when at last they were run into their barracks, exhausted, dazed, and drenched with sweat. Their course took them past a transients’ barracks, where young men leaned out of open windows with hoots, wolf whistles, catcalls, and cheerful cries of, “Man, you maggots are in a world of shit!”

Home for the next several days was a receiving barracks, a long, narrow room with ancient wooden floors, lined with beds stacked two high, each bunk separated from the next in line by a gray double locker.

Here, the recruits were again assembled on the floor, where they were given a long and detailed lesson in the strange and alien new language they were now required to use. It was not a floor, but a deck; not a ceiling, but an overhead; not a door, but a hatch; not stairs, but a ladder, not a bed, but a rack. You didn’t wear pants, you wore trousers; you didn’t wear a hat, but a cover. Upstairs was topside; downstairs was below deck. This area where they were assembled was the squad bay. The area just outside the drill instructor’s office at the far end of the room was the quarterdeck. A room was a compartment. The bathroom was the head. Left was port, right was starboard.

It seemed as though the Marines had a different name for everything, and the Goddess help anyone who forgot or slipped into his old patterns of civilian speech.

The drilling continued for another hour, followed by a session where they were assigned racks and gently instructed in how to lay out, fold, and stow the clothing and gear they’d been issued. Next, they were ordered to strip, and with shower clogs on their feet, a towel in the left hand and soap in the right, were marched to the head. “Let’s go, ladies, anytime you’re ready! Close it up! Close it up! Nuts to butts! Make the guy in front of you smile!”

Showering was done, literally, by the numbers, with Sergeant Heller looking on from behind a glass window in the bulkhead above the shower pit and barking orders over a needlemike. “First! Place your towels on the overhead bars. Next! Take your positions on the footprints painted on the deck! Reach up with your right hands! Grasp the shower chain and pull down, while standing in the stream!” Shrieks, groans, and giggles accompanied the icy torrent. “Belay that racket in there! No one told you to talk! One! Two! Three! Four! Five! Release the shower chain! Now! Lather up the soap and wash your head and face! Reach up with your right arm and grasp the shower chain. Pull down and rinse off. One! Two! Three! Release the chain! …”

It was a bizarre experience for John. The shower facility was downright primitive, with cold water dumped on their heads when they yanked on the pull chain. No temperature selector. Bar soap, for Goddess’s sake, instead of a disinfect mixture or dirt solvent or skin cleanser added to the water stream. No sonic wash or infrared bake. No pulsing spray or steam mist, and definitely no civilized ten-minute soak in the hot tub to finish off the ritual. And having someone barking out at them what to wash, when to wash it, and how long to rinse it …

“Next! Lather up your right arm … that’s your right arm, maggot … yes, you! Twelve from the end! Grasp the pull chain. Pull to rinse … One! Two! Three! Release the chain! …”

They were being treated, he realized, like children … no, worse, like incompetents, like brain-damaged incompetents too slow to understand the simplest command. He could understand the need for this kind of guidance, intellectually, at least, but the process itself was humiliating in the extreme.

“Now lather your crotch. Do not be embarrassed. No one is looking. No one would want to look, believe me! Lather thoroughly! Now, reach up and grasp the pull chain. Pull to rinse … One! Two! Three! Release the chain! …”

After showering and drying off, they marched nuts to butts back to the squad bay, where they stood in line, arms stretched out at shoulder level, while Sewicki, Heller, and a Navy corpsman walked down the line, inspecting each shivering recruit for wounds, cuts, abrasions, bruises, or signs of ringworm or other fungal infections. Only then were they allowed to don for the first time the uniform of their new service … olive drab BDU trousers, T-shirts, and utility covers. The only technical aspect to their garb was in the heavy black boondockers, smartshoes that sighed and hissed as they adjusted themselves to the size and shape of each recruit’s feet. There were no sensors in their BDUs, no fitting mechanism, no heaters or coolers, not even a link to a smartgarb channel for weather advice.

John thought about that pile of discarded electronics in the disposal bin. He’d always thought of the Marines as high-tech, with their armored suits and APCs, flier units and M-2120 lasers, combat implants and e-boosters. What they were wearing now was about as back-to-basics as it was possible to get.

Another hour passed as men who’d somehow missed getting vital items of clothing or gear or who’d ended up with extras were sorted out and discrepancies corrected. Civilian clothing was carefully sealed in plastic bags, labeled for storage, and collected. It would be returned when they completed boot camp … or when they washed out and gave up the new uniform.

Only then were they herded once more into ranks, then marched across the parade field outside—no, that was a grinder—to the mess hall. John thought at first that he would be too tired to eat, but found instead that he was ravenous. Even when he was eating, though, the constant barrage from Heller and Sewicki never let up. They paced among the tables, continuing the sharp-barked litany of correction, guidance, and downright bullying. “Food is fuel. You need good fuel to do what we expect you to do. No sliders! No rollers! No goddamn pogey bait! Good food, and lots of it! Regulations say three thousand two hundred calories per meal. And you will need it! …”

And there was a lot, but with just twenty minutes precisely in which to eat it. Chipped beef piled over toast, scrambled eggs, salad—a salad for breakfast!—orange juice, fresh oranges …

But as he wolfed down the meal, he was already wondering if he’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. …

6

21 JUNE 2138

Building 12, Xenocultural Mission

Terran Legation Compound

New Sumer

Ishtar, Llalande 21185 IID

27:13 hours Local Time

“Come on, Moore! They’re coming over the north wall!”

Dr. Nichole Moore kept retrieving her data mems, pulling double handfuls of the domino-sized crystalline chips from the lab’s storage compartment and stuffing them into the Marine seabag Sergeant Aiken had given her.

“I’m almost done,” she replied.

Carleton, the senior PanTerran representative, pounded on a desktop with a clenched fist. “Damn it, they’ll be here any minute! Forget that crap!”

She whirled on him, eyes blazing. “This is five years of research, Carleton!” she yelled. “Five years of my life! I’m not leaving it to be burned!”

“Stay then!” Carleton snapped, and vanished into the passageway outside. She could hear the wail of the assembly siren over in the Marine compound. She knew Carleton was right. There wasn’t much time.

But she had to save her records. Five Terran years of patient work with the An and their human pets. She raked the last of the mems into the bag, added her personal recorder and the desktop computer, which still had several thousand photographs and several megabytes of notes that hadn’t been mem-stored yet, then sealed the opening.

The Marine seabag had little in common with the all-purpose stowage bags of centuries past. It was more like a square satchel, but with smartthreads woven into the fabric. A couple of tugs on the carry straps unfolded it into a backpack; as she pushed her arms through the straps and hoisted it into place, she heard the whine of servos adjusting the balance on her back and felt the grip of shoulder distributors snugging down over her shoulders. She had nearly thirty kilos of notes, mems, and electronic gear inside, and lugging it out of the compound would have been a real bitch without the technic assist.

Nichole took a last look around her office, feeling the tug of regret. Five years …

Damn Geremelet and his Destiny Faction anyhow … and damn the High Emperor for trying to appease them, and damn the Trade Mission for interfering with the millennia-old balance of social forces on this world, and damn the Humankind Party on Earth for stirring things up, and, yes, damn herself and her xenocultural team for digging into questions that perhaps should not have been uncovered. Of course slavery was immoral, unjust, and obscenely wrong … but when the slaves were actually happy with their lot, had been bred to be happy for generation upon untold generation …

Satisfied at last that she’d managed to grab the most critical of her research data, she accessed her neurimplants, logging onto the Legation network one last time. The main network AI was still offline, though, and all she could see within her electronically enhanced mind’s eye was the same warning that had been up and broadcasting for the past twenty hours—all civilian personnel were to gather a minimum of necessary belongings and report to the Pyramid of the Eye for evacuation. The base’s two ground-to-orbit transports had been shuttling up and down constantly for the past twelve hours or so, hauling people up to the relative safety of the Emissary, in Ishtar orbit. The evacuation was perhaps half complete. According to the posting on the net-cast, another transport would be lifting within forty minutes.

And she would be on it. She took a last look around the room, then, on impulse, used a stylus to scrawl a brief message on a notebook, leaving it on a countertop. Someday she might be able to return. More likely, though, it would be someone else, someone trying to figure out what had gone wrong here. The message might help. She hurried out into the hallway, palm-locking the door behind her. As if I’ll be back to work here at the next shift, she thought, bitter.

Building 12 was a gray, ground-extruded nanocrete dome near the east side of the XC Mission quarter, ugly as sin, as her grandmother back in Michigan used to say, but it had been home and office for five Terran Standard years. She emerged from light and air-conditioned coolness on the elevated walkway halfway up the side of the curved wall, plunging into the steamy heat outside.

Spread out below her within the tight perimeter of the Legation walls, the embassy compound was submerged in murky red twilight, with only the bright gleam of a handful of lights in scattered windows to show where Earthers had left them burning after leaving for the evacuation pickup. Gunfire crackled and snapped from the north, where a company of Marines was trying to hold off the incoming tidal flood of Anu god-warriors and their Sag-ura slaves. Smoke stained the red sky at a dozen different points—most of them marking burning ’villes outside the wall, but a few were inside, set by fanatics within the embassy compound or by firebombs lobbed over the wall.

It was late morning—not that the Terran Legation staff ever paid much attention to local time. Ishtar circled giant Marduk in 133 hours, which meant that its day-night cycle was five and a half Earth days long. The Legation’s work and rest periods were based on a standard twenty-four-hour cycle matched to Greenwich Mean Time on distant Earth, a necessary concession to the biological needs of a much different world’s evolution. In any case, the light from the primary, red-dwarf Llalande 21185, was so wan that the landscape always seemed to be shrouded in twilight, even at high noon.

At the moment, the sun was a red-ember pinpoint gleaming high in the eastern sky, well above the haze-shrouded Ahtun Mountains, too tiny and too distant to lend Ishtar more than a trickle of heat. In the west, above the black cone of God Mountain, Marduk hung against the deep green and purple sky, a baleful scarlet eye poised to fall upon the exotically lush landscape of Ishtar and crush it. Though gibbous and waning now, the sliver of Marduk’s night side visible at the moment glowed almost as brightly as the sunlit side. Stirred and stressed by the constant gravitational tug-of-war with its largest satellite, the gas giant radiated far more heat than it received from its star, heat sufficient to warm its Earth-sized satellite to tropical temperatures on the side forever facing Marduk in tide-locked captivity.

Nichole spared only a moment for the red-gloom beauty of the landscape. The gunfire in the north was growing steadily in intensity, and she could see the black sprawl of Geremelet’s hordes surging through the shattered main gate. A cluster of rockets rose from the jungle beyond, trailing orange flame. The flames winked out; moments later, a scattering of flashes popped and strobed across the northern quarter of the compound, followed seconds later by the dull thud of the explosions. The Marines wouldn’t be able to hold that army of Ahannu fanatics back much longer.

A Marine Wasp droned overhead, its insectlike body painted in stripes of yellow and dark blue-black. It angled across the compound toward the north, and she guessed that it was searching for the launch site of those rockets.

Shouldering her pack, she moved quickly down the stairway curving along the wall of Building 12. The streets of the city were almost lost in the near-darkness. Not for the first time, she wished she had microimplant optics like the Marines used, to help her pick her way through the shadows. Normally, the Legation’s streets and walkways were brilliantly lit, but the power had failed hours before and the streetlights were out. The ground was littered with debris—scattered chunks of rock and broken nanocrete from the Ahannu rocket barrages—and twice she nearly stumbled with her heavy load.

“Halt! Who’s there?” a voice demanded from the shadows to her left.

“I’m Dr. Moore,” she said. “Xeno-C Mission.”

A figure stepped forward from the shadows, man-shaped but bulkier, heavier, and clad in black military armor. Gauntlets grasped a massive laser rifle, which was connected to the armor’s backpack by a trio of thick cables. The armor was dented and scarred in several places. The name aiken, g. was stenciled across the top of the helmet, above where the visor would have been had it had one, and a master sergeant’s insignia decorated the upper left arm, painted in dark gray against the darker black of the armor.

“Hey, Doc,” Aiken said. His voice, amplified through the suit’s speaker system, echoed off nearby walls. “I hoped that was you. Lemme give you a hand.”

She pulled back. “I … I can manage just fine, Master Sergeant.”

“Sure you can.” The speaker’s volume was lower now. “But I can do it faster.” He reached out and lifted the pack from her shoulders as lightly as if it were empty. “We’ve got to hustle.”

“What are you doing here, anyway? I thought you guys were holding the north wall.”

“That’s Company G. Companies C and E are checking to make sure all the civilians get out. And we’re late for rendezvous with our transport. Anyone else back there?”

She knew he meant the mission and shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

The armored figure seemed to be listening or hesitating … and then she realized Aiken was talking to someone else on his radio. “Okay. The rest of my team will go through the mission, just to make sure. You come with me.”

He turned and strode down the rubble-littered street without looking back to see if she was following. She hesitated … but then realized he had all of her notes and records. She had to follow to keep her claim to them. Damn him.

Nichole didn’t like the Marines, didn’t like their presence here on Ishtar. She felt that militarism had no place on an alien world, had no place at all for a first contact with a sentient alien species. As far as she was concerned, the Marine contingent accompanying the science and diplomatic missions only increased the tension and mistrust between the humans on the one hand and the Ahannu on the other.

Even so, she had to admit that when things turned sour with the locals, the Marines were all that had stood between members of the civilian missions and death. She couldn’t help wondering, though, if things would have been different had there been no military to provoke Geremelet and his fanatics in the first place.

Well, the Marines were here, and the damage done. She wondered how things could be patched up with the locals, wondered if there was any way, now, to find a common ground with them. Goddess! Between Geremelet here and the Humankind Party back on Earth …

Another Ahannu rocket banged into the roof of a compound building nearby, sending up a shower of swirling red sparks. Ahannu technology was such a bizarre mix of the antiquated and the advanced. Some few among their elite warrior units carried weapons more advanced than anything in the Terran arsenal … and yet they used gunpowder rockets, primitive firearms, swords, and chakhul—a kind of pike or spear with a long and wickedly curved blade. The high-tech stuff was believed to be working artifacts left over from the Ahannu glory days of ten thousand years before—god weapons, the Ishtaran natives called them. Ishtar was all that was left of a spacefaring empire that once had spanned at least a dozen worlds, including ancient Earth. The Ahannu and the humans they’d brought with them from Earth had survived the collapse of their civilization, which continued only here in sharply abbreviated and primitive form.

Current xenoarcheological thought was sharply divided at the moment between two mutually opposing theories. Traditional dogma held that the Ahannu Empire had been utterly destroyed ten thousand years ago by the enigmatic race known as the Hunters of the Dawn, that somehow the Hunters had overlooked this oddball world, largest moon of a gas giant in a red dwarf star system.

Nichole preferred the newer, more daring theory, advanced by Dr. Hayakawa and others. It posited that the Hunters of the Dawn were long dead when the Ahannu first reached Earth sometime toward the end of the last ice age. The Hunters had been a predatory species ranging this part of the galaxy perhaps half a million years ago, at the time when an earlier cycle of galactic civilization called the Builders had been terraforming Mars and tinkering with what would become the human genome. They and their technology, represented by the immense artifact discovered almost eighty years ago on one of Jupiter’s moons, had destroyed a thriving interstellar community encompassing some hundreds of races scattered throughout this region of space. The Hayakawa Solution held that the Ahannu had been destroyed in a war with themselves, a civil war that devastated all but one of their handful of worlds—Ishtar. It was much easier to accept that idea than the notion that any technic species could have survived—and still be wiping out potential competitors—in nearly historical times.

It was also a bit more comforting. Any killer species like the near-mythical Hunters that could survive half a million years would have godlike powers by now … and it was arrogant presumption to assume they’d lasted long enough to destroy the Ahannu Empire, then conveniently faded into extinction. No, the Hunters must have destroyed themselves, she believed, or simply retired from the galactic stage at some point in the distant past, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Not that any of that was of any great importance now, she thought, as another rocket exploded overhead, and bits of red-glowing, smoking shrapnel clinked and chattered on the pavement. “You okay, Doc?” Aiken asked her.

She nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her with his back to her. “Yes,” she said. “Homemade rockets. Primitive stuff.”

“It’s still deadly enough,” he replied. “Especially if you’re not wearing armor. C’mon. Down this way.”

He led her sharply right, into the mouth of a narrow alley between a storehouse and Building 4, the Mission Recreational Center. He was moving at a jog that ate up the ground, and she found herself having to run all out to keep up with him. Damn, I’m not used to this, she thought. Too much sitting around in the office trading gossip and eating native sholats. She was sweating heavily in the humid heat, and her jumpsuit was rapidly soaking through.

They emerged on Alexander Boulevard, at the edge of the native compound, and turned southeast, toward the Pyramid of the Eye.

Traditional Ahannu architecture ran heavily toward step pyramids and conical, two- and three-story huts. Some xenoarcheologists thought the ziggurats of ancient Mesopotamia had been inspired by the buildings of the An colony destroyed there in about 8000 b.c., though there was ample evidence that the Builders had used the same design much earlier, on Mars and elsewhere.

In fact, the structure dubbed the Pyramid of the Eye was almost certainly not Ahannu but something much older, erected in the Ishtaran jungle by the Builders as much as half a million years ago.

Perhaps the ancient An had gotten the idea of the step pyramid from the Builders.

Or perhaps it was simply a very common, very sturdy and easily raised architectural style, common to hundreds of civilizations across the galaxy. Nonetheless, the stark power of the ancient ziggurat contrasted sharply with the low, dome structures of mud and brick clustered around its base.

She was reminded again of something she’d seen on Earth—the ruins of ancient Egyptian temples, palaces, and workers’ huts clustered about the bases of the three much older, enigmatic pyramids on the Giza Plateau on Earth.

Aiken abruptly stopped, spinning to his left. Nichole saw nothing but shadows beneath an awning extended from the side of a native shop, but the Marine triggered his laser, firing from the hip. The heavy weapon gave a low-throated hum, deep and loud enough to make her teeth ache, and the beam, made visible by dust particles and ionizing air, sparkled in yellow-white brilliance for nearly a full second.

Rock exploded from the face of the storefront. By the brief glare of incandescence, Nichole saw a shape—a human shape—stumbling from the scattered shadows.

It was a man, a Sag-ura, naked and shaven-headed. Judging by the fine network of tattooed scales all over his body, the colorful face markings, and the keen-edged chakhul in his hands, he was one of the Sag-ura slave warriors of the God’s Hand. Aiken’s shot had sliced at an angle down across his torso, nearly severing his head and left arm from his chest in an explosion of blood and charred flesh.

Nichole didn’t scream, not quite, but she let out a yelp. “What have you done?”

“Getting you the hell out of here. Come on!”

“You killed him!” But then she realized how stupid that protest sounded. The slave soldier had certainly been trying to kill them, and if his spear was useless against a Marine’s battle armor, he wouldn’t have had much trouble with the light plasweave fabric of her mission jumpsuit. According to some of the stories collected by the Sag-ura Cultural Studies Group, the Sakura-sag were not known for taking prisoners.

The Pyramid of the Eye loomed ahead now, its truncated peak bathed in harsh, white light. A pair of Wasps orbited the structure, protecting a larger, more massive flier resting on the uppermost platform. She could see people up there, tiny black stick figures moving against the lights.

There was a flash and a loud bang, and Aiken stumbled. Nichole could hardly see what happened next, so quickly did it unfold, but she had the blurred impression of more humanoid figures emerging from shadows between several of the buildings along the north side of the boulevard.

Aiken dropped to one knee, recovering, pivoting with his cumbersome laser. The weapon hummed again, and by its flash she saw the attackers, a handful of Sag-ura led by a full-caste Ahannu warrior.

It was a big one, taller than a man, and more massive. The folks back home called them reptiles, though they were more properly classified as parareptilians. The scales, the slit pupils, the cranial crest, the fighting claws, all contributed to the lizard-like feel of the thing. Literally designed for fighting, it didn’t have the intelligence of Ahannu god-warriors, but it was quick and it was cunning. The god-weapon clutched in its six-fingered hands didn’t help either.

It fired a second time, and something exploded against Aiken’s armor. It staggered him, but he brought the laser to bear, firing into the Ahannu’s chest. It was wearing a quilted cloth uniform or armor of some kind, but that provided scant protection from the Marine’s return fire. It keened, a shrill, baying wail, then dropped to the pavement, heavily muscled legs kicking and twitching.

The Sag-ura warriors that accompanied it slashed at Aiken with their spears, then scattered as he triggered the laser again and brought down two of them. Two more armored Marines trotted up. “Hey, Master Sergeant!” one said over his suit’s external speaker. “You called?”

“Where the hell were you guys? The freakin’ Annies are all over the place.”

“Roger that. They’re coming through the North Gate like nobody’s business. We’re not holding them.”

Aiken stooped, picking up the god-weapon dropped by the Ahannu warrior. “Let’s move it. We have a transport to catch.”

The trio led Nichole through the East Gate of the Legation compound to the west face of the pyramid just beyond. Other people, civilians and military, were moving up the broad steps. A rocket exploded in the distance with a hollow thump. “Go on up and get on the T-40,” Aiken told her. “Here.” He handed her the pack.

“What … what about you guys? Aren’t you coming?”

“We’ll be going out later,” he replied. With that, he turned and trotted toward the northwest, the other two Marines at his heels.

Nichole started up the pyramid’s steps. The satchel, slung over her shoulder, was heavier than she’d remembered it, and she was out of breath from the ragged jog through the Legation compound’s streets. Her jumpsuit was supposed to be self-drying and cooling, but its microcircuitry just couldn’t keep up with the heat or her exertions, and she felt her strength waning.

Three-quarters of the way up, she stopped, dropping the pack and sagging onto the step for a breather. From there, the compound and the surrounding city were spread out below and around her in magnificent, twilit panorama. Heavy columns of smoke stained the sky to the north and northwest, and she could see hordes of attackers surging through the streets and plazas a kilometer away. Many carried torches and were burning anything they could find that was flammable. It was a scene out of Hell, of an alien Armageddon.

Shouldering her pack again, she started up the last of the steps. They were awkwardly placed, steeper and more narrow than was comfortable for human legs. Ahead, the stairway split to either side of an alcove opening into the pyramid’s interior, creating a stone-walled chamber that opened onto the steps. Light spilled from the inside, and she saw people moving within. She decided to enter the alcove and see who was there.

The Chamber of the Eye, from which the pyramid took its name, was featureless and bare, the walls, floor, and ceiling highly polished black stone, with no carvings, no paintings, no decorations of any kind. The lights came from high-power lamps erected by human technicians; the only furnishing that had been in the room when the first expedition arrived from Earth was an ellipsoid of what looked like polished rock crystal two meters across, suspended from the ceiling by a slender but rigidly inflexible tether. Its dark interior gave it the look of a huge eye—hence the name.

At the moment, a man’s head and shoulders hovered within the eye’s pupil. Behind him was the corporate logo of PanTerra, a stylized graphic of Earth floating within a canted ring. The usual pair of Marine sentries stood inside the door, expressions blank. Carleton stood in front of the eye, along with three other PanTerran reps, speaking with impassioned urgency. “Damn it, Roth, this is your screw-up! I’m not taking a fall for it!”

“No one is asking you to, Mr. Carleton,” the face within the eye said with a bland lack of emotion. “And, of course, we take full responsibility for all decisions made at the corporate level. Still, our field personnel must be held accountable for losses incurred due to any mishandling of the local situation—”

“There was no mishandling, damn it! We carried out Corporate’s directives to the letter!”

“That will be determined at the review. We’ll keep you informed, of course.”

“Jesus Christ, have you been listening to me, Roth? We’re losing the interstellar link! We’re eight light-years from help! An hour from now we could all be dead!”

“Well, we certainly hope that won’t happen, Mr. Carleton,” Roth said. “As you point out, though, you are eight light-years and some away … a ten-year journey at best. There is absolutely nothing any of us here can do … but wish you luck. Goodbye, Mr. Carleton. I hope your fears about the situation there … prove meritless.”

The face in the Eye blanked out, replaced by the standard carrier wave signal of ICLI. The government organization known as Interstellar Communications Link International was the entity responsible for maintaining the faster-than-light comlinks between several far-flung planets—here on Ishtar, among the melancholy ruins on Chiron at Alpha Centauri A, on inhospitable Hathor at Wolf 359, and of course in the Cave of Wonders on Mars. Within the Cave of Wonders, beneath the barren Cydonian mesa known as the Face, an array of thousands of viewscreens, product of a technology seemingly magic by current human standards, showed that once, half a million years ago, the Builders had created an instantaneous communication network linking thousands of worlds. Most of the screens at the Martian Builders site were dead, evidence that their empire, like so many others, had fallen to the Hunters of the Dawn.

Of the rest, a handful had been identified with nearby stars, and, as the new antimatter-torch technology gave humankind a means of approaching near-light speed, three of those worlds—Chiron, Hathor, and Ishtar—had been visited. The first two were dead worlds, the detritus of a war of interstellar extinction fought half a million years before; Ishtar, however …

“Bastard!” Carleton snapped.

“What’s the matter, Carleton?” Nichole asked. “Your books showing a loss for the quarter?”

Carleton whirled. “What are you doing here?”

“Hey, I just came in out of the cold.”

The irony was lost on the PanTerra agent. “You shouldn’t be in here.”

“Why not? Free access …” One of the absolute rules of ICLI’s stewardship of the FTL comm links was that access to the Builder technology was never to be restricted to any person or group, for any purpose. It was a rule more often honored in the breach than in fact.

“We’re not going to have access in another few moments,” he said, apparently trying to steer the conversation away from PanTerra business. “Those idiots!”

“Blaming the home office for your own stupidity isn’t going to cut it,” she told him. “Anyway, PanTerra has no business exploiting the natives or their technology.”

“That, Doctor, is not your decision. C’mon, let’s get to the transport.”

He brushed past her and out onto the pyramid steps, followed by his assistants. Nichole hesitated a moment, staring at the Eye, then turned and followed them.

That Eye had provided humans with their first glimpse of living An a century ago, when Dr. Alexander himself had entered the Cave of Wonders on Mars and seen for the first time the arrayed viewscreens providing two-way real-time links with a thousand worlds. Studies of the sky—the slow-moving stars and a spectroscopic analysis of the distant red sun glimpsed through the open, west-facing opening of the chamber—had identified the site as a world of Llalande 21185, and a relatively easy goal for one of Earth’s early interstellar attempts. The chances for profound scientific and historical investigation and discovery had been staggering.

But so too, unfortunately, had been the opportunity for corporate greed. Nichole hated Carleton, hated the whole idea of having PanTerra and a consortium of other corporate and government business interests present on this expedition … but as Carleton had so bluntly pointed out, that had not been her decision. The Lima Accord of 2125 had promised the right of corporate entities to trade with the Ahannu, in order to define, create, and realize new markets and products, and to provide diplomatic and cultural ties between the two races.

Who could have foreseen that their interference would have caused a damned war?

At the truncated peak of the Pyramid of the Eye, a T-40 Starhauler rested on massive landing jacks, its cargo ramp down. A line of Marines was trying to maintain order in the crowd attempting to board the transport. “Take it easy, people!” one Marine bellowed over an amplified suit speaker. “There’s room enough for all of you! Take your time, and take your turn!”

“Move along! Move along!” another Marine called from the top of the transport’s ramp. “Plenty of room. Don’t panic.”

Plenty of room … but the Marines weren’t coming, not on this trip. The T-40 had been detailed to haul the last of the Legation compound’s civilian population up to the Emissary, in orbit five hundred kilometers above Ishtar.

Nichole took her place in line and filed up the ramp, just behind Carleton and his assistants. The Starhauler had been designed as a transatmospheric cargo carrier, not a people mover, but its capacious cargo bay could hold thirty people or so in claustrophobic discomfort.

Nearly two hundred civilians had already been transported to the Emissary on previous trips. About 150 remained, most milling about outside the Marine guard perimeter waiting to board a shuttle, but they were fast running out of time, just moments ahead of the Destiny Faction’s attack on the compound.

A Marine at the edge of the waiting crowd took her name, checked his implant data, and said, “There you are, Dr. Moore! Where’ve you been, anyway? You’re on top priority.”

“I’d just as soon wait my—”

The Marine cut her off. “Key admin personnel and people with expert knowledge of Annie customs and language have immediate clearance to orbit, ma’am. Come on through.”

He ushered her through the Marine barricade as the crowd grumbled and surged forward. A real nasty scene in the works, she decided … and decided, too, that she didn’t envy those Marines their job.

She stood in line beneath the thrust of the transport’s stub wing but had not yet reached the ramp when someone screamed and pointed.

People around her stopped talking, and several wandered out of line, walking toward the north parapet of the pyramid. In the west, the peak of the conical mountain known as An-Kur—“God Mountain”—was … glowing.

“What the hell?” Carleton said, turning on the ramp ahead of her to stare back at the sight.

“It’s a volcano!” a young media rep shouted.

It was no volcano, that much was obvious. To Nichole, it looked as though the top of that far-off mountain had just peeled itself open, and now a pinpoint of light brighter than the local sun, brighter even than Earth’s sun seen from Earth, was shining out of the cavity within.

The blue-white thread of light snapped on abruptly, connecting the mountain peak with the sky at a ten-degree angle from the vertical, a beam so bright that Nichole covered her eyes as more of the watching civilians screamed or yelled.

An instant later a soundless flash blossomed in the deep green of the sky.

Long seconds passed, breathless, and then the shockwave from the mountain reached them, a dull, thundering rumble and a gust of heavy, heat-scorched air. The flash in the sky had faded to a scattering of starlike embers, slowly fading.

Only then did the enormity of what had just happened sink in. “Goddess!” she cried. “They’ve destroyed the Emissary!”

And then the panic set in atop the Pyramid of the Eye.

7

22 JUNE 2138

Briefing Room 401

White House Subbasement, Level D

Washington, D.C., Earth

1425 hours ET

“They’re coming in over the walls now!” the Marine cried, his eyes wide and staring. He couldn’t have been older than twenty. “They’re inside the compound and closing in on the pyramid!”

The young Marine’s face filled the darkened briefing room’s wallscreen, which stretched floor to ceiling across one end of the cool, wood-paneled chamber. A number of men and women sat at the long table, watching quietly. The atmosphere was heavy with emotions ranging from grim acceptance to shock.

“We got the last of the civilians out a couple hours ago,” the Marine continued. “There’s a place in the mountains east of here—an Uhsag village the scientists’ve managed to make contact with. We might be able to hold out there for quite a while.

“Of course, ten years is a long time. And maybe you guys—”

Moisture trickled down the huge face on the wallscreen. It was impossible to tell whether it was sweat or tears, but his eyes were glistening. He broke off, then shook his head.

“Screw that. Anyway, if you send relief, watch out for An-Kur. That’s the big, lone mountain ten klicks west of the compound. There’s some kind of god-weapon there, a big son of a bitch, hidden inside the top. We had no idea it was there. It picked the Emissary right out of the sky, one shot. Don’t know what the range is, but it’s at least five hundred klicks. I … I … damn it! They’re supposed to be primitives here! What are they doing with a freakin’ planetary defense system?”

A loud explosion banged nearby, and voices could be heard in the background, shouting commands, yelling response. The Marine looked around, shouted, “Right!” Then he looked back into the Eye. “They’re comin’ up the pyramid steps! Gotta go. Uh … look, remember us to our families, for those of us that got ’em, okay? Man, this really sucks vacuum.”

The Marine’s face spun away from the pickup. The quietly watching military officers and civilians in the room could make out a vertical slice of green-violet sky stained by what might have been a distant cloud of smoke, the doorway into the Chamber of the Eye, looking out across the city of New Sumer. Several sharp sounds emanating from the screen—the hiss and snap of high-powered lasers, the shrill whine of power packs—filled the air. Movement, a tumble of half-glimpsed shapes, blocked out the sliver of sky momentarily. Someone screamed.

Several moments passed, punctuated by more sounds, like the cold scrabblings of claws on stone, the clink of metal, a low-voiced grunt. For just a moment another face filled the wallscreen, flat and emotionless, a reptilian face dominated by enormous, oddly shaped eyes of metallic gold, horizontally slashed by elongated pupils. The skin was green and faintly scaled, the skull elongated and topped by a low, bony crest, the mouth a black-rimmed slash. Nictitating membranes flickered over those hypnotic eyes once … twice … and then the apparition vanished.

The wallscreen flickered, then winked out. General Haslett, Army Chief of Staff for the UFR Central Military Command, stared into the dark emptiness for a moment, shocked and afraid. My God, he thought. What are we sending our people out there to face?

General Dahlstrom, the National Security Council’s senior briefing officer, stood as the lights came up.

“Madam President,” she said, “Gentlemen, ladies, that was the last transmission monitored by our ICLI station on Mars. Since about ten hundred hours our time yesterday there has been no further transmission from the Llalande system—only the usual open-channel carrier wave. We still have a visual of the Chamber of the Eye, but there’s been no activity that we can make out.”

“Then the rebels haven’t destroyed the Builder FTL unit,” President Katharine LaSalle mused aloud. “That’s one good break for us, at least.”

Dahlstrom nodded. “Yes, Madam President. However, our xenosoc analysts believe that it would be extremely unlikely for them to damage the unit in any case. The Eye is as sacred to Geremelet’s faction as it is to the High Emperor.”

“Right,” Admiral Knudson, the head of the Joint Chiefs, said. He was a brusque, hard-bitten man with long service in the Naval Space Forces. “Part of their campaign, remember, was to liberate the Eye from the evil offworlders.”

“Just what the hell happened out there, anyway?” the President demanded.

“The situation is … complicated, ma’am,” Samantha Van Horne, Director of Central Intelligence, said. She gestured at the empty wallscreen. “It’s hard enough to get good intel on human opponents, let alone aliens. In this case, we have only the tiniest glimmer of how the Ahannu think and, in particular, what they think of us.”

“They can’t still be thinking of us as escaped slaves,” General Karl Voekel, the Aerospace Force representative of the Joint Chiefs, said. He gave David Billingsworth, the SecState, a hard look. “The State Department has been working on that issue for the past five years!”

“This is hardly the time for recriminations,” Billingsworth said. He looked across at Warren Boland, the Secretary of Science. “Besides, we worked with what DepSci gave us.”

Boland shrugged. “As Samantha said, it’s tough reading nonhumans or guessing how they’ll react to anything we do.”

“Every report coming through my data feed indicated that relations with the God-Emperor and his court were good and getting better,” Billingsworth said.

“Its court,” Dahlstrom reminded him. “The Ahannu have no sex.”

“It must make their Saturday nights damned boring,” Haslett observed dryly. “No wonder they’re so riled up. In any case, this—this Destiny Faction, as they call themselves, appeared to be a minor nuisance, nothing more.”

Voekel chuckled. “Jesus, General, a minor nuisance? It’s a damned civil war, and it’s been brewing for years! How did we miss it coming?”

“It’s not exactly a civil conflict,” Van Horne said. “The Ahannu God-Emperor seems to be waiting to see whether it should openly support Geremelet’s horde. It hasn’t come out with a public disavowal, at any rate.”

“So is the Destiny group working for the Emperor?” the President asked. “Or against it?”

Billingsworth shook his head. “We just don’t know, ma’am.”

“Our best reports suggest that the Destiny Faction is independent of the Ahannu government,” Van Horne added, “but that the imperial court is tolerating it and possibly even helping it along privately.” She shrugged. “Maybe the God-Emperor is just letting Geremelet do what the Emperor itself can’t do.”

“Playing both ends against the middle,” Haslett said. “With us as the middle.”

“Something like that,” Billingsworth said. “Now that the Legation compound has been overrun, we have to assume that the God-Emperor will bring Geremelet into the government formally and probably adopt Geremelet’s foreign policy as well.”

“Do we know what that will be?” President LaSalle asked.

“No, ma’am, but we can take a guess. Geremelet’s faction came to power on the platform that humans were renegade slaves … uh, what was the word?”

“‘Sag-ura,’” Van Horne told him. “It means, roughly, ‘foreign slaves.’”

“Right. They don’t have the technology to strike at Earth, of course, but that’s probably just rhetoric. What they do want is us off of Ishtar, permanently.”

“Ishtar for Ishtarans,” Knudson said with a sneer. “Is that it?”

“Basically, Admiral, yes. They feel they were shamed as a people by appearing inferior to us technologically. Remember, they still think of us as their property, slaves or pets that they domesticated thousands of years ago. If we’re not around to remind them, they can feel better about themselves.”

“So what’s the solution, then?” the President wanted to know.

“Let ’em have their damned planet,” Voekel said. “God knows we don’t need trade with the Annies. The xeno people can study ’em from orbit.”

“Not if they have the technology to shoot a starship out of the sky,” Dahlstrom pointed out.

Voekel shrugged. “They’ve had five years to study these critters. That ought to be enough.”

“Five years,” Boland pointed out, “isn’t enough time to even begin mapping out the problem. This is a whole world, a whole culture, a history, a language, a people unlike anything we’ve ever known—”

“The fact is,” Voekel said, “we don’t need these Annie jokers nearly as much as they need us. And starships are damn expensive. I just think we ought to take a real careful look at what we have invested here, before sending any more of our assets out there to Llalande.”

“Are you saying we should call off Operation Spirit of Humankind?” Haslett asked. He pursed his lips, a sardonic acknowledgment of the pretentiousness of the cumbersome title. “At this late date?”

“What’s late?” Voekel asked. “The ships haven’t launched yet. The relief force hasn’t even been assembled. We could call the whole thing off this afternoon. Damn it, I say we should call it off. The cost—the risk—it’s just not worth it.”

“Which means we write off our people on Ishtar,” Admiral Knudson said. “Unacceptable. Absolutely unacceptable!”

“Karl may be right,” Thomas Wright, the Secretary of Human Affairs, said. “The cost of each interstellar expedition is … quite literally astronomical.” He chuckled at his own wit. “Attempting to enforce our political will on aliens is lunacy at best. DepHA regrets the loss of life, of course, but I remind you that we advised against the original involvement at Llalande when contact was first established ten years ago. The Ahannu are primitives and no longer understand those fragments of advanced technology they still possess. It’s not as though they can teach us anything, right?” He made an unpleasant face. “As for the xenohistorical crap, that’s been out of control since First Contact and the Genesis Awareness. I don’t think anyone really understands the Frogs or what they supposedly did on Earth thousands of years ago. I don’t think we need to. It’s all moot.”

“We’d damned well better understand them, Mr. Wright,” Van Horne said, her voice sharp, “if we’re going to understand the psychoreligious mania that’s infected the American population over the past few decades.”

That, Haslett thought, was certainly true. The knowledge that aliens, the ancestors of the Ahannu, had colonized Earth over ten thousand years earlier, enslaving the human inhabitants of the Fertile Crescent, had struck humankind’s collective awareness like a thunderbolt. The idea that those aliens had actually tinkered with the human genome, somehow been responsible for what humans were like today … that bit of information had utterly and forever transformed the way man would look at himself.

“Just the American population?” Billingsworth asked with a wry grin. “Whether people think they’re gods, devils, or alien slave raiders, the whole damned world has gone nuts over the Ahannu, one way or another.”

“Be that as it may,” Voekel said, “certain inescapable facts remain. We cannot support a major military operation at interstellar distances against the determined resistance of an entire planetary population. Further, there is no compelling reason to do so. The loss of our people already in the Llalande system is regrettable, certainly, but we must recognize and accept that even if some have survived the debacle at Ishtar, ten years is a long time. There will be no survivors by the time the Derna and her support group arrives in the Llalande system.”

“Madam President,” Admiral Knudson said, turning to face the woman at the head of the table. “The voters will never forgive a … a betrayal of this magnitude! We must at least attempt to relieve the Llalande mission. Anything less would be criminal!”

“Sending more people after them to die would be stupid,” Voekel said. “If military history teaches us anything it’s that we should know when to cut our losses and get out.”

“There’s more to it than that,” the President said. “There are … certain political considerations that must be taken into account.”

“Aren’t there always?” Billingsworth asked with a wry twist to his mouth.

“It’s this issue of human slaves on Ishtar,” the President continued. “The people are up in arms. Protests. Demonstrations. Marches. Riots, even. Some pro-An, of course, mostly the religious groups, but the worst are the anti-An movements. More and more groups are appearing everywhere now, here and in other countries too. The Human Dignity League. The Earth First Coalition. The Humankind Abolitionist Union. I’ve never known any issue to unite so many people from so many countries across so much of the entire globe!”

Again Haslett had to agree. Descendants of human slaves taken by the An to the Llalande system ten thousand years ago now numbered anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions—no one was sure how many there were—and their bondage had become a rallying point for all of the anti-An groups on Earth.

“And the violence is completely out of hand,” President LaSalle continued. “That riot in New Chicago a couple of weeks ago … what was the final tally on that?”

“Fifty-one killed, Madam President,” an aide with an open cerebralink seated just behind him said, a vacant expression on his face as he pulled the requested data down off the White House AI-Data Net. “Over three hundred injured. Perhaps 800 million in property damage.”

“Fifty-one killed,” President LaSalle repeated, shaking her head. “And there have been riots all over. Here in Washington. Detroit. Los Angeles. New Miami. And in other countries too. Johannesburg. Rome. Kiev. Madrid. Rio. The people want those human slaves on Ishtar—these Saguras—they want them free. If we abandon the planet, it’s going to count heavily against us in the congressional elections this year and even worse in the presidential election in ’forty.”

“Madam President,” Voekel said, “surely we can’t base our policy—our military policy—on a world eight light-years away, on the antics of a few damned malcontents!”

“General, those ‘few damned malcontents,’ as you call them, pull a hell of a lot of political weight. You know how unsettled things have been all over the world since the discovery of human slaves on Ishtar. If we back out now, if we abandon the relief mission, we could conceivably find ourselves facing civil unrest at home and a shooting war with the rest of the Federation. I will not be the President who signs that order!”

The men and women gathered at the table were silent for a moment. General Haslett finally spoke. “General Colby? You’ve said nothing so far. They’re your Marines. What do you think?”

General Anton Colby, Commandant of the U.S. Marines, shook his head gravely. “The Marines go where they’re told to, General. For the record, I am opposed completely to abandoning our people on Ishtar, but you all knew that already.” There were a few subdued chuckles from around the table.

“With the situation on Ishtar,” Colby continued, “we are faced with a strategic problem unlike anything we have faced before. As General Voekel pointed out, the battlefield is so far away that the tactical situation is likely to have changed beyond recognition by the time our boys and girls get there. The length of the deployment is such that we will need to use a specially derived and trained unit, one without close family ties to home. By the time they return to Earth, everyone they know will have aged twenty years at least, while they will have aged only months … depending on the rho-delta-tau and the efficiency of the onboard hibertechnic equipment.

“Gentlemen … ladies … Madam President … there is an old saying in the Corps, one dating from the first half of the twentieth century. ‘Send in the Marines.’ That saying was a reflection of the Corps’ flexibility and hitting power in situations where it just didn’t pay to declare war and send in the entire army, but where military might or the threat of an all-out war was necessary to achieve the President’s goals, whatever they might be.

“The Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit will have the training and the hardware necessary to rescue our mission in the Llalande system. If we’re too late for a rescue, well, they can secure our property there, show the folks back home that we at least goddamn tried, and if necessary send a message to the Ahannu that humans don’t take kindly to being pushed around.

“I would like to add that some eighty of the people on Ishtar are Marines serving with the Terran research mission there. The Corps does not forget its own. If the decision is made to abandon those brave men and women out there, then I am prepared to immediately tender my resignation as Commandant of the Marine Corps. A number of my staff and other senior Corps officers are prepared to take the same steps. That, Madam President, is all I have to say at this time.”

“Well spoken,” Billingsworth said. “Madam President, I must agree with General Colby. Operation Spirit of Humankind must go on, whatever the cost in dollars or lives. We lose too much if we let the Ahannu scare us off.”

“This council is not a democracy,” the President said, her voice cold. “There will be no vote. The decision rests entirely with me.”

“Ah, and with Congress, Madam President,” the Secretary of Human Affairs said. “We can’t forget Congress. They’re paying the bill, after all, and have the responsibility to declare war.”

“You needn’t remind me, Tom,” she told him. “And you needn’t worry. Congress will declare war when I ask them to. They’re the ones whipping up all of these anti-An resolutions lately, remember. It’s good political capital for the folks back home.”

“An interesting public relations problem there, Madam President,” Haslett said. “We declare war, but it will be ten years before our strike force reaches the target. Do you think Congress, or the public, will still be interested in fighting this war in 2148? A decade is a long time in politics and in the public’s memory.”

“Frankly, General Haslett,” the President said, “that will be my successor’s problem, not mine.” She chuckled. “I plan to win my second term in ’forty, retire with dignity in ’forty-four, and be safely ensconced as an elder statesperson teaching metapolitical law on the WorldNet by the time our people even get to the Llalande system.”

“But that also means, Madam President, that your successor, or the next Congress, might not want to continue paying for a war that we started. Our troops could find themselves eight light-years from home with no hope of further reinforcements or supply.”

“Then the Joint Chiefs and the Federal Military Command will just have to see to it that we win with the one expeditionary force, won’t they?”

Haslett nodded but felt deep reservations. This unexpected Ahannu god-weapon that could shoot starships from the Ishtaran sky … it was disturbing, even frightening. If the transport Derna was destroyed while the Marines were on the ground, they would have no way home, no matter what provisions Earthside Command made in advance. And Haslett was politician enough to know that the public wasn’t likely to support another expensive mission to Llalande to rescue the first two, no matter how up in arms they were at the moment over the Ahannu’s human slaves.

General Haslett glanced across the table at Colby and wondered what the Marine commandant was thinking.

The Mall

Washington, D.C., Earth

1840 hours ET

Secretary of State David Randolph Billingsworth rarely visited what he thought of as the tourist city. The special government service maglev subway generally whisked him straight from the underlevels of the White House–Executive Building complex to the station less than a block from his suburban Bethesda home, so his only glimpses of downtown Washington were through the odd window or on the big wallscreen in his office. The coded message that had come through on his cerebralink’s priority comm channel had been as explicit as it had been terse, however. He’d checked a robot floater out of the Executive Office motor pool and ridden six blocks to the Fourteenth Street entrance of the Mall Dome, right next to the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

The Dome, actually a long, narrow ellipsoidal geodesic, stretched from the foot of Capitol Hill almost to the base of the Washington Monument, arching high above the historic Washington Mall. The largest freestanding geodesic in the world when it was built in 2069, it was widely praised as a modern wonder of the world … and equally vilified as a monumental eyesore in the City of Monuments.

Billingsworth had no feeling about it one way or another. It was possible for him to get anywhere within the government office warrens by maglev, from the Pentagon to the Capitol Building to Central Intelligence at Langley to the White House, so he never needed to go up on the surface and actually see the thing. But he had to admit it was rather pleasant … a cool escape from the heat and humidity of midsummer D.C., with late afternoon sunlight filtering through the transparencies to the west, from behind the slender dark spike of the Washington Monument.

He took a seat on a park bench next to a riot of forsythia. Tourists strolled or hurried past on the walkway or slid silently along on the glidepath. A naked couple snuggled on a blanket on a hillock nearby. A young woman—a congressional aide, perhaps—jogged past with a determined gait, her head completely enclosed in a sensory overlay helm, wearing nothing else but a sports bra and shoes. Near the Mall entryway, a gaggle of teenagers resplendent in iridescent Ahannu scale tattoos and shaven heads were passing out pro-An vidfliers to any who would take them.

No one seemed to recognize him, and that was good. He’d considered wearing an overlay helm himself … but that would have broadcast his ID out to anyone else with the requisite electronics and an unhealthy curiosity. Besides, people knew the President … but how many knew what the SecState looked like or even what his name was?

“Mr. Billingsworth?”

He turned. Allyn Buckner sat down on the other end of the bench and casually pretended to read a newsheet. He was wearing a conservative green and violet smartsuit and dark data visor.

“Buckner. Why’d you drag me out here?”

“Security, of course. I can’t very well come to your office, or even your home, not without my presence being noted on a dozen e-logs. Nor could you visit me unnoticed. And hotel rooms, restaurants, and places like that all have so many electronics nowadays there’s no way to guarantee a private conversation.”

Billingsworth took another long look at the people passing by. This hardly seemed private … and even an open park had more than its fair share of police surveillance floaters, security scanners, and even roving news pickups.

But Buckner had a point about other possible meeting places. Public establishments were entirely too public, while offices and government buildings were heavily wired for all manner of electronic communications and data access. He would have preferred to meet with the PanTerran VP in one of his own secure meeting rooms—there were ways to avoid the log-in and ID protocols—but this, he supposed, would have to do.

“Well?” Buckner asked with brusque matter-of-factness. He scanned a fast-moving live newsfeed of a religious riot in Bombay, then folded the sheet and dropped it on the bench. “Let’s have it.”

Billingsworth sighed. “Operation Spirit of Humankind is still go,” he said. “Scheduled departure is four months from now … October fifteenth.”

“Give me the details.”

Billingsworth reached out and took Buckner’s hand, shaking it as if in greeting, pressing the microelectronics embedded in the skin at the base of his thumb against similar nanocircuitry in the PanTerran officer’s palm. The ultimate in secret handshakes, the transfer of files stored in the SecState’s cerebralink to Buckner’s files took only a few milliseconds, with no RF or microwave leakage that might be intercepted and monitored.

“Excellent.” Buckner seemed satisfied, in his acidic way. “My people were afraid that the government was going to backstep on this.”

“I don’t understand why you need me to be your … your spy.”

“Not a spy, Mr. Billingsworth. Our associate. In twenty years, if all goes well, our very, very wealthy associate.”

“Twenty years …”

“Think of it as long-term investment. You’ll be … what? Eighty-one? Eighty-two? Young enough to benefit from a complete rejuvenation program, if you wish. And still be rich enough to buy that Caribbean island you want to retire to.”

Billingsworth felt a sharp stab of alarm as a floater with the WorldNet News logo on its side drifted past, its glassy eye on the lookout for anything newsworthy. Humans might forget a face, but not a news bureau AI; he turned his head away, studying the foreplay antics of the couple on the hillock behind them. With a soft whine of maglifters, the flying eye drifted past, moving slowly toward the Fourteenth Street entrance.

“But I still don’t understand what you need with these briefing records,” he said when the snoop-floater was out of range.

“They help us plan, Mr. Billingsworth. The government is notoriously unreliable when it comes to long range planning. You can never really count on anything past the next round of elections. When dealing with business opportunities light-years away, that can be a distinct disadvantage. With this,” he tapped the right side of his head, “we know we can proceed with certain plans, long range expensive plans, without risking the loss of our investment when the government waffles, or changes its mind, or decides to have a war. Besides, you need to do something to justify your shares in this venture, right?”

“I suppose so. But the scandal if this gets out—” he broke off as another congressional jogger bounced past, oblivious and anonymous in his sensory helm. Next time, Billingsworth thought, he would definitely wear one of those, but with the ID functions off. There had to be a way to rig that, somehow.

Buckner gave a thin smile. “Then it’s in both our best interests not to let it get out, right?”

“Yes, damn you.”

“Good. You’ll let me know if there’s any change or new development. The usual e-drop.” He stood up, dropping the newsheet in a nearby recycler. “And cheer up! You’re going to be rich and live to be two hundred, easy. And no one will ever hear about those bad investments of yours last year.”

Buckner turned and walked away, heading toward gardens filling the Mall interior.

Billingsworth watched the couple having sex on the hillside a moment longer, then used his cerebralink to signal the robocar, stood, and walked toward the Fourteenth Street entrance to meet it.

He was sweating, despite the Mall’s air-conditioning, and his breath was coming in short, hard gasps. Damn it, he had to find a way to guarantee better privacy for his meetings in the future.

8

24 JUNE 2138

DI’s Office, Company 1099

U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center

Parris Island, South Carolina

0920 hours ET

“Garroway! Center yourself on the hatch!”

Garroway leaped into the DI’s office, moving at the dead run that had been demanded of him and all of his fellow recruits in Company 1099 since the day they’d arrived at Parris Island.

“Sound off!” Gunnery Sergeant Makowiecz barked without looking up from his desk display.

“Sir!” Garroway snapped back as the toes of his boots hit the white line painted on the deck and he came to rigid attention, eyes locked firmly on an ancient water stain on the cinder-block bulkhead above and behind the DI’s left shoulder. “Recruit Garroway reporting to the drill instructor as ordered, sir!”

“Recruit,” Makowiecz said, his voice still as razor-edged as a Mamaluk sword, “your indoctrination classes are complete and you are about to enter phase one of your training. Are you fully aware of what this entails?”

“Sir! This recruit understands that he will be required to surrender all technical and data prostheses still resident within his body, sir!”

“Well quoted, son. Right out of the book. Stand at ease.”

The sudden change in his DI’s manner was so startling that Garroway nearly fell off his mark. Almost reluctantly, muscle by muscle, he relaxed his posture.

“Why do you want to be a Marine, son?” Makowiecz asked.

“Sir, this recruit—”

“Belay the third person crap,” Makowiecz told him. “This is off the record, just you and me. You’ve seen enough of boot camp now that you must have an idea of how rough this is going to be. You are about to go through twelve weeks of sheer hell. So … why are you putting yourself through this?”

Garroway hesitated. He felt like he was just starting to get the hang of automatic recitations in the third person—“this recruit”—and it somehow didn’t seem fair for the DI to suddenly come at him as though he were a normal, thinking human being. It left him feeling off balance, disoriented.

“Sir,” he said, “all I can say is that this is what I’ve wanted ever since I heard stories from my mother about my great-grandfather.”

Makowiecz placed his palm on a white-lit panel on his desk, accessing data through his c-link. “Your great-grandfather is one of the Names of the Corps,” he said. “Manila John Basilone. Dan Daly. Presley O’Bannon. Chesty Puller. Sands of Mars Garroway. That’s pretty good company. His name is a damn fine legacy.

“But you know and I know that there’s more to being a Marine than a name …”

He paused, waiting expectantly, and Garroway knew he was supposed to say something. “Sir … this recruit … I mean, I don’t know what you want me to tell you. I can’t go back to what I was. Sir.”

“You have an abusive father.”

The change of topic was so sudden, Garroway didn’t know how to respond. “Uh, it’s not that bad, sir. Not sexual abuse or anything like that. He just—”

“I’m not interested in the details, son. But hear me, and hear me loud and clear. All abusive behavior by parents or stepparents or line-marriage parents—or by anyone else in authority over a kid, for that matter—does incalculable damage. Doesn’t matter if it was sexual abuse or physical abuse with routine beatings or ‘just’ emotional abuse with screaming fits and head games. And it doesn’t matter if the adult is alcoholic or addicted to c-link sex feeds or is just a thoroughgoing abusive asshole. It’s really impossible to say which is worse, which kid gets hurt the most, because every kid is different and responds to the abuse in different ways.”

“My father yelled a lot,” Garroway said, “but he never hit me. Uh, not deliberately, anyway.” He didn’t add that Carlos Esteban had hit his mother, frequently, and threatened more than once to do the same to him, or that he was an alcoholic who’d disabled the court-appointed cybercontrols over his behavior.

“Doesn’t matter. It says here your mother has filed for divorce. She’s out of the house?”

“Yes, sir. She’s staying with a sister in California now.”

“Good. She’s better off out of this guy’s way, and you’ll be better off knowing she’s okay.” He got a faraway look in his eyes as he scrutinized the data feed flowing through his link. “It says here you were hospitalized once with a dislocated shoulder after a domestic altercation.”

“That was an accident, sir.”

“Uh-huh.” The sergeant didn’t sound at all convinced. “Your father has been cited seven times … domestic violence … disturbing the peace … assault … This bastard should have been locked away and rehabbed a long time ago.”

“There are … political factors, sir. He’s a pretty big man in Sonora, where we live. He’s good friends with the local sheriff and with the governor.”

“Shit. Figures.”

“Sir … I don’t understand where this is going. Are you saying I’m not qualified to be a Marine because my father—”

“You’re qualified, son. Don’t worry about that. What we’re concerned about right now is your c-link. Your implant is a Sony-TI 12000 Series Two Cerebralink.”

“Uh, yessir. It was a birthday present from my parents.”

“Do you have a resident AI?”

“A personality, you mean? No, sir.” Most cerebralinks had onboard AI, for net navigation if nothing else. He didn’t have one with a distinct personality, though. His father hadn’t believed in that sort of thing.

“Cybersex partner?”

“Uh … no …” He’d linked into a number of sex sites, of course, for a few hours of play with various fantasy partners. Everyone did that. But he didn’t have a regular playmate.

“Cyberpet?”

“No, sir.” His father had been pretty insistent about his not having any artificial personalities—a waste of time and money, Carlos had said, and a threat to his immortal soul—and he’d done a lot of e-snooping to make sure his orders were obeyed.

“What did you do for companionship?”

“Well … there’s my girlfriend. …”

“Lynnley Collins. Yes. You’re pretty close with her?”

“Yes, sir.”

“A fuck buddy? Or something closer?”

“She’s a friend. Sir.” He had to bite back his rising anger. This kind of cross-examination was the sort of thing his father did, stripping him of any semblance of privacy.

Of course, he’d known he would be surrendering most of his privacy rights when he signed up. But this prying, this spying into his private life … damn it, it wasn’t right.

“I know, son,” Makowiecz said gently, almost as if he was reading Garroway’s mind. “I know. This is as intrusive, as downright abusive, as anything your old man ever did to you. But it’s necessary.”

“Sir, yes, sir. If you say so, sir.”

“I do say so. Does it surprise you that we pay pretty close attention to a recruit’s private life here? We have to.” He pulled his hand off the contact panel on the desk and leaned back in his chair. Outside, clearly audible through the thin walls of the DI’s barracks office, a boot company jogged past, sounding off to a singsong cadence to the beat of footsteps thundering together.

“Am I right or am I wrong?

Each of us is tough and strong!

We guard the ground, the sea, the sky!

Ready to fight and willing to die!”

“It’s a damned paradox, Garroway,” Makowiecz said as the chanting faded away across the grinder. “Lots of kids join the Marines who had bad childhoods. For a lot of ’em, the Corps is their mother and father put together. I know. That’s the way it was for me. And we have to put you through six kinds of hell, have to break you in order to build you up into the kind of Marine we want. If that’s not abuse, I don’t know what is.”

“A history feed I downloaded once said that it used to be that Marine DIs couldn’t even swear at the recruits. Sir.”

Makowiecz nodded. “True enough. That was back, oh, 150 years ago or so. We couldn’t lay hands on recruits then either. A number of Marine DIs were discharged, even court-martialed and disgraced, for not following the new guidelines. They’d grown up in the old Corps, after all, and they thought that harassment and even physical abuse toughened the recruits, made them better Marines.

“We know better now. Still, the rules have relaxed a bit since then, because it was discovered that we couldn’t make Marines without imposing discipline … and sometimes some well-placed profanity or grabbing a recruit by the stacking swivel and giving him a shake is just what is needed to get the message through his damned thick recruit skull. You copy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“We have to invade each recruit’s private life, right down to his soul—if he has one. We need to know what makes him tick. How he’ll react under stress. And how we can transform him into a U.S. Marine.”

“I understand that, sir.” And he did, reluctantly … and with a few reservations.

“Good. You understand too that we have to remove your cerebralink.”

“Yes … sir.”

“You don’t sound so sure of that.”

“Well, it’s kind of scary, thinking about being without it. I’ll be getting a Marine Corps model, right?”

“That’s affirmative. Eventually. But first you will learn how to function without any electronic enhancement at all.”

“Without … any? …” The thought wasn’t scary. It was terrifying.

“Right. Look … you know the cerebralink is nothing but a tiny set of parallel computers nanotechnically grown inside your head and connecting to certain parts of your nervous system, like the linkpads in the palm of your hands. It lets you link head-to-head with others with compatible hardware, lets you connect with the WorldNet and pull down the answer to any question, gives you a whole library just a thought-click away. You can see anything, call anyone, make reservations, even download the whole history of the Corps just by thinking about it. The thing is, too many kids nowadays rely on the net, know what I mean?”

“I guess so. But … are you saying it’s wrong to link on?”

“Wrong? Hell no. Direct net access is one of the great cornerstones of modern technology and culture. But you as a Marine need to learn that you can get along without any technic prosthesis whatsoever … not just learn it, but know it right down to your bones. Our ancestors went a long way without implants or c-links. You can too.

“However, we’ve found a special problem with kids coming from families with major dysfunctions. Alcoholism. Net addictions. Violence. Kids who don’t get the love and care they need at home tend to grow up relying on surrogates, like AI companions, cyberpets, or e-mates. When they’re separated from their comfort-of-choice, whatever it is, it can be pretty rough.”

“Why don’t you just keep them from enlisting, then?” Damn it, if they were going to kick him out of boot camp for this …

“If we did that, son, we’d have to exclude the majority of our volunteers. And some of our best people came from bad home situations. Myself included. But we do take them aside first, like I’m doing with you, and give them a final chance to think about it, think about what they’re in for. When we pull your hardware, you’re going to feel more alone, more lost, more isolated than you’ve ever felt in your life. It’s going to be hell. And you’re going to have to ride it out. Eventually, you will be issued with a Marine Corps implant. If you make it through.”

“And if I don’t?”

“If you don’t, the government will stand you to a replacement, though I’m afraid it won’t be as fancy as a Sony-TI 12000. Government issue, IBM-800 series. But you can upgrade that for anything you want later.”

“What … what are my chances, sir?”

“Oh, pretty good, actually. We lose maybe fifteen percent of our recruits at this stage. But the proportion is higher for kids from dysfunctional families, like yours. We could lose, oh, maybe thirty, thirty-five percent. A lot of kids have formed attachments they can’t get along without. You have an edge, because you haven’t bonded with an AI construct yet.”

“I can handle it, sir.”

“Good. Because our best Marines are fighters, the ones who’ve had bad shakes and had to fight to make it through. Tough. Survivors. We want that in our people. But we need to give you the chance to back out now, before we yank your plug-in.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You have twenty-two hours to think it over. Tomorrow, at zero-seven-thirty, you will report to recruit sick bay for processing. You may, at any time until then, refuse the treatment. At that time you may opt either for a full discharge or transfer to one of the other military or government services. One less demanding than the U.S. Marine Corps. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Very well.” He paused, and his voice hardened again. “Back to the routine. Dismissed!”

That, Garroway knew, was his cue to slip back into his recruit persona. “Sir! Aye aye, sir!”

He pulled a sharp about-face, then fairly lunged from the compartment, on the run.

Headquarters, PanTerra Dynamics

New Chicago, Illinois

United Federal Republic, Earth

1545 hours CT

A scarlet-uniformed attendant ushered Dr. Traci Hanson into the briefing chamber on the 540th floor of the PanTerra Dynamics Building in New Chicago and toward her seat at a large, crystalline-topped conference table. A viewall behind the table showed the gold, scarlet, and purple panorama of Ishtar, the vast orb of Marduk hanging low in the sky above clustered pyramids, obelisks, and the low, rounded domes of native habitations.

She was still having some trouble getting around on Earth, three weeks after her return from Mars, but she waved off the proffered arm and made the final walk to her seat on her own. She wore an earth-return EW suit, a utilitarian-looking green jumpsuit with an exoskeleton walker frame invisibly woven into the fabric. It helped her stand without falling, and supported the weight that, to her, still felt three times greater than normal. At least now she could stand. For the first few days after her return, she’d been all but confined to a wheelchair. Now she could get around pretty well without any artificial aid at all, resorting to the EW suit only when she knew she was going to be standing or walking for long periods.

Rising with solemn formality, Allyn Buckner introduced himself and the others already seated.

“Dr. Hanson,” he said in a raspy voice. “So good of you to come. May I present Gavin Norris … Clarence Rafferty … Lee Soong Yi … Mary Pritchard … and I believe you already know Conrad Robinson and Marine Colonel Thomas Jackson Ramsey.”

She nodded to each in turn. Conrad Robinson was her department head at the American Xenoarcheological Institute, though she barely knew him. And Ramsey …

“Colonel Ramsey,” she said. “Yes. We shared the packet hop back to Earth.” She noted with a small stab of irritation that Ramsey was wearing a dress Marine uniform, with no sign of the braces at neck or wrists indicating that he was wearing a walker.

“Hello again, Dr. Hanson,” Ramsey said with a grin. “Gotten your Earth legs yet?”

“More or less,” she replied brusquely, in no mood for casual talk. She looked at Buckner as she sank into her seat, grateful to be off her feet. “So. I understand you want me to go out-system. Why? Or perhaps I should say, ‘Why me?’”

“Because you are one of our best xenoarcheologists, and an expert on the An or Ahannu or whatever they call themselves.”

“An,” she replied in a clipped, offhand manner, “is what primitive humans in the Mesopotamian region called the species when they first arrived on Earth, some ten to twelve thousand years ago. Their name for themselves is Ahannu, which means, approximately, ‘the Holy People.’”

“Er, yes. Exactly,” Buckner said.

“You see, ladies and gentlemen,” Robinson said quickly, “why I said Dr. Hanson would be perfect for this mission.”

“But you haven’t asked me if I want to go,” she said. “I am flattered, Mr. Buckner, but I am not prepared to sacrifice twenty years or more of my career … not when there is so much yet to do here and on Mars.”

“Sacrifice? Who said anything about sacrifice? Upon your return, you will only be some five years older, not twenty … and thanks to cryohibertechnics, you’ll experience none of the actual voyage. And you will be able to study the Ahannu in person, on their homeworld.”

“Not their homeworld,” she said, correcting him. Damn the netnews media. With sloppy reporting and sheer carelessness, they’d perpetuated the popular misconception that Ishtar was the world where the An had originally evolved. “The world we call Ishtar was an An colony world, like Earth. The Hunters of the Dawn appear to have overlooked Ishtar when they—”

“Yes, yes, as you say. In any case, the chance to meet the Ahannu face-to-face would have to be the chance of a lifetime for a dedicated research scientist such as yourself.”

“A dedicated research scientist such as myself,” she said, “depends on the timely publishing of papers to stay current and to stay known in a highly competitive field. I will not waste twenty years sleeping while my colleagues are continuing to publish in my absence!”

“Not even for, say … fifty million newdollars, plus the chance at royalties from discoveries this corporation may make on Ishtar?”

She opened her mouth, then clamped it shut again. Had she heard right? “Fifty … million?”

“I would think, Doctor, that that much money might go a long way toward paying you back for any professional … inconvenience. And upon your return, you will, of course, be the expert on the Ahannu. I expect we could promise you a position with PanTerra Dynamics, in fact.”

“What happened to Nichole Moore?”

“Eh?”

“Nichole Moore is the xenoculturalist assigned to the Terran Legation on Ishtar,” she said, “working under a government grant for the Smithsonian Institute. She’s been in the New Sumer compound for five years now. She would be the leading expert on the Ahannu at the moment, unless …”

“We have … lost touch with Dr. Moore,” Buckner told her. “We are assembling an expedition to go to Ishtar, rescue any survivors, and reestablish a Terran presence in the Llalande system. Since it will be ten years before the relief mission can arrive, we must assume that Dr. Moore and the rest of Emissary’s people are all dead or will be dead by the time you arrive.”

She nodded slowly. “I see.” She’d suspected as much, of course, both from what she’d picked up at the Cydonian complex and from her conversations with the Marine women on board the Osiris. Geremelet’s Destiny Faction had won considerable power among the Ahannu, and there’d been growing danger of a coup or at least of a civil war on Ishtar, one that would threaten the tiny human contingent stationed at New Sumer. “They killed Dr. Moore, and now you’re sending me?”

“You’ll have considerably more firepower behind you than Dr. Moore did,” Buckner said. “A full Marine Expeditionary Unit, in fact. One of its primary tasks will be to protect you.”

“No,” she said. “Find another victim.”

“I beg your pardon?”

She looked at her boss. “Mr. Robinson, the institute is largely funded by the federal government, but we are not soldiers to be ordered about! They can’t just pack me off to another goddamn star for twenty years!”

“Actually, Dr. Hanson,” Robinson said, “I put your name in the running. You will be ideal for this mission. And you must admit that the financial remuneration package is, well, quite generous.”

“I don’t care about that! You can’t transfer me eight light-years! What about my work here?”

“Carter and Jorgenson will be more than able to fill in for you at Cydonia, Dr. Hanson.”

“Carter and Jorgenson! Carter is a second-rate hack who can’t see beyond his fringie religious beliefs! And Jorgenson is so determined to try and prove that some mythical ancient human culture was the Hunters of the Dawn that—” She stopped, eyes widening. So that was it. Jorgenson was her chief rival within the institute. She’d crossed academic swords with the man more than once, and was convinced that he owed his current power and prestige more to the people he knew in government than to any real ability in his field. He’d also failed more than once to get her into his bed, and had taken to twisting her words whenever he had the opportunity, as if in petty revenge. Hell, he’d delivered one paper that had made her look like the fringie nutcase, by misrepresenting her contention that the An had introduced the concept of religion to the early native population of Earth.

He’d been silent ever since she threatened to expose him as a fraud. Was this his way of getting even?

“If I were you, Doctor,” Robinson went on, “I would give some thought to my future with the institute and where else you might be able to apply your considerable talent and experience.”

She blinked. “Is that a threat?”

“There are no threats here, Dr. Hanson,” Buckner said gently. “Think of it as … an incentive.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Fifty million newdollars?” Buckner chuckled. “Compounding interest at ten percent over ten years? Or … let’s make it seventy-five million. And a contract with PanTerra Dynamics naming you research director of your own exostudies department upon your return to Earth. You will be extraordinarily rich … and able to apply your talents toward any area of research you might desire. Who knows? Working with the Ahannu directly … you might open up whole new, undreamed of areas of study. …”

Traci felt light-headed, almost dizzy. This was everything she could ever have dreamed of. Freedom of research, and the money to let her pursue that research wherever it took her. No longer dependent on the institute, or anyone else. It seemed almost too good to be true. …

Which in her book meant that it was too good to be true.

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait just a damned minute. How can you afford to throw money around like that? Fifty million, seventy-five million. What’s your annual salary, Buckner? About ten, maybe twenty million, at a guess? Hell, I don’t care if seventy-five million is nothing but loose credit chips to you, even a company as big as PanTerra has to show a profit. And you won’t show a profit spraying newdollars around like water.”

“Believe me, Dr. Hanson, when I say that there is a great deal of profit to be made in a new market, an entire new world market, for this company. I can offer you, oh, let’s say an even one hundred million. That’s five million per objective year, and I assure you that the profit potential for an entire world is many times greater than that.”

“That is an interesting point, Mr. Buckner,” Ramsey, the Marine colonel, said. His hands were clasped together on the desk before him, and his eyes were like gray ice. “A fascinating point. What is it about a planet that makes it so worth PanTerra’s attention?”

“What do you mean? An entire planet. Do you have any idea what the gross domestic product of the Earth is right now, Colonel?”

The Marine showed a cold smile. “Large. But that’s not the point. I’ve done some research, sir, into the economics of interstellar trade. I think both Dr. Hanson and I would be most interested in just what it is you expect to find in the Llalande system that could be worth such a whopping big investment on your part.”

“Well, the trade alone with the Ahannu—”

“Isn’t enough, sir. The Llalande system has no raw materials that our own system doesn’t have in vast abundance. We’ve barely begun to tap the raw material resources of our own asteroid and Kuiper belts, and the nickel, iron, and heavy metals we find right here in our own backyard are just as good as anything we could haul back across eight light-years, and a hell of a lot cheaper. Native products? The Ahannu are primitives, millennia behind us in technology. There would certainly be a market for Ahannu artwork and crafts … but nothing worth the cost of shipping them eight light-years.”

“There is one commodity, Colonel, that always pays in the long run,” Buckner said. “Knowledge. Information. You’re right, of course. We may never have merchant ships plying the galactic trade routes. But the knowledge we could pick up from an entire new, alien culture is staggering, and literally incalculable.

“Consider. Knowledge of the fact that there has already been contact between the Ahannu and humans, in our own prehistory, has utterly transformed the way we think about ourselves, how we think about our place among the stars. The new philosophical insights, the new religions—”

“Have already been more trouble than they’re worth,” Traci put in. “I’ll grant you that knowledge is the one transportable resource that might make interstellar trading worthwhile. But you can send information by FTL comm or even laser or old-fashioned radio. Why do you need to send people out there?”

“To get the information, of course.” Buckner sighed, crossing his arms. “AIs are still limited in what they can do, especially in a situation involving an alien species. If you don’t want the job, there’s nothing more we can do about it. I have other contacts, other agencies. Perhaps we could approach Dr. Chaumont, at the Institute Française Xenobiologique. …”

“Damn it, Dr. Hanson,” Robinson said, half rising from his chair. “Consider what you’re doing!”

Traci could see that her department head had a pretty hefty stake in this affair as well. If PanTerra went to the EU, the institute might lose grant money … or worse, prestige.

She still didn’t like it. Colonel Ramsey had a point: PanTerra was being just a little too free with their money, and she had the feeling there was more to the corporate giant’s interest in Ishtar than they were willing to admit.

On the other hand … a hundred million newdollars, and the chance to write her own ticket when she returned? There was such a thing as too good to be true … and such a thing as too good to pass up. This was literally the chance of a lifetime.

“Okay, okay,” she said. “Don’t get your underwear in a twist. I can hardly pass this one up, can I?”

“Excellent,” Buckner said. “I knew we could count on you, Dr. Hanson. You won’t be sorry.”

Traci smiled as she shook his hand, but the smile was forced. She found herself trusting Buckner about as far as she could throw him in a ten-g field.

Just how long would it be before she was sorry?

9

25 JUNE 2138

Recruit Sick Bay

U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center

Parris Island, South Carolina

0800 hours ET

“Sir, Recruit Garroway, reporting as ordered, sir.”

“Have a seat, recruit,” the Navy corpsman, a hospitalman first class, said, gesturing at the white-draped table. “We’ll be right with you.” The man’s data badge gave his name as HM1 D. LOGAN.

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Drop the ‘sir’ crap,” Logan said. “I work for a living.”

Garroway sat on the table, watching apprehensively as the corpsman passed a small, handheld device in front of his head and torso. A monitor on the console nearby displayed Garroway’s vital signs: temperature, pulse, respiration, blood pressure, EEG output, and cyberneural feed frequencies.

“Corrective optic nano?”

“Yes …”

“We’ll write you a scrip for glasses.”

Garroway had no idea what that word meant, though the context suggested something to correct his nearsighted vision. He suppressed an urge to do a search on the net; Parris Island was shielded from regular library services, and he didn’t have the codes to navigate the base military data stores.

“Your heart rate’s a bit high,” Logan said. “And your BP is up.”

“Of course they are,” Garroway replied stiffly. “I’m … scared.”

It was an honest response, at least. He’d thought about what he was doing thoroughly, as his DI had suggested, and in the end decided he had no choice but to go through with this. But of course he had second thoughts … and third … and fourth. He’d spent the last thirty minutes standing in formation outside the medcenter, waiting as one member of his company after another vanished into the building.

Thirty minutes to reflect on whether he really wanted to go through with this.

But the thought of pulling out now, of transferring to another service—or, infinitely worse, of going back home to Guaymas—was far more disagreeable. Besides, if he wanted to be a Marine, this was his path.

“Scared? Of the procedure?” The corpsman grinned. “I thought you wanted to be a big, rough, tough Marine?”

“Hey—”

Logan shrugged. “Don’t sweat it. Most guys make it through okay. Just remember that … if you feel strange, y’know? It’s all up here.” He tapped the side of his head. “You can think your way through and come out fine. How many channels you got?”

“Four hundred eighty.”

“Library feed?”

“Local Hermosillo Node, and a direct feed from GlobalNet Data.”

“Ow. That’ll hurt, losing all that. Pretty hot stuff. Full graphic capability? Visual overlay?”

“Yes …”

“And comm, of course. What kind of math coprocessor?”

“Sony-TI 12000. Series Two, with nonlinear math processing. Extensions for hypertrig, Calculus Four, and polylogmatics.”

“Well, I’m afraid you’re going to be counting on your fingers and toes for a while.” Garroway watched as the corpsman picked out the injector and loaded it with a vial of what looked like clear water. Placing the device on the table, the man then looked toward the wall and said, “Right. He’s ready.”

Part of the wall unfolded then into a tangle of gleaming tubes, arms, and sensors. Cables with EEG contacts touched Garroway lightly at various points on his scalp. Thoughts flickered through his consciousness, downloading through his cerebralink … a burst of violet light, a chord of organ music, and words, a gentle, female voice saying, “Please relax.”

Garroway had been in AI-doctor treatment rooms before—each time he’d been given an injection of medical nano, in fact—but the experience always verged on the unsettling. A pair of robotic arms gently clasped his head and shoulders, immobilizing them in thick-padded fingers. A third hand, lighter and more delicate, reached down with glittering fingers and plucked the loaded injector off the table, then approached his neck with the injector clasped tightly in its metallic grip. Garroway felt a brief stab of fear … but then a gentle current flowing through the link dispersed the emotion, replacing it with a sense of quiet, placid euphoria. He barely felt the touch of the jet spray against his throat, just below the angle of his jaw at the left carotid artery.

He imagined he could feel the antinano fizzing up inside his brain, seeking out the nanochelates clustered within the deeper rifts of his cranial sulci and dissolving them. It was imagination, of course, since he had no sensory nerves inside his brain, but the feeling was real and distinctly odd nonetheless. In another moment he thought he could feel the chelated contact points in the palms of his hands softening as well, as the silver-gold-carbon alloy of the palmlinks was absorbed back into his bloodstream.

One feeling that was decidedly not in his imagination, though, was the sense of diminishment … a kind of shrinking of mind and awareness. For one confused and near-panicky moment, it felt as though he was somehow being muffled in layers of unseen insulation. His hearing felt … dead, as well as his sense of touch, and something like a translucent gray mist dropped across his vision. Dozens of separate sensations shriveled, as though drawing back from his consciousness … smells, sounds, sensations of touch and temperature, and even vision itself becoming less intense, less there.

“Goddess …” he said, his voice sounding distant in his ears. He felt a little dizzy, a bit light-headed, and he might have fallen over if the robotic doctor hadn’t been gently but firmly holding him upright on the table.

“Kind of rocks you, doesn’t it?” the corpsman said. “How ya doing?”

“I’m … not sure. …”

“Can you stand?”

“I think so.” He slid off the table, then braced himself as the dizziness returned, threatening to drop him to his knees. He swayed, then steadied, trying to clear his head. Damn it, where had the room gone?

No, the room was still here, but he felt so oddly detached. He remembered what Logan had said about it all being inside his head and tried to focus on what he could see and sense around him, not on what was no longer there.

Damn, he had never realized that the cybernanochelates in his brain had added so much to his perception of his surroundings. With his cerebralink operating, he’d been aware of everything within his range of vision. Now he found his visual focus only included a relatively limited area directly in front of his eyes, that he had to consciously shift his awareness to notice objects at his visual periphery. A moment before, he’d been aware of dust motes hanging in the air, of a scuff mark on the otherwise brilliant finish of the sick bay deck, of a three-K-cycle low frequency hum from the lighting panels overhead, of a small scrap of paper in the sick bay’s far corner … all without consciously focusing on them. They were simply there. Now, to his increasing dismay, he had to really look to see something and note what it was. The corpsman’s data badge no longer automatically transmitted rank and ID; he had to actually read the printed letters that spelled out HM1 D. LOGAN.

And … what had happened to his vision? Everything was slightly fuzzy now, though he found he could tighten things up a bit by squinting. Ah. His corrective optic nano, that was it. He no longer had microsilicate structures reshaping his eyeballs to give him perfect focus.

Was this really what it was like without cyber enhancement?

“Man, where’d the world go?” he asked.

“It’s still there,” Logan told him. “You just don’t have the sensory enhancement or the electronic processing tied into your cerebral cortex anymore. Don’t worry about it. You’ll be amazed what you can do with the equipment nature gave you.”

Garroway blinked, trying to assimilate this. He’d been expecting something more or less like this, of course, but the reality carried a lot more impact than the expectation. Damn, he felt so slow, so muzzy-headed.

He suddenly realized that he didn’t know which way was north … and he no longer carried a small, internal map of where he was and where he’d been for the past several minutes.

For that matter, he no longer had an internal clock. He’d walked into the sick bay at 0800 hours … but how long had he been there? Several minutes, at least … but how long exactly?

He didn’t know, had no way of knowing.

“Go out that way,” Logan told him, jerking a thumb at a different door than the one he’d entered through. “Follow the blue line and join the rest of your company on the grinder.”

The door had a touch pad, but it didn’t open when he laid his palm across the slick, black surface. He had to push and engage the manual control so that the door slid open to let him out.

The blue line was painted on the wall, and if it had a cyber component to it, he couldn’t feel it, not anymore. It led him down a corridor, through several lefts and rights, depositing him at last on the steps below the sick bay’s back door. The rest of Company 1099, those who’d already gone through the process ahead of him, were waiting in ranks. Sergeant Dolby, one of 1099’s three assistant DIs, motioned him into line without comment.

The other recruits appeared as dazed as he felt. Most, he knew—the ones who’d not been able to afford more than a basic-level cerebralink system or who’d had to rely on government-issue implants—weren’t feeling nearly as dazed as he was, but all of them looked stunned, and several looked like they were about to be sick or pass out. Dolby walked up one rank and down the next, pausing occasionally to stop and talk quietly to a recruit who looked particularly bad off. The sergeant passed him without stopping, so perhaps, Garroway reasoned, he wasn’t as bad off as he felt.

He tried to remember what it had been like before he’d gone to the medical center at Hermosillo on his fourteenth birthday and received the injections for his Sony-TI 12000. Before that he’d had a government-issued school model, of course, implanted when he was … what? It must have been around age four or so, but school models weren’t sensory-enhanced, as a rule, and didn’t store detailed memories unless a teaching code was downloaded in order to store a specific lesson. He remembered being taught how to read, how to research any question he could imagine on the WorldNet, even how to feel good about himself, but his day-to-day memories from that time were pretty hazy.

It took him a moment or two to realize that an hour ago, those memories would have been crystal clear. His cerebralink helped access memories, even those that had not been cataloged in downloading. He felt … diminished … shrunken, somehow … barely present.

The next thing he knew, he was lying on the pavement, looking up into the less than appealing features of Sergeant Dolby. He felt dizzy and sick, light-headed and cold. Dolby slapped him lightly on the face a couple of times. “You okay, recruit?”

“S-Sir.” He tried to formulate the correct response—This recruit is okay—but failed. “Yes, sir.”

“Stay put. A doc’ll be along in a second.”

Five other recruits of Company 1099 had passed out as well. They were helped back into the sick bay by unsympathetic corpsmen, who laid them out on cots, took their vitals, and gave them spray injections in their arms. There was no autodoc or treatment room; without cerebralinks, they couldn’t be hooked into a diagnostic system. That thought alone was enough to leave Garroway wondering what could possibly have possessed him to voluntarily give up his cyberimplants.

After receiving the injection and being allowed to rest for twenty minutes, he felt well enough to return to the rest of the group. Another hour dragged by as the rest of Company 1099—those who’d agreed to lose their cybernano, at any rate—passed through the sick bay and the ministrations of the AI examination room. Out of the original complement of ninety-five men in Company 1099, fifteen had refused to allow their nanochelates to be removed, and three more had been rejected by the AI treatment room for one reason or another. Most of them were on their way back to civilian life by that afternoon, processed out on a DD-4010—“Subject unsuitable for Marine Corps service,” a convenience-of-the-government discharge. Two volunteered instead for a transfer to the Navy, and three others elected to join the Aerospace Force.

“Why,” Gunnery Sergeant Makowiecz bellowed at the ranks later that morning, “did we take away your implants? Anyone!” Several hands went up, and Makowiecz chose one. “You!”

“S-Sir, this recruit believes that you will issue Marine implants,” Murphy, a kid from Cincinnati, said. “Civilian implants may not be compatible with military-issue gear or with each other. Sir.”

“That,” Makowiecz replied, “is part of the answer. But not all of it. Anyone else?”

Garroway raised his hand, and Makowiecz snapped, “You!”

“Sir,” Garroway said, “it is Marine Corps policy to have all recruits begin at the same level, with no one better or worse than anyone else, sir!”

“Again, a piece of the answer, but not all of it. And not the most important part. Anyone else?” No one moved in the ranks. “All right, I’ll tell you.” Makowiecz pointed at the sky. “Right now, there are some 2,491 communications satellites in Earth orbit, from little field relays the size of your thumb in LEO to the big library space stations at L-4 and L-5. They all talk to one another and to the Earth stations in all of the major cities down here. As a result, the air around us is filled with information, data streams moving from node to node, access fields, packets uploading and downloading so thick if you could see ’em with your eyes you’d think you were in a snowstorm.

“With the right hardware chelated into your brains, all you have to do, anywhere on the surface of the Earth, is think a question with the appropriate code tag, and the answer is there. You want to talk to another person, anywhere between here and the moon, all you do is think about them and bang, there they are inside your head. Right?

“If you go to Mars, there are 412 communications satellites in orbit, not counting the big stations on Deimos and Phobos. Same thing holds. You don’t have as many channels or as much of a choice in where you get your data from, but you can have any question answered, any spot on the planet mapped down to half-meter resolution, or talk to anyone at all, just by thinking about it.

“Even if you were to go all the way out to Llalande 21185, to the moon Ishtar, you’d find a few dozen communications satellites in orbit, plus the mission transport. Same deal. The Llalande net is a lot smaller even than the one on Mars. Highly specialized … but it’s there.

“But what happens if you find yourself on some Goddess-forsaken dirtball that doesn’t have a GlobalNet system?”

He let the words hang in the air for a moment, as Garroway and the other recruits wrestled with the concept. There was always a GlobalNet. Wherever man went, he took his technology with him … and that meant the net, and the myriad advantages of constantly being online. Life without the net would be as unthinkable as … as life without medical nano or zollarfilm or smartclothing or … food.

Their access to the net had been limited since they’d arrived on Parris Island, of course, but even that knowledge didn’t carry the same impact as the DI’s grinning words.

“Don’t look so shocked, kiddies,” Makowiecz went on. “People got on just fine without instant net access, back before they figured out how to shoot nanochelates into your brains. And you will too. Trust me on that one! Awright! Leh … face! Fowah … harch! Left! Left! Your left-right-left …”

Garroway was willing to accept the idea of learning how to live as a primitive, at least in theory. He’d expected to go the camping and survival route, learning how to make a fire, orienteer across the Parris Island swamps, catch his own dinner, and treat himself or a buddy for snakebite. The Marines were famous for being able to live off the land and get by with nothing much at all. He had no idea just how primitive things would get, however, until that afternoon after chow, when Dolby marched half of them back to the recruit sick bay to be fitted with glasses.

Glasses! He’d never heard of the things, though he realized now that he had seen them before, in various downloads of historical scenes and images from a century or two back. Two pieces of glass ground to precise optical properties, held just in front of the eyes by a plastic framework that hooked over the ears and balanced on the bridge of the nose … Once, evidently, they’d been quite fashionable, but the advent first of contacts, then of the dual technologies of genetic engineering and corrective visual nano, had sent them the way of the whalebone corset and silk necktie.

Those recruits whose parents had selected for perfect vision before their births didn’t need visual correction. About half of the company, however, had had nano implants as part of their cerebralinks—submicroscopic structures that both allowed images and words to be projected directly onto the retina and, as an incidental side issue, subtly changed the shape of the cornea and of the eyeball itself to allow perfectly focused vision. Contact lenses, it had been decreed, were too dangerous, too likely to be smashed into the eye in pugil stick practice, a fall on the obstacle course, or hand-to-hand training. Glasses, with unbreakable transplas lenses, might fly off the face but they wouldn’t blind a careless or unlucky recruit. And, unlike contacts, glasses could be taken off and cleaned in the field with the swipe of a finger after a fall in the platoon mud pit.

They just looked as ugly as sin … and twice as silly. Why, Garroway wondered, couldn’t they just inject them all with a specialized antinano that neutralized the neural chelates but left stuff like vision correctives?

Several times so far in his service career he’d heard people refer to how there were three ways of doing anything—the right way, the wrong way, and the Corps’ way.

He decided that he was going to have to get used to the occasional seeming irrationality, to accept it as a normal part of this new life.

It was that or go mad.

Headquarters, USMCSPACCOM

Quantico, Virginia

United Federal Republic, Earth

1415 hours ET

Colonel T.J. Ramsey wondered what megalomaniac had designed this program.

A dozen Marine officers hovered in space, like gods looking down upon the glowing red-gold, brown, and violet sphere representing distant Ishtar. A window had opened against the planet, revealing an orbital survey map of the New Sumer region along the north coast of the continent called Euphratea. The sense of sheer power was almost hypnotic.

Colonel Ramsey was completing the mission briefing. “That’s it, then,” he said. He gestured, and lines of green light flared against the map of the city, outlining perimeters, zones of fire, and LZs. “The initial landings will seize control of the city of New Sumer and the immediate area, with special attention paid to gaining control of the Pyramid of the Eye. That will be the Regimental Landing Team HQ.” Another window opened, enlarging the map area around a prominent rise west of the city. “Before that happens, however, we will need to neutralize Mount An-Kur. That will be the particular task of your Advance Recon Landing Team, Captain Warhurst.”

The briefing room, if it could be called that, was being projected inside the minds of the participants, some of whom were at Quantico, others as far away as the Derna, in high Earth orbit. The icon representing Captain Martin Warhurst wore Marine grays, which were somewhat outmoded on the fashion front. Just three weeks back from Egypt, he’d not had time to update his personal software, what with endless rounds of debriefings and the work he was putting into his latest assignment—the Llalande Relief Expedition ARLT. In contrast, most of the others at the virtual briefing flaunted the latest Marine officer’s fashion, duotone white and gold tunics over blue trousers, both with red trim, and with a holographic globe-and-anchor projected above the left breast. Ramsey wondered how many of them wore the new uniforms outside of virtual reality. They looked peacock-gaudy in the briefing feed; few field commanders, however, bothered with the game of fashion keep-up so popular with the stateside Corps brass.

“I’d still feel better about this if we just rocked ’em from orbit,” Warhurst said. “This giant gun or whatever it is they have inside the mountain … if it can claw starships out of the sky, how the hell are we going to even get close?”

Colonel Ramsey nodded. “I know. But we have very specific orders on this one. I already tried to sell the commandant on a bombardment from space, but his orders are to deliver that weapons system to our experts … intact. If we reduce that mountain to a crater, the Joint Chiefs are not going to be happy with us.”

“So?” Major Ricia Anderson said, grinning, her voice just low enough that the colonel could convincingly ignore it. “They’ll be ten years away! What are they gonna do, write us a nasty e-note?”

“Fortunately,” Ramsey went on, “the Annies don’t know we have to take that mountain instead of flattening it. That gives us a possible edge tactically, a slim one. From the description provided in the last transmission from the pyramid, we estimate that the beam weapon hidden inside An-Kur must generate a bolt of energy measuring at least 10¹⁶ joules.

“Now, we don’t know how they generate that kind of power. Like all of the Ahannu god-weapons, it’s pretty much magic so far as we or they are concerned. But that much energy takes time to generate and store, even if they have some kind of antimatter generator down there. We’re counting on the fact that they’ll have a limited number of shots, with a goodly recharge time between each one. That, Captain, will operate in your favor.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Ramsey smiled. What else could Warhurst say? The man had volunteered for this mission as soon as it had been described to him. The chance to deploy to another star system … hell, don’t quibble. The chance at an assignment with a Career 3 rating meant promotion points as well as a whopping big combat-hardship pay bonus. If Warhurst survived this op, his career would be made.

“Our biggest problem right now,” Ramsey told his staff, “is manpower. Volunteers only, of course … and because of the objective mission duration, the pick is limited to Famsit One and Two. Our original TO and E called for a full regimental MEU … about two thousand people. With the logistical limitations of a Derna-class IST, we’re reconfiguring that as an MIEU, a Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit, with a roster of twelve hundred. Even with that, though, we may have trouble filling out the roster.”

Lieutenant Colonel Lyle Harper, the Regimental Landing Team’s CO, raised a hand. “We could put in a special request at Camp Lejeune, Colonel. There are sixteen companies in training right now, and a fair percentage of those people won’t have close family ties. Hell, they might see it as an adventure.”

“Not to mention returning to Earth with five years objective under their belts,” Major Lyssa DuBoise, commander of the MIEU’s aerospace element, said. “Eligible for discharge and a hell of a lot of hardship pay!”

“Since when did the Corps become a mercenary unit?” Major Samuel C. Ross, the Regimental G-2, said. He was in charge of mission intelligence—a particular bastard of a job, Ramsey thought, since no one knew exactly what was happening on Ishtar right now, and there was no way in hell they could guess what it would be like ten years hence.

“Our people will do their jobs because that’s the way they were trained,” Ramsey said. “As for the rest, it’s about time they got some financial recognition for what they do. There’s little enough material gratification in the peacetime Corps.”

“Amen to that,” someone in the watching group muttered aloud.

“In any case,” Ramsey continued, “Major Anderson will be responsible for recruiting volunteers at Lejeune. Because of the mission’s subjective length, we’ll need a high percentage of young men and women right out of boot camp. They’ll all be eligible for sergeant’s stripes and better by the time they get home.”

Subjective versus objective time was becoming more and more of a problem in the modern military, especially in the Navy and the Marines. While career-military officers and senior NCOs were “lifers”—meaning they expected to be in the service for a full twenty or thirty years, at least—the vast majority of enlisted personnel signed up for an initial four-year hitch. Some small percentage of those opted to extend their enlistment for an additional six years, to “ship-for-six,” as the old saying went, and a smaller percentage of ten-year veterans decided to go the full twenty or more to retirement.

If a young Marine rotated through various duty stations on Earth, or even on the moon or one of the orbital stations, there was no problem. That’s the way things had been run in the military for centuries. But it was expensive to ship large numbers of men and women plus their equipment to other worlds within the Solar system, and so time on-station offworld tended to be measured in years rather than months.

And now that Marines were being sent to the worlds of other stars, the problem of finding unattached personnel who didn’t mind leaving Earth and all they knew there for years, even decades at a time, was becoming critical. Nanohibernation technology and time dilation might make subjective time on board the Marine transport seem like days or weeks, at most, but objectively the voyage would last a decade—two before the mission personnel saw the Earth again. Those young Marine men and women would return to an Earth aged twenty years or more. And even the most optimistic mission planners expected the deployment to the Llalande system to require no fewer than two years of ground-time at the objective.

Finding the best Marines who were also Famsit One—no close family ties on Earth—or Famsit Two—FOO, or Family-of-Origin only—was becoming damned near impossible. If anyone could deal with the details and the delicacies of such a search, Ramsey knew it was Ricia.

“I have one final piece of business for this briefing,” Ramsey said. He thought-clicked a new connection, allowing another image to form within the shared noumenal conference space. “Ladies, gentlemen, may I present our mission commander, Brigadier General Phillip King.”

In fact, the image was a secretarial AI, projecting General King’s thin face and dour expression into the group noumenon, and identified as such by a winking yellow light at his collar. Ramsey mentally shook his head at that; one never knew for sure if the construct one met in noumenal space was a real-time projection or an AI secretary, unless the other party put up an AI tag like King’s insignia light. For most senior officers, secretary stand-ins for briefings and presentations were a necessity if they wanted to get any real work done at all.

In King’s case, though, the light was a kind of message board proclaiming, “I am a busy man and have no time to spare for you.” Ramsey had served under King once before, back in ’29, and hadn’t enjoyed the experience. The man tended to be fussy, rigid, and a bit of a prima donna.

He was also a superb politician, with a politician’s connections and oil-smooth sincerity, at least on the surface. The word from on high was that King—thanks to postings to various ambassadorial staffs over the past few years—had the blessing of half a dozen other national governments involved in the international relief force.

“Thank you, Colonel Ramsey,” the image said in King’s somewhat nasal tones. “I look forward to getting to meet each of you personally in the coming months.

“For now, I wish to impress upon each of you what an honor it is to be chosen for Operation Spirit of Humankind. I expect each of you to do your best, for the Corps, for America, for the Confederation, and for me.

“We are engaged in a deployment of tremendous … ah … diplomatic importance. As you all know, the Marine expeditionary force was to be followed by a second American expedition. That has now changed. The follow-up expedition is now envisioned as a true multinational interstellar task force, one including personnel from the European Union, the Brazilian Empire, the Kingdom of Allah, the Republic of Mejico, and others, besides our Confederation allies. The Confederation Council has decided that this is an expedition of truly human proportions, one in which all of humankind has a stake.

“It will be our task not only to defeat enemy forces on Ishtar, but to maintain the peace with the disparate members of the multinational task force. We will present a united front to the Frogs. …”

Somehow, Ramsey stifled an inward grimace that might otherwise have projected into the noumenon. The fighting in Egypt with KOA religious fanatics was only the most recent bit of terrestrial bloodshed going down. The European Union had been sparring with Russia as recently as the Black Sea War of ’34, and the Brazilians and Japanese were going at it over Antarctic fishing rights just last year. And things had been simmering between the United Federal Republic and Mejico since long before the Second Mexican War.

Frankly, facing a planet-full of hostile Ahannu god-warriors was infinitely preferable to facing the politics, red tape, and outright blood-feuds that were bound to entangle Earth’s first interstellar expeditionary forces. Ramsey knew that not even King, for all his diplomatic experience, was going to have an easy job keeping those factions straight.

And as a military commander … well, he had serious doubts that General King was the best man possible for the command.

10

19 JULY 2138

Field Combat Range

U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center

Parris Island, South Carolina

0640 hours ET

“Crawl, you sand fleas! Crawl! You will become one with the dirt!”

Makowiecz stood on the beach like an implacable giant, hands on hips, khaki uniform, as always, immaculately clean and sharp-creased, despite the unmitigated hell flying around him. The sound was deafening and unremitting, with explosions going off every few seconds and live rounds, both solid and optical, cracking through the air a meter above the ground.

John Garroway wondered why the ordnance never came near the DI, and decided, like the others in his company, that no bullet or laser pulse would dare threaten to muss the man’s uniform, much less actually hit him. Break-room speculation had it that the DIs on the combat range wore smartclothes that communicated with the robotic weapons laying down the fire on the beach, blocking any fire aimed too close to any of the exercise supervisors, but that couldn’t be proven. Besides, shrapnel and spent rounds were mindless and didn’t care where they flew. A low-powered round glanced off John’s helmet—a spent rubber bullet, by the dull thump it made—and left his head aching.

“Garroway, you stupid asshole!” Makowiecz screamed. Damn, the man had been thirty meters up the beach; he had never seen him approach. “What do you think, that this is some kind of VR sim? Get your fucking head down!”

“Sir, yes, sir!” John screamed back through a mouthful of gritty sand. He pressed himself flatter as a close-grouped trio of explosions detonated meters away. Makowiecz didn’t flinch.

“And keep moving! The enemy’s that way! That way! What, are you waiting for him to come give you a personal invitation? Move your damned, tin-plated ass! Move it!”

John kept moving, forcing himself ahead with an odd, uncomfortable twisting of the hips, inching forward in his dead-man armor.

The grim sobriquet was an old term for Mark XIV polylaminate impact armor, obsolete since the Second Mexican War or before. Unpowered, unenhanced, the suit was heavy and drunk-clumsy, and moving in it was like dragging along the weight of another man. The outer chamelearmor layer had been stripped off, leaving a stark, bone-white surface shiny enough that the recruits could be easily seen on the combat range, at least in theory. At the moment, the recruits were so mud-covered that they might as well have been fully camouflaged.

They hadn’t even been given fully enclosed helmets; learning how to use HDO displays was still weeks away in their training. Instead they wore ancient bucket helmets with swing-down laser-block visors and just enough built-in comm linkage to let their DIs talk to them, usually in blistering invective.

Not that Gunny Makowiecz needed technical assistance to chew out the recruits. He seemed to be everywhere on that live-fire range, yelling, swearing, admonishing, cajoling, raging, relentlessly using every trick of the drill instructor’s handbook to motivate his struggling charges.

For three weeks now Company 1099 had been all but living in the antique Mark XIVs, marching in them, exercising in them, standing fire watch and sentry duty in them, and when they weren’t wearing them, cleaning them. Twice now John had been ordered to hit the rack wearing his armor as punishment for being too slow hitting the mark with his ready kit at morning muster. That bit of motivational guidance, as it was called, had left him sore, chaffed, and tired, and a hell of a lot more eager to jump out of bed at a zero-dark-thirty reveille.

Another explosion thundered nearby, and John felt the thump of the detonation through the ground. Gravel rattled off his armored back. He was by now thoroughly miserable. Wet sand, mud, and grit had worked its way, inevitably, past the armor suit’s seal at his neck and chafed now against tender places too numerous to mention. The platoon had started this morning’s exercise twenty minutes ago at the surf line on the beach, leaving all of them soaked and coated with sand. Their objective was to belly-crawl three hundred meters up the shelf of the beach, over the dune line, and across the mud pit beyond. Explosive charges buried in the sand and the constant laser and projectile fire overhead kept things interesting … especially with the word from the DIs that one in a hundred of the bullets whizzing overhead was steel ball, not rubber, just to keep the men focused.

John stopped for a moment, trying to rub against a suddenly insistent itch on his side, beneath the armor. Sand fleas. They infested the beaches of Parris Island, seemingly as thick as the sand grains themselves, and when they got inside the armor, they bit and bit and bit, leaving long chains of fiery welts.

He was up to the line of dunes now, dirty gray sand slopes capped by straggling patches of grass rising like mountains in his path. Robot gun towers and sensors were spaced along the crest of the ridge, entrenched behind ferrocrete bastions, but the recruits were to ignore those and keep moving. The finish line for this sadistic race lay beyond the mud pits on the far side of the dunes.

“If you stop, you’re dead.” Makowiecz’s voice grated in their ears, an ongoing litany, chiding, needling, threatening. “When you’re under fire out in the open this way, you keep moving or you stay put and get killed. That’s your choice, ladies. That’s your only choice! Now hump it! Fox! Paulsen! Stop your malingering, you two! Garroway! You’re not being paid to scratch! The last ten men to the finish give me fifty push-ups, in armor!”

John humped it, wiggling up the dune slope faster, ignoring the grating pain of sand-rasped sores in armpits, neck, and groin, ignoring the burning itch of the flea bites. He’d managed to place himself so he would pass close to one of the robot sentry guns, the idea being that explosives and the fields of fire from the array of field emplacements wouldn’t come too close to other gun mounts. Maybe he could make up for some lost time, then, crawling over the crest of the dune without having to worry about one of those damned towers winging him.

He’d been tagged for armored push-ups more than once before when he couldn’t keep pace, and he did not like it.

The sun was still low above the teeming, reeking swamps of Parris Island to the east, still burning through the early morning mist. South, the gleaming facade of the new hospital facility, aerospace port, and depot HQ rose on pylons from the sea halfway to the skytower complex at Hilton Head, on the outskirts of Greater Savannah. Another world, that … an alien world, as far removed from the mud and stink and sweat and sand fleas of Parris Island as the fabled Ruined Cities of Chiron were from Earth.

No. That was just four light-years and some. Make it the An world at Llalande.

John squirmed onto the crest of the dune, up on knees and elbows now, scuttling ahead as fast as he could. The next thing he knew, a hammer-blow caught him smack in the tail-bone, toppling him over and sending him sprawling back down the seaward side of the dune. Lying on his back, blinking up at the sky, he next became aware of Gunny Makowiecz leaning over him. “You okay, recruit?”

“S-Sir! Yes, sir!”

Makowiecz appeared to be listening to someone else—tapping into his link, perhaps, to the monitor AIs that kept track of all of the personnel on the range. “They say you caught a round in the ass, sweet pea. Maybe next time you’ll learn to keep your damned ass down, where it belongs! You hear what I’m saying?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“How do you cross an exposed ridge crest?”

“Sir! Flat on the belly and using all available cover to avoid showing a recognizable silhouette against the sky, sir!”

“Back in the action, then! And this time keep your mind on what you’re doing!”

How the hell did Makowiecz know what was going on in his head? The man was uncanny. “Aye aye, sir!”

His hips and buttocks felt numb, but he rolled over and crawled back up the slope, careful this time to keep flat on the ground. Even rubber bullets packed a hell of a wallop, and he was going to be sore for days after this.

Worse, the rest of the platoon was well across the mud pit by now, plowing ahead as explosions sent columns of mud geysering into the air and bullets smacked and chopped into the mud around them. He’d lost a lot of time.

He thought-clicked to check his time, then groaned when nothing happened. Damn it, he still kept instinctively trying to trigger his Sony-TI 12000, even though almost a month had passed since he’d lost it. The worst was not being able to talk with Lynnley.

Makowiecz was waiting for him with an evil grin when he straggled in at the finish line fifteen minutes later … one of the last three or four to arrive.

“Assume the position, recruits!” Corporal Meiers, an assistant DI, barked. “Push-ups! And one! And two! And …”

John’s legs were aching now, but he went into the exercise set with grim determination.

“Remember, ladies!” Makowiecz bellowed over his assistant’s cadence. “Pain is the feeling of weakness leaving your body!”

“And twenny-eight! And twenny-nine! And …”

Lagrange Shuttle King Priam

In approach to IST Derna

Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

1320 hours Zulu

Half a million kilometers from Parris Island, the Marine Interstellar Transport Derna fell in her month-long orbit about the Earth. Built around a long, slender keel with a cluster of antimatter drive engines at the aft end, she had a length overall—her loa—of 622 meters. The massive, dome-shaped ablative shield and reaction-mass storage tank ahead of the three hab-cylinders gave her the look from a distance of a huge mushroom with a needle-slender stem. Aft, the broad flare of heat radiators resembled the fletching on a blunt-tipped arrow.

When under drive, the hab cylinders were folded up tight behind the RM dome, safe from the storm of radiation and high-energy dust impacts resulting from near-c velocities. Under one g of acceleration, aft was down. When the drives stopped—even AM-charged torchships couldn’t haul enough reaction mass to carry them onward for years at one g—the three hab cylinders folded out and forward on arms extending ninety degrees from the ship’s central keel, though still protected by the overhang of the RM dome. Rotating around the ship’s axis, they provided out-is-down spin gravity for the passengers without requiring a rearrangement of the deck furniture, consoles, and plumbing.

At the moment, the IST Derna was in orbital configuration, her hab modules spread and rotating slowly. Beyond her, twenty kilometers away, Antimatter Production Facility Vesuvius gleamed in the sunlight, its vast solar array back-lit by the glare of the sun.

Strapped into one of the passenger seats on board the Lagrange Shuttle King Priam, Gavin Norris watched the approach on the viewscreen set into the back of the seat in front of him. The shuttle was making her final orbital insertion maneuver with short, sharp taps on her thrusters; she was still several kilometers out from the Derna, but the immense transport still all but filled the screen.

Norris was on his way at last, with unimaginable wealth at the end of the journey. He let his gaze stray from the screen and move about the passenger cabin. Every seat was taken by hard-muscled men and women in gray fatigues—the Marines who would be his fellow travelers for the next two decades.

He was glad that most of that time would be spent asleep. These were not exactly the sort of people he would choose as companions on a vacation cruise. The woman in the seat next to him, for instance … an argument against genetic manipulation and somatic nanosculpting if ever he’d seen one. Big-boned, lean, muscular, she looked like she could snap him in two with a glance from those eerily black augmented eyes. Her hair had been close-cropped to little more than fuzz, and if she had anything like breasts under those fatigues, she kept them well hidden. Hard, cold, asexual … he tried to imagine himself in bed with her, then decided that was a noumenon he did not want to file in permanent memory.

He wondered why they were here. This was a volunteer mission, of course; you didn’t simply order young men and women to leave homes and families for a twenty-year mission to another star, not if you wanted to avoid a full-fledged mutiny. They certainly weren’t offering these grunts money. What, then? Rank? Glory? He snorted to himself. To Norris, the military mind was something arcane and incomprehensible.

“What the fuck are you gawking at, civ?”

He blinked. He’d not been aware that he was staring. “Uh, sorry,” he told her. A thought-click picked up her name-tag data. She was Gunnery Sergeant Athena Horst, of something called ComCon DS 219. The mil-babble told him nothing. “I was just wondering why you Marines would sign up for a party like this.”

She grinned at him, an unsettling showing of teeth. “Hey, this is the Corps,” she told him. “Just like they say in the recruiting blurbs. ‘See exotic worlds, meet fascinating life-forms, kill them. … ’”

“Uh … yeah …”

“Why are you here?”

“Me? I’m the corporate rep for PanTerra. They have … interests on Llalande, and I’m going to see to it that they’re protected.”

“What, you’re a lawyer?”

“As a matter of fact, I am. My specialty, though, is CPM.”

“What’s that?”

“Corporate problem management.” When her face remained blank, he added, “I’m a troubleshooter. I make certain that small problems do not become large ones.”

“Troubleshooter, huh?” She chuckled. “That’s rich. A civilian Marine!”

“What?”

“A civilian Marine! We’re troubleshooters too, y’know. There’s trouble, we shoot it!” She cocked her thumb and forefinger, mimicking a gun. “Zzzt! Blam!” She blew across the tip of her finger. “Problem down. Area secure.”

“I see.”

“I doubt that. Ha!”

“What?”

“I was just thinking,” she said, grinning. “When we get to Ishtar, let me know how your troubleshooting works with the Frogs.”

“Uh … frogs?”

“The Ishtaran abs. The Ahannu. What are you going to do if they get out of line, slap ’em with a lawsuit?”

“I will assess the situation and report to the PanTerran director’s board with my recommendations. I’ll also be there as a corporate legal representative should there be, um, jurisdictional or boundary disputes, shall we say, with any of the other Earth forces going to Ishtar.”

“I like my way better,” Horst said. She shook her head. “Give me a twenty-one-twenty with an arpeg popper any day.”

“A … what? Arpeg?”

“The Remington Arms M-12 underbarrel self-guiding rocket-propelled 20mm grenade launcher, RPG Mark Four, Mod 2, select-fire, gas-actuated, laser-tracking, self-homing round in high-explosive, armor-piercing, or delay-detonated bomblet or intel submunitions,” she said, rattling off the words as though they were a part of her, “with select-fire from an underbarrel mount configuration with the Marine-issue GE LR-2120 Sunbeam pulse laser with detachable forty- or ninety-round box magazine and targeting link through the standard Mark Seven HD linkage—”

“Whatever you say,” he replied, interrupting when she took a breath. “I’ll stick to legal briefs, thank you.”

She laughed. “Washington must really be pissed with the Frogs,” she said. “Being taken down by a self-homer arpeg round is a hell of a lot cleaner than being fucking lawyered to death.”

He smiled blandly, then looked away, pointedly taking an interest in the docking approach on his seat-back screen. Clearly, he shared little in the way of language or attitude with the Marines. He wondered if PanTerra was paying him enough for this assignment.

The shuttle docked with the Derna, drifting gently into a berthing rack mounted on the flat underside of the reaction mass dome. A number of other TAV craft were already docked, their noses plugged into a ring of airlock modules circling the transport’s core just forward of the slowly spinning hab-module access collar.

There was a slight pop as cabin pressures matched, then the Marines around him began unbuckling, floating up from their seats and forming a queue in the central aisle. He unbuckled his own harness but kept hold of the seat arm, unwilling to let himself float into that haphazard tangle of legs, arms, and torsos.

“Mr. Norris?” a voice said in his head. “Have you had zero-g experience?”

He thought-clicked on the noumenal link. “Yes,” he said. “A little, anyway.” He’d had other offworld assignments with PanTerra—on the moon, on Mars, on Vesta, and twice on mining stations in the Kuiper Belt. All had been steady-g all the way—PanTerra always sent its executives first class—but he’d endured weightlessness during boarding and at mid-trip flipovers.

“Even so, it might be best for you to remain in your seat until the Marines have moved out. A naval officer can help you board the transport and get to your deck.”

“Who is this?” He didn’t recognize the noumenal ID: CS-1289. An artificial intelligence, obviously, but ship AIs generally went by the name of their vessel, and this one felt a bit broader in scope than a typical ship AI.

“You may address me as ‘Cassius,’” the voice said. “I am the executive AI component for the command constellation on this mission.”

“I see.”

“Colonel Ramsey regrets that he cannot receive you in person,” Cassius went on, “but he is still on Earth attending to the details of mission preparation. And Cicero has not yet uploaded to the Derna.”

“Cicero?”

“General King’s AI counterpart.”

“Who’s General King? I thought Ramsey was the mission commander?”

“Colonel Ramsey is the regimental commander and, as such, will have operational command on the ground at Ishtar. General King will have overall mission command, including all ground, space, and aerospace units.”

“The CEO, huh? He supervises the whole thing from orbit?”

“The analogy is a fair one, Mr. Norris. Once the Pyramid of the Eye has been secured, and assuming direct real-time communications can be reestablished between the Legation compound and Earth, General King will likely transfer his headquarters from the Derna to New Sumer.”

Norris nodded, then wondered if the disembodied voice in his head could see the gesture. “Gotcha,” he said. His briefing at PanTerra had covered Marine space-ground command structures and procedures in some detail, but he would need to know the people involved, not just the TO&E. General King, evidently, would be his primary target, but Ramsey would be the one to watch. He would have to get close to both men if his assignment for PanTerra was to succeed.

Waiting, only somewhat impatiently, he watched the last of the Marines float out of the aisle and through the King Priam’s forward lock. Patience had never been one of Norris’s best or most reliable assets; he needed to keep reminding himself that he was committed to a twenty-year-plus contract in objective time, that even in subjective time there was no need for hurry at all.

Angry with himself, he thought-clicked through some meditative subroutines in his implants, seeking peaceful acceptance. Within moments the medical nano in his body was subtly altering the balance of several neurochemicals, lowering his blood pressure, slowing his heart rate, inducing the patience he required.

“Mr. Norris?”

It was an external voice a human voice this time. He opened his eyes. “Yes?”

A Navy officer floated in the aisle next to his seat row. He wore dress whites and appeared very young. “I’m Lieutenant Bolton. Will you come with me, please?”

“Of course.”

The lieutenant gestured toward a storage case forward. “Uh, pardon my asking, but do you need a drag bag?”

“Drag bag?”

“Microgravity Transit Harness, sir. An MTH. To help get you—”

Norris frowned. He’d seen MTHs used in civilian spacecraft, and a more undignified mode of travel was hard to imagine. “That won’t be necessary, Lieutenant. I’ve been in zero g before.”

“Very well, sir. If you’ll just follow me?”

Grasping fabric handholds on the tops of the seats around him, Norris pulled himself gently from his seat and maneuvered his way into the aisle. For a dizzying moment his visual references spun and shifted; he’d been thinking of the cabin as having the layout of a suborbital shuttle or hypersonic TAV, with seats on the floor. During acceleration out from Earth, of course, down was aft, toward the rear of the cabin, and he felt as though he were lying on his back, but it was easy to translate that in terms of the acceleration one felt during the suborb boost from New York to Tokyo.

Now, though, all references of up and down were lost. The seats were attached to the wall, he was hanging in midair above a long drop toward the cabin’s rear, and Lieutenant Bolton was swimming straight up, toward the forward lock.

It’s all in your mind, he thought, angry again. He closed his eyes, grasped the next handhold forward, and grimly pulled himself along. When he opened his eyes, just for a moment, perspectives had shifted again and he was now moving down, head first, into a well, with Lieutenant Bolton looking up at him with a worried expression. “Mr. Norris?”

“I’m fine, damn it,” he said. “Lead on!”

The worst parts were the twists and turns, though the airlock was small enough and without contradictory visual cues, so he could catch his breath. Damn it, when was someone going to find a way to provide constant gravity, no matter where you were on a ship or what the ship was doing at the time?

Inside Derna’s inner hatch, a sign had been attached to one wall saying QUARTERDECK, next to an American flag stretched taut by wires in the fly and hoist. Lieutenant Bolton saluted the flag, then saluted again to another naval lieutenant who floated there. “Permission to come on board.”

“Permission granted.”

An asinine ceremony, Norris thought with distaste. How did one stand at attention in zero g? Once the military got hold of one of these little rituals, they never let go.

At last they floated through a hatch and entered a cylindrical compartment with the words DECK and FEET TOWARD HERE painted in red letters on one end. Using straps on the wall, they aligned themselves with the deck, and Bolton used his implant to activate the elevator.

The device loaded into one of the rotating hab arms like a shell locking into the firing chamber of a rifle. For a disorienting moment Norris felt like he was upside down, feet hanging toward the ceiling, while the elevator’s gentle acceleration away from the ship’s spine induced a momentary feeling of weight. Then the sensations of spin gravity took hold and he drifted, feet down, to the deck.

The returning feeling of weight did little to soothe his bad mood. He’d never liked being weightless, with conflicting clues as to what might be up or down. The hatchway opened at last on Deck One of Hab Three. Uppermost of five decks in the module, this deck had rotation sufficient to create the sensation of about half a g, a bit more than the surface of Mars. Relishing the feeling of a solid deck beneath his feet once more, Norris strode into the lounge area surrounding the central elevator shaft.

He wrinkled his nose as he stared about the room. “What the hell is that smell? I thought this was a new ship?”

“It is, sir. New wiring, new fittings, new air circulators. All new ships smell a bit funny. Just wait until you wake up in ten years! It’ll smell a lot worse, believe me!”

Norris didn’t doubt the man. The interior of the hab module was clearly designed to cram as many humans into as small a space as possible. The walls—no, on a ship they would be called bulkheads, he reminded himself irritably—the bulkheads were covered by hexagonal openings, some open and lit within, some closed, giving him the impression of being inside an immense beehive. The central area was divided into thin-walled cubicles. He glimpsed men and women in some of them, sitting at workstations or jacked into entertainment or education centers. There was also a lounge with a table—not large or spacious, but with chairs enough to sit in small groups.

“The head—that’s the bathroom on board a ship—is over there,” Bolton said, pointing. “There’s a common area in each hab module … Deck Two, one down from here. That’s where the mess deck is, too.”

Norris eyed the hexagonal cells all around him. Each appeared to be a tiny, self-contained cabin, two meters long and a meter across, only slightly larger than a coffin. A person could lie inside, but there wasn’t room to stand. “My God, how many people do you have in here?”

“On this deck? Eighty. But these are the luxury quarters, sir … for the command constellation and the officers. Decks Three and Four house two hundred personnel apiece.”

He looked around the compartment in disbelief. “Five hundred people? In here?”

Bolton cleared his throat. “Uh … actually, 480 just in this one hab module, sir. The Derna carries an entire Marine Interstellar Expeditionary Unit. An MIEU consists of a Regimental Landing Team, headquarters, recon, and intelligence platoons, and an aerospace close-support wing. That’s twelve hundred Marines altogether, sir, plus 145 naval personnel as ship’s crew. Of course, only about a quarter of that complement are on board now. The rest will be coming up over the course of the next three months.”

“Thank you for the lecture,” Norris replied dryly. “Where do you keep them all?”

“In the cells, of course,” Bolton said. “Yours is over here, sir.”

He would have to climb a ladder to reach his hexagonal cell, he found … located four up from the deck, just beneath the chamber’s ceiling, or “overhead,” as Bolton called it. Inside was a thin mattress, storage compartments, data jacks and feeds, access to the ship’s computer and library, and a personal medical suite; altogether, a wonder of micro-miniaturization.

“It’s not very big, is it?” Norris was reminded of the traveler hotels, common worldwide now, but first designed in Japan a century or two back, a person-sized tube with room to sleep in and not much else.

“You won’t need much space, sir,” Bolton told him. “You’re scheduled for cybehibe in …” He closed his eyes, accessing the ship’s net. “… twelve more days, sir. At that time, you’ll be plugged into the ship’s cryocybernetic system, and you won’t know a thing until we reach Ishtar.”

“Twelve days.” He wondered how he was going to endure the crowding until then, and gave himself another nano boost. Acceptance. “Twelve fucking days.”

11

8 AUGUST 2138

Sick Bay

U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center

Parris Island, South Carolina

1430 hours ET

“Garroway!”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“Through that hatch!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

Garroway banged through the door that had already swallowed half of Company 1099. Inside was the familiar, sterile-white embrace of seat, cabinets, AI doc, and the waiting corpsman.

“Have a seat,” the corpsman said. It wasn’t the same guy he had met in there before. What was his name? He couldn’t remember.

Not that it was important. New faces continually cycled through his awareness these days. Without his implants he could only memorize the important ones, the ones he was ordered to remember.

Of course, that was about to change now. He suppressed the surge of excitement.

“Feeling okay?” the corpsman asked.

“Sir, yes, sir!”

“No injuries? Infections? Allergies? Nothing like that?”

“Sir, no, sir!”

“Do you have at this time any moral or ethical problems with nanotechnic enhancement, implant technologies, or nanosomatic adjustment?”

“Sir, no, sir!”

The corpsman wasn’t even looking at him as he asked the questions. He wore instead the far-off gaze of someone linked into a net and was probably scanning Garroway now with senses far more sophisticated than those housed in merely human eyes or ears.

“He’s go,” the man said.

The AI doctor unfolded from the cabinet. One arm with an airjet hypo descended to his throat, and Garroway steeled himself against the hiss and burn of the injection.

“Right,” the corpsman said. “Just stay there, recruit. Give it time to work.”

This was it, at long last. It felt as though he’d been without an implant now for half his life, though in fact it had only been about six weeks. Six weeks of running, of learning, of training, all without being able to rely on an internal uplink to the local net.

It was, he thought, astonishing what you could do without a nexus of computers in your brain or electronic implants growing in your hands. He’d learned he could do amazing things without instant access to comlinks or library data.

But that didn’t mean he wasn’t eager to get his technic prostheses back.

Outside of a slight tingle in his throat, though, he didn’t feel much of anything. Had the injection worked?

“Okay, recruit. Off you go. Through that door and join your company.”

“Sir … I don’t feel—”

“Nothing to feel yet, recruit. It’ll take a day or two for the implants to start growing and making the necessary neural connections. You’ll be damned hungry, though. They’ll be feeding you extra at the mess hall these next few days to give the nano the raw materials it needs.”

He fell into ranks with the rest of his company and waited as the last men filed through the sick bay. Damn. He’d been so excited at the prospect of getting his implants that he’d not thought about how long it might take them to grow. He’d been hoping to talk to Lynnley tonight. …

He hadn’t seen her, hadn’t even linked with her, since arriving on Parris Island. Male and female recruits were kept strictly apart during recruit training, though he had glimpsed formations of women Marines from time to time across the grinder or marching off to one training exercise or another. The old dream of serving with her on some offworld station seemed remote right now. Had she changed much? Did she ever even think about him anymore?

Hell, of course she’s changed, he told himself. You’ve changed. So has she.

He’d been on the skinny side before, but two months of heavy exercise and special meals had bulked him up, all of the new mass muscle. His endurance was up, his temper better controlled, the periodic depression he’d felt subsumed now by the daily routine of training, exercise, and discipline.

And a lot of things that had been important to him once simply didn’t matter now.

He had been allowed to vid family grams to his mother, out in San Diego. She was still living with her sister and beginning the process of getting a divorce. That was good, he thought, as well as long overdue. There were rumors of unrest in the Mexican territories—Recruit Training Center monitors censored the details, unfortunately—and scuttlebutt about a new war.

He kept thinking about what Lynnley had said, back in Guaymas, about him having to fight down there against his own father.

Well, why not? He felt no loyalty to that bastard, not after the way he’d treated his mother. So far as he was concerned, he’d shed the man’s parental cloak when he’d reclaimed the name Garroway.

“Garroway!” Makowiecz barked.

“Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Come with me.”

The DI led him down a corridor and ushered him into another room with a brusque “In there.”

A Marine major, a tall, slender, hard-looking woman in dress grays, sat behind a desk inside.

“Sir! Recruit Garroway reporting as ordered, sir!” In the Corps, to a recruit, all officers were “sir” regardless of gender, along with most other things that moved.

“Sit down, recruit,” the woman said. “I’m Major Anderson, ComCon Delta Sierra two-one-nine.”

He took a seat, wondering if he’d screwed up somehow. Geez … it had to be something pretty bad for a major to step in. During their day-to-day routine, Marine recruits rarely if ever saw any officer of more exalted rank than lieutenant or captain. From a recruit’s point of view, a major was damned near goddesslike in the Corps hierarchy, and actually being addressed by one, summoned to her office, was … daunting, to say the least.

And a comcon? That meant she was part of a regular headquarters staff, probably the exec of a regiment. What could she possibly want with him?

“I’ve been going over your recruit training records, Garroway,” she told him. “You’re doing well. All three-sixes and higher for physical, psych, and all phase one and two training skills.”

“Sir, thank you, sir.”

“No formal marriage or family contracts. Your parents alive, separated.” She paused, and he wondered what she was getting at. “Have you given much thought yet to duty stations after you leave the island?”

That stopped him. Recruits were not asked to voice their preferences, especially by majors. “Uh … sir, uh … this recruit …”

“Relax, Garroway,” Anderson told him. “You’re not on the carpet. Actually, I’m screening members of your platoon for potential volunteers. I’m looking for Space Marines.”

And that rocked him even more. He’d wanted to be a Marine for as long as he could remember, true, ever since he’d learned about his famous leatherneck ancestors, but the real lure to the Corps had always been the possibility of offworld duty stations. The vast majority of Marines never left the Earth; most served out their hitches in the various special deployment divisions tasked with responding to brushfire wars and threats to the Federal Republic’s interests around the globe.

A very special few, however …

“You’re asking me to volunteer for space duty?” Excitement put him on the edge of the seat, leaning forward. “I mean, um, sir, this recruit thinks that, uh—”

“Why don’t we drop the formalities, John? That third-person recruit crap gets in the way of real communication.”

“Thank you, si—uh, ma’am.” He sighed, then took a deep breath, trying to force himself to relax. The excitement was almost overwhelming. “I … yes. I would be very interested in volunteering for a duty station offworld.”

“You might want to hear about it first,” she cautioned. “I’m not talking about barracks duty on Mars.” She went on to tell him, in brief, clipped sentences, about MIEU-1, a Marine expeditionary unit tasked with a high-profile rescue-recovery mission at Llalande 21185 IID, the Earthlike moon of a gas giant eight light-years distant.

“That’s where the human slaves are, right, ma’am?” he asked her. The newsfeeds had been full of the story around the time he’d signed up. The enforced e-feed blackout during his training period had pretty well cut him off from all news of the outside world, but there’d been plenty of rumor floating around the barracks for the past couple of months. “We’re going out there to free the slaves?”

“We are going to protect federal interests in the Llalande system,” she replied, her voice firm. “Which means we’ll do whatever the President directs us to do. The main thing you have to think about right now is whether you want to volunteer for such a mission. Objective time will be at least twenty years. Ten years out in cyhibe, ten back, plus however long it takes us to complete our mission requirements. Things change in twenty years. We won’t be coming back to the same place we left.”

That sobered him. His mother was, what? Forty-one? She’d be sixty-one or older by the time he saw her again. Regular anagathic regimens and nanotelemeric reconstruction made sixty middle age for most folks nowadays, but twenty years was still a hell of a chunk out of a person’s life. How much would he still have in common with any of the people he left behind?

“We’ll be in hibernation for the whole trip?”

“Hell, yes! That transport is going to be damned cozy for thirteen hundred or so people. We’d kill each other off long before we reached the mission objective if we weren’t. Besides, they wouldn’t be able to pack that much food, water, and air for that long a flight.”

“No, ma’am.” In a way, he was disappointed. Part of his dream included the thrill of the journey itself, flying out from Earth on one of the great interplanetary clippers or boosting for the stars on a near-c torchship.

Anderson was accessing some records with a faraway look in her eyes. “I’m checking your evaluations,” she told him. “Your DI thinks highly of you. Did you know you’re up for selection for embassy duty?”

“Huh? I mean, no, ma’am.” The way Makowiecz and the other DIs kept riding him, he’d not even been sure they were going to recommend him for retention in the Corps, much less … embassy duty? That was supposed to be the softest, best duty in the Corps, standing guard at the UFR embassy in some out-of-the-way world capital. You had to be absolutely top-line Marine for a billet like that, and be able to keep yourself and your uniform in recruiting poster form. But the duty was the stuff dream sheets were made of …

“It’s true,” she told him. “And I won’t bullshit you. The Ishtar mission is a combat op. We’ll be going in hot, weapons free, assault mode. The abos are primitive, but they have some high-tech quirks that are guaranteed to raise some damned nasty surprises. So … what’ll it be? A soft billet at an embassy? Or a sleeper slot and a hot LZ?”

He knew what he wanted. Plush as embassy duty was supposed to be, he’d always thought the reality would be boring. In fact, most duty Earthside would be boring, punctuated by the occasional day or two of truly exciting discomfort, pain, and fear during a combat TAV deployment to some war-torn corner of the planet. The Llalande mission might be hardship duty and combat, but it was offworld … as far offworld, in fact, as he was ever likely to get.

It would be what being a Marine was all about.

“Um, ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“I have a friend who joined up the same time I did. Recruit Collins. She’s in one of the female recruit training platoons.”

“And …?”

“I was just wondering if she was being asked to volunteer too, ma’am.”

“I see.” She looked thoughtful for a moment. “And that would determine your answer?”

“Uh, well …”

“John, you presumably joined the Corps of your own free will. You didn’t join because she joined, did you?”

“No, ma’am.” Well, not entirely. The idea of signing up together, maybe getting the same duty station afterward, had been part of the excitement. Part of the thrill and promise.

But not all of it.

“I’m glad to hear it. Contrary to popular belief, the Corps does not want mindless robots in its ranks. We want strong, aggressive young men and women who can make up their own minds, who serve because they believe, truly believe, that what they are doing is right. There is no room in my Corps for people who simply follow the crowd. Or who have no deeper commitment to the Corps than the fact that a buddy joined up. Do you copy?”

“Sir, yes … I mean, yes, ma’am.”

“I’m sure your DI has drilled this line into your skull, even without implants. The Corps is your family now. Mother. Father. Sib. Friend. Lover. In a way, you cast off your connections with everyone else when you came on board, as completely as you will if you volunteer for Ishtar and report on board the Derna for a twenty-year hibe slot. You will have changed that much. You’ve already changed more than you imagine. You’ll never go back to that old life again.”

“No, ma’am.” But he wasn’t talking about a civilian friend. Why didn’t she understand?

“And you also know by now that the Corps cannot be run for your convenience. Sometimes, like now, you’re given a choice. A carefully crafted choice, within tightly defined parameters, but a choice, nonetheless. You must make your decision within the parameters that the Corps gives you. That’s part of the price you pay for being a Marine.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“So. What’ll it be? I can’t promise you’ll end up stationed with Recruit Collins, no matter what you decide. No one can. The question is, what do you want for yourself?”

He straightened in his chair. There still was no question what he wanted most. “Sir, this recruit wishes to volunteer for the Ishtar billet, sir,” he said, slipping back into the programmed third-person argot of the well-drilled Marine recruit.

“Very well, recruit,” Anderson replied. “No promises yet, understand. We’re still just screening for applicants. But if everything works out, and you complete your recruit training as scheduled, it will be good to have you on board.”

“Thank you, sir!”

“Very well. Dismissed.”

“Aye aye, sir!”

He rose, turned, and banged through the door, scarcely able to believe what had happened.

The stars! He was going to go to the fucking stars! …

Headquarters, PanTerra Dynamics

New Chicago, Illinois

United Federal Republic, Earth

1725 hours CT

“PanTerra Dynamics is going to the stars, gentlemen,” Allyn Buckner said. “We have personnel on our payroll on the Derna, and they will be on Ishtar at least six months before you. Now … you can work with PanTerra, or you can be left out in the cold. What’s it going to be?”

The virtual comm simulation had them standing in a floating garden, high above the thundering mist of Victoria Falls, in the Empire of Brazil. The building actually existed—a combination of hotel, conference center, and playground for the wealthy. Terraced steps, sun-sparkling fountains, riotous tangles of brightly flowering greenery to match the remnants of rain forest around the river below, Orinoco Sky was an aerostat city adrift in tropical skies.

Buckner, of course, was still in New Chicago. His schedule hadn’t allowed him the luxury of attending this conference in person. In fact, perhaps half of the people in the garden lounge in front of him were there in simulacra only. Haddad, he knew, was still in Baghdad, and Chieu was linking in from a villa outside of Beijing.

Through the data feeds in their implants, however, each of the conference attendees saw and heard all of the others, whether they were in Orinoco Sky in the body or in telepresence only.

Buckner was glad he was there in virtual sim only. The decadence of the surroundings fogged the brain, sidetracked the mind. It was easier to link in for the meeting he’d called, get the business over with, and link off, all without leaving the embrace of the VR chair in his New Chicago office.

For one thing, it meant he could cut these idiots off if they imposed on his time.

“You Americans,” Haddad told him with a dark look. “For a century you’ve acted as though you own the Earth. Now you are laying claim to the stars as well. You should remember that Allah is known for bringing down the proud and arrogant.”

“Don’t lecture me, Haddad. You’re lucky even to be here, after that business the KOA pulled in Egypt.” He grinned mirthlessly. “Besides, I thought you Mahdists didn’t believe in the Ahannu.”

“Of course we believe in them.” He gave an eloquent shrug. “How could we not? They are there, on the Llalande planet, for all to see. We do not believe, however, that they are gods. Or that they shaped the course of human destiny. Or that they … they engineered us, as some ignorant people, atheists, suggest.”

“Our friends in the Kingdom of Allah are not the blind fanatics you Americans believe them to be,” Dom Camara said. “They are as practical, and with as keen a sense of business, as we here in the Brazilian Empire. Your scheme could upset the economies of many nations here on Earth. We wish to address that.”

“You want to be in on the distribution of goodies, is what you mean,” Buckner said. “I can accept that. But PanTerra is going to be there first. That means you play by our rules.”

“And what, precisely,” Raychaudhuri asked, “are the rules, Mr. Buckner?”

“PanTerra Dynamics will be the authorized agent for Terran economic interests in the Llalande system. All Terran economic interests. We welcome investment on Ishtar, but the money will go through us. We expect, in time, to form the de facto government on Ishtar.”

Camara chuckled. “Mightn’t the abos have something to say about that?”

Buckner made a dismissive gesture. “That’s what the American Marines are for,” he replied. “The human slavery issue has all of North America ready to kick the Ahannu where it hurts most.”

“What do you mean?” Koslonova, of Ukraine, said. “You’re saying the Marines are going to wipe out the Ahannu?”

Buckner smiled at her. “That, of course, would be the ideal.”

Pelligrini, one of the other Euro-Union representatives, looked shocked. “Signor Buckner! You are talking about annihilating the population of a planet!”

“Calm yourself, Aberto. I said that would be the ideal, from our perspective, but we are realists. The MIEU will only have about a thousand Marines or so, and Ishtar is a world, a damned big place. They wouldn’t be able to wipe out something like ten million aborigines all at once. Hell, even if they could, public reaction back on home would be … counterproductive.

“But we do see the game playing out like this: we all know they won’t find any of our people alive when they get there, not after ten years. The Marines will have to assault the Legation compound and, of course, secure the Pyramid of the Eye to reestablish real-time communication with Earth. The Frogs, the abos, are practically stone age, but they’re tenacious little bastards. They’ll put up a fight. The Marines will have to smash them down pretty hard in order to regain control.

“Once the local government is forced to see reason, our people will form an advisory council and oversee the creation of a new abo government. We can expect the defeat of the current government to result in the surfacing of lots of new factions, and we’ll selectively help those factions who go along with our plans for Ishtar. Within two years, three at the most, we should have a functioning Ahannu government in place, one completely friendly to PanTerran interests and compliant to the directions of our representatives. And, of course, the Marines will be there to provide the stick behind PanTerra’s carrot.”

“The gwailos of the western world followed a similar policy once on the shores of the Middle Kingdom,” Chieu said quietly. “The end result was revolution, economic ruin, the collapse of empires, and unspeakable human suffering. Do you really expect your policies on Ishtar to have any different outcome?”

Buckner wasn’t sure at first what Chieu was talking about. He thought-clicked through some download references, pausing just long enough to confirm that the Hegemony’s representative was referring to the virtual land rush in China during the nineteenth century. Hong Kong. Macao. The Opium Wars. The Boxer Rebellion. A dozen nations had staked claims to various trading ports along the Chinese coast, intervening in Chinese affairs, forcing China to trade with the foreigners and on the foreigners’ terms.

“Mr. Chieu, PanTerra has already invested heavily in the development of our franchise on Ishtar. We wish only to see a return on that investment. Frankly, when Ishtar ceases to be a profitable venture, we will be quite happy to return full control of Ishtaran affairs back to the Ahannu. In the meantime, we offer the aborigines peace, technical advancement, the advantages of technic civilization in so far as they’re able to handle them, and stability. Think of it! Ahannu culture has advanced scarcely at all since the collapse of their interstellar empire ten thousand years ago. Within a few generations, they could undergo an industrial revolution and even contemplate a return to space.”

“It’s not like PanTerra to encourage potential competitors,” Camara said. His smile robbed the words of their edge.

“Not competitors,” Buckner said. “Trade partners. Business partners. The point is, all of that won’t happen for a century or two. We don’t need to worry about it. All we need do is think about the money we’re going to make from this one investment!”

“Yes,” Haddad said. “Money. A return on your investment. I believe I speak for a number of us here when I say that your scheme for using the human slaves on Ishtar as an additional return on your investment … this has a very foul smell to it. Am I to understand that PanTerra intends to import slaves, human slaves, from Ishtar? That you intend—if I understand this correctly—to use a campaign to free those slaves, only to ship them back to Earth for use as slaves here?”

“Please, Mr. Haddad,” Buckner said with a pained expression. “We prefer the word ‘domestics.’ Not ‘slaves.’ There are entirely too many negative connotations to that word.”

“Whatever you choose to call it,” Haddad said, pressing on, “the concept is neither moral nor economically viable.”

“Representative Haddad has a point,” Chieu said. “The population of Earth would never accept such a moral outrage.”

Buckner scowled at the assembly. “You want to lecture me on morality? You, Haddad—when for at least the past two hundred years or more your upper classes have imported domestic servants from various parts of Asia and Pacifica and paid them so poorly they cannot return home if they wish? When pockets of outright slavery still exist throughout the KOA in places like Sudan and Oman, and when women still have fewer rights than male slaves?”

“We are all slaves of Allah—” Haddad began.

“Can the sermon. I worship at a different church, the Church of the Almighty Newdollar.” Haddad bristled, but Buckner raised a hand. “Please. I mean no disrespect to anyone here. But it does give me a tremendous pain when people start making a major bleeding poor-mouth about moral outrages when it’s their comfort and their security and their wealth that they’re really concerned about. I don’t like hypocrisy.”

“According to the report you’ve uploaded to us,” Raychaudhuri said evenly, “you plan to partly defray PanTerra’s development costs on Ishtar by bringing freed human Sag-ura back to Earth and selling them as servants. If that, sir, is not hypocrisy—”

“And in your country, Raychaudhuri, a poor man can still sell his daughters,” Buckner said. “But that’s not the point, is it? Everything depends on how it is packaged. You’ve seen PanTerra’s reports … in particular, the reports on these Sag-uras. For ten thousand years they’ve been raised, been bred, as slaves to the Ahannu. They think of the Ahannu as gods … would no more think about disobeying them than you, Mr. Haddad, would think about disobeying Allah. They are conditioned from birth to accept the living reality of gods who direct every part of their lives.

“And now, we’re going to arrive there, backed up by the Marines, and stand their world on its ear. What do you think would happen if we just walked in, gathered up all the Sag-ura, and said, ‘Congratulations, guys. You’re free.’ Hell, they’d starve to death in a month! They don’t even have a word in their vocabulary that means ‘freedom’! Like Orwell pointed out a couple of centuries ago, you can’t think about something if you don’t have a word for it.

“At the same time, we have half the people on Earth clamoring for their release. ‘Humans being held in slavery by horrible aliens! Oh, no! … We must set things right, must free those poor, wronged innocents from their bondage!’

“So PanTerra is proposing a social program that will satisfy the people of Earth, help the Ishtaran humans, and, just incidentally, help PanTerra recover what we’ve put into this project. As we send interstellar transports filled with Marines, scientists, and researchers out to Ishtar, we will begin bringing back transport loads of ex-slaves. They will be reintegrated slowly and carefully into human society. They do not understand the concept of ‘money’ or ‘payment’ or ‘salary,’ so they will be hired out to people willing to provide them with room and board in exchange for their domestic services.

“Status, my friends, is an important coin in human relations. The upper classes on Earth of nearly every culture still derive considerable status from the employment of human servants. And, as they used to say, good servants are so hard to find. Well, PanTerra has found the mother lode of domestic servants. Happy, healthy, beautiful people conditioned to take orders and provide service because that’s the way they were raised, because that’s the only thing they know. And those Sag-ura who are shipped back to Earth, I might add, will derive considerable status from the mere fact of being chosen to return to the fabled home planet. And they will have the chance to slowly assimilate into Earth-human culture.

“And if PanTerra charges for providing this service … what of it? People, don’t you see? Everybody wins! You. The Sag-ura. And PanTerra.”

“Mr. Buckner,” Chieu said, “I thought PanTerra’s sole interest in Ishtar was the possibility of acquiring alien technology?”

Buckner nodded. “It’s our interest, certainly. Not our sole interest, but an important one. We expect to reap enormous profits from our research on Ishtar. The greatest profits of all may well come from aspects of their history and technology and biology and culture yet to be uncovered, things that we’re not even aware of yet. But that is all so speculative at this point, it would be insane to count on that to balance the accounts. We know we will make a profit by bringing a few thousand Sag-ura back to Earth and acting as agents on their behalf. Anything else is, as they say, gravy.”

The French representative, Xarla Fortier, folded her arms, radiating disapproval. “What arrogant assumption, monsieur, gives you the right to dictate this way to us? Ishtar, its wealth and its lost knowledge, should be the inheritance of all of humanity, not the playground of a single corporate entity! What you propose is nothing less than the wholesale rape of an inhabited world, to your benefit.”

“Worse, Madame Fortier,” Raychaudhuri said, “he proposes to let us watch but not participate. PanTerra intends nothing less than a complete monopoly over Ishtar and all her products, subsidized by the United Federal Republic and backed by the muscle of the U.S. Marines. I, for one, protest.”

“Tell us, Mr. Buckner,” Chieu said, eyes narrowing to hard, cold slits, “what happens if the population of Earth at large gets wind of this scheme of yours? You realize, of course, that any one of us here could upset your plans simply by net-publishing your report.”

“Is that a threat, Mr. Chieu?” Buckner sighed. “I’d thought better of you. Each and every one of you answers to your own corporate interests. You will need to consult with them before taking such an irretrievably drastic step … one, I might add, that would reveal your own complicity in these deliberations. PanTerra would respond as necessary to minimize the damage, to put a good spin on things. We would emphasize the benevolent nature of our business dealings on Ishtar, the great public good we were providing. Even slavery, you see, can be presented as good, as a social or an economic or a religious necessity, if there is a carefully nurtured will to believe. … Am I correct, Mr. Haddad? True, our profits might be adversely impacted to some degree, but I doubt there would be major problems in the long run.

“Of course, whoever leaks that information would find their corporate interests cut off from the deal. My God … we’re not leaving you out. We’re making you our partners! Secrecy, you see, is more in your interests than in ours. Play along, and each of you becomes the sole agent for the distribution of what we bring back from Ishtar to your own countries. New science. New knowledge. New medicines, perhaps, or new outlooks on the universe. And, of course, the chance to offer Ishtaran domestics to the upper strata of your populations, at a very healthy profit for yourselves.

“Mr. Chieu, why would you possibly want to jeopardize that for yourself or the people of the Chinese People’s Hegemony?” He shrugged. “You all can discuss it as much as you want. Take it up with the Confederation Council, if you like. The simple fact is, PanTerra will be at Ishtar six months before the joint multinational expedition gets there. And I happen to know that the Marines will have orders not only to safeguard human interests on the planet, but to safeguard Confederation interests as well … and that means UFR interests, ladies and gentlemen. PanTerran interests. I tell you this in the hope that we can avoid any expensive confrontations, either here or on Ishtar.” He spread his hands, pouring sincerity into his voice. “Believe me when I say we want a reasonable return on our investment—no more. PanTerra is not the evil ogre you seem to believe it is. We are happy to share—for a fair and equitable price. Ishtar is a planet, a world, with all of the resources, wonders, and riches that a planet has to offer, with fortunes to be made from the exchange of culture, philosophy, history, knowledge.”

“And if anyone can put a price tag on that knowledge,” Haddad said wryly, “PanTerra can. Friends, I think we have little alternative, at least for now.”

“I agree,” Fortier said. “Reluctantly. We don’t have to like it. …”

“We understand the need for secrecy, Señor Buckner,” Dom Camara said. “But how can you guarantee that word of this—this plan of yours will not leak anyway? You can threaten to cut us off from our contracts with you … but not the Marines. Or the scientists.” Camara cocked his head to one side. “This civilian expert you’ve hired … Dr. Hanson? Suppose she doesn’t go along with your ideas of charity and enlightenment for the Sag-ura?”

“Dr. Hanson is, quite frankly, the best in the field there is. We brought her on board to help us identify and acquire xenotechnoarcheological artifacts that may be of interest. She is a PanTerran employee. If she doesn’t do her job to our satisfaction, we will terminate her contract.”

He didn’t elaborate. There was no reason to share with these people the darker aspects of some of the long meetings he’d held here in New Chicago with other PanTerran executives. The truth of it was that anyone who got in PanTerra’s way on this deal would be terminated.

One way or another.

“And the Marines?” Camara wanted to know.

“They work for the FR/US government, of course, and are not, as such, directly under our control. They will do what they are sent out there to do, however. And we have taken … certain steps to ensure that our wishes are heard and respected.

“Believe me, people, we are not monsters. We are not some evil empire bent on dominating Earth’s economy. What we at PanTerra are simply doing is ensuring that there is not a mad scramble for Ishtar’s resources.” He cocked an eye at Chieu. “We certainly do not want an unfortunate repeat of what happened in China three centuries ago, with half the civilized world snapping like dogs at a carcass. We propose order, an equitable distribution of the profits, and, most important, profits for everyone.”

“Including the Ahannu, Mr. Buckner?” Chieu asked.

“If they choose to accept civilization,” Buckner replied, “of course. They cannot wall off the universe forever. But as they adopt a less hidebound form of government, a freer philosophy, they will benefit as our partners and as our friends.” He was quite sincere as he spoke.

He almost meant everything he said.

12

2 SEPTEMBER 2138

Combat Center, IST Derna

Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

0810 hours Zulu

“Maybe we should get up,” Ramsey said. “The day’s half over.”

“And just what,” Ricia Anderson asked, “do you mean by up?”

“Insubordinate bitch!” he said playfully. “You know what I mean!”

In fact, there was no up, no down, no sense of direction save the words neatly stenciled across one bulkhead: THIS END DOWN DURING ACCELERATION.

“Bitch,” Ricia said, cheerful. “That’s me. Beautiful … intelligent … talented … creative … and hard to please.”

He chuckled. “Hard to please? You didn’t sound hard to please a little while ago.”

She snuggled closer. “Mmm. That’s because you’re rather talented and creative yourself.”

They floated together, naked, still surrounded by tiny glistening drops of perspiration and other body fluids adrift in microgravity. The compartment they occupied was small, only a couple of meters across in its narrowest dimension, an equipment storage space and access tunnel to the Derna’s logic centers. The electronics housing the various AIs running on board—including Cassius and the Derna’s own artificial intelligence—lay just beyond an array of palm panels on the “ceiling” and one bulkhead. Tool lockers and storage bins took up most of the remaining surfaces, with a narrow, circular hatch in the deck leading aft to the centrifuge collar. Ramsey could hear the gentle, grinding rumble of the centrifuge beyond the hatch.

“Yeah, well,” he said, ripping open the Velcro closure on the body harness joining them. “If somebody comes up forward through that hatch to check on the logic circuits, we’ll have some explaining to do.”

He pulled the harness off their hips and they drifted apart, reluctantly. Ricia rotated in space, plucking from the air behind her a towel she’d brought for the purpose, and began sopping up the floating secretions. Ramsey grabbed his T-shirt and helped, taking special care to wipe down the gleaming surfaces of the storage bins and lockers around them. He knew that every Marine on board must know what went on in there, even those who didn’t use it for recreational purposes, but it wouldn’t do to leave behind such obvious evidence of their tryst. The Derna’s Navy crew could get testy about the grunts and the messes they made.

Getting dressed together in those close confines was almost as much fun as getting undressed earlier. It was easier when they helped one another, since there was hardly room enough to bend over. It would be nice, Ramsey thought with wry amusement, if the people who designed these ships would acknowledge that people needed sex, and included sufficient space for the purpose—maybe a compartment with padded bulkheads and conveniently placed hand- and footholds—not to mention locker space for clothing and perhaps a viewall for a romantic panorama of a blue-and-white-marbled Earth hanging against a backdrop of stars.

But unfortunately, that just made too damned much sense.

The Derna, first of a first generation of interstellar military transports, was designed with efficiency of space, mass, and consumable stores in mind, not the erotic frolickings of her passengers. She had to keep thirteen hundred people alive for a voyage lasting years, even with relativistic effects, which meant that every cubic centimeter was carefully planned for and generally allotted to more than one purpose.

If the damned sleep cells had been just a little larger … but they were designed for one occupant apiece. Having sex in one of those hexagonal tubes was like coupling in a closed coffin. Ramsey knew. He’d tried it during the past month … twice with Ricia and once with Chris DeHavilland. They would be claustrophobic in micro-g; they were impossible under spin-gravity. Besides that, everybody on the hab deck would know who was sleeping with whom, and the Corps simply wasn’t that liberal yet.

Everyone knew it was done, of course. The whole point of command constellations was supposed to be that teams that worked well together should be kept together, especially on long deployments. There was nothing wrong with that. But the fact that they’d been deliberately chosen because they had few family ties on Earth meant that there would be ties, both casually recreational and seriously romantic, among team members. They were, after all, human.

But few things about human nature ever changed, or, when they did, the change took a long time to manifest. The likely response among civilian taxpayers who paid for the Marines—not to mention their spartan accommodations in deep space—would have been horror at such scandalous goings-on. And the senior staff was always at pains to make certain that nothing scandalous about the Corps ever got into general circulation among civilians … especially civilian lawmakers.

Ramsey thought of an old Corps joke—the image of a Marine kept perpetually in cybehibe, with a sign on the sleep tube, “In case of war, break glass.” Marines weren’t supposed to have families, friends, or lives.

And they certainly weren’t supposed to have sex.

They finished dressing—shipboard uniform of the day was black T-shirts, khaki slacks, and white sweat socks—gently spun one another in midair for a quick once-over for incriminating evidence of their past few hours, then pulled close in a parting hug. “Again tonight, after duty?” he asked.

“Sorry, T.J.,” she told him. She kissed him gently. “I’m going to be with Chris. And tomorrow I’m shifting to the third watch. Maybe in two weeks?”

He nodded, masking his disappointment. “Sure.” Relationships within the command group created what sometimes amounted to a large, polyamorous family. Social planning, however, could be a real problem at times, especially when complicated by ever-shifting duty schedules.

Well, it beats the hell out of living with civilians, he thought. He’d been married once—a five-year contract that Cindy and George had elected not to renew with him. If you were going to sleep with someone, it helped if they had some notion of what it was you did for a living, what it cost you, and why you did it.

Making their way aft through the docking bay, they paused on the quarterdeck to chat with Lieutenant Delgado, floating at his duty station in front of the big American flag. “Logic center is clear,” he told Delgado, sotto voce.

“Aye aye, sir.” Zeus Delgado was not a member of the command constellation, but he knew what went on forward. He’d promised to flash Ramsey over his link if someone was heading toward the logic center access who couldn’t be turned aside.

At the centrifuge collar, Ramsey followed Ricia into an elevator and together they swiftly dropped outshaft into the familiar tug of spin gravity once more. Emerging on Deck 1 of Hab 3, they stepped into a crowded, hot, and noisy bustle of activity.

Eighty percent of the MIEU’s troop complement was on board, but so far fewer than half of those had entered cybehibe. That meant crowding on all decks and a battle for the shipboard environmental systems as they struggled to vent all of that excess heat. Supplies were arriving at the L-4 space docks at the rate of two freighters every three days, most of them carrying either water or C-sludge, the hydrocarbon substrate used in the nanoprocessor tanks to make food. The Derna needed water especially, a small ocean of water, in fact, filling the huge mushroom cap forward. Water was Derna’s primary consumable, necessary not only for the drinking and washing needs for her crew and passengers, but also as their source of oxygen, their AM-drive reaction mass, and as radiation shielding at near-c velocities.

But the MIEU’s weapons and equipment were arriving on board as well, and those Marines who hadn’t yet gone into cybehibe were busy unpacking gear, checking it for wear, damage, or missing parts, and stowing it for the long voyage ahead. Everything from Mark VII suits and laser rifles to spy-eye floaters and TAL-S Dragonflies had to be unpacked, examined, up- or down-checked for maintenance, and entered into the virtual ship’s manifest. Each individual Marine was responsible for her or his personal gear, including armor and primary weapon, so the hab deck was packed with men and women unshipping, inspecting, and cleaning everything from LR-2120s to KW-6000 power packs to M-780 grenades and CTX-5 demo packs. It was a job that would have been more happily carried out groundside, especially in the case of the high explosives, but the troops were arriving piecemeal, as were their weapons, on different flights from different spaceports scattered across the Earth. Especially considering the need to check all equipment after it had made the trip up to L-4, the most efficient place to bring the two together was on board the Derna.

But it made for a hell of a lot of chaos.

As Ramsey threaded his way past busy groups of enlisted Marines, he reopened his implants to shiplink traffic. He’d shut them down to afford some peace for his tryst with Ricia, and now he had to brace himself against the onslaught of messages and requests that had backlogged during his virtual absence.

“Good morning, Colonel,” Cassius said. “You have forty-seven link messages waiting, twenty-nine of them flagged ‘urgent’ or higher. Two are flagged as Priority One. You also have seventeen requests for face meetings, and twenty-one requests for virtual conferencing. Also, there will be a delay in the shipment of the Dragonflies from Palo Alto. This may mean an additional delay in mission departure time.”

Take a couple hours off for a quick docking maneuver, he thought, and all hell breaks loose.

“Two Priority Ones?” he asked the AI-symbiont aloud. “Shit, why didn’t you tag me?” The command group’s AI could reach him at any time, whether his link was online or not, and standing orders were to let Priority One and Two messages come through no matter what his link status.

“I felt you needed the downtime, sir,” Cassius replied. “You’ve been pushing quite hard and showing both emotional and physiological signs of stress. I exercised discretionary judgment according to the specific parameters of—”

“Can it. What were the calls?”

“One from General King. He wished to know the status of the Dragonfly shipment. In your persona, I routed him through to the TAL-S maintenance center at Seven Palms.”

“I see.” He would have done the same. “And the other?”

“From General Haslett, sir, requesting an immediate virtual conference on the political situation. I pointed out that Derna is on Zulu, that you had been up quite late overseeing the arrival of the last stores freighter and were currently on sleep shift. I offered to wake you, and he said it could wait. I have scheduled you for a virtual conference with the general in … two hours, seventeen minutes from now.”

Again he couldn’t fault the AI’s judgment … which was the reason they made such exceptional personal secretaries. Both priority calls had been less than truly urgent, but both needed handling by means both courteous and expeditious.

“Very well,” he told Cassius. “Let’s see the urgents.”

“You may wish to greet Captain Warhurst first, sir.”

“Eh?” Warhurst’s dress khakis were a bit more up-to-date than his icon garb, Ramsey noted. “Oh. Of course.”

Warhurst was uncovered so he did not salute, but he came to a crisp attention. “Captain Martin Warhurst reporting on board, sir.”

“Ah, Captain Warhurst, yes,” Ramsey replied. “Welcome aboard.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Check with my exec, here, Major Anderson, for your berthing assignments. Are your people getting settled in?”

“Yes, sir. But my company is only at half strength … eighty-two troops out of 150 on my TO and E.”

“Affirmative, Captain. But I’m afraid the rest of your team will be newbies.” He saw Warhurst’s face fall at that news. “Don’t worry, son. You’ll have time to whip them into shape before deployment.”

“Yes, sir. Uh … fresh meat out of Lejeune, sir?”

“Yup. Volunteers from recruit companies 1097, 1098, and 1099. They’ll be arriving over the next three weeks or so.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Major Anderson has the specs and stats. You can review their recruit records online, of course, and you can interview them, if you wish, before they embark. Problem, Captain?”

Warhurst made a face. “No, sir. It’s just …”

“Yes?”

“My mission brief has my company hitting Objective Krakatoa. I would have thought you’d want an experienced Mobile Assault Team on that one, sir.”

“Ideally, yes. I’m afraid we don’t have that luxury, however. Groundside HQ is holding back the best MATs against the situation in Mejico and the Southwest territories. We get what’s left, I’m afraid.”

“I see, Colonel.”

“Don’t worry, son,” Ramsey said with an easy grin. “If your people aren’t experienced now, they sure as hell will be by the time they’ve taken Krakatoa!”

“The ones who survive will be experienced, yes, sir,” Warhurst told him. “The rest will be dead.”

“That’s the way it always is, Marine. You have your orders. Carry on!”

“Aye aye, sir!”

Warhurst was not happy, but that couldn’t be helped. Weeks ago, Ramsey had downloaded the captain’s combat record and guessed that Warhurst was at least as worried about his own qualifications for the assignment as he was about the experience of his men. He’d only taken part in one combat mission so far—the brief, bitter assault on Giza last June—and he must be wondering about why he’d been recruited for a berth with the MIEU, much less why he was supposed to lead the first assault onto Ishtar.

No matter. He was a good man and would come through when he had to.

Or he would be dead. But he would do his honest-to-Chesty-Puller best.

Semper fi. …

U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Training Center

Parris Island, South Carolina

0730 hours ET

Time, which had crawled forward at a seemingly imperceptible pace, with each day very much like the one past, at last began to accelerate. Garroway’s training entered phase three as his nanochelates began to kick in, then phase four, when all of the pain and sweat at last began coming together. He might be, in Makowiecz’s cordially bellowed invective, a scum-of-the-Earth lowlife-maggot recruit, but by the Goddess, he was a Marine scum-of-the-Earth lowlife-maggot recruit.

“Fire teams advance, by the numbers!” Philby called over the squad comm channel. “Fire Team One … go!”

Recruits Myers, Kilgore, and Garvey rose from cover, their combat suits mottled with the same ocher and gray tones of the rock and sand of the desert. They were still a bit clumsy with the new suits; Kilgore slipped in a soft patch of sand and fell heavily, dropping his laser rifle as he hit.

“Any time you’re ready, Kill-girl!” Makowiecz’s voice cut in, harsh and sarcastic. “I’m sure the enemy will happily sit down and wait until you’re freaking ready!”

“Sorry, sir!”

“Yes, you are! Now move! Move! Move!”

Garroway heard the exchange spoken inside his head, a kind of technological telepathy generated by the chelated nanoconnections growing in key areas of his brain.

The full range of vision and hearing available to him was breathtaking, and he was still getting used to a sensory input that could be overwhelming at times. With a thought-click, his helmet’s AI could adjust his visual input to anything from monochrome to full HSD, a hyperspectral display combining every wavelength from deep infrared to X ray. By clicking through a mental menu, he could see in the dark, filter out harsh light, and easily tell the difference between natural vegetation and camouflage.

“Fire Team Two!” Philby called. “Go!”

Mendelez, Jaffrey, and Kaminski rose from the sand, rushing forward in short, zigzagging bursts of speed, their goal a low, rock-strewn ridge crest a hundred meters ahead. Simulated laser fire—hell, it was real laser fire, Garroway thought, but stepped down in wattage until only suit sensors could register it—flashed and strobed from a pair of automated gun emplacements concealed among the boulders ahead and to the left. Explosions detonated somewhere behind him. The word was that the AIs triggering each burst knew how close they could get without actually hurting any of the recruits, but scuttlebutt also said there’d been plenty of injuries in other recruit companies during this part of the training already, and even a few accidental deaths. Dead was still dead, whether you were fighting frog-faced aliens eight light-years away or taking part in a routine training exercise right in your own backyard.

The excitement of the moment pounded in Garroway’s skull. This might be just an exercise, but it was being played in deadly earnest against both AIs and flesh-and-blood opponents. His company—what was left of it now, eleven weeks into training—had been TAV-lifted to the Marine Corps training facility at Guardian Angels, in the Baja Territory, to play war games with SpecOps commandos and other Marines. They’d been told off in threes, grouped according to the Corps’ current three-four-two doctrine: three men to a fire team, four fire teams to a squad, two squads to a platoon section. Owen Philby, a short, wiry agro from Niobrara, Nebraska, was the ARNCO—the acting recruit noncommissioned officer in command of Third Platoon’s 1st Squad. They’d been given their orders—to take and hold that ridge up ahead—and except for Makowiecz’s acid commentary over the comm channels from time to time, they were largely on their own.

Shit. Mendelez was down, the servos in his suit killed by his own AI. He would lie on the ground, a simulated casualty of a simulated fight, until the exercise was over. Garroway thought-clicked to his squad status display and saw that Kilgore and Garvey were down as well. Those guns up there were chopping the squad to bits.

“Fire Team Three! Go!”

Three more suited figures rose from cover, zigzagging across the open ground. One of them stumbled and fell … Fox. Then Lopez. And Hollingwood. Three up, three down. The enemy guns had the range.

“Fire Team Four! Go!”

That was Garroway’s cue. Scrambling to his feet, he began dashing toward the ridge crest, dodging and weaving across the rocky ground. Philby and Yates rose with him, clumsy in their Mark VIIs. Philby took three lumbering steps, then fell heavily facedown as his suit servos cut out. Garroway saw the AI-generated flash of a rapid-fire laser skittering across the slope but couldn’t make out where it was coming from. There was a wrecked and rusted hulk at the top of the ridge—the wreckage of an old magfloater APC, it looked like. The fire might be coming from there, but it was impossible to tell for sure.

Yates stumbled and fell, another simulated casualty. …

Garroway dropped to cover behind a sand-polished boulder, his shoulder slamming painfully against the rock despite the internal padding of his suit.

He thought-clicked to the tactical display again, superimposing the remaining members of 1st Squad on a color-coded map of the immediate area. Myers was halfway up the ridge, pinned down behind a scattering of boulders. Kaminski was also pinned, thirty meters behind Meyers. And … damn! Jaffrey had just gone down as well, yet another casualty.

And Garroway had barely gotten started, tail-end Charlie, a hundred meters from his objective.

Three men left, out of a twelve-man squad, strung out across the laser-blasted boulder field. Not good. Not good at all. Gunny Makowiecz was ominously silent. Had he already written the squad off for this exercise?

Garroway sagged inside his armor, almost overcome with frustration and, more, with exhaustion. This week in the Baja was an old Corps tradition—“Motivational Week,” more often referred to by the recruits who endured it as “Hell Week.” In a solid week of exercises and evolutions, each man in the company could expect to get perhaps seven hours sleep in seven days, as his physical and mental limits were tested to the snapping point.

This was day two of Motivational Week. How the hell was he going to see this thing through for five more days? And what was the point? Things had been getting steadily worse ever since he’d arrived at Parris Island. He knew now he’d never make it as a Marine. All he needed to do was flash-link Makowiecz with the words “I quit.”

An hour from now he could be enjoying a hot shower followed by a hot meal as he waited for them to process him out of the Corps. It would be so easy. …

Yeah? he asked himself. Then what? Transfer to the Aerospace Force? Go back to live with your mother? Maybe you could get a job boss-linking construction robots on the moon. …

He sighed, as another round of explosions detonated nearby. He’d had this discussion with himself before, and frequently. It was just getting harder and harder to see the answer clearly.

Still, there was one answer he could see, and that was an advantage, a small one, to the tactical situation he found himself in. The three surviving recruits of 1st Squad were so widely scattered that they were tougher targets for two automatic gun positions. More important, the three of them had more line-of-sight data to work with, with three widely spaced perspectives. Those guns might be invisible to all three men individually, but if they put their AI heads together, as it were …

“Myers!” he called over the tactical channel. “Ski! This is Garroway! Link in with your HSD data!”

He knew he was begging to be slapped down, and kept expecting Makowiecz to step in with his sharp-edged sarcasm and ask what he thought he was doing. He was taking over the responsibilities of the squad leader here … but Philby, the squad ARNCO, was lying helpless among the rocks a few meters away now, his suit dead and his comm suite offline. Somebody had to take charge, and Garroway’s position at the far end of the strung-out line gave him a slightly better overview of the tactical situation.

His helmet AI picked up the data feeds from both Myers’s and Kaminski’s suits. With a thought-click, he could now see what the other men were seeing from their vantage points … and he could let his own AI sort through all three hyperspectral arrays and build up a more detailed, more revealing image of what was really up there.

For over a century, now, military technology had witnessed a race between high-tech camouflage and the high-tech means of seeing through it. The first primitive hyperspectral arrays had been developed late in the twentieth century, allowing analysts to see the tanks, gun emplacements, and other equipment masked beneath camo netting and cut branches. Paint that changed color to match the surroundings had been harder to distinguish, but even the best reactive paint still had slightly different optical properties than steel, plastic laminates, or ceramics, especially at both long infrared and at UV and long X-ray wavelengths.

Nowadays, reactive camo paints used nanotechnology to mimic textures and UV refractive properties and to better mask distinctive heat signatures at all IR wavelengths. While targets like vehicles, which shed a lot of heat, couldn’t be masked completely, relatively cool targets like robot gun emplacements were almost impossible to spot.

And yet …

His helmet AI brought three sets of data together, repainting the landscape in front of him in enhanced colors. A laser flashed again—the muzzle was carefully shielded, so he couldn’t pinpoint the weapon that way—but Myers’s helmet scanners had also detected something else, something critical … a telltale shifting of reflective frequencies that suggested movement.

“Myers, can you work your way farther to the left?”

“I’ll try,” Myers replied. “But every time I move, those damned guns—”

His voice was chopped off as the comm link was cut. But Garroway had the last bit of necessary input now, relayed just as Myers had shifted position. One of the two guns was there, well to the left and halfway up the ridge. The other was straight ahead, close to that wrecked APC but a little below it and to the right, a position calculated to misdirect the recruits into thinking the laser emplacement was somewhere on the wreckage itself. Sneaky …

His helmet marked both guns for him in bright red.

“You see them both, Ski?” he called.

“Got ’em, Gare.”

“You take the one on the left,” Garroway told him. “I’ll get the one by the APC.”

“Roger that.”

“On my command, three … two … one … now!”

Garroway rolled to the left side of the sheltering boulder, coming to his knees and dropping his laser rifle into line with the chosen target. His weapon projected a crosshair onto his helmet display; he leaned into the boulder, bracing himself, as he dropped the targeting reticle onto the patch of enhanced color that marked the enemy gun, bringing his gloved finger tight against the firing button. The weapon cycled as the enemy gun spotted him and swung around to target him.

Garroway was a fraction of a second faster. The enemy gun didn’t fire.

“Got him!” Kaminski yelled. “One echo down!”

“Two echoes down,” Garroway added, using mil-speak shorthand for a gun emplacement. The ridge should be clear now, but he checked it out carefully before moving again. There could be backup positions, well-hidden and kept out of action until the first guns were killed.

“Sea Devil, this is Devil One,” he called, shifting to the platoon frequency.

“Devil One, Sea Devil,” the voice of the platoon controller replied. “Go ahead.”

“Objective positions neutralized, but we’ve taken eighty-two percent casualties. If you want that fucking ridge, you’d better send support ASAP.”

His phrasing wasn’t exactly mil-standard, but the exhaustion and despair of a few minutes ago had just given way to a surge of adrenaline-laced excitement. Rising, he trotted forward, making his way up the face of the ridge to join Kaminski, who was already crouched in the shadow of the wrecked APC.

“Quite a view, Gare,” Kaminski told him.

It was … and a familiar one. From up here, Garroway could look east across the silver-gray gleam of the Sea of California.

It was a bit strange being so relatively close to his old home at Guaymas, a place he honestly expected never to see again. The training range in the desert scrub country of Isla Angel de la Guarda was just across the Gulf of California from Hermosillo and only a couple hundred miles northwest of Guaymas. Even in late September the air simmered with the familiar dry but salt-laden heat of home, a baking, inhospitable climate ideal as a test range for the recruits as they learned to handle their new Mark VII armor.

I’m not going back, he thought, the emotion so fierce his eyes were watering. I’m not going to quit.

The thought came unexpectedly, unbidden, but he thought he recognized the surge of emotion that rode with it. He was over the hump.

Time after time in the past weeks, Makowiecz and the other DIs had hammered at the recruits of Company 1099: “Sooner or later each and every one of you will want to quit. You will beg to quit! And we’re going to do our best to make you quit! …”

Every man and woman going through recruit training, he’d been told, hit a period known as “the wall” somewhere around halfway to three-quarters of the way through, a time when it felt like graduation would never come, when the recruit could do nothing but question the decision to join the service in the first place.

For those tough enough to endure, the wall was followed by “the hump,” a time when training became even tougher, when the questions, the doubts, the self-criticism grew ever sharper, and then …

“Garroway!” Makowiecz’s voice snapped in his head. “What the hell did you just do?”

“Sir!” he replied. “This recruit took command of 1st Squad when the acting squad leader was incapacitated, sir! We then took the objective, sir!”

He braced for the inevitable chewing out.

“Well done, Marine” was Makowiecz’s surprising reply. “What would you have done differently if you had been in command from the start?”

“Sir, this recruit would have attempted to reconnoiter the objective with one fire team in the lead, the other two in support, and attempted to correlate hyperspectral data from all vantage points before moving into the open. Sir.”

Philby, frankly, had screwed up, ordering the squad to advance into the open, knowing those guns were up there but without knowing their exact positions. In any race between man and laser, the laser was going to win.

Garroway kept his opinion of Philby’s tactics to himself, however. They were all in this together, after all. Gungho …

“Outstanding job, Marine,” Makowiecz told him. “Your support is on its way. Second Squad lost its ARNCO. When they reach your position, you will take command. Sit tight until then.”

“Aye aye, sir!”

He was over the hump.

Graduation might be another five weeks off, but he felt like a Marine.

Makowiecz had called him a Marine!

Even getting killed an hour later didn’t dampen the feeling. The Army SpecOps commandos were literally buried behind the ridge, their heat signatures masked by solid rock, their fighting holes hidden by boulders. They waited until 2nd Squad arrived and was just settling in, then rose like ghosts from their positions and cut down the recruits with simulated laser and plasma gun bursts before they knew what was happening. “You’re dead, kid,” one of the black-armored commandos had said as he grabbed Garroway from behind.

It didn’t matter. He was a Marine. …

13

9 OCTOBER 2138

Pacifica

Off the California Coast

1105 hours PT

Garroway grinned at Lynnley. “You know, this would be a lot more fun in zero gravity.”

“You!” she retorted, giving him a gentle punch in the chest. “Aren’t you ever satisfied?”

“Well, if anybody can do it, you can,” he replied. He checked his inner timer. “I guess we’d better be moving.”

“Unless we want to be listed as AWOL, yeah,” she told him. She stroked his arm gently. “It’s been good, being with you like this. Thanks.”

“Real good. I’m … going to miss you.” He shook his head as she rolled out of the bed.

The walls and ceiling of the room showed a view of space—Earth, moon, sun, and thick-scattered stars, slowly circling. The view was an illusion, of course; for one thing, even in space the stars weren’t that bright when the sun was visible.

“I’ll miss you too,” Lynnley said.

“I still don’t want to believe we can’t see each other again. Maybe ever.”

“Don’t say that, John! We don’t know what’s going to happen!”

“Sure we do! I’m on my way to Ishtar, and you’re going to Sirius. I checked a star map download. We’ll be farther away from one another than if one of us stayed on Earth!”

She shrugged. “That doesn’t make any difference, does it? Even one light-year is too far to think about.”

“Well, you know what I mean. We’re going in two different directions. And I’d hoped we’d get deployed together.”

“Damn it, we both know how unrealistic that idea was, John. The needs of the Corps—”

“Come first. I know. But I don’t have to like it.” He balled his fists, squeezing tight. “Shit.” He got out of the bed and began picking up his clothes. He and Lynnley had been fuck buddies off and on for a couple of years now … nothing serious, but she was fun to be with and therapeutic to vent at and fantastic recreation in bed. He’d thought of her as his closest friend and somehow never even considered the possibility that they would end up in different duty stations.

“Simulation off!” he called, addressing the room. The view of space vanished, replaced by empty walls that seemed to echo his loneliness.

“Look,” she told him, “we’re both getting star duty, right? And we’re both going about eight light-years. There’s still a good chance we’ll be tracking each other subjectively when we get back.”

“I guess so.” She meant that their subjective times ought to match pretty closely. Since they were both heading eight light-years out, they’d be spending about the same times at the same percentage of c and aging at about the same subjective rate.

But he didn’t believe it. Things never worked out that neatly in real life, especially where the Corps was concerned. If he ever saw her again, one of them might well be years older than the other.

He sighed as he started pulling on his uniform. How much did that matter, really? They both knew they would be taking other sex partners. With the future so uncertain, there was no sense in meaningless promises to wait for one another. It wasn’t like they shared a long-term contract.

“I think,” he said slowly, sealing the front of his khaki shirt, “I’m just feeling a bit cut off. Like I’ll never be able to come home again.”

“I know. Everything, everyone, we leave here is going to be twenty years older when we see them again. At least. My parents aren’t happy about it, but at least they understand. And they’ll only be in their sixties when I get back.”

“I just don’t understand my mother,” he said. “How can she consider going back to that … man?”

“Like I told you once before, you can’t protect her. You can’t live her life. She has to make her own decisions.”

“But I keep wondering if she’s going back to him because of me. Because I’m going to Ishtar.”

“That’s still her issue, right? You have to do what’s right for you.”

“But I don’t know what that is. Not anymore. And I feel … guilty. She wasn’t happy when I saw her yesterday. About my going to Ishtar, I mean.”

“I think you’re giving yourself a lot more power over your mother than you really have. You’ve been around before when she’s left, and she’s always gone back, right? What made you think this time would be any different?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. You ready?”

Dressed now in her khakis, she pulled on her uniform cap and tugged it straight. “Ready and all systems go,” she told him. “You feel ready for lunch?”

He brightened, with an effort. “You bet.” If they only had a few more hours together, he was determined to enjoy them, instead of brooding about the might-have-beens and the never-would-bes.

They left the room, stepping out onto the hotel concourse. Pacifica was a small city erected on pylons off the southern California coast, halfway between San Diego and San Clemente Island, a high-tech enclave devoted to shopping, restaurants, and myriad exotica of entertainment. Two days after their graduation from boot camp, they were in the middle of a glorious seventy-two—three whole, blessed days of liberty. They’d already been to the Europa Diver, paying two newdollars apiece to take turns steering a submarine through the deep, dark mystery of Europa’s world-ocean, all simulated, of course, to avoid the speed-of-light time lag. After that they’d checked into the pay-by-hour room suite and entertained themselves with one another.

Now it was time to find a place to eat. The restaurant concourse was that way, toward the mall shops and the sub-O landing port. White-metal arches reached high overhead, admitting a wash of UV-filtered sunlight and the embrace of a gentle blue sky.

In another forty-eight hours he would be vaulting into that sky, on his way to the Derna at L-4.

And after that …

“What do you do,” he wondered aloud, “when you know you’re not going to see Earth again for twenty years?”

“You are gloomy today, aren’t you? We won’t—”

“I know, I know,” he interrupted her. “Our subjective time will only be four years or so, depending on how long we’re on Ishtar … and most of that time we’ll be asleep. From our point of view, we could be right back here a few months from now. But all of this …” He waved his hand, taking in the sweep of the Pacifica concourse. “All of this will be twenty years older or more.”

“Pacifica’s been here for forty-something years already. Why wouldn’t it be here in another twenty?”

“It’s not Pacifica. You know what I mean. All of these people … it’s like we won’t fit in anymore.”

“Take a look at yourself, John. We’re Marines. We don’t fit in now.”

Her words, lightly spoken, startled him. She was right. In all that crowded concourse, Garroway could see three others in Marine uniforms, and a couple of Navy men in black. The rest, whether in casual dress, business suits, or nude, were civilians.

Their uniforms set them apart, of course, but he also knew it was more than the uniform.

And now he knew what was bothering him.

It was as though he’d already left on his twenty-year deployment, as if he no longer belonged to the Earth.

It was a strange and lonely feeling.

Hab 3, Deck 1, IST Derna

Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

1240 hours Zulu

Keep thinking about the money, she told herself with grim determination. Keep thinking about the money … and the papers you’re going to publish … and winning the chair of the American Xenocultural Foundation. …

Traci Hanson lay halfway out of the hot and claustrophobic embrace of her hab cell, flat on her back on the sleep pad, eyes tightly shut as the technicians on either side of her made the final connections. She hated the prodding, the handling, as if she were a naked slab of meat.

Which, of course, in a technical sense she was. The idea was to preserve her for the next ten years, to feed and water her while her implants slowed her brain activity to something just this side of death.

IV tubes had been threaded into both of her arms as well as in her carotid artery beneath the angle of her jaw. A catheter had been inserted into her bladder. She knew her implant was supposed to block all feelings of hunger, despite the fact that she’d had no solid food for a week, but her stomach was rumbling nonetheless. She was uncomfortable, sweaty, ill-tempered, she hadn’t had a decent shower since she’d come aboard the Derna, and now these … these people were sticking more tubes and needles into her.

“Relax, Dr. Hanson,” one of the cybehibe techs told her. “This’ll just take a moment. Next thing you know, you’ll be at Ishtar.”

“‘Relax.’ Easy for you to say,” she grumped. She opened her eyes and turned her head as far as the tube in her throat would let her. The hab deck was still crowded with Marines, most of them busily cleaning or working with weapons and other articles of personal equipment. “You have to go through this with every one of those people?”

“Sure do,” the tech told her. “That’s why it takes so long to work through the list. There’s only about thirty of us, and we have twelve or thirteen hundred people to prep this way.”

She noticed that her blood was flowing through the tubes in her wrists, and the thought made her a little queasy, despite the suppressant effect of her implant.

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay, I guess,” she said. “Uncomfortable. The pain in my arms is going away, a little.”

“Good.”

“It feels like this damned mattress pad is melting, though. It feels wet, and kind of squishy. Am I sweating that much?”

“No. It’s supposed to do that. Think about it. For the next ten years, you’re going to be lying here, breathing, eating, drinking, eliminating, filtering your blood, all through these IV tubes. Medical nano and the AI doctor built into these walls are going to be monitoring and handling all of your body functions. The one thing these machines can’t do is safely turn you over every couple of hours for ten years. Can you imagine the problems you’d have with bedsores if you just laid on your ass for that long? By the time you’re asleep, the pad will have turned into a kind of gel bath. It’ll support you gently, just like you were in a pool of water … and the gel gives the medical nano access to your back so it can rebuild skin cells and keep your circulation going, keep your blood from pooling, y’know?”

“It feels … like I’m sinking.” Thoughts of drowning tugged at her mind. She wasn’t thinking clearly, and she was having trouble formulating the questions she wanted to ask. “Will … I dream?”

“Maybe a little, when you’re going under, and when you’re coming out. The AI doc will be initiating REM sleep as it takes you down. But most of the time? No.”

One of the other techs laughed. “I know I wouldn’t care to have to deal with a decade’s worth of dreams,” she said, “especially knowing I couldn’t wake up!”

“I … think the Ahannu sergeant is Cydonia at the Institute. Ahannu Buckner is a real bastard. Manipulative. Make me rich …”

“I’m sure that’s true, Doctor. Would you mind counting backward from a hundred for me?”

“Counting … backward? Sure. Saves power. But what about the Hunters of the Dawn? They won’t have to wait in line, not with PanTerra. A hunnerd … ninety … uh, no … ninety-seven. Eight … nine … Ishtar. It’s beautiful there, I understand. …”

“You’ll be able to see that for yourself, Doctor, very, very soon now.”

Hab 3, Deck 1, IST Derna

Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

1405 hours Zulu

The surface of the world of Ishtar blurred beneath the hurtling Dragonfly, jagged mountains and upthrust volcanic outcroppings among gentler rivers of gleaming ice. This was Ishtar’s anti-Marduk side, the hemisphere held in the grip of perpetual winter as the moon circled its primary in tidal lock-step.

But the ice was thinning, the land greening. New Sumer lay just beyond the curve of the red-purple horizon up ahead, another hundred kilometers or so. …

“Black Dragons,” Warhurst announced over the tactical net, using the assault force’s new call sign. “Stand by … three minutes.”

One by one the other dragons responded. Six Dragonfly reentry vehicles, laden with APC landers, hugged the terrain as they swung into the final approach, skimming scant meters above the boulders and ice whipping past below. Abruptly, rocks and ice gave way to open water, and the sextet of deadly black skimmers howled over the sea, raising rooster tails of spray in their sonic-boom footprints.

Ahead, just visible now, the black, conical mountain designated Objective Krakatoa lifted slowly above the horizon. Following plans logged with their onboard AIs, the shrieking aerospacecraft began weaving back and forth, spreading out to make themselves harder targets to hit.

Forty kilometers from the target the sky exploded in dazzling, blue-white radiance. Dragonfly Three, touched by that nova heat, melted away in an instant. Dragonfly Five, jolted by the blast’s shock wave, lost control and struck the water in a cartwheeling spray of foam and metallic debris.

Damn, he thought. Not again!

It just wasn’t working. …

And then the mountain was rising to meet them, vast and black and ominous. Dragons One and Two flared nose-high, dumping forward velocity, then hovering briefly above flash-blasted rock and cinder, before releasing their saucer-shaped payloads—“personnel deployment packages” in mil-speak. Dragons Four and Six howled low overhead, reaching farther up the mountain slope before settling with their PDPs.

Each saucer lander, cradled in the gap behind the Dragonfly’s bulging nose and intakes and the tail-boom mounted rear plasma thrusters, carried a section of twenty-five Marines and their equipment—two to a fifty-man platoon. The Marines, strapped into wire-basket shock frames, were jolted hard back and forth within their harnesses as the saucers plowed into the burned-over side of the mountain.

Then the pilot AIs released the harnesses and cracked open the side hatchways, and the Marines spilled out into the dim red twilight of Ishtar.

Warhurst followed, though his proper post was the HQ command center in Dragon One’s lander. They’d already lost, and there was no sense in continuing. …

“End program,” he called, and in a flicker of blurred motion the towering mountain, the red and purple sky, the charging Marines, all vanished, and he was again in the simulation couch in his office on Deck One, Hab Three, of the IST Derna.

The simulated attack had failed the moment he’d lost a third of his assault team to Krakatoa’s searing, antimatter-powered beam.

“You should have continued the assault, Martin,” Major Anderson’s voice said over his link. “You might have learned something.”

“I really don’t care to get killed again, Major,” he said. “Neither do my people. That sort of thing can’t be good for morale.”

Actually, he was more concerned with his troops picking up careless habits than about poor morale. Losing your life in a VR simulation like this one was no worse than losing a game sim, but Warhurst wondered if too much reliance on painless simulations led to Marines taking chances on the battlefields of the real world … chances that could leave them dead and jeopardize a critical mission.

“So what happened?” Colonel Ramsey asked over the link.

“Same as before, Colonel. We lost two of the Dragonflies going in. We can’t take that whole damned mountain with only a hundred Marines.”

“Mmm. And we won’t have the resources to use human wave tactics. The troops or the equipment.”

“No, sir,” Warhurst replied. Colonel Ramsey wasn’t serious about human wave tactics, of course. Marine tactical doctrine emphasized finesse rather than brute force. Ramsey was gently pointing out that this particular tactical problem was not one that could be solved by throwing more troops at it.

“Recommendations?”

“Hard to make any, sir, since we don’t really know what to expect. But if these worst-case scenarios prove out, then we’re screwed. We need to hit Objective Krakatoa with at least two full companies to be sure of getting through with one.”

The only information they had about the An planetary defense weapon had been based on the account FTL-transmitted by a young Marine at the New Sumer compound moments before it was overrun by the An rebel forces. They knew that the An facility, hidden in the mountain they called An-Kur, could shoot down a spacecraft in orbit, and that it could shift the aim of the beam by as much as ten degrees out of the vertical to aim at a specific target.

Could that beam be aimed at a target hugging the surface of Ishtar only a few kilometers away, as well as claw starships out of orbit? No one knew. Was the beam generated, as most analyses suggested, by matter-antimatter interaction? Pure conjecture, based on the fact that no one knew of another energy source with the same star-hot output. Was there a recycle time on the beam, meaning a force could slip in after it fired once, while it was still recharging? No one knew. So far as anyone on Earth was aware, the An-Kur beam had fired exactly once. Hell, there was a possibility that the thing was a one-shot weapon, like the old X-ray laser technique that used the detonation of a nuclear weapon to generate the needed X rays, destroying the gun as it fired. The Marines might get to Objective Krakatoa and find nothing left there but a ten-year-old glass-bottomed crater.

But they couldn’t count on that, not with so much riding on the question.

Damn it all! How the hell was he supposed to train himself and his company for an assault when next to nothing was known about the target?

Warhurst’s stomach rumbled, and he realized again how hungry he was. He didn’t notice it when he was in sim, but once he was back in the real world, he wanted to eat, and he didn’t care what his implants told him he was supposed to feel. This fasting business, he thought, was strictly for the religious fanatics. The thought made him smile, though. He was going to get to see the An in person, which was more than most of Earth’s fanatics could hope for, whether they were with the Human Dignity League or the Anist Creators Church.

He just wished he didn’t have to starve to do it.

Warhurst covered his face with his hands, thinking. “Okay,” he said at last. “If I only have one company, that’s all I have. The best approach we’ve tried was Scenario Five. We only lost one Dragonfly that way. Splitting up over the horizon and angling in from all directions is bound to scatter the enemy’s defenses somewhat and may keep our casualties down. The only other possible approach is to land farther out and make the approach on foot.”

“Which runs up against the time problem,” Anderson put in.

“Agreed.”

“I’d throw in a tactical reserve if we had one,” Ramsey said, thoughtful. “But we’re stretched way too thin as it is. Trying to invade a whole damned planet with twelve hundred Marines … it’s like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket. We just don’t have the assets to spare, in personnel or in logistical transport.”

“Don’t I know it. I’ve been thinking about this lots, Colonel. If my people don’t take Krakatoa, we’re pretty much screwed no matter what … unless the whole thing is a paper tiger anyway. And I’m not betting the farm on that possibility.”

“Nor am I, Martin. Nor am I. Doesn’t make sense to turn a mountain into a gun that’s only good for one shot.”

“Unless, of course, they have lots of mountains around New Sumer, each with its own superpopgun,” Anderson said.

“Lovely thought,” Ramsey told her. “I’ll recommend you for command of the World Pessimists Legion.”

“No thanks. I probably wouldn’t like that.”

“Fortunately,” Ramsey said, “there’s no indication of more than one planetary defense element. We have to start somewhere, and the Chiefs of Staff are starting this one with the assumption that we have one target—An-Kur—and that the An aren’t going to be too eager to point that devastating a weapon at anything below their own horizon. Tell you what. We go with Scenario Five. I’ll cut back on the first ground assault at New Sumer by … make it two Dragonflies. That’s one more platoon. We’ll treat Black Dragon as a reinforced company of four platoons. How’s that sound?”

“Best we can do, I guess,” Warhurst agreed. “Thank you, sir.”

“Not a problem. It’s my job to make your life and career a living hell. How’m I doing?”

“Quite well, actually. I’m impressed.”

“Glad to know we’re all doing what we’re best at. Okay, Major Anderson and I have to split for a senior staff meeting. Do you need anything more from us?”

“A steak would be nice, Colonel. Rare. With onions.”

“You’ll have to wait twenty years for that, Captain, but I’m sure it can be arranged when we get back home. Talk to you later.”

And the voices in his head were gone.

So … not as good as he’d hoped, but better than he’d feared. Hitting Krakatoa with eight Dragonflies instead of six was a little better, anyway. The worst part of the whole situation was the fact that his company included so many relatively inexperienced men and women, the newbies coming out of the past month’s crop at Parris Island. The assault on An-Kur was not something he wanted to throw unseasoned people into, not if the idea was to keep down casualties.

But Captain Warhurst was a Marine. He made do with what he was given. Or with what he could steal …

Stomach still growling, he linked into Cassius in order to begin working on a rewritten TO&E for the Black Dragon assault.

Hab 3, Deck 1, IST Derna

Orbital Construction Facility 1, L-4

1430 hours Zulu

The virtual meeting space had the look and feel of a large, Earthside conference room, complete with chairs, American flag, and a floor-to-ceiling viewall currently set for the GlobalNet Evening news. In the virtual reality unfolding within his mind, Colonel Ramsey leaned back in one of the glider chairs at the table, watching the broadcast with the dozen or so other people in the room.

“Yes, Kate,” an earnest-looking reporter said, staring into the pickup. “Here at New York City’s Liberty Plaza, enthusiasm is building for the imminent launch of Operation Spirit of Humankind, the relief expedition to the world of Ishtar. Folks have been gathering here for the past twenty-four hours to show their solidarity with the American forces who will be departing our Solar system soon, bound for the world of another star.”

At the reporter’s back a vast throng of demonstrators carrying torches sang beneath the reflected glare of floater lights. Liberty Plaza was a broad, sweeping esplanade built fifty years earlier to raise the Statue of Liberty above the slowly encroaching waters of the Upper Bay. The plaza was filled now with demonstrators, picked up by a far-flung array of hovering cameras as scene followed scene. Batteries of powerful, ground-mounted searchlights beamed the reflective floaters a hundred meters up, which scattered a frosty, blue-white radiance across a veritable sea of singing, chanting, swaying people. In the distance, across the bay, the vast and translucent city dome of lower Manhattan shone like an enormous, iridescent pearl in the ghostly glow, as arc lights sent slender needles of white radiance vertically into the night sky.

“Let my people go! Let my people go! Let my people go! …” The background chanting rose and fell, a muted thunder of thousands of voices. An enormous projection screen had been raised at the foot of Lady Liberty, high enough to reach above her waist, displaying a view of the Derna floating free at L-4 against a background dusting of stars.

“Satellites counting the crowd here tell us over sixty thousand people have come to Liberty Plaza tonight to witness the historic departure of the first MIEU, scheduled for some forty hours from now,” the reporter was saying. “I don’t think these camera images can ever possibly convey the sense of excitement and purpose and sheer dedication displayed here in what must be one of the biggest and grandest parties ever thrown in the Greater New York City area. I’m told that deliveries of food to Liberty Plaza exceed 150 tons in the past twenty-four hours alone, delivered by air, by hovercraft, by tunnel. At that, most of the people I’ve talked to aren’t eating and aren’t sleeping. They’ve set their implants to take care of their bodily needs so they can concentrate on what one of the demonstration organizers here called, and I quote, ‘A group mind experience that will shake the very walls of reality.’ And I have to tell you, Kate, that the atmosphere here is like nothing I’ve—”

“Screen mute,” President LaSalle said, and the reporter’s voice fell silent. “You see, General, what we’re up against. The political repercussions of further delay in this project could be devastating.”

General King nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“This whole thing is wildly out of hand. All of the different religious factions are at each other’s throats, either hailing the An as gods or attacking them as demons. And everyone who isn’t working to start a new round of religious wars is marching or demonstrating for a crusade to free the slaves on Ishtar. And in addition to all of that, we have the second relief mission being assembled at L-5. They’re breathing down our necks right now. So … tell me again, in words that I can understand … why the new delay?”

General King glanced at Ramsey before answering, then across the table at Admiral Vincent Hartman, who would be commanding the naval assets of the mission. “Madam President … the cybernetic hibernation personnel on board the Derna are just running too far behind sched. They can only put people into hibernation so fast, you know. And more Marines keep arriving, making for extremely crowded conditions. It’s … well, it’s pretty chaotic up there.”

Which was something of an understatement, Ramsey thought, even though King hadn’t yet been physically on board the ship. Things were chaotic. With crowding, heat, and tempers all rising, there’d been four fights on the lower decks already, and it was only a matter of time before someone got hurt or threw a punch that could not be ignored or downplayed by the officers.

“What can be done to speed things up?” General Gabriowski said. He looked at the President. “If things slip much further, the Europeans and Brazilians will beat us to Ishtar. Then they’ll dictate to us how things are played.”

“Unacceptable,” LaSalle said. She looked at Ramsey. “Colonel? The bottleneck seems to be in your backyard. What do you propose?”

“Madam President—” He stopped, suddenly uncomfortable. There was something that could be done, but he’d been putting off suggesting it. It would be hard on the men, especially the newer ones.

“Go on, Colonel,” Gabriowski told him.

“Yes, sir. Madam President, there are still about four hundred Marines on Earth, waiting for passage up to L-4. One reason they’re not moving faster is that the D-480s—the personnel transfer shuttles we’ve been using—can only carry thirty people at a time, and they have a long turnaround time on the ground.”

“You can’t blame the Navy for that,” Vice Admiral Cardegriff put in. Cardegriff was the Navy’s representative on the Joint Chiefs, and a senior member of the National Security Council. His word hauled a lot of mass.

“No, sir. The Navy’s been doing all that’s expected, and a hell of a lot more. But we might be able to speed things significantly by putting the Marines straight into cybehibe on the ground and shipping them up as cargo.”

“As cargo, Colonel?” President LaSalle said. “That seems a bit … indelicate.”

“Marines aren’t exactly what you would call ‘delicate,’ ma’am. I’ve been looking at this for a while now, wondering if we’d need to go this way. With more technicians and more room on the ground, we can pop out people into hibernation a lot faster than we can at L-4. They’ve been on their diets now for several days already and getting the preliminary nano injections, so we can start processing them through pretty quick. Best of all, they can be loaded straight into their cells on the Derna once they stop the hab rotation. Zero g’ll make things a hell of a lot easier. And they won’t be using consumables—water and air, mostly—if they’re hibernating.”

“You don’t sound happy about it, Colonel.”

“No, Madam President. I’m not. Most of those four hundred Marines are fresh out of recruit training. I was hoping to start them on simulation combat training once they reached the Derna and were waiting to be dropped into hibe. Besides, it’s kind of a dirty trick to pull on them, shipping them up like slabs of frozen meat. I imagine a lot of them are looking forward to the flight up, and now they’re going to miss it.”

“I’ll remind you, Colonel,” Gabriowski said, “that this is the Corps we’re talking about, not a travel agency. These people didn’t sign on for a scenic tour.”

“No, sir.”

“How fast can you do it?”

Ramsey already had the figures stored in his implant. “Here’s the data,” he told them. “The short story is that we can have them all aboard within the next five days. If we wait for the D-480s, it’ll be another nine days before they’re all aboard, and it will be at least two weeks after that before the last of them are in cybehibe.”

“I don’t think we have much choice,” the President said. “Do you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then do it. Do what you have to to get the Derna under way within the next week. That’s October sixteenth at the latest. At the latest. Am I clear?”

“Clear, ma’am.”

“Very well. Keep me informed of further developments.” And the President of the United Federal Republic vanished from the conference room.

“Dismissed, gentlemen,” Admiral Cardegriff said. And the fiction of the conference room faded from Ramsey’s awareness.

He was back on board the Derna, lying back in his VR couch.

His people weren’t going to like this. Not the section leaders who needed to see to it that everyone was up to speed on the training sims. Not the logistics personnel, who were looking forward to the use of a few hundred more backs to help shift cargo into Derna’s holds. And not the men and women themselves, who were going to be taken by surprise by this change. Marines were creatures of habit that never liked unexpected change.

How in all of the hells of the Corps was he going to break this to them?

14
INTERLUDE

16 OCTOBER 2138 TO 24 JUNE 2148

IST Derna

En route to Llalande 21185 IID

Launch …

The trio of starships, IST Derna and the two cargo ships ISC Regulus and ISC Algol, drifted at L-4 well clear of the building docks and the Vesuvius AM complex. Because AM-enhanced fusion torch exhaust consisted of very high-energy particles, their torches would not be lit until they were well clear of heavily trafficked regions of the inner Solar system. Instead, each was attached to one of the new Cerberus-class tugs, massive, blocky-looking nuclear-chemical workhorses with fifty million kilograms of thrust apiece.

Derna’s centrifuge rotation had already been stopped and her three hab modules folded back against her spine as loading work continued in microgravity. The last of Derna’s passengers arrived on board already in cybernetic hibernation and were transferred with the last few hundreds of tons of equipment and supplies. Meanwhile, cybehibe techs on board processed the last of the MIEU’s waking personnel—Colonel Ramsey and members of the unit’s command constellation—and hooked them into the ship’s nanocybernetic suspension system.

Algol and Regulus, unmanned vessels both, were already cleared for launch.

Across the world a half million kilometers away, humankind seemed to watch with an indrawn psychic breath. Manned expeditions to the stars had been boosting out-system for fifty years but always on missions strictly limited to science and diplomacy. The Smithsonian archeological expeditions to Chiron at Alpha Centauri and Volos at Barnard’s Star, the diplomatic and science legation at Ishtar, and the science missions at Thor and Kali had all been deployed to the stars on strictly peaceful missions. Now, for the first time, humankind was going to the stars armed and armored for war.

Derna’s complement of 145 naval personnel remained awake, monitoring the prefire and launch systems, but the launch itself was handled entirely by the onboard AI, unofficially known as “Bruce.” The countdown, which had been running now for days, trickled down at last to zero, and the main engines of the three Cerberus tugs flared white-hot.

Fifty thousand tons of thrust seemed barely to nudge the giant starships, but the acceleration, which lasted for all of five minutes, was enough to nudge the trio off-station and start them in a long half-million-kilometer fall toward the Earth.

In Washington, D.C., President LaSalle delivered a speech proclaiming the need to safeguard human life and interests at Ishtar, emphasizing that Operation Spirit of Humankind was not a mission of vengeance or retaliation but one of rescue and recovery.

Elsewhere, riots flared into what amounted to open warfare, as devotees of the An-creator gods battled with the legions of Earth First and traditional religious forces. The Catholic world, already sundered a generation earlier by the election of the Papessa Mary to the seat of St. Peter at the Holy See, was shattered by pitched battles in Asuncion and Ciudad de Mejico, in Madrid and Paris, in Roma, Manila, and even in the suburbs of Boston. The Papessa, in the Vatican, called for a holy crusade to free the human Sag-ura slaves held on Ishtar and to prove once and for all that the An were neither gods not angelic creative spirits acting as God’s agents. Pope Michael at the Counter-Vatican in Lausanne preached crusade against those who would deliberately bury the scientific evidence that humankind had been created by agencies from the stars, and urged a dialogue with the An to reveal at long last the Hidden Truth.

Radical militant Anists, meanwhile, attacked both branches of the Church, calling for a return of man to his rightful place at the feet of the wise and powerful Universal Creators. Anist-led riots in Munich, Belgrade, and Los Angeles killed thousands. The battle in South Los Angeles alone claimed 918 lives, and the burning of both Catholic and Counter-Catholic churches triggered a wave of pro-Aztlan, antigringo demonstrations and rioting.

Four days later Derna, Algol, and Regulus, still in close formation and with the Cerberus tugs detached, whipped past the Earth in a hyperbolic trajectory, accelerated by gravity. Ten days after that, as the trio hustled outbound past the ten-million-kilometer mark, the main drives cut in. Minute quantities of antimatter were fed into the hydrogen slush entering the aft thruster reaction chambers, triggering a pulsing chain of fusion explosions at a rate of eight per second, each one contained, then expelled by powerful magnetic fields. Thrust built steadily until the starships were accelerating at ten meters per second per second, just a nudge more than one g.

Riding nova flares of incandescence hot with gamma radiation in the 511 keV band of positron annihilation, Derna, Algol, and Regulus accelerated out-system. Four and a half days later, traveling now at four thousand kilometers per second, they hurtled past the south pole of Jupiter, using that giant planet’s gravity for a second slingshot acceleration and to swing onto a new course, high up above the Solar ecliptic. They were aimed now at right ascension eleven hours, thirty-seven seconds, declination +36 degrees 18.3 minutes … in the southern reaches of the constellation Ursa Major.

Three months after 1 MIEU’s departure a second, larger military force departed from the shipyards at L-5. Built around the ISTs Soares Dutra and Jules Verne, and the cargo vessels L’Esperance, Sternwind, and Teshio Maru, the International Interstellar Relief Expedition, as it was now called, followed a similar outbound course, picking up a gravitational assist from Earth and then another, stronger boost from Jupiter as they hurtled together into the interstellar night.

Eleven months after launch the three ships of 1 MIEU were traveling at just beneath the speed of light, fast enough that time itself had slowed to a crawl. The Navy crew on board Derna had by then joined their Marine passengers in cybehibe, and the operation that followed was carried out entirely by the ships’ AIs. Together to the millisecond, the AM drives cut off and the starships fell through an interstellar void strangely distorted by their velocity, with the entire sky appearing to be crowded ahead of their mushroom-cap prows in a doughnut-shaped smear of starlight. Thanks to time dilation, a week of shipboard time was the equivalent of over two months on Earth.

In the outside universe, time continued in its normal fashion. President LaSalle, battered by the politics of secession in the Southwest, lost the election of ’40 to John Marshal Cabot, a Boston Neodemocrat who rejected military intervention in Mejico, favored adoption of AI metacontrol of the World Bank, and advocated peaceful negotiations with the Ahannu. The MIEU flotilla by that time, however, was over half a light-year away, well beyond the range of any normal-space communications net. New orders, if any, would have to be relayed to the Marines via the FTL Pyramid of the Eye, if and when they were able to retake it.

In fact, the Cabot administration made no official announcement of policy changes in regard to the Llalande situation. Much could still happen, both at Ishtar and back on Earth. Besides, the poll numbers did not lie. Americans still favored freeing the Ishtaran slaves, and by a whopping majority of seventy-three percent.

Perhaps because he maintained a low political profile so far as the Llalande situation was concerned, Cabot was reelected by a narrow margin in ’44. The World Bank Crisis of ’45 and the resultant financial crash led to calls for an end to extrasolar adventurism. In fact, the archeological outposts on Chiron, Kali, and Thor were abandoned as funding for them dried up Earthside. Nothing could be done about the expeditions already outbound, however. The MIEU and the Isis Expedition to Sirius were both five light-years out, traveling in nearly opposite directions, both utterly beyond the hope of recall.

Besides, the American public still favored freeing the slaves on Ishtar, by a majority of fifty-eight percent.

On board the Derna, the Marines remained unaware of such political niceties, so deeply asleep now that even dreams were banished. The air within their sleep cells was chilled to a constant five degrees Celsius, just warm enough to prevent tissue damage from ice formation.

Meanwhile, the United Federal Republic found itself fighting three nasty little wars, in South China, in New Liberia, and in Nicaragua. In 2146 the situation in Egypt, never wholly settled, exploded into the Great Jihad War, with the EU and the UFR against the Kingdom of Allah. What began as a battle to save world cultural treasures in Egypt swiftly devolved into all-out religious war, with Anists and various antislavery factions in uneasy alliance against the rabidly anti-Anist Islamic militants. The Giza Plateau remained secure in western hands once French, Ukrainian, German, and British commandos took Cairo, but the fighting merely spread to Pakistan, Indonesia, Morocco, and Turkey. Some netnews reporters began calling the conflagration a new world war. Elements of the 1st Marines were committed to fighting in Indonesia and, a year later, in the Philippines. Other Marine units reported to the moon, Mars, and Jupiter space to protect various xenoarcheological sites, including the Singer in the icy embrace of Europa. The Kingdom of Allah had minimal space capability, but the threat of infiltration and sabotage was thought to be serious.

Perhaps because of the seriousness of the military situation on Earth, interest in the MIEU was waning fast. In October of 2146, a netnews poll reported that only four percent of Americans now favored military intervention at Ishtar. Nearly ten percent felt that the expedition should refuel and return to Earth as soon as it reached the Llalande system, without even awakening the sleeping Marines.

By the middle of 2147 the Great Jihad War had officially been elevated in status to World War V, at least by the various news media. Opinion polls indicated that forty-one percent of Americans now favored military intervention in An affairs and that, significantly, seventy-three percent admitted to strong anti-An political or religious views. Some thirty-one percent felt that negotiation with the An was the better way to go, a figure that had doubled in the past ten years; almost twenty percent were unaware that human slaves were held by the An, and twenty-eight percent more knew but didn’t care. In July, President Cabot called an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss the fact that a military mission was entering an alien star system intent on waging a war that no longer enjoyed a broad base of popular support at home. The only agreement reached was that the greatest threat to the mission now was the International Interstellar Relief Expedition six months behind the Derna. The troops on board included both KOA and anti-An Traditional Catholic forces from Brazil. They might well pose a greater threat to the Marines than the An, now that they were enemies in the world war raging back home. A full briefing was prepared, both for standard radio transmission and for FTL relay through the Cydonian facility on Mars.

The question was when—and if—the Marines would get the word, and whether the enemy troops in the IIRE, who would also have access to the FTL site at New Sumer’s Pyramid of the Eye, would learn of their change in status first.

Eight light-years away, the Derna, Algol, and Regulus all had spun end for end, folded their hab modules, and refired their AM drives. Backing down the acceleration curve, now, they were less than half a light-year from their destination. This was, arguably, the most dangerous point of the flight. For three years of shipboard time the crew and passengers of the Derna had been protected from high-energy impacts by the vast bulk of the reaction mass storage tank forward. Now, though, with the AM drives pointed at the destination and with the craft still moving at close to c, the hab modules were exposed to stray bits of matter incoming at relativistic speeds. The drive flare itself, together with the magnetic fields used to focus the exhaust plume, was supposed to clear the way, but the technique was still highly experimental. Inflatable balyuts—a doughnut of balloons filled with water—unfurled aft of the hab modules to provide some extra protection, but mission experts on Earth could only cross figurative fingers and wonder what was happening. Derna should be slowing now, but they wouldn’t know about it on Earth until either the Pyramid of the Eye was recaptured intact or a radio signal made it back to Earth in another eight and a half years.

The Marines remained asleep, though by now Derna’s medical AI had begun warming the sleep cells slowly to body temperature, as nano injections prepped their brains for reawakening. The Navy crew would be revived first. They’d been lucky on this passage; out of 145 naval personnel, only seven had failed to survive the trip.

By March 2148 the Derna and her escorts were falling into the Llalande system, still decelerating at one g. Drives were focused to initiate end-course corrections that would bring the trio of vessels into Marduk space. Potential disaster was averted when Algol’s ship AI failed to make the necessary course changes; high-speed particles had degraded elements of Algol’s navigational software, deleting key commands. Derna’s crew transmitted software patches over the laser communications link, however, and brought the cargo vessel back onto the proper course.

Derna, meanwhile, deployed twenty-five Argus probes—robot fliers cocooned inside ceramic-sheathed TAV transport modules. They would arrive at the objective days ahead of the hard-decelerating starships.

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 jackoffs 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.

15

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 distance 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, facing 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.

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 lineage 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, remembered 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.

16

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 recognize 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.”

ARLT Section Dragon Three

Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

1642 hours ST

“C’mon, son!” Valdez said gently but firmly. Stooping, she slapped the back of his armored shoulder, urging him up and forward. “You can’t help him now!”

Garroway had dropped Pressley’s severed arm moments before, but he continued to lie in a shallow depression in the rock a meter away from the Marine’s blood-drenched lower torso. Pressley’s helmet lay nearby, the man’s black-irised eyes and gaping mouth clearly visible behind the blood-smeared visor.

“Garroway!” Valdez rasped. “Snap to, Marine!”

“A-Aye aye,” he managed to say.

“Hit your backbone,” she told him. “Do it!”

Backbone was Corps slang for the nanoneurotransmitters within his implanted technics that adjusted certain key chemical, muscular, and mental responses. They didn’t exactly banish fear at a thought-click, but they could help a Marine on the verge of going into shock to pull out of it, to focus on the task at hand, to keep from getting sick or simply having his legs fail beneath him.

Garroway nodded inside his helmet and focused on the mental code that activated the appropriate NNTs. He felt an inner rush, a kind of emotional flutter in his gut, and then he drew a sharp, deep breath. He could still feel the horror of Pressley’s death, but it was cocooned somehow, more distant, less immediate. He felt the strength coming back into his legs and belly, felt the shaking stop. “Thanks, Gunny,” he told Valdez.

“Keep moving, Marine,” she told him. “We have a mountain to take.”

She moved off without looking back. He picked up his weapon and followed.

ARLT Command Section, Dragon

One

Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

1642 hours ST

Captain Warhurst remained harnessed inside Lander One, though he was almost completely unaware of his surroundings. As CO of the ARLT, he was expected to stay safe and give orders, coordinating the attack from the presumed security of the armored LM. The training invested in modern military officers was simply too expensive, too valuable, to allow them to lead from the front; indeed, they’d not done so for two centuries or more.

Warhurst listened to the rattle of small arms fire off the lander module’s hull and wondered who they were kidding with that kind of blatant rationalization. The LM was a definite target—a large and quite attractive one, in fact—while individual Marines wearing stealthy armor were able to literally fade into their surroundings and become very hard to hit.

And that too, he realized, was his own form of rationalizing things. The fact was, he wanted to be out there with his people right now, not stuck behind in this glorified tin can, watching an AI run the data link switchboard and holding the collective hands of the command staff still on planetary approach.

His noumenal awareness was crowded with images, feeds, and downloads. With a thought-click he could tune in on the helmet sensor array of any of his Marines. At the same time, he was aware of several members of the command staff “riding his link,” looking over his virtual shoulder from the Derna’s CIC. Majors Anderson, DuBoise, and Ross were all there, as were Lieutenant Colonel Harper, Colonel Ramsey, and both General King and Admiral Hartman. The electronic ghosts of a dozen other command staff officers and technicians were there as well, sifting through the flood of incoming data. Theoretically, they were there to offer advice and watch to see that he didn’t miss anything. In practice, it was a micromanagement cluster-fuck waiting to happen. Warhurst concentrated on doing his job and ignoring that particular unpleasant possibility.

An aerial view of the LZ was spread out beneath him in his noumenal awareness. Robotic drones, battlefield management probes, and the sensor feeds from the Marines outside all contributed their data streams to build up a more or less coherent picture of the engagement as it unfolded. Four landing modules—one hundred Marines—were on the ground now and advancing toward an apparent door in the side of the mountain. Two more were angling in from opposite directions, north and south. Enemy resistance was heavy—twelve Marines dead so far, plus fifteen HK-20 robots knocked out—but the troops were advancing. The worst danger at this point of the assault was that the Marines would be pinned down, unable to move; instead, they seemed to have momentum enough to carry them into the mountain, despite sleeting small arms fire.

“We’re taking heavy fire from the mountainside,” Warhurst said, uploading to the Derna CIC. “We need air support!” The Marines on the ground needed firepower, and they needed it now.

“Major DuBoise,” Ramsey said. “Scrape that mountainside clean!”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Warhurst heard the orders being given over the air support net. All that remained was to wait for them to be carried out.

Kikig Kur-Urudug

Deeps of An-Kur

Third Period of Dawn

It was called the Abzu, a word constructed from aba, the sea, and zu, to know, and meaning, roughly, “the Sea of Knowing,” or possibly “the Sentient Sea.” Ancient Sumerian texts had spoken of the Abzu as a land beneath the sea, or as the “Lower World,” the place where the god Enki ruled. Perhaps, Tu-Kur-La thought, the Abzu had once been a physical place on far-off Kia, one of the scattered Anu colonies on that world before the coming of the Hunters of the Dawn. The old records read that way.

Or perhaps it had always been this, an artificial construct representing the collective unconscious of all of the gods. The records, even the Memories passed down across the ages, often broke at key places, with information forever lost or rendered corrupt. Sometimes it was hard to tell what the old memory texts truly meant.

Rarely, though, was an exact interpretation of the records necessary. The spirit of what was meant, of the information transmitted across the centuries—that was the heart and soul of the thing.

Interpretation of the records was best left to others.

Tu-Kur-La relaxed as the Sea engulfed him. Physically, he was within one of the lower chambers of the Kikig, the command center for the Mountain of the Gods. The Abzu-il, the Gateway to the Lower World, oozed slowly from the cavern walls around him, enveloping him, penetrating him, its artificial nervous system forging billions of connections with his physical brain on countless levels, drawing him swiftly under.

To Tu-Kur-La’s senses, the Abzu seemed to be a physical place like any other, a kind of green-lit cavern with dim and far-off walls all but lost in soft fog. Reality coalesced itself from that fog. He saw images … other Ahannu … and heard voices, as the battle in the world above raged. Information was here for the asking, within a kind of library of the mind. And he could see whatever he willed himself to see. …

“Welcome, Tu-Kur-La,” a voice said within his mind. “We welcome your soul to the Circle of An-Kin.”

“Thank you, Lord,” he replied, startled. The voice, the towering figure before him, was none other than Gal-Irim-Let—Kingal An-Kur, the Great Commander of the Mountain of the Gods. An-Kin was a council of the gods, a meeting to determine the future course of the gods’ will. Why would the Kingal itself want the advice of a mere second-level god-warrior?

“We desire the advice of all those who faced the Zah-sag-ura two cycles ago,” the voice said, answering his question before he could voice it. “Your experience will help us decide how best to bring them down.”

“To that end,” another voice said, “we bestow upon you the rank of uru-nam, that you may take your place with us.”

This second speaker was Usum-Gal, a title that was both name and rank—the Great Dragon, the Lord of All. The Sag-ura of Kia referred to it as the High Emperor, a strange and meaningless term.

“I … I thank the Great Lord,” he stammered. “I will strive to be worthy of the honor.” Uru-nam! It meant Guardian of Destiny; this made him a minor kingal in his own right.

“You are one of the gods,” Usum-Gal replied, “a Guardian of Destiny by nature. It is no honor to do what is your nature, but simple personal responsibility. Now, Uru-nam Tu-Kur-La, tell us how we might destroy the invaders.”

Within his inner vision, a scene unfolded, a view of the city the invaders called New Sumer, which the An had always called Shumur-Unu, the “Stubborn Fortress.” Strange how the invaders had such trouble with the proper pronunciation of language. Much of the city was burning, as hordes of Anu god-warriors and Sag-uras burst through and over the walls, storming toward the Pyramid of the Eye.

A handful of offworlder warriors gathered at the base of the pyramid steps, holding off the onslaught for long moments as survivors of the attack loaded on board one of the alien flying machines at the pyramid’s apex. One by one the defenders fell, as heaps of burned and torn god-warrior bodies piled up in a semicircle about the plaza. At last, like a black sea, the Ahannu god-warriors surged forward, overwhelming the few surviving defenders.

“Our victory two cycles ago,” Tu-Kur-La replied, “was one of superior numbers. There were not enough armed Blackheads to withstand our full might.”

“These Sag-ura sky-warriors,” Gal-Irim-Let said, thoughtful. “What are they called?”

Tu-Kur-La plucked the alien word from the Abzu’s knowledge stores. “Marines,” he said. “They call themselves Marines.”

“These Marines possess a weapons technology that gives them a considerable advantage in combat. Their body armor … their weapons-of-power …”

“All true, Great Lord,” he said. “And there are many more of them this time than last. Victory will not be easy.”

“We will suffer terrible losses,” Gal-Irim-Let observed. “We have lost twelves of sixties already, simply defending An-Kur.”

“But consider,” Tu-Kur-La said. “Our god-warriors number sixty sixties of sixties or more. Only a handful of these Blackhead Marines have landed so far. There may be more on the vessels now approaching Enduru, but … how many? A sixty of sixties?”

“Half of that,” Gal-Irim-Let replied. “According to what the prisoner-slaves told us, a thirty of sixties. No more.”

“Exactly. However many god-warriors we lose, we can afford to grow more, as many as are needed. The Marines are a long way from Kia and reinforcements. If our information from the Sag-ura we took two cycles ago is accurate, it will be a cycle and a half before news of their need can reach Kia, another two cycles before more ships could cross the gulf between Kia and Enduru.”

“Unless they recapture the Pyramid of the Eye,” Gal-Irim-Let said. “They could call for help immediately then, as they did before.”

“Perhaps. But their ships sail more slowly than the pictures in the Pyramid. They still require a two-cycle trip.

“And long before then, the last of these Marines will be dead.”

ARLT Section Dragon Three

Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

1644 hours ST

A bullet spanged into Garroway’s chest armor, staggering him back a step, but he leaned forward and kept moving. From what he’d heard and downloaded so far about the Ahannu, they were supposed to be armed with spears, damn it, not guns. Someone’s intel about this rock was seriously out of date.

At least most of the incoming rounds were small stuff, gauss-gun projectiles accelerated by powerful magnetic fields. The monster high-velocity, high-mass rounds like the one that had taken Tom Pressley apart were pretty rare, thank the Goddess, and most of those were being aimed at the LMs and at the circling air support.

The Dragonfly TAL-S transports, relieved of the burden of their lander modules, were lighter now by fifteen tons each and far more nimble, darting about above the LZ much like their terrestrial namesakes above an insect-infested swamp. Swooping in close to the black mountainside, chin turrets pivoting sharply, they sent fusillades of pulsed laser bursts into each crevice, outcrop, and ledge that might hold enemy gunners. Weapons pods slung under their down-canted wings loosed clouds of high-velocity needles, microrockets, and target seekers. Rock shattered as explosions detonated across the cliff face, sending showers of rock cascading down to the ledge below. The Marine pilots of those Dragons were throwing everything they had on the line to give the ground-pounders below a chance to clear the kill zone.

As he watched, one of the Dragons shuddered from a hit, its left wing and arched tail boom crumpling as black smoke began boiling from the dorsal drive unit. The aircraft banked sharply, then began tumbling, smashing into the side of the mountain. The other Dragons stooped from the glowering sky, electronically noting the location of the gauss launcher that had felled their comrade and searing it with pulsing laser flame.

The fire from the mountainside half a kilometer ahead was slackening now, he thought. Either the air support was doing its job or the defenders were pulling out. “Heads up, Marines,” Valdez’s voice said over the tactical link. “The Ahannu gunners are pulling back. That could be good … or it could mean—”

“Hit the deck, Marines!” Colonel Ramsey’s voice shouted in the noumenal, overriding Valdez’s words. “We’ve got a mag reading off the scale. They’re going to—”

Garroway fell full-length on the ground. He could feel the rocky surface of the ledge trembling through his torso armor as inconceivable energies deep within the mountain built higher and higher. His audio pickups relayed a shuddering rumble, like far-off thunder.

Then a dazzling blue-white light illuminated the rocks, the murky twilight replaced by blazing high noon. As the light faded he looked up, just in time to see a wall of white mist rushing down the slope from the mountain’s peak.

“Shock wave!” Valdez shouted. “Stay down and hang on!”

And then the wave front hit him like an oncoming hurricane. Once when he was a kid, a tropical storm had hit Baja and the Sonoran coast, lashing inland with 160-kilometer winds. This was like that, only worse, much worse, as the howling wind suddenly seemed to turn solid, smashing at the Marines scattered across the storm-seared landscape. The external temperature, he saw on his helmet display readouts, was nearly one hundred degrees Celsius, and the atmospheric pressure had momentarily surged to well over fifteen atmospheres.

Garroway felt himself being lifted, felt himself sliding back across the rock. Reaching out with both gauntleted hands, he grabbed hold of a crack in the rocky grounds and hung on. The wind slammed him down then, rattling him inside his armor.

The pressure wave passed over in another second, leaving Garroway and the other Marines gasping but more or less unscathed. He picked up his laser rifle, checking the settings. “What the hell was that?” someone yelled over the tactical link.

“The bastards downed another Dragon,” someone else shouted back.

Garroway looked up into the turbulent overcast. The blast had wiped the circling Dragons from the sky. Four were returning now, but one other had vanished.

“Move in, Marines!” Valdez ordered. “Hit that gateway, bearing two-one-five!”

Garroway turned his helmet, watching the bearing indicator numbers sweep around to the indicated direction. There was something there. …

He thought-clicked his helmet magnification to ten times and could make out the gateway Valdez was talking about. It looked as though a portion of the rock wall above the ledge LZ had been cut away with a high-energy beam of some sort, leaving a deep crevice. Rock had flowed like water there before cooling and hardening once more, leaving smoothly shaped basaltic flowstone. Within that smooth-walled break in the cliff, a high, narrow, rectangular opening plunged into blackness. His helmet radar confirmed that it was indeed a gateway of some sort, open for at least twenty meters back into the mountain. Elsewhere on the cliff face, to either side of the gate, red light gleamed from slit windows cut into rock—gun ports, he guessed, from which the defenders were sweeping the LZ with deadly fire.

Basic tactical doctrine downloaded into Garroway’s implant during boot camp was clear. When you’re in the open and in danger of getting your ass shot off, move! NNTs sang in his blood, his brain, his thoughts. He thought-clicked his fear down another notch and started running, pounding across the scorched and broken rock surface of the ledge toward the gate.

The other Marines in the ARLT were sweeping forward as well, armored figures to his left and right. His helmet warned of movement ahead. …

He was only a few meters away from the gateway in the rock when figures began boiling out of the tunnel and from openings in the ground to either side. It took him a chilling moment to realize that the shapes were not human.

Humanoid, certainly … but shorter than men, most of them, with oddly articulated arms and legs and an odd, forward-leaning manner of holding themselves as they leaped into battle. They didn’t run so much as bound, with powerful leaps driven by strongly muscled legs. What he noticed about them most, though, was their eyes, large and gold, with horizontally and jaggedly slit pupils. They wore an oddly mismatched collection of armor, those that wore anything at all, primitive armor almost laughably clumsy and piecemeal compared with the Marines’ Mark VIIs. And though a few carried odd-looking guns, most were armed with spears, razor-tipped lances, swords, and even war clubs. It was like stepping from a twenty-third-century battlefield into something out of the Middle Ages … worse, like a fantasy in some virtual role-playing sim.

Primitive they might be, but there were a hell of a lot of them, too many to count.

And they were rushing to meet the Marine charge head-on.

17

25 JUNE 2148

ARLT Command Section, Dragon

One

Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

1645 hours ST

Another Dragon gone, snapped out of the air by a burst of plasma from that damned mountaintop. Four aircraft left out of the original eight.

Warhurst thought he saw the pattern, though. The mountain fortress could fire at targets in any direction and within about 140 degrees of straight up. That meant that targets within a few kilometers of the mountain’s base, including the entire LZ, were safe from direct fire. Dragonfly Two, however, had circled far enough away from the side of the mountain to bring it into the defense complex’s kill zone. Secondary fringe effects of the weapon’s shots—blast, heat, overpressure, radiation—were all threats to units inside minimum range, especially aircraft, but not so deadly that they could not be countered. Armored troops in the open need only hunker down to be more or less safe; the blast effects were rough on airborne units, but the Marine flyers were good at what they did, and the TAS-L Dragonfly was arguably the most rugged aircraft in the sky.

He was already uploading what he’d learned, seen, and guessed to Major DuBoise, and she was passing it back down in distilled form to her surviving pilots. They would have to carefully balance their flight paths, close enough and low enough to avoid becoming targets for the Ahannu gun, yet high enough and far enough out to avoid being smashed by the shock wave from the next shot.

On the ground, the Marines had moved in close to what appeared to be the entrance into the mountain and encountered a wave of Ahannu troops.

This, he decided, was where the Marines would earn their pay.

ARLT Section Dragon Three

Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

1645 hours ST

John Garroway raised his LR-2120, squeezing off a burst of rapid-fire pulses when his helmet display flashed red on an acquired target. An Ahannu ten meters in front of him shrieked and staggered back into the crowded front ranks of its companions, the elaborately molded plastron of its bronze body armor exploding in glittering motes of white-hot liquid metal. The Ahannu mass continued surging forward, enveloping the dead warrior and trampling it underfoot. Garroway dropped to one knee, steadying his weapon, then fired again … and again. Other Marines were firing as well, slashing into the enemy mob, and still they kept coming.

There were just too damned many of them. …

“Grenades!” Lieutenant Kerns yelled over the tac link. “Use your M-12s!”

A dangerous option at such close range, but the only one going against such a numerous and densely packed enemy. Garroway thought-clicked his weapon link, engaging the 20mm underbarrel grenade launcher, then setting it to slow full-auto. He braced the rifle’s stock against his hip and pressed the firing button, swinging the weapon slowly from left to right.

The M-12 fired with a heavy thud-thud-thud, loosing three rounds per second, each shot slamming the rifle’s butt against his armor. Each spin-stabilized round detonated on contact with rock, armor, or flesh with a cheerful lack of discrimination, filling the air with dust, smoke, and a thin scarlet mist of Ahannu blood and body parts.

The Ahannu warriors kept charging, dying by the tens, then by the hundreds, with every few paces. A number of them carried poles holding vertically hung banners, something like the sashimono of feudal Japan. They seemed to designate units; banner colors ranged from red and scarlet to orange, brown, and yellow, and each bore a different alien symbol at its center, geometric designs laid out in sharp, black brush strokes. Most, Garroway saw, carried blade weapons of various types. The ones with rifles were the most obvious first targets, and few of them got more than a few meters toward the Marine ranks before being ripped apart by explosive 20mm rounds.

Still, it was a near thing, that desperate firefight in the shadow of the alien mountain. The Marines were putting down a deadly fusillade of high-explosive death, blasting the close-packed ranks of charging Ahannu warriors, but the enemy horde was spilling out of countless hidden doorways and crevices in the mountainside and closing in from all sides. The Marines closest to the mountain gateway had to begin letting their flanks fall back, pulling into a circle, creating a perimeter to keep the charging mob at bay.

And Marines were being hit now by incoming small arms fire. Each time an Ahannu warrior dropped a rifle when it died, one of its companions would scoop up the weapon and keep coming, firing as it leaped across the high-piled stacks of its slain fellows. The smaller Ahannu weapons couldn’t penetrate a Mark VII battlesuit, but they had a kind of a gauss railgun, its two-meter length unwieldy for the short Ahannu warriors, and it packed enough power at close range to punch through Marine laminate armor like a high-powered laser. The sound was a hideous cacophony of cracking explosions mingled with the eerie shrieks, wails, and screams of the Ahannu and the deeper, ragged yells of the Marines.

Garroway’s entire universe was narrowed down to a tiny slice of ground a few meters across, a space filled with dust and smoke and bodies and the staccato flash and bang of 20mm grenade charges detonating in strings. Lance Corporal Patricia Brandt was on Garroway’s left, and Hollingwood was on his right, both Marines leaning into their weapons as they hosed the oncoming charge with grenades. At this range there was no point in locking targets for guided RPG smartrounds; they simply pointed and fired, and the grenades smashed through Ahannu armor, skin, and bone at eight hundred meters per second, often before the grenade ramjet engines could even ignite.

“Heads down, Forty-four!” a voice called over the tactical link. An instant later a shrill sound like tearing paper hissed overhead, and the rock wall tunnel vented a savage, ground-shaking blast filled with flying Ahannu and shredded, scarlet-bloody meat.

“Way to go, Sandy!” someone yelled. “Sandy” was Sergeant Thor Sanderval, the platoon’s sniper, taking pot-shots at the gateway with an MD-30 from his lander pod. From the blast effects, Garroway guessed he must be firing mass-driver bomblets instead of the usual steel-jacketed depleted uranium rounds. The rock walls of the gateway crevice had amplified the small grenade’s detonation into something resembling a shell from an old-style artillery fieldpiece.

A moment later a whirling blast of hot wind and swirling dust enveloped the Marines, and Garroway looked up at the howl of an incoming aircraft. One of the Dragonflies was balancing down on shrieking ventral thrusters, hovering as close to the mountainside as its pilot dared, spraying the Ahannu troops with pulsed laser fire from its chin turret and pod-launched, special-munitions bomblets. Shotgun rounds exploded meters above the Ahannu hordes, slicing through dozens of screaming warrior fanatics.

But those warrior fanatics still had the initiative, were still coming despite everything the Marines could throw at them. Garroway’s grenade magazine bleeped its dry warning; five more rounds and he would be empty. He switched back to laser fire and burned down a charging Ahannu waving a wickedly curved sword.

Too late, he saw a second Ahannu already bounding high in the air, leaping above the line of crouching Marines, firing his two-meter railgun straight down as he sailed overhead. Garroway fired and missed; the Ahannu landed behind him, spun, raised his rifle …

… and sagged forward in a crumpling heap as Gunny Valdez pulled a gore-dripping Marine combat knife from the warrior’s back.

And suddenly it was very quiet.

The charging Ahannu, what was left of them, had vanished as abruptly as they’d appeared, leaving piled-high heaps of blast-mangled bodies behind. “Goddess!” Garroway said. He slapped Hollingwood’s shoulder. “Did you see Gunny with that knife?” Battle lust still sang in his blood; he felt wild and hot and flushed, and incredibly proud of what his squad leader had just done.

Hollingwood didn’t respond, and Garroway took another look. That last Ahannu’s shot from overhead had punched through the back of Hollingwood’s helmet, leaving a fist-sized hole in the dark metal and a visor opaque with blood.

“Oh, shit!” He double-checked the armor’s med sensors and confirmed that Hollingwood was dead.

His battle lust drained away with that realization, leaving Garroway very weak and very scared in the middle of the dust and smoke-fogged carnage.

Combat Information Center

IST Derna, approaching Ishtar orbit

1712 hours ST

Ramsey watched the battle come to its abrupt resolution from the vantage point of a URV-180 battlefield drone, circling a hundred meters above the dust and chaos and death below. The remaining Ahannu warriors seemed to stop almost in mid-stride, as though yanked back by invisible leashes, then scrambled for cover in the surrounding rocks.

“Are you getting those trapdoor locations, Cassius?” he asked.

“Of course, Colonel.”

“Good. There’re too many of them for me to keep track of. That mountain face must be honeycombed with the things.”

“I have noted 217 distinct openings, not counting the main gate,” the AI said. “Individual tunnels appear to be less than half a meter in diameter, too narrow to admit a Marine in full armor. It will require special tactics to clear them.”

“Roger that.” Special tactics. The term embraced a number of distinct possibilities, none of them pleasant to think about. Sending small-framed Marines without body armor into those holes was one. Tunnel rat duty was never popular, though Ramsey had no doubt there’d be ample volunteers. Casualties would be high, however, and too large a percentage of his force would be tied down for too long. That was not a cost-effective action.

The use of chemical or biological agents was another possibility. CB warfare hadn’t been used on Earth for centuries, originally due to moral injunctions against them and later because combat armor and effective decon countermeasures rendered them useless on the modern battlefield. The Ahannu weren’t using sealed armor, however, and were vulnerable. On the other hand, Ahannu biology was still poorly understood, and a gas or bacterial agent would have to be specially tailored to their biochemistry to be effective. There wasn’t time for that … or proper research facilities on board the Derna.

Of course, a few things were known about the Ahannu. They did breathe, for instance, and filling those tunnels with smoke might drive them out. Might. How long could they hold their breath? Again, not enough data.

Besides, Ahannu moral codes, beliefs, and psychology were even more poorly understood than their biology. Ramsey’s orders included a most particular injunction against jeopardizing PanTerra’s chances of establishing useful and viable relations with the Ahannu after the mission’s primary objectives were met. If gassing them in their holes meant they would begin viewing humans as monsters or war criminals, the PanTerran people might not be able to pick up the pieces.

He made a mental note to have a noumenal conference with both Gavin Norris and Dr. Hanson. If they had any further information not included in the regular briefing downloads …

In any case, Ramsey wasn’t eager to gas the critters. The MIEU One’s mission was one of coercion, not extermination. They needed to convince the Ahannu to accept a Terran presence on Ishtar, to release their Sag-ura slaves … and, just possibly, to be willing to deal with PanTerra on matters of trade, research, and cultural exchange. Besides, Ramsey had no desire to go down in history as the man who’d annihilated the first sentient species to be encountered among the stars, and a poorly controlled or vectored CB agent could do just that. No, there had to be another way.

Other special tactics included the use of robots—no good, since HK gunwalkers didn’t possess the requisite programming. Teleoperating the things was out too, since control signals wouldn’t penetrate rock. Besides, there were fewer HKs with the MIEU than there were tunnels, and they needed to be saved for other duties.

Nano agents? As with biological agents, not enough was known about Ahannu physiology. Infecting them all with microscopic machines that put them to sleep or made them decide to quit fighting was great in theory but still well beyond the technical capabilities of nanotech programming specialists.

No … in this case, “special tactics” probably meant doing things the old-fashioned way, using high explosives to seal each and every one of the tunnel entrances down there. Smoke might work … and if the Krakatoa tunnel complex was as extensive as he feared, there might be no alternative but to use tunnel rats.

In other words, they would use the same tactics that Marines had used on Saipan and Iwo Jima, in Vietnam and Colombia, in Cuba and Vladivostok—slow, dirty, and all too often, costly. It would be simple enough to identify the tunnel entrances on the outside of the mountain. Cassius had already managed that. But the labyrinth inside Krakatoa was going to be something else entirely.

“How long do you expect the clean-up to take, Colonel?” General King asked.

Ramsey started. He’d been so deep in the noumenal awareness, he’d forgotten King’s presence there, looking over his virtual shoulder. “No way to tell, sir,” he replied over the link. “Our people have to go inside that mountain. They’ll have a better picture once they do.”

“We can’t afford to screw around with fanatic holdouts.”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“We have a little over five hours—”

“Until we come over Krakatoa’s horizon. Yes, sir.” He was becoming annoyed with King’s hovering, dithering worry.

King missed the exasperation in Ramsey’s mental tone—or chose to ignore it. “Do you think we’ll have to use the cork?”

“Too early to tell, sir.”

“Damn it, Ramsey, you’re no help. Who’s the ARLT commander. … Warhurst, is it?”

“Yes, sir—”

“How do I raise him directly? Ah … there’s the command channel. …”

Ramsey felt King opening up the private link with Captain Warhurst.

“Warhurst? This is General King. You are not to use the cork unless I give explicit orders to that effect.”

Ramsey didn’t hear Warhurst’s reply. Abruptly, he pulled out of the noumenon, returning his full awareness to Derna’s CIC. King was floating on the other side of the compartment, secured in his harness. “General King. A private word, sir? Outside the noumenon?”

After a moment, King’s eyes blinked, then opened. Ramsey unsnapped his harness and pushed off from his console, drifting across the compartment to a point near King.

“This is highly irregular, Colonel,” King told him as Ramsey caught a hand grip on the overhead and pulled himself to a halt.

“And everything we say over the noumenal link is recorded by Cassius and the Derna’s AI,” Ramsey replied. “I wanted this to be private.”

King arched a skeptical eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Sir, we have to let our people down there do their job. Anything else is micromanagement bullshit and is going to jeopardize the mission. Let’s let it play out and see what happens. Sir.”

“I could order you to stand down, you know,” King told him. “Insubordination! Those aren’t our people on Ishtar, Colonel. They’re the Marine Corps’ people, and since I am the senior Marine officer within eight light-years, they are my people. Is that understood?”

“With all due respect, General, that’s not how the chain of command works. As regimental commander, I have authority over my units, and that includes Captain Warhurst and the ARLT. You have overall command of the MIEU, and it is your job, therefore, to determine overall strategies that you then implement through me. Sir.”

“Are you telling me my job, Colonel?”

“I am reminding the general that our people at the LZ know what they’re doing and that micromanagement will only confuse, slow, and hamper operations. Sir.”

King opened his mouth as if to argue, then seemed to think better of it. “The success of this mission, our very survival, depends on Warhurst and the ARLT, Colonel. At the same time, however, my orders require me to secure certain potential assets on Ishtar, assets of considerable value to … to Earth. Using a cork would guarantee the destruction of that planetary defense complex down there. But if we can find some sort of control center inside that thing, or access the computer that controls it. …”

“The ARLT officers and senior NCOs have all been well-briefed, sir. And we have ten people down there with special download programming for dealing with any instrumentation they may find. If there’s any way to capture the facility intact, they’ll manage it. If not. …” He shrugged, the motion turning him slightly in zero g. He pulled himself back to avoid bumping the general with his feet. “If not, they use the cork in another four hours. That’s the plan, as we all agreed to it.”

“God help us if this goes wrong, Colonel. God help us all.”

King, Ramsey noticed, was sweating heavily, the droplets of moisture beading up and drifting through the air like tiny, gleaming words when he moved his head. He’s terrified, Ramsey thought. What the hell is going on with this guy?

ARLT Section Dragon Three

Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

1715 hours ST

Garroway had stopped feeling much of anything. His emotions during the past few minutes had seesawed wildly between terror and elation, and Hollingwood’s death had left him feeling utterly spent. He watched in numb emptiness as a spidery-looking walker picked its way over the steaming piles of Ahannu bodies and vanished into the gateway crevice.

“Garroway,” Valdez said. “You okay?”

“I … think so.”

“Brandt bought it. I’m moving Sergeant Foster to the PG team. From now on, you’re with my fire team. Understand?”

He nodded, then realized his squad leader couldn’t see the nod in his helmet. “Uh, yes, Gunny. Aye aye.”

“Good man.”

The import of Valdez’s words was only now beginning to sink in. Second Squad had been organized as four fire teams of three Marines apiece. His fire team had consisted of Hollingwood and Sergeant Cheryl Foster. Lance Corporal Brandt had been teamed, along with PFC Cawley, with Honey Deere and his plasma gun. Brandt’s death put a hole in the plasma gun fire team, which needed three experienced operators—gunner, assistant gunner, and spotter/security. Foster was filling that hole, which left Garroway without a fireteam. Valdez’s trio, called the squad command team, included Dunne and Pressley. Now he was replacing Pressley in the SCT.

The reshuffle made sense, he supposed, given the need for three experienced hands on the plasma gun. Still, he felt a nagging worry that Valdez was doing it this way just to keep a close eye on him.

“TBC in place and ready to fire,” Valdez called over the tac net. “Fire in the hole!” An instant later the crevice in the mountainside lit up with a fierce, blue-white light. The shock wave washing over the Marines crouching outside was as thunderous as the detonation from Krakatoa’s peak.

Rock was still clattering down the mountainside when Lieutenant Kerns shouted, “Go! Go! Go!”

Garroway scrambled to his feet and advanced toward the crevice. “Mind the walls,” Valdez warned. “They’re still hot.”

Hot enough, indeed, to melt any part of Garroway’s armor that happened to touch them, though the special insulation on his boots would let him cross the entrance floor without burning his feet. The rock underfoot was oddly plastic, clinging to him like heavy mud with each step. The Thermal Breaching Charge, teleoperated into the gateway by a small remote walker, had momentarily concentrated the heat of a small star against a portion of the blocking door less than a millimeter across. Much of the gate, as well as several tons of surrounding rock, had been turned into plasma and a great deal of energy, leaving behind a larger, gaping hole with walls and floor still incandescent. Air roared into the tunnel as the Marines filed through, entering the larger chamber beyond.

“We’re looking for a control center of some kind,” Valdez told her squad. “But stay alert. These passageways’ll be full of Frogs.”

Garroway thought-clicked his light and heat sensitivity up a few notches. It was dark in the high-vaulted cavern beyond the entrance, with only a dim, reddish glow filtering down from somewhere high overhead. With enhanced vision, he could dimly see the far walls of the place, black and rippled, as though the rock had momentarily flowed like water before hardening into something like glass.

The TBC’s effects hadn’t reached this far inside the mountain, he knew. These chambers in the heart of Krakatoa must have been melted out of the solid volcanic rock millennia ago by a technology at least as advanced as what humankind currently possessed. He overlaid his surroundings with a virtual image drawn from the maps of the tunnel complex stored in his helmet memory, and dim green ghosts of passages and rooms and chambers floated in the darkness around him, beyond the shadowy rock walls. Hot spots from his IR sensors pinpointed places where some of those tunnels opened into the main chamber. Other Marines were already fanning out in several directions to seal those potentially lethal doorways.

He kept looking ahead, though, wondering if some of those tunnels up there connected with the core of the mountain. Could the Frogs vent some of the titanic fury of their big weapon into these passageways? Not a pleasant thought …

“Second Squad,” Valdez called. “With me!”

Garroway trotted along after Valdez and Dunne, trying to look in all directions at once. This was a wonderful place for an ambush, if there was going to be one. …

It was then that a portion of the chamber wall dissolved and the Marines were enveloped by hordes of Ahannu warriors.

And this time they had no hope of help from air support.

ARLT Command Section, Dragon

One

Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

1725 hours ST

“They’re coming! Open fire!”

“Third Squad! First Squad! Form perimeter! Second Squad, get your asses the hell back here! You’re going to be cut off!”

“Mathorne! Where’s Mathorne?”

“Get those PGs firing, damn it!”

“Corpsman! Marine down!”

“Second Squad! Damn it, you’re being cut off!”

Captain Warhurst listened to the excited shouts and commands coming from inside the mountain and wondered if he could pull the plug.

The “plug” was a Mark XVII laser-plasma-fired backpack fusion demolition device. There were six of them assigned to the ARLT, and four were currently being worn by four different Marines inside the mountain—Gunnery Sergeants Mathorne and Valdez, Staff Sergeant Ostergaard, and Lieutenant Kerns. The remaining two were stored on the lander modules for Dragon One and Dragon Six. Any or all could be detonated by the Marine carrying one, with the appropriate firing codes provided by one of the LM AIs, by Warhurst himself from Lander One, or by the Command Constellation still on board Derna. It was believed that one device, with a yield of 0.7 megaton, detonated inside Objective Krakatoa, would collapse enough of the entire mountain to render the Ahannu planetary defense complex useless.

The plug was decidedly an option of last resort, one to be used only if there was no other way to protect the incoming transports. The things could be given a time delay or triggered immediately. The hope, of course, was that one of the Marines could leave a warhead where it would do enough good and give the ARLT time to evacuate to a safe distance, but no one in on the planning for Operation Spirit of Humankind believed that escape would be possible. The plugs turned the ARLT assault into a suicide mission.

Worse, from Warhurst’s point of view, only the Marines actually wearing the deadly packs knew what they carried. The rest of the Marines down there didn’t know, and that was just plain wrong, Warhurst thought. A man or woman who was going to die when a friend thought-clicked a command trigger ought to know what was going to happen … and that instantaneous incineration meant success for the rest of the invasion.

But knowledge of the Mark XVIIs had been locked under need-to-know restrictions. Someone higher up the chain of command had decided that knowing about that part of the operation might degrade unit combat efficiency.

That still didn’t make it right.

Four warheads were inside the underground complex now, totaling 2.8 megatons. If he was ordered to fire those warheads in the next few minutes … could he? No problem if everyone inside was dead when he punched it, but combat rarely worked out that neatly. There would be survivors in there, not to mention the Marines still outside the mountain who might be caught in the blast. None of them would know. …

And as the battle inside the mountain increased in fury, Warhurst knew the moment of decision was almost on him.

Damn the waiting … and damn the fact that he was stuck out here, instead of inside that mountain with his people.

18

25 JUNE 2148

ARLT Section Dragon Three

Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar

1727 hours ST

Second Squad had been ahead of the others when the Ahannu warriors began boiling out of hidden entrances on all sides of the underground chamber. As a black sea of leaping, thronging figures swirled around them, they were in serious danger of being cut off from the ARLT main body.

Garroway dropped to one knee between Well Dunne and Gunny Valdez, pumping 20mm grenades into the horde of attackers, using single shots to conserve his dwindling ammo. Many of these new Ahannu, he noticed, were different from the ones outside—taller, more muscular, and much darker in color, the green-black of their skin making their large, golden eyes even more prominent in the dim light.

These attackers, in fact, were quite different from those he’d studied in downloads on board the Derna. A different species? There wasn’t any data on the topic one way or another. Their body armor looked heavier, more ornate … and seemed to provide better protection from shrapnel and laser bursts.

But they could still be killed. Explosions chopped and tore through the packed ranks of the attackers. The onslaught wavered as the Ahannu in the lead ranks hesitated, unwilling to press in closer to the deadly ring of fire laid down by the hard-pressed Marines.

Then Garroway’s M-12 chimed a tone indicating it was out of rounds.

He reached for his belt pack and pulled out his last forty-round magazine. “I’m almost out of grenades,” he told the others. “One mag left!”

“Same here,” Vinita added.

“I’m out,” Chuck Cawley said. “Nothing left but light!”

The attacking wall surged closer. And beyond the massed ranks, Garroway saw a larger shadow, a hulking, humanoid form rising above the smaller Ahannu like a giant, with massive forearms, stooped shoulders, and gold eyes tiny compared to the broad swath of face, almost hidden deep within bony sockets. It carried a long and clumsy-looking weapon, another gauss gun of some kind, but so long that no smaller Ahannu could have wielded it.

“My God!” Garvey screamed. “What the hell is that?”

“Just kill it!” Foster barked. “Pour it on!”

Laser fire snapped and flashed across the monster’s heavily armored form, eliciting a scream like doomsday. It raised its weapon; Garroway felt the high-velocity round shriek low overhead, felt the concussion behind him.

“Second Squad!” Honey Deere yelled. “Hit the deck!”

Garroway threw himself forward, landing facedown on the rock floor. An instant later lightning snapped and glared overhead with a stuttering burst of thunder. Outside, he’d not noticed the squad’s plasma gun in action in all the swirling noise and confusion. Inside this enclosed chamber, however, the rapid-fire bolts of charged plasma banished darkness in a dazzling explosion of light and sound.

Garroway felt the noise fade out as his helmet compensated, and his visual feed darkened as the input filters snapped in. Deere’s plasma gun loosed bolts in such rapid succession that the effect was of a single flickering bolt of lightning.

And whatever that lightning touched vanished, exploding in clouds of vapor and sprays of blood and charred tissue. The giant Ahannu collapsed in a heap; smaller Ahannu were scrambling back, falling over one another in their rush to escape.

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