Читать книгу The Complete Inheritance Trilogy: Star Strike, Galactic Corps, Semper Human - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 60

“Hang on to your lunch!” Lieutenant Kesar Eden yelled over the intercom. “We’re punching it!”

Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst lay cradled in his fighting position, linked into the Ontos’ combat system. There was a savage thump, and then the John A. Lejeune’s launch bay fell away around him, the carrier dwindling rapidly astern as the MCA-71 Ontos accelerated at fifty gravities.

Ontos was the Greek word for “thing,” and this was the second time in the long history of the Corps that a Marine weapons system had borne that unlikely name. Eight hundred years before, during the 1950s, the Marine Corps had developed a light tracked vehicle specifically as a fast-moving antitank weapon. Massing just 9 tons, and squeezing three crew members inside a hull compartment just four feet high, that first Ontos, designated the M50A1, had mounted six 106mm recoilless rifles on the upper deck of the vehicle. The idea had been to allow it to engage enemy armor with six rapid shots, guaranteeing a kill; its speed, then, would let it withdraw to cover, allowing the exposed recoilless rifles to be reloaded.

No one, however, had quite known what to do with the ugly little vehicle. In fact, the Army had cancelled their original order when the prototype testing was complete. The Marines, however, had accepted almost 300 of the vehicles, taking them to war in a place called Vietnam—an environment for the most part lacking enemy armor to serve as targets.

The Marines were well known for their ability to adapt to changing conditions and battlefield needs. The Ontos was an awkward beast, it turned out, unable to carry much ammunition, and requiring the crew to exit the vehicle in order to reload, making them vulnerable to enemy fire. Even so, it proved popular with its crews, who noted that frequently the enemy would break and run as soon as one of the ugly little beasts arrived in the combat zone. Those six recoilless rifles fired beehive rounds, each shell consisting of a bundle of one hundred darts that sliced through jungle foliage with devastating effect, turning the vehicle into what had been called the world’s biggest shotgun. Used against bunkers and against enemy infantry, the Ontos provided Marine riflemen with effective close-fire support at the company level.

Always considered an ugly duckling, however, that first Ontos had never been accepted by decision-makers above the company level, and the weapon system was withdrawn from service after it had seen only four years of combat service. For decades after, the Ontos had been something of an embarrassment to those tasked with designing and procuring new weapons.

Eight centuries later, a new Marine weapons system had been introduced to the Corps bearing the ancient Greek name for “thing.” Part vehicle, part artillery, it was designed to both provide close infantry support in combat—especially in zeroand low-gravity environments, and also to serve as transport for a Marine squad, getting them safely into combat, then providing artillery support as they made their assault. The new Ontos was undeniably ugly, as awkward-looking as its ancient predecessor, flat, stubby, and massing 383 tons, with multiply jointed legs and a ball-mounted forward blast head that gave it the appearance of a huge and ungainly insect. Twelve armored Marines and their equipment could be carried aft in the lightly armored belly. The vehicle’s “wings” mounted a pair of hivel accelerator cannons that could fire antimatter rounds, tactical nukes, nano-D canisters, or conventional high explosives.

Space was sharply limited on board the transport, however. Warhurst and one other gunner were squeezed in to either side of the vehicle commander in a dorsal sponson forward, behind the blast-head mount, and cyberlinked into the Ontos’ command network. The Marines aft were as tightly cocooned as their counterparts in the SAP pods now being launched from the Samar. Like the ancient Ontos, no one really knew what to do with the modern weapon of that name, but the Corps had adapted it especially for ship-boarding actions. Four, including Warhurst’s vehicle, had been accelerated from the Lejeune’s launch bay, and were vectoring in on the PanEuropean monitor Rommel now.

Like aerospace fighters, the Ontos operated off of a Solenergia ZPE quantum-power transfer unit. Using the same principle as a Quantum-Coupled Communications system, the ZPE transfer unit used quantum entanglement to transmit energy from one point to another, without actually traversing the space in between. Extremely high energies were drawn from the zero-point field taps on board the Lejeune and the Samar, but routed directly to field-entangled power receivers on board individual F/A-4140s and the MCA-71 Ontos transports, without the possibility of that transmission being blocked or even detected.

The system had some important trade-offs. The advantage, of course, was that the massive quantum power taps could be left back on board the capital ships. The disadvantage, though, was that if the Lejeune or the Samar were knocked out of action, their orphaned offspring would become dead in space, with only their relatively low-powered on-board antimatter converter systems from which to draw on for life support and maneuvering.

All of that was of less importance to Warhurst now than was the simple fact that he was back in action at last.

When he left Recruit Training Command, there’d been speculation that he would end up in a rifle company with a number of his former recruits. The 1MIEF personnel department had killed that idea, however, and in fairly short order. Marine recruits were instilled with the absolute and unvarying principle of the Corps—Marines work together, as a unit. However, learning that basic lesson as they go through boot camp, most Marines reach graduation hating their DI. Respecting him, yes, but hating him nonetheless.

It wasn’t that 1MIEF’s command constellation was afraid that some former recruit of Warhurst’s was going to get even some night on deployment. Platoon AIs were good watchdogs when it came to that sort of thing. They were conscious, though, of the need for a smoothly functioning structure at the squad, platoon, and company levels. Hatred—or fear—of a squad mate during a combat situation when everyone needed to work together smoothly, as a unit, might get Marines killed.

So Gunny Warhurst had been assigned to an Ontos crew, a demanding billet that required experienced combat veterans, rather than newbies. The platoon’s fresh meat would do best in assault platoons where they could draw on one another—and on the old hands in each platoon—for support and strength. Serving a gun station on an Ontos required more seasoning, and the ability to link very closely indeed with the vehicle commander, and with the other gunner on board.

Warhurst’s relief at being in action again had more, much more, to do with his need to get away from Mars and the still-burning pain of having been evicted from his family. The psych AIs at Ares RTC had tried to counsel him through the rough parts, but he honestly couldn’t tell now if they’d done a damned thing to help.

He knew he was still spending way too much time uselessly rehearsing conversations in his head. He so wanted his family—especially Julie—to understand, to, to what? To come to their senses and feel how he needed the Corps, to understand that this was his family as much as the Tamalyn-Danner line marriage, because, damn it, the Corps was a part of who and what he was, that he could no more discard it than he could discard his own heart.

He was beginning to realize that a lot of his grief was centered less on losing Julie, Eric, Donal, and Callie than it was on being rejected. Dumped. As though he meant nothing to any of them, had contributed nothing, had been nothing. When he thought about how they’d cast him aside, it was all he could do to see through that haze of enveloping white pain … a searing mingling of grief and loss, of fury and hatred and broken ego and insulted honor and yearning desire.

He hated them all, now. And he still wanted them to come back, to say it had all been a mistake.

He still wanted to love them. …

Damn it, he was doing it again. Focus, you idiot! he snarled at himself, furious. Pay attention to what you’re doing or you’ll get us all killed!

The Ontos had vaulted through the emptiness between the Lejeune and the enemy monitor, shifting vectors wildly and rapidly in order to make things as difficult as possible for the Rommel’s fire-control AIs. Drawing on the ZPE energy tap on board the Lejeune, the Ontos could afford the added power-hungry luxury of phase-shifting, which made the enemy’s job even harder in terms of target acquisition and lock, and provided some measure of defense against beams and shrapnel.

But not complete protection, he noted, as a small hivel slug struck the Ontos amidships. He felt the staggering shock as a few grams of depleted uranium passed through the ship. Most of the released kinetic energy, fortunately, was dissipated by the Ontos’ phase-shifted state, but enough leaked through to jar his teeth.

He stayed focused on his link, however. They were still flying, so he ignored the impact, figuring that there was nothing he could do about it except to keep doing his job, which was to try to track incoming missiles or armored enemy troops or gun or sensor emplacements on the monitor’s hull and knock them out with hivel cannon fire.

The ship’s AI had already highlighted the turret that had loosed that slug. He dragged his mental targeting cursor over the dome and thought-clicked the number two gun starboard, sending a stream of high-velocity rounds slashing through the turret in great, pulsing gouts of white heat before it could fire another shot.

As it neared its objective, as the Rommel loomed huge in his downloaded mental vision, the Ontos’ hull began morphing into its landing configuration, wings and weapons outstretched, clawed legs extended, blast head forward and down, seeking contact.

Then the Ontos was on the monitor’s hull with a heavy, ringing thud, its ugly blast head extending and dropping to bring a torch of plasma energy, as hot as the core of a sun, into contact with the monitor’s armor cladding.

Under that searing assault, the outer nanolayers rippled and flowed as they tried to distribute the heat, then burst away in clouds of vapor, exposing the tender ceramics and alloys beneath. The Ontos’ claws dug in and held, as the current of vaporizing metals and composites howled past like a hurricane wind, expending itself in vacuum. A crater formed, then deepened, widening, as the Ontos thing continued to eat its way through the skin and into the heart of the enemy ship.

The Rommel carried fighters—not as many as the Lejeune, but enough to provide some measure of close defense against such tactics as the Ontos was now employing. His AI warned of two bogies swinging up and around over the horizon of the monitor’s hull, identifying them as PanEuropean Épée fighters—robotic craft that were exceptionally fast and maneuverable because they had no flesh and blood on board to coddle.

Warhurst was screaming as he brought both starboard-side guns to bear on the stooping targets. …