Читать книгу The Complete Legacy Trilogy: Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 11

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.