Читать книгу The Complete Legacy Trilogy: Star Corps, Battlespace, Star Marines - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 23

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.