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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.