Читать книгу Battlespace - Ian Douglas, Matthew Taylor - Страница 21

“All right, Marines. Listen up!”

Garroway looked up from his LR-2120, partially disassembled on the table before him, to hear what Staff Sergeant Dunne had to say. Around him, the steady buzz of conversation among other Marines in the company died away.

“Gentlemen, ladies,” Dunne went on, “first off … happy fucking birthday!”

The announcement was met with cheers and shouts of Ooh-rah! and fists pounding on tables. The tenth of November was the anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Marines—originally the Continental Marines—by an act of Congress in 1775, a date celebrated by Marines around the world and far, far beyond.

“Festivities begin at 1900 hours tonight at the mess hall. Cake, ice cream, and pogey bait will be the order of the day.”

He waited for a fresh round of cheers to die down. “Okay, okay, simmer down. Next order of business. The waiting is over. The Nergs are going to war.”

That raised a low-voiced murmur of excitement. Nergs was a new battlename for the Marines, another in the long list of nom d’guerres bestowed by enemies and friends alike—devil dogs, leathernecks, jarheads, gyrines. Nerg, or Nergal may-I, was from the phrase, identical in both An and in ancient Sumerian, nir-gál-mè-a, which meant something like “respected in battle.” The Fighting Forty-fourth had won that accolade from the Ahannu warriors on Ishtar immediately after the desperately fought action that had ended in Ramsey’s Peace.

“Now,” Dunne went on, “the really good news. Authorization has come through for promotions for all personnel who were on the Ishtar op. You have all received an automatic advancement by one pay grade. Personnel advancing to sergeant or higher will still be expected to take the test for your new rank, but the time-in-grade requirement has been satisfied.”

There was some more cheering and a rattle of applause at that. Garroway grinned. He’d just made corporal. Decent!

“A new download is available,” Dunne went on, “coded White Star-one-one. Please open it up and take a look.”

Garroway brought up the code phrase and thought-clicked it. Immediately, he was in a noumenal space. …

Visual: Star-strewn night, gas clouds, a pair of intensely brilliant pinpoint-stars, and the vast and enigmatic loom of a ring-shaped structure, obviously huge. …

“The ring is our objective,” Dunne went on, his voice sounding in their thoughts as they studied the alien construct. “It is located in the Sirius star system, 8.6 light-years from Earth. We believe it to be a stargate, a device floating in deep space that allows instantaneous travel between stars. Those patterns of light along the rim suggest that it is inhabited. We do not know by who.”

Sirius. Garroway felt the word strike hard, like a blow to the stomach. Lynnley!

The Marine company watched in silence as the golden needle-shape emerged from the ring, accelerated, and the image was suddenly and disconcertingly lost.

“These images were transmitted ten years ago by the explorer ship Wings of Isis,” Dunne’s voice went on as the blast of static was replaced by another view of the ring. “We do not know what happened to the Isis, but we must assume she was destroyed. There’s been no word from her since these images were received.

“The Wings of Isis had a crew of 245, 30 of them Marines, as well as several AIs. We have no real hope that any of them are still alive out there—or, if they are, that they will still be alive ten years from now when we arrive in-system. However, the Marines do not abandon their own. Accordingly, MIEU-1 is being prepared to deploy to the Sirius system. Once there, we will recon the area and assess the situation. We will attempt to make contact with whoever or whatever is operating that stargate. If necessary, we will organize a boarding party, enter the artifact, rescue human survivors if any, and maintain a beachhead, providing security for a science team which will perform a threat evaluation of the structure.”

Profound silence attended this announcement. Garroway found himself grappling with a dozen questions. How big was that wheel? How were they supposed to get inside, ring a chime at the front door? What kind of defenses did the thing have? How the hell were the Marines supposed to draw up a battle plan when they didn’t even know the nature of their enemy?

But more pressing still were the unanswered—and unanswerable—questions about Lynnley.

In subjective terms, the time he’d actually been awake and not crowding the speed of light, it had been less than a year since he’d seen her last, just before he’d entered cybehibe for the voyage to Ishtar. He missed her. In his mind, she was still very much alive, alive in his recent past. The knowledge that it had been eleven years since whatever had happened out at Sirius had happened seemed completely surreal.

Dead eleven years? No. He couldn’t get his mind wrapped around that one.

The images from Sirius faded out. Garroway sat, once again, at a table in the barracks, his laser rifle partially disassembled in front of him.

“Questions?” Dunne snapped.

“Gunnery Sergeant?” Sergeant Houston said. “What if we don’t want to go?”

“Come again?”

“What if we don’t want to go? I’ve got six years in sub, twenty-six ob. I‘ve done my bit. I want out, man.”

“This is not a volunteers only mission,” Dunne replied slowly. “The brass is treating this like an ordinary deployment, with two exceptions.

“First, if you’re within one year of your scheduled retirement, you can request an exemption. Since your expected OTIS—that’s your objective time-in-service—since your OTIS will be on the order of six months to one year for this mission, you may opt for taking an early out instead.

“Second, there will also be a case review board. Anyone with special needs or hardships arising from this deployment can talk to them. I’m given to understand they will not be unreasonable, and that they will consider each application on a case-by-case basis.

“However, I would ask you to think very carefully before deciding to remain on Earth. Things are different here, now, than we knew them twenty-some years ago. If you elect to stay behind, you will be given psychological assistance, including special programming for your implants to help you … adjust.”

Again, low-voiced murmurs sounded in the room. By now, every man and woman in the room had heard about the watchdog program that had taken out six of their number the other night at the condecology in ELA, and they didn’t like it, not one bit.

“I don’t know about all of you,” Dunne added, “but I’m gonna be damned glad to get back out there!”

“We’re with you, Gunny!” Corporal Bryan called out, using Dunne’s new rank for the first time. It sounded a bit strange … but right.

“I’ve also been told to tell you,” Dunne went on, “that for those of you who stay with the MIEU, there will be an additional rank increase immediately upon returning. They’re also in the process of putting through a special payment incentive. The word is it’ll be fifty percent of your standard paycheck, above and beyond combat pay, hazardous-duty pay, and XS-duty pay.”

And that, Garroway thought, would come to a very nice sum. He took a quick moment to download the appropriate pay scale tables in his mind. Yeah … very sweet. As a corporal with over three years’ subjective in, his base pay would come to n$1724.80 per month. Fifty percent of that was an additional n$862 plus change per month. That, plus the bonus for hazardous duty, extrastellar duty, and combat …

He gave a mental whistle and wondered if that kind of money made the Marines into modern-day, high-tech mercenaries.

“Is that ob or sub, Gunny?” someone asked.

“Yeah,” someone else added with a laugh. “It does make a difference!”

“Strictly subjective time, people, just like your base pay.” There were groans in response. “Can it!” Dunne added. “It’s bad enough the government pays you while you’re sleeping your sorry lives away in cybehibe! They’re not paying you for time that shrinks to no time at all while you’re traveling at near-c!

“Any other questions?” There were none. “Carry on,” Dunne said, leaving the Marines to discuss the news.

A few—Sergeant, now Staff Sergeant, Houston and Corporal, now Sergeant, Matt Cavaco—felt that arbitrarily ordering the Marines to go to Sirius, rather than making it a volunteer-only mission—was just flat wrong. Most, though, were excited by the prospect, both for the extra pay, and because of the distinct alienation many of them were feeling from Earth. Those few who’d gotten passes to go ashore in the past few days had returned with less than happy news about the planet, and about its inhabitants. Damn, but Dunne was right. The background culture of North America had changed and in some unpleasant ways.

There was a lot else about the local scene Dunne had not mentioned, but the other Marines in the company had been discussing it endlessly for the past several days.

It wasn’t just the shifting jargon and language, the strange new religions and philosophies, or the everchanging buzz about numnum persies or zaggers, whatever the hell those were. Where to begin?

Politics were one issue. The voices calling for separation were louder, more strident, than ever. Aztlanistas had been calling for independence since well before Garroway had been born, but the debate now approached open warfare in some of the Latino slums of LA, and in the borderlands of southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Strife was building with the Québecois, too, as the Canadian winters worsened. Their claim to western Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley was less viable even than that of the Aztlanistas, since it had been the British Empire, not the United States of America, that had taken their old territories in the French and Indian Wars. Still, it made for amusing and often virulent name-calling on the public forums and news feeds.

There were more rules and regulations. Most states could now arrest and prosecute people for breaking one or another of the citizenship laws, dictums prohibiting any behavior that might disturb good social order and public decency. That sounded so much like the articles of the Uniform, Code of Military Justice—specifically the one about “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline”—that some Marines were speculating that America was now a military state. And with far more convicted criminals than prison space, more and more felons were being turned loose with specially programmed watchdog nano injected into their bloodstreams, nano that could evaluate their behavior against certain narrow parameters and administer punishment—even death—in the event of a violation. That was police-state stuff.

Scary.

And there were other problems, some of them not man-made. The weather was worse, a lot worse, than when Garroway had left Earth twenty-one years ago. Sea levels were higher, ultraviolet in the sunlight harsher, storms bigger and more dangerous. Most major coastal cities—Washington, D.C., coastal Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans—all were enclosed now by high thick seawalls, and at least partly covered over by transparent domes to keep out both the worsening ultraviolet and the periodic storm surges that otherwise would have flooded them completely. Despite that, there was serious talk about abandoning the original cores of those cities and rebuilding inland. Some coast cities, because of their terrain, could not be completely protected; New York City, San Francisco, and Seattle were in grave danger.

Manhattan, in particular, offered such a tangled and problematical geography with its rivers and associated borough-cities that the seawall and dome offered only partial protection. Fifteen years earlier, Hurricane Trevor had come ashore at the mouths of the Hudson and East rivers, causing tens of billions of newdollars’ damage. The next year, the state of New Jersey had, against riotous protests, finally moved the Statue of Liberty to artificial high ground near Secaucus before her copper body deteriorated any further.

Most forms of cancer were treatable through various nanomedical techniques—one did not go into direct sunlight any longer without nanotechnical augmentation to eyes and skin!—but skin cancer in particular cost Americans tens of billions per year in both treatment and prophylaxis.

And the ongoing deterioration of the planet’s climate appeared to be accelerating. Temperatures in the equatorial zones were rising steadily, fueling migrations of local populations to the north and south—but especially into the north. All across the globe, equatorial peoples were on the move as local government broke down and whole populations became migratory.

Scuttlebutt around the barracks had it that much of the furor over tracking down ancient alien technology among the stars was centered now on learning how to control climate on a planetary scale.

But was such an audacious goal even possible?

And then there were the religions. Always the religions. Dozens of new ones seemed to appear almost weekly, the majority of them either claiming the An were gods or that they were hell-born demons. Each new exoarcheological revelation on Earth, the Moon, Mars, or elsewhere seemed to spawn more ways of dividing humankind in the name of faith, peace, and spiritual brotherhood.

Established sects continued to splinter, sometimes violently. Within the Catholic world, Papessa and Anti-Pope continued to snipe at one another over issues ranging from how to think about the An to the use of nanomedical anagathics. Most Baptists believed the An were demonic; several new Baptist offshoots, however, continued to disagree on whether the An, like Lucifer, were fallen, or if Lucifer had somehow created them—an important theological question, since if they were fallen, then Christian missionaries sent to Ishtar might bring a few of that deluded race to the light.

Even within Garroway’s own Wiccan tradition—as easygoing and nonjudgmental faith as existed anywhere—there were bewildering new branches and offshoots disagreeing over such burning issues as whether or not the An were ancient gods, whether use of nanotechnology for special effects within ritual circles could be considered true magic or not, whether or not Christians should be held accountable for the Burning Times, and over the Rede-ethics of weather-witching, using magic to control the weather.

And finally there were the wars. Everywhere wars and more wars. Any Marine of the forty-fourth who did end up staying on Earth—if he didn’t take an early out—was going to find himself much in demand. Temperature extremes were driving many inhabitants of far-northern or equatorial regions into the somewhat more habitable latitudes in between. Anti-migration laws had resulted in open warfare and in border massacres. In just the past thirty years, Marines had deployed to Mexico and Egypt, to Siberia and the Chinese coast, to a dozen other shores and climes, fighting at one time or another troops of the Kingdom of Allah, the Chinese Hegemony, the European Federation, the Ukrainian Nationalists, Mexicans, Québecois, Brazilians, Colombians, and forces of the Pan-African Empire. The Great Jihad War of 2147 was now being called World War V. Already there was talk of a World War VI, as migrating populations, spreading famine and disease, and the collapse of national economies propelled desperate people into paradoxically suicidal bids for a better life.

The black forces of War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death were abroad in the world, and it seemed that not even the UFR/US Marines could possibly hold them in check much longer.

Earth had become as scary and as strange a place as Ishtar … worse, perhaps, since Garroway and his fellow Marines thought it was as familiar as, well, as home.

Sirius couldn’t possibly be any more alien—or more disappointing—than Earth.

Garroway was ready to go. He wanted to go, since the only people he knew—his brother and sister Marines—were also going, or most of them were. The one thing standing in his way was what he was thinking of now as unfinished business with his father.

“Hey, Gare?” Kat Vinton said, interrupting black thoughts. “What’s with the ten-thousand-meter stare?”

He blinked, then looked up at her. “Hey, Kat.”

“Hey yourself. What’s going on? Why the intense glare?”

“Sorry. I’m feeling … a bit torn.”

“Your girlfriend was onboard the Isis, I know. You told me. I’m sorry. …”

He nodded. He looked past her at the other Marines in the barracks. He felt as though he were barely holding on.

“Thanks, Kat. I still can’t believe she’s dead.” Trying to conceal the unsteady emotions within, he turned his attention, part of it, at any rate, back to the disassembled laser rifle before him. He’d already cleaned the optical connector heads and replaced both the pulse-timer chip and the circuit panel pinpointed as dead by his initial diagnostic check. All that remained was to put the thing together, a task Marine recruits were drilled at until they could do it, quite literally, blindfolded.

“Maybe she isn’t. We rescued the Marines and scientists on Ishtar after they’d been hiding out in the mountains for ten years, right?”

“I guess,” he told her. He concentrated for a moment on connecting the barrel to the charge assembly. “Pretty grim stuff.”

“But this is different. You saw those downloads.”

“Yeah.” he snapped home the final piece, the pistol grip clicking firmly into the base housing. He set the completed rifle aside. “Grim isn’t half of it. If we haven’t heard from them in all this time, I don’t think we ever will.”

She reached out and touched his shoulder. “Oh, Gare. I’m so sorry.”

It was passing strange, talking to Kat about this. Lynnely had been his lover, and they’d reached the point of discussing marriage before he’d shipped out onboard the Derna for Ishtar. Kat had been his fuck-buddy since Ishtar … his lover, yes, but without the romantic overtones or plans for a serious long-term social connection. When your entire list of social contacts—those you could talk to, at any rate—were fellow Marines, such arrangements became common. Standing regulations frowned on sexual fraternization among enlisted personnel, but in practice both officers and NCOs alike ignored the affairs and relationships that inevitably blossomed among the lower ranks.

Marines were only human, after all, even if they rarely cared to admit it.

“Well, at least we can go out there and kick the ass of whoever did it,” Garroway told her.

“Assuming they have asses to kick,” Kat replied. “Yes.” She cocked her head to one side. “What else is going on behind those gray eyes of yours?”

She knew him too well.

“I told you about my father, right?” Damn it, the place was just too damned crowded for this kind of conversation, Garroway thought.

“Ah. The light dawns.” Kat looked around the crowded barracks, then at Garroway, and seemed to read his mind. “Say, Gare?” She jerked her head toward the door. “As long as we have some downtime, I need to show you something. Outside.”

“’Kay.”

He returned the assembled LR-2120 to its position in a rack with forty-seven other laser rifles, then followed her down the steps, through the building lobby to the front desk where they checked out with a bored sergeant and then out through the front doors into the harsh glare of the sun. It was midafternoon and Garroway felt his exposed skin tingling as the nano imbedded there began reacting to the influx of ultraviolet. The glare lessened to comfortable levels as his eye implants darkened.

The sunlight reminded Garroway once again—and forcefully—of all of the recent barracks chatter about Earth’s worsening climate. Every religion was different, of course, but his own Wiccan beliefs held that the Earth herself was alive, the Goddess in material form, Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis of two centuries earlier given spiritual shape and meaning. To see the Earth in Her current condition genuinely hurt. Could he turn and walk away for another twenty years or more? What would She be like upon his return?

Could She be dying and was it his responsibility to stay with Her and try to help?

But what could one person do to stop the drawn-out ecological death of a planet?

“Where the hell are you taking me?” he asked her as he followed her down the front steps.

“I just wanted to find a place where we could talk,” she replied. “I thought the LVP ready line. …”

Across from the gleaming white building housing the barracks, a number of vehicles had been drawn up in a rigidly straight line along the side of a paved parade ground. The large hangars housing vehicle maintenance and the flight assembly building rose around the perimeter of the field.

The vehicles were LVPs, the acronym standing for landing vehicle, personnel. Specifically, they were M-990 Warhammers, so called for the blunt, crescent-shaped nose assemblies, like the business end of a double-headed hammer, mounting plasma guns housed in turret blisters at each tip.

The vehicles were ugly, their hulls behind the nose section heavily armored and as streamlined as a misshapen brick. Though they could fly, in an ungainly fashion, they were designed to be ferried from orbit to ground slung from the wasp-waist belly of a TAL-S Dragonfly, one of the Corps’ space-capable transatmospheric landing vehicles. They were heavily armed, too; besides the plasma guns, they had laser point-defense weapons, and turreted railgun mounts at the chin and aft-dorsal hardpoints. Each Warhammer was designed to carry two squads—twenty men—plus their weapons and gear, with a two-man/one-AI crew up front.

They walked across the tarmac to the nearest Warhammer. Kat touched an access panel, and the hatch unfolded from the hull, providing them with steps up into the cargo bay.

“This is a lot roomier than the old TAL-S lander modules,” Garroway said, stepping inside and letting his hand slide along the white-painted overhead. “Wish we’d had these on Ishtar.”

“Yeah, the Corps is always coming up with improvements,” Kat told him. “New and better ways to kill things. Anyway, I thought we could talk here without being … disturbed.”

“Did you think I was going to lose it?”

“No. But I didn’t want you clamping down on what you were feeling. C’mon, Gare. Your dad. You don’t really want to kill him, do you?”

He sighed. “Kill him? I guess not. I wouldn’t like going to prison. Or getting a charge of watchdog nano. Another charge, I mean, worse than what we got.”

“Your mother did go back to him, you know, after she’d gotten away. In a way, she has some of the responsibility too.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t fair. I wish I had a newdollar for every time I’ve heard of abused women either going back to their abusers, thinking they would change, or just because they didn’t know what else to do … or going on to hook with up someone else just as abusive, or worse. It makes me sick.”

“Sounds like you have a personal stake in it.”

“I do. My sister. Her third husband beat her to death. Her first and second husbands tried to.”

“I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “So am I. I hear the bastard’s on nanocontrolled release now, out in Detroit. I hope he screws up and gets fried. I truly, truly do. But I’m not going to hurry him along.”

“They haven’t caught my father,” Garroway said. “Not yet. In fact, he’s probably with the Aztlanista underground. He certainly held Azzy sympathies when I knew him.”

“Yeah, and that’s just it, Gare. You don’t know him. Not now. It’s been twenty-one years, right? He’s a completely different man. I’m not saying he isn’t any better now. I’m not even saying the bastard doesn’t deserve to die. But you’ve been away from Earth too long to get caught up in that.” She grinned at him. “Even if it only feels like a year for you.”

“Damn it, Kat. He killed my mother! …”

“So … somehow you track him down, find him wherever he’s hiding out. What do you do?”

“I alternate between wanting to put a bullet through his brain and wanting to blow out his kneecaps, leave him crippled.”

“With meditech the way it is nowadays, he wouldn’t stay crippled. Look what they did to the asshole you side-kicked. And how would you carry it out, when the watchdog nano in your system is watching you all the time, watching for you to just think a violent thought before putting you out?”

Garroway’s eyes were burning. He was having trouble swallowing.

“You wake up in jail, with a charge of attempted murder hanging on you. No captain’s mast this time. You end up in front of a civilian judge. Dishonorable discharge. Prison or worse. Is the revenge, is the attempted revenge, really worth it?”

Then the tears began to flow freely. A low moan escaped from his throat and then he was crying. He hadn’t cried like this in years, not since he’d been living at home with an out-of-control abuser for a father and a mother terrified of being her own person.

A long time later, Kat held him close. A pull-down storage shelf in the cargo bay had become their bed, a thick roll of foam padding their mattress. Their lovemaking had been hard and needy, almost desperate. At last, though, they clung to one another, sweat turning their bare skin slick and soaking the pad beneath them. With the power off, the interior of the Warhammer had grown stiflingly hot, but that hadn’t mattered, somehow.

Garroway breathed in the delicate scent of Kat’s hair, mingled with the smells of sweat, sex, and machine oil. Reluctantly, he consulted his internal clock. “We’d better get back,” he whispered.

“I know. But this was … good. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he told her.

“So, what’s it gonna be? Are you going to ditch the Corps and try to hunt down your father? Maybe do hard time?” She gave him a wicked grin, barely visible in the half-light filtering aft from the Warhammer’s cockpit. “Or are you coming with me to the stars?”