by Ian Douglas
More subtle than that, however, was the psychological impact on men and women who were being subordinated by a sophisticated computer program, who in a very real sense were being turned into small cogs in a very large machine. Tests run back on Earth had demonstrated that the system could seriously and adversely affect a unit’s morale.
Marines usually pointed out that those tests had been run on Army and Aerospace Force personnel, and didn’t—couldn’t—tap into the reality of modern combat. From the Corps’ perspective, a lone Marine could easily be lost in the fog of war; a team, functioning together with machinelike precision, dispelled the fog and controlled the battlefield. Hell, Marines had been voluntary small cogs in a big machine for centuries and were quite proud of the fact. Fighting closely with brother and sister Marines, both on the ground and in the aerospace theater, was what the famous Marine esprit was all about. Ooh-rah!
Garroway aimed, Sissy fired. Another Wheel defender tumbled, bits of hot metal spalling from its flank.
Garroway had never used CCN in anything other than training simulations. The system had been new and experimental when he’d shipped out for Ishtar thirty-two years objective ago, and had then been employed only by Marine Recon and a few other specialist units. But his training, all Marine training, emphasized working as part of a larger team, and it hadn’t been hard to learn the ins and outs of CCN methodology and tactics.
A red arrow flashed in his helmet display and he shifted to Sissy’s next target.
Point Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1308 hours, Shipboard time
“I think we’re holding them,” Warhurst said. “Barely, but we’re holding them.”
“Is it my imagination,” Ramsey asked, “or is the enemy somewhat lacking in tactical ingenuity?”
“We haven’t seen anything from him yet but brute force and very fast reaction times. Those vehicles seem to be trying to force breakthroughs at three distinct points in the perimeter…here, here…and over here.” He indicated the threatened sectors with mental highlightings.
“So CCN is turning our infantry into tank-killer teams.”
“That’s pretty much it, sir.”
Sissy, working together with Cassius’s much larger overview of the situation, had determined that the combined fire of eight to ten Marines was sufficient to disable one Wheel combat machine. That black metal drank the laser light from a single 2120, apparently redistributing the energy throughout a large patch of the hull, with the end result that the target area wasn’t more than slightly warmed. Five hundred megawatts of energy, however, hitting a single small area within the same fraction of a second, was more than the alien armor could handle. It heated suddenly, then exploded with force enough to disable the machine. At the moment, three sections—actually about 50 Marines all together—were actively engaging the enemy, which meant that Sissy could kill five enemy vehicles at a time. And if that had been all there was to it, simple mathematics would have won the battle for the Marines within the next few minutes.
Unfortunately, combat was never that simple.
Warhurst was listening to the communications coming through the company channels, a steady stream of conversation, blasted by intermittent static, ragged with the emotions of men and women in combat.
“Watch it! Wiggles are coming through the defile!”
“Fire support! We need fire support, target Charlie-one-one-niner by Echo five-zero-three! Multiple hostiles coming through the perimeter! Repeat, multiple hostiles coming—”
“We’re taking fire! We’re taking fire!”
Those shouted calls gave lie to the sense of detachment Warhurst felt as he watched the patterns of colored lights shift and drift within his noumenal display. Some of those lights were winking out moment by moment, and the casualty list was growing.
“The enemy doesn’t appear able to concentrate his fire the way our CCN does,” Warhurst told Ramsey, “but there’re more targets than our people can shoot at and they’re concentrating on these three points.”
“I suggest, Major, that you move to Plan Bravo.”
“Already initiated, sir. But it’s going to take time.”
Plan Bravo required Marines from the nonthreatened portions of the perimeter to begin creating a second, smaller perimeter inside the first, then having the outer perimeter Marines fall back, covered by their fellows. Withdrawal in the face of an enemy attack, however, was never easy, was always dangerous.
And there simply was no time….
“We’ve got bogies coming out of the main valley! Get on them! Get on them!”
“Fire support! We need fire support now!…”
“Where’s our damned aerospace close support?”
“Gone, gyrine. Out of go-juice. It’s knife work, now!”
“Multiple bogies! Multiple bogies! Pour it on ’em, Marines!”
Sergeant Wes Houston
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1308 hours, Shipboard time
Houston, Lance Corporal Roger Eagleton, and PFC Randy Tremkiss made up a fire team assigned to the sector their pre-drop briefing had designated as the Cincinnati AO, the Area of Operations. The area was a bit more built up, if that language could be applied to this alien and lifeless artificial terrain, than the flatter region around Memphis. Flat-topped ridges and plateaus—walls, almost, with sloping sides—crisscrossed the region and in the direction arbitrarily designated as “north” by the operation planners lay a broad, open, and flat-bottomed valley running toward the northeast.
That valley, as it happened, had become a highway for one of the advancing columns of Wheel defenders. The drifting icons and symbols on his helmet display had revealed a full two dozen of them moments ago, and the team had been busy methodically targeting one after another with CCN.
Then the Starhawks had stooped over the valley, slamming the remaining attackers with plasma fire and high explosives, reducing all to scattered and twisted lumps of dead metal, radiating fiercely at infrared wavelengths.
The respite had been a brief one, however. Five more of the hovering black monsters had appeared. Whether they were survivors of the original twenty-four or new arrivals on the battlefield, Houston didn’t know. He and the others had taken aim at the nearest, however, letting Sissy guide their aimed fire with deadly accuracy.
One advantage of the CCN system was the fact that each vehicle was knocked out by eight to ten converging pulses of laser light arriving from at least three directions. The defenders did not appear to be as well coordinated as the Marines in their fire control, and generally chose only one of the firing groups of Marines as counter-fire targets.
Sissy triggered their weapons, and they immediately ducked back and shifted position to the right in order to avoid enemy return fire.
This time it almost worked. Houston hadn’t even waited to see the results of that last joint shot; that kind of rubbernecking was begging for trouble. He’d taken no more than three steps, however, when his earphones were blasted by static, and a monster sledgehammer had slammed him in his left leg and side, hurling him back and down.
“We’re taking fire!” Tremkiss screamed over the radio link. “We’re taking fire!”
Houston felt completely numb from the waist down, and couldn’t move. “I’m hit!” With a final burst of static, his radio faltered and died, plunging him into a cocoon of death-still silence.
And then the pain hit, a searing, raging white-hot burn eating into his left side, and all he could hear was his own screaming.
He never heard Tremkiss shouting, “Marine down! Corpsman! Corpsman!”
HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1308 hours, Shipboard time
“We’re taking fire! We’re taking fire!”
“I’m hit!”
&n
bsp; “Marine down! Corpsman! Corpsman!”
HM2 Lee IDed the call for help. It was in Cincinnati, his operational area, and he started moving forward. After rendezvousing at Point Memphis, he’d stationed himself about fifty meters behind Alpha Company’s position on the perimeter, ready to move if he was needed.
There were five Corpsmen assigned to Alpha Company. The senior Corpsman—Chief Mattingly—stayed with the HQ section, while the other four each took a platoon. Lee was assigned to Alpha Company, though technically, he wasn’t on the company’s roster. According to the TO&E, the corpsmen belonged to the Battalion Medical Officer, Captain Howard, who was watching the whole operation from his station in Ranger’s sick bay.
But so far as Lee and the Marines of Alpha Company were concerned, they were his Marines, he was their corpsman, and TO&E be damned.
He covered the ground in long, loping strides, keeping himself bent over even though no one seemed to be shooting at him. Yet. Alpha Company’s sector had been pretty hot in the last few minutes, judging from the radio calls he’d overheard. He hadn’t actually seen any of the Wheel defenders yet, save as colored icons on his helmet display. He hadn’t tapped into the main battle data net, yet, because he needed to stay focused on the job at hand, not electronically rubber-neck on the battlefield.
As he moved, he downloaded data from the CAN—the casualty assessment net running as part of the company AI software. Based on information transmitted by the men’s armor, it was classifying Sergeant Houston as a class-one, PFC Tremkiss as class-three. Class-three indicated the wounded man was not in immediate danger; his suit systems were coping with the damage, at least so far.
A class-one was life-threatening and urgent. He homed in on Houston’s position, following the CAN’s flashing guide arrows.
He was aware of several Marines on the high ground to either side, intent on aiming their weapons at something beyond the heights. Once a bright flash of light washed through the sky to his left, accompanied by a burst of static over his radio, but he saw no other indications of a major firefight. Not that he could do much about it if he did.
“Houston!” he called. “Houston, this is Doc Lee. Do you copy?”
There was no reply. Either the man was unconscious or his com gear had been damaged.
Houston’s vac-armor beacon guided him for the last thirty meters. It was tough even seeing a Marine in camelearmor if the man didn’t want to be seen, but the beacon acted like an IFF signal, guiding Lee close enough to be able to see a flop of movement on the lip of a long, narrow crater.
There he is! The crater looked like a heavy weapon burn-through on the flank of one of the low, angular plateaus, half a meter deep. Houston was lying at the crater’s edge; Tremkiss was lying next to him, waving feebly.
“I see you, Tremkiss!” he called. “Stay down!”
“I’m hit, Doc!” Tremkiss said. His voice sounded dull, almost detached. “And the Sarge. He’s…he’s…”
“Just hold on, Private. Help’s on the way!”
He dropped down next to the two Marines. Christ on a crutch! he thought. Houston’s left leg was a mess, the suit shredded, raw and bloody flesh and white bone exposed to hard vacuum, blood trying to bubble even as it congealed and froze. The worst part was the man’s frenzied thrashing. His com was out, but he obviously was conscious and in severe pain.
Parts of the crater were still glowing a dull red by visible light, and the whole area was radiating fiercely on infrared. Rolling himself into the crater’s shallow embrace, Lee crouched down over Houston, trying to hold him down while slapping his comjack into the man’s helmet.
And instantly clicked down the volume as the man’s screaming shrilled in his helmet earphones. “Houston! Houston, can you hear me?”
The only response was the Marine’s continued screams.
Engineering Section
Breakthrough Point
AO Memphis, Sirius Stargate
1310 hours, Shipboard time
Staff Sergeant Ernest Giotti stood in a circle with the other five men of the engineering detail, watching the nanotunneler slowly settle into the deck. The device, dropped onto the Wheel inside the VBSS airlock, which had been inflated around it, stood half a meter tall and three meters in diameter, a squat, thick, aluminum-gray doughnut with a hollow core and a wall fifty centimeters thick. The bottom end of the device was a seething, boiling mass of some trillions of nanomachines, each a bit larger than a human red blood cell, each capable of taking a minute chunk of whatever inert material it came in contact with and converting it into another nanomachine.
The tunneling process started slowly, but as more and more newborn nanos came online, the digging accelerated. How long it would take depended on the density of the substrate, and on the thickness of the Wheel’s outer hull at this point.
He read the data off his helmet display. One hundred thirty-one centimeters so far, after four minutes of digging. And the test cores had indicated a thickness here of 4.85 meters. At that rate, and with straight-line data, the process would take another two and a half hours before they broke through. Fortunately, that time would come down as the digging speeded up. Giotti didn’t have enough data yet to determine just how sharp the acceleration curve was going to be.
Shit. It would be faster to have the fly-guys or the Navy pound the spot until they created a five-meter-deep crater…except for the fact that no one knew what the effects of such an attack would be on the Wheel and especially on those little black holes that were supposed to be whizzing around down in the depths of this thing. The idea was to capture the Wheel intact, if possible.
“Let’s inject some more e-movers,” he suggested. “Ten percent.”
“Up ten percent, aye aye,” Corporal Moskowitz replied from the other side of the disk. E-movers were a specialized form of nanomachine that converted substrate material into energy, stored it, and transferred it back up the pipe to the mechanism that was creating the basic diggers. Increasing the flow of energy would increase the rate of nanoproduction…but within carefully balanced limits. Try to speed the process too much and the tunneler would choke on too many diggers, or stall because there were too many e-movers and not enough diggers.
Balancing the two was part of the extensive engineering download he and the others had received during the week before their departure from Earth. They were all too aware that the equations had been created on Earth, using Earthly test materials, and that no one really knew how well they would work on a structure built by an alien civilization at a star almost nine light-years distant.
“Giotti!” Warhurst’s voice called over his comm channel. “How long?”
Shit. He took the data he had, extrapolated the curve of dig-rate increase, and came up with a figure of twenty-five more minutes. Not bad…but it was still an only somewhat educated guess. He added fifty percent and rounded up, just to be sure.
“Forty-five more minutes, sir,” he replied. “And that is definitely a HAG.”
HAG. A hairy-assed guess.
He could do no better than that.
AO Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1310 hours, Shipboard time
Forty-five fucking minutes!…
There was no way they were going to hold the enemy forces that long. The hostiles had already breached the Marine perimeter in two places. Dozens of the things had been knocked out by Onager fire, by close air support, and finally by CCN-guided concentrated fire of individual Marine rifle squads. The second perimeter was forming up inside the first, but there was no reason to think they would have any greater success in stopping those monsters.
Toughest for Warhurst was the realization, the clear and firm knowledge, that he’d done everything he could, deployed his troops the best he could, taken every precaution he could take…and still that wasn’t enough. There was nothing else he could do now, save trust in the fighting ability and determination of his Marines.
“General Ramsey,�
�� he said over the command link. “Warhurst. They’re through the perimeter, at Milwaukee and at Cincinnati.”
“I see it. What’s your assessment?”
“‘The issue is still in doubt.’”
In December of 1942, a detachment of 449 U.S. Marines on Wake Island had held off a vastly superior Japanese invasion force for two weeks. As two thousand Japanese special landing force troops stormed ashore, the last radio message received from the garrison read: Enemy on island. Issue still in doubt.
Warhurst was feeling a bit like Major James Devereaux must had felt on Wake during those final hours. What do you do when there’s nothing left to do, and the enemy is kicking in your front door?
“Understood,” Ramsey told him. “Just remember. Devereaux took out eight hundred enemy troops, twenty-one aircraft, and four warships before he was through. Do what you can, then get out of the way and let your Marines do what they can.”
It was as though the general was reading his mind. “Aye aye, sir.”
He didn’t ask about evacuation. Ramsey would be positioning the TRAPs for pickup if they decided they had to get everyone off the Wheel. That was Ramsey’s decision, however, not his.
And the enemy advance was slowing. As more and more of the Wheel combat vehicles were destroyed, more were arriving from elsewhere…but slowly.
Maybe, if they killed enough of the things, killed them fast enough…
HM2 Phillip Lee
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
AO Cincinnati, Sirius Stargate
1310 hours, Shipboard time
Lying halfway across his struggling patient, Lee grabbed a nanodyne Frahlich Probe from his pouch and slipped the needle through the man’s armor at a point on the shoulder where it was relatively thin. He let the needle settle through the armor, then rammed the device home, letting the silver shaft of the needle seal itself airtight to the polylaminate material surrounding it. A green light at the tip winked safe and he felt the datalink connection through his implant. He selected a level four programming, and thought-clicked the injector’s firing mechanism.
