by Ian Douglas
Dunne turned and picked up an LR-2120 from a small pile of weapons nearby. “Gonna make you sleep with it, Marine,” he growled. Traditionally, recruits in boot camp who dropped their weapons during training were required to take them to bed with them. The Marine creed My Rifle, memorized by generations of recruits for the past two centuries, emphasized the very special relationship between a Marine and his weapon. Dunne started to hand the weapon to Garroway, then stopped. “Belay that. You checked out with the pig-ninety?”
“Sure thing, Gunny.” Of course he was. Every Marine in the company had drilled endlessly with the things, back at L-4.
“Then take this.” Replacing the laser rifle on the stack, he picked up instead a larger, longer, heavier weapon, a PG-90. It was connected by a cable to a backpack battery unit. “Watch the fringe-bleed and watch the splash. It’s gonna be close-quarters down there.”
“Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”
“Try not to lose it.”
Garroway accepted the weapon, snicking back the bolt-feed access, checking the power pack, and linking to the computer for a fast diagnostic. According to the ID data that appeared as he powered up, the weapon had belonged to a Sergeant Graff, Charlie Company.
He didn’t know the man, and didn’t ask what had happened to him.
The PG-90 was a full-automatic squad-support plasma weapon, 1.2 meters long and massing 10.3 kilograms, while the battery and charger unit massed another 14.1 kilos. It took centimeter-long bolts of a ferrous-lead-mercury alloy and used a powerful surge of electromagnetic energy to both accelerate it and convert it into a thumb-sized packet of white-hot plasma. The weapon had a cyclic rate of about four hundred rounds per minute, though in vacuum, even with the radiator vanes installed, the practical rate of fire was reduced to about 150 rounds per minute, and with frequent barrel changes to avoid overheating.
Marines called it the “thundergun,” or, more usually, “pig.”
“Ooh-rah!” Garroway said as the diagnostics showed the weapon powered up and at optimum.
“Vinton!” Dunne snapped. “Arhipov! You’re with the pig.”
“Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant!”
“Sure thing, Gunny.”
“You three deploy with me, Deek, and Lobowski.”
That was a startling bit of information. Plasma guns were fielded in three-Marine teams, two riflemen supporting the squad automatic weapon as assistant gunner and spotter/security. Generally, there was one pig to a twelve-man squad. Staff Sergeant Eugene Deek and Reg Lobowski both, however, were also pig-gunners. Having two thunderguns in one squad was decidedly unusual; having three was unheard of.
“We’re not going to have the manpower for CCN linkups down there,” Dunne explained, as though reading Garroway’s surprise. “I want as much firepower packed into as small an area as we can manage. Just don’t get in one another’s way. Copy that?”
“Aye-firmative, Gunny.”
“Now move it. The Nergs’ve got an appointment below with the Wiggles and we don’t want to be late.”
Garroway moved it.
Engineering Section
Breakthrough Point
AO Memphis, Sirius Stargate
1352 hours, Shipboard time
Staff Sergeant Ernest Giotti watched as the three-meter cutout settled a bit. The nanotunneler had vanished into the ring-shaped hole, leaving the cutout precariously balanced. Using his implant, he was carefully monitoring the tunneler’s descent. Now, centimeters from cutting through, he ordered the device to halt.
“Cutting suspended, sir,” he told Warhurst. “Ready to proceed on your order.”
“Hang tight,” Warhurst told him over their private channel. “How’s the pressurization going?”
He checked the data. Air had been bleeding through into the bubble. The working space had gradually been pressurizing through the test hole over the past half hour and now stood at nearly 9 psi. He could now even hear sounds in the chamber through his helmet as he and the other engineers worked.
“We’re at 8.8 psi,” he said. “Internal pressure inside the Wheel reads out at about 11.5. Temperature 23 Celsius. Composition…oxygen, nitrogen…”
“I’ve got all that,” Warhurst snapped. “Stand by. Recon’s going to start cycling through into the bubble.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
The inner hatch of the airlock hissed open and armored Marines stepped into the bubble’s interior, their armor chameleonics rapidly fading from black to a dark mottled gray, matching the interior of the portable airlock dome. One of them closed the hatch. Minutes passed, and then the hatch opened again, admitting four more Marines. The outer lock was only large enough to admit four men at a time, and it took a while to bring in an entire forty-man platoon.
The ID on one of the first men through indicated he was Lieutenant Gansen, the platoon’s CO. “Lieutenant Gansen?”
“What is it?” He sounded tight…even scared.
“Uh, sir? I was just wondering. The Wiggles’ve had plenty of time to know exactly what we’re doing up here and where we’re going to break through.”
“Do you think I don’t know that, Staff Sergeant?”
“No, sir.”
“Damned cluster fuck, is what it is. A cluster fuck.”
Giotti edged a bit farther away from Gansen. The man was not happy and Giotti didn’t want to be in position to take the hit if the guy exploded.
As the Marines came in, the first eight took position around the three-meter circle on the deck, facing out. Eight more Marines stood in an outer circle, facing their counterparts, holding a tether from their armor, with the free end nanofused to the deck. Two of the first eight held PG-90s, muzzles up; the rest carried LR-2120s in one hand, and gripped the tether in the other.
More and more Marines squeezed through the lock, taking up waiting positions around the sixteen men and women in the center. “Don’t bunch up, guys, or one grenade could get us all,” one joked and another said something about taking turns breathing, but for the most part they were silent, waiting.
“Major Warhurst,” Gansen said after the last four Marines cycled inside, “we are ready to board.”
“Very well, Lieutenant,” Warhurst replied. “Staff Sergeant Giotti! Pull the plug on that damned thing!”
Giotti gave the thought-clicked command and the nanotunneler fired up to full dig once more. An anxious moment passed, and then, suddenly, the central core of the cutout portion of the deck vanished, dropping away into the shaft. A final blast of air came through, equalizing the pressure and accompanied by a mushroom of dust on the updraft.
“Grenades!” Gansen yelled. Half a dozen M-780 grenades sailed into the pit, detonating seconds later in a stuttering burst of multiple blasts and flashes. If anyone or anything was waiting for them down there, that should have distracted them for a precious instant or two.
Next into the pit was an AR-7 Argus reconnaissance probe, configured for atmospheric operations. Little more than a meter-long pallet supporting a power plant, reaction mass, and a highly sophisticated sensor suite, it lowered itself into the hold on sharp-hissing thrusters, transmitting a full three-sixty of its surroundings at both optical and infrared wavelengths.
And when the Argus took no defensive fire, Warhurst gave the final order. “Lieutenant Gansen, deploy your Marines.”
“Go!” Gansen yelled. “Go-go-go!”
The eight Marines on the inner circle leaned back, taking up the strain on their tethers, then stepped back as one and dropped into darkness.
CPL John Garroway
Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Wheel Entry Breach, Sirius Stargate
1425 hours, Shipboard time
Garroway was one of the first Marines in. With the PG-90 snapped to a weapons mount on the side of his torso armor, he rappelled down the shaft, entering a vast, empty space and landing a moment later atop the canted plug of surface material that had dropped down from above.
The tunnel wa
s dark at optical wavelengths, a murky green on infrared. The space was huge, a cavernous passageway almost four meters high and six wide, with rounded walls and water dripping from the ceiling. The first thing that entered Garroway’s mind was that he’d just entered the intestines of some enormous beast…an image he wished immediately he could forget.
He was receiving video from the Argus probe, which appeared inside a window within his noumenal vision. The image was low-res, but gave him enough information to let him orient himself once he hit bottom.
In a moment, he stood in a circle with seven other Marines, facing outward. Vinton and Arhipov on his fire team, standing to either side of him; Lobowski, Baxter, and Weis in the other; and Dunne and Womicki completing the team as the command/communication element.
The Argus probe was already moving down the tunnel toward arbitrary “north,” and was already vanishing into the dark. From his OP in the bubble on the surface, Gansen gave a command and running lights snapped on, illuminating the probe and some of the tunnel surrounding it. The enemy already knew the Marines were there; they might as well have a target they could see, one that did not have a Marine inside.
As the circle of Marines expanded slightly, eight more Marines dropped down at their backs. Dunne rasped an order and the first eight redeployed, moving into two columns of four, following the slow-drifting Argus toward the north. The second group of eight immediately set up a defensive position, facing south. They would hold the entry point…just in case it became necessary to turn it into an exit point instead.
The water here was knee deep and slowly growing deeper.
“Ugh,” Vinton said, pushing her way forward at Garroway’s back. “You think this is part of their sewer system?”
“I don’t know, Kat,” Lobowski replied from Garroway’s right. “At least if it is, we don’t have to smell it.”
“Maybe it’s coolant for some kind of power plant,” Arhipov suggested.
“Can the chatter, Marines,” Dunne snapped. “Lobowski! Weis! Baxter! On point!”
“Aye aye, Gunny.”
Lobowski and the two riflemen supporting him detached themselves from the other five and moved forward a few meters. They took a couple of stumbling steps, then righted themselves. The water was now up to their waists.
“Shit, Gunny!” Lance Corporal Weis called. “If it gets any deeper, we’re gonna be swimming!”
“Gunny?” Garroway said.
“What?”
“If it does get deeper…2120s don’t work for shit underwater.”
He surveyed the black water around him uneasily. The pigs ought to work okay submerged, at least for short ranges. A high-velocity plasma bolt would flash the surrounding water to steam. Friction and cooling would slow it, but it would retain a deadly punch for at least several hundred meters.
Laser bolts, however, were nothing but pulses of coherent light, and water drank light, scattering and absorbing it completely within a distance of a few meters. Blue-green lasers, emitted at wavelengths of 500 to 540 nanometers, were best able to penetrate water, but LR-2120s operated at a wavelength of 640 nanometers—a deep red, chosen because red light didn’t scatter as easily in atmosphere as shorter wavelengths.
For that matter, water would hamper both communications and data feeds, both radio and lasercom. This was not good.
Under the lights of their armor, the water’s surface appeared to be acting…peculiar. It was crisscrossed by myriad tiny ripples, as though from some vibration coming through the tunnel walls.
Not surprising, really. The readout on ambient gravity was jittering back and forth between 9.132 and 9.133 gravities, a tiny shift that was probably related to the spinning of those mini-black holes somewhere beneath their feet.
Probably. The truth was, they just didn’t know what they were facing here, and that knowledge—the lack of it, rather—made each step forward a struggle.
“Gunny!” Baxter screamed. “There’s something in the water!”
“Calm down, Marine. What is it?”
“I don’t know! I felt it bump me…there! Over there!” He aimed his laser rifle and fired, the bolts just visible as faint red flickers in the humid air.
“Baxter!” Dunne shouted. “Belay firing! Wait’ll you have a target!”
“S-sorry, Gunny.”
“He’s right, though,” Weis pointed out. “There could be sharks in here.”
“‘Sharks’?” Womicki said. He laughed. “That don’t seem likely!”
“You now what I mean, damn it.”
“Yeah,” Garroway said. “Remember those civilian briefings we DLed? If the Sirians are Wiggles, those Nommo things the scientists say visited Earth a few thousand years back, well, they were supposed to be amphibious, right? They lived in water.”
“So they’re swimming around us, right here?” Weis said. “I don’t think I like this.”
“Fucking great,” Lobowski added, swinging the muzzle of his pig back and forth, covering the uneasy surface of the water ahead in long, sweeping arcs. “Now we’re fighting freakin’ tadpoles!”
“We don’t know what we’re fighting, people,” Dunne warned. “Just stay sharp!”
The eight Marines pulled back, finding comfort, if not necessarily safety, in the closeness of the others. They could see the Argos probe twenty-five meters ahead, hovering at half a meter, its jets roiling the dark water’s surface, the sharp hiss amplified by the bare tunnel walls. Halfway between the probe and the Marines, something broke the surface, a long, rolling shape that glistened in the glare from the AR-7’s lights.
“Shit!” Baxter cried. “What was that?”
“Tighten up, people,” Dunne told them. “I’m on the command channel with the boss.”
“We can’t fight what we can’t see,” Womicki said. “What the hell are we doing down here anyway?”
“Maybe,” Garroway said slowly, “we’re making contact.”
“Right now,” Lobowski said, “the only contact I want to make is with my pig.”
The water was almost waist deep on Garroway now. “Hang on,” he called. “I’m going to try something.”
“What?” Dunne asked.
“I’m going to stick my head under. Don’t worry. I’ll be right back.”
“Womicki! Grab the handhold on his armor. Haul him up if he gets into trouble.”
“Right, Gunny.”
He resisted the unthinking urge to hold his breath. With Womicki keeping hold, he slipped forward headfirst under the surface of the water. It was ink-black and his IR scanners could pick up nothing. He thought-clicked his armor’s lights on and the murk was filled with a milky-gray pearlescence filled with drifting motes of brightly lit muck. His suit’s external mikes were picking up a universe of sound, however, a barrage of rapid clicks and chirps that reminded him of dolphins, back on Earth.
Were those Nommo? “His voice, too, and his language, were articulate and human,” at least according to one of the fragments of Berossus’s history downloaded from the data stores of the civilian advisors. If that clicking was intelligent speech, it wasn’t human.
His eyes were almost useless. Visibility was limited to less than a meter, even when he tried dimming the lights a little. No…something was moving out there. He caught only a shadow, long and sinuous, casting odd shadows as it moved in a rippling flash from right to left. He tried swinging his PG-90 to follow it, but it was gone before he could shove the cumbersome weapon through the water.
Another flash of movement, this one to the left. Turning his body against the steady pressure of Womicki’s grip, he was able to see something like an angular face perhaps a meter away—two huge fishlike eyes, green against horny black skin, and a smoothly rounded, elongated skull behind. He had an instant’s glimpse only and then the creature was gone in a rippling flash. He thought he saw a body like an eel’s or a snake’s—or it could have been a tentacle. Mostly what he remembered were the eyes.
Getting his feet under him
, Garroway stood up, his helmet breaking the surface and water cascading from his shoulders. “I saw something,” he said. “Here it is.” He uploaded the glimpse he’d had as recorded by his armor’s sensors. Cassius and the other AIs might be able to extract more information from the brief sighting than he could manage with his own eyes. The human brain was notoriously unreliable when it came to making sense of something so strange it had nothing with which to compare it. Electronic AIs would be less easily misled.
“How’s the water, Gare?” Kat asked him.
“I wish these suits had sonar,” he replied. “Couldn’t see for shit. But I think Ski has it right. We’re fighting giant tadpoles. The thing I saw must be one of the Nommo young.”
Garroway felt himself trembling inside his armor. The stress, after the combat on the surface, was almost crippling. Up there, at least, he’d been fighting an enemy he could see, an enemy that registered on his combat maps, on infrared, and on the control Net. He’d entered the tunnel expecting more of the same—and an opportunity to take the fight to the enemy’s home ground.
But here, waist deep in what looked suspiciously like an alien sewer, he couldn’t see the enemy and couldn’t fight him. If that thing he’d glimpsed underwater was one of them, however, they could see the Marines without any difficulty whatsoever.
Something bumped his left leg, hard.
“Hold it!” he shouted. The surface of the water was moving in a peculiar way, as though something large, very large, was moving just below. “I think…”
Something massive coiled about his knees and yanked him into the black water.
Major Warhurst
AO Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1442 hours, Shipboard time
“Man down!” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne’s voice crackled over the communications net. “We have a man down!”
“Gare!” That was Kat Vinton.
“Pull them back, Lieutenant,” Warhurst said over the command channel.
“Aye aye, sir!” Gansen snapped. “You heard the man, people! Fall back!”
“Negative!” Dunne said. “Negative, sir! We’ve lost a Marine! He just vanished underwater! We are not leaving without him.”
