by Ian Douglas
Jack did wonder, sometimes, why the guy was still only a corporal when he had to have been in damned near forever to have gotten a billet with the MMEF. He’d asked Slider about it once, but the Marine had just shrugged, and said, “Sergeants. Can’t live with ’em, and it sure would be nice to live without ’em.”
“So what’s your idea?” Jack asked.
“I figure we could sell these to the other guys at sixty bucks a pop, maybe seventy-five, see?” He stared at Sam for a moment, watching her silent, writhing dance on the PAD’s display. “Hell, I’m gonna have to think about the price, some. Even a hundred wouldn’t be too much for one of these baby dolls! Anyway, I figure you and me split the take, fifty-fifty. You do whatever customizing is necessary, you know, to get her to use the customer’s name and everything. And I’ll see to the sales and marketing end of things. I can make the pitch, close the sale, collect the cash, and then we make the split. Deal?”
“Oh, man,” Jack said. “I’m going to have to think about that one.”
“Lemme ask you one thing.”
“Shoot.”
“You think you might wanna go with this idea? I mean, it’s a possibility, right?”
“Well, I guess so….”
“Then do us both a big favor, kid. Stop giving the fucking things away!”
“Huh?”
“You’re gonna kill the market with freebies, man! What’s worse, some other techie-type might get ahold of this and do up a product of his own! Man, you gotta go into business with me on this thing just to protect your interests, y’know?”
Jack shrugged. He’d only given Sam to Slider and a couple of others…and three or four of the guys like Lonnie who’d come over to the Vlad with him. He didn’t suppose it mattered. “Okay, sure. Why not? But I’m still not sure this thing’s such a good idea.”
“Hey, trust me, Flash! I wouldn’t steer ya wrong! You ‘n’ me are gonna clean up big!”
Jack looked at his watch again. “Hey, I gotta get to the honey buckets, Slider. I’ll see you later.”
“Okay, man. Just remember! No more freebies!”
Honey-bucket duty was one of the less glamorous aspects of service with the Marines, Jack was finding. Each morning, and again in the evening, the cut-down two-hundred-liter fuel cans set beneath the latrine benches had to be hauled out into the open, the contents doused with diesel fuel or kerosene, and burned. It was filthy, back-breaking, stinking, stomach-turning work, the sort traditionally reserved for the newbies and the replacements who either hadn’t yet proven themselves, or who hadn’t been aboard long enough for anyone newer to come along and get picked for shit detail instead.
“So, anyone hear any more about that asteroid the UNdies are supposed to’ve launched at the US?” Lonnie wanted to know. There were four of them on the detail—Jack, Lonnie Costantino, Duberand, and PFC Alan Kale, another alumnus from Platoon 4239. They’d dragged out the first three honey pots and set them ablaze. Oily, foul-smelling smoke boiled above the barren hillside.
Kale leaned on his shovel. “I still think it’s all bullshit. The UNdies’d never launch an asteroid at us! I mean, they gotta live on this planet, too!”
“I dunno,” Duberand said. “My sister’s in the Air Force, stationed at V-berg, and she said they already launched missiles to knock the thing off course. She swore it was true.”
“You’re too ugly to have a sister, Dub. How come they didn’t tell the whole country, huh?”
“Maybe because they didn’t want a panic,” Jack said. “Or because they want to wait and make sure it’s going to miss.”
“Man,” Kale said. “You think they’d let something like that go down without warning folks? Without trying to evac ’em or something? That’s cold, man.”
“If they can’t move everybody,” Jack said, “maybe they opted not to move anybody, just because of the panic and stuff.”
“You know,” Duberand said, “there’s a story goin’ around that it wasn’t the UN that moved that asteroid. It was aliens.”
“No way,” Costantino said. “Uh-uh, no way it was aliens.”
“What makes you an authority, Lonnie?” Kale wanted to know. “You talk to ’em?”
“As a matter of fact, yeah.” Lonnie pointed at his forehead, where four months earlier he’d worn the star emblem of the An. “I’m still Alien Astronauts, y’know. The Masters don’t want to harm the Earth. They want to save it.”
“I don’t know what scares me more,” Kale said. “The idea of the UN dropping rocks on us, or you telling me that the aliens won’t.”
“Some churches back home are saying the aliens are the Antichrist’s forces,” Jack pointed out. “Others say they’re angels, here to save us. They both can’t be right!”
“What do you say?” Duberand wanted to know.
He shrugged. “I don’t think they’re gods or devils. I think right now they’re telling us more about humans, from the way people react to them, than they are telling us about themselves.”
“Yeah, so you think the UN has been changing asteroid orbits?”
“Wouldn’t put it past them. A small enough rock might just be enough to cripple us, without hurting the rest of the world. It’d be a hell of a weapon. Of course, that’s why the Marines are going to need more of a presence in space.”
“Uh-oh,” Kale said. “Flash is gonna do his speech again!”
“Fuck you too, Kale. No speeches. But if any two-bit dictator or terrorist with even minor space capability can bump a fair-sized rock into an Earth-intercept orbit, we’re going to have to set up some sort of regular patrol out there, just to make sure no one tries that shit! What I want to know is, if that rock is on the way, how come they didn’t scramble the Marines to go get it?”
“Would you have gone on a mission like that?” Lonnie asked.
“Hell, yeah. Wouldn’t you?”
“Hell, no. I don’t mind joining the Marines and getting shot at by unfriendly natives. But getting stuffed into a tin can and fired into space, man, a guy could get killed that way. No thanks!” Costantino stirred the bubbling, smoking mess in one of the burn bins with his shovel. “I think we’re ready for another load, here.”
“I’ll get it,” Jack said. Turning, he started down the hill toward the latrines. Lonnie followed him.
The move—all of four meters—saved their lives.
A Chinese railgun located well inside Manchuria had fired a hypervelocity fléchette cluster moments before; the depleted uranium fléchettes, traveling at nearly eight times the speed of sound, slammed into the hilltop occupied by Ol’ Buck and a Quarter with a release of kinetic energy equivalent to a kiloton pocket nuke.
Kale was sliced cleanly in two. Duberand was lucky; he only lost his leg. The thunderclap of the impact was deafening, as buildings, sandbag walls, artillery pieces, and one of the Cataphract MWPs were either shredded, flattened, or enveloped in flame. When Jack was able to raise his head again, he was fifteen meters from where he’d been, half-buried in mud and gravel. The air was choked with clouds of smoke, and the shrill screams of the wounded went on and on and on above the crackle of flames in nightmare choruses of agony and terror.
This time, no one bothered with the Maggie’s-drawers joke.
TWENTY
MONDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER 2042
HQ, Marine Firebase 125
Near Kirovsky
Russian Far Eastern Maritime
Territory
1540 hours local time
Jack stood at rigid attention in front of Captain Thomas Rollins, his company commander, with Slider to his right. His left arm was still in a sling to immobilize the shoulder wrenched by the hyper-V attack, and he’d been on light duty for the past five days. They’d both been summoned by Gunny Blandings, whose sorrowful mien was all Jack needed to convince him that the two of them were headed for nothing less than a court-martial. “The Old Man is freaking pissed” was all Blandings would tell them.
When they knocked at h
is door, they were admitted with a brusque “Center yourselves on the hatch!” Inside, Rollins was seated at his desk, his PAD open and an expression on his features that managed to merge astonishment with both sadness and anger.
“Corporal Slidell, Private First Class Ramsey, reporting as ordered, sir!” Slidell rapped out. He could sound every inch the Mr. Clean Marine when he wanted to.
“Would either of you gentlemen care to explain…this?” Rollins said, turning his PAD so that they both could see the screen, with Sam enticingly displaying herself, and Jack knew that the worst had happened.
Or, more accurately, perhaps, the worst was just about to happen.
“Why, ah…sir,” Slidell said. “That’s just a little skin program that Flash here picked up Stateside. No one’s ever said anything about not being able to bring in a skin book or magazines, so what’s wrong with—”
“This,” Rollins said, shaking his head dangerously, “is considerably more than a skin mag, Corporal. I’ve had Gunny and a couple of the tech people from Battalion look at this.”
God! Jack thought, now terrified. This has gone all the way up the line to Battalion?
“They tell me,” Rollins went on, “that you’ve somehow dropped a new agent program on top of the government-issue AIDE, actually recoded the thing so it works better, smarter, and faster. And this new program, they tell me, is probably cobbled together from at least two other programs, though they can’t tell for sure. Very slick stuff, I’m told. Very professional work.”
Jack had to clamp down on himself to keep from blurting out a pleased “Thank you, sir!” He doubted very much that the Old Man had hauled him in to admire his programming prowess. He remained at attention, his eyes focused on a spot on the green-painted wall above and behind Rollins’s left shoulder.
“Slidell, according to your records, you have all of the programming skills and cybernetic savvy of wet spaghetti. But you do have a penchant for con jobs, scams, dealing, and selling just about anything you can lay your hands on. You’re the best scrounger in the company, but you’re just a little bit too greedy. My guess is that you’ve been, um, marketing Ramsey’s little toy here.” He turned his cold gaze on Jack. “As for you, Ramsey, you’re brand-new to this outfit, and I don’t know you that well. You have a good boot-camp record, though, and your quals tell me you have an unusual aptitude for programming and computers. I’m surprised as hell they didn’t put you in for a 4069 MOS and send you to nerd school.” The 4069 Military Occupation Specialty code designated a systems programmer. “I’m guessing that this young lady is your doing. Am I right?”
“Yes, sir!”
“Are you aware that you’re probably in violation of half a dozen different copyright laws with this little gem?”
He started to tell the captain that copyrights and programs were still a gray area in law but immediately thought better of it. “Yes, sir.” He swallowed, then added, “It, ah, didn’t start off as something to sell, sir. But, well, things kind of got out of hand.”
“I’m much more concerned about the alterations you introduced into the mil-issue PAD agent. Tampering with that is about as smart as tampering with the pin on a hand grenade. Suppose your alterations left it unable to perform some vital task, like calling up the right tactical data, or providing you with the correct map?”
“Sir, I made very sure that that didn’t happen.”
“Normally, I would put a statement like that down to damned-fool arrogance. However, I am told by Battalion’s technical team that you are correct. Your revisions not only allow AIDE to do everything it was designed to do, they let it operate faster, more efficiently, and smarter. In effect, you’ve managed to upgrade the damned thing to a level-two AI and done it in a smaller and more efficient package. Battalion is still shaking their collective heads over that one.
“As a result, Ramsey, you are going to luck out. This time. My first instinct was to hit you with mast. Deliberate misappropriation and alteration of government property. Endangerment of yourself and your fellow Marines. Even taking into account the fact that you seem to have fallen in with bad company and been led astray, you would’ve been in deep trouble. Those charges could have ended in a general court-martial. Believe me, son, this is some serious shit you’ve stepped in.
“However, Major General Holcomb has reviewed the case, including the recommendations by the tech team. He has directed me to put through your transfer, effective immediately. You will be put on the first transport back to the States, where you will report to the Space Combat Training Command at Quantico, Virginia. There, you will be given a course in space operations.
“It seems, Ramsey, that the Corps is in desperate need right now for people with talents such as yours. You are headed for 1-SAG. Now get the hell out of here.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
Dazed, ears ringing, Jack all but stumbled from the captain’s office. As he left, though, he heard Rollins turning his full attention to Slider. “You know, Slidell, I’m beginning to think you like being a private! So. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do….”
The thundering, numbing shock of what had just happened didn’t really hit home until fifteen minutes later.
He was going to space after all….
FRIDAY, 12 SEPTEMBER 2042
Vandenberg Aerospace Force
Base
0740 hours PDT
They both showed their passes to the Aerospace Force guard at the front gate, who looked at them carefully before waving them through and saluting. Security at Vandenberg was unusually tight now…a decided case of locking the barn door after the horse had already galloped off. Rob swung the rented blue-and-silver Samurai onto Oceanview Drive with a thin, electric whine and steered for the old Visitor’s Complex, which for several years now had housed the Marine enclave on the base.
“What a mess,” Kaitlin said, as the hydrogen-fueled vehicle passed a burned-over stretch of scrub brush and the charred-forest remains of an H2 tank farm. The smoldering, skeletal remains of a K-120, its blue UN flag still visible on one upthrust wing, sprouted from the center of the farm like some obscenely alien, flame-scorched tree. “Looks like that one pulled a kamikaze smack into the hydrogen tanks.”
“Might’ve just been a lucky hit,” Rob replied.
“Unlucky for the pilot. That’s not one he’s going to walk away from.”
She shivered. She and Rob had been lucky as well, lucky they’d not been on base when the sneak attack had come. The orders confining 1-SAG to base had been lifted three days before, and the next evening, she and Rob, seeking privacy, had gone to a motel off-base to spend the night together.
Their play had been interrupted by the thunder of explosions. By the time they’d gotten back to the base, the attack was over.
A second sentry, a Marine this time, waved them through at the Visitor’s Complex gate. Smoke still stained the morning sky above the airfield and the assembly hangars in the distance; the pall was especially thick above Pad 4B, where it was expected that the fires, fed by ruptured underground feed lines, would continue burning for days more. A Marine Valkyrie rested tail high in the scrub just outside the complex, where its pilot had brought it in for a none-too-gentle emergency touchdown.
The UN raiders had struck late in the evening two days before, a flight of German stealth K-120s coming in off the Pacific at wave-skimming altitude, minutes behind an initial wave of cruise missiles. The aircraft had been launched by a UN submarine aircraft carrier that had crept to within twelve hundred kilometers of the California coast. The cruise missiles had been launched from a pair of French arsenal subs lurking eight hundred kilometers farther north.
Both UN squadrons had been hit by US retaliatory strikes; one of the arsenal ships, the Pluton, had been sunk by Aerospace Force A-40 Wasps vectored out of Travis by a spotter aboard a US military orbital recon station. The German carrier, believed to be the Seeadler, had been heavily damaged by the Lakota, a US strike sub, and was still being hun
ted in the dark, cold waters beyond the Jasper Seamount. None of the six attacking K-120s had made it back to their carrier.
Still, the raid had to be chalked up on the big board as a UN success. The stealth attack had left twenty-one Wasp and Defender Aerospace Force fighters destroyed or crippled on the ground. Worse, far worse, a Zeus II being readied on Pad 4B had been destroyed in a titanic fireball that had lit up the western night skies for all of Los Angeles, and six precious SRE-10s being readied in the assembly hangars had been badly damaged. Those Sparrowhawks had been on the prep line, being fitted with missiles to bump those surviving fragments of 2034L that still posed a threat to the Earth; there would be no more counter-asteroid launches now, and the techies still weren’t confident that the oncoming fragment cloud was going to leave the Earth unscathed.
Rob pulled the Samurai into the parking lot outside Building 12. The two of them stopped in the lot and saluted as morning colors sounded, then walked up to the entrance, returned the salutes of the two Marine sentries posted there, and went inside.
Room 310, on the third floor down from ground level, was the Marine enclave’s main briefing room in a building devoted to the planning of the missions that were extending the reach of the US Marine Corps from the surface of sea and land into the empty reaches of space. Several dozen men and women were already in the room when Kaitlin and Rob checked through the last security station and walked in, but they were still early. A buffet table to one side provided doughnuts and coffee, and they helped themselves as the crowd quietly milled about, ate, and talked.
Captain Fuentes approached them, coffee cup in hand. “Action briefings the civilized way,” she told them. “Complete with breakfast.”
“Don’t want to get into a firefight on an empty stomach,” Rob said.
“So, what’s the word?” Kaitlin asked, pouring herself a Styrofoam cup of coffee. “Are we going to get clobbered or not?”
“I imagine we’ll hear today,” Fuentes said. “The astronomers’ll have a precise vector for it, and any splinters that got bumped off.” She shook her head. “I still find it hard to believe that we have the power to change the orbit of something like that!”
