Star Marines

by Ian Douglas

  “I haven’t heard anything. Why? What have you heard?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing, really. Some of them…I don’t know. Upset. Like the sergeant who lasered us for our uniforms.”

  He hadn’t noticed anything different about the man who’d scanned their bodies, recording their precise measurements, and who’d then handed them freshly nanufactured uniforms. But Derel was unusually perceptive, especially when it came to the emotions of others.

  “They’re almost home, Der,” he told her. “Maybe they’re just anxious. You know, worried about their families back on Earth. They’ve been away…what? Twenty-two of their years? That’s a long time to be gone, even if they were in cybe-hibe for most of that time.”

  “Maybe. But I heard they’d been selected for duty on Enduru because they didn’t have close families back on Earth. FamSit One or Two, it’s called. They volunteered knowing that the Earth they knew would be thirteen hundred cycles older when they got back, but with no close family to return to, it shouldn’t matter that much. No, something else is wrong. Something bad.”

  “Well, I’m sure we’ll be told if there’s something we need to know. In the meantime…” He stopped. One bulkhead of the mess hall had just lit up, and now the head and shoulders of a Marine officer appeared, looking out over the crowded mess hall. Nal recognized her—Colonel Karla McTaggart, the commanding officer of the 15th Regiment, stationed at New Sumer for the past 120 cycles.

  “Good evening, Marines,” she said. “Or maybe I should say good morning, since we’ve all just been awakened from a very long sleep.

  “But according to the shipboard clocks, it’s 1930 hours, GMT, on the eighteenth of March 2314. After a ten-year flight, objective—two years, subjective—Chosin has entered the Solar System and continued to decelerate toward Earth. We are currently just inside the orbit of Jupiter. Earth—home—is less than two hundred million kilometers ahead.

  “But I have some…news. Very bad, stunning news. Five hours ago, the High Guard cruiser Endymion hailed the Chosin by lasercom. After verifying our ID, they transmitted a long message from the CO of the Marine base on Mars.

  “The text of the message will be available shortly for download, for those of you who wish to view it. The short version, however, is that two weeks ago, a Xul spacecraft entered the Solar System at FTL velocities and diverted a number of asteroids toward Earth at extremely high speed. The Xul ship was successfully destroyed by a U.S. Marine strike force. However, although most of the projectiles it launched were successfully intercepted and diverted or destroyed, at least one of those struck in the Atlantic Ocean, generating tidal waves and firestorms that have devastated our planet.”

  For a moment, there was stunned silence. Then hundreds of people tried speaking at once—murmuring to their neighbors, or shouting aloud.

  “Please! Marines, silence…please!” Colonel McTaggart’s image said. She waited as the crowd noise died down once more. “I’m afraid I have little hard information beyond that. Casualties have been high—at least five billion dead, possibly many more than that. Damage is severe, on a scale literally inconceivable—dozens of major cities simply wiped out, and extensive damage to most others.

  “We’re told that remote probes sent in from Luna have been carrying out surveys of much of Earth’s surface. The hardest-hit regions were Europe, western Africa, and the Americas. Asia and Australasia have both taken some damage, but are still functioning as dynamic sociopolitical entities.

  “In other areas, however, the situation is appallingly grim. There are not millions, but billions of refugees, food stores have been wiped out, clean water is rare, medical nano supplies and hospitals destroyed, nanufactories and power plants smashed. There are already reports of cannibalism, of starvation and of epidemics on an unprecedented scale, of a complete breakdown of civilization. Volcanic eruptions in places are spewing poisonous gasses into the atmosphere. A cloud completely blankets the Earth, reflecting heat and light back into space. It’s…getting colder. Scientists believe this may well be the beginning of a new ice age.

  “There is a serious question as to whether Humankind can survive on our home world.”

  McTaggart paused, letting the words sink in. Nal tried to imagine what he would feel like if he learned suddenly that Enduru had been destroyed, that most of the people he knew were dead, that the villages and enclaves of the Free Peoples were wiped away.

  He failed. Such complete devastation was…literally unimaginable.

  “A large number of military forces were offplanet when the disaster occurred, of course,” McTaggart went on. “Some of these—the High Guard, aerospace patrols, system defense facilities—all remain in place, on alert for a second alien incursion. Most of the rest, however, including all space-deployed elements of the U.S. Marines, are in the process of redeploying to Earth, where they will be employed in disaster relief and security efforts. Chosin was supposed to rendezvous with the space yard at L-5, but has now been ordered to LEO. Once in low Earth orbit, shuttles will be employed to take us down to the surface.

  “There are only eleven hundred of us, but we will do what we can….”

  There was more, but Nal heard little of it. The silence in the mess hall had deepened, become blacker, almost palpable.

  Slowly, conversation resumed, low murmurs punctuated by people gasping for breath…or sobbing.

  The colonel had said there was doubt that Humanity would survive, but at the moment, Nal’s concern didn’t go beyond the survival of the other Marines on board the transport. Some had an unhealthy look in their eyes, like cornered animals…or they simply sat, staring at nothing. After several more moments, several were suddenly, violently sick, vomiting onto the deck or rising suddenly and bolting from the compartment. Others, men and women alike, were hysterically crying.

  Perhaps most disturbing of all, he could see one Marine, a corporal seated at the next table over, using a combat blade to make tiny, precise slices in the skin of his forearm. Blood trickled from his arm and pooled on deck and table…and no one around him appeared to notice.

  Humanity might be on the verge of extinction, but the Marines on Chosin’s hab decks might well be on the brink of madness.

  13

  25 MARCH 2314

  Camp Hope

  Ring City, Virginia, US/FRA

  0720 hrs, EST

  Gunnery Sergeant Travis Garroway hadn’t been able to sleep. The dreams kept coming—especially the one where he was lost inside the endless, tangled maze of the Xul warship, the robotic horrors were swarming closer, and he had to get through somehow or everything was lost….

  Both Chrome and Earth were wrapped up in that dream somehow, with the feeling that if he failed—and there was no way he could succeed—both would die.

  That dream, or variants of it, had haunted him now for weeks.

  Despite the sleepless night, he’d stayed in his rack on the second deck of the temporary NCO barracks at the Fairfax Center until reveille, then gotten up, dressed, and gone below to the first-deck mess hall for breakfast.

  As Marines filed into the mess hall, other Marines handed them a bowl and breakfast—one to a customer, a rectilinear lump half the size of a brick—dark brown, with the look and consistency of hard-dried mud—vacuum-sealed in plastic.

  Garroway sighed. He was getting damned sick of NMFEs, and wondered if they would ever have decent food, real food, again.

  Finding a space at one of the long tables in the mess hall, he placed his brick in the bowl and lightly ran his thumb down the middle. His touch and his body temperature caused the plastic to peel away, exposing the brick to the air.

  The NMFE rations being passed out now were nothing more than blocks of processed sludge, vacuum-sealed with a thin film coating of submicroscopic nanobots. Opening the pack and exposing the film to the oxygen in the air triggered the transformation within about three minutes, turning dried sludge into an equal mass of what was euphemistically called “porridge.” Moi
sture pulled from the air rehydrated the meal; an extra programming trick let each nanobot liberate a tiny quanta of heat as it self-destructed into its constituent atoms once more, heating the entire meal.

  It was hot and it was nourishing, but it still looked like mud.

  After picking through the uninspired gruel, Garroway checked out a set of Class 1 combat armor—a lightweight vest with a sealed Mk. 56 helmet, as prescribed by the Plan of the Day—and a weapon, left the building, and crossed the parade ground outside, headed toward the Monument grounds. It was still raining, as it had been for the past thirty-eight days, though in the past week the torrential downpour had turned into a thin and chilly drizzle. The temperature this morning was five degrees—and falling.

  It wouldn’t be much longer before the snows came.

  He checked his weapon’s charge as he walked, then slung the LC-2300 laser carbine slung over his shoulder. The shaggies had come again last night, trying to storm the gun emplacements along Southgate Road, right outside of Henderson Hall, and there might still be snipers in the area.

  A flight of Skydragons was expected in from the West Coast this afternoon. He hoped that proved true. A few Skydragons would go a long way toward tightening up the perimeter.

  On the grinder outside of the barracks, he came to a halt. It was 0800 hours, and the flag detail was raising the flag as a recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” played in the rain. Garroway came to attention and rendered a hand salute.

  The brief ceremony was an important gesture, vitally so, given that there was yet some question as to whether or not there was a United States of America anymore, or a Federated Republic. In this tiny corner of a shattered world, the Marines of 1MarReg were all that stood between the memories of civilization, and a very dark and savage reality.

  Across Meade Walkway—once a road for wheeled traffic, and now a tree-lined footpath—he entered sacred ground.

  By a miracle of topology, the Monument had remained above water.

  Late in the twenty-first century, a 180-meter transplas dome had been raised over this hallowed circle of parkland to protect the Monument from the rapidly worsening effects of acid rain. That dome was gone now, blasted away by hurricane-strength winds booming in off the Atlantic with the Armageddon Strike five weeks before, but the famous bronze statue—over 23 meters tall overall, including the flagstaff—still, somehow, stood. Five figures stood in a tightly packed cluster as they raised the flag, perfectly duplicating the 2-D photograph captured by photographer Joe Rosenthal. Portrayed in bronze were the likenesses of five Marines and a Navy hospital corpsman, each ten meters tall: Sergeant Michael Strank, Corporal Harlon H. Block, Private First Class Franklin R. Sousley, Private First Class Rene A. Gagnon, Private First Class Ira Hayes, and Navy Pharmacist’s Mate Second Class John H. Bradley. Rosenthal had snapped that photo—which later won him the Pulitzer Prize—on the summit of Mount Suribachi, the highest point on a tiny, embattled, volcanic atoll named Iwo Jima, on February 23, 1945. Of the six men depicted, three—Strank, Block, and Sousley—had been killed later in the same battle.

  The American flag—flown from the monument’s angled flagstaff twenty-four-hours a day by a presidential decree going back to 1961—had been blown away by the storm, but the Marines had raised another when they arrived on the scene three weeks earlier—seventy-two stars aligned in concentric circles on the blue field, the thirteen red and white stripes symbolizing the original thirteen states. It hung limp in the drizzle, as if dispirited.

  Garroway came to attention a second time, and again rendered a hand salute.

  Reverently, Garroway approached the monument. The base was of rugged Swedish granite, with the names and dates in burnished gold of every action in which the U.S. Marines had taken part, along with the inscription, IN HONOR AND IN MEMORY OF THE MEN OF THE UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES TO THEIR COUNTRY SINCE NOVEMBER 10, 1775. Another inscription was a quote from Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, referring to the assault on the black sands of Iwo: UNCOMMON VALOR WAS A COMMON VIRTUE.

  The Memorial, though, was not just for the Marines who’d fought on Iwo. It honored every Marine who’d died in the service of the nation, from the American Revolution through to the eight Marines who’d died fighting Eridani separatists in the Eostre Insurrection of 2301.

  Garroway looked at that last entry on a very long list, and wondered if anyone would add to it. Some good Marines had died in the defense of Earth, out there in the Asteroid Belt.

  No. Someone would make that addition. Somehow. He remembered that, when the flag was raised over Suribachi, Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, onboard a U.S. warship several miles offshore, had reportedly told the officers with him, “The raising of that flag on Suribachi guarantees a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

  He ran a couple fast subtractions through his implant coprocessor. Iwo Jima had been fought 369 years ago—with 131 years left to go in order to fulfill Forrestal’s prophecy. Perhaps it would be up to the Marines to guarantee the existence of the United States for the next few centuries.

  Walking around the monument, Garroway approached a plasma gun emplacement on the bluff overlooking the Potomac River. Sergeant Hathaway looked up from his position behind a sandbag barricade. “Hey, Gunny. What brings you out in the rain?”

  “Perimeter check. Everything quiet?”

  “So far. I think the shaggies all gave up and went home.”

  “Nice, if true. Don’t count on it. Not when home is a hole in the rubble.”

  “Roger that.”

  Garroway took a moment to survey the landscape. The Memorial rose from a low hill overlooking what had been Theodore Roosevelt Island, in the middle of the Potomac River. Directly opposite was the center of Washington, D.C., only dimly visible through drifting clouds of mist, beneath a leaden overcast that turned early-morning into a deep and brooding twilight.

  The tidal waves blasting in from the Atlantic had lost a great deal of their energy as they rolled across Delaware and Maryland’s Eastern Shore. By the time they reached the nation’s capital, they retained only a fraction of their original destructive power, but even that had smashed buildings, utterly shattered the huge transplas dome covering the Mall between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument, and sent a tidal surge up the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River that had buried everything below the Georgetown Heights in several meters of silt.

  The waters were still high, as the steady rains continued to feed them, though they’d been going down slowly. The Potomac River was still ten meters above its normal level. Directly below the Marine Corps Monument, Roosevelt Island was completely submerged, as was the badly wrecked Kennedy Center on the bank just beyond. The Watergate Metrotower still rose above the flood waters, as did the Washington Monument, somehow still intact. Exactly 5.2 kilometers to the east, according to his helmet display, the Capitol dome, badly damaged but yet standing, stood on a low island in the midst of water-drowned rubble.

  Many of the more massive structures of this “City of Monuments,” as D.C. had been known in centuries past, were still standing, the dark stains on their white marble sides showing just how high the waters had risen three weeks ago, and how far down they’d dropped since. But the marble was Washington’s public face, the clean and proud and shiny part of itself that it had showed to the world since the nineteenth century. Much of the poorer reaches of the outlying city, especially to the south and east, had been leveled by the tidal hammer, and little now showed above that sea of mud stretching clear to the horizon save shattered buildings like broken teeth. Millions had died here; millions more had survived by fleeing to higher ground to the north and west, or by crowding the tops of the taller museums, hotels, metro enclaves, and monument buildings.

  And in the ensuing weeks, many survivors had grown desperate. Heavily armed mobs had ranged inland, raiding farms, communities, and cities not so hard hit as the coastal regions. Stockpiles of food that had surv
ived the fall of Armageddon were wiped out in the space of days, and there were disturbing, widespread rumors of cannibalism.

  Desperation had bred insanity. Aerial transports bringing food, water, and medical support to the D.C. area from inland had been fired on. A C-980 Skyhauler on approach to Arlington had been brought down in Rock Creek Park southeast of the old Naval Observatory, the crew killed, the wreckage looted. The renegades were well-armed; the Skyhauler had been hit by antiaircraft plasma weaponry taken from a Guard armory.

  The Marines of 1MarReg, 3rd Division were too few to secure the entire area. Instead, they’d set up a perimeter on the high ground west of the Potomac, from the Marine Corps headquarters complex at Henderson Hall in the south, to the Corps Monument in the north, and taking in the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery in between.

  This gave them an easily defensible position with clear fields of fire in all directions, and direct access to the quagmire of the Pentagon, just one and a half kilometers east of Henderson Hall. The Pentagon was on low-lying ground, just ten meters above the old sea level; west, the ground rose steadily, and the Corps HQ was nearly forty meters higher. Efforts were now underway to clear passages through the stifling mud and silt to reach some thousands of military personnel and political leaders still alive in deep subbasements of the Pentagon. Deep tunnels gave direct access to the lowest levels of the White House, the Capitol building, and other government buildings in the area, and priority had been given to rescuing them before their supplies of food and air ran out. It had often been observed that an entire city beneath a city existed in the earth beneath the nation’s capital; the Pentagon offered rescuers their best hope of reaching the survivors trapped below the mud.

  The rescue would not be easy. Using blueprints, Army Engineers had located the positions of several deep-level ventilation tubes, and were now attempting to build casements around them. Once completed, the interiors could be pumped free of mud, the ventilator shafts opened, and survivors brought up, but a lack of available heavy equipment meant the operation had to proceed by hand, using essentially nineteenth-and twentieth-century technologies.