by Ian Douglas
The casement shafts had collapsed twice already.
Worse, much of the work was being done under intermittent fire from the towers to the south that once had housed the old Drug Enforcement Agency. Four times in the past week, Marines had stormed those towers and come up empty. Because the towers were half-submerged in the waters of the swollen Potomac, HQ had decided it was too dangerous to leave men in place to guard the position.
And each time the Marines had pulled out, the snipers had come back in. Scuttlebutt had it that when those Skydragons arrived, their first targets would be those towers.
That, however, was not Garroway’s concern. His team had been assigned to the Marine Corps Monument grounds, two and a half kilometers to the northwest. Here, the shaggies, as the renegades and looters were called, were less numerous, and less aggressive. Even so, the supplies flown in by the Marines when they established their perimeter on the Potomac’s west bank had proven irresistible. Every night, a few desperate individuals at least tried to make it through the automated security perimeter and the robot guns.
And behind those outer defenses were people like Sergeant Hathaway.
“It’s almost ten-hundred hours,” Garroway told him. “Stay alert.”
“Don’t worry about that, Gunny. I’m not sure I’m ever going to sleep again. Dreams…y’know?”
“Yeah. I know what you mean. You see the Doc?”
Hathaway made a face behind his visor. “Yeah. Told me to use my implant ECs. Didn’t help.”
Lots of the Marines had been having trouble sleeping, Garroway included. No matter how tired they were, the nightmares always came.
Each Marine had a set of ECs, emotional control programs resident within his personal implant hardware, simplistic bits of software designed to help control fear and emotional trauma, to boost awareness during combat, or to serve as tranquilizers, but the Marines of 1MarReg were facing sets of trauma on a scale that the AI programmers had never envisioned, and they were facing it day after day after nerve-wracking day. Download software for their implants had been promised to help shield them from PTSD and the terror of the more disturbing dreams, but the necessary connections hadn’t yet been set up. They still only had a local Net up and running, and intermittent connections with offworld.
Still, Garroway thought, it would be best over the long term if each of them somehow learned to deal with the nightmares without the help of software. None of them, none of them, had really come to grips yet with the magnitude of what had happened to Earth…which seemed to mean that the emotional trauma, the horror, the loss, the despair, the anger, the isolation that each Marine felt could only emerge during sleep.
Downloaded e-tranqs were well and good, but they would all have to face the situation squarely and on their own sooner or later.
He circled the Monument grounds, moving clockwise, checking at each gun emplacement. Morale was low, he noted, but not yet at a level severe enough to seriously compromise combat efficiency. If we can just hang tough a little longer….
Satisfied that the Monument was secure, he retraced his steps back across the Meade Walkway to the barracks at the Fairfax Center. At the parade ground, he flagged down a Marine hover transport heading for the relief distribution point at the edge of the Ring City, and hitched a ride.
Once, the city had been the center of commerce, the hub for transport ways for private and commercial ground traffic, and a kind of magnet drawing people looking for work. Cities had grown, for the most part, at the nexus of key transportation lines—along navigable rivers, especially, and, later, rail lines.
During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, though, something had gone wrong. Increasing population pressures, rising crime, racial tensions and, more than anything else, increasing city taxes on business and industry, had driven both people and jobs out of the inner cities and into the surrounding suburbs, where the so-called ring cities had taken root and grown.
Over the succeeding centuries, the original cities had been rehabilitated to a large degree, especially as more and more of the local industry and power production was moved offplanet into orbit. The advent of nanotechnology, too, had transformed crumbling infrastructures, and allowed the cheap construction of truly enormous metroplex towers and habitats capable of housing hundreds of thousands where only a few thousand could have lived before.
But the ring cities remained—usually as independent metropolitan entities in their own right. West of Washington, D.C., Alexandria-Fairfax had begun as a dozen isolated centers of commerce in northern Virginia, ultimately fusing into a single metropolitan swath following the old track of the Washington Beltway.
Seated in the back of the hovercraft with a dozen other Marines, Garroway watched the scenery stream past on the vehicle’s cargo deck screens, walkways and parkland giving way to impressive white towers. Located on higher ground than the nation’s capital, Alexandria-Fairfax had suffered less in the way of damage from Armageddon Fall than had Washington. The waves surging up the Potomac Valley had submerged much of Old Alexandria, but the metroplex towers, for the most part, still stood. Parts of the city had burned when the looters came, but most citizens had stayed put rather than fleeing, turning city facilities into fortresses to keep the marauding hordes at bay.
They had limited food reserves, however, and even more limited clean water. When the 1MarReg had touched down at Arlington two weeks ago, they’d found vast throngs of hungry civilians, desperate for food, for water, for medical help, and most especially for defense against the marauders.
The hovercraft gentled its way through a delivery entrance in the titanic wall of the Marshall Sports Complex, an enormous domed enclosure with seating for eight thousand looming above the Arlington Old City Center one kilometer west of the Monument grounds. The hovercraft grounded inside the main stadium, and the other Marines created a human chain and began offloading crate after crate of NMFEs. Garroway thanked the driver for the lift and began looking for Chrome.
He found her in charge of the security element at the C-D distribution point.
“Hey, Chrome,” he called over the private chat channel. “How’s it hangin’?”
“Trigger!” She was standing alone atop a raised platform, a kind of stage, beneath a holographic banner that read CAMP HOPE RELIEF CENTER: ANNANDALE, with instructions to form a single line, maintain order, and wait your turn. “What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were scheduled for downtime this morning.”
“Screw that,” he said, clambering up the steps to join her on the platform. “Too much to do. Anyway, I’ve been getting the comjits.”
“Yeah.” She looked around the interior of the stadium, which was filling rapidly with people, both civilians, and personnel in military uniforms. The stage, raised a good three meters above the stadium’s floor, gave an excellent view over the crowd. “You and me both. The trick is knowing what’s legitimate precog, and what’s normal, healthy paranoia.”
Comjits—combat jitters—was Marine slang for the premonitions shared by every combat veteran since the armies of Sargon the Great. Military psychologists now accepted as fact the heightening of extrasensory abilities, and even worked at strengthening them through mental disciplines such as Weiji-do. But, as Chrome had just pointed out, it was impossible to differentiate between ESP and simple fear.
For Garroway, comjits were simply that feeling in the pit of his stomach that something was about to happen…an empty, gnawing, falling sensation in his gut indistinguishable from fear. His usual response, as now, was to try to find something constructive to do. If his extrasensory antennae weren’t sharp enough to pick a genuine warning out of the ether, including details of where and when the attack would come, then the best thing he could do was be ready for anything.
He looked up at the dome roof, arching 200 meters overhead and ending in a ragged edge open to the gray sky and drizzle. The eastern half of the dome had been blown away, but what remained still provided some shelter from
the incessant rain. More important, it served as an easily defensible bastion from which supplies could be passed out to the locals. Every morning, civilian representatives of the local enclaves would arrive, in hydrogen-powered trucks, in jury-rigged maglev transports, even in horse-drawn wagons, to receive their community allotment of water and precious NMREs. Individual citizens, too, came to volunteer several hours of work in exchange for food for themselves and their families.
“Attention,” a loudhailer blared from somewhere overhead. “Civilian personnel will now approach the distribution stations. If you are here representing yourself, your family, or your block, please line up alphabetically, remain in single file, and maintain order. If you are here to receive distributions for your community, please move to the line identified by city or district. Attention…”
The message continued to repeat, as barriers across the entrances through the audience bleachers were lowered, and streams of civilians and civilian vehicles began separating from the amorphous mob gathered just outside the stadium’s main gate and began feeding through to the fifteen distribution points set up near the center of the stadium. Garroway unslung his carbine and stood next to Chrome, watching the crowds move.
Most of the civilians on foot were lining up in front of the alphabetically designated stations. The vehicles, though, began queuing in front of the stations identified by community—Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax, Bethesda, Silver Springs, and others. His feeling of nervousness moved up a notch. If anything was going to happen, it would happen very soon.
The regiment’s primary mission had been the rescue of military and civilian leaders trapped beneath the Potomac mud, but Colonel Lee had made the determination on the spot that the Marines could help, and, more to the point, that simple humanity demanded that they do so. He’d begun by ordering extra stores of NMFEs without telling orbital HQ what he planned to do with them. By the time they caught on, he could point out, quite truthfully, that the locals were willing to help the Marines both in the work at the Pentagon, and even in the defense of the perimeter, in exchange for supplies of food and clean water.
Frankly, Garroway wondered how long it would be before there were food riots—not from lack of food, but as reaction against the NMFEs.
Nanufactured Meals, Field Expedient, had been in general use in the armed forces for over a century now. The concept was simple. All food, like the organisms that consumed it, was made up of the same organic molecules, in turn formed from the same elements—chiefly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Nanobots—nano-scale machines, each less than a micron across, but working together by the hundreds of trillions—could manipulate large numbers of atoms very quickly, rearranging, say, a small hill of sludge pumped from the river, or even raw sewage, into NMFEs.
Of course, the Marines, who had to live on the stuff during waking periods on board interstellar transports or during long deployments on distant worlds with alien biochemistries had their own explanations for the acronym—many of them, in fact. “No More Fucking Excrement” was one of the most popular, but there were others.
The trouble was that the stuff, while both sterile and nourishing, didn’t have much taste, and the reason had to do with software copyright law. When nanufactured foods had first became practical late in the twenty-second century, there’d been a period of intense competition among bioprospectors, a kind of high-tech gold rush, to develop and patent specific artificially assembled aromatic molecules for flavoring foods. The haute-cuisine restaurant industry, especially, had long ago established proprietary control over the nanoprocesses that could take bland gruel and transform flavor, smell, and texture into something indistinguishable from, say, Escalopes de Saumon Gigondas, or a nice green salad made with fresh produce, croutons, and bleu cheese dressing.
There were freeware downloads available for programming taste into nanomeals, but those had been lost, with so much else, with the collapse of the Global Net. Copies of some freeware cuisine programs existed in the various off-world nets, and included such basic and non-copyrightable standbys as chicken flavor, beef flavor, chocolate flavor, and the like. Tracking those down in the electronic chaos of the past few weeks, however, had been impossible, especially since so much else had higher priorities.
And so, the Marine relief efforts had settled for nutrition and purity, if not taste and appetizing appearance and texture. The same process purified water, and could be used to turn dirt, scrap metal, and debris into emergency nanocrete shelters, barricades, and even emergency spare parts for various pieces of standard equipment. Basic nanotechnic medicine was more specialized, but also available through all of the military nets, allowing the creation of swarms of short-lived nanomachines that could supplement and boost the human immune system, seal wounds, and serve as prophylaxes against the old killers following in the wake of disaster throughout the history of the human species—cholera, typhoid, typhus, dysentery, plague, flu, and a host of others.
Without nanotechnology, Garroway thought, the relief effort would have been doomed before it started. There was no way enough food could be grown offworld to feed Earth’s starving population, and not enough ships in the whole Solar System to move it all even if it had existed. Starvation and disease would have killed at least another twenty percent of the billions of survivors remaining on the planet, even ignoring the predicted effects of the coming long winter.
It still would have been nice, however, if they could have programmed the gruel to taste like chicken.
In any case, the latest word from orbit was that the huge, solar-powered nanufactories out at the Lagrange Points, normally used for military and large-scale power plant construction, were being converted to produce emergency supplies for the Earth relief effort. Initial setup was expected to take three weeks; after that, supplies of programmed nanobots for creating food, shelter, medical supplies, and even construction equipment would be coming down by glider in megaton lots.
All they needed to do was hold out until then.
Scanning the queuing crowds, Garroway noticed a number of Marines on the main deck in front of the alphabetically ordered stations. Using his helmet optics, he zoomed in for a high-mag view. They looked painfully young, and were unarmored—wearing olive-drab Marine utilities and forage caps instead of Class Ones and Mark 56s. They looked foreign to Garroway, with black hair, swarthy skin, and full lips; at first, he wondered if they were South Indian troops, possibly from the World Union. But when he queried the local MilNet over his helmet com, he saw they were new recruits from Ishtar. He’d heard about them a week ago, but had forgotten in the chaos since.
“How are the offworld newbies doing?” he asked Chrome.
“The Ishies? Okay, I guess. They need close supervision, just like little kids. They’re still recruits.”
“Yeah. They were supposed to be coming to Earth to go to Parris Island, right?”
“Right. Only Parris Island ain’t there anymore.”
Garroway felt a pang at that. No Marine really enjoyed the hell of recruit training, but once they were out, they tended to look back at Camp Lejeune with a kind of masochistic nostalgia.
We’ve lost so much….
“So what are we supposed to do with them?”
“They’ve had Phase One of boot camp,” Chrome said, “so they’re not completely raw.” She shrugged. “Hell, the way I see it, Trig, we need all the help we can get.”
He nodded slowly. He wished, though, they had more experienced people. There were only about twenty Marines on duty here in the stadium, assigned to maintain order while the food and water were passed out.
That nagging feeling that something was wrong was still gnawing at him, still—
A savage, hollow bang echoed across the stadium. Garroway ducked and looked up in time to see a shower of debris falling from the north side of the dome overhead, perhaps fifty meters to his right. Civilians screamed and broke out of line, scattering in all directions.
“Incoming!” someone
yelled over the tactical channel.
“Bandits!” another voice cried. “Bandits at the North Gate!”
“Maintain order!” a voice boomed over the mob from a speaker somewhere overhead. “Stay where you are! Do not panic!”
And then another explosion ripped through the stadium dome high above him, followed an instant later by a far heavier, massive whump from somewhere just outside, and all hope of restoring anything like order to the mob vanished.
14
25 MARCH 2314
Near the Stadium North Gate
Marshall Sports Complex,
Relief Distribution Center
1020 hrs, EST
Recruit Private Nal il-En Shra-dach dropped to the deck when the first explosion went off, and was very nearly killed as the queues around him disintegrated. Thousands of people were inside the stadium dome, and suddenly they were all trying to leave at once. A loudhailer voice was booming above the crowd noise, trying to maintain calm and order, but a moment later, the second and third explosions went off, and the stampede of civilians began to take on a life of its own, surging away from the North Gate and rolling back deeper into the stadium.
Rolling to one side, he managed to get his back to a wall—actually the barrier in front of the bleacher section—and to unsling his weapon, an LR-2290 laser rifle, standard Corps issue.
He still wasn’t entirely sure how to use the thing.
Trust your downloads, the voice of Staff Sergeant Wojkowiz said in his head. The knowledge is there. Trust it!
Well and good, but he needed a target first. Right now, all he could see was a thundering, screaming mob trying to flee.
A fundamental fact of biology confronted Nal. Ten thousand years of genetic isolation on Ishtar had resulted in a substantial drift in the genome; everyone in this huge, domed room was taller than he was, and he couldn’t see more than a few meters.
