by Ian Douglas
But he could see far enough. Three meters away, Derel was struggling to remain on her feet as panicked civilians crowded past her. She fell, and he heard her scream as she was trampled.
“Make a hole!” Nal bellowed, pushing forward into the mob, wielding the stock of his laser rifle like a paddle. “Make a hole!”
It was unlikely that the crowd understood the ancient military expression, or that they even heard it. By sheer, brute strength and determination, though, Nal shoved, prodded, and beat enough people aside to create a tiny clear space around Derel long enough for her to regain her feet.
“Thanks, Nal!” she gasped.
“Hang on to my shoulder!” he yelled, turning his back on her and swinging his weapon hard. “Come on! This way!”
Perhaps the sight of two Marines, neither more than 150 centimeters tall, charging against the flow of traffic was startling enough to get through the fog of panic spreading through the mob. Civilians moved out of their way, or tried to. A woman clinging to an infant stumbled and fell, shrieking. Nal adjusted his course to push his way in front of her, as Derel helped her up. Several men locked arms and battled the tide to create a human barrier, forcing the rest of the crowd to flow around them.
Together, somehow, they fought the oncoming tide of humanity and managed to regain a measure of relative safety in the lee of the wall. The human barrier dissolved back into the sea.
“Now what?” Derel asked, panting.
“We move up!” Nal replied. He pointed toward a set of steps going up from a break in the wall a few meters to the left. There was a gate, but the lock yielded to a sharp blow from his weapon, and they clambered into the lowest levels of the bleacher section. From there, they could make their way along an aisle to a kind of bridge spanning the broad opening of the North Gate. Looking down over the railing, Nal could see nothing but the tops of heads, as more and more people streamed through into the stadium’s interior.
“Smedley!” he thought, transmitting the mental code to access the unit AI. “What should we do?”
All he got in response was the wait light blinking in his mind’s eye. The AI was either down or overwhelmed by other requests at the moment. Nal and Derel were on their own, a bleak and terrifying thought.
Trust your training.
The thought—and the bass thunder of Wojkowiz’s remembered bellow—steadied him. Phase One Marine training, back at Gilgamesh, had consisted largely of learning how to use their new Corps-issue implants. Basic skills—such as marksmanship, basic first aid, and the standards and protocols of military life—all had been electronically downloaded into the recruits’ brains.
The trouble was, the information was there, now, but the physical neural connections in his jellyware brain required to make using it automatic were not. Rather than having a datum he needed simply there, at the instant he required it, he had to feel around in his thoughts searching for the memetic place marker that would let him access it. Phase Two of recruit training was supposed to have given them proficiency in extracting and using their downloaded training. Unfortunately, that part of training had been indefinitely postponed.
Another explosion ripped through the dome ceiling overhead, releasing a cascade of debris that showered onto the panicking mob, urging them forward. Nal could see bodies on the deck, some moving, some still, many bloodied, civilians trampled by the stampede. Someone was firing at the stadium dome, that much was certain. The question was why?
No, he corrected himself. Not “why.” The question is what do I do about it?
Other recruits who’d been out on the deck managing the queues were making it, in bedraggled twos and threes, to the shelter of the wall. As he and Derel waved and shouted, more and more found the stairs, and began coming up into the bleachers to join them…Vanet Gan-Me, Trab Jil Gar-ad, Chakar Na-il Havaay, and others.
All of them were recruit privates from Ishtar, however. There were no AIs, officers, or NCOs to tell them what to do.
It was Nal who took the initiative. “I’m in command,” he told the others, a ragged group of eight. “Follow me!”
And the miracle was that they did.
Center Stadium Area
Marshall Sports Complex,
Relief Distribution Center
1029 hrs, EST
Garroway was trying to connect with the unit AI. Priority override! he thought. Give me a fucking channel!
All he got in reply was the please-wait icon. Quincy was locked up and out of the running.
Which was one of the dangers of relying on artificial intelligences that were, by their very nature, reliant on massive parallel processing across multiply redundant communications nodes. Under normal circumstances, AIs like Quincy “lived,” if that was the word, on large-scale data nets—Global Net or the myriad military Internetworks. A smaller and simpler version of Quincy, “Quincy2,” could function reliably on the smaller number of platforms and service nodes in a single ship, like the Preble, and on the numerous computers and interconnected processors carried by individual Marines.
A certain minimum complexity was required, however, to maintain a viable AI net, and 1MarReg had been working very close to that minimum for three weeks, now. Ninety percent of their processing power was still on board the Preble, in low Earth orbit. Most of the civil and military communications satellites that formerly had swarmed about the planet were gone, now, wiped away by the sleet of high-speed dust and debris sweeping in from the Asteroid Belt just before Armageddonfall, and only a handful had been replaced so far. As a result, once every ninety minutes there was a twenty-three-minute hole in their communications links with the Preble, and the AIs working on the ground were limited to the rather narrow scope of the computers in Fairfax Center, at Henderson Hall, and in the individual combat suits and helmets of the Marines on the ground.
And the attack, by sheer bad luck, had been launched halfway through the blackout in comlinks with the Preble. Right now, Quincy2 still existed inside the navigational computers on board the transport, but only fragmentary pieces of him—decidedly non-intelligent software—were working on the ground at the moment.
Unable to raise Quincy, he shifted to a straight communications channel. “Echo One! Echo One! This is Trigger! Do you copy?”
He heard nothing back but static, and bit off a curse. That loud thump he’d heard after the first couple of explosions had sounded like it came from the direction of the stadium’s main gate outside. Echo One was the security element in charge of the gate; it was possible that they’d been taken out.
Giving up on the com channel, he scanned the crowd on the stadium floor, using his helmet optics to zoom in on individuals and vehicles. There was a pattern here, and a damned disturbing one. The explosions on top of the dome—arpegs, he thought—seemed designed to stampede the crowd in a specific direction—from the North Gate south through the center of the stadium. If that larger explosion had taken out the Main Gate security element, the attackers might be swarming in behind the panicked civilians any moment now.
There! He zoomed in closer on a mass of faces coming in through the stadium’s inner doors behind the fleeing civilians…hard faces, determined faces, and in the same instant he saw the weapons.
The Marines called them shaggies because they needed a name, and “marauders” or “bandits” seemed too intellectual, even prissy. In fact, they were no more ragged-looking or hairy than the rest of the mob. Many wore mismatched items of military clothing taken from military surplus shops or stolen from armories. Some, not all, wore red rags tied over their upper right arms; some, not all, sported collections of animated tattoos as impressive as Chrome’s. Their weapons were a miscellany of civilian and military arms, from slug-throwing hunting rifles to hand lasers and Army-issue mass drivers. Garroway didn’t see any pigs in the mob, and was grateful for that…but the fact that he didn’t see them didn’t mean they weren’t there. That starhauler, he remembered, had been brought down by a man-portable plasma weapon.
The shaggies seemed to represent a broad cross-section of races and ethnicity, Garroway saw. There were black faces in the crowd, and Latinos, and Middle-Eastern/Semitics, and Asians, and there were plenty of blond and blue-eyed faces as well.
Desperation knew little of ethnic boundaries.
Desperate or not, this band had to be stopped. Clearly they’d come after the supplies of food and water being handed out to the civilian population, and clearly their assault had been carefully planned and timed.
From what intelligence the Marines had been able to gather so far in the Greater-D.C. area, the entire region was controlled by about a dozen different warlords, each with a personal army that might number as high as a couple of thousand. The more successful a warlord was in securing supplies of food and weapons, the more fighters he attracted and the bigger his army. Those red bands on their arms, Garroway thought, probably meant this bunch was with General Tom Williams, as he styled himself, and the Red Tiger Militia, one of the biggest and most troublesome of the private armies in the area.
And they were crowding into the stadium, mingling with the unarmed civilians.
“Bandits in sight!” Garroway called over the tactical channel. “Coming through the North Gate! Heads up! It’s a puppy rush!”
Puppy rush was milspeak for using hostages, civilians, even crowds of children as human shields, herding them ahead of and around an attacking force in order to storm a defended position. The attackers were hoping the Marines would hold their fire—or at least hesitate for a critical few moments—for fear of hitting unarmed civilians.
It was a low-tech means of defeating high-tech, and one that frequently worked. Still, military technology had a trick or two that continued to give the Marines an edge.
Garroway raised his laser carbine and projected the thought-code that switched on his weapon’s CAT function. Computer-Assisted Targeting had been around since the late twentieth century, when laser, radar, or infrared tracking had enabled so-called smart weapons to stay locked on to designated targets. The CAT scope on Garroway’s carbine was simpler. A camera bore-sighted with the weapon fed a magnified image to Garroway’s helmet visor display, with red crosshairs marking the target point. Laser pulses traveled in precisely straight lines, unaffected by gravity, by magnetic fields, by friction with the air, or by the wind, so if Garroway could see even a portion of a militiaman’s body beneath the reticule, he could hit it.
He thumbed the weapon’s selector switch to implant control, and held down the trigger as he took aim. Now the weapon would not fire until and unless he gave a single, sharp mental code, fed through his cerebral implant to the weapon’s firing control system. He magnified the image in his visor display, put the reticule on top of a red-banded marauder’s scowling face, and gave the code—now!
The computer interface allowed him to trigger the shot without risking a jerky movement that might throw off his aim. A single bolt of coherent light struck the marauder just above his left eye, vaporizing a quarter of the man’s skull in a splash of blood and red mist. Garroway smoothly shifted his aim a couple of meters to the left, targeting a second marauder, and taking him down with a clean shot through the throat. The LC-2300 fired a ten-megawatt laser pulse, which carried about the same energy—delivered as flash heating and thermal shock—as the detonation of two hundred grams of chemical high explosives. A single shot to an attacker’s head, throat, or unprotected upper chest did end the argument, at least for that particular individual.
Other Marines throughout the stadium were opening fire as well, and the marauders were going down. Several broke suddenly, and ran, but others tried firing over the heads of their human shields, continuing to push forward.
A trio of projectiles arced high into the space beneath the dome one after another, hesitated for the space of half a second, then began to twist around toward the elevated platform. “Arpegs!” Garroway yelled. Rocket-propelled grenades—and these appeared to be smart weapons, capable of identifying people in armor and carrying weapons and homing in on them with deadly accuracy.
Before Garroway could react further, however, all three projectiles flashed briefly in a trio of sharp, loud cracks, and disintegrated into clouds of falling fragments. The Marines had set up a pair of autogun towers—robot sentries—behind the stand, and these could track and target incoming projectiles faster and far more accurately than could human gunners. More RPGs streaked into the air, only to be whiplashed by invisible laser pulses from the robotic gun towers.
Garroway tried to identify the sources of the RPGs, which were coming from the thickest part of the moving crowd. That crowd was beginning to open up, however, as civilians streamed past the elevated stand and into the southern half of the stadium. As the mob parted, Garroway saw a vehicle just emerging from the north entrance—a low-riding cargo GEV heavily layered with strap-on sandbags, scrap metal, and logs. The Ground Effect Vehicle was thrusting ahead through the crowd, scattering civilians, its skirts rippling with the blast of high-pressure air emerging from its ventral thrusters.
“Technical at the North Entrance!” Chrome called over the tactical net. “Repeat! We have a technical at the North Entrance!”
“Technical” was an old term for a civilian vehicle fitted out with makeshift armor and weapons—a serious threat when the crowds of fleeing civilians in front of it precluded the use of heavy weapons. The back of the vehicle was open, and Garroway could see armored figures there, one behind what looked like a heavy plasma gun mount. Taking aim, he increased the magnification on his helmet optics, zooming in close enough to see that there were three men in back, and that they were mirror-armored.
Combat armor that could adopt the local light levels and hues, becoming, in effect, actively changing camouflage, had been around for several centuries and, at first, Garroway thought that’s what he was seeing. The figures appeared to be reflecting their surroundings—mostly the grays and whites of the dome surface overhead.
He targeted one of the men, however, and fired. There was a flash, but no apparent damage. Damn!
Combat armored suits with nanoflage coatings that could both become perfectly reflective and repair themselves were more recent innovations than traditional active camo, and still expensive. Garroway didn’t know where the marauders had managed to get these suits—stolen from a Guard armory, perhaps—but he knew they meant trouble. Those coatings were as reflective as liquid mercury, scattering nearly all incoming light, and swiftly repairing areas of the coating that were charred by the small amount of energy actually absorbed. The weak point was the helmet—specifically—the optical receptor patches for the interior visor display, which were small, almost invisible, and usually programmed to shift rapidly from point to point.
Garroway put the targeting reticule over what might have been the helmet’s optical patch and triggered his weapon. As before, he saw a flash of scattering light, with no effect on the target. Other hits flashed and strobed off the slick, reflective surface, which seemed to ripple and distort as the vehicle moved slowly forward.
And now he could see two more GEVs following the first in line-ahead.
The plasma gunner in the back of the GEV slewed his weapon around on its mount and fired, the bolt trailing a thunderclap as it burned through the air a meter above Garroway’s head. “Cover!” he yelled, and he and Chrome dropped flat on the platform’s steel grating. A second shot struck the platform, and the structure canted sharply to the right, throwing the two Marines to the ground.
They scrambled to their feet. The mob was surging around them, fleeing the oncoming vehicles, but they were able to stand their ground as the crowd flowed past.
“C’mon!” he yelled at Chrome.
There was only one way to take on those hovercraft….
North Gate,
Marshall Sports Complex,
Relief Distribution Center
1031 hrs, EST
Nal looked down over the railing from the promenade bridging over th
e inner gate, and saw the hovercraft directly beneath him, slowly moving forward as it cleared the entrance. Its thrusters howled, and clouds of dust and grit swirled out from its skirts. Three men in mirrored armor were crouched on the flatbed behind the low cab, and the entire vehicle was covered with makeshift armor of sandbags, sheet metal, and wood.
He’d led his small and makeshift army out onto the walkway above the main entrance, hoping to grab a high-ground position from which he could open fire on the marauders as they rushed through eight meters beneath. The walkway gave them that vantage point, but the arrival of the hovercraft changed everything.
Trab Jil Gar-ad snapped off a shot with his laser, but the bolt flashed uselessly from the shiny garment one of the marauders was wearing. Nal, too, took aim with his weapon, trying to let the downloaded information about how it worked flow through him, without having to dig for it. Aim…track…breath…hold…squeeze…
The bolt flashed harmlessly off mirrored armor.
Their download sessions back home had included a bit of factual data about lasers—that lasers were nothing but light, and, like light, were reflected from mirrored surfaces. Their laser weapons were useless here, even at almost point-blank range.
Nal had only a second to make a decision.
Dropping his laser rifle, he drew his combat knife from its sheath and vaulted over the railing.
Center Stadium Area
Marshall Sports Complex,
Relief Distribution Center
1031 hrs, EST
Garroway charged forward, Chrome close by his side, rushing headlong against the flow of panicked civilians. The crowds were greatly thinned out now, with most of the civilians behind them, now, filling the southern half of the stadium. North, eight or ten scruffies were firing randomly into the crowd and, beyond them, the first of the cargo hovercraft was edging through the North Gate and onto the stadium floor. The pig gunner on the flatbed behind the cab fired his weapon again, sending a bolt whipcracking across the stadium floor and striking one of the robot sentries at Garroway’s back.
