by Ian Douglas
Lifting from the ground on his gravitics, he began drifting forward. His AI spotted a Xul point-defense weapon three hundred meters away and he turned his X-ray laser on it. Within his in-head display, a targeting cursor zeroed in on the enemy gun, locking on to it. He thought-clicked the triggering command….
…as sand crunched beneath his shoes. The column had been struggling ahead through soft beach sand beneath the hot sun for an hour, now, muskets loaded and at shoulder arms. Behind them came a column of fifty sailors off the Cabot under the command of Lieutenant Weaver. Ahead, Fort Montagu rose next to the emerald waters off New Providence Island, a low, deeply truncated pyramid with embrasures for cannon, and a red, white, and blue Union Jack fluttering from a flagpole inside. The town of Nassau lay just beyond, pastel-colored buildings gleaming in the sun. The place, both town and fort, appeared unnaturally quiet, even deserted.
The Marines had hoped to catch the fort by surprise, but a signal gun had boomed out as they’d come ashore, sounding the alarm. Bad luck, there. They would have to storm the fort…unless the redcoats could be talked into surrender. To that end, a short while before, Captain Nicholas had sent a runner on ahead with a message for a Governor Montfront Browne, advising him to avoid bloodshed and surrender the town.
A puff of smoke appeared at one of the fort’s embrasures, followed seconds later by the far-off boom of a cannon. Porter saw something strike the beach a hundred yards ahead and to the left, sending up a spray of sand between the column and the sea. A second later, it hit again, farther up the beach, and then a third time, the round skipping across the sand as it flashed past. Several of the men in ranks bellowed derisively. “Damned lobsterbacks!” Private Dolby called out. “Y’ninnies can’t hit a barn wall at arm’s length from yer noses!”
“Silence in the ranks!” Captain Samuel Nicholas called. “Sergeant Prescott! Have the men deploy in line of battle, if you please.”
“Aye, sir!” the sergeant, a grizzled old-timer off the Alfred, growled. “Awright, you men! You heard the Captain of Marines! Column, halt! Battle formation, hut!”
The Marine drummer rattled off a long roll as the Continental Marines broke out of column formation and took up two parallel lines, one behind the other, facing the fort. Porter was in the front rank, feeling nakedly exposed and vulnerable. The fort was still several hundred yards away, well beyond effective musket range.
“The men may fix bayonets, Sergeant.”
“Aye, sir! Awright, Marines! Horder…harms!”
More or less as one, the lines of Marines brought their muskets down off their shoulders, slapped them into port arms, then dropped the buttstocks to the sand sharply alongside their right legs. They’d been practicing and drilling these maneuvers for weeks, getting them letter perfect, but in the excitement of imminent battle, the execution this morning was a bit ragged.
“Fix…bayonets!”
Porter drew the slender, 14-inch steel blade of his bayonet from its scabbard, fixed the locking ring over the muzzle of his weapon, and snapped it home.
Captain Nicholas walked in front of the lines, his sword drawn. “Men…no fancy speeches this morning. Right now, up in New England, General Washington desperately needs gunpowder for the Continental Army outside of Boston. Over there is the British supply depot for the Bahamas…and about six hundred barrels of black powder. We’re here to take it away from those fellows. Sergeant, you may deploy the men for the attack.”
“Yessir! Huzzah for the captain, lads!”
“Huzzah!” Porter and the rest of the 250 Marines and sailors shouted in shrill unison. With surprise lost at the landing, they might as well let the British know they were coming. “Huzzah! Huzzah!”
“Marines! Charge…bayonets! At the walk…for’ard…harch!”
Right foot first as he’d been taught, John Porter stepped forward, his musket held stiffly at his right side, bayonet leveled at the enemy. He wondered if they would fire a volley before they reached the wall…and how close that might be. He wondered if they would have to storm those sloping stone and wood walls with the bayonet, and how many men might die in the attempt. He wondered…
A second puff of smoke erupted from the fort. Another ball struck the sand just ahead, and Porter wondered if he was about to die.
HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines
Within Objective Reality
0847 hours, GMT
Nal wondered if he was about to die. For a moment, he’d been locked in a terrible, life-or-death struggle with a nightmare apparition of black metal-ceramic and lashing tentacles…but the vision faded and he was back on the barricades outside the city of Derna.
Musket fire crackled from behind the barricades, knocking down several Greek and Arab mercenaries. Sergeant Derek was caught now in a desperate, life-or-death struggle with some hundreds of turbaned Barbary Coast pirates, and for a horrible moment, when Eaton was shot and the assault began to falter, it seemed as though the attack was doomed at last. Derek recovered from his bayonet thrust, then whipped the stock of his musket around to smash the jaw of another pirate rushing him from the left. Just in front of him, a musket boomed and Private John Whitten caught the round high in his chest, sprawling to the ground in an untidy splay of arms and legs and pooling blood. Derek lunged again with his bayonet, cutting down the pirate who’d just fired.
And then, suddenly, magically, the enemy was running, running, turning their backs on the polyglot band of Marines and mercenaries and fleeing into the town. The men began cheering, some of them throwing caps and turbans into the air. Against all expectations, against all odds, the rush had carried the barricades and broken the enemy line of defense.
Nearby, the naval midshipman with the column was tying off a rough bandage around General Eaton’s wrist. The man gave a thin-lipped smile and drew his pistol with his right hand. “We’re not done yet!” he bellowed, pointing with the weapon. “The fort, men!”
Flushed and panting with exertion and victory, the handful of Marines and mercenaries cheered more loudly. After a mere sixty of them had stormed the barricades and set hundreds of defenders to flight, anything seemed possible now. As Derek began pulling the force back into order again, though, he felt a dark flash of foreboding. Of the seven enlisted Marines in the party, including himself, three—Thomas, O’Brian, and Steward were wounded, Steward critically—and one, John Whitten, was dead. Over half of the Marine contingent was out of action, now…and the Marines had been all that had held Eaton’s bizarre little army together for the past seven weeks. Several Christian Greek mercenaries lay dead as well, along with several Muslims, and a dozen men out of the sixty were wounded. The victory at the barricades had come at a high price. One of the wounded men insisted he was still able to fight, but the other two would be left behind with some Greeks to watch over them.
The harbor fort lay just ahead, ominously silent. The naval midshipman raised a pre-arranged signal flag from a city wall parapet, and moments later the naval gunfire from the flotilla offshore slackened, then died away.
“We take that fort and the city is ours!” Eaton declared. “Victory or death!”
Eaton, Derek had long since concluded, was a vainglorious idiot with a penchant for melodrama. But the fort appeared empty, almost inviting.
Gunsmoke clung to the streets of Derna like a thick, New England fog as the ragged army, with four enlisted Marines and one officer in the van, began making its way through narrow streets toward Derna’s harbor fort.
Blue Twelve
Objective Reality
0849 hours, GMT
Lieutenant Kadellan Wahrst wondered what was happening. She’d been…on her belly in the wheat, as machine-gun fire sliced the stalks inches above her back. Then she’d been crawling, trying to work her way around the Hun gun position. And then…
She guided her Starwraith up to the opening, a twenty-meter triangular cavern mouth yawning in the gray surface of the Xul world. Laser beams and particle cannon contin
ued to gouge huge chunks from Xul surface structures, silencing the defensive weapons one by one. In the violet-blue mists overhead, flights of Marine Maelstrom heavy fighters off of the Nicholas flew dangerously low across the fire-torn landscape, guided to Xul targets by strikepod Marines on the surface, or by unmanned battlespace drones and recon AIs.
Captain Xander’s icon was gone from her in-head display. No…there she was. Fifty meters distant and closing. What was wrong with their tracking?
“Blue One! Blue Twelve! Where’ve you been?”
“I…I’m not sure what happened.” Captain Xander’s voice sounded shaken. “I was…in Mexico. Mexico. A place called Chapultepec….”
“Fuck,” Blue Nine, Misek Bollan said. “I was in some kind of small, open metal boat. Explosions in the water everywhere. And the beach was so far….”
“We may be under attack,” Xander said. “Psychic attack. Or possibly through our implants. Shake it off!”
“We’ve got an entrance to the Xul underground here!”
“I’m coming.”
Xander, Bollan, and three other Marines joined Wahrst moments later. Their scanners showed no signs of life or movement within, but that didn’t mean the Xul weren’t lying in wait, their power systems damped down to near invisibility. Theory said the Xul “pilots” of those war machines lived on their equivalent of the Net, digital intelligences that could animate a lifeless piece of metal with a thought and turn it deadly.
“Nicholas, Blue One!” Xander called over the main QCC channel. “We are entering Objective Reality.”
And that was a misnomer if Wahrst had ever heard one, she thought. Whatever was happening around her, it wasn’t reality, objective or otherwise. As she entered the cavern’s mouth, the darkness faded to bright sunlight, to waving stalks of wheat, to pillars of climbing black smoke and the bellow and howl of artillery rounds.
Corporal Edgar O’Malley was crawling fast now, on his hands and knees, his Springfield awkwardly slung over his back. His destination was the tree line to his left, now less than twenty yards away.
All across the battlefield, tiny groups of Marines, their numbers decimated in those first few bloody moments of the advance, had abandoned their worse-than-useless French training and hit the deck, continuing to move forward but taking advantage of every bit of cover the shell-ravaged fields and woods had to offer. In a way, it was the supreme American military gesture, reverting to Indian tactics to defeat an enemy that expected them to march and maneuver parade-ground fashion in plain and easy-to-kill sight. American colonials had used such tactics to drive the British column all the way back from Concord to Boston in 1775. Now the U.S. Marines were using them to gain a foothold in the woods.
Belleau Wood, the place was called, a tiny comma of forest two miles long and narrowly pinched at the middle. It occupied the center of a triangle marked by three shell-blasted villages—Belleau, Bouresches, and Lucy-Le-Bocage—and its sole importance lay in the German high command’s determination to teach the newly arrived Americans a bloody lesson in the realities of European warfare.
Emerging from the wheat, O’Malley crawled over a low hummock and slid down among a small clump of Marines huddled in the scant shelter afforded by a smoking shell crater. Other Marines lay and crouched nearby, trying to return fire against the incessant and deadly chatter of the German Maxim guns. The mangled dead and dying lay scattered everywhere.
“Fuck this!” one of the men inside the crater shouted. He rose to his feet, fully exposed now to the enemy fire. With a start, O’Malley recognized him. He’d seen his photographs, and even seen him in person at a military review a few weeks before. He was Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly, one of the old-breed leathernecks, a two-time Medal of Honor winner from the Boxer Rebellion and Haiti.
Daly waved his bayoneted rifle over his head with a wild, forward sweep. “Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?”
With a roar, the Marines in the shell hole scrambled to their feet and clambered out, rushing forward with Daly in the lead. Elsewhere across the bloody wheat field, other Marines, singly and in small, huddled groups saw the charge, rose up, and joined it.
And O’Malley raced forward with the rest of them, shouting wildly.
Garroway, Gold One
Above Objective Reality
0849 hours, GMT
The sharp, cold pain in his leg brought Garroway screaming back to full consciousness. He was again on board the Nicholas, lying in his link couch, his Starwraith unattended somewhere within the depths of the Great Annihilator’s gravitational maw. A Navy corpsman bent over him, looking concerned. “General? Are you okay? What happened?”
The pain was fading but its memory remained. He also remembered his last glimpse of the battle, the screaming mob of Chinese Boxers as they closed in on him, jabbing and lunging at him with their spears and pikes. Sitting up, he tugged at his trousers, exposing his left calf. An angry red welt there was rapidly fading. “Son of a bitch.”
“What happened to your leg?” the corpsman asked. He reached for a nanospray therapeutic unit. “Here, let me inject you….”
“Forget it, son,” Garroway told him, waving him off. “I need to think about this.”
He dropped back on the link couch, but not to reconnect with the Starwraith. He wanted to talk this over with Socrates or one of the other high-level AIs, but if the Xul had compromised the Associate Fleet’s electronic networks, the AIs too might be compromised.
He began linking in with his command constellation. Two, Geisman and Bamford, were still linked to other Starwraiths at Objective Reality, but the other nine were merely linked in at the Nicholas’ end of the data stream, managing the battle.
“Heads up, people!” he snapped over the circuit. “We have a problem.”
Recon Zephyr
Objective Reality’s Ring
0849 hours, GMT
Lieutenant Amanda Karr was a part of the chorus. Through Luther and a set of translation programs compiled over the centuries by other penetrations of Xul ships and networks, she could merge with the litany and follow it.
They were researching the Marines.
These are ancient enemies. We have faced them before….
We have faced them. We have beaten them, absorbed them….
And they have beaten us, time and time again.
Survival is paramount. We must survive.
To survive we must find their weaknesses and destroy them.
Destroy them….
Karr moved through a sea of chanting voices, unnoticed, the penetrator program providing her with a software shell that let her move through the alien electronic network, tasting, listening, understanding. Hundreds, no, thousands of distinct data streams carried encyclopedic volumes of information that seemed to relate to the history of the Marine Corps. As she sampled the streaming data packets, she caught glimpses of ancient, seagoing sailing ships, of ranks of men in stiff-necked uniform jackets carrying antique powder firearms, of men in cloth uniforms and steel helmets, of men in various types of space suits and combat armor.
She merged with one stream. She saw a frozen, snow-covered hillside. Gunnery Sergeant Donald Atkins crouched in his fighting hole, aiming a primitive pulse laser at an advancing wave of dark-clad figures. To left and right, other Marines in mid-twenty-first-century combat dress calmly picked out their targets and fired. The heavy backpack batteries powering their Sunbeam, Mk. IX lasers had been placed in their holes by their feet; winking orange indicator lights indicated that all of the power packs were nearly drained dry.
And the Chinese Hegemony hordes kept coming….
Karr could hear Atkins’ thoughts. The year was 2061, and the place was Hill 440 outside of Vladivostok, in east-maritime Russia. The Marine Third Division had been called in to help America’s Russian allies repel the Hegemony’s attempt to take over the entire Russian Far East.
The winking light on Atkins’ battery pack went red, then faded, and his Sunbeam
died.
“That’s it for my laser,” he called over the tactical comm net. Setting the useless weapon aside, he drew his service sidearm, a high-power 10mm Colt M2015 automatic.
“Same here,” Captain Norman said from a nearby position. “We hold here, Marines. We hold!”
The front ranks of the oncoming army were only fifty meters away, now. Atkins chambered a round and took aim….
Karr jerked back out of the data stream. The simulation…no, the alternate reality, the parareality within the flow was powerful and compelling. But where was it coming from? It was inconceivable that the Xul would have enough information about human and Corps history to create such a detailed illusion. The information had to be coming somehow from the Marines’ own libraries.
A digital scout within an electronic jungle, she began to investigate more deeply.
Blue Seven
Approaching Objective Reality
0849 hours, GMT
A third cannon shot boomed out from the fort, struck sand, and skipped toward the Marine formation. At Nicholas’ shouted orders, the two ranks of Marines parted, dividing left and right, and the near-spent ball rolled harmlessly between them. Another order, and the ranks came together again, continuing the relentless advance on the fort.
The guns appeared to be silent, now. Far off in the distance, a bugle sounded and, moments, later, the flag hanging from the fort’s flagstaff lowered.
“Damn my eyes!” a sailor called out. “Th’ buggers’re surrendering!”
With quickening excitement, John Porter and the rest of the Continental Marines swept toward the fort, as the gates swung open to receive them.
HQ Section, Second Battalion, Ninth Marines
Within Objective Reality
0849 hours, GMT
And in the Tripolitean town of Derna, a handful of Marines rushed the gates of the harbor fort. Enemy resistance appeared to have collapsed entirely, and Mustafa’s troops were scattering everywhere.
To the south and west, Hamet’s cavalry had swept into Derna unopposed. The defenders on that side of the town, apparently, had been drawn off by Eaton’s assault on the eastern barricades, leaving the way wide open for Hamet’s men. They’d occupied an empty castle on the outskirts of town, then moved on to seize the governor’s palace.
