Star Strike

by Ian Douglas

  “You maggots,” Warhurst growled, his former tough-DI persona slowly re-emerging, “you mudworms are even more stupid than I was led to believe. All right. Show’s over. Like I said earlier, from this point on, you are mine. I personally am going to eat you alive, chew you up, and spit your worthless carcasses out on these sands.

  “But maybe, maybe, a few of you will have what it takes to be Marines.” Turning, he addressed one of the assistants—the evil-grinning one. “Sergeant Corrolly!”

  “Yes, Drill Instructor Warhurst!”

  “We need to find out what these worms are really made of. Let’s take them on a little run before breakfast!”

  The evil grin grew wider. “Yes, Drill Instructor!”

  “Move out!”

  “Aye, aye, Drill Instructor!” The assistant DI turned to face the waiting survivors of the morning’s muster. “You heard the Drill Instructor! Recruit platoon…lef’ face! For’ard, harch! And…double time! Hut! Hut! Hut!…”

  Garroway began to hut.

  And within twenty minutes, as he dragged screaming leg muscles through the fine, clinging, ankle-deep sand of the Martian desert, he was wondering if he was going to be up for this after all.

  What the hell had he been thinking when he’d volunteered?…

  2

  0407.1102

  Green 1

  Meneh, Alighan

  0512/38:20 hours, local time

  Ramsey kicked off, his 660-ABS armor amplifying his push and sending him in a low, flat trajectory across bubbling ground. Maneuvers like this always carried a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t risk. Jump too high and your hang time made you an ideal target; jump too low and flat and a miscalculation could slam you into an obstacle.

  He came down next to a ferrocrete wall, his momentum carrying him into the half-collapsed structure with force enough to bring more of it down on top of him, but he was unhurt. A quick check around—he was a kilometer from the city’s central plaza. All around him, the skeletal frameworks of skyscrapers rose like a ragged forest, a clean, modern city reduced in minutes to ruin and chaos. Some of the damage was due to the Marine bombardment, certainly, and to the firefight raging now through the enemy capital, but much, too, had been self-inflicted by Muzzie nano-D.

  In fact, Ramsey’s biggest tactical concern at the moment were the nano-D clouds, which were highlighted by his helmet display as ugly purple masses drifting low across the battlefield. Where they touched the ground or surviving fragments of building, rock, earth, and ferrocrete began dissolving in moments, as the submicroscopic disassemblers in the death clouds began pulling atom from atom and letting it all melt into a boiling and homogenous gray paste.

  Where the cloud hit counter-nano, sparks flashed and snapped in miniature displays of lightning. Nano-D, much of it, possessed intelligence enough to attempt to avoid most countermeasures; victory generally went to the cloud with both the most numbers and the most sophisticated programming.

  A Muzzie field-pulse gun opened up from a ferrocrete bunker two hundred meters ahead, sending a stream of dazzling flashes above his head. Almost automatically, Ramsey tagged the structure with a mental shift of icons on his noumenal display, which hung inside his thoughts like a glowing movie screen. His suit AI melded data from a wide range of sensory input into a coherent image. In his mind’s eye, he could see the bunker overlaid by the ghostly images of human figures inside, and the malevolent red glow of active power systems.

  “Skyfire, I have a target,” he said, and he mentally keyed the display skyward, tagged with precise coordinates.

  Seconds later, a voice in his head whispered what he’d been waiting to hear. “Target confirmed. Sniper round on the way.”

  Several seconds more slipped past, and then the cloud deck overhead flared sun-bright, and a beam of light so brilliant it appeared to be made of solid, mirror-bright metal snapped on, connecting clouds with the bunker.

  At the beam’s touch, the bunker exploded, ferrocrete and field-pulse gun and Theocrat soldiers all converted to fast-expanding vapor, blue-white heat, and a sharp surge of gamma radiation. The ground-support gunners out in Alighan orbit had just driven a sliver of mag-stabilized uranium-cladded antimatter into that gun emplacement at half the speed of light. The resulting explosion had vaporized an area half the size of a city block, leaving very little behind but hard radiation and a smoking hole in the ground.

  Unfortunately, the enemy had weapons just as powerful, and as minute followed bloody minute, more and more of them were coming on-line. He needed to move…but first, this looked like a good place to leave one of his mobile weapons.

  Working quickly, Ramsey pulled a KR-48 pack out of a storage compartment on his hip, extended its tripod legs with a thought, and placed the device atop what was left of the wall. Through its optics, the image relayed through his helmet AI to his brain, he checked its field of fire, giving it a clear view toward the city’s central plaza.

  His 660-ABS had more than once been compared to a one-man tank, but so shallow an image wildly missed the point, and in fact was insulting to the battlesuit. In fact, tanks had become obsolete centuries ago thanks primarily to the rise of battlesuit technology. Wearing an ABS, a Marine could walk, run, or soar for distances of up to a kilometer, could engage a wide range of targets on the ground and in the air with a small but powerful arsenal of varied weaponry, and could link with every other ABS in the battle zone to coordinate attacks and share intelligence. An ABS allowed its wearer to shrug off the detonation of a small tactical nuke less than a hundred meters away, to survive everything from shrapnel to radiation to heavy-caliber projectiles to clouds of nano-D, and to function in any environment from hard vacuum to the bottom of the sea to the boiling hell-cauldron of modern combat.

  In fact, any contest between a lone Marine in a 660 battlesuit and a whole platoon of archaic heavy tanks could have only one possible outcome.

  What was important, however, was why, after a thousand years, individual and small-unit tactics were still of vital importance in combat. For centuries, virtual-sim generals had been predicting the end of the rifleman as the centerpiece of combat. The energies employed by even small-scale weapons were simply too deadly, too powerful, and too indiscriminate in their scope to permit something as vulnerable as a human being to survive more than seconds in a firefight.

  Somehow, though, the venerable rifleman had survived, his technology advancing to extend his effectiveness and his chances of survival. The truth was, a planetary ground-assault unit like the 55th MARS could drop out of orbit, seize the starport, and hold it, where larger, faster, and more powerful AI-directed weaponry would simply have vaporized it.

  Of course, by the time the Muzzies were through defending the port, most of it would be vaporized, wrecked, or otherwise rendered unusable anyway. That was the problem with war. It was so damned destructive…of personnel, of property, of entire cultures and societies….

  He completed setting up the KR-48 and keyed it to his helmet display. He switched on the weapon’s power shields, to keep it from being directly targeted by roving enemy combat drones or smart hunters, then bounded clear, making his way around the perimeter of the city plaza. Gunfire continued to crack and spit from the surrounding buildings, those that hadn’t been demolished yet, but the accuracy of the Marines’ orbital sniper fire seemed to be having a telling effect on the defenses. The instant a Marine came under fire, the attack was noted by Skyfire command and control, and the attacker would in moments be brought under counterfire, either by high-velocity rounds chucked from orbit, or from the A-90 ground-support aerospace craft now crisscrossing the skies above the port complex, or from other Marines on the ground linked into the combat net.

  “Bravo one-one-five,” a voice whispered in his mind. His AI identified the speaker as Captain Baltis, his platoon commander, but he recognized the dry tones without his suit’s comm ID function. “Hostile gun position at six-one-three-Sierra. Can you neutralize it, Ram?”
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  He zoomed in on the indicated coordinates on his map window. The enemy fire was coming from the top of a forty-story structure two kilometers ahead. A drone feed showed the Muzzie gunners, clustered on a rooftop overlooking the plaza, clustered around a tripod-mounted high-velocity sliver gun.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Ramsey replied. “Why can’t we leave it to Sniper?”

  “Because that would bring that whole tower down,” Baltis replied, “and we have civilians in there.”

  Shit. The Muzzies didn’t seem to care whether their own civilians were caught in the line of fire or not. But the Marines were under standing orders to minimize collateral damage, and that meant civilian casualties.

  “Okay. I’m on it.”

  Rising, he bounded forward, covering the ground in long, low, gliding strides that carried him both toward the objective building and around toward the right. He was trying to take advantage of the cover provided by some smaller buildings between him and the target. As he drew closer, someone on the rooftop spotted him and swung the heavy-barreled weapon around to bear on him. He felt the snap of hivel rounds slashing through the air above his head, felt the impacts as they punched into the pavement nearby with bone-jarring hammerings and raised a dense cloud of powdered ferrocrete.

  Dropping behind a plasteel wall, he connected with the KR-48 he’d left behind, using his suit’s link with the weapon to pivot and elevate the blunt snout toward the target building. On the window inset in his mind, he saw the KR-48’s crosshairs center over the top of the building; a mental command triggered a burst, sending a stream of thumb-sized missiles shrieking toward the rooftop gun emplacement.

  The missiles vaporized chunks of cast stone, but the Muzzies’ armor damped out the blast effects. He’d been expecting it; he was using the weapon as a diversion, not for the kill.

  Instantly, the Muzzie gunners swung their weapon back to the south, searching for the source of incoming fire. Ramsey watched the shift in their attention, and chose that moment to leap high into the air.

  A mental command cut in his jump jets in midair, and he soared skyward, clearing the upper ramparts of the building, cutting the jets, and dropping onto a broad, open rooftop.

  He used the flamer connected to his left wrist to spew liquid fire into the gun emplacement. The enemy troops were shielded against tactical heat, of course, but the suddenness of his appearance, arcing down out of the sky, surprised and startled them, and the torch blast melted the plastic mountings of the hivel gun and toppled it over onto its side.

  Shifting his aim, he torched the floor of the rooftop enclosure, cutting open a gaping crater. Two of the Muzzie infantrymen were caught in the collapse of the roof, falling through in a shower of flaming debris; Ramsey shifted to the mag-pulse rifle mounted on his right arm and hammered away at five more Theocrat soldiers who were busily crowding back and away from his landing point.

  One of the hostiles managed to open fire with a sliver gun at Ramsey, and the Marine felt the hammer of high-speed rounds thudding into his chest and helmet armor, but he held his ground and completed his targeting sweep with the pulse rifle, watching the barrage smash through enemy armor like a rapid-fire pile driver, shredding, rending, turning titanium laminate carballoy into bloody scrap.

  The last of the hostiles collapsed on the blazing rooftop, or toppled through the gaping hole in front of them. The entire engagement had taken perhaps three seconds.

  “Bravo one, Bravo one-one-five,” he reported. “Target neutralized.”

  “Good deal,” Baltis replied. “Now get your ass forward! You’re behind sched!”

  “On my way.”

  Another leap, and he sailed off the burning building’s upper story, using his jump jets to brake his fall.

  His suit AI was flagging another gun position just ahead….

  * * * *

  USMC Recruit Training Center

  Noctis Labyrinthus, Mars

  0720/24:20 local time, 1738 hrs GMT

  “Fall in! Fall in!”

  Panting hard, Garroway stumbled up to the yellow line painted on the pavement. The run, which Warhurst had lightly declared to be a shake-down cruise, had lasted two hours and, according to his implant, had covered nearly 14 kilometers. A number of the recruits hadn’t made it; at least, they’d not kept up with the main body. Presumably, they were still straggling along out in the desert someplace, unless Warhurst had sent a transport out to pick them up.

  Garroway had assumed that the meager third-G of Mars’ surface gravity would make calisthenics—no, PT, in the Marine vernacular—easy. He’d been wrong. Gods, he’d been wrong. The run across the rugged highlands of the Noctis Labyrinthus had left him at the trembling edge of collapse. His skinsuit, newly grown for him when he’d checked in at the Arean Ring receiving station, was saturated with sweat, the weave of microtubules straining to absorb the moisture and chemicals now pouring from his body. His leg muscles were aching, his lungs burning. He’d thought the implants he’d purchased two weeks ago would have handled the extra stress.

  This was not going to be easy.

  The worst of it was, Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst had accompanied them on that run, and so far as Garroway could tell, the guy wasn’t breathing hard, hadn’t even broken a sweat. His uniform was still crisp, the flat-brimmed “Smokey Bear” hat of ancient Corps tradition still precisely squared above those hard, cold eyes.

  “Okay, children,” he said, planting his hands on his hips. “Now that we’ve warmed up a bit, it’s time we got down to work. Hit the deck, push-up position! And one! And two!…”

  By now, the sun was up, though much of the run had been through the foggy, pre-dawn darkness. Mars was a tangle of mismatched terrain, rendered both beautiful and twisted by the centuries of terraforming. The sky was a hard, deep, almost violet-blue, the sun shrunken and cold compared to back home. The ground was mostly sand, though patches of gene-tailored mosses and coldleaf added startling accents of green and blue. The run had brought them in a broad circle back to Marine RTC Noctis Labyrinthus, a lonely huddle of domes and quick-grown habs in a rocky desert. East, the tortured terrain of the Vallis Marineris glowed banded red and orange beneath the morning sun, and open water gleamed where the Mariner Sea had so far taken hold.

  Damn it, he couldn’t breathe….

  “Come on, kiddies!” Warhurst shouted. “You can give me more than that! There’s plenty of oh-two in the air! Suck it down!”

  What sadist, Garroway wondered, had decided that this was where Marine recruits would come to train? Centuries ago, of course, RTC had been on Earth…at a place called Camp Pendleton, and at another place called Camp Lejeune. Those places were no more, of course. The Xul Apocalypse had wrecked both bases, when tidal waves from the oceanic asteroid strikes had come smashing ashore. For a time, Marines had been trained on Luna, and then at one of the new LaGrange orbital bases, but almost two centuries ago, with the completion of the Arean Ring, the Corps had transferred much of its training command to Mars. The first recruits on the surface at Noctis Labyrinthus, Garroway had heard, had done their PT wearing coldsuits and oxygen masks. He was beginning to think someone had jumped the gun in deciding to forego the support technology.

  “Okay! Okay! On your feet!” Warhurst clapped his hands. “How are we doing, kids? Eyes bright? Hearts pumping? Good! We have a very special treat in store for you now.” He pointed. “See that building? Fall in, single file, in front of that door! Move it! Move it!”

  The platoon scrambled to obey, running fifty meters across the ’crete pavement and lining up outside the door. A sign beside the doorframe read SICKBAY.

  That puzzled Garroway. They’d pumped him full of medinano at the receiving station, enough, he’d thought, to kill everything in his system that wasn’t nailed down. He’d already had several thorough physicals, back on Earth Ring, and in Mars orbit. What were they going to…

  Realization hit him just as Warhurst began addressing the formation.

&nb
sp; “This, children, is where we separate the real men and women from the sheep. You were all informed that this would be part of your recruit training, and you all agreed when you thumbed your enlistment contract. However…if any of you, for any reason, feel you cannot go through with this, you will fall out and line up over there.” He pointed across the grinder at one of the assistant DIs, who was standing in front of a transport skimmer. “You will be returned to the receiving station, and there you may make arrangements for going home. No one will think the less of you. You will simply have proven what everybody knows—that the Marine Corps is not for everyone. Do I have any takers?”

  Again, Garroway thought he felt some of the recruits in line around him wavering. The terror was almost palpable.

  “If you file through that door,” Warhurst continued, a tone of warning giving his edge a voice, “you will be given a shot of decoupling nano. It won’t hurt…not physically, at any rate. But after the shot takes effect, you will be unable to access your personal cerebral implants. Right now, each of you needs to think about what that means, and decide if being a Marine is worth the cost.”

  The decoupler shot. Yeah, they’d told him about it, but he’d already known about it, of course. It was one of the things that set the Marines and a few other highly specialized elite military units apart from the Army, Navy, or the High Guard. Wonderingly, Garroway looked down at his right hand, catching the glint of gold and silver wires imbedded in the skin at the base of his thumb and running in rectilinear patterns across his palm.

  He was going to lose his implants.

  The vast majority of humans had cereblink implants, including palm interface hardware, quantum-phase neuro-circuitry, and a complex mesh of Micronics grown layer by layer throughout the brain, especially in the cerebral sulci and around the hypothalamus. The first nano injections generally were given to the fetus while it was still in womb or in vitro, so that the initial base linkages could begin chelating out within the cerebral cortex before birth. Further injections were given to children in stages, at birth, when they were about two standard years old, and again when they were three. By the time they were four, they already possessed the hardware to let them palm-interface with a bewildering variety of computers, input feeds, e-pedias, and machines. Most basic education came in the form of electronic downloads fed directly into the student’s cerebral hardware. Adults depended utterly on hardware links for everything from flying skimmers to paying bills to experiencing the news to opening doors to talking to friends more than a few meters distant. The cereblink was one of the absolutely basic elements of modern society, the ultimate piece of technology that allowed humans to interface with their world, and interact with their tools.