by Ian Douglas
In terms of both tonnage and firepower, however, the PanEuropeans held the advantage. Both Samar and the Lejeune, while sizeable vessels, possessed only relatively lightweight armament—primarily point-defense lasers to engage incoming missiles or enemy fighters. Thor and Morrigan were more heavily armed, but they were two against six, and the enemy monitor was a behemoth, slow-moving and clumsy, but possessing a devastating long-range punch in its trio of turret-mounted antimatter accelerators.
The one advantage held by the Commonwealth lay in the sixteen Stardragons of VMA-980. The fighter squadron already was beginning to live up to their nickname, the Sharpshooters, a proud name born by other Marine aviation squadrons across the centuries. As soon as each fighter was aligned with a PE target, its on-board AI, closely linked with the Weapons Officer’s mind, calculated range and speed, adjusting the spacecraft’s attitude to permit interception shots across a range of almost 100,000 kilometers. Like miniature suns, packets of fast-expanding fusing hydrogen snapped across the void, penetrating magnetic shielding, slicing through hull composites, liberating flashes of starcore fury with each strike. The outer hull of the immense Rommel seemed to sparkle with the impacts.
The Rommel was clearly the key to the battle, the equivalent of the proverbial high ground in a conventional surface battle. The Commonwealth destroyers and Lejeune’s fighter squadrons could deal with the enemy frigates and destroyers easily enough…if the PanEuropean monitor could be neutralized. And if not, the monitor’s heavy weaponry would make short work of all of the Commonwealth vessels.
From the PanEuropean perspective, it was vital to knock out the two Commonwealth destroyers quickly, before they could combine their considerable firepower and cripple the monitor. Neither Lejeune nor Samar possessed heavy weapons—they were transports, after all, the first of Marine aerospace fighters, the second of Marines, and while they mounted considerable point-defense capabilities and some high-energy lasers for ship-to-ship actions, they lacked the more devastating firepower of antimatter accelerators or large plasma cannon.
Admiral Edan Mitchell was in command of the Commonwealth fleet, operating from his combat command center on board the Lejeune. He would be linked in to the battlenet now, Garroway thought, directing the Commonwealth fleet to focus its full attention on the enemy monitor. Already, fighters were issuing from the Lejeune’s ventral launch bays, accelerating at high-G toward the PanEuropean behemoth. Clouds of tiny, robotic probes were already scattering throughout the battlespace, each providing a steady feed of visual and electronic data for the Commonwealth C3, allowing the battle analyses staff to build up a coherent picture of the action.
On board the Samar, the waiting Marines could only watch the battle unfold around them, watch…and wonder if they would get to take part in the battle, or if a direct hit on Samar was about to end their careers in a single, sun-brilliant flash. Once, a plasma bolt struck Samar’s hull with a savage, burning snap and an explosion of vapor into empty space, and the transport had rolled slightly, staggered by the shock. There were no casualties; armor and an AI-controlled point-defense gun turret had been all that had been hit.
But the jolt had driven home the overwhelming sense of helplessness Garroway and the other Marines were experiencing right now. And it had led him to rather forcibly remember one of the battle simulations he and the other recruits of his training platoon had experienced at Noctis Labyrinthus, after their naked time, after they’d received their Corp implants.
The historical battle had been at a place called Tarawa, in Earth’s Pacific Ocean back in the late pre-spaceflight era. In that action, the U.S. 2nd Marine Division, with elements of the Army’s 27th Infantry Division, had made an amphibious assault against a tiny tropical coral atoll defended by 4,500 Japanese under the command of Rear Admiral Shibasaki Keiji.
Tarawa, according to the download data, had been a royal cluster fuck, an operation that had come that close to being an utter and complete military disaster. The preliminary bombardment had transformed the atoll into a fire-blasted landscape reminiscent of the cratered surface of the Moon, but had utterly failed to touch the defenders, dug in to a well-protected labyrinth of trenches, log forts, and five hundred concrete bunkers. Worse, much worse, the first Marine waves had gone in late, and the tides had been unexpectedly low, so the incoming landing craft had gotten hung up on the coral reef 500 yards offshore. The first waves of Marines had been forced to swim and wade ashore across a fire-swept lagoon, ideal targets for the Japanese mortars and machineguns.
A few amphibious tractors—amtracks—had made it over the reef and across the lagoon, then begun shuttling back and forth between the beach and the reef, carrying stranded Marines ashore, but the Japanese fire had been accurate and heavy. Within a few hours, half of the available amtracks had been knocked out.
For the Marines huddled in those vehicles, the crossing must have been hell. All the men could do was wait…crowded together, helpless, wondering if the next incoming round would be the one to score a hit on their wallowing vehicle.
Garroway had been there, standing on the reef next to a blazing landing craft, then on board an amtrack churning its way across the lagoon as mortar shells sent geysers of spray skyward on all sides. He’d charged bunkers with handfuls of Marines, had watched the battle slowly, slowly shift in the attackers’ favor, but only after three days of savage fighting, three days collapsed into several long hours by the simulation feed at Noctis Labyrinthus.
Not until now, however, had Garroway truly felt one with those long-ago, long-dead Marine brothers.
“Listen up, Marines,” Lieutenant Jones’ voice called over the command channel. “We have orders. Stand by to launch!”
“Shit,” Ramsey said. “This is it!”
“All you newbies,” Master Sergeant Barrett said. “Your trajectories will be AI controlled. When you get on board the target, just stay close and watch your feeds. Just like your training sims.”
“Yeah,” Ramsey added. “And thank the Marine-green gods of battle you’re not going up against the Xul first time out of the gate!”
“Let’s kill the bastards!” Barrett added.
“Ooh-rah!” chorused from the ranks of waiting Marines.
Garroway watched the data feed coming through. Samar was rotating to bring her SAP launch tubes to bear on the Rommel, now 12,000 kilometers off and hammering away at both the Morrigan and Thor. Garroway watched the numbers of the countdown flicker toward zero, bracing himself…and then his SAP slammed into the void under nearly twenty gravities of acceleration.
With inertial dampers on and his suit cushioned within the narrow constraints of the pod by a thick, almost gelatinous liquid, he felt only a few of those twenty Gs, but they were enough to crush the breath from his lungs and blur his vision. When it cleared, when he could focus again on his link feed, he could see Samar receding rapidly astern, against a sky lit by intense but utterly silent flashes of light. SAPs were too small to mount the heavy generators necessary for phase-shifting, so each pod was fully visible to the enemy’s fire-control radar and lidar systems. This visibility was offset somewhat by the pods’ absorptive and energy-scattering outer layers, and the pods were maneuverable enough to give any fire-control AI severe headaches as it tried to predict the myriad incoming vectors…but the enemy was tracking the Marine assault wave almost from the instant it emerged from Samar’s armored belly.
Point-defense lasers snapped out, crisscrossing the gulf between the Rommel and Samar. Those beams of intense, coherent energy were invisible in hard vacuum, but the AI governing the tactical feed was painting them in, presumably to reassure the Marines on the grounds that a beam you could see had already missed you.
Somehow, Garroway didn’t feel particularly reassured. It seemed as though the entire sky ahead had lit up with flashing, snapping threads of red light, that they were weaving a web of fire so thick and complex that the incoming assault pods couldn’t possibly avoid them all.
T
hen a brilliant, eye-twisting sun erupted over Rommel’s aft hull as a small fusion warhead went off. Morrigan and Thor both were firing everything they had at the monitor, including nuke-tipped missiles, trying to buy precious time for the Marine assault. The superheated plasma and EMP from the blast would provide the SAPs with a bit of cover, at least for a few seconds.
But the plasma cloud dissipated all too swiftly, and Rommel’s own point-defenses were simply too effective to allow more missiles to reach her. Abruptly, shockingly, PFC Dulaney’s pod was speared by a point-defense beam, a direct hit that vaporized half of the capsule, and sent fragments hurtling outward from within an expanding cloud of hot gas. An instant later, Sergeant Mendoza’s pod was hit, a glancing, slicing strike that sheared away part of the hull, and left the remnant tumbling helplessly through the void.
One by one, the enemy fire-control systems locked onto incoming pods. One by one, the pods were being slashed from the sky. There’d been forty SAPs in the first wave. Halfway across the gulf there were thirty-four left…then thirty-two. Garroway felt panic rising; none of them were going to make it across!
All he could do was hang there in space, a naked and helpless target.
* * * *
Ontos 7
Battlespace, Puller 695 System
1953 hrs GMT
“Hang on to your lunch!” Lieutenant Kesar Eden yelled over the intercom. “We’re punching it!”
Gunnery Sergeant Warhurst lay cradled in his fighting position, linked into the Ontos’ combat system. There was a savage thump, and then the John A. Lejeune’s launch bay fell away around him, the carrier dwindling rapidly astern as the MCA-71 Ontos accelerated at fifty gravities.
Ontos was the Greek word for “thing,” and this was the second time in the long history of the Corps that a Marine weapons system had borne that unlikely name. Eight hundred years before, during the 1950s, the Marine Corps had developed a light tracked vehicle specifically as a fast-moving antitank weapon. Massing just 9 tons, and squeezing three crew members inside a hull compartment just four feet high, that first Ontos, designated the M50A1, had mounted six 106mm recoilless rifles on the upper deck of the vehicle. The idea had been to allow it to engage enemy armor with six rapid shots, guaranteeing a kill; its speed, then, would let it withdraw to cover, allowing the exposed recoilless rifles to be reloaded.
No one, however, had quite known what to do with the ugly little vehicle. In fact, the Army had cancelled their original order when the prototype testing was complete. The Marines, however, had accepted almost 300 of the vehicles, taking them to war in a place called Vietnam—an environment for the most part lacking enemy armor to serve as targets.
The Marines were well known for their ability to adapt to changing conditions and battlefield needs. The Ontos was an awkward beast, it turned out, unable to carry much ammunition, and requiring the crew to exit the vehicle in order to reload, making them vulnerable to enemy fire. Even so, it proved popular with its crews, who noted that frequently the enemy would break and run as soon as one of the ugly little beasts arrived in the combat zone. Those six recoilless rifles fired beehive rounds, each shell consisting of a bundle of one hundred darts that sliced through jungle foliage with devastating effect, turning the vehicle into what had been called the world’s biggest shotgun. Used against bunkers and against enemy infantry, the Ontos provided Marine riflemen with effective close-fire support at the company level.
Always considered an ugly duckling, however, that first Ontos had never been accepted by decision-makers above the company level, and the weapon system was withdrawn from service after it had seen only four years of combat service. For decades after, the Ontos had been something of an embarrassment to those tasked with designing and procuring new weapons.
Eight centuries later, a new Marine weapons system had been introduced to the Corps bearing the ancient Greek name for “thing.” Part vehicle, part artillery, it was designed to both provide close infantry support in combat—especially in zero-and low-gravity environments, and also to serve as transport for a Marine squad, getting them safely into combat, then providing artillery support as they made their assault. The new Ontos was undeniably ugly, as awkward-looking as its ancient predecessor, flat, stubby, and massing 383 tons, with multiply jointed legs and a ball-mounted forward blast head that gave it the appearance of a huge and ungainly insect. Twelve armored Marines and their equipment could be carried aft in the lightly armored belly. The vehicle’s “wings” mounted a pair of hivel accelerator cannons that could fire antimatter rounds, tactical nukes, nano-D canisters, or conventional high explosives.
Space was sharply limited on board the transport, however. Warhurst and one other gunner were squeezed in to either side of the vehicle commander in a dorsal sponson forward, behind the blast-head mount, and cyberlinked into the Ontos’ command network. The Marines aft were as tightly cocooned as their counterparts in the SAP pods now being launched from the Samar. Like the ancient Ontos, no one really knew what to do with the modern weapon of that name, but the Corps had adapted it especially for ship-boarding actions. Four, including Warhurst’s vehicle, had been accelerated from the Lejeune’s launch bay, and were vectoring in on the PanEuropean monitor Rommel now.
Like aerospace fighters, the Ontos operated off of a Solenergia ZPE quantum-power transfer unit. Using the same principle as a Quantum-Coupled Communications system, the ZPE transfer unit used quantum entanglement to transmit energy from one point to another, without actually traversing the space in between. Extremely high energies were drawn from the zero-point field taps on board the Lejeune and the Samar, but routed directly to field-entangled power receivers on board individual F/A-4140s and the MCA-71 Ontos transports, without the possibility of that transmission being blocked or even detected.
The system had some important trade-offs. The advantage, of course, was that the massive quantum power taps could be left back on board the capital ships. The disadvantage, though, was that if the Lejeune or the Samar were knocked out of action, their orphaned offspring would become dead in space, with only their relatively low-powered on-board antimatter converter systems from which to draw on for life support and maneuvering.
All of that was of less importance to Warhurst now than was the simple fact that he was back in action at last.
When he left Recruit Training Command, there’d been speculation that he would end up in a rifle company with a number of his former recruits. The 1MIEF personnel department had killed that idea, however, and in fairly short order. Marine recruits were instilled with the absolute and unvarying principle of the Corps—Marines work together, as a unit. However, learning that basic lesson as they go through boot camp, most Marines reach graduation hating their DI. Respecting him, yes, but hating him nonetheless.
It wasn’t that 1MIEF’s command constellation was afraid that some former recruit of Warhurst’s was going to get even some night on deployment. Platoon AIs were good watchdogs when it came to that sort of thing. They were conscious, though, of the need for a smoothly functioning structure at the squad, platoon, and company levels. Hatred—or fear—of a squad mate during a combat situation when everyone needed to work together smoothly, as a unit, might get Marines killed.
So Gunny Warhurst had been assigned to an Ontos crew, a demanding billet that required experienced combat veterans, rather than newbies. The platoon’s fresh meat would do best in assault platoons where they could draw on one another—and on the old hands in each platoon—for support and strength. Serving a gun station on an Ontos required more seasoning, and the ability to link very closely indeed with the vehicle commander, and with the other gunner on board.
Warhurst’s relief at being in action again had more, much more, to do with his need to get away from Mars and the still-burning pain of having been evicted from his family. The psych AIs at Ares RTC had tried to counsel him through the rough parts, but he honestly couldn’t tell now if they’d done a damned thing to help.
H
e knew he was still spending way too much time uselessly rehearsing conversations in his head. He so wanted his family—especially Julie—to understand, to, to what? To come to their senses and feel how he needed the Corps, to understand that this was his family as much as the Tamalyn-Danner line marriage, because, damn it, the Corps was a part of who and what he was, that he could no more discard it than he could discard his own heart.
He was beginning to realize that a lot of his grief was centered less on losing Julie, Eric, Donal, and Callie than it was on being rejected. Dumped. As though he meant nothing to any of them, had contributed nothing, had been nothing. When he thought about how they’d cast him aside, it was all he could do to see through that haze of enveloping white pain…a searing mingling of grief and loss, of fury and hatred and broken ego and insulted honor and yearning desire.
He hated them all, now. And he still wanted them to come back, to say it had all been a mistake.
He still wanted to love them….
Damn it, he was doing it again. Focus, you idiot! he snarled at himself, furious. Pay attention to what you’re doing or you’ll get us all killed!
The Ontos had vaulted through the emptiness between the Lejeune and the enemy monitor, shifting vectors wildly and rapidly in order to make things as difficult as possible for the Rommel’s fire-control AIs. Drawing on the ZPE energy tap on board the Lejeune, the Ontos could afford the added power-hungry luxury of phase-shifting, which made the enemy’s job even harder in terms of target acquisition and lock, and provided some measure of defense against beams and shrapnel.
But not complete protection, he noted, as a small hivel slug struck the Ontos amidships. He felt the staggering shock as a few grams of depleted uranium passed through the ship. Most of the released kinetic energy, fortunately, was dissipated by the Ontos’ phase-shifted state, but enough leaked through to jar his teeth.
