by Ian Douglas
Book One of
The Legacy Trilogy
Star Corps
Ian Douglas
Contents
Prologue
Master Sergeant Gene Aiken leaned against the sandbag barricade and…
1
The trio of TAV Combat Personnel Carrier transports came in…
2
And further still from Earth, some 780 million kilometers from…
3
Colonel Ramsey lay snug within the embrace of a linking…
4
Like a large and exceptionally ugly beetle, all angles and…
5
“Now I want you maggots off of my bus…move! Move!…
6
“Come on, Moore! They’re coming over the north wall!”
7
“They’re coming in over the walls now!” the Marine cried…
8
“Garroway! Center yourself on the hatch!”
9
“Sir, Recruit Garroway, reporting as ordered, sir.”
10
“Crawl, you sand fleas! Crawl! You will become one with…
11
“Garroway!”
12
“Maybe we should get up,” Ramsey said. “The day’s half…
13
Garroway grinned at Lynnley. “You know, this would be a…
14
Launch…
15
“…and four…and three…and two…and one…release!”
16
The Dragon skimmed broken rock and black sand, flashing across…
17
Another Dragon gone, snapped out of the air by a…
18
Second Squad had been ahead of the others when the…
19
Within the link, Ramsey looked down on Ishtar from space…
20
“Everyone back to your landers,” Captain Warhurst called, his voice…
21
The Dragon descended over the Legation compound, depositing the lander…
22
Garroway rolled off Hanson, snatching up his rifle and taking…
23
He was Lance Corporal Garroway now. Funny. He’d not even…
24
“Let’s go, Marines! Take ’em down!”
25
But it didn’t end.
26
“You know, they used to call this kind of party…
Epilogue
Lance Corporal Lynnley Collins floated in the wonder of the…
About the Author
Other Books by Ian Douglas
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
12 MAY 2138
Firebase Frog
New Summer
Ishtar, Llalande 21185 IID
72:26 hours Local Time
Master Sergeant Gene Aiken leaned against the sandbag barricade and stared out across the Saimi-Id River. Smoke rose from a half-dozen buildings, staining the pale green of the early evening sky. Marduk, vast and swollen, aglow with deep-swirling bands and storms in orange-amber light, hung immense and sullen, as ever just above the western horizon. The gas giant’s slender crescent bowed up and away from the horizon where the red sun had just set; its night side glowed with dull red heat as flickering pinpoints, like twinkling stars, marked the pulse and strobe of continent-size lightning storms deep within that seething atmosphere.
The microimplants in Aiken’s eyes turned brooding red dusk to full light, while his battle helmet’s tactical feed displayed ranges, angles, and compass bearing superimposed on his view, as well as flagging thermal and movement targets in shifting boxes and cursor brackets.
The sergeant studied Marduk’s blood-glow for a moment, then looked away. At his back, with a shrill whine of servomotors, the sentry tower’s turret swiveled and depressed, matching the movements of his head.
He could hear the chanting and the drumming, off to the east, as the crowds gathered at the Pyramid of the Eye. It was, he thought, going to be a very long night indeed.
“How’s it going, Master Sergeant?”
Aiken didn’t turn, not when he was linked in with the sentry. His battle feed had warned him of Captain Pearson’s approach.
“All quiet on the perimeter, Captain,” he replied. “Sounds like the Frogs’re pretty riled up down in the ’ville, though.”
“Word just came through from the embassy compound,” Pearson said. “The rebel abos have seized control in a hundred villages. The ‘High Emperor of the Gods’ is calling for calm and understanding from his people.” The way he said it, the title was a sneer.
Abos, abs, aborigines; Frogs, or Froggers. All were terms for the dominant species of Ishtar…ways of dehumanizing them.
Which was a damned interesting idea when you realized how not human the Ahannu were.
“Do you think they’ll attack us?”
“It could happen. The ambassador still hasn’t answered Geremelet’s ultimatum.”
A gossamer flitted in the ruby light, twisting and shifting, a delicate ribbon of iridescence. Aiken lifted the muzzle of his 2120 and caught the frail creature, watching it quiver against the hard black plastic of the weapon’s barrel in bursts of rainbow color. Other gossamers danced and jittered in the gathering darkness, delicate sparkles of bioluminescence.
“They’re not talking about…surrendering, are they?”
“Not that I’ve heard, Master Sergeant. Don’t worry. It won’t come to that.”
“Yeah. The Marines never surrender.”
“That’s what they say. Keep a sharp watch. There’ve been reports of frogger slaves trying to gain entrance at some of the other bases. They might be human, but we can’t trust them.”
“Aye aye, sir.” The Ahannu slaves, descendants of humans taken from Earth millennia ago, gave Aiken the creeps. No way was he letting them through his part of the perimeter.
“Good man. Give a yell if you need help.”
“You don’t need to worry about that, sir.” He hesitated, looking up at the vast and seething globe of Marduk. “Hey, Captain?”
“What?”
“Some of the guys were having a friendly argument the other night. Is Ishtar a planet or a freakin’ moon?”
Pearson chuckled. “Look it up on the local net.”
“I did. Didn’t understand that astrological crap.”
“Astronomy, not astrology. And it’s both. Marduk is a gas giant, a planet circling the Llalande sun. Ishtar is a moon of Marduk…but if it’s planet-sized and has its own internally generated magnetic field and atmosphere and everything else, might as well call it a planet, right?”
“I guess. Thanks, sir.”
Pearson walked off into the gloom, leaving Aiken feeling very much alone. He turned and looked into the southern sky, where the first stars were beginning to appear. Eight light-years from home had not much altered the familiar constellations, though the dome of the sky was strangely canted against the cardinal directions. There was a bright star, however, in the otherwise dim and unremarkable constellation Scutum, not far from the white beacon of Fomalhaut. Aiken might not know astronomy from astrology, but he’d pulled downloads enough to know what he was looking at now.
Sol. Earth’s sun. As always, the sight of that star sent a small shiver down Aiken’s spine. So far away, in both space and time…
Eight point three light-years. Help from home could not possibly arrive in time.
1
2 JUNE 2138
Giza Complex
Kingdom of Allah, Earth
0525 hours Zulu
The trio of TAV Combat Personnel Carrier transports came in low across the Mediterranean Sea, avoiding the heavily populated
coastal areas around El Iskandariya by crossing the beach between El Hammam and El Alamein. Skimming the Western Desert at such low altitudes that their slipstreams sent rooster tails of sand exploding into the pale predawn sky, the TAVs swung sharply south of the isolated communities huddled along the Wadi El Natrun, dumping velocity in a series of weaving banks and turns. Ahead, silhouetted against the brightening eastern horizon and the lights of Cairo, their objective rose like three flat-sided mountains above the undulating dunes.
The defenders would know that something was happening; even with stealth architecture, the three transatmospheric vehicles had scorched their radar signatures in ion reentry trails across the skies of Western Europe as they’d descended from suborbit, and the mullahs of the True Mahdi had been expecting something of the sort. The only question was how long it would take them to react.
Captain Martin Warhurst, CO of Bravo Company, sat hunched over in his travel seat in the rear of CPC Delta’s red-lit troop compartment, crowded torso to armored torso with the men and women of 1st Squad, First Platoon. There were no windows in the heavily armored compartment, no viewscreens or news panels, but a data feed painted a small, brightly colored image within his Helmet Data Overlay, showing the outside world as viewed through a camera in the TAV’s blunt nose.
There wasn’t a lot to see, in fact—abstract patterns of light and darkness wheeling this way and back with the TAV’s approach maneuvers. The area beyond the Giza complex, along the west bank of the Nile, was brightly lit. The extensive archeological digs behind the Sphinx and between the two northern pyramids, those of Khufu and Khafre, were bathed in harsh spotlights reflected from aerostats hovering high above the ground-based beam projectors.
He knew the mission orders, knew the lay of the land and the location of the company’s objectives, but it was almost impossible to make sense of what he was seeing on his HDO display. Balls of yellow and red light floated up from the ground—fire from enemy antiaircraft positions. Colored lines and symbols glowed among alphanumerics identifying targets, way points, ranges, and bearings. His cranialink provided analysis, based on data jacked through from the CPC’s combat computer. He could see the area marked as the platoon’s drop-off point, midway between the Sphinx and Khafre’s pyramid.
“Captain Warhurst,” the phlegmatic, female voice of the TAV’s AI pilot said in his helmet receiver. “Thirty seconds. Hot LZ.”
“I see it,” Warhurst replied. His grip tightened on his weapon, a General Electric LR-2120 Sunbeam pulse laser, with its M-12 underbarrel 20mm RPG launcher and data hotlink to his Mark VII armor. He’d been in the Marines for six years and made captain two years ago, but this would be his first time in combat, his first hot drop, his first time in command with a live enemy.
God, don’t let me screw it up….
The TAVs made a final course adjustment, shrieking low above the sands between the middle and southern pyramids, their dead-black hulls slipping through crisscrossing targeting radar beams like ghosts, evading hard locks. Air brakes unfolded like ungainly wings as their noses came up, and billows of sand exploded from the hard-driving plasma thrusters arrayed at wing roots and bellies.
“Hold on,” the AI’s voice said, as deceleration tugged at Warhurst’s gut and the steel deck tilted sharply beneath his booted feet. “We’re going in.”
“Hang onto your lunches, boys and girls,” he called over First Platoon’s comm channel. “We’re grounding!”
A jolt…a moment of suspense and silence…and then another, harder jolt as the TAV decelerated on shrieking thrusters to a slow-drifting hover. With a shrill whine of hydraulics, the first CPC was extruded from the side of the TAV’s fuselage on unfolding davits as raw noise banged and shrieked inside the sealed troop compartment. Plenum thrusters already spooling howled now as all four onboard hovercraft personnel carriers swung free of the floating TAV and detached their cables. Sand blasted around the hovercraft as they floated half a meter above the surface, skittering sideways to clear the overhang of their huge, black transport while the TAV engaged full thrusters and rose clear of the drop zone. “Good luck, First Platoon,” the AI pilot’s voice announced.
“We’re clear of the TAV, Captain!” Lieutenant Schulman, the CPC commander, yelled over the vehicle’s comm system. Hammer blows clanked and pinged and sang from the hull outside. They were taking small-arms fire. “Objective in sight, range two-three-five. Moving!”
“Roger that!” Warhurst’s helmet display feed had shifted automatically to a pickup on the CPC’s hull now that the hovercraft was free of its ride. He could see the flash and wink of gunfire in the darkness, the streaking tracers of heavy automatic weapons. Somewhere in the distance a round of HE went off with a deep-throated crump, briefly lighting the dune shadows nearby. The CPC’s turret shrilled as it rotated in its collar above and forward of the troop compartment, and Warhurst felt the steady thud-thud-thud of the 50mm autocannon slamming high explosive rounds into an enemy gun position.
The armored Marines remained strapped in their seats, weapons muzzle up between their knees, silent while boiler room noise boomed and banged around them. Once, the CPC lurched heavily to the left as a near miss rocked the hovercraft over on its plenum skirts like a boat listing in heavy seas, but Schulman righted the stubborn, tough-hulled machine and swerved hard as armor-seeking missiles strobed in dazzling cacophony outside.
“Coming up on the drop-off, Captain!” Schulman warned. “Ten seconds!”
“Roger that!” He checked the map on his HDO. They were on target. With a focused thought, he shifted to the platoon freak. “Ten seconds, people! Go to IR!”
With a thought focused through his implant, Warhurst engaged his helmet’s infrared overlay, and the red-lit shapes around him faded into gloom, nearly invisible, with only enough heat leakage from joints and peripheral gear to give each Marine in the compartment a faint, ghostly aura.
The hovercraft slewed sideways, and the aft hatch opened up, ramp dropping and shields unfolding to reveal a cold black sky above the grays and midnight blues and black-greens of a chill desert landscape painted in infrared. Warhurst hit the quick release on his harness and was on his feet, ducking to step beneath the hatch. “C’mon, Marines!” he shouted. “Ooh-rah!”
In a double line, twelve Marines stormed down the drop ramp and onto the sand as point-defense lasers on the CPC’s upper deck tracked incoming mortar rounds and flashed them to metallic vapor. Warhurst raced ahead, conscious only of the press of the Marines around him, of the rattle and pop of weapons fire, the flicker of muzzle flashes in front of him.
He threw himself down on the slope of a dune, scrambling up and forward until he could bring his weapon to bear. The 2120’s sighting camera was linked by computer to his helmet display. A red-glowing reticle crosshaired whatever the laser’s muzzle was pointed at, together with flickering numbers giving range, bearing, and probable target ID. He took aim at the muzzle flashes fifty meters to his northeast and thumbed the lever to engage his RPG autolauncher. He let the weapon’s sight record the target—dimly seen shapes of yellow emerging from the inky blue-green backdrop. His computer tagged the guns as teleoperated sentries, but the body heat of a dozen enemy soldiers showed as vague shapes through the dune itself and as pillars of moist heat moving above the sand. Field sensors detected the RF leaked by electrical systems, probably the sentries’ motors and power packs.
Good enough. He squeezed the trigger. The boxlike hard plastic case of the weapon vibrated within the grip of his gloves as he loosed a burst of grenades, cycling at twelve rounds per second, fanning eight rounds in a spread along the crest of the sand dune ahead. Accelerated to eight hundred meters per second by the launcher’s mag driver, each round unfolded in flight, a tiny ramjet engine kicking on as microvanes steered the projectile toward its chosen target. Like steadily glowing fireflies against the night, the string of ramjet-propelled grenades streaked through the darkness, rising high above the sand dune sheltering the enemy gun
ners, then angling suddenly and sharply down, detonating behind the ridge in a chain of explosions, each as powerful as the blast from a fist-sized lump of CRX-80.
Shrieks and screams rose from the target area as clouds of sand geysered into the sky, mixed with chunks of plastic, metal, and more grisly debris. A running figure showed briefly at the crest of the ridge; Warhurst thumbed his weapon to laser and triggered a pulse. The target flopped out of sight, but Warhurst wasn’t sure whether he’d scored a kill or not.
Explosions continued to thump and boom all around them. The other members of First Platoon had spread out along the dune, laying down a devastating curtain of explosive firepower, driving the enemy gunners to cover.
With a thought, he engaged his helmet’s data link with the CPC. What’s up ahead?
The CPC sensors were far sharper and more observant than those packed in a Mark VII combat armor suit. In addition, Lieutenant Schulman had by now deployed a small army of recon floaters, marble-sized sensor packs riding their magfields across the battlefield, allowing the CPC computer to build up a coherent and complete view of the entire engagement.
A picture inset opened for him at the top of his helmet’s field of view. Symbols moved slowly across a 3D model of the surrounding terrain—green squares, circles, and triangles for Bravo Company’s Marines; reds for known hostiles; yellows for unknowns. Dropping the resolution to a hundred meters, he was able to narrow the feed to just First Platoon, checking on their position, then open it again to the entire battlefield.
The sand dune ahead was clear. No living targets, no operating machinery or electrical devices. The flanks were clear as well, as Second and Third Platoons completed their deployments to either side. “First Section, First Platoon, move out!” he called over the platoon’s command channel. “Second Section, overwatch.”
