Battlespace (13 page)

Ramsey sighed. Were these people born this thick? Or did they have to work at it? “Humor, sir, requires peculiarly human traits such as empathy, surprise, the ability to think in terms of homonyms and double-meanings, a sense of the absurd. The point is that AIs and humans simply do not
think
the same way. Think about a problem in two different ways instead of only one, and you have a much better chance of solving it.

“The best approach in situations like this is to field a human-AI team, one that can make use of the strengths of both sides of the equation—artificial intelligence and human intelligence—in such a way that strengths are maximized and weaknesses eliminated. And that is exactly what we are planning for this mission.”

“I do enjoy working with humans,” Cassius added. “It seems that there is always something new to be learned from my association with you.”

“It still makes you wonder,” Durand said, “about the possibilities of downloading millions of AI copies into machines. It might make human soldiers and Marines obsolete.”

“I doubt that that will ever happen, Madam Congressperson,” Ramsey told her. “Artificial intelligence is still a tool, something we use to achieve an end, to carry out a mission. Cassius, for instance, is the electronic component of our command constellation, working with me and the human members of my staff to run the MIEU. The idea is to create a
partnership
with machine intelligence, not a rivalry. We work together and we do it very well.”

“Perhaps, Colonel,” Durand said, “but given how much we don't know about intelligence, machine or human, I still wouldn't make any long-term bets. Cassius and his sort could replace us yet.”

“Such an outcome might be theoretically possible, Madam
Congressperson,” Cassius said. “But I hope not. A universe without humans, or the stimulation advanced AIs get from them, would be very boring indeed.”

It took Ramsey quite a while to realize that Cassius had made a joke.

11
DECEMBER
2159

Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1438 hours, GMT

Hospitalman Second Class Phillip Lee sat huddled in almost total darkness, feeling the pressure of vac-armored Marines squeezed in tightly against him to left and right. The only light came from the HUDs glowing inside his visor and the visor of the other Marines around him. The glows stage-lit the faces revealed in the other helmets and cast weirdly shifting shadows through the crowded compartment as men moved their heads.

His own HUD continued to provide the usual reassurance of suit integrity, air flow, and system confidence, along with a graphic of the pod's current position on its intercept course. All he could hear was the rasp of his own breathing and the pounding of his pulse in his ears.

This
is
what you volunteered fo
r, he told himself.
Right
?

A soundless
bump
slammed him to the left—a sharp acceleration.

The driver must be lined up with the target now. He won
dered how fast they were moving…ah, there it was. Eighty meters per second.

The vehicle was an CTV-300 series transfer pod, an ugly little vehicle called a flying coffin, a sewer pipe, or by the unfortunate acronym TRAP by those forced to endure their no-frills accommodations, among other, less flattering terms. It was a blunt and elongated hot dog shape eighteen meters long and two and a half meters thick, big enough—at least, so it claimed in the specs, to hold twenty Marines—a section or one half of a platoon—in two tightly packed rows. It had thrusters and fuel tanks on both ends, giving it a comic look the men called “double-assed,” and was carried by larger vessels like heavy munitions. They'd originally been designed to transfer cargo between ships and orbital facilities in space, but the Marines had early on seen their potential for use in docking and boarding maneuvers.

Lee felt a double slap on his right shoulder, the prearranged signal that his neighbor wanted to talk. The section was under radio silence, but plug-in cables allowed voice-powered communications suit-to-suit, more clearly than helmet conduction, and without leaking RF to a potential enemy listener.

His neighbor snapped the plug into the receptacle on the side of his helmet. The man, Lee decided, must have cat's eyes to see in this almost lightless sewer pipe.

“You okay, Doc?” It was the voice of Gunnery Sergeant Dunne, the platoon's gunnery sergeant, sitting on his left.

“I'm fine, Gunny,” he replied. “A few bruises never hurt anybody, right?”

“That's the way, Doc. You just hang tight. When we go EV, you stick with me, understand? Just release when I do and follow me in. And remember to flex and dump when you hit. Let your suit absorb the shock.”

“Flex and dump. Right.”

He expanded his HUD feed of graphics showing the coffin's path toward the objective. Thirty-seven kilometers left
to go…closing at 80 meters per second…7.6 minutes…make it seven minutes or so to release.
This is just a dry run
, he told himself.
A practice CBSS. Just do it by the book.

It felt good to know that Gunny Dunne was looking out for him, though. Never had he felt that link with the Marines as he did now—of the Navy Corpsman taking care of the Marines in his platoon…and the Marines taking care of him, in turn.

CBSS—Combat Boarding Search and Seizure—had been a routine task for Marines since the late twentieth century, when they'd begun boarding suspected terrorist or other hostile vessels at sea. Arguably, the practice went back to the Marines of the Continental Navy two centuries earlier. Stationed onboard American ships as sentries, ship's police, and sharpshooters in the rigging, they would join boarding parties during engagements at sea with enemy vessels.

During the U.N. War of 2042, the Marines had expanded on the idea a bit by boarding the old International Space Station, at that time a U.N. orbital facility. What they would attempt to do out at Sirius was quite similar to the ISS operation, albeit with a few minor refinements.

Of course, no one knew if they would actually have to use the techniques they now were practicing. They wouldn't know, either, until they reached Sirius and various robotic and AI surrogates had checked out the objective at close hand. The word was that Alpha Company was going to be designated as Recon Company for the MIEU, however. That meant that if a CBSS was required, they were the ones who would be on call to carry it off.

Five minutes.

He wished he could talk with the others around him,
really
talk, not just listen to the pep-talk chatter from the Gunny. The radio silence was to let them practice this evolution without suit-to-suit or command communications. No one knew for sure what kind of defenses they would be facing at Sirius, but everyone agreed the bad guys would be able to see them
coming whether they used radio or not. What the hell was the point?

Damn it, everyone always said the hard part was the waiting, and Lee was learning that that was absolutely true.

Three minutes.

Alpha Company, First Platoon,
A Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1440 hours, GMT

Corporal
Garroway—his promotion had only just been confirmed a week before—sat in near darkness, packed like an armored sardine into a narrow tin with nineteen other Marines. He'd been through this drill many times before, to the point that it was becoming busywork, not training.

The Marines of the MIEU had been coming up steadily from Earth over the past couple of weeks, flying up from southern California a platoon or two at a time. The brass was still sorting out the TO&E. Apparently, MIEU-1 was being completely reorganized, the changes based, in part, on the unit's experiences at Ishtar.

They needed a Recon Company, for example. Normally, recon personnel went through specific and grueling training, but the decision had been made to draw all MIEU recon personnel from those men and women who'd been to Ishtar. It made sense, in a way…though Garroway would have been happier accepting that particular honor after going through the Basic Reconnaissance Course at Little Creek or Coronado. They'd told him he could download what he needed to know. He was Marine enough to know that
that
was a seriously deep load of shit.

Still, when he'd been asked if he wanted to volunteer for Recon, he'd said sure. It meant a higher combat bonus…and it might mean some more interesting training, or, at least, so he'd thought. So far, though, it was still the old Corp routine—hurry up and wait.

At least until today.

A sharp
thump
shivered through the deck beneath his boots and he lurched to the side. They were decelerating now. The driver was adjusting the pod's velocity so that the Marines wouldn't smash into the objective at eighty meters per second. His HUD showed a much more leisurely approach velocity now of five meters per second.

A yellow light flashed on at the forward end of the compartment. All twenty vac-armored men stood up and positioned themselves, two lines, facing one another. They were in zero gravity, of course, except for the brief moments when the pod accelerated or decelerated, and his mind kept trying to tell him he and the other space-suited figures were standing on their heads. Then he felt a sudden queasy slewing sensation in his gut and a momentary wave of dizziness; the pod had just rotated ninety degrees. They were now approaching the target broadside—or perhaps broad
roof
was the better term. The pod's dorsal surface faced the objective.

The clamshell doors of the overhead began opening up….

Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1440 hours, GMT
i

Lee looked up as the cargo compartment doors swung aside, and his breath caught in his throat. The objective ap
peared to be directly overhead…in so far as “overhead” had any meaning in the directionless tumble of zero-G. It was huge, much larger than he'd expected, a vast white-painted, rounded disk with some sort of apparatus at the center.

Each Marine grabbed hold of the gauntleted hands of the Marines to either side. Lee tried to rearrange what he was seeing in his mind. He was approaching the objective in a prone position, looking ahead at it; it was
not
hanging above his head, about to fall and crush him.

After a moment, his mind accepted this alternate orientation and his stomach settled a bit. He could sense the tension building around him, though.
C'mon, c'mon, let's do it already
!

The timer display on his HUD flickered away the last few seconds.

And suddenly the deck dropped away beneath his feet, the pod racing away and leaving nineteen Marines and one Navy Corpsman hanging motionless in space.

Well, that was what it felt like. His
brain
knew that the pod had just decelerated again, hard, coming to a dead standstill relative to the target, and that the Marines, still retaining their five meters per second velocity, had simply kept on going.

Carefully, so as not to impart a tumble to the Marines to either side, Lee let go of their hands. The section became a cloud of independently moving figures, dropping headfirst toward the swiftly growing white disk. For a moment, panic clawed at his gut and throat. He was
falling
. Beside him, Gunny Dunne gave him a thumbs-up and the panic eased back a bit.

He looked back, toward his feet. The pod, with its fuel tanks and engine clusters at each end, was moving away quickly now, still dorsal side-on. Beyond, the Earth was in half-phase, an achingly beautiful swirl of white against azure blue; the sun was a dazzling glare to his left.

He looked back along the direction of his fall. That disk, he knew from the briefings, was the reaction mass tank of the
vessel that was going to be his home for the next twenty years objective—the Interstellar Transport
Chapultepec
. Measuring over one hundred meters across, the gently curved surface of the R-M tank provided a relatively uncluttered and safe target for the training evolution. The single bit of clutter in all that vast expanse was at the exact center, where a gray dome reared twenty meters above the gentle curvature of the surrounding terrain. That, Lee, knew, was a temporary shield rigged over the
Chapultepec
's forward drive thruster, the exhaust venturi used to slow the vessel from near-
c
during the last year of her flight. Normally, the forward thruster poked up through the R-M tank like the muzzle of a huge gun; the opening was a good three meters wide, a gaping maw that could easily swallow several Marines if they were unlucky enough to fall in.

The Marines around him were unshipping their weapons now, and securing them to their suit attachment points. The pre-exercise briefing had been incandescently clear: there would be
no
loaded weapons on this drop. Plasma guns and laser rifles would not be connected with their power packs; slug throwers would not be loaded. The opportunity for disaster with a platoon's worth of Marines spilling out of the sky with loaded weapons was far too great.

Still, the point of the exercise was to get used to maneuvering in this environment with weapons and a full load of juice packs and magazines. Lee himself was carrying a Sunbeam LC-2132 laser carbine, a pathetically underpowered little weapon, but one that didn't require the massive backpack of the LR-2120s, but he left it secured to his suit backpack. The ancient conventions that decreed that medical personnel go into combat unarmed had long ago crumbled, but the Navy Corpsman's primary mission was still rendering emergency first aid, not combat. He wouldn't need it.

Five meters per second. It didn't feel as though he was moving at all, but the objective was slowly growing larger. Around him, Marines tucked their knees to chest and rotated,
so that they were approaching feet first instead of helmet-first, and Lee did the same. His HUD ticked off the range…fifty meters…forty…thirty…

Alpha Company, First Platoon,
A Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1441 hours, GMT

Something had gone seriously wrong. The transfer pod had rotated, in order to present its dorsal side toward the objective, and opened its clamshell cargo bay doors according to sched. But when the thrusters fore and aft fired to sharply decelerate the vehicle, it had skewed suddenly beneath Garroway's feet. Garroway had collided with several other Marines, then hit something, hit it
hard
—he thought it was the side of the cargo bay hatch—and a numbing pain shot through his right arm. He tried to look around and found himself totally disoriented.

Damn, he was tumbling. The transfer pod drifted across his field of vision…then the broad, white disk of the objective…then the cargo pod again, but smaller now, more distant. The sky was filled with other tumbling figures; the pod's misfire had managed to scatter A Section all over the sky.

This was not good, not good at all.

Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Marine LaGrange Space Training
Facility
L-4
1442 hours, GMT

In the last few seconds, Lee's mental orientation had swung wildly; he was now definitely
falling
toward an infinite white plain…that, or the plain was rushing up to meet him. With a thought, he switched on his mags. He bent his knees, trying to go limp.

He felt the solid jar as his boots hit the white slightly convex surface.
Flex and dump
…