Battlespace (25 page)

At the last instant, he passed through the gravitational gradient, dropping from free fall to nearly one G in a single, stomach-twisting instant. He didn't have time to think about it though. A second later he hit the stargate surface, letting his knees collapse under him and allowing his armor to take the shock of the impact.

He crumpled into a clumsy roll.

Unlike the training runs back at Earth's L-4, there was no danger of bouncing off and drifting back into space. Standing on the stargate was like standing on solid ground back home.

It just
looked
weird.

The surface was heavily pocked and cratered, almost like a sponge in places, yet the structures scattered across the landscape retained an angular appearance, as though made of haphazardly piled slabs. The horizon was
very
close, close enough to step off of, if he wasn't careful.

All around him, other Marines descended from the black sky, drifting down at a steady speed, then beginning to accelerate through the last few meters as they entered the gate's oddball gravity. Both Sirius A and B were blocked by the Wheel's structure, so, technically, it was night here; the stars were bright and achingly beautiful. He'd not even been able to see them before, because of the two nearby suns.

Which one, he wondered, was Sol?

But there was no time for wondering or for rubbernecking. Glancing up to make sure he wasn't stepping into the path of
another falling Marine, he got a bearing on his section's rally point and started moving at a steady jog.

At least no one was shooting at him.

Not yet.

2
APRIL
2170

Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
Sirius Stargate
1248 hours, Shipboard time

HM2 Phillip Lee dropped toward the stargate, trying to keep his mind empty of everything save
relaxing
…knees bent…ready to drop and roll….

His stomach twisted as he fell through the gravity gradient, and then he struck, hitting hard, but letting his suit take most of the punishment. He was down.

“Corpsman on the beach,” he announced over the company channel.

“Welcome aboard, Doc,” Gunny Dunne told him. “We're setting up Beach Ops at these coordinates.” A map location flashed up on Lee's noumenal display. “Point Memphis. The company is forming up on the perimeter…here.”

“Copy that. I'm on my way. You got anything for me?”

“Couple of busted ankles,” was Dunne's reply. “No one's shooting at us, at least, thank the Goddess.”

The first set of map coordinates Gunny had given him were about five hundred meters in
that
direction, at the site designated Point Memphis. He started off at a slow jog, careful of his footing. He didn't want to break an ankle of his own.

A strange kind of battle, he thought, but one suited to this eldritch landscape of black slabs and boxes. Wasps and Starhawks continued to crisscross through the star-gilt sky, loosing laser bursts and gunfire at anything that even remotely threatened the Marines. A brilliant explosion flared in the distance…bright enough and far enough off that it must have been a strike by one of the starships. He thought he felt a tremor underfoot.

He heard nothing, of course, save what was coming over the radio net. A check on the Battalion Channel located the injured men, both at the spot designated as Operations HQ—code-named Memphis.

That was where he needed to be.

Point Memphis—Beachhead HQ
Sirius Stargate
1257 hours, Shipboard time

Major Warhurst had jumped with Charlie Company's Third Platoon. The unit was light, down by five on the roster, with personnel transferred to other platoons to bring them up to full strength, so there was room on one of the TRAPs for Warhurst and his three-person staff. They'd designated an open spot in the northeast quadrant of the DZ as Beachhead Operations, the nucleus for all Marine ops on the stargate.

Of course, at the moment, Beach Ops consisted of nothing more than the four of them in vac armor, plus the tripod-mounted complexity of a multibroadband laser FCT, a Field Communications Transceiver. The FCT took over all direct communications with the
Chapultepec
and
Ranger
, as well as serving as the primary local node for Cassius and lesser Battalion AI assets.

The FCT also allowed Warhurst to jack in for a full noumen connection. He sat on the “ground,” leaning against
one of the odd, clifflike slabs scattered about the landscape, only marginally aware of his immediate surroundings. In his mind's eye, he could see the entire expanse of the DZ and well beyond it, computer-modeled in exacting detail. Green pinpoints of light marked the positions of each Marine in the landing force, with platoon leaders and section sergeants marked by ID tags as well. With a thought-click he could communicate with any of them. Cassius monitored all battalion radio and laser traffic and made sure he heard anything that was tactically important. The sheer volume of data coming and going from the beachhead was utterly beyond the scope of any one human. It was here that the specialized talents of artificial intelligences truly came into their own.

With their help, he could see that most of both companies, Alpha and Charlie, were on the stargate surface. B Section of Charlie's First Platoon and A section of Alpha's Third Platoon both had scattered a bit, missing the DZ by nearly two kilometers, but they'd at least managed to come down on the stargate, rather than miss and fall into empty space. Both sections of Alpha's Fourth Platoon were still inbound.

“Steel Beach, Steel Beach,” a voice called in Warhurst's head, using the call sign for Beach Ops. “This is Alpha Two. We are tracking unidentified movement at Sector one-threeniner delta! It looks…yeah, it looks like they're coming right out of the ground! Do you copy, Steel Beach?”

“Alpha Two, Steel Beach, we copy,” Master Sergeant Vanya Barnes said. She was on loan from the MIEU command constellation and Warhurst was damned glad to have her. “Give us your tactical feed so we can see too.”

“Ah, sorry, Steel Beach. Here y'are.”

Whatever it was Alpha Company's Second Platoon was tracking, it wasn't on any of the remote sensors or probes, and Alpha's CO, Lieutenant Gansen, had neglected to patch through the data from his own unit's sensors.

There they were…a long line of red pinpoints crawling
down a kind of valley between two sets of surface structures. No wonder they hadn't shown on the remote sensor net. The local terrain was screening them.

“Alpha Two, this is Elvis,” Warhurst said, using his personal call sign. “Do you have a visual? Over.”

“Yessir! There must be a hundred of 'em!”

“Can
we
have a visual?” Damn. Whittier was scattered—not focused and he was forgetting to use his tech. The guy must be rattled, first time in combat—and first time facing unknown and alien hostiles. Warhurst made a mental note to keep an eye on him—and on his company.

“Sorry, sir. Here it is. We don't have any sensors in that area, but you can get a pretty good image off of high-mag optical.”

The picture that opened in Warhurst's mind was fuzzy and grainy, with frequent bursts of static and data dropouts, and it tended to jerk and wobble unpredictably. It was being relayed from the helmet optics of Lance Corporal Janet Higgins, according to the data lines running across the top of the image. She was one of the Marines in Alpha Company's Second Platoon and was shooting the scene under extreme magnification.

It was impossible to get a good feel for the size of the objects, with nothing in the image to give a good sense of scale. It was also hard to understand what he was seeing. Each object was flat-bottomed and skimming along above the Wheel surface, probably using some type of magnetic levitation. Each was an odd blend of sharp angles and smoothly curved organic shapes and no two were the same. Each, however, did sport a decidedly phallic protuberance that almost had to be some sort of weapon.

The camera angle was high up above the line of objects, almost overhead; on his mental map, he could see that Higgins was positioned atop one of the slablike “cliffs,” looking down into the flat-bottomed valley through which the objects were now streaming.

“Higgins,” Warhurst said, opening a squad channel. “This is Warhurst. I'm linked into your visual.”

The image in his head jumped wildly, then steadied on the oncoming objects once more. “Sir! Yes, sir!”

“Easy there, Corporal. How big are those things?”

“It's hard to say, sir. They look to be about five, maybe six times as long as a man—twelve meters, maybe—and half that wide. Can't even guess about their mass, sir.”

“That's okay. Just tell me what you can. What's your impression?”

“They're hard to see, sir. Black-on-black.” The objects appeared to be made of the same material as the Wheel itself. Perfect camouflage. “I'm getting readings of high-energy magnetics. Don't know if that's their weapons or their propulsion system breathing, but it's hot. And they're
fast
. They're barreling down this valley like they're on a mag-lev monorail.”

Warhurst glanced at the data tags on her transmission. “You're still on passive mode—” he said.

“Aye aye, Sir. Going active.”

“No! Wait—”

His noumenal display lit up with new information…then suddenly flared, dazzlingly bright and static-blasted.

The data tags winked out, replaced by the harshly accusing words
TRANSMISSION TERMINATED
. The green pinpoint on the map marking Lance Corporal Higgins's position was gone.

“Damn!” he exclaimed aloud. “Damn!
Damn
!”

“Sir?” Vanya Barnes asked him.

He didn't reply. Damn it, he was acting as unfocused as Lieutenant Gansen. A moment's carelessness in what he'd said, a misinterpretation of his words by a too-eager Marine…

So long as the Marines used their armor's passive sensors only, they were invisible to the enemy. Higgins had switched on her active sensors, bathing the approaching objects in low-energy laser light and radar.

Which, of course, had instantly lit her up like a white-hot flare on the enemy's sensors. Their reaction time was startlingly quick.

Warhurst blamed himself for Higgins's death, but could not afford the luxury of self-recrimination now. “Whittier!”

“Sir!”

“Fall back on Topeka and form on the battalion perimeter. Order your people not to engage, repeat, do
not
engage. They are to remain on passive sensors only.”

“Aye aye, sir!”

“Move out.”

Higgins's death had provided one bonus for the landing force, however…a better idea of the enemy's nature. That instant's backscatter of laser light had provided plenty of information for Cassius and the other battalion AIs and he knew now that each of those objects measured anywhere between six and ten meters in length. Higgins's eyeball guestimate had been a bit high, understandably enough.

The landing force was facing the equivalent of tanks—armored but highly mobile behemoths each mounting at least one heavy weapon…a particle beam, from the look of the data, though not an antiparticle beam, at least. The burst that had killed Higgins appeared to be a short pulse of high-energy electrons, not positrons.

Though the Marines had trained to face them, tanks were, if not obsolete, somewhat quaintly old-fashioned in modern warfare. When tanks first had appeared on the battlefield, some two and a half centuries before, the .50-caliber bullet had been developed as the first antitank round. The subsequent arms race of tank armor versus tank killers had eventually been decided in favor of light, portable antitank weapons and highly maneuverable tank-killing aircraft. A single Marine with an M-30D7 Onager was a
lot
cheaper, more easily replaced, and more easily fielded in large numbers than the most heavily armored tank.

The MIEU had fifty Onagers in its inventory, half of them with the first drop, with five warshots per weapon. Warhurst just wished they had a few hundred more. Besides Onager AT rounds, all they had that might even slow those monsters were CTX-5 demo packs and massed CCN-coordinated laser or plasma weapon fire.

“All platoon leaders, listen up!” he said over the platoon leader private channel. “We have the equivalent of a column of tanks coming in from one-three-niner delta. Deploy your Onager teams forward. Let's see if we can get some kills.”

As the platoon leaders acknowledged, Warhurst wondered what he might have missed. Damn it, what other tricks might the enemy pull?

One Warhurst had already thought of was starting to nag at him, a nightmare unrealized, but potent. Somehow the aliens could control gravity, as was obvious from the way the face of the Wheel was pulling them at something less than 1G, while over the center or above the rim gravitational acceleration was closer to 12 Gs. What was to stop them from switching off that shielding, pinning the entire MIEU flat to the surface with twelve times the Earth-normal weight of their bodies and equipment? They wouldn't be able to move. Hell, they wouldn't be able to remain conscious.

Or could the somehow
reverse
gravity and fling everyone off into space?

It all depended on whether or not they could turn gravity on and off like a light. If the apparent gravity control was somehow part of the structure, built into the structure somehow, the Marines were probably safe from that form of attack, at least. If not, they were dead. As simple as that.

The fact that the enemy
hadn't
switched off the gravity yet or flattened them all into armored pancakes suggested that they couldn't pull off that particular type of magic. They hadn't done anything of the sort to block the surveillance probes earlier—or the fighters. The longer the Marines were
able to move around normally on the Wheel's surface, the likelier that the gravitational shielding was not something the enemy could switch on or off.

It was also something Warhurst couldn't do a damned thing about, one way or the other. He pushed the thought from his mind and tried to focus on other, more immediate problems.

First and foremost was the creation of a perimeter within which the landing team could operate. Those things out there were enough like tanks that they might be killed using infantry antitank tactics. No guarantees, of course. In
any
battle, the enemy was guaranteed to surprise you. In this operation, that axiom was more true than ever. The Marines were fighting in a vacuum of information as well as in fact. They simply did not and could not know what the enemy was capable of—or how best to fight him.

But as sure as Chesty Puller was a devil dog, they were going to try.

Alpha Company, First Platoon,
B Section
1304 hours, Shipboard time

“Onager teams front!” Lieutenant Jeff Gansen's voice rasped out.

“You heard the man!” Gunnery Sergeant Dunne snapped.

“Vinton! Morton! Get your wild asses up there! Fire teams! Cover them!”

Garroway started moving toward what passed for high ground in this alien terrain, a kind of black metal plateau two meters high, with sloping sides and oddly angled corners. He and the other two members of his fireteam, Cavaco and Geisler, had been detailed to provide fire support for Sergeant Jeff Morton and Corporal Kat Vinton, B Section's Onager team.

“Wild asses” was an insider's joke. The original Onager had been a kind of wild, central-Asian ass, now extinct; the ancient Romans had fielded a kind of siege catapult called the Onager, so called, according to Marine lore, because it had a hell of a kick. In the late twentieth century, the U.S. Marine Corps had experimented with a small, tracked vehicle mounting six recoilless rifles, also called the Onager.