Semper Human (17 page)

With startling abruptness, the empty space within the flattened ellipse ahead changed. Instead of a gray metal bulkhead, Nal could see into a large compartment with a high overhead, banks of instrument consoles, and a large number of people, most wearing distinctive black and gold uniforms. The image appeared to be unsteady, shivering and jolting even as the people on the other side began reacting to the appearance of the d-teleport gateway in their midst.

“Go!” Lieutenant Haskins screamed over the company com channel. “Go!
Go!
”

“Belay that!”
The sharp command was Lofty's, echoed closely by Captain Corcoran, but it was too late. The First Platoon was already going through.

And it was a bloody disaster from the very start.

Strike Squadron 340, Blue Flight
Objective Samar
Tavros-Endymion Stargate
0513 hours, GMT

Lieutenant Garwe felt the sharp acceleration as his Starwraith pod snapped off its accelerator rail and into empty space. As always, he struggled to suppress the surge of fear as space exploded around him.

His body, he knew, was safely back on board the
Sam Nick
, strapped into a link couch, but there was absolutely no way of telling that from the sensations flooding his brain. The vast bulk of the phase-shift transport dropped away astern, dwindling into the distance in an instant. Ahead and in all directions, the sky was filled with a dazzling, jewel-like array of tightly clustered stars enmeshed within the filaments and tendrils and twisted sheets of clotted, blue-white luminosity that were the Tarantula Nebula.

“Stay tight, War Dogs,” Captain Xander warned. “They can't see us.”

Not yet
, Garwe thought, but he adjusted his pod's gravitic drive slightly, edging into closer formation with the other fifteen Starwraiths of Blue Flight. Myriad glowing specks drew multicolored contrails across his field of view, marking other Starwraiths, as well as the ships of the task force translated in on board the
Nicholas
, along with other remote-piloted combat and reconnaissance craft. Ahead, bracketed in bright red, a slender ring floated against the backdrop of stars and starstuff, growing swiftly as his pod dropped closer.

White globes of incandescence began appearing across the starscape, flashing and expanding as the enemy batteries began opening up.

And the War Dogs vectored in on the Tarantula Stargate.

Company H, 2/9
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
0513 hours, GMT

“Belay that! First Platoon, pull back!
Pull back!
”

But the assault had already tumbled into bloody chaos. One of the Marines at the extreme left of the front rank bumped against the Marine to his right, stumbled, and fell sideways against the edge of the elliptical gateway. Nal heard the shrill
scream as the man's left arm, legs, and lower torso vanished, his body sliced through as cleanly as if by the touch of a plasma torch. The room beyond the gateway gave another lurch, and three more Marines tumbled off the ramp and across the threshold.

From his vantage point far back in the assault formation, Nal could see what was going wrong. The two volumes of space, each a few meters across, which should have overlapped in order to allow the Marines to step smoothly from one into the other, were imperfectly aligned. The space within the objective control center appeared to be throbbing or pulsing, and was drifting back and forth erratically.

The Marines of First Platoon were too close to the gate to clearly see what was happening. Those in the front ranks were trying to move back, away from the yawing gateway into the enemy command center; those behind were still pushing forward, jostling, shoving, and the resultant collision was spilling Marines off the ramp.

A few fell to either side just in front of the open gateway, and appeared to be all right. Others, though, were being shoved forward into the gate by the press from behind. Some appeared to be landing intact on the other side, but several fell partway through the invisible, three-dimensional interface of hyperdimensional space with the space of the
Sam Nick
's debarkation bay, and were hideously mangled. With horror and disbelief, Nal watched one Marine appear to step
through
an instrument console on the enemy command deck, then abruptly jerk and thrash as the atoms of his body became inextricably mingled with the atoms of the enemy console.

Men and women were screaming. Blood, shockingly scarlet, splashed across the deck and the vaguely outlined Hellfire armor of struggling Marines. On the far side of the gate, black and gold-clad troopers were turning to face the threat, raising their weapons.

Abruptly, the scene glimpsed through the open gate flipped upside down, then reversed, right switching with left. Corporal
Regin Devrochik—“Chickie” to his squadmates—was caught partway into the gate interface when it shifted, and the front half of his body, from weapon and Hellfire armor to internal organs and blood vessels, all the way down to his individual cells all turned suddenly and horribly inside-out. What was left collapsed backward onto the ramp, still flailing as what was left of Chickie's brain tried to make sense of what had just happened. Sergeant Cori Ryack fired a single bolt from her plasma rifle, incinerating the bloodily twitching horror on the deck.

The Dahl troopers on the far side of the gate were firing, now, their upside-down images moving closer to the opening, but not stepping through. Plasma beams snapped through First Platoon's ranks; some didn't pass through the shifting dimensional interface, while others were absorbed or refracted by Marine armor, but a few more Marines on the embarkation deck went down.

“Return fire!” Lieutenant Haskins was screaming over the command net. “Return fire!”

But the Marines in the rear ranks were blocked by those in the front, and no one could even be sure the plasma bolts were getting through the strangely twisted geometries between the two spaces, the
Nick
's embarkation bay and the enemy command deck. Another man fell through, fell
up
as he dropped through the dimensional interface and landed on the enemy's deck. Dahl Imperium troops were pouring into the compartment on the other side, now, many of them in black and silver armor similar to the Hellfire armor worn by the Marines.

There was a sudden new danger…that if the gateway was stabilized, the enemy troops might actually storm through onto the
Sam Nick
's embarkation bay deck, and try to take the ship from within. With the narrow field of view offered by the elliptical gateway, it was impossible to tell how many Dahl troops were over there, but there appeared to be several hundred at least.

And then, after what had seemed like an eternity, the gate shut down, the inverted image of the interior of the enemy
command center winking out, replaced by the cold gray metal of the bulkhead. Nal checked his time implant and was startled to see that only eight seconds had passed between the opening and the closing of that dimensional gateway.

The gate might be closed, now, but the screams, shrieks, and moans of the wounded continued as the surviving First Platoon Marines tried to sort themselves out. Corpsmen began moving among the fallen Marines; someone else fired a plasma bolt into the brain of someone too horribly injured to survive.

Smoked
. Meaning that their brains had been vaporized and that they were irretrievably dead. Even in Nal's day nine centuries before, if a wounded Marine's brain could be recovered intact, they could usually be saved. Whole new bodies could be force-grown for transplant, and Nal gathered that the process was a lot slicker and more efficient today than it had been a millennium ago.

But when only
part
of the brain survived the initial trauma, the personality was generally so changed that it was no longer the same person, and there were other problems as well.
That
kind of agony often meant insanity or, somehow worse, the reduction of the mind to a vegetable state, alive, even aware, but unable to communicate.

When what was left was no longer fully human, a mercy shot to the head was often the final and best service one Marine could provide for a comrade.

The remaining Marines were milling about in stark confusion. “Get those people in line, Master Sergeant,” Captain Corcoran demanded.

“
Attention on deck!
” Nal rasped out, and the movement came to an immediate halt, the Marines standing in the midst of drifting smoke and the sprayed swatches of gore. “Now fall in! Ranks of four!”

In seconds, order was resumed. There'd been thirty-five men and women in First Platoon a moment ago; Third Platoon, in reserve, was the short-handed one. Now, they formed up as four ranks of four, with three left over—just nineteen
Marines left. A quick check of the company's medical net showed seven wounded, all now being tended by hospital corpsmen. Ten were dead or missing.

First Platoon, Nal knew, would be in shock, now. Suffering 47 percent casualties in the space of just eight seconds was sufficient to ruin the most elite of combat units. “Captain Corcoran?”

“What is it, Master Sergeant?” He sounded distracted.

“I suggest we drop First Platoon into reserve, and move Second and Third Platoons up to the main assault.”

“What? Are you crazy, man? We can't go through that gate now! Not after what just happened!”

“Sir? We
have
to go through. We have some MIAs on the other side. ‘No man left behind,' right?”

“They were probably killed as soon as they hit Samar's deck!”

“Maybe. But if there's even one chance in hell…”

Nal could feel the captain thinking about this. “Okay, Master Sergeant. Make the change, then stand ready. But I'm going to need to bump this up the line.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Corcoran, Nal thought, was a good enough officer but an unimaginative one, experienced and well trained, but not the best when it came to taking the initiative or assuming responsibility for a potentially controversial decision. The man wasn't about to try a second attempt on the enemy base without very explicit orders from higher up the chain of command.

At least he
was
checking to see if those orders would be forthcoming, and not simply assuming that the fight was over. Uppermost in Nal's mind was the knowledge that, before the teleport technicians had shut down the power and killed the gate, he'd seen Marines safely over and on the other side. They'd jumped or been pushed through, landed intact despite the wildly shifting dimensional substrate, and been fighting with the enemy troops over there when the closing gate had cut them off.

Corcoran was right. They might well be dead by now…but they might also have surrendered or been overpowered by superior numbers, and if they were still alive, they would know that the rest of H Company would be coming through to get them.

Nal played back a portion of those eight seconds recorded through his helmet scanners, checking IDs. Yeah…Sergeant Ferris, PFC Brisard, and PFC Tollindy had been engaging the enemy over there, and it looked like two more, at least, were wounded but still alive, PFC Garcia and Lance Corporal Zollinger. Five men and women.

The Corps did
not
leave its own behind.
Ever
.

1002.2229

Command Deck
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
0516 hours, GMT

General Garroway watched the unfolding battle as a fast-flashing series of images and informational updates streaming through his consciousness from the artificial intelligence commanding the
Sam Nicholas
and the rest of the Associative Marine-Navy task force.

Most of the op was moving well and as close to plan as these things ever did. Bravo and Delta Companies had teleported through to capture fire control centers, weapons emplacements, and a command center on Objective Novaleta, a huge armored orbital fortress some twenty thousand kilometers from the Tarantula Stargate. Alpha and Charlie Companies had successfully teleported onto the surface of a cold, Mars-sized world at the very limit of teleport range, nearly one hundred thousand kilometers distant, seizing a small starport and several related ground stations and facilities. Echo and Fox Companies had teleported onto several Dahl Imperium warships within the local battlespace volume.

In each case, the fighting was reported as fierce, but headway was being made.

The single exception was Objective Samar, a huge command-control center orbiting just a few kilometers outside the twenty-kilometer ring of the Stargate itself. Golf Company was attacking weapons emplacements on the station, while Hotel was targeting the main command center, with orders to capture Emperor Dahl himself if they could find him. Reports so far were very confused, but the upshot appeared to be that there were technical problems in establishing a solid teleport link with the station. There'd been heavy casualties in the opening seconds of the engagement.

Unfortunately, Objective Samar was the focal point of the entire operation, the key to capturing the local Stargate. The main Associative battlefleet was waiting now at Waypoint Tun Tavern. All they needed was word from the assault group so that they could swarm through and take over the rest of the Dahlist facilities on the Tarantula side of the gate. But Samar's heavy weapons controlled the exit space from the Stargate.

The heavy weapons on Samar would pick the Associative warships off one at a time as they came through, unless the Marines could secure that fortress.

Garroway was now linked in with the command network, focusing on the action at Objective Samar. He'd seen the bungled assault, seen the eight-second nightmare of confusion as orders and counterorders had shoved the lead Marine company forward and back. And he'd overheard the terse discussion between the H Company commander and his senior NCO.

“General Garroway,”
Lofty whispered in his mind.
“There's a request for orders coming up the chain from H Company—”

“I know,” Garroway replied. He'd considered entering the conversation at the time, but held off. Generals who eavesdropped and barged in on company-level discussions within
their command only harmed morale and discipline. “Put him through.”

The image of Captain Corcoran appeared in his mind…a command AIvitar that was actually Corcoran's personal AI mimicking the captain's appearance and voice.
“General Garroway!”
the figure said.
“Captain Corcoran, H Company, reporting, sir! We tried to go through
—”

“I saw, Captain,” Garroway said, interrupting. “Re-set the teleport field and try again. It is
imperative
that we capture that command center!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Garroway checked the strategic map, looking for nearby assets. Battlespace was a confused tangle of colored stars and course-indicator lines curving in toward their objectives.
There
was one….

“I'm deploying a flight of Marine assault pods to support you from outside.
But get your people back on board that station!”

“Yes, sir! Aye, aye, sir!”
And the image winked out.

The 340th Assault Squadron, the War Dogs, had been tasked with searching for hidden weapons emplacements on the Stargate ring itself, but those orders were secondary in importance to capturing Objective Samar.

“Lofty,” he said. In his mind, he highlighted the cluster of green blips now closing with the Stargate in the three-dimensional map spread out in his mind. “Convey new orders to the 340th Marine Strike Squadron…here. Captain Xander. They are to redeploy to Objective Samar and attempt to enter the station from outside. Priority is to be given to securing the command deck, along with Golf and Hotel elements of the 2/9.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

Only after he'd given the order did he remember that Xander's group was an Anchor Marine squadron, distinct in training and experience from his own Globe Marines. Garroway hated the distinction. Marines should be Marines, wherever, or
when
ever, they came from.

At the same time, he wasn't entirely sure he trusted those members of the Corps from the forty-first century, or the doctrine of remote combat.

Training was the major issue. He'd looked in on the training sessions for Anchor Marines back in Earthring, and been disappointed to find out that nearly all Marine training nowadays was
virtual
training, with recruits put through AI-linked simulations accompanied by massive downloads of data on weapons, tactics, regulations, and history.

For Garroway, mental sims could never replace the reality of actually having been there. Just the possibility of actually getting shot could, as one ancient philosopher had suggested in the context of being hanged, concentrate a man's mind wonderfully. He didn't trust this new way of creating Marines, didn't trust the Marines who'd not gone through the physical training—the
crucible
, as ancient Marines had called it.

It took him a moment more to remember that one of the members of the 340th was Garwe, one of his own descendents.

Was Marek Garwe a
real
Marine? Could Garroway—and the Marines of H Company—really depend on him and the other Anchors?

Garroway had to admit to himself that he just didn't know.

But the next few minutes of battle ought to tell him a lot.

Company H, 2/9
Marine Transport
Major Samuel Nicholas
Objective Samar
0519 hours, GMT

“Stand ready, Marines!” Nal called over the company link. “We're going through again. Do
not
move until you get the go from Captain Corcoran or myself.”

Second Platoon had moved forward, now, taking up the jump-off position on the ramp in front of the elliptical
gateway under the command of Lieutenant Fellacci. Behind them was Third Platoon, under Lieutenant Vriberg, moved up from the ready reserve. Next was the HQ element, and with the battered remains of First Platoon now behind them in reserve. After what First Platoon had been subjected to a few moments earlier, though, Nal desperately hoped he wouldn't need to call them in.

The last of the wounded had been evacuated to the rear and were on their way up to the
Sam Nicholas
' sick bay. The smoke had been pulled from the compartment. Nothing could be done, though, to mask the splotches of blood still steaming at the top of the ramp and beneath the physical gateway. Despite that all too vivid reminder of the failed teleport assault, the H Company Marines appeared to be tightly focused and ready. They were shaken and they were stressed, but overall they appeared steady.

Nal found himself praying to the ancient and powerful Ahannu, gods that he'd long ago renounced, that the Marines' strength remain steady.

“The teleport gate is opening,”
Lofty announced.
“Do not, repeat, do
not
move until you have the go order.”

The gateway opening misted over, then clarified, again looking into the command-control compartment on the other side. Again, the hyperdimensional link appeared to pulse and tremble, as the image drifted unsteadily to one side. Enemy troops were firing now, sending a storm of plasma rifle fire into the embarkation bay. Several Marines took direct hits and fell, but the rest held their position. Fellacci ordered Second Platoon to return fire and they did so, with meticulous precision. Black-and-gold Dahlist soldiers began collapsing on the other side in twos, threes, and fours.

“Hit them with the am-fours!” Nal shouted. “Suppressive fire!”

A dozen contrails lanced through the air from the mass of crouching Marines, into the elliptical gateway, and on into the command center beyond. Half failed to negotiate the twisted,
distorted space within the ellipse and were automatically disarmed by their safeties. Six, however, went through dead-center.

Once within the Dahlist battle station, they swung in different directions, each AM-4 smart grenade independently controlled by its on-board micro-AI, seeking out concentrations of enemy troops. When it found one, it homed in with deadly precision and a microscopic fleck of antimatter came into contact with the normal matter of the grenade's shell.

Brilliant, high-yield energy blasts thundered within the confined space of the Samar command center. In seconds, the far side of the teleport gateway showed little but wrecked instrument consoles and torn deck plating, the place a smoking, ruined shambles.

But heavily armored Dahlist troops remained sheltered in the wreckage, and more were coming through several doorways every moment.

“What the hell is going on with the image?” Corcoran asked in Nal's mind. The image continued to shake and drift, as the spacial volume of the dimensional interface stretched and twisted.

“Gravitational interference, sir,” he replied. “That's what I'm getting on the tech feed.” He had an open link to the
Sam Nick
technicians attempting to anchor the teleport lock. The dimensional interface—the overlap of two distinct volumes of space a thousand kilometers apart—was unstable, shifting as if in the ebb and flow of a gravitational tide.

When he glanced at a strategic map inset in the display area of his mind, he felt a sudden flash of insight.

“Sir!” he said. “Samar is orbiting just a few thousand meters from the outer surface of the Stargate ring! Those counterrotating black holes inside the ring structure—”

“The outer surface of the ring is supposed to be grav-shielded, Master Sergeant. Don't you think we'd have looked for something that obvious?”

“Then maybe they fucking turned off the shielding! But the space-time ripples from the Gate are sure as hell scrambling our attempts to lock in!
Sir
!”

Cocoran hesitated. “Pass that on to the teleport techs.”

“Already uploading, sir.”

Inside the ring of the Stargate were two Jupiter-masses compressed to proton-sized singularities, whizzing about two internal tracks at close to the speed of light. The precisely tuned gravity waves emerging from that vortex of warping spacetime was what opened the big Stargates in the first place.

But those waves could be highly disruptive close to the ring's surface, disruptive enough to interfere with the attempt to overlap two spacial volumes close by.

However, the technicians attempting to effect that overlap could correct for the distortion if they could tune in on the frequency of the pulses and cancel them out.

Nal felt one of the techs give him a mental thumbs-up. The image beyond the elliptical gate steadied, expanded slightly, then locked in solidly.

“We have lock!”

“Go!
” Corcoran ordered.

And Second Platoon surged forward, leaning ahead into the volleyed fire from the other side as if pushing into a hurricane's blast. Lightning bolts sparked and flashed from Hellfire suits into the steel deck. Two Marines stumbled and fell, but the rest kept going, Marines in the rear moving up to take the place of those who'd been hit.

Strike Squadron 340, Blue Flight
Objective Samar
Tavros-Endymion Stargate
0520 hours, GMT

“This is it!” Xander yelled over the link. “
Hit them, Marines!
”

Together with the others, Garwe accelerated toward the
fast-swelling globe below, as high-energy bursts flared and blossomed throughout the sky. The War Dogs, their assault pods shielded and all but invisible to enemy scanners, dropped through a deadly storm of point-defense fire toward the surface of Objective Samar.

The Dahlist battle station was the size of a small asteroid, eight kilometers across. At a range of a hundred kilometers it was still tiny, a bright star, but under optical magnification fed through his implant, he saw it as an inmense, flattened sphere with a mottled black and white external shell bristling with weapons systems.

Most of those weapons, squat, cumbersome monsters set into massive turrets, were designed to engage enemy warships emerging from the Stargate—the entire point of positioning the battle station this close to the ring. Those big guns could not even
see
, much less lock on to and track something as small and as maneuverable as a Starwraith.

There were thousands of lesser weapons scattered across the surface of that artificial worldlet, however, point-defense batteries with AI-directed detection and response fire-control systems, designed to defeat just such an assault as this one…or to take out clouds of incoming antimatter missiles.

The War Dogs were lost within a vast and expanding cloud of decoys, each created by a thumb-sized microbot. Some were programmed to mimic the maneuvers and the energy profiles of a Starwraith pod, while others, the majority, appeared to Dahlist scanners to be incoming AI-directed missiles. Once they were close enough to appear as solid targets, the enemy defenses
had
to respond in order to protect the station…and the sixteen Marine pods could slip through unnoticed.

That, at least, was tactical doctrine. No one knew how good the Dahlist AI defenses actually were, or how quickly they would be able to sweep through the decoys and finally reach the Marines.