Star Corps (26 page)

ARLT Section Dragon Three
Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar
1642 hours ST

“C'mon, son!” Valdez said gently but firmly. Stooping, she slapped the back of his armored shoulder, urging him up and forward. “You can't help him now!”

Garroway had dropped Pressley's severed arm moments before, but he continued to lie in a shallow depression in the rock a meter away from the Marine's blood-drenched lower torso. Pressley's helmet lay nearby, the man's black-irised eyes and gaping mouth clearly visible behind the blood-smeared visor.

“Garroway!” Valdez rasped. “Snap to, Marine!”

“A-Aye aye,” he managed to say.

“Hit your backbone,” she told him.
“Do it!”

Backbone
was Corps slang for the nanoneurotransmitters within his implanted technics that adjusted certain key chemical, muscular, and mental responses. They didn't exactly banish fear at a thought-click, but they could help a Marine on the verge of going into shock to pull out of it, to focus on the task at hand, to keep from getting sick or simply having his legs fail beneath him.

Garroway nodded inside his helmet and focused on the mental code that activated the appropriate NNTs. He felt an inner rush, a kind of emotional flutter in his gut, and then he drew a sharp, deep breath. He could still feel the horror of Pressley's death, but it was cocooned somehow, more distant, less immediate. He felt the strength coming back into his legs and belly, felt the shaking stop. “Thanks, Gunny,” he told Valdez.

“Keep moving, Marine,” she told him. “We have a mountain to take.”

She moved off without looking back. He picked up his weapon and followed.

ARLT Command Section, Dragon
One
Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar
1642 hours ST

Captain Warhurst remained harnessed inside Lander One, though he was almost completely unaware of his surroundings. As CO of the ARLT, he was expected to stay safe and give orders, coordinating the attack from the presumed security of the armored LM. The training invested in modern military officers was simply too expensive, too valuable, to allow them to lead from the front; indeed, they'd not done so for two centuries or more.

Warhurst listened to the rattle of small arms fire off the lander module's hull and wondered who they were kidding
with that kind of blatant rationalization. The LM was a definite target—a large and quite attractive one, in fact—while individual Marines wearing stealthy armor were able to literally fade into their surroundings and become
very
hard to hit.

And that too, he realized, was his own form of rationalizing things. The fact was, he wanted to be out there with his people right now, not stuck behind in this glorified tin can, watching an AI run the data link switchboard and holding the collective hands of the command staff still on planetary approach.

His noumenal awareness was crowded with images, feeds, and downloads. With a thought-click he could tune in on the helmet sensor array of any of his Marines. At the same time, he was aware of several members of the command staff “riding his link,” looking over his virtual shoulder from the
Derna
's CIC. Majors Anderson, DuBoise, and Ross were all there, as were Lieutenant Colonel Harper, Colonel Ramsey, and both General King and Admiral Hartman. The electronic ghosts of a dozen other command staff officers and technicians were there as well, sifting through the flood of incoming data. Theoretically, they were there to offer advice and watch to see that he didn't miss anything. In practice, it was a micromanagement cluster-fuck waiting to happen. Warhurst concentrated on doing his job and ignoring that particular unpleasant possibility.

An aerial view of the LZ was spread out beneath him in his noumenal awareness. Robotic drones, battlefield management probes, and the sensor feeds from the Marines outside all contributed their data streams to build up a more or less coherent picture of the engagement as it unfolded. Four landing modules—one hundred Marines—were on the ground now and advancing toward an apparent door in the side of the mountain. Two more were angling in from opposite directions, north and south. Enemy resistance was heavy—twelve Marines dead so far, plus fifteen HK-20 robots knocked out—but the troops were advancing. The worst danger at this point of the assault was that the Marines would be pinned down, unable to move; instead, they
seemed to have momentum enough to carry them into the mountain, despite sleeting small arms fire.

“We're taking heavy fire from the mountainside,” Warhurst said, uploading to the
Derna
CIC. “We need air support!” The Marines on the ground needed firepower, and they needed it now.

“Major DuBoise,” Ramsey said. “Scrape that mountainside clean!”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Warhurst heard the orders being given over the air support net. All that remained was to wait for them to be carried out.

Kikig Kur-Urudug
Deeps of An-Kur
Third Period of Dawn

It was called the Abzu, a word constructed from
aba
, the sea, and
zu
, to know, and meaning, roughly, “the Sea of Knowing,” or possibly “the Sentient Sea.” Ancient Sumerian texts had spoken of the Abzu as a land beneath the sea, or as the “Lower World,” the place where the god Enki ruled. Perhaps, Tu-Kur-La thought, the Abzu had once been a physical place on far-off Kia, one of the scattered Anu colonies on that world before the coming of the Hunters of the Dawn. The old records read that way.

Or perhaps it had always been
this
, an artificial construct representing the collective unconscious of all of the gods. The records, even the Memories passed down across the ages, often broke at key places, with information forever lost or rendered corrupt. Sometimes it was hard to tell what the old memory texts truly meant.

Rarely, though, was an exact interpretation of the records necessary. The spirit of what was meant, of the information transmitted across the centuries—that was the heart and soul of the thing.

Interpretation of the records was best left to others.

Tu-Kur-La relaxed as the Sea engulfed him. Physically, he was within one of the lower chambers of the Kikig, the command center for the Mountain of the Gods. The Abzu-il, the Gateway to the Lower World, oozed slowly from the cavern walls around him, enveloping him, penetrating him, its artificial nervous system forging billions of connections with his physical brain on countless levels, drawing him swiftly under.

To Tu-Kur-La's senses, the Abzu seemed to be a physical place like any other, a kind of green-lit cavern with dim and far-off walls all but lost in soft fog. Reality coalesced itself from that fog. He saw images…other Ahannu…and heard voices, as the battle in the world above raged. Information was here for the asking, within a kind of library of the mind. And he could see whatever he willed himself to see….

“Welcome, Tu-Kur-La,” a voice said within his mind. “We welcome your soul to the Circle of An-Kin.”

“Thank you, Lord,” he replied, startled. The voice, the towering figure before him, was none other than Gal-Irim-Let—Kingal An-Kur, the Great Commander of the Mountain of the Gods. An-Kin was a council of the gods, a meeting to determine the future course of the gods' will. Why would the Kingal itself want the advice of a mere second-level god-warrior?

“We desire the advice of all those who faced the Zah-sagura two cycles ago,” the voice said, answering his question before he could voice it. “Your experience will help us decide how best to bring them down.”

“To that end,” another voice said, “we bestow upon you the rank of
uru-nam,
that you may take your place with us.”

This second speaker was Usum-Gal, a title that was both name and rank—the Great Dragon, the Lord of All. The Sag-ura of Kia referred to it as the High Emperor, a strange and meaningless term.

“I…I thank the Great Lord,” he stammered. “I will strive to be worthy of the honor.”
Uru-nam!
It meant
Guardian of Destiny; this made him a minor
kingal
in his own right.

“You are one of the gods,” Usum-Gal replied, “a Guardian of Destiny by nature. It is no honor to do what is your nature, but simple personal responsibility. Now, Uru-nam Tu-Kur-La, tell us how we might destroy the invaders.”

Within his inner vision, a scene unfolded, a view of the city the invaders called New Sumer, which the An had always called Shumur-Unu, the “Stubborn Fortress.” Strange how the invaders had such trouble with the proper pronunciation of language. Much of the city was burning, as hordes of Anu god-warriors and Sag-uras burst through and over the walls, storming toward the Pyramid of the Eye.

A handful of offworlder warriors gathered at the base of the pyramid steps, holding off the onslaught for long moments as survivors of the attack loaded on board one of the alien flying machines at the pyramid's apex. One by one the defenders fell, as heaps of burned and torn god-warrior bodies piled up in a semicircle about the plaza. At last, like a black sea, the Ahannu god-warriors surged forward, overwhelming the few surviving defenders.

“Our victory two cycles ago,” Tu-Kur-La replied, “was one of superior numbers. There were not enough armed Blackheads to withstand our full might.”

“These Sag-ura sky-warriors,” Gal-Irim-Let said, thoughtful. “What are they called?”

Tu-Kur-La plucked the alien word from the Abzu's knowledge stores. “Marines,” he said. “They call themselves Marines.”

“These Marines possess a weapons technology that gives them a considerable advantage in combat. Their body armor…their weapons-of-power…”

“All true, Great Lord,” he said. “And there are many more of them this time than last. Victory will not be easy.”

“We will suffer terrible losses,” Gal-Irim-Let observed. “We have lost twelves of sixties already, simply defending An-Kur.”

“But consider,” Tu-Kur-La said. “Our god-warriors number sixty sixties of sixties or more. Only a handful of these Blackhead Marines have landed so far. There may be more on the vessels now approaching Enduru, but…how many? A sixty of sixties?”

“Half of that,” Gal-Irim-Let replied. “According to what the prisoner-slaves told us, a thirty of sixties. No more.”

“Exactly. However many god-warriors we lose, we can afford to grow more, as many as are needed. The Marines are a long way from Kia and reinforcements. If our information from the Sag-ura we took two cycles ago is accurate, it will be a cycle and a half before news of their need can reach Kia, another two cycles before more ships could cross the gulf between Kia and Enduru.”

“Unless they recapture the Pyramid of the Eye,” Gal-Irim-Let said. “They could call for help immediately then, as they did before.”

“Perhaps. But their ships sail more slowly than the pictures in the Pyramid. They still require a two-cycle trip.

“And long before then, the last of these Marines will be dead.”

ARLT Section Dragon Three
Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar
1644 hours ST

A bullet spanged into Garroway's chest armor, staggering him back a step, but he leaned forward and kept moving. From what he'd heard and downloaded so far about the Ahannu, they were supposed to be armed with spears, damn it, not guns. Someone's intel about this rock was seriously out of date.

At least most of the incoming rounds were small stuff, gauss-gun projectiles accelerated by powerful magnetic fields. The monster high-velocity, high-mass rounds like the one that had taken Tom Pressley apart were pretty rare,
thank the Goddess, and most of those were being aimed at the LMs and at the circling air support.

The Dragonfly TAL-S transports, relieved of the burden of their lander modules, were lighter now by fifteen tons each and far more nimble, darting about above the LZ much like their terrestrial namesakes above an insect-infested swamp. Swooping in close to the black mountainside, chin turrets pivoting sharply, they sent fusillades of pulsed laser bursts into each crevice, outcrop, and ledge that might hold enemy gunners. Weapons pods slung under their down-canted wings loosed clouds of high-velocity needles, microrockets, and target seekers. Rock shattered as explosions detonated across the cliff face, sending showers of rock cascading down to the ledge below. The Marine pilots of those Dragons were throwing everything they had on the line to give the ground-pounders below a chance to clear the kill zone.

As he watched, one of the Dragons shuddered from a hit, its left wing and arched tail boom crumpling as black smoke began boiling from the dorsal drive unit. The aircraft banked sharply, then began tumbling, smashing into the side of the mountain. The other Dragons stooped from the glowering sky, electronically noting the location of the gauss launcher that had felled their comrade and searing it with pulsing laser flame.

The fire from the mountainside half a kilometer ahead was slackening now, he thought. Either the air support was doing its job or the defenders were pulling out. “Heads up, Marines,” Valdez's voice said over the tactical link. “The Ahannu gunners are pulling back. That could be good…or it could mean—”

“Hit the deck, Marines!” Colonel Ramsey's voice shouted in the noumenal, overriding Valdez's words. “We've got a mag reading off the scale. They're going to—”

Garroway fell full-length on the ground. He could feel the rocky surface of the ledge trembling through his torso armor as inconceivable energies deep within the mountain built
higher and higher. His audio pickups relayed a shuddering rumble, like far-off thunder.

Then a dazzling blue-white light illuminated the rocks, the murky twilight replaced by blazing high noon. As the light faded he looked up, just in time to see a wall of white mist rushing down the slope from the mountain's peak.

“Shock wave!” Valdez shouted. “Stay down and hang on!”