Star Corps (27 page)

And then the wave front hit him like an oncoming hurricane. Once when he was a kid, a tropical storm had hit Baja and the Sonoran coast, lashing inland with 160-kilometer winds. This was like that, only worse, much worse, as the howling wind suddenly seemed to turn solid, smashing at the Marines scattered across the storm-seared landscape. The external temperature, he saw on his helmet display readouts, was nearly one hundred degrees Celsius, and the atmospheric pressure had momentarily surged to well over fifteen atmospheres.

Garroway felt himself being lifted, felt himself sliding back across the rock. Reaching out with both gauntleted hands, he grabbed hold of a crack in the rocky grounds and hung on. The wind slammed him down then, rattling him inside his armor.

The pressure wave passed over in another second, leaving Garroway and the other Marines gasping but more or less unscathed. He picked up his laser rifle, checking the settings. “What the hell was
that
?” someone yelled over the tactical link.

“The bastards downed another Dragon,” someone else shouted back.

Garroway looked up into the turbulent overcast. The blast had wiped the circling Dragons from the sky. Four were returning now, but one other had vanished.

“Move in, Marines!” Valdez ordered. “Hit that gateway, bearing two-one-five!”

Garroway turned his helmet, watching the bearing indicator numbers sweep around to the indicated direction. There was something there….

He thought-clicked his helmet magnification to ten times and could make out the gateway Valdez was talking about. It looked as though a portion of the rock wall above the ledge LZ had been cut away with a high-energy beam of some sort, leaving a deep crevice. Rock had flowed like water there before cooling and hardening once more, leaving smoothly shaped basaltic flowstone. Within that smooth-walled break in the cliff, a high, narrow, rectangular opening plunged into blackness. His helmet radar confirmed that it was indeed a gateway of some sort, open for at least twenty meters back into the mountain. Elsewhere on the cliff face, to either side of the gate, red light gleamed from slit windows cut into rock—gun ports, he guessed, from which the defenders were sweeping the LZ with deadly fire.

Basic tactical doctrine downloaded into Garroway's implant during boot camp was clear. When you're in the open and in danger of getting your ass shot off,
move!
NNTs sang in his blood, his brain, his thoughts. He thought-clicked his fear down another notch and started running, pounding across the scorched and broken rock surface of the ledge toward the gate.

The other Marines in the ARLT were sweeping forward as well, armored figures to his left and right. His helmet warned of movement ahead….

He was only a few meters away from the gateway in the rock when figures began boiling out of the tunnel and from openings in the ground to either side. It took him a chilling moment to realize that the shapes were not human.

Humanoid
, certainly…but shorter than men, most of them, with oddly articulated arms and legs and an odd, forward-leaning manner of holding themselves as they leaped into battle. They didn't run so much as
bound
, with powerful leaps driven by strongly muscled legs. What he noticed about them most, though, was their eyes, large and gold, with horizontally and jaggedly slit pupils. They wore an oddly mismatched collection of armor, those that wore anything at all,
primitive
armor almost laughably clumsy
and piecemeal compared with the Marines' Mark VIIs. And though a few carried odd-looking guns, most were armed with spears, razor-tipped lances, swords, and even war clubs. It was like stepping from a twenty-third-century battlefield into something out of the Middle Ages…worse, like a fantasy in some virtual role-playing sim.

Primitive they might be, but there were a hell of a lot of them, too many to count.

And they were rushing to meet the Marine charge head-on.

25
JUNE
2148

ARLT Command Section, Dragon
One
Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar
1645 hours ST

Another Dragon gone, snapped out of the air by a burst of plasma from that damned mountaintop. Four aircraft left out of the original eight.

Warhurst thought he saw the pattern, though. The mountain fortress could fire at targets in any direction and within about 140 degrees of straight up. That meant that targets within a few kilometers of the mountain's base, including the entire LZ, were safe from direct fire. Dragonfly Two, however, had circled far enough away from the side of the mountain to bring it into the defense complex's kill zone. Secondary fringe effects of the weapon's shots—blast, heat, overpressure, radiation—were all threats to units inside minimum range, especially aircraft, but not so deadly that they could not be countered. Armored troops in the open need only hunker down to be more or less safe; the blast effects were rough on airborne units, but the Marine flyers were good at what they did, and the TAS-L Dragonfly was arguably the most rugged aircraft in the sky.

He was already uploading what he'd learned, seen, and guessed to Major DuBoise, and she was passing it back down in distilled form to her surviving pilots. They would
have to carefully balance their flight paths, close enough and low enough to avoid becoming targets for the Ahannu gun, yet high enough and far enough out to avoid being smashed by the shock wave from the next shot.

On the ground, the Marines had moved in close to what appeared to be the entrance into the mountain and encountered a wave of Ahannu troops.

This, he decided, was where the Marines would earn their pay.

ARLT Section Dragon Three
Objective Krakatoa, Ishtar
1645 hours ST

John Garroway raised his LR-2120, squeezing off a burst of rapid-fire pulses when his helmet display flashed red on an acquired target. An Ahannu ten meters in front of him shrieked and staggered back into the crowded front ranks of its companions, the elaborately molded plastron of its bronze body armor exploding in glittering motes of white-hot liquid metal. The Ahannu mass continued surging forward, enveloping the dead warrior and trampling it underfoot. Garroway dropped to one knee, steadying his weapon, then fired again…and again. Other Marines were firing as well, slashing into the enemy mob, and still they kept coming.

There were just too damned many of them….

“Grenades!” Lieutenant Kerns yelled over the tac link. “Use your M-12s!”

A dangerous option at such close range, but the only one going against such a numerous and densely packed enemy. Garroway thought-clicked his weapon link, engaging the 20mm underbarrel grenade launcher, then setting it to slow full-auto. He braced the rifle's stock against his hip and pressed the firing button, swinging the weapon slowly from left to right.

The M-12 fired with a heavy
thud-thud-thud
, loosing
three rounds per second, each shot slamming the rifle's butt against his armor. Each spin-stabilized round detonated on contact with rock, armor, or flesh with a cheerful lack of discrimination, filling the air with dust, smoke, and a thin scarlet mist of Ahannu blood and body parts.

The Ahannu warriors kept charging, dying by the tens, then by the hundreds, with every few paces. A number of them carried poles holding vertically hung banners, something like the
sashimono
of feudal Japan. They seemed to designate units; banner colors ranged from red and scarlet to orange, brown, and yellow, and each bore a different alien symbol at its center, geometric designs laid out in sharp, black brush strokes. Most, Garroway saw, carried blade weapons of various types. The ones with rifles were the most obvious first targets, and few of them got more than a few meters toward the Marine ranks before being ripped apart by explosive 20mm rounds.

Still, it was a near thing, that desperate firefight in the shadow of the alien mountain. The Marines were putting down a deadly fusillade of high-explosive death, blasting the close-packed ranks of charging Ahannu warriors, but the enemy horde was spilling out of countless hidden doorways and crevices in the mountainside and closing in from all sides. The Marines closest to the mountain gateway had to begin letting their flanks fall back, pulling into a circle, creating a perimeter to keep the charging mob at bay.

And Marines were being hit now by incoming small arms fire. Each time an Ahannu warrior dropped a rifle when it died, one of its companions would scoop up the weapon and keep coming, firing as it leaped across the high-piled stacks of its slain fellows. The smaller Ahannu weapons couldn't penetrate a Mark VII battlesuit, but they had a kind of a gauss railgun, its two-meter length unwieldy for the short Ahannu warriors, and it packed enough power at close range to punch through Marine laminate armor like a high-powered laser. The sound was a hideous cacophony of cracking explosions mingled with the eerie shrieks, wails,
and screams of the Ahannu and the deeper, ragged yells of the Marines.

Garroway's entire universe was narrowed down to a tiny slice of ground a few meters across, a space filled with dust and smoke and bodies and the staccato flash and bang of 20mm grenade charges detonating in strings. Lance Corporal Patricia Brandt was on Garroway's left, and Hollingwood was on his right, both Marines leaning into their weapons as they hosed the oncoming charge with grenades. At this range there was no point in locking targets for guided RPG smartrounds; they simply pointed and fired, and the grenades smashed through Ahannu armor, skin, and bone at eight hundred meters per second, often before the grenade ramjet engines could even ignite.

“Heads down, Forty-four!” a voice called over the tactical link. An instant later a shrill sound like tearing paper hissed overhead, and the rock wall tunnel vented a savage, ground-shaking blast filled with flying Ahannu and shredded, scarlet-bloody meat.

“Way to go, Sandy!” someone yelled. “Sandy” was Sergeant Thor Sanderval, the platoon's sniper, taking pot-shots at the gateway with an MD-30 from his lander pod. From the blast effects, Garroway guessed he must be firing mass-driver bomblets instead of the usual steel-jacketed depleted uranium rounds. The rock walls of the gateway crevice had amplified the small grenade's detonation into something resembling a shell from an old-style artillery fieldpiece.

A moment later a whirling blast of hot wind and swirling dust enveloped the Marines, and Garroway looked up at the howl of an incoming aircraft. One of the Dragonflies was balancing down on shrieking ventral thrusters, hovering as close to the mountainside as its pilot dared, spraying the Ahannu troops with pulsed laser fire from its chin turret and pod-launched, special-munitions bomblets. Shotgun rounds exploded meters above the Ahannu hordes, slicing through dozens of screaming warrior fanatics.

But those warrior fanatics still had the initiative, were
still
coming despite everything the Marines could throw at them. Garroway's grenade magazine bleeped its dry warning; five more rounds and he would be empty. He switched back to laser fire and burned down a charging Ahannu waving a wickedly curved sword.

Too late, he saw a second Ahannu already bounding high in the air, leaping above the line of crouching Marines, firing his two-meter railgun straight down as he sailed overhead. Garroway fired and missed; the Ahannu landed behind him, spun, raised his rifle…

…and sagged forward in a crumpling heap as Gunny Valdez pulled a gore-dripping Marine combat knife from the warrior's back.

And suddenly it was very quiet.

The charging Ahannu, what was left of them, had vanished as abruptly as they'd appeared, leaving piled-high heaps of blast-mangled bodies behind. “Goddess!” Garroway said. He slapped Hollingwood's shoulder. “Did you see Gunny with that knife?” Battle lust still sang in his blood; he felt wild and hot and flushed, and incredibly proud of what his squad leader had just done.

Hollingwood didn't respond, and Garroway took another look. That last Ahannu's shot from overhead had punched through the back of Hollingwood's helmet, leaving a fist-sized hole in the dark metal and a visor opaque with blood.

“Oh,
shit!
” He double-checked the armor's med sensors and confirmed that Hollingwood was dead.

His battle lust drained away with that realization, leaving Garroway very weak and very scared in the middle of the dust and smoke-fogged carnage.

Combat Information Center
IST
Derna,
approaching Ishtar orbit
1712 hours ST

Ramsey watched the battle come to its abrupt resolution from the vantage point of a URV-180 battlefield drone, circling a hundred meters above the dust and chaos and death below. The remaining Ahannu warriors seemed to stop almost in mid-stride, as though yanked back by invisible leashes, then scrambled for cover in the surrounding rocks.

“Are you getting those trapdoor locations, Cassius?” he asked.

“Of course, Colonel.”

“Good. There're too many of them for me to keep track of. That mountain face must be honeycombed with the things.”

“I have noted 217 distinct openings, not counting the main gate,” the AI said. “Individual tunnels appear to be less than half a meter in diameter, too narrow to admit a Marine in full armor. It will require special tactics to clear them.”

“Roger that.”
Special tactics.
The term embraced a number of distinct possibilities, none of them pleasant to think about. Sending small-framed Marines without body armor into those holes was one. Tunnel rat duty was never popular, though Ramsey had no doubt there'd be ample volunteers. Casualties would be high, however, and too large a percentage of his force would be tied down for too long. That was not a cost-effective action.

The use of chemical or biological agents was another possibility. CB warfare hadn't been used on Earth for centuries, originally due to moral injunctions against them and later because combat armor and effective decon countermeasures rendered them useless on the modern battlefield. The Ahannu weren't using sealed armor, however, and were vulnerable. On the other hand, Ahannu biology was still poorly understood, and a gas or bacterial agent would have to be specially tailored to their biochemistry to be effective. There wasn't time for that…or proper research facilities on board the
Derna
.

Of course, a few things were known about the Ahannu. They
did
breathe, for instance, and filling those tunnels with smoke might drive them out.
Might
. How long could they hold their breath? Again, not enough data.

Besides, Ahannu moral codes, beliefs, and psychology were even more poorly understood than their biology. Ramsey's orders included a most particular injunction against jeopardizing PanTerra's chances of establishing useful and viable relations with the Ahannu after the mission's primary objectives were met. If gassing them in their holes meant they would begin viewing humans as monsters or war criminals, the PanTerran people might not be able to pick up the pieces.

He made a mental note to have a noumenal conference with both Gavin Norris and Dr. Hanson. If they had
any
further information not included in the regular briefing downloads…

In any case, Ramsey wasn't eager to gas the critters. The MIEU One's mission was one of coercion, not extermination. They needed to convince the Ahannu to accept a Terran presence on Ishtar, to release their Sag-ura slaves…and, just possibly, to be willing to deal with PanTerra on matters of trade, research, and cultural exchange. Besides, Ramsey had no desire to go down in history as the man who'd annihilated the first sentient species to be encountered among the stars, and a poorly controlled or vectored CB agent could do just that. No, there had to be another way.

Other special tactics included the use of robots—no good, since HK gunwalkers didn't possess the requisite programming. Teleoperating the things was out too, since control signals wouldn't penetrate rock. Besides, there were fewer HKs with the MIEU than there were tunnels, and they needed to be saved for other duties.

Nano agents? As with biological agents, not enough was known about Ahannu physiology. Infecting them all with microscopic machines that put them to sleep or made them
decide to quit fighting was great in theory but still well beyond the technical capabilities of nanotech programming specialists.

No…in this case, “special tactics” probably meant doing things the old-fashioned way, using high explosives to seal each and every one of the tunnel entrances down there. Smoke might work…and if the Krakatoa tunnel complex was as extensive as he feared, there might be no alternative but to use tunnel rats.

In other words, they would use the same tactics that Marines had used on Saipan and Iwo Jima, in Vietnam and Colombia, in Cuba and Vladivostok—slow, dirty, and all too often, costly. It would be simple enough to identify the tunnel entrances on the outside of the mountain. Cassius had already managed that. But the labyrinth inside Krakatoa was going to be something else entirely.

“How long do you expect the clean-up to take, Colonel?” General King asked.

Ramsey started. He'd been so deep in the noumenal awareness, he'd forgotten King's presence there, looking over his virtual shoulder. “No way to tell, sir,” he replied over the link. “Our people have to go inside that mountain. They'll have a better picture once they do.”

“We can't afford to screw around with fanatic holdouts.”

“Affirmative, sir.”

“We have a little over five hours—”

“Until we come over Krakatoa's horizon.
Yes,
sir.” He was becoming annoyed with King's hovering, dithering worry.

King missed the exasperation in Ramsey's mental tone—or chose to ignore it. “Do you think we'll have to use the cork?”

“Too early to tell, sir.”