Star Corps (36 page)

“And that is?”

“We've been calling it Objective Suribachi, sir.”

Ramsey smiled, then chuckled. “I like it. Objective Suribachi it is.”

Suribachi was the volcanic mountain on the south end of a black speck of an island in the Pacific Ocean where six thousand Marines had given their lives two centuries before, a place called Iwo Jima.

Mount Suribachi had been the site of the famous flag-raising during the battle, a Corps icon. Watching from a ship offshore, James Forrestal, the Secretary of the Navy at the time, had declared to General Holland Smith, “The raising of that flag on Suribachi means there will be a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

Well and good. All
this
Suribachi would determine was the survival of the MIEU for the next six months.

27
JUNE
2148

Marine Bivouac
Legation Compound
New Sumer, Ishtar
0053 hours ALT

He was
Lance Corporal
Garroway now. Funny. He'd not even gotten used to being a PFC, and now he'd been advanced to pay grade E-3.

The announcement had come down from HQ with a blizzard of other announcements and promotions. Sergeant Tim Logan and Hospitalman First Class “Doc” McColloch—one of the Navy corpsmen assigned to the Marines as medics—had been put in for Medals of Honor for their daring rescue of two wounded Marines at the north wall earlier that day. And the newbie PFCs had all gotten their promotions…not, as it turned out, by being Van Winkled, but as meritorious field promotions. Van Winkling would have required confirmation from Earth; Colonel Ramsey had chosen to make those promotions immediate.

It didn't matter, really. The experience of combat, of surviving his first firefights, had changed Garroway far, far more deeply than any bureaucratic waving of the wand possibly could.

Out of his armor at last and clad in Marine utilities, Lance Corporal Garroway stood beneath the Ishtaran sky. It was, for him, the end of a very long day, even though technically the
sun was still rising. This was his down time; in a few minutes he would try to go get some sleep. First, however…

Facing east, in the direction of the red-spark sun close beside the towering pyramid at the edge of the compound, he held the athame, ritual blade high, point toward the sky, and intoned the old formula. “Brothers and sisters of the east, spirits of air, spirits of mind and intellect…hail, and welcome.” Sketching the outline of a pentagram in the air with the blade, he then turned in place to the right, drawing an imagined quarter circle of blue fire. “Brothers and sisters of the south, spirits of fire, spirits of directions, of paths, of passions…hail, and welcome…”

It had been a long time since Garroway had performed ritual and cast a circle. He had been raised Wiccan by his mother, though he'd lost interest in all religion and drifted away until about four years ago, when the workings of the craft had become yet another way to defy his staunchly Catholic father. “You won't practice that pagan crap in my house!” the elder Esteban had stormed…and so he'd taken warm satisfaction in holding ritual outdoors in secret, at a private stretch of the Guaymas beach.

Often, his mother had joined him.

“Brothers and sisters of the west, spirits of water, spirits of emotions, of relationships, of family…hail, and welcome…”

The beings he invoked, spirits representing the traditional elements of air, fire, water, and earth, he understood as metaphors that let him grasp the unknowable; if they had any objective reality at all, they were not bound by the limits of time and space. Still, the hard, rationalist, left-brained part of him questioned if the ritual made any sense at all.

If there were such things as elemental spirits, or gods, or guardians of the soul…could they hear him out here, so far from home?

He felt a bit self-conscious, aware that there were Marines lounging nearby who could see him.

The hell with them. Freedom of religion was an absolute
and basic right in the Corps, even back in boot camp. Lots of the other men and women in the MIEU were Wiccan, World of the Goddess, or pagan of various other stripes, and he knew he could have found others to join him in this ritual.

But he wanted to do this one solo, just him and the universe. Normally, he would have performed it inwardly, a simulation within the noumenal world, but with the net down he was left to do it in the phenomenal world instead. His father hadn't allowed him to use the Sony-TI 12000 for Wiccan rites either, so he'd learned how to do it the traditional way, with athame blade and imagination. He'd found as private a corner as he could, off on the south edge of the open compound area they were now calling “the grinder,” an out-of-the-way spot for the ritual that would make this patch of ground sacred space.

“Brothers and sisters of the north, spirits of earth, spirits of practical things, of daily life…hail, and welcome…”

He completed the imagined circle of blue fire, a perimeter around him now sealed by four pentagrams. Stooping, he touched the ground with the point of his blade.

“Great Mother…Goddess…Maiden, Mother, and Crone, I invite you to this circle. Be here now.”

In many Wiccan traditions the Goddess represented Gaia, the spirit of Earth herself. Could she find her way across the light-years? Or did Ishtar have its own goddess spirit? The thought stirred sudden inspiration, and he added, “Goddess of ancient Sumeria and Babylon, Goddess who is called Inanna, Astarte, and Ishtar…Goddess of Love and Goddess of Battles, hail and welcome.”

Standing, he raised his blade high. The gas giant Marduk hung vast and banded in the west. “God of Light, God of the Sun, known as Utu, Shamash, and Marduk, be here now. Hail and welcome.” He wasn't entirely sure that Marduk could properly be linked mythologically with the earlier Mesopotamian gods of the sun, but it didn't matter. It was the idea behind the words that mattered.

He closed his eyes and imagined Ishtar and Marduk,
queen and consort, standing within his circle within a blaze of radiant light. A small but rational part of his mind noted that those deities likely had their origins with the An colonists in ancient Sumer ten thousand years ago. Most of the oldest Sumerian gods, it seemed—Utu and Enki, Ea and An and Nanna—had been real beings, or at least personalized composites drawn from actual encounters between early proto-Sumerian nomads and the Anunnaki, “Those Who Came from Heaven to Earth.”

Not that this mattered either. Humankind had long ago refashioned all of the gods in its own image. He doubted that the modern Ahannu would recognize what he called upon now.

More disturbing, the rational part of him thought, was the idea of a twenty-second-century high-tech Marine invoking spirits in a ritual two centuries old, one drawn, it was claimed, from beliefs and practices thousands of years older—older even than the starfaring gods of ancient Sumeria.

He pushed the intruding thought aside, focusing instead on the inner pacing of the solitary ritual, on the metaphors that allowed him to tap deep, deep into his own unconscious, to draw on the guidance, the symbols, the energy residing there. Religion, the religious impulse, whatever its outward trappings and whatever its origin, was undeniably as much a part of humankind as language, politics, or even breathing.

“By the earth that is her body, by the air that is her breath, by the fire of her bright spirit, by the living waters of her womb, this circle is cast.”

He opened his eyes, turning them toward a momentarily clear, crystalline blue-green twilight sky alive with pale auroras and the banded beauty of ringed Marduk. A meteor flared briefly at the zenith. “I stand now between the worlds.”

He smiled at that. In a sense, he
was
between the worlds. But more…he might be light-years from Earth, but the connection he sought with the divine was something he car
ried within himself, the god and goddess both parts of his own being. The deities he called to this place were not so distant after all. They were a part of his own noumenal world, as opposed to the phenomenal world of sight, sound, and matter.

Facing east once more, he concentrated on raising inner energy for the working he had in mind. He heard laughter and opened his eyes. Yeah…he was being watched. A group of Marines offloading supplies from a cargo LM nearby were taking a break, and several were watching his ritual. Let them. This was
his
time, his sacred space, and their laughter meant nothing.

The spiritual feeding of the men and women of 1 MIEU was an undertaking nearly as complex and as daunting as feeding them physically. There were a number of chaplains with the MIEU, all of them tasked with multiple spiritual duties. Captain Walters, for instance, served as priest for both the Catholics and the counter-Catholics, as well as the Episcopalians—a reconciliation of viewpoints that, Garroway thought, must require a fascinating set of mental gymnastics. Lieutenant Steve Prescott was chaplain for the less fundamentalist Protestants, the Church of Light, the Spiritualists, the Taoists, the Neo-Arians, and several other faiths, while a staff sergeant from C Company named Blandings took care of the fundy sects, Four-Squares, Baptists, and Pentecostals. There were two rabbis for the Jews, two imams for the Muslims, a priest for the Hindus, and a young lieutenant named Cynthia Maillard who watched out for the spiritual needs of the pagans, the Native American shamanic traditions, the Mithraists, and five different ancient astronaut sects. He'd heard somewhere that there were all of sixty-five different faiths represented among the MIEU's personnel complement, not counting the atheists, agnostics, and personal faiths. Arguably, the only major religion
not
represented were any of the radical Anist sects. While the Corps was enjoined by law not to discriminate on the basis of religious be
lief, people who believed that the An were literal gods or that humankind was intended to be a slave race were not the best recruits for a Marine deployment to an Ahannu world.

If he needed counseling during the deployment to Llalande, Garroway's assigned chaplain was Lieutenant Maillard. He doubted that he would need to talk with her, however. Wiccans, for the most part, handled their own priestly duties without the need of clergy.

He did wonder why this ritual, this time set apart, was so important to him now but decided he didn't need to look further than the bewildering avalanche of sights, sounds, emotions, and impressions of the past twenty-some hours. Pressley's shocking death…the news that the
Derna
had been crippled in orbit…the destruction of An-Kur…the battle at the north wall…He felt as though he'd lived years in a day's span of time.

Now
there
was an interesting twist on the whole question of objective versus subjective time.

An old, old saying held that religion was for those who feared Hell, while
spirituality
was for those who'd been there.

He felt the faint, nails-on-blackboard tingle on his spine that he thought of as energy rising from the earth, filling him, recharging him. He needed this as much as he needed sleep; it was a reminder of who he was, of
what
he was, and why. An old military saying held that there were no atheists in foxholes.

If his religion had not been important to him before, save as a weapon to wield against an abusive and drunken father, it was vitally important to him now.

He was scared. Alone and scared.

The word had come down from the LM command post earlier that day, along with the news of the promotions and medals. They were looking for forty-eight volunteers for an airborne assault on the pyramid in the east. He'd given it some thought, then decided to put in his name.

He still wasn't entirely sure why he'd done it. Hell, “never volunteer” was the unwritten cardinal rule for all enlisted personnel, a rule probably going back to the time of Sargon the Great. But he was still feeling a bit…
detached
was the only way he could phrase it. Numb. The loss of so many men and women he'd come to know over the past subjective days had left him feeling as though he needed to reach out and reattach himself, to put down new roots, forge new bonds.

Volunteering for what they were calling Operation Suribachi seemed the best way to do that.

Of course, they might turn him down for lack of experience, the way Gunny Valdez had. Somehow, though, he felt now as though he carried an entire world of experience squarely on his back.

The Wiccan ritual was a good way to ground himself with earth and with
now
as well.

“God and Goddess, Marduk and Ishtar…speed the passing of friends and comrades from this world to the next. Make bright their ways. Strengthen those they've left behind…”

A long time later—all of thirty minutes, perhaps, though it seemed like hours—Garroway closed his circle and returned to the phenomenal world of space and time.

He still felt numb, but he did feel stronger. A little, anyway.

He sheathed his athame—a standard Corps-issue Mk. 4 combat knife once again—and returned to the patch of open ground in front of Building 12, where he'd stowed his sleep roll and gear.

Now, he thought, he might be able to sleep.

MIEU Command Center
Legation Compound
New Sumer, Ishtar
1545 hours ALT

“The walkers are through the east gate,” Major Anderson reported. “No contact.”

“Very well, Major,” Colonel Ramsey said as he continued watching the big monitor screen mounted on one bulkhead of the command LM. The view was of a dusty New Sumer street, a view that lurched unsteadily from side to side as the camera platform stalked ahead on two scissoring plasteel and carbon fiber legs. The legend at the bottom of the screen reported that the image was being transmitted from Gunwalker Seven. A red crosshair reticle floated about the scene, marking the aim point of the walker's Gatling laser.

To Ramsey's left a line of seven Marine technicians sat at a long, makeshift console with bread-boarded processor blocks and salvaged monitors. Each watched his or her own screen closely, making moment-to-moment adjustments on the joystick controls in front of them.

“So far, so good,” General King said, edging up beside Ramsey and peering up at the big screen. “How much farther?”

“Half a kilometer, General, thereabouts.”

“Coming up on East Cagnon and Rosenthal Street, Colonel,” one of the techs said. “Making the turn north onto Rosenthal.” The image on the screen swung sharply as the teleoperated walker veered left; Ramsey caught a glimpse of another walker making the turn—an ungainly looking device that reminded him of a neckless ostrich cast as modern sculpture. The Gatling laser, slung beneath the body and between the legs in blatantly phallic display, pivoted left and right, seeking targets. “Still no contact.”