Star Corps (40 page)

“Right.”

“So…what if the Frogs have something like our net? A means of transmitting data among themselves very quickly? An Ahannu who knew English could have been listening in when we captured this one and been telling him what to say.” Warhurst shrugged. “Or maybe the purple gunk is just the local equivalent of a computer translator. Whatever it is, we've got to be damned careful not to make assumptions about things we don't understand based on our human experience.”

“Good advice, Captain,” Ramsey said. “What do you suggest so far as talking with our friend here goes?”

“Well, sir, like you said, we have some people coming now who speak the lingo. But if you want to talk to the
Ahannu leadership, our best bet might be to take our friend here right back up to the Chamber of the Eye.”

“Hmm.” Ramsey considered this. “I'm not sure I want to trust him up there. Like you said, we can't afford to make assumptions about things we don't understand. That includes what passes for their technology. We'll wait and see what a translator makes of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ramsey stared long and hard into the unblinking golden eyes of the prisoner.

What was it thinking?
How
did it think? Like humans…or in some way utterly and fundamentally different—
alien
, in other words?

What did it know?

And would it ever be possible to communicate with something that alien?

15
JULY
THROUGH
23
JULY
2148

Pyramid of the Eye
New Sumer, Ishtar
1930 hours ALT

“You know, they used to call this kind of party a steel beach,” Dunne said.

“Steel beach?” Garroway asked. “How do you mean?”

“Navy and Marine personnel on big, oceangoing ships,” Dunne replied. “Like aircraft carriers, y'know? They'd have some time off, they'd go out and sun themselves on the deck, maybe smuggle in some liquid contraband.” He raised a can of beer in explanation. “They called it a steel beach 'cause all there was to lie on was steel.”

“We're not on a ship, Sarge,” Vinita pointed out.

“Sure, Kat. But remember your basic Marine terminology. It's a ‘hatch,' not a ‘door,' a ‘ladder,' not stairs. Even ashore.” He waved the beer can to take in the Legation compound, the alien green sky, the distant purple jungle, the untidy sprawl of New Sumer. “We're ashore. We treat the place like a ship, anyway. Hence…‘steel beach.'”

“With not a single bit of steel in sight,” Womicki said, looking around at the flat expanse of the pyramid's top. “Makes as much sense as anything in the Corps.”

“Fuckin'-A!” Dunne exclaimed. He drained the last of the beer, then smashed the can against his forehead, crum
pling it flat. A small pile of flat, crumpled disks on the ground in front of them paid mute testimony to beverages already consumed.

Garroway still wasn't sure how they'd managed it. Dunne claimed that he and Honey Deere had smuggled a couple of cases of brew onto a supply pallet destined for the
Regulus
before their departure from Earth. Those cases had been hidden inside supply containers marked “dietary supplements” and seemed to have survived the four-years-subjective voyage in reasonable taste. Beer smuggling was by now a grand tradition in the spacefaring Corps. Old-timers liked to regale newbies with the exploits of a Marine unit at Cydonia seventy years ago. Some of old Sands of Mars Garroway's Marines, it seemed, had managed to smuggle a few cases of beer to Mars. Garroway's famous ancestor had appropriated it and turned it into makeshift chemical weaponry against the occupying UN forces.

Modern Marines delighted in finding new and original means of smuggling beer to remote duty stations, an activity still listed as very much a crash-and-burn in both Navy and Marine Corps regulations. If they were caught, the standard excuse was, “We were just following Corps tradition,
sir!
”

Sometimes it even worked.

Garroway took a sip from his can, grimacing. He didn't really like the taste of the stuff but didn't want to admit it to the others. Besides, it was a kind of honor, a right of passage, even, to be included in this simple Corps ritual.

And it
was
a ritual, one every bit as meaningful and as sacred as anything Garroway had performed as a Wiccan. With each can opened and held toward that glorious sky, the name of another fallen comrade was toasted. Dunne had toasted Valdez and Deere, and Kat Vinita had remembered Chuck Cawley and Tom Pressley. Womicki toasted Brandt and Foster, while Garroway saluted his two comrades from boot camp, Hollingwood and Garvey.

The four of them were seated on the pavement atop the Pyramid of the Eye, in armor because they were on call, but
with gloves and helmets off. They'd been reorganized once again into a new unit—First Platoon, Alfa Company—all from veterans of the fight for Objective Suribachi three weeks before.

Members of the company had taken to calling themselves the “Pyramidiots,” and the name had stuck.

Garroway turned his head, studying the darkening panorama around them as the eclipse slowly deepened. He thought-clicked his visual center, opening his nano-enhanced irises wider to suck in more light. Other members of the company stood guard around the top of the pyramid or lounged in front of the nanocrete dome erected beside the crater as a firebase HQ. The American flag fluttered from a much taller mast now, above the HQ building. Native workers,
dumu-gir
from the free village of Ha-a-dru-dir, continued to clear the crater of loose stone and rubble under Marine engineer supervision. In the distance, a pair of Wasps circled high above New Sumer on ever-vigilant patrol.

Somehow, he managed to gulp down the last of his beer and hand the empty across to Dunne.

“Ooh-rah!” Dunne said, and crumpled the can flat.

“Your turn for a toast, Gare,” Womicki told him, handing him another can from the opened supplement container.

“What?” He almost didn't recognize his Corps handle. “Gare Garroway” wasn't all that inspired, but for him it was a final break from his old civilian identity as “John,” a name he hadn't used, it seemed, in centuries.

“Your turn. Who's next?”

Shit, who was left? They'd toasted all of the fallen in the old assault force squad. And there were so many more…Marine men and women he'd never gotten to know but who'd fought and died for this small and distant patch of alien soil. “I think you're just trying to get me drunk,” he told them.

“Of course,” Dunne replied, grinning. “That's part of the ceremony.”

“Well…” He thought for a moment, then popped the tab
and raised the can. “To fallen comrades, past and future,” he said. “
And
to the cease-fire. Long may it hold!”

“Amen!” Womicki called.

“Most righteous,” Dunne added, raising a new can of his own.
“Ooh-rah!”

They chugged the toast. Dunne accepted Garroway's empty can and smashed it against his forehead.

“How do you
do
that?” Vinita asked.

Dunne grinned. “Got an implant here,” he said, running a hand across his forehead. “Solid nanochelated carbotitanium replacing a chunk of my skull. From a little present I picked up in Colombia, y'know?” He knocked his forehead with a fist. “Hard head.”

“Figures,” Womicki said. “He
is
a Marine, after all.”

The sky was rapidly darkening as the Llalande sun settled behind Marduk in its once-in-six-days eclipse, scattering brilliant sunset colors halfway around the gas giant's full-circle horizon. Theoretically, this was the third eclipse since their landing twenty-one days ago, but thick clouds and rain had blocked both of the others.

Yeah, like they said. If you didn't like the weather on Ishtar, just wait a minute.

The cease-fire still seemed too good to be true. Three shipboard days after the fighting on Suribachi, however, Sumerian-speaking Marines from the old Legation expedition had met with a delegation of Ahannu leaders, a meeting arranged by the Frog they'd captured in the Chamber of the Eye. They said his name was Tu-Kur-La.

According to Tu-Kur-La, the Ahannu had been terribly hurt by their failed assault on the pyramid, a battle that had cost the Marines fifty-one dead and thirty-eight wounded, including the casualties in the compound fighting as well as those at the top. Exact Ahannu casualties were unknown but were believed to exceed twelve hundred Ahannu god-warriors, seven hundred Sag-ura, and nearly two hundred of their specially bred
kur-gal-gub
, the “mountain-great-warriors” the Marines called “trolls.”

Twenty-one hundred dead Ishtarans at least; the full number might never be known, since so many bodies had been utterly destroyed in the fighting. After the first arranged truce meeting ten days ago, a vast panoply of Ahannu warriors had appeared north of the Legation compound, holding high a forest of
urin
battle standards and keening in their strange, rasping voices. The Marines learned later that the Ahannu song had bestowed an honor of their own upon the men and women of 1 MIEU, as well as a new name.

They called the Marines
nir-gál-mè-a
, which according to Aiken and the other old Ishtar hands, meant “respected in battle.” The Fighting 44th had immediately adapted the name to its own use—the Nergal May-I, or Nergs for short.

Garroway smiled at that. The Corps carried a number of nicknames handed to it over the centuries. Leathernecks, for the stiff collars worn by Marines in the nineteenth century, supposedly to protect the throat from sword cuts but actually a means of making recruits stand up straight. Jarheads, a pejorative for the “high-and-tight” haircuts of the twentieth century. Devil Dogs, from Teufil Hundin, a name bestowed on them by their German enemies after the Battle of the Marne, originally as an insult, since
hundin
meant “bitch,” but ever after one of the proudest of the Corps' noms de guerre.

And now they were Nergs.

The Marines had made their mark, it seemed, out here among the stars. The folks back home would never understand, but that didn't seem to matter anymore.

The folks back home. Garroway swallowed and bit back the stinging in his throat and eyes. Two days after the fight on Suribachi, communications had at last been established with Earth through the FTL screen in the Chamber of the Eye. There'd been all kinds of scuttlebutt flying through the MIEU about mysterious delays or problems in opening the channel, but the link had been established at last, with an instantaneous two-way connection with Mars, and an added twenty minutes for the Mars-to-Earth link one-way. Regular
calls for the Marines hadn't been authorized yet, but a few familygrams and special messages had been routed through from Quantico.

And one of them had been a 'gram for Lance Corporal John Garroway, from his aunt in San Diego. His mother was dead.

He was still having trouble wrapping his mind around that one. According to the brief message, limited to a barren and emotionless twenty-five words or fewer, she'd been found dead a year after the
Derna
had boosted out of Earth orbit. The death was listed as accidental, of course…a fall down the steps in front of the Esteban home.

Garroway didn't believe
that
for a moment. He knew she'd gone back to Esteban before he was shipped up to the
Derna
. He'd dreaded this very possibility, that she would go back to that abusive bastard one time too many….

There wasn't a lot he could do now, except grieve. His mother had died nine years ago, while he'd still been asleep in cybehibe on board the
Derna
, outbound from Earth. As for his father, well, apparently there wasn't much news. According to CNN briefs relayed over the net from home, the abortive Aztlan Antistatehood Insurrection of 2042 had driven the ringleaders into hiding.

Carlos Esteban among them, apparently.

Garroway found himself fervently hoping his father was dead.

No…No, on second thought it would be better by far if the bastard were alive. That way, he might be able to present his biological father with a bill of reckoning someday. He looked down at his hands, flexing them. His left arm—broken by a gauss round in the battle—was still sore, but it was working now, thanks to the calcium nanochelates and fastheal the corpsmen had given him. He was going to survive this deployment, and he was going to get back home.

And someday, he would meet his father again.

Someday…

He looked up into the darkening sky. The brightest stars were beginning to show as the eclipse deepened the twilight. He uplinked to the net to check which stars were visible and where.

At least the net
was
working now. The Navy personnel left on board the
Derna
, plus the command constellation's AI, had brought the full net back online only three days ago. Garroway and the others were still getting used to having that much information a thought-click away once more. In some ways, things had been simpler when they'd had to rely on their own memories and on such primitive-tech anachronisms as radio, human and robotic scouts, and sign language.

Data flowed through his thoughts. Yes…that bright one there, low in the north. The brightest star in what at home would be the constellation Scutum, just north of Sagittarius.

The sun of home.

Yeah. Someday.

Gavin Norris
Chamber of the Eye
Pyramid of the Eye
New Sumer, Ishtar
1935 hours ALT

Gavin Norris was puffing hard by the time he clambered up the last step and leaned against the entrance to the Chamber of the Eye. A Marine sentry was there, but he thought-queried Norris's e-pass, snapped to attention and said, “You are recognized, sir.”

Good. He'd not expected trouble, but you never knew with these damned jarheads.

Portable lights illuminated what had been the black interior of the Chamber of the Eye. The Eye itself was aglow, showing the interior of the so-called Cave of Wonders at Cy
donia, eight light-long light-years away. As promised, the
Quebecois
Giselle Dumont was on duty at the other end.

“Hello, Madame Dumont.”

“Ah, Mr. Norris,” she said, turning to face the screen. “I was told to expect you about now. Is everything in order?”

“It is. I think we're finally ready to begin.” He stepped aside as the others filed into the chamber behind him—Carleton, Dr. Hanson, and Tu-Kur-La the Frog.
“Friar Tuck,”
Norris had been calling the thing, making a joke of the alien name. The Ahannu didn't appear to care.

“I'm still not convinced this is a good idea,” Carleton said. “I don't trust the Frogs. Not after ten years in that damned jungle.”

“That's not your concern, Carleton,” Norris said. “Tell Tuck to do his thing.”

Carleton grimaced, then gargled something at the Frog. It gargled back, then sat itself on the chamber floor, holding both six-fingered hands out above one of the cracks between the polished stone blocks.

“What's happening?” Dumont said. “I can't see.”

“Sorry,” he told her. “We have with us the Frog we used to make contact with the Frog leadership. He's going to connect himself up to a kind of organic computer network the Frogs have grown all throughout this part of the planet. They call it the…what was it, Dr. Hanson?”